Jonathan Rosenbaum

I only laughed once here, at a Treat Williams reaction shot; the rest of the time I was trying to figure out why Allen made this movie.

80 minutes of formulaic unpleasantness isn't even close to my idea of a good time, and I doubt that Hitchcock himself could have done very much with Mark L. Smith's script.

An empty-headed horror movie (1979) with nothing to recommend it beyond the disco-inspired art direction and some handsome, if gimmicky, cinematography.

Holly Hunter and Sigourney Weaver, a cop and a shrink, are the main trackers, but so little is done in Ann Biderman and David Madsen's script to give them or their colleagues or even their prey interesting human dimensions that the overall ambience is chiefly pornographic.

It has its moments, but not many, and generally speaking it runs neck and neck with Dune as the least successful and least interesting Lynch feature.

Out of Sight engaged me less and less, until by the end I no longer cared which of the characters lived or died. Not even the engaging Jennifer Lopez, George Clooney, Albert Brooks, Don Cheadle, and Ving Rhames or the talented secondary cast can survive the abbreviations and last-minute shoehorning their characters receive.

The film's a swell way of torturing yourself for 108 minutes.

An offensive premise and a pathetic, almost pleading desire to outrage our sensibilities with it.

The ugly, aggressive, proliferating effects were all I could begin to contend with, and trying to keep interested in them was like trying to remain interested in a loudmouth shouting in my ear.

This movie feels like it was made by a bank rather than a person.

None of the characters or ideas is allowed to develop beyond its cardboard profile.

Misogynistic claptrap about a divorced husband (Dustin Hoffman) fighting for the custody of and learning to cope with his little boy (Justin Henry) - a movie whose classy trimmings (including Nestor Almendros's cinematography) persuaded audiences to regard writer-director Robert Benton as a subtle art-house director.

For me the film creates more embarrassment than sympathy, but at least it's a kind of embarrassment that's instructive.

Moving in fits and starts, mawkish in its sincerity, and at times disjointed in its lumpy structure.

The concept was interesting and charming in "Love Letters," up to a point, but here it quickly becomes repetitive, obvious, and dull.

If you want to waste a couple of hours, you can surely do much better looking elsewhere.

Insofar as one can distinguish the investigative research from the career move, this Sundance prizewinner is effective muckraking, but it lacks much of a political program apart from the message that we're poisoning ourselves.

John Frankenheimer is credited as director, but given the scrambled, multiple agendas at play here, he seems to function more like a bemused traffic cop.

Once again, the overall premise is milked for some mild titillation involving the hero's sexual innocence, making one wonder if the genre's popularity might involve some deeply sublimated form of kiddie porn--arguably the distilled ideological essence of squeaky-clean Reaganism.

Stone's all-purpose conspiracy theory, built like a house of cards, rivals "Mississippi Burning" in its sheer crudeness and contempt for the audience.

Slick and effective escapism with a touch of poetry (a la "The Sixth Sense") that left me vaguely dissatisfied once the mystery was supposedly resolved.

May be amusing if you feel a pressing need to feel superior to somebody, but the aim is too broad and scattershot to add up to much beyond an acknowledgment of small-town desperation--something Sherwood Anderson and Sinclair Lewis did much better back in the 20s and 30s.

Poorly acted, over-the-top, and generally out-of-control bloodbath.

In what I saw, Madonna in the title role tries bravely not to buckle under the weight of Stone and Parker's sense of Stalinist monumentality and fails honorably, while the Lloyd Webber music goes on being nonmusical.

A festival favorite in 1992, this flamboyant Australian crowd pleaser and first feature by Baz Luhrmann ("Moulin Rouge") struck me then as one of the more horrific and unpleasant movies I'd seen in quite some time.

If you haven't lived until you've seen Laurence Fishburne and Sam Neill duke it out in a vat full of red paint, here's your chance; personally, my idea of hell would be having to see this stinker again.

Unfocused, condescending, and corny.

Despite a certain grace in the dialogue and casual plot construction, this is positively reeking of a desire to be cheerful in the face of adversity.