Lawrence Van Gelder

This clunky juvenile comedy lurches among multiple story lines without fully realizing the comic potential of any.

A modest but engaging mixture of comedy and drama that derives most of its energy from the performance of Callie Thorne.

Eventually becomes preaching that is likely to tax the credibility of the unconverted.

If it were medically possible to overdose on claptrap, Orca would be compelled to carry a warning from the Surgeon General.

The scenery, however, is handsome, and Miss Pays is indeed the sort of beauty who might have inspired Fitzgerald. But on the subject of credible motivation, Oxford Blues is likely to have left him depressed.

A high-concept, low-reward hodgepodge that mingles elaborate stunts and shootouts with stereotypical ethnic humor.

In films, as in the ring, heart and will without exceptional talent don't produce winners.

All its 89 minutes of fast cuts, swooping overhead shots, sun, surf, song, sunburn and sex cannot obscure the extent of its shallowness.

When it comes to father, sons and mob life, stick to "The Godfather."

Comes off as noisy and ill conceived, long on morphing monsters, short on storytelling talent and uneven in its efforts at animation.

There is an explanation for everything, but it is a long time coming and not worth the wait.

Begins to seem not so much an examination but an exploitation.

Cause for fright in only one respect: the possibility that it could spawn sequels.

Gang Related is a preposterously overplotted tale of two police detectives with moral compasses so defective that they have buried their brains and consciences along with 10 of their murder victims long before the film even begins.

Even pretensions toward the humorous and hip cannot save this blood-drenched film from its innate tastelessness.

Light on originality and low on suspense though high on design and special effects.

In the spring a monster's fancy lethally turns to thoughts of lust. This thought, reduced to a level contemptuous of taste and reasonable intelligence, underlies Species II.

Monotonously paced and too long, Jersey Guy also suffers in its early scenes from attempts at humor that probably read better on the page than they play on the screen.

J.D.'s Revenge crosses the line from a stupid movie to a potentially harmful one.

Poor old Mr. Magoo should have been allowed to rest in piece. This film suggests that when you loot a crypt, you're likely to find a corpse.

Juvenile comedy targets a gallery of imperfect women.

All the special effects in the world cannot compensate for an inability to generate tension, establish and sustain pace or create any character whose survival is worth rooting for.

Amateurish and incoherent.

Not very funny, intellignet or grippingly plotted, it is likely to appeal only to those who think that anything to do with marijuana - smoking, sharing, stealing or selling - constitutes the Everest of rip-roaring hilarity. [17 Jan 1998]

To imagine the life of Harry Potter as a martial arts adventure told by a lobotomized Woody Allen is to have some idea of the fate that lies in store for moviegoers lured to the mediocrity that is Kung Pow: Enter the Fist.

Brilliant film of nature has been warped into something jarringly unnatural.

A mound of standard-issue parent-child conflicts and enough self-help cliches to drive Polonius to the aquavit barrel at Elsinore.

Tedious descent into cinema hell.