Kenneth Turan

Cutthroat Island is a bloated, jokey production whose motto, no doubt tattooed on the back of some poor assistant director's neck, could well be, When in doubt, blow something up.

Moves with the suffocating deliberateness of a river of molasses.

Mostly I Spy, with more dead spots than a Jerry Lewis telethon, is content to mark time. That gives us, and perhaps the cast as well, the opportunity to reflect on how satisfying this film could have been if anyone had thought it worth their while to provide real material for the talent to work with.

Like a drug that starts with a rush and ends with a headache, Total Recall is too much of a good thing.

When faced as a director with the rudderless screenplay he (Jonze) co-wrote with Eggers, he's been powerless to energize it in any involving way. Sometimes you are better off with 10 sentences than tens of millions of dollars, and this is one of those times.

Less fascinating and finally unsatisfying is the awfully familiar racism angle, a subplot that, though unusual in a POW movie, turns regrettably earnest and preachy almost immediately.

Le Week-End is a sour and misanthropic film masquerading as an honest and sensitive romance. A painful and unremittingly bleak look at a difficult marriage, it wants us to sit through a range of domestic horrors without offering much of anything as a reward.

Make no mistake, the high-flying stunts in director Renny Harlin's film are definitely state of the art, and while they're going on, the film works up a serious level of excitement. But as soon as the action stops and the inevitable talking begins, Cliffhanger falls to earth with a considerable thud. [28 May 1993 Pg. F1]

The Chamber is like a balloon that all the air has leaked out of. Maybe it wasn't magnificent before, but in its current state it is sad indeed.

A sincere attempt at epic filmmaking, it has been unable to translate its aspirations into believable, non-cliched cinema. What unrolls instead is approximately three hours of violent, cartoonish posturing incongruously set in the realistically evoked milieu of East Los Angeles. [30 Apr 1993, p.F1]

It is sad, truly sad, to have to report that Color of Night is a disappointment in almost every respect.

Kids is more tedious than titillating, one of those cinematic irritations more interesting to read about than to see.

It starts out like a house afire, but by the time it's over we're the ones feeling burned. A slick heist tale with more twists than sense, this is one movie that ends up outsmarting itself.

The plotting is so leaden and the fire fights so pro forma that not even the sight of the three Shafts in action can keep this film from sinking under its own weight. Yes, the great Isaac Hayes music makes an appearance, but the old days are gone and they are not coming back.

What's especially disheartening is the large gap between what's on the screen and the significant, meaningful work its creators sincerely believe they've made.

Landais has made a version of Aspern that is too often uncertain and unconvincing despite the good work of his female stars. And when the actresses leave the screen and the film ventures into ill-advised flashback territory, things get shakier still.

This is generic filmmaking at its most banal, a simple-minded simplification of a not overwhelmingly complex book.

Scorsese and his team have created a heavy-footed golem of a motion picture, hard to ignore as it throws its weight around but fatally lacking in anything resembling soul.

Another traditional Japanese production, weakly plotted, woodenly acted and indifferently dubbed.

Lacking noticeable energy or drive, its almost visceral distaste for dramatic momentum is puzzling, especially in a film about the black arts.

Because of its look, some fine period music including the Mills Brothers version of "Coney Island Washboard," and actors giving it their best effort, Wonder Wheel is not as completely forgettable as it would otherwise be.

But the result is no more than a forced fable, a self-consciously smarty-pants concoction that is too clever by half and too pleased with itself in the bargain.

Does go on too long, leading to inevitable dead spots.

Working with cinematographer Karl Walter Lindenlaub, director Caton-Jones has givenRob Roy a beautiful wide-screen look, filled with gorgeous vistas. But this film is like a color Xerox copy of the real thing: hard to tell from an original until you look closely at the details.

Though Waterworld has some haunting underwater visual moments, the film's impact is weakened by flat dialogue, an overemphasis on jokeyness and a plot that, despite all those screenwriters, does not satisfactorily hold together at any number of points.

Days is loaded with effective visual razzmatazz, but what the eyes giveth, the ears taketh away. For whether it's the plot, the dialogue, the character development or the acting itself, anything that stands apart from camera style is a thudding disappointment.

Main lure is what feels like a very authentic visual sense of the nontourist side of Kingston, where the ambience of zinc-walled shacks wallpapered with old newspapers is captured by cinematographer Richard Lannaman.

Both too unfocused and overly familiar. It has enough comic energy to generate some chuckles, but even when we laugh we're always wondering why the jokes aren't funnier. [5 Mar 1999]

By consistently and relentlessly overplaying everything, by settling for standard easy emotions when singular and heartfelt was called for, by pushing forward when they should have pulled back, director Joe Wright and screenwriter Susannah Grant have made the story mean less, not more. Instead of enhancing The Soloist's appeal, they have come close to eliminating it.

As forgettable as the humor is the film's predictable portrayal of adults as clueless, overbearing cretins.

It can't decide what kind of a film it wants to be and so ends up failing across a fairly wide spectrum.

The Wayne's World concept, which, egged on by a rabid studio audience, works so beautifully in skit format, ends up feeling dragged out and energy-less at feature length. [14 Feb 1992 Pg. F1]

Elephants aside, the plot of this Ong Bak is rudimentary at best.

What is disturbing and frankly distasteful about The Girl Next Door is how slick and shameless it is in its eagerness to blur boundaries, to squeeze as much transgressive material as it can into a nominally bland and innocent form, to serve up a benign, sanitized and exquisitely titillating portrait of the world of pornography in the cozy sheep's clothing of a teenage movie.

Though one enjoys and appreciates Rush for what it is, it does not thrill the blood the way we have the right to expect a film like this to do.

The problem rather is the wholesale embracing of what has become de rigueur in animation, the practice of treating major characters as if they were stand-up comics working a room in Las Vegas.

The genre's recent past has set the bar quite high, and Treasure Planet doesn't quite make it over.

Given the subject matter, an exercise in delicacy and restraint was unlikely, but it's too bad that the film's concept is way more entertaining than what has ended up on-screen.

Though individual set pieces are well done, the film inevitably leaves an empty taste behind it once it's done.

While this film fits squarely into Soderbergh's recurrent goal of ignoring audience interest when possible, that's the only area in which it can be considered a success.

The truth is that two other films with Greengrass' name on them, "The Bourne Supremacy" and "The Bourne Ultimatum," have spoiled us for this kind of thriller filmmaking, and stacked against that, Vantage Point doesn't have a chance.

Ought to be disreputable fun. Instead it ends up, all its explosions and exposed flesh notwithstanding, rather inert.

Solondz's filmmaking style tries to make a virtue out of flatness and distance, and is always more comfortable indicating where feelings would go than actually providing them.

Suffers from being neither here nor there. In its rush to modernize its story and attract a young audience with stars like Ethan Hawke and Gwyneth Paltrow, the film ends up problematic both in relation to the original and on its own terms.

Instead of engaging what we get is a plodding, unfocused effort with few genuine thrills to speak of, the kind of movie that would play best on an airplane when you are eager to kill time.

Even if the vivid Whale/Karloff version had never been made, this treatment of the Shelley novel would be a loud and tacky disappointment.

Whatever was unforced and funny in the first film has become exaggerated here, whatever was slightly sentimental has been laid on with a trowel. The result, with some exceptions, plays like an over-elaborate parody of the first film, reminding us why we enjoyed it without being able to duplicate its appeal.

A wax-museum movie that is both bland and reverential despite its focus on the great man's love life, Jefferson is hampered by its disconnected protagonist.

A vaguely amusing formulaic comedy with a premise that turns out to be more discomforting than endearing.

The unsurprising, one-note nature of The Good Son, the fact that it’s a bump-in-the-night movie where all the bumps are visible a mile ahead, sorely constricts any possibility of excitement.

On paper it has every advantage, from gifted stars Ben Stiller and Jennifer Aniston to an established comedy writer-director with a promising idea about a romance between a carefree woman and a worried man. But instead of maximizing those pluses, Along Came Polly so completely fritters them away that even its brief 90 minutes feels unhappily long.

Death Becomes Her is a black comedy that is so pleased with its blackness it frequently forgets to be funny. [31 July 1992, p.F1]

It's a copy all the way, a disheartening attempt to capitalize on the success of the original.

A reminder of the difference between exhilaration and exhaustion, between tension and hysteria, between eroticism and exhibitionism. The line may be fine, but it is real enough to separate the great thrillers from the also-rans. And Basic Instinct is not a great thriller.

Yes, some of the individual stunts and action set pieces temporarily hold our interest...but the story itself is not convincing on its own terms, playing like a series of boxes (Bond asking for a martini shaken not stirred) that need to be checked off and forgotten.

This movie version adds a whole lot of other stuff, most of it not very good and not in keeping with the spirit of the Seuss original.

If anything, it uses its gifted veterans to disguise how tired, implausible and overly sentimental the proceedings turn out to be.

Zoolander 2 defines haphazard. You may smile at times, but not as often as you'd like.

Life, however, cannot be lived entirely on stage, and once the characters have to take off their thongs and return to their real lives, the film goes nowhere that is either interesting, involving or surprising.

(Mamet) backslides to a system that has his speeches read in a stylized way. The result is language that sounds unhappily artificial and characters who behave like they are less than real.

Features an aggressive, in-your-face romanticism that's noticeably lacking in genuine warmth. While its story of lonely misfits searching for love has appealing moments, more often it turns into an overbearing fable overburdened with fake joie de vivre.

The four actors are very good, and it's a shame they aren't working from a more focused and original concept. Written by Fusco and Michael Garrity, there's nothing awful about Stealing Time except that it mixes familiar ingredients with pretty bland results.

The idea that sexual harassment is about power, not sex, and that a woman in power can potentially misbehave just like a man may be news to certain segments of the population, but they are not news enough to light a much-needed fire under this production. [9 Dec 1994, p.1]

That bland, opaque quality is a disadvantage here; whatever else [Depp] is capable of, making audiences feel his pain is not at the top of the list.

Though the new film has some good things, it does not have enough of them to make the third time the charm.

Hologram for the King is a baffling film, cinema without weight or heft. The problem is not that anything on screen is troubling, it's that nothing there, not even star Tom Hanks, is capable of holding our interest or attention for very long.

Runaway Bride's Josann McGibbon & Sara Parriott script is so muddled and contrived, raising issues only to ignore them or throw them away, you wonder why so many people embraced it.

It's not objectionable (which is saying something these days) but neither does it have any compelling reason to be seen.

Against all reason and expectation, the result is a distinctly unfunny film.

As directed by Timur Bekmambetov, this 21st century Ben-Hur is more phlegmatic than awful, a by and large dull and lethargic piece of work that is not bad enough to get mad at. What it lacks most of all is a convincing reason to exist.

The main thing the new Shaft gets right is casting for the title role. It's too bad the rest of the film doesn't hold your attention the way he does.

The romance makes an awkward, contrived fit with the nominally serious political stuff, and even those momentous events come off as generic and unconvincing.

Yet for all its ballyhooed candor about sexual matters, it's a surprisingly baffling and opaque film, too artistic to be standard pornography and too zealously focused on being graphic to the exclusion of all else to succeed as drama.

Any movie whose computer-generated effects are more believable than its actors is asking for trouble. A frustrating combination of the magical and the mundane, Dragonheart has less difficulty creating a creditable dragon than a recognizable human being. [31 May 1996, p.F1]

It's not often that you see talented, well-meaning people joined together like cultists in the snare of a group delusion, but that's what makes this film fascinating, the proverbial accident you can't take your eyes off.

Goofy and gee-whiz when it isn't being post-apocalyptic glum, it is such an earnest hodgepodge that only by imagining "Mad Max" directed by Frank Capra can you get even an inkling of what it's like.

the first techno-misfire from Walt Disney Pictures, an over-elaborate film that leaves you feeling harangued, harassed and assaulted.

It's doubtful that records are kept about this sort of thing, but consider the possibility that Clash of the Titans is the first film to actually be made worse by being in 3-D.

A painfully contrived and artificial exercise in futility.

Affleck and Paltrow, who've been excellent elsewhere, display less chemistry than they've shown in magazine photo shoots. Even Woody and Bo Peep had more going on between them in "Toy Story" than these two manage here.

It's a portrayal so unconvincing it makes it close to impossible for the rest of the film to function as intended.

Coppola decided that he really wasn't making a horror film after all, but rather a love story, a comic burlesque, a costume drama, a piece of erotica, whatever. But no matter what else you do with it, a Dracula that cannot manage to be more scary than silly is as pitilessly doomed as that elegant old Transylvanian himself. [13 Nov 1992]

Writer-director Steers has chosen to overload "Igby" with phony archness and forced black humor, making it not the place to look for satisfying acting.

It has a tendency to run ragged and spends an unhealthy amount of time idling pointlessly at intersections.

While adapting accomplished fiction such as this is a lure Hollywood can never resist, some characters breathe better on the page, and that is the case here.

The only thing about The Naked Gun that won't make you laugh is the film itself...To mix a metaphor in appropriate style, the filmmakers have really beaten a dead horse into the ground with this one.

The Hunt lacks the courage of its presumed convictions, displaying no more than a determination to make as much cash as possible by exploiting national divisions less covetous individuals are despairing of rather than monetizing.

What audiences end up with word-wise is a hackneyed, completely derivative copy of old Hollywood romances, a movie that reeks of phoniness and lacks even minimal originality.

The hard truth is that the line between being deadly earnest and unintentionally silly is thinner than these people think, and Beyond Borders turns out to be an unreal film about a real situation, unavoidably cartoonish, as was the earlier "Tears of the Sun," in its attempt to join crucial issues to ridiculous melodrama.

Jack is more depressing than the weight of its demerits because of the quality of the work both these men have done before.

This noisy retread, a secondhand facsimile of a movie, is, except for the headache its boisterous sound level leaves you with, as forgettable as a bad day in the Disneyland parking lot.

If ever a film was made with more money than sense, this is it.

Experiencing Beast of Burden's inept dialogue and uninspiring direction on screen is a continual trial.

The Lone Ranger exists without a convincing sense of jeopardy or, more critically, any place for audiences to emotionally connect.

Laurence Fishburne is one actor who has charisma to burn, but even his incendiary performance can't ignite Hoodlum, a would-be gangster epic that generates less heat than a nickel cigar. [27Aug1997 Pg 8]

Given the polyglot nature of the cast, with actors from at least five countries taking their best shots at the English language, it's unclear why Cage felt he needed an accent or, stranger still, why it took him a reported seven months to come up with this one.

Though it strives to be clever, the only time Nine Months manages to be genuinely witty is in its closing credits, when it displays baby pictures of its stars. It's a small touch but it's not overdone, which is probably why it provides such a contrast with its surroundings. [12 July 1995, p.F1]

George Clooney's first effort behind the camera was doubtless more stimulating to direct than it will be for audiences to watch.

Pedestrian and awkward, this film is a disappointment not only in comparison with Lee's earlier epic, the underrated " Malcolm X," but also in comparison with another film with similar aims, Rachid Bouchareb's "Days of Glory."

Not clever or polished enough to be successful as farce, unwilling to supply any reason to care about any of its characters, unable to make the points about the role of fashion in society it thinks it is, "Ready to Wear" is madness without the usual Altman method.

Watching Tank Girl is as disorienting as waking up in someone else's bad dream. You want to get out as fast as possible, but all the exits seem to be blocked.

Loaded as it is with undeveloped notions about feminism and individuality, nothing about it is really memorable except the appealing musicality of the fine k.d. lang/Ben Mink score, which deserves better. [20 May 1994]

Though the photographs are memorable, the photographer is not.

A leaden mash-up of western and science-fiction elements that ends up noisy, grotesque and unappealing.

Fake or not, I'm Still Here is no fun to watch, and in fact Phoenix's situation comes off as so dire that it becomes a reason to doubt the film's authenticity. Filming someone having a mental breakdown is embarrassing and exploitative at best.

Just because people are objecting to Max for all the wrong reasons doesn't make it a good film, and it's not. It's a bizarre curiosity memorable mainly for the way it fritters away its potentially interesting subject matter via a banal script, unimpressive acting and indifferent direction.

A trying experience. As we watch Rochester fall apart in spectacular fashion, it's clear that a major lure for the venturesome Depp was the chance to play a grotesque, to become a pestilent physical wreck with an artificial silver nose. There's more in that role for the actor, however, than there is for us.

The most disheartening line in 187 is its last, written in bold type across the screen just before the credits roll: "A teacher wrote this movie." It's enough to make you weep, and not just because it's painful to think that this muddled and manipulative film was penned by someone in a position to mold impressionable minds. [30 Jul 1997, p.F1]

Larry Crowne is an inside-out movie, acceptable around the edges but hollow and shockingly unconvincing at its core. When that core is two of the biggest movie stars around - Tom Hanks and Julia Roberts - it's an especially dispiriting situation.

A bad movie for connoisseurs of the genre.

Falling Down encourages a gloating sense that we the long-suffering victims are finally getting our splendid revenge. The ultimate hollowness of that kind of triumph reflects the shallowness of a film all too eager to serve it up. [26 Feb 1993, p.1]

A complete waste of time and potential.

Though the Strick-Robinson script is solid from line to line, the film's plot is finally too implausible for anyone to rescue.

Lacks even a vestige of subtlety and is rarely so much as amusing. Viewers with fond memories of the brothers' wildly funny "There's Something About Mary" will be astonished at how few laughs the current venture has.

Sgt. Bilko is one of those joyless comedies that have lately become so prevalent, a halfheartedly amusing film that avoids originality while relying on old and tired material. [29 Mar 1996, p.F1]

It would be lying not to say that some of the moviemakers here aren't working at the top of their craft, or that the movie won't reach audiences. On its own terms, Kindergarten Cop is nearly fool-proof: the last word in glib, shallow, soulless, spuriously warm-hearted commercialism. [21 Dec 1990, p.1]

Such a classic combination of feckless dramaturgy and rampant excess that giving way to giggles is the only sane response.

Yet another silly disaster movie, where the special effects are believable and the characters aren’t.

The best thing that can be said about this lethargic coming-of-age tale, noticeably undernourished at 78 minutes, is that it's better than the even more pathetic "Stolen Summer."

Haunting almost serves as a reverse image of a successful film, demonstrating by what it lacks exactly what is needed to do things right. [23 July 1999, p.F15]

Though he claims to be a seeker, someone who "has to find out" why believers believe, Maher sets out not after answers but cheap laughs that preach, so to speak, to the converted.

Not just any kind of trash, it's high-art trash, a kind of "When Tutu Goes Psycho" that so prizes hysteria over sanity that it's worth your life to tell when its characters are hallucinating and when they're not.

Buried under the miscalculations, the shamelessness, the off-putting and inappropriate broadness are sporadically visible souvenirs of a good project gone bad, hints of the unusual, bittersweet story that got away.

Redford's Gage is so busy being exquisitely sensitive and polite he neglects to project any energy, and without it the crucial morning-after part of the movie gradually collapses under the weight of its own self-importance. [07 Apr 1993 Pg. F1]

Mad City is an example of how enervated polemical filmmaking can become when its plot loses contact with plausibility.

Though it displays enough perils to put a dent in future cruise ship sales, the film has a makeshift, slapdash quality that is the opposite of its predecessor.

Sporadically effective, it appears not to have particularly excited the people who made it, and that lackadaisical quality is a drawback.

It might even have made a good film, but it hasn't. In the hands of stars in denial about their stardom and a director who can't be bothered to take things seriously, it has come out implausible and unsatisfying, a comic thriller that is not especially funny or thrilling.

As the Farrellys have proved, tastelessness can be made palatable, but they've misfired with Me, Myself & Irene.

What's most troubling about this witless mishmash of whiny, infantile philosophizing and bone-crunching violence is the increasing realization that it actually thinks it's saying something of significance.

The problem overall is not so much that the humor, especially in the parent-tryout situations, is forced, but that it simply is not there at all. So little is going on in this mildest of fantasies that it is hard to even guess what kinds of emotional effects were aimed at in the first place.

The laugh lines are mostly crude and the prevalent slapstick is weak and uneventful.

The Canyons is a bad accident everyone saw coming, and now it is here.

Aside from preserving these folks for a presumably grateful posterity and convincingly depicting Austin as an open-air lunatic asylum, Slacker does not offer much to anyone who likes to stay awake.

Rising Sun has gotten everything backward. Mystifying when it should be clear and clear when it should be mystifying, it is the murkiest, most unsatisfying of thrillers. And the biggest mystery of all is how a project that appeared to have so much going for it could have gone so determinedly astray.

Not only are none of these characters particularly fun to be with, but the inevitable violence that enters their lives is strong and unpleasant. [03 Sep 1993]

Irritating, childish and more frantic than funny, Cats & Dogs does manage some few pleasant moments, but they are not worth waiting for.

A Good Day to Die Hard plays like an extended victory lap for star Bruce Willis and the entire "Die Hard" franchise. Not surprising, but not overwhelmingly entertaining either.

Getting progressively less involving as it goes along, the strongest feeling Series 7 creates is the passionate desire to change the channel and move on.

Scattered, phlegmatic and an all-around weak effort, Celebrity turns out instead to be one of Allen's periodic misfires.

Not the kind of unwatchable mess you might assume a film withheld from reviewers' scrutiny would be. It is, however, something equally unfortunate: a mess you'd rather not be watching.

By the time Duets faces the music, hardly anyone is going to care.

This is a surprisingly dull and tedious affair where nothing is even remotely plausible, the romance and the sex least of all.

The film's tone works overtime at mythologizing tawdry incidents into some ultimate epic about the lost innocence of youth. Gilded trash is more like it.

Despite that frisson of naughtiness and the occasional smile, Jersey Girl is overall too bland to hold our interest.

With some momentary exceptions, Jack the Giant Slayer simply isn't any fun.

A weakly comic splatter movie oversupplied with jokey, cartoonish violence.

A paint-by-numbers version of an artist's life, Basquiat is amusing for all the wrong reasons, especially at those horrible moments when you realize you're supposed to be taking it seriously.

As pretentious as it is hard-core specific, this fiercely anti-erotic film makes even the chilly "Eyes Wide Shut" play like "The Big Easy."

Soon becomes a sadistic experience in its own right. Experiencing this pretentious wallow -- overwritten, under-thought and overdone -- is a very sophisticated form of torture.

Feels more planned than passionate, scary at points but unconvincing overall.

McCarthy has not done himself or his reputation any favors with this original.

Decadence has rarely looked so pathetic, lethargic and dispiriting as it does in this listless film.

The Quick and the Dead is showy visually, full of pans and zooming close-ups. Rarely dull, it is not noticeably compelling either, and as the derivative offshoot of a derivative genre, it inevitably runs out of energy well before any of its hotshots runs out of bullets.

The Basketball Diaries is a lose-lose proposition. Although it masquerades as a cautionary tale about the horrors of heroin, this epic of teen-age * Angst is more accurately seen as a reverential wallow in the gutter of self-absorption.

It's as sad and painful to report as it is to experience, but Hollywood Ending makes the conclusion inescapable: Woody Allen has become his own worst enemy.

By coddling viewers and micromanaging our responses, The Other Sister shows almost as little respect for the audience as Elizabeth does for her feisty, underappreciated daughter.

The Majestic isn't. Rather it's "The Film That Wasn't There," a derivative, self-satisfied fable that couldn't be more treacly and simple-minded if it tried. And it tries, oh, how it tries.

Overall, Charlie Wilson's War is glib rather than witty, one of those films that comes off as being more pleased with itself than it has a right to be. It also suffers from being not all of a piece, with mismatched elements struggling to cohere.

With no plot, character or dialogue worth experiencing, let alone remembering, the film merely occupies space on the screen and hopes for the best.

Hollow, simple-minded and about as profound an experience as stepping in a pile of road kill.

By any rational standard, this film is kind of a mess. Even if you agree with its politics, you will probably weep at the ineptitude of it all.

Rock is undisputably gifted and charismatic, but when Down to Earth takes his edge away, the film's energy goes with it. And without energy, no comedy can survive.

So exasperating in its contradictions, so frustrating in its fakery, so deeply irritating in its pretensions, it's frankly hard to know where to begin to dissect it.

A misguided romantic serio-comedy aimed at women and gay men that ends up caricaturing both.

This is a Laura Ashley on Safari meditation on bored rich people searching for fulfillment and a new life among the photogenic wildlife of Kenya. Just wake me when it's over.

Lacking most kinds of inspiration and geared to undemanding minds, this project is so overloaded with hardware and stunts, it's a relief to have it over.

Too glib too often to make much of an impression any way you look at it.

"Implausible" is a mild word for the shenanigans Gang Related expects us to swallow. Writer-director Jim Kouf has loaded a lifetime's worth of ploys and contrivances, feints and jabs, into this unpleasant, interminable, more-than-usually pointless film. [8 Oct 1997, p.F4]

Chappie is a movie about the evolution of artificial intelligence that's as dumb as a post. It also marks the continuing devolution of the work of director and co-writer Neill Blomkamp.

If Penélope Cruz were any less attractive, maybe someone would have noticed how dull this mild, would-be romantic fairy tale has turned out.

Sporadically funny, often strange and almost never poignant.

It ought to be delightful, but it isn't.

Stillborn, pointless piece of work.

Taking issue with efforts like The Salton Sea, cold and unemotional films that couldn't be more pleased at the opportunity to enthusiastically drag audiences through unhappy material, is as futile as getting mad at the wind.

The latest in what feels like an endless string of movies ... in which the actor's parts have ruinously overdosed on sentimentality and schmaltz at the expense of humor and even sanity.

Watching Jade is such a hollow experience it’s hard to work up the energy to dismiss it. A movie where the car chases have more personality than the people, its monotone acting and recycled plot make one wonder, not for the first time, how something this tired ever got made.

A kind of dirty fairy tale in which people with nasty attitudes inhabit a trash-talking, macho world of fast cars and complaisant women.

This is a film that almost is not there.

Almost completely lacking in genuine thrills. Even the attractive presence of star Angelina Jolie can't keep this leaden, plodding, completely underwhelming film from playing like "Lara Croft: Yawn Inducer."

This poor film is so shamelessly manipulative and hopelessly bogus it will make you bite your tongue in regret and despair.

Not bad in the aggressive, ambitious, over-the-top way that “Showgirls” epitomized. “Two If by Sea” is more like a zero, an inert lump of a movie with so little going on that fidgety viewers can sneak out for a hot dog or some popcorn and return without fear of having missed anything significant.

A film that is more listless than funny and could surely use some of the energy that animated both Art Buchwald and Paramount Pictures in the lawsuit surrounding authorship of [Eddie Murphy]'s 1988 "Coming to America." [01 Jul 1992]

Tiresome, inept farce that's not even a fraction as clever or entertaining as it likes to imagine it is -- a complete waste of time.

One of those movies that makes you want to throw up your hands in despair, disgust, or maybe both.

The thrill is definitely gone, leaving a disappointing and unpleasant mess in its place.

Not only have bothersome plot changes been made, but the entire tone of the book has been transformed from tension to tongue-in-cheek with dismal results.

A haphazard film about half as sophisticated as the average beer commercial.

Even in thriller terms, nothing rings remotely true here, with even the baseball action--including a game that is not called despite enough rain to unnerve Noah--laced with a heavy dose of preposterousness.

Such a tedious Hollywood farce, so unpleasantly glib and relentlessly shallow, that Pacino's excessive performance is not even the worst thing about it.

Seems merely tired and stale, the opposite of fresh, marked by ideas for jokes rather than things that are actually funny. Then, without warning, it goes from inept to complete disaster, sinking from indifferent to fiasco in the blink of an eye.

After sitting through M. Butterfly, you'll wonder why they even bothered to try. [01 Oct 1993]

A numbing and dispiriting experience aimed at the least discriminating parts of the teen-age audience.

Forced, heavy-handed and overdone, it's a pretend serious film that offers crass manipulation in the place where honesty is supposed to be.

Turns out to be a muddled limp biscuit of a movie, a vampire soap opera that doesn't make much sense even on its own terms.

The filmmaking here is so glacially paced (the final script was only 62 pages for a 100-minute film) and enervating that boredom is the most frequent result.

It is hard to say what is more dispiriting about True Romance the movie itself or the fact that someone somewhere is sure to applaud its hollow, dime-store nihilism and smug pseudo-hip posturing as a bright new day in American cinema. [10 Sept 1993]

What's most interesting about this new film is how lacking it is in any of the things, from humor to emotion to halfway decent acting, we might go to a movie for. There's not even enough here to get mad at.

Despite a wealth of special effects...this movie is surprisingly inert, more dull than anything else, with little to recommend it on any level.

This aggressively stupid film is merely business as usual, a compendium of all the current obsessions and fixations that make so many of these films such unhappy experiences.

May not be the most tedious superhero movie ever - the competition is admittedly tough - but it is certainly in the running.

Misconceived, misguided and a completely miserable viewing experience, this is one to avoid at all costs and for all time. [06 May 1994]

Those foolhardy enough to place themselves at the mercy of 8MM can expect the following emotions: disgust and revulsion, then anger, followed by a profound and disheartening sadness. There are some films whose existence makes the world a worse place to live, and this is one of them.

Doomed to be inconsequential and forgettable.

Don't imagine there is any reason to see Fair Game.

The result is a calculated, cynical piece of business that epitomizes the creative bankruptcy and contempt for the audience that infects so much of the blockbuster side of Hollywood.

Some movies make you sorry you've seen them, and The Cell is one of those. Creepy and horrific, it's a torture chamber film.

Even Willis seems a bit bewildered at times, as if asking himself how he managed to get into such a mess. [24 May 1991]

How feeble a movie is Stolen Summer? So feeble they've just about buried the title on the film's own poster.