Liam Lacey

Though Lillard's excitable tone keeps promising wild comic adventures, the sequences are uniformly flat and humour-free.

Distinctly humdrum, The Last Legion, a boy's adventure story that seems to have been dragged out of the vaults of some early-sixties TV series.

As directed by Bob Giraldi, well-known for his work in rock videos, Hiding Out manages to offer a brief catalogue of the cliches from both genres, before allowing the teen flick to take over. The film is essentially a series of comedy bits in the service of an MTV soundtrack. That soundtrack, which includes the first revelation of K.D. Lang and Roy Orbison's duet on Crying, may be the film's only creditable achievement. [10 Nov 1987]

A determined romantic comedy with a theme, and damned if it won't see it through.

Director Adam Shankman pushes together scenes with little rhythm or flow. Writers Thomas Lennon and Robert Ben Garant ignore credibility, throw in pointless sight gags, treat humiliation as comedy and use tiresome ethnic stereotypes. In short, Diesel doesn't get the help he needs.

[Lange] does give the movie the only excitement it possesses -- the frisson of a hideous thrill -- but it's still an excruciating embarrassment.

Well-intended but maladroit, with a clever premise and cute animation that are undermined by the trite sci-fi parody plot and manic, unfunny banter.

George Huang's Swimming With Sharks purports to give us the goods on the big bad egos who run Hollywood, but it lacks both credibility and coherence. [06 May 1995]

Unfortunately, Siemaszko's performance is less tour-de-force than schtick-de-sitcom.[9 Oct 1987]

The dramatic justification for all this careless maligning of gypsies and lawyers remains as enigmatic as the film's title. The only sure thing about Stephen King's Thinner,in the end, is that Stephen King's bank account is fatter.

The high point might be the opening scene, before the stars arrive on screen.

The intriguing thing about The Peaceful Warrior is that nothing else in the movie feels haphazard.

Brick Mansions is a non-starter: It chokes on its déjà vu, the hyperactive Mixmaster editing is exhausting and the characters’ banter is so leaden it might violate federal emission standards.

Perhaps the major disappointment of Silver Bullet is that it never gets as bad as the beginning promises. From playing on the precipice of so-bad- it's-good, Silver Bullet bobs up to the level of conventionally mediocre- bad, and remains there until the closing credits. [12 Oct 1985]

There's a risk of taking The Brady Bunch too seriously but, please, let's not think of it as funny, then or now. [18 Feb 1995]

The most disturbing aspect of Cold Creek Manor -- a predictable, disjointed "Cape Fear" knockoff -- is that a script this disjointed and unoriginal could actually get the Hollywood green light.

Refn’s expectation-defying choice is laudable in theory, but Only God Forgives is a pretty awful drama.

The movie's dated, stereotypical comedy often contradicts its wholesome intentions, coming across as laboriously cutesy and occasionally perverse.

The lower orders seem to have been left out of The Lost City -- there just aren't any poor characters -- which for a movie about a workers' revolution seems downright slipshod.

All the borderline pantomime acting and wigged buffoonery is deliberate and silly, but The Three Musketeers remains charmless, a romp brought down by its lead-footed script.

A twisted, but not particularly clever, black comedy.

With its stilted dialogue, fragments of voice-over and over-busy camera, Red Riding Hood feels off-kilter from the start.

Some of the most memorable performances from great actors are also their worst: Add to that list Anthony Hopkins's turn as a sinister old Jesuit.

After six years in development, this comedy starring and produced by Adam Sandler feels as slapped together one of the comedian's live-action buddy movies.

The United States of Leland has a resonance of "Elephant" without the visual poetry or structural sophistication, or "American Beauty" without the leavening comedy, but it's neither an insightful nor well-made film.

By comparison to this effort, "Pineapple Express" seems like a model of thoughtful maturity.

Runner Runner is a bad run of cliché clichés.

The movie seems much, much longer than its 90-minute running time. [15 June 1998]