Michael Sragow

The movie plays like a dunk-the-clown game at a carnival. Through intent or ineptitude, he sets up the Bush family and administrations as caricatures.

Despite these flaws, people sick of gross-out films and teen-sex comedy may be so hungry for farce that they laugh.

S.W.A.T. may be an acronym for Special Weapons and Tactics, but by the end of this routine melodrama, it might as well stand for Standard Whacking and Trashing.

Without Duvall, this movie would be as wet as Waterworld.

Gibson mounts a convincing crucifixion, but his victim is the audience. The Passion of the Christ aims its metallic cat-o'-nine-tails at the viewers' nerves.

The Safety of Objects is just another stilted comic-dramatic essay examining the mold in the white bread.

Made is an amateur-hour buddy movie.

The dramatic content in Memento is as blank as Leonard's post-traumatic mental state.

How does an embarrassment of riches turn into mere embarrassment?

Never persuasively dramatize the agony, ecstasy and intricacy of composing poetry. Without that aesthetic component, all you see is that Plath's hunger for life couldn't compete with her death wish.

It's hard to know what these stars are ready for after this fiasco. Maybe a fitness video.

Pious, high-minded and bad history.

Forget chemistry: There's no biology to the star casting.

You don't want to look at anything else when Zeta-Jones is on-screen.

There's no irony within the film, but there's a whopping irony surrounding it. Just as Star Wars has finally ended, Rocky seems to be starting all over again.

Manipulates the audience.

The movie's own style is strictly an anti-style, all pre-packaged post-punk.

Roos suffers from fallen archness in his interminable new movie Happy Endings. He wants to be mischievous and ambitious and "human," all at the same time. He ends up with delusions of tragicomic grandeur that leave an audience fed up and dissatisfied.

The Hangover is like an infernal comedy machine. Surrender your soul to its foul mesh of cheap cleverness and vulgarity. and you howl like a delighted demon. Resist, and you feel all sense and sensibility being crushed in its cogs.

The movie gives us a time machine that resembles a twin-engined Mixmaster and a script that was tossed together inside one.

This new version may be closer to the Cole Porter biography, but it's hardly any more true to life. There is no life in this movie. It's a brittle contraption of a biopic.

The result is a flabby, episodic phantasmagoria.

Nolan pushes the twilight-zone atmosphere so hard that it loses its capacity for mystery. When it's not assaulting us with jolting audiovisual expressions of fatigue, this movie plays like a pedestrian response to David Lynch's effortlessly eerie "Twin Peaks."

This Women doesn't take place in reality or even in a glamorous urban fantasyland. It's strictly TV Land.

And Witherspoon? She does the American equivalent of a mechanical British performance: She hits every note too perfectly. There's no shadow to her smile.

By the end, this movie's balancing act is the equivalent of network news' equal-time laws. The "fairness" becomes deadening.

Wonderland marks a "biopic" first: Moviegoers will know less about the real-life subject going out than they did going in.

Hanks tries his hand at a king-size heartless comic role, and flubs it terribly. He looks slack and pasty and, what's worse, sounds slack and pasty.