Jonathan Rosenbaum

Drove violence to the point of redundancy.

Glitz with no mind and lots of fancy visuals, edited with a pounding beat.

Ingmar Bergman at his most painful, pretentious, and empty.

Unfortunately writer-director Paul Feig has a weakness for artiness in general and hokey art movies in particular, and the overall sluggishness of this 2003 adaptation starring Ben Tibber makes such devices as slow-motion seem like mannered rhetoric.

Your enjoyment of this picaresque tearjerker may depend on how much you can tolerate its shameless contrivances and didactic social realism, whereby the story exists only to illustrate the plight of illegal aliens. I was ultimately more moved than appalled, but it was a close contest.

A rather tedious kidnapping movie by writer-director Lisa Krueger, despite the novelty of the kidnappers (Scarlett Johansson and Aleksa Palladino) being sisters, one of whom is pregnant, and the kidnapped person being a nurse (Mary Kay Place) needed to assist with the childbirth.

While the results are both cheerful and occasionally inventive, they can't hold a candle to his previous features; too many jokey asides and cameos - not to mention an overdose of plot - keep getting in the way.

The only characters in this formulaic crime comedy that I halfway liked were a couple of barely glimpsed wives, but the two leads keep it going through sheer determination.

A charming, albeit slightly overextended (even at 81 minutes) multiracial sex comedy.

John G. Avildsen directs Stallone's primitive script with the corn it calls for, hoping to distract from the simplicity with a few fancy montages, and does a fairly good job with the climactic slugfest; but the dramatic moves are so obvious and shopworn that not even.

Some of the gags here are funny, but they aren't executed effectively enough to score.

The most striking thing here is a performance by Robert Forster, as one of the older men on the boat, that's so terrific everything else in the picture pales beside it.

If you decide to hit the concessions stand (where you're bound to have lots of company), I'd suggest going out for popcorn during either the first hour or the third, because the second features some pretty good big-screen effects involving planes, ships, and explosions.

McKee's direction of actors is as clumsy as the stabs at rapid editing.

I was seduced part of the time, thanks largely to Bonham Carter's sensuality, but the whole is unsatisfying, and it's tempting to see the imposed recutting as a major source of the problem.

Dopey but charming.

Maybe the magic will work for those who loved the book, but I found this film stultifyingly self-important and, despite the regularity with which it cuts to the chase, weirdly static.

A step down from the first Naked Gun cop-thriller spoof, which was a step down from Airplane! and Top Secret!; but if you care about such fine distinctions, this may be marginally better than Naked Gun 2 1/2: The Smell of Fear. Or at least it is when the movie finally arrives at the climactic Academy Awards ceremony; prior to that, it's mainly just one little-boy gag after another.

Lost me early on with its show-offy shooting and editing, portentous metaphysical conceits about winners and losers, and exaggerated displays of evil, violence, and deceit.

The stunt work is pretty good, the brain work close to nonexistent.

Cage is the only actor allowed to do riffs on his assigned part, something he takes full advantage of; the others are stuck with their two-dimensional satirical profiles, which grow increasingly tiresome and unyielding as the comic plot predictably unfolds.

Most of this is silly, dim-witted stuff, but a few of the shocks carry some of the crude power of Jack Arnold's low-budget horror films of the 50s.

It's not clear why Steven Spielberg's Amblin decided to make a live-action entertainment starring the least interesting and most saccharine of all 50s cartoon characters, the friendly ghost who can't help scaring people, but here's your chance to search for an answer.

This is pretty much the Lucas mixture as usual, this time in a Tolkien mode, with everything from the Old Testament to Kurosawa to Disney fed into a blender and turned into wallpaper. For easy-to-please five-year-olds of all ages.

Howard lacks the sense of film rhythm --required to make such an exercise work. Just about the only clear triumph here is an underplayed performance by Angie Dickinson, though Winger and Rosanna Arquette also provide welcome relief from Howard and Le Mat's self-indulgent carousing.

Material so bereft of plot and insight that all it can provide is actorly turns with no cogent means for tying them together.

Though the look aspires as usual to be both otherworldly and familiar, there's nothing that doesn't reek of southern California (as opposed to Hollywood) plastic, and this is as true of the characters as the decor.

If this were witty, it might have qualified as a downtown version of "All About Eve"; if it were believable, I wouldn't have come away feeling that the actors (including Dylan McDermott and Chloe Sevigny) were wasted.

Alison Lohman isn't very convincing as the reporter who's trying to dredge up some dirt on the entertainers, and the elaborate flashback structure can't hide the fact that the story never fully comes to life.

Billy Wilder’s soggy and uninspired 1963 adaptation of the hit Broadway musical, minus the songs.

This is the silliest horror movie I've seen in years, though some of the special effects are pretty good.

Cassavetes's “Gloria” may have been action-packed nonsense, but it was enjoyable precisely because it was all of a piece. This Gloria is simply pieces--a few of them enjoyable, most of them not.

The Fort Lauderdale setting imparts little flavor or atmosphere, and the same goes for the flagrantly unerotic dances.

Apart from a few incidental flickers of Wang’s sidelong humor, there’s little of his personality evident in this film about a divorced underground cartoonist (Tom Hulce) finding himself enmeshed in a murder plota story that steadily loses coherence and interest the longer it proceeds.

I wouldn't call this 1960 picture one of Billy Wilder's best comedies—it's drab, sappy, and overlong at 125 minutes.

This frantic tale seems at once preachy and incoherent, collapsing into a more or less random collection of disconnected, unfocused scenes.

As usual Spielberg is too bored by everyday life to use his premise for anything but a fairy tale, whose cheap pathos suggests a bad Chaplin imitation. This grows progressively phonier and eventually devolves into "Mr. Roberts," with Stanley Tucci filling in for James Cagney as an airport bureaucrat.

This egregious collection of cock-waving cliches is the silliest piece of macho camp since Roadhouse.

Jon Voight, the all-purpose villain, does a pretty good job of imitating Marlon Brando imitating a Paraguayan snake expert, but the rest of the players--including Jennifer Lopez, Ice Cube, Eric Stoltz, Owen Wilson, Vincent Castellanos, Jonathan Hyde, and Kari Wuhrer--seem to be in a hurry to pick up their checks.

Behind all the macho bluster stand (or, it would appear, sit) director Tony Scott, writers Michael Schiffer and Richard P. Henrick, and producers Don Simpson and Jerry Bruckheimer, trying (and failing) to get all the characters to behave like grown-ups.

Killing Zoe has little of the style, pacing, characterization, or wit of Reservoir Dogs or Pulp Fiction (though Avary worked on the scripts of both).

Overlong but watchable.

The problem with this film's earnest script about corruption in college basketball is that the usually witty Ron Shelton (Bull Durham, White Men Can't Jump) wrote it long before he developed his familiar jivey style. Not even an unsentimental basketball fan like director William Friedkin can wash away all the corn syrup.

The surface activity keeps one occupied, but never adds up to much because none of the characters is developed beyond the cartoon level; and the snobby sense of knowingness that's over everything is uncomfortably close to what the movie is supposed to be dissecting.

The first third or so offers all the dominatrix fantasies one might wish for, but then fantasy gives way to the aggressiveness of the special effects and optical effects.

The sensibility of this movie is so adolescent that it's hard to take it as seriously as the filmmakers intend us to.

Has some flavor, and Ron Silver gives a swell impersonation of a cool and slimy studio executive.

The standard line on this actor-heavy, brain-light concoction by writer-director John Herzfeld (1996) is that it’s Short Cuts meets Pulp Fiction, but it isn’t a tenth as good as either.

This three-hour 1962 remake of the Charles Laughton-Clark Gable MGM classic (1935) was the first production in which Marlon Brando really ran amok, with various delays causing the budget to skyrocket. Hardly anyone was pleased with the results.

Lee has tried hard to give this shapeless picture some visual patterning though the cluttered effect created by his mistrust of silence is even more harmful than in the past.

Dispenses so many rubber masks to allow the characters to swap identities that no hero or villain winds up carrying any moral weight at all.

Naim's premise has possibilities, but its execution often feels slapdash -- the viewer's sense of deja vu may be even more excessive than the characters'.

Might be for you. Or you might be bored anyway.

[Brooks's] second Williams adaptation (1962) is literally a form of emasculation that offers little indication of what made the original play interesting (especially in Elia Kazan’s stage production), despite the fact that Paul Newman and Geraldine Page are called on to reprise their original roles—as a hustler returning to his southern hometown and a Hollywood has-been—and do a fair job with Brooks’s hopeless script.

The first half is better than average for an opulent Classics Illustrated film, thanks to realistic period detail, brisk storytelling, and Reese Witherspoon as the saucy rags-to-riches Becky Sharp. Then the whole lumbering weight of the production catches up with the filmmakers, slowing the proceedings to an interminable crawl.

Its main source is a comic book, but it might as well be a computer.

Unfortunately, without even the most cursory effort to establish some notion of normality, the movie progressively gets duller and duller as its mechanical horror fancies spin themselves out.

There are many plot complications, most designed to get us to applaud our tolerance of religious differences.

The attempt to extract the essences of several genres (cold-war submarine thriller, love story, Disney fantasy, pseudomystical SF in the Spielberg mode) and mix them together ultimately leads to giddy incoherence.

Despite very good performances, this is anemic and uninspired filmmaking: shapeless as narrative, awkward and drifting as drama.

Unfortunately, the pattern has so calcified that Gene Autry westerns seem like models of moral complexity by comparison.

Its trickery might seem cute or clever to viewers who don't take either movies or people very seriously, but to me it recalled cynical "puzzle" films like "Memento" and "Irreversible," with no reason to exist apart from its gimmick.

On the plus side, it isn't boring, and Jolie and Ethan Hawke, who plays an art dealer and key witness, generate a certain amount of edgy chemistry. But eventually the filmmakers' desire to shock and tease overtakes any feeling for character or common sense.

A rather stagy and creaky early talkie (1931) by Alfred Hitchcock, adapted from a John Galsworthy play.

The double crosses are so intricate and the cynicism so enveloping that it becomes increasingly difficult to care about the characters

As an "Animal House" romp about consumer slackers in a New Jersey mall, it's harmless enough--just don't expect any sort of edge. Smith has left the working class to become just as boring as everybody else.

With all her (Bullock) grotesque disguises, this often suggests a sequel to "Mrs. Doubtfire."

Even a good performance by Tom Hanks and noble intentions can't save this mainstream look at AIDS from the worst effects of nervous committeethink.

Characters remain stuck in their cliche profiles, and the direction -- by music video specialist Michel Gondry -- doesn't improve matters.

The plot of this 1995 romantic comedy, directed by Jon Turteltaub ("Cool Runnings") from a script by Daniel G. Sullivan and Fredric Lebow, is pretty stupid throughout, and the filmmakers show no compunction in shaking its silliness in your face, but the film's casual warmth may make you tolerate some of the shortcomings.

Apart from the welcome grace and pluck of Asian action star Michelle Yeoh--who all but steals the movie away from Pierce Brosnan's Bond and single-handedly makes this a better wedding of Hong Kong and Hollywood than either Rumble in the Bronx or Face/Off--this film has no personality whatsoever.

Halfhearted food movie that's also a romantic comedy crammed with issues.

But despite a compelling opening, as a movie it loses focus and purpose as it proceeds.

Not bad to look at, but consistently unedifying.

Part of what keeps this from working is that Modine's character is almost as obnoxious as Keaton's—Griffith proves to be the pluckiest member of the trio—and matters are not improved by a lot of gratuitous camera movement and an especially lousy dream sequence.

The liberal pieties underlying the script become so simplistic and predominant that they ultimately deprive the characters and the story of the density and edge they might have had.

Rudolph Mate directed, and Richard Derr, Barbara Rush, and John Hoyt all make a game try at sounding like real people—which is not always easy, given Sidney Boehm’s script.

Woody Allen at his most inconsequential and insubstantial; don't expect to remember this black-and-white throwaway of comic sketches five minutes after it's over.

Despite the high spirits, most of the comedy is feeble and forced; Steve's career as a therapist seems especially far-fetched.

An exceptionally glib satire about reality TV, by writer-director Daniel Minahan, that puts most of its effort into looking as much as is possible like a real TV show.

The usual valorizing of guns and vigilante justice and tedious action sequences to begin and end the picture.

At least it has Bill Murray.

Succeeds at least in being offbeat, but its inanities and glib pretensions are so thick that it mainly comes across as tacky and contrived.

It's been a month since I attended a preview, and I'm more grateful than sorry that I no longer remember it well. Drug thrillers and revenge plots bore me.

Maybury's art-world talents don't include storytelling, and his visceral bursts of fast editing and extreme close-ups don't yield any full-blown characters, narrative, or political vision.

There's something offensive about the movie's chintzy view of death and the way it periodically flirts with promising conceits (i.e., Goldberg offering her body as a surrogate so that Swayze and Moore can "touch" one another) only to back away from them in as cowardly a manner as possible.

Dog slobber enthusiasts (as well as fans of dog farts) will have a field day. Everyone else will have to settle for a formulaic cop comedy that has Hanks but little else.

It's predictable stuff, though with a nice old-fashioned edge.

Despite a good deal of witty, bantering dialogue and clever plotting, some interesting moral ambiguity about the relative corruption of a cop (Russell) and a drug dealer (Gibson), and a likable performance by Raul Julia, this film seems overinfected by the kind of southern California narcissism that makes all of the male characters a little too pleased with themselves, with Pfeiffer little more than a beanbag in the little-boy macho games.

Thematically the film starts off like “The Believer,” Henry Bean's 2001 drama about an anti-Semitic Jew, and winds up like “Sullivan's Travels” without the comedy.

The heroes (Kilmer, Derek Luke) are all totally good, the villains (Ed O'Neill, William H. Macy) are all totally bad, and the macho one-liners are sufficiently adolescent to produce the desired snickers. I tried very hard to imagine I was somewhere else.

Unfortunately this is much tamer than it had to be--Rudnick Lite, meaning on the edge of evaporation.

The direction of this clammy 1935 horror item is credited to Louis Friedlander, which is actually Lew Landers in hiding—perhaps understandably.

Lugubrious and rather contrived... Because this whole project seems detached at times to the point of indifference—no one ever seems to be having any fun, including the filmmakers—even one's clinical interest eventually begins to evaporate.

Dopey, violent horror thriller.

The ideological reasons for the heroine's project aren't divulged, so I guess we're supposed to be fascinated simply by the fanaticism of her will, doubts and all. I wasn't.

The film's oily overdefinition of various class and cultural categories (ranging from “poor” and “well-to-do” to “avant-garde” and “vulgar”) is strident enough to betray a condescending attitude toward the audience.

I'm all for bold screwiness, but this provocation seems labored despite the striking images.

After making his best and smoothest drama (Match Point) in England, Woody Allen returns there for one of his most clueless and awkward, outfitted with a standard-issue Philip Glass score.

If you've never seen the lovely Wenders film, maybe you'll be charmed by this low-grade variation, all of whose best qualities--such as the airy crane shots poised over city vistas and freeways--can be traced back to the original; otherwise you might run screaming from the theater.

A piece of cheese without much flavor.

The first four letters say it all.

To my mind, this is one of Robert Aldrich’s worst films, but clearly not everyone agrees.

Awkward storytelling and spotty exposition reduce it to a string of rude shocks--not even the eventual denouement provides a lucid enough account of where this is all coming from.

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.

To boost this movie's rating to "worth seeing" would make me feel like a publicist or simply a dope.

A deeply stupid and offensive action comedy-romance.

Considering the degree to which Fatal Attraction and Basic Instinct are already self-parodies, writer David O'Malley and director Carl Reiner don't have to do much to show how silly they are; in order to understand how silly this movie is, on the other hand, all you have to do is sit through it.

I'm usually a sucker for courtroom dramas, but Rob Reiner's highly mechanical filming by numbers of Aaron Sorkin's adaptation of his own cliched and fatuous Broadway play kept putting me to sleep.

Loaded with facile social themes, opaque characters, pointlessly intricate flashbacks, and inflated technique.

With so many dubious elements at play, even the half-good ideas get lost in the shuffle.

If you can swallow one more amnesia plot and one more recycling of favorite bits from Godard's Bande a part, pressed to serve yet another postmodernist antithriller about redemption, this has its compensations.

The mirthlessly sadistic gags tend to target people in wheelchairs or hospital beds and betray a mild if all-encompassing disgust for the source material and 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.

One more sluggish, artfully framed thriller with Rembrandt lighting set in a New York borough--a kind of picture that's awfully hard to do in a fresh manner.

The film's hatred of Ricci and Channing and its affectionate tolerance of the hero's mousy hypocrisy and his mentor's negativity are familiar Allen motifs, but the faint echoes of his best work only make this one seem grimmer.

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

You can't be both political and incoherent, and even though Kelly's models are "Kiss Me Deadly" and "Blade Runner," this vision of the near-future suggests a random blend of "Dr. No" and "Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!"

Torturously dull.

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

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.

As satire it's toothless and at times close to incoherent; its predictable swipes are aimed equally at conservative racists and bleeding-heart liberals.

Every effect is so calculated that only the conscious minds of filmmakers and viewers are engaged--and not by very much or for very long.

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.

There are a few pretty good design effects en route, but not enough to compensate for all the embarrassments.

This 2005 farce about a hellish Passover seder panders to middle-class Jews as gleefully as Tyler Perry's movies pander to middle-class African-Americans, though there's less religiosity and a greater degree of self-hatred in the vulgar stereotypes.

The unfocused story is so bereft of any clear sense of period or location that the political melodrama sometimes seems to be taking place inside a cigar box.

Tsai's obvious disgust at the sex is part of what makes the film so unpleasant; he remains a brilliant original, but this is a parody of his gifts.

At first I thought this was a Michael Haneke knockoff, but it's more depressing and less edifying than most of those narrative experiments, which is why I eventually tuned it out.

Unfocused, condescending, and corny.

The film itself regresses, starting in the present and winding up with a cautionary ending that evokes the hokiest SF movies of the 50s.

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.

More of the same, though a lot coarser than its immediate predecessor, and the characters and situations have now calcified to the point where they're simply sitcom staples.

Slapdash plot, paper-thin characters, misogynist undertones, and mechanical crosscutting are all soft-core standbys.

There are no characters to care about or remember afterward - just a lot of flashy technique involving decor, some glib allegorical flourishes, and the obligatory studied film-school weirdness.

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.

A feeble sequel to The Naked Gun that's about one and a half rungs down from its predecessor and a good four or five down from Airplane!

I haven't seen the original, and this mishmash -- doesn't make me want to.

The result is a dull and campy 97-minute bloodbath offering little distinction between good guys and bad.

If old-fashioned jolts are what you're after, this nasty piece of merchandise delivers. But so does electroshock.

A film about a junkie rock musician, played by Michael Pitt at his most narcissistic, doing nothing in particular for the better part of 97 minutes isn't my idea of either a good time or a serious endeavor.

Thomas is a couch potato as well as a recluse, and a terminal bore to boot. The women, real and simulated, are only slightly more interesting, and then only when they talk back.

Based on this outing, writer-director Joe Carnahan (Narc) can't tell a story worth a damn--especially not a complicated mishmash like this one.

This interminable contest between two narcissists, stretched out over many miles and years, is supposed to have something to do with romance.

It's pretty perverse for William Wheeler, who scripted this feature, to get most of the facts wrong, inflating details that don't need any spin. (As Irving himself remarked, "You could call it a hoax about a hoax.")

It's an utter waste of Watts; there's not a trace here of the talent on display in Mulholland Drive, perhaps because the script doesn't bother to give her a character.

Payne is just as guilty of using her (Ruth) as a figurehead for his ideas--most of them about the stupidity and futility of politics--as are the targets of his satirical abuse.

This anachronistic tale goes beyond Capracorn to evoke Depression-era fare like "One Hundred Men and a Girl" in which the charm is overtaken by mush. One wants to protect this, but it's hard not to gag on the cuteness.

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.

This is mainly a narrative brain-teaser like "Memento" or "The Jacket"; merely keeping up with the game requires so much energy that the thinness of the material becomes fully apparent only toward the end.

This fumbling and formulaic semiremake of The Private War of Major Benson (1955) is basically just an excuse to let comic Damon Wayans—functioning here as cowriter and executive producer as well as star—strut his stuff. But he's strutting in a void, and not even two gold teeth will light his way. The initial premise [is] good for a couple of laughs at most.

I don't doubt the noble motives behind this Disney parable, but the attempts at amiable, laid-back dialogue (script by Gerald DiPego) are painful, the pacing is sluggish, and the confused story's poorly focused.

Mainly it's a shambles, though for once Williams gets to do what he's best at (his stand-up shtick), and the absurd story, no matter how carelessly assembled, keeps moving.

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.

[An] unsatisfying mess.

The truth is that this programmatic Christian parable is pretty unbearable--glib, often myopic, and reeking with sentimentality and self-pity.

Even though Kristy is seen mainly through the uncomprehending eyes of Jake, McGovern manages to fare better with the cliches thrown at her than Bacon does; but neither has a prayer of scoring at a game whose rules and players might have been dreamed up by a computer. Even the cutesy minor gag of putting the title's initials on the hero's license plate has something grimly nonhuman about it.

A tiresome 1998 rip-off of The Hustler, with poker (in a New York Russian Mafia milieu) taking the place of pool, Matt Damon taking over for Paul Newman, and John Malkovich's scenery chewing supplanting Jackie Gleason's self-effacement.

Director Philip Kaufman's usual flair for erotic detail largely deserts him here, and this thriller seems most interested in lingering over battered and bloodied male faces.

An exceptionally stupid movie.

Frantic and unfunny.

Essentially a one-trick pony.

A bewildering mixture of fairly accomplished storytelling (I enjoyed it more than Dead Poets Society, which isn't saying a lot), awkward contrivances in the script, and lies in the overall conception so egregious they undercut any pretensions the film might have to social seriousness.

Bored me for most of its 178 minutes and then infuriated me with its cheap cynicism once it belatedly became interesting--which may be a tribute to writer-director Lars von Trier's gifts as a provocateur.

There's so little respect for the music that we never see or hear a number from beginning to end, and we rarely hear any of the musicians speak more than a few seconds at a time. Overall the glibness and self-contempt are so thick you can cut them with a knife.

Another virtual-reality SF movie -- and you're not likely to care.

13 (Tzameti) might seem allegorical, but it’s too cynically concerned with what works as entertainment to offer larger truths about human existence.

As effective as MacDowell was in sex, lies, and videotape, she's clearly no match for the talented Depardieu; perhaps she'd seem less out of her depth if the script wasn't so implausible and threadbare.

Arnold Schwarzenegger and Jamie Lee Curtis must have a soft spot for the disabled kids of billionaires, because both have cameos near the end of this vulgar and dreadfully dopey enterprise; more impressively savvy is director Penelope Spheeris, who plays herself directing the movie-within-a-movie and manages to seem superfluous in both roles.

Despite the resourcefulness of the two leads, the movie finally registers as much ado about very little.

For the first 100 minutes or so I found this hokey but serviceable; after that my watch became more meaningful than anything I could locate on-screen.

One very sick and messed-up movie.

This is basically sloppy, all-over-the-map filmmaking with few hints of self-criticism and few genuine laughs.

More concerned with attitude than character and too moralistic to be much fun.

Running beyond three hours, the movie more than overstays its welcome, and despite some vague genuflections in the general direction of The Godfather regarding family ties and revenge, there are simply too many years and locations covered, too many crane shots and rainstorms.

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

Allen doesn't get us to care much about any of the characters here.

Director Ken Kwapis (The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants) gives this script by many hands a certain gloss it doesn't deserve.

Though praised when it came out (1930), Alfred Hitchcock’s film of Sean O’Casey’s play, with some of the original Dublin cast (including Sara Allgood as Juno), is a fairly deadly case of canned theater that’s pretty close to what Hitchcock many years later would refer to as “photographs of people talking.”

Compels questions about Kinski's bravado and artistry, and suggests that it might not always be easy to distinguish his from Herzog's.

This is the dullest and least successful adaptation of the Christmas chestnut I've ever seen, possibly because the mixture of Muppets and humans creates anomalies of scale and degrees of stylized behavior that the film tries to ignore rather than work with.

Humorless, lugubrious, and interminable.

The movie offers an insulting "let them eat cake" gesture toward the 1982 audience, but the pacing is so ragged and the characters so lifeless that few will be able to stay awake long enough to feel offended

The protracted shoot-out at the end of Dear Wendy is even more pornographic than the moment when a female member of the Dandies exposes her breasts. The audience is clearly expected to enjoy the bloodbath even while it disapproves.

The plot of this character-driven drama is slender and the digital images rather muddy--apparently an impoverished indie feature can look bad and still not be very interesting--but to his credit, Thelemaque sticks to his minimalist turf. And the dogs are great.

Jarhead virtually begins with a rip-off of the basic-training sequence that opens Stanley Kubrick's "Full Metal Jacket."

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

More fanciful than factual, less likable than either The Big Easy or Breathless, McBride's previous two features, the movie tries hard to re-create the euphoria of 50s rock films, but the poor-white milieu is treated with such crude derision that all the characters wind up seeming like two-dimensional geeks.

"Sorry, viewers" is more like it.

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

This comedy is an ill-fated attempt to remake "Risky Business" (1983) for the 21st century, complete with a wind-chimey score, the hero posing in his underpants, and a cynical happy ending.

If you're an 11-year-old boy at heart, this is undoubtedly even better than the pile of dinosaur shit in Jurassic Park.

I don't know the actual budget of this adventure yarn, but it feels like a middle-range effort whose heart is with the bargain-basement offerings of yesteryear.

The tricky plot has an interesting payoff, but it's a slow and bumpy ride getting there, and Koepp fares better with special effects than with generating either suspense or interest in the characters.

The rationale behind this unattractive animated comedy, a U.S.-German coproduction, seems to be that since it can't create a fairy-tale world of its own, it might as well riffle through many of the more familiar ones, with particular emphasis on Cinderella's, pretending to deconstruct them with postmodernist glosses, adolescent wisecracks, and a few high-tech anachronisms.

A horrendous effort all around.

Sean Penn's first film as writer-director, steeped in sullen Method acting, pretentious symbolism, and mannered slow motion, is obviously a sincere and considered effort, but I found it insufferably tedious, self-indulgent, and reeking with self-pity.

Suspense is fairly effective until it's stretched to the point of monotony.

Director F. Gary Gray doesn't have a clue about how to film this couple dancing, and Peter Steinfeld's crude script confuses character with shtick while racing us through a story where loyalties and motivations turn on a dime.

Murphy seems either incapable of or uninterested in creating a recognizable world, so local comic effects count for everything.

Well-acted but otherwise conventional war hokum.

When the cast is shown during the final credits repeatedly cracking up in blown takes, one would like to think they were laughing at some of the lines they were expected to deliver.

The few halfway decent ideas in the story (by John Skip, Craig Spector, and Leslie Bohem) and production design (by C.J. Strawn) are mercilessly and fatally crushed by the inept direction of Stephen Hopkins and the flaccid editing.

This all-day sucker put me to sleep -- though it's possible I retreated out of self-defense.

Now that Robin Williams has been emasculated--dangerously schizoid comic turned into nice-guy movie star--it isn't too surprising that a commercial hack like Chris Columbus would use him the way he does in this cutesy 1993 comedy: cutting between Williams trying on different voices rather than holding the camera on him as he lurches between these voices without notice.

This caper movie starts off as enjoyable guff before turning strictly formulaic and winding up as unenjoyable guff.

This interminable, poorly constructed drug thriller by writer-director Frank E. Flowers sat on the shelf for two years before winning a release.

Unfortunately the movie's more interesting and challenging social aspects, which imply more than one "British-Chinese gay experience," are often overtaken by its smarminess--including an aggressively banal score and the way some actors have apparently been encouraged to overwork their eyebrows.

Easy to take but even easier to leave alone.

The script...and Rob Reiner's direction...bristle with phoniness.

Interminable...Writer-director Richard Lowenstein seems as bored with the proceedings as most spectators are likely to be; consequently there's probably more gratuitous camera movement per square inch here than in any other film of 1986.

The film is far too appreciative of its own jokes to let the audience discover anything on its own.

Schwaba's uncertainty as a director is underlined by the almost arbitrary jump cuts, freeze-frames, and sped-up action.

Translating Woolrich's pulpy obsessiveness and crazy contrivances into the stuff of light comedy is no easy matter, and the movie gets as far as it does mainly with the help of Lake and Shirley MacLaine.

If you care whom she winds up with or why, you probably caught more of the TV references than I did.

I don't believe in fixing things that aren't broken. Sandra Nettelbeck's wholly accessible "Mostly Martha" (2001) is one of the most delightful comedies of recent years, so the idea of a remake with English instead of German dialogue is already pretty dubious, an insult to the capacities of both audiences and the original filmmakers.

Eugene Levy is the only actor who emerges relatively unscathed in such a fetid climate; as for Joan Plowright, I hope she took home a healthy check.

If Sayles had persuaded me he knew anything about Bush, his background, or his entourage that isn't already well-known, I might have felt more like laughing.

Its paper-thin characters turned into caricatures by egregious hamming, this 1996 Japanese comedy-drama about shy ballroom dancers is sentimental goo and downright interminable.

Laughless, brainless, styleless, and clueless.

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.

A lot of effort appears to have gone into the glitzy period re-creation, but this is mainly a tearjerker.

Proves that the Disney people can sell just about anything--including a misogynistic celebration of big business and prostitution.

Part of the idea here was to play in the ambiguous zones where Las Vegas tackiness, LSD hallucinations, Gilliam beasties, and lots of vomit become difficult to separate.

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.

An appalling piece of junk that tries to redo The Odd Couple and Grumpy Old Men in presidential terms.

If Frank Capra had directed the Three Stooges in a Disney Christmas release, the results would have been considerably better than this godawful Fox comedy (1994) by writer-producer-director George Gallo.

Pretentious, boring, and consistently uninvolving, this effort by producer Robert Evans and director William Friedkin to make comebacks with an incoherent Joe Eszterhas script simply won't wash.

The most obnoxious case of masculine swagger since Andrew Dice Clay, with just a tad of Paul Lynde thrown in for spice, Jim Carrey defies you not to bolt for the exit while playing the title hero in this 1994 comic mystery.

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

Imagine combining bad imitations of the "Ace Ventura" and "Austin Powers" movies and you'll have a rough idea of this feeble Dana Carvey farce.

If your idea of a good time is watching a lot of stupid, unpleasant people insult and brutalize one another, this is right up your alley.

Mechanical, soulless.

Given the audacity, it would be a pleasure to report that the results are hilarious, but most of it isn't even funny, and the sense of "anything goes" hangs heavy over the film as it develops.

The unfunniest comedy I can recall seeing in ages.

The talented director Bill Duke (A Rage in Harlem, Deep Cover), who brought distinction even to The Cemetery Club, his previous outing, goes to sleep here, and it's hard to blame him; why stay awake for insulting hackwork like this? James Orr and Jim Cruickshank wrote this malarkey.

Despite the cast -- Kevin Bacon, Matt Dillon, Neve Campbell, Denise Richards, Daphne Rubin-Vega, Theresa Russell, Robert Wagner, and Bill Murray -- I found it preposterous.

David Morse, who plays the driver, gives a relatively sharp and understated performance -- for me the only bearable thing in the movie.

An epic about the Irish patriot (Liam Neeson) during the last years of his life (1916-'22), it clearly represents a lot of thought on Jordan's part, yet it's dramatic and cinematic sludge.

Overwritten by Billy Crystal and Peter Tolan, overdirected by Joe Roth, overplayed by most of the cast, yet typically undernourished.

Alas, the plot eventually takes over, and it's exceptionally ugly and unpleasant.

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.

The plot exposition gets laborious in spots, the period flavor is only occasional and approximate, and the direction tends to be clunky, yet the strong secondary cast helps to take up some of the slack.

For most of the running time I was mainly confused, as well as mildly nauseated by the gross-out details of a tale that tends to be more slimy than scary.

This stupidly contrived thriller is all the more disappointing if you admire previous work by Berry and director James Foley (After Dark, My Sweet).

I had a pretty good time with this until the end, when I felt so soiled by the filmmakers' cynicism and the characters' gratuitous viciousness that I wanted to take a bath.

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

Nearly all the SF premises are accorded the status of Andrew Dice Clay one-liners - which means that they, along with the characters, keep changing from one scene to the next.

I don't know the novel, but judging from the script by Crichton and John Patrick Shanley, this must be scraping the bottom of the Crichton barrel.

The gratuitous use of the city (New Orleans) during Mardi Gras is the least of this movie's unoriginal sins.

Offers the same crudely effective variation on the hatred and fear of hillbillies in "Deliverance."

When nostalgia, hypocrisy, and indifference to history converge in the kind of shameless Capracorn manufactured here, one can either be stupefied by the filmmakers' cynicism or fall for the package hook, line, and sinker.

There's so little urgency to the plot that one eventually feels not even the actors and filmmakers believe for a second in what's going on.

The indifference of the proceedings and the hero's slapstick behavior to the everyday realities of the camps borders on the nauseating.

The whole thing becomes a very rickety and contrived tearjerker.

Costner has an uncanny aptitude for gravitating toward the dopiest projects in sight, but this time he's outdone himself.

An extravagant mess.

But it's also Howard's and his audience's misfortune that a good time can be had by all only if nothing of substance gets said.

It's clear that writer Akiva Goldsman and director Joel Schumacher are bereft of ideas and using the MTV clutter as a cover-up.

Almost no plot here and even less character--just a lot of pretexts for S-M imagery, Catholic decor, gobs of gore, and the usual designer schizophrenia.

Offers so much frenetic fast cutting to so little purpose that it becomes an ordeal.

A geek festival that mainly invites us to hoot at a bunch of alleged crazies.

A major washout.

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