Liam Lacey

This is a movie that was made not because the director had anything to say, but because she wanted to get a movie made. Even at that, the script is slapdash. Only one character has any dimension (Frances O'Connor's Mia), the plotting is the usual sub-screwball comedy with obligatory pranks and misunderstandings, and the overall tone is bland, smug and connivingly cute. [11 Apr 1997, p.C6]

A funereally unfunny comedy.

There's are nagging problems with the script, which feels like it has lost a few pages during its rewrites. Instead of an orderly, inexorable pressure of events, we get a surfeit of red herrings, followed by the rather uninteresting killer simply stepping out of hiding.

Occasionally a movie comes along that’s such an awkward compilation of ideas it fascinates: The Forger, a Boston-set melodrama involving cancer, Impressionist art and deadbeat dads, is only about half that good.

What "serious" means for young actors, as we know from Miley Cyrus's "The Last Song," is maudlin, and Charlie St. Cloud is no exception.

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

Just how dumb is Senseless? So dumb it even takes the fun out of stupid.

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]

In the life-is-too-short category, file Kangaroo Jack as a sub-Farrelly Brothers, dumb-plus-dumber buddy picture.

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]

Ronan, youthfully elegant as always, tries hard, but the material defeats her.

The filmmakers have altered the premise from the unlikely to the ridiculous.

This is the sort of movie that ends up awash in sincere revelations, and not a moment of it feels remotely believable.

As the teenage new-waver in a land of corn-fed farmers, Bacon has an aggressive, nervous edginess, but is ultimately too limited an actor, or too poorly directed, to carry the leaden weight of the script. [20 Feb 1984]

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.

For a comedy about the quest for inner peace, A Thousand Words reeks of desperation.

About as much fun as being given a wedgie and hung from the camp flagpole, Daddy Day Camp is an unnecessary sequel.

Instead of story or suspense, Double Team offers a busy sampling of eye candy. [4 Apr 1997, p.C6]

The film is a howler of illogical, overwrought emotion, inexplicable actions and sudden bursts of bloody violence. [03 Mar 1984]

What can you say about a film the comic high point of which is Dan Aykroyd standing half-naked in a bathroom while extracting hairs from his nostrils with manicure scissors? For starters you can say it's bad, as bad as a film can be that looks to National Lampoon's Vacation for creative inspiration. [17 June 1988]

Feels like a five-year-old with a megaphone, excitedly yelling about his latest bulldozer-soldier-dinosaur smash-kill-squash-everything game.

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]

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.

All the silliest racist cliches are perpetrated: the dark people with their dark magic; British actress Cathy Tyson, as a Haitian psychiatrist who is occasionally possessed by demons and lapses into frenzied love-making; evil third world politics hand-in-hand with black sorcery. [5 Feb 1988]

The film is a mawkish mess, only occasionally alleviated by the performances or Shange's poetry.

One of those non-stop jabbering cartoons in which most of the lines sound like the spontaneous riffs from a couple of comics sitting around a diner.

As coy sleaze goes, the new Olsen twins' movie doesn't match Britney Spears's "Crossroads," but it comes close.

It's difficult to say who is more misguided here: the men (director, screenwriter and producer) who made the movie, or the women who signed on to play the parts.