Kevin Thomas

Feeble and unfunny.

In comparison to Where the Heart Is, the Wal-Mart commercials seem like cinema verite.

Pretty dreadful.

A trite, incoherent tale.

The actors are game, but their roles lack color and depth, and it's a real struggle to survive Soul Survivors to the finish.

The disastrous new version of H.G. Wells' "The Island of Dr. Moreau" at least affords Marlon Brando a grand entrance and a great comic portrayal. [23 Aug 1996, p.F12]

This picture, which looks far, far better than it is, is so clunky that you can't be sure just how funny writer John Esposito, in adapting an early King short story, and director Ralph S. Singleton intended it to be.

The genitally ambiguous as well as transsexuals and gay people deserve more than XXY's good intentions.

The Great Outdoors is about as much fun as ants at a picnic for anyone over the age of 10. It's a crass, blah comedy about summer vacation perils that teams Dan Aykroyd and John Candy, but gives them next to nothing to work with. If the prolific and profit-making John Hughes weren't the writer--as well as the co-executive producer--of this scattershot nonsense directed frenetically by Howard Deutch, it's hard to imagine the film getting made, let alone attracting Aykroyd and Candy.

Best of the Best is a by-the-numbers martial-arts movie graced by several celebrated actors marking time between more rewarding assignments and crowned by an appallingly brutal Tae Kwan Do competition. There's nothing here except for karate fanatics. [10 Nov 1989, p.F15]

Unfortunately, Jodorowsky is no Bunuel -- nor a Leone, for that matter -- and El Topo’s bloody odyssey, involving endless heavily symbolic encounters with the bizarre and fantastic, expresses the eternal tug of war between the savage and the spiritual in human nature on the most obvious level and in the most ponderous fashion.

Turns out to be a tedious and under-inspired comedy.

Appalling, shamelessly manipulative and contrived, and totally lacking in conviction.

Darkness Falls -- with a thud. But it does not go gently into the night, for director Jonathan Liebesman and his large crew cram as much style and energy as they can into a hokey and morbid supernatural thriller plot. It's a downer to see so much effort expended on such junk.

Greenaway is a man of distinctive ideas and insights who this time out has expended his abilities and perceptions -- and those of many others -- on an exercise in grossness that depresses rather than enlarges the human spirit. The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover is sensational, all right, but hardly entertaining. [13 Apr 1990, p.F12]

By the time the heavy-handed Solomon & Gaenor is over, it has become such a punishing exercise in the self-evident that one is left numb and eager for escape.

Has plenty of warmth, affection and conventional wisdom, but too much of the time it plays out in routine fashion with moments of contrivance.

More travesty than tragedy.

[An] inept, incoherent and charmless would-be romantic comedy-thriller.

Asks us to spend 101 minutes with people most of us wouldtake pains to avoid in real life.

Not even a brief appearance by Quentin Tarantino and a ton of references to other movies enlivens the proceedings much.

Paymer and many others in a large cast are well-established players with strong credits, and they do the best they can to pump life into remorselessly glum material.

The humor in this film is so elementary, so numskull, it defies description or extended discussion.

Implausible at every turn, it offers a dab of quirkiness and edge from writer-director Finn Taylor, but otherwise has nothing for audiences to embrace.

The attempt to find humor in mean-spiritedness is way beyond Paris and Fejerman's abilities, and their last-reel attempt to portray Sofia as an ultimately liberating force for her daughters is as contrived as My Mother Likes Women is repellent.

A film that means to be seductive but merely progresses from the contrived to the manipulative.

Cease Fire is no art film but, rather, mainstream fare that's likely to appeal primarily to Farsi-speaking audiences. It is talky, too long at 1 hour, 44 minutes and tends to be preachy and tedious.

Fandango overreaches badly and sinks under a heavy weight of symbolism, bathos and sheer preposterousness that no amount of humor and incident can redeem.