Michael Wilmington

Wacky and heartless, bloody and silly -- and it ends in a flourish of grotesque sentimentality.

A neo-noir movie nightmare gone sadly wrong.

At its best, Transamerica made me laugh and feel for Bree. At its worst, it made me cringe at the potential creepiness of its central relationship.

"Masked" is erratic and volatile, too, from scene to scene, moment to moment. The script is chaotic, but the top-flight actors play their hearts out.

As silly movies go, this one is at least pretty exciting. But in the end, Typhoon leaves you feeling as exiled from the two Koreas as Sin is.

There are no surprises in this movie -- not even in the Bollywood parodies, when the hero and heroine finally, subversively kiss. There is talent, though.

As sports movies go, Gridiron Gang isn't bad, just not top-line material.

Soft and predictable -- which might be OK if there were more laughs and insight.

The movie goes too far on too little motivation - and the middle section, with its maggoty villains, roiling skies and native revolts, seems almost barmy. Yet Exorcist: Beginning does score a small victory. It's not as bad as you'd think.

Slickly produced, well cast and very excitingly made, it's based on plot hooks so silly, most of them blow up in your face.

A smorgasbord of bad ideas, sumptuously over-realized.

No Holds Barred gets no points for originality. It's written with the subtlety of a body-slam and directed with the finesse of a hammerlock. But the movie never takes itself seriously and director Tom Wright has fun with the wrestling montages.

It's a harmless enough movie, and quite a good-looking one; Bettany and Dunst are an attractive enough couple, even if Lizzie has been written as a selfish little snip and he as a whining man-child.

The movie has an odd, queasy edge to it. It's cute. But, sometimes, it gets cold cute, ghastly cute. The effect is mixed--like a Norman Rockwell cover redrawn in Gahan Wilson's style by a computer.

It's lively but chaotic and evasive. The period re-creation switches on and off. We get a sense of what the silver-walled Factory was like, but not the rest of swinging Manhattan in the '60s.

In the end, it all can't help feeling a little slight, more a pleasant wade into a writer's neurotic playground than a satisfyingly deep dip.

American movies about childhood often have a spurious feel. They can be grandiosely phony or sentimental--or both, as in Home Alone. Unfortunately, Now and Then, despite massively good intentions, fits right into the program. [20 Oct 1995, p.J]

The movie has bounce and bite, but it skitters around too much. Its needle is hip-hopping around between too many grooves.

Drop Dead Fred is an erratic stab at making madness sensible, a slapstick nightmare that goes too sane, that tries too hard to be both good and rotten.

A funny movie, but like "Josh" himself, it's too self-absorbed, and maybe too nice, for its own good.

Hackman, Jones, Heard, Cassidy, Pam Grier and Dennis Franz -- in another of his greaseball cop roles -- are always interesting to watch. And Davis still suggests he might evolve into an action specialist in the Don Siegel-Phil Karlson class -- if he chooses less apocalyptic scenarios.

Material like this might have worked if the moviemakers had played it completely crazy and over-the-top, if they'd made it a true satire of the American upper class facing its worst nightmare. But the tone of Toy Soldiers suggests its makers might have tried to turn Animal House into a triumph of the spirit story, too. [26 Apr 1991, p.F10]

An irritation, more fizzle than sizzle.

A limply derivative, disappointingly trivial and hokey fish-out-of-water crime comedy.

Weighed down by the presence of Griffith. She plays her satiric part without much gusto or conviction - as if she were afraid we might believe she really is Honey.

Scientology or not, the movie is a battlefield bummer that makes you want to revolt.

There’s a good movie buried in it, but it stays buried--and, by the end, the annoyances outweigh the pleasures.

The "Fallen" moviemaking team obviously want to make a thinking person's horror movie. Intermittently, they succeed. But this movie suffers the fate of many recent nightmare thrillers. [16 Jan 1998, p.A]

The results aren't gothic and bloody, as they were in the Lauren Bacall film "The Fan," or elegant and ironic as in the Bette Davis classic "All About Eve"--though the plot suggests a bit of both.

Captain Ron is a movie about trapped suburbanites who break out into romantic seas, but it never really leaves suburbia. Its spiritual home is in the shopping mall. Like the Cap'n himself, this movie guzzles up its dreams and ignores the busted engine.

A wild, wanton and wasteful western farce that's so overblown and underwritten it almost makes you cringe to watch it.

An odd mix itself, of contemporary sexual realism and unabashed romantic fantasy. If "Days" works, it's mostly on a sheer fantasy level.

It's overwhelming and, in a curious way, it's charming, but at the center, even though you see it in the right place, you detect not a heart, or a mind, but something like a hot, roasted marshmallow beating and burbling within a thickened, ursine breast.

Kirk Douglas' performance...is so strong and inspiring it's a shame there isn't a better movie around it.

A sappy, often absurd disappointment, another would-be inspirational romance that, like Costner's overwrought "Message in a Bottle," is impossible to swallow.

With his brazen gifts for mimicry, Eddie Murphy may now be the Peter Sellers of blockbuster toilet comedy movies.

It’s a dazzlingly filmed and acted synopsis.

It’s not really a bad movie. In some ways, it’s a better directed farce than the current hits “Back to School” or “Legal Eagles.” But it’s erratic, and often weightless or uncentered; the pieces keep flying apart.

This one's worth the ticket price only if you are a showbiz-aholic.

Not a picture that makes you think very much -- except to wonder why the studios keep making movies like this.

A dumb movie, but it's also a knowing one: a cheap castle of lewd trivia and corny excitement built on The Rock.

In a weird way, what happens to the kids is what happens to the movie. The humans shrivel to crawling piffles or get deformed into caterwauling robots; the super-tall grass and the giant cookies and insects take over.

Ragged as some of it might have been, that old "Out-of-Towners" had a unified and surprisingly dark comic vision to go with its nifty one-liners. This big, glossy picture is set in movie-movie land, that shiny, peachy place where a celebrity -- like Mayor Rudy -- waits around every corner. [2 April 1999, Friday, p.A]

The best things about The Last Boy Scout are the editing, Bill Medley's singing, a few moments of Noble Willingham villainy and Willis--whose weary, exasperated style exactly suits this kind of material. But the worst things about Scout are its slickness and self-confidence. A story about lonely heroism in a sick age should be a little hipper to what's really heroic and what's really sick.

Something about baseball seems to bring out the silly side in moviemakers -- even in a movie like The Fan, which starts out well-crafted and deadly serious and seems to have good enough actors and a savvy enough director to stay that way. But halfway through this thriller things go haywire. [16 Aug 1996, p.D]

The sum of all snores until the moviemakers start blowing up Baltimore halfway through. Then the special-effects people take over for about 20 breathless minutes.

Though the story is potentially fascinating and the visuals sometimes spellbinding, the movie itself is stranded in the purgatory of the second-rate.

Without Lemmon and Matthau, it's doubtful either "Grumpy" movie would be worth watching -- or even thinking about. But, because these two get much of their humor from reactions, the magnificent friction they create, they can say ridiculous things -- or even make up ridiculous lines (which they seem to be doing here) -- and make the scenes play. [22 Dec 1995, p.P]

For all Ricci's zingers, the actress who gets the most laughs here is Kudrow, who has an amazingly right-on offbeat comic sense and rhythm. Playing a bright, sexually repressed Indiana teacher, she displays priceless timing. [19 June 1998]

Critters is a dumb, but sometimes likable little movie: maybe an odd comment, since it contains savage killings, mutilations and general bloodshed and evisceration. [25 Apr 1986, p.8]

Pearce and Bonham Carter are remarkably photogenic, but the movie is fitful and mannered to a fault, full of watery allusions and stormy scares.

All Center of the World has is the double entendre of its title, some unremarkable dramatic and sex scenes, and some embarrassing moments for its very game co-stars.

Written with such murderous gravity, certainty and gloomy solemnity - such an absence of real life or feeling - that it tends to kill our interest.

There are nice things in Medicine Man but it only works perfectly when it leaves its characters up a tree. [07 Feb 1992, p.F10]

At bottom, Lethal Weapon isn't much. It's a big, shallow, flashy, buddy-buddy cop thriller; it attacks you like a stereophonic steamroller, flattening everything behind it. Snatches of "Hustle" "Magnum Force" and "48 HRS." float above this plot like scum on a polluted lake, and the holes in logic and mindless climax are (or should be) embarrassing. [6 Mar 1987, p.4]

Larger Than Life is far closer to Murray's worst than his best. It's a truly senseless, erratic, if occasionally charming comedy that manages to waste Murray, a fine cast, good location photography and a terrific actor: Tai, the 8,000-pound trained pachyderm whose considerable stuff was strutted in 1995's Operation Dumbo Drop. [03 Nov 1996, p.11C]

At least Reno is around -- and he's the only spice in this stale, slick stew

Elaborate misfire, which misuses an unusually good cast.

May be the only movie in recent memory unworthy of its own genuinely hilarious Web site, www.finemanfilms.com.

Mighty Joe Young is a mighty big movie about a mighty big gorilla. And a lot of it is mighty bad -- unless you're a devotee of high tech and low camp, elephantine effects and mouse-sized stories, politically correct nostalgia and/or Charlize Theron and Bill Paxton in jungle outfits.

Ernest Saves Christmas is an improvement on Ernest Goes to Camp, mostly because of Seale. But basically it's another TV ad, a chestnut roasting on an open fire, exploding in your face every so often with another Ya know what I mean? [15 Nov 1988, p.7]

Compared to many movies of this kind, this Beaver is an enjoyable but mixed bag. [22 Aug 1997, p.C]

Isn't good satire or good slapstick. It does have those lyrical, catchy Menken tunes, and the film perks up whenever Raitt or lang sing one of them. But much of this movie is deadly.

Irwin Winkler's The Net, which should have worked a lot better than it does, is a glossy, intricately plotted, mostly implausible suspense movie about a woman on the run.

Unfortunately, after watching Paycheck, you may wish you had the picture's gimmickry at your disposal, so you could erase your own memory of it.

A ravishing crock. Like its title character, a computer-generated movie star programmed to resemble a cross between Grace Kelly, Audrey Hepburn, Lauren Bacall and Kim Basinger, it's beautiful but empty, gorgeous but spurious.

Much of this movie seems a crock.

Writer-director Kouf often comes up with seemingly sure-fire ideas and then fails to develop them. "Gang Related" takes some chances. But, while trying to shift the moral center and avoid cliches, it keeps floundering and stumbling back into them. Like the accumulating corpses on Divinci and Rodriguez's beat, it seems a victim of greed, confusion, mistaken identity and a mixed-up system that turns good guys bad. [8 Oct 1997, p.1]

There's nothing classic about Surviving Eden, even if it is better than reality TV.

For anyone who knew and loved the 1950s TV series The Phil Silvers Show -- in which Silvers played the peerless motormouth Army con artist, Master Sgt. Ernie Bilko -- Sgt. Bilko, starring Steve Martin, will probably be a disappointment. [29 Mar 1996, p.C]

Watching actors this good handle material this dopey is like waiting for Itzhak Perlman to pick up his violin and start playing variations on My Baby Does the Hanky Panky. It's funny. But it's also sad. The movie suggests we get the government we deserve, but do we really deserve this movie?

Fessenden cooks up a likably offbeat horror movie. But somehow, it never jells, never really scares us.

This pretty but witless movie is well-produced, slickly directed -- full of jokes about hot dudes and hot babes pitched right at the "American Pie" crowd.

The movie, like Hitch, tries to be cool, funny and sweet but falls on its face without generating any real sympathy, smarts or humor.

Has the air of a film and actor (Beatty)reaching clumsily for a golden past that's gone.

A lively little Australian rock movie hamstrung and sunk by one of the least successful story ideas I've seen recently.

In compositions lustrously lit and creamily colorful as an elegant piece of soft-core porno, the moviemakers guide us through Veronica’s life, from virginity to bawdy fame to sainthood. Reality never intrudes — even though the script obviously wants to set us straight about gender, femininity and political power in 16th Century Venice.

A comedy that seems to have most everything going for it but the ability to make us laugh.

Tries to take us from heaven to hell but winds up leaving us in limbo: exasperated and dumfounded.

It's a nice little film, likable but not exceptional, and it will probably appeal most strongly to actors, would be-actors, wannabes and ex-actors.

Won't make your day, but it won't kill it either.

The Gate, whatever minor triumphs it dredges up, is too hopelessly copycat. It's basically powdered Speilberg on Zwieback toast and Stephen King on a stick. [19 May 1987, p.3]

It's hard to create snap-crackling languor or laid-back frenzy. And there's also something condescending in the entire conception of Mixed Nuts. [21 Dec 1994, p.7]

Happily was begun as an old-fashioned 2-D "flat" cartoon and then switched by producer John Williams (of "Shrek") and director Paul J. Bolger to 3-D during production. The style finally is an uncomfortable amalgam of both.

Townsend seemed to me ill-matched as a romantic hero: way too moony-eyed and mushy to cope with the likes of the towering Theron and torchy Cruz.

Though it's somewhat better than its predecessor, largely through sheer directorial and photographic panache, it's still pretty disreputable and mindless. [29 Apr 1988, p.4]

Shot in Chicago, this is a picture that looks better than it sounds and is made much better than it deserves to be.

Should have worked on our emotions like a scalpel, made us cry and bleed. But, though it's an affecting, polished film, it's not satisfying. [12 March 1999, Friday, p.A]

Though they're a good pair (Hopkins and Rock), this isn't a very good movie. It's slick but hollow.

Has the worst happy ending I've seen in a while.

Bad as the overall design remains, individual scenes keep sparking alive, partly because the dialogue, or delivery, seems fresh, and improvisatory; partly because Van Peebles, in his directorial debut, figures out unusual or athletic camera designs for every scene. It's obvious he has talent, equally obvious there's no way this story can work right, no matter how strenuous the staging.

Should please its core audience, which includes anyone who might actually want to win a date with Tad Hamilton. Others may opt to wait for another date with Kate Bosworth -- or Nathan Lane.

Sometimes funny, often strained comedy.

It's a Hitchockian "wrong man" story, but there's a twist.

Two gifted co-stars, Denzel Washington and Angelina Jolie, and the highly imaginative thriller specialist Phillip Noyce lend some luster and credibility to another borderline-absurd scenario.

A dark comedy that blows up like an exploding cigar, leaving nothing much behind but smoke, noise and a bad taste.

Whether you're won over depends on your own taste for ineptitude. Like the others in the Worrell saga, Ernest Goes to Jail is a movie with couch-potato stylistics and switching-channel logic. Watching it is like sitting with a lukewarm TV dinner for an hour or so, while somebody tries to pound you into a Smurf. [09 Apr 1990, p.F12]

A commendably brave piece, but less focused and powerful than you'd like. In the end, Garapedian might have been better off concentrating her energy on the 1915 Armenian story--which has been told on film various times (for example, in "Forty Days of Musa Dagh" and Atom Egoyan's "Ararat"), but never with the power of, say, "The Pianist" or "Schindler's List."

A big, empty picture full of star turns, artificial energy and jokes that don't quite work, even if stars Willis and Perry do their best to slam them across.

Spectacular, fast, never boring. But it's also one of the more disappointing movies I've seen recently.

There's too much hardware, too little sense. Too much blood, too little flesh. Too much program, too little mind. That's the virus of the contemporary movie techno-thriller.

You know the drill: Seven gates of hell. The walking dead. Blood and spurting eyeballs. Strictly for horror mavens hungry for kitsch. [03 Jul 1998]

Species carries the whole idea of the erotic thriller--that '80s yuppie genre that mixed sex and slaughter--past cliche into howling absurdity.

Stolen Summer is no disaster, though. It's merely one more misfire fortunate enough to attract actors like Bonnie Hunt and Aidan Quinn, who almost make it work.

More an uninspired letdown than a flabbergasting turkey... One reason for this lack of bite lies in the werewolves themselves. They're a bit too teddy-bearish, even oddly cuddly, and the fright scenes work better when you don't see much of them.

An expensive-looking new detective thriller that should have been much better.

Tries for both civilized wit and primitive joy -- and mostly misses both.

A tasteful, intelligent, well-acted film about one of the most ghoulish serial killers in American crime history - and I'm afraid that's a good part of what's wrong with it.

So fast, sleek and riveting it almost makes you expect miracles -- which never materialize.

The show has its moments-some funny scenes, some wild stop-motion Phil Tippett computer action, some of Torn's scenery-chewing. But they're only moments. RoboCop 3's main problem is that nobody fouled up its program. It's a RoboMovie. [05 Nov 1993, p.C]

Despite the final escape of star Steve Guttenberg, and the loss, long since, of the original director and writers, this is almost a good movie. It's an incremental, heavily qualified success, but "PA 5" is an improvement on the elephantine, witless "2," "3" and "4."

American Pie 2, which brings back the same cast for more of the same, is just another by-the-numbers, money-hungry sequel with a lot of recycled shaggy-sex jokes and gross-out gags.

For all its crashes and flash, this is a movie that drifts away as we watch it. Muscle cars and all, it's often a waste of gas.

Beyond some well-observed sibling interaction, the mutual effort of four writers is mutually uninspired. Whoever wrote the episodes between hot-to-trot Jojo (Taylor) and her balky boyfriend Bill (D'Onofrio) should be ashamed. [21 Oct 1988]

Vice Versa may be a better film than Like Father, Like Son, largely because of the direction and Savage’s performance, but it’s still a disappointment.

As a bunch, the film makers have created the sort of mystery story that might well puzzle a 12-year-old who had never read a mystery story before and wasn't paying attention anyway, and the sort of love story that 12-year-olds might throw away to read the mystery story, along with the sort of dog story many dogs would actually enjoy--if the pages were edible...Luckily the team of Hanks and Beasley are around to save the show, tell a few snappy stories, dance a few licks, chase a few crooks, make you laugh, make you cry. Who needs writers?

When the crashing chords and defiant lyrics of "Be the Rain" close things out, there's a burst of idealism and energy that redeems everything. If you see Greendale, treat the movie charitably and dig the music.

To say Enemy of the State is senseless is an understatement. This is a movie where logic is the enemy.

So clearly derived from the movie One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest that you might begin to wonder when Jack Nicholson will show up. The Dream Team isn't unusual, but it's funnier than, say, Twins or Fletch Lives. It can't really hit any classic highs, perhaps because it regards rebellion as cute and paranoia as a running gag. The jokes, to stick, need grittier, sawtooth edges.

Drably shot, unimaginatively written and shallowly acted, it's a poor example of the "daffy, goofy, sex-crazed guys" occupational comedies that flourished throughout the job-obsessed '80s. [19 Feb 1999]

I found nothing likable or funny about either of these characters, who both deserve a pie in the face. (One of them even gets it.)

Fast-moving shocker, but it's a dull shocker, so morally dead that it deadens you to watch it. After a while you couldn't care less if anyone is slaughtered or raped -- including the heroines.

Psycho III--better in most respects than II--lets you down with the same swampy thud at the end. It's not a catastrophe. It has some good writing, and some better-than-good acting (Perkins, Diana Scarwid, Jeff Fahey), directing (Perkins again) and camera work (Bruce Surtees). But it fails any sequel's acid test: It feeds off the original without deepening it.

Though Stealth's strengths are obvious -- high-tech marvels and a good cast -- so are its flaws. At its worst moments, a mad robot seems to have taken over the movie, too.

The film's triple thesis is that elections are run badly, Democrats are often clueless and Republicans are clever. Maybe--but that still leaves too many unanswered questions.

To work, it has to make us feel crazy with love, like "Vertigo" did. Instead, it often just makes us feel crazy for believing any of it.

It's one of those fast, slick, half-smart shows that can't decide whether to pay its debts to action or reality -- and winds up cheating both.

Though the movie is pretty stereotypical and sometimes crude, it also has a sweet laid-back temper. It has amusing moments.

May try to revive the eerie spirit of the Gothic novel, but, unless you're suffering from amnesia yourself, it probably won't surprise or thrill you.

Lawrence and Zahn generate enough comic tension and mayhem to jump-start this mass of action-comedy cliches into a fairly amusing show.

Newsies becomes a string of set-pieces, some of which work, some of which don't, all barreling full-speed ahead toward its Teddy Roosevelt deus ex machina. [10 Apr 1992]

Some of LaGravenese's dialogue crackles, but it's a dry crackle, a hollow cough. And that's despite Leary-and in spite of Judy Davis and Kevin Spacey, two of the best actors around these days.

Although Alien 3 is stylish--and ambitious--the movie doesn't have the soul or guts to sustain that ambition. It gets swallowed up in its own technology and genre expectations. And Fincher gets stalled in the drama, trapped in too many scenes of talking heads looming out of the gloom.

It's fairly entertaining--but not the second coming of indie comedy some notices might lead you to expect.

It's got the smoothest, glossiest finish imaginable, but something inside it doesn't jell. [15 July 1988, p.26]

Does have heart and enthusiasm. But it might have worked better if it had been glitzed up and energized the way "Fame" was. It's not a script that can survive this kind of minimal, earnest, self-congratulatory treatment.

A shiny bauble full of dead weight, gloppy good feeling and airless cliches. And every time you try to grab onto "Bride's" characters, they run away. [30 July 1999]

Chris Farley is fine at physical gags, David Spade is snappy with wise cracks and Brian Dennehy is a good actor who has the best part in the movie-because he gets to die halfway through it. Tommy Boy, an attempt at populist comedy, has some laughs. But it doesn't really have any ideas, meaning or real feeling. This movie has a heart of plastic. It doesn't beat; it squeaks. [31 Mar 1995, p.C2]

Minimalism be damned; even a postmodern noir needs more than Minus Man gives us. So do the actors.

The Shadow shows what can happen when you overdress pulp. You wind up with something gorgeous and suffocated, bejeweled trash floundering in its own oversplendid stuffings. [01 Jul 1994, p.H]

This genuinely ambitious and accomplished Chicago production does have strong points, not the least of which is Lana herself. When the fiery, emotionally transparent Orlenko lets her talent and presence pour down on Lana's Rain, the movie springs to life.

The Baby-sitters Club movie, written by Dalene Young and directed by Melanie Mayron, winds up seeming just as packaged and programmed as many of its summer competitors. The books, however obvious, don't talk down to their youthful readers. But the movie does. [18 Aug 1995, p.F]

How can Reiner, who has been terrific in the past with both comedy ("This is Spinal Tap," "When Harry Met Sally") and children ("Stand By Me"), come up with something like "North," a movie that may set some kind of record for unfunny humor, forced satire and unappealing kids? [22 Jul 1994, p.C2]

It would take the dark wit of a Billy Wilder or a Coen brother--or at least a Neil Simon--to put across this kind of material.

Likable but relentlessly trivial.

A pretty good film, acted powerfully .

This romantic-comedy action movie is a fizzle.

Just Cause might better have been called "Without a Cause." Or "Without a Clue." [17 Feb 1995, p.C2]

For about half its length, Ravenous is a fairly effective scare picture, with a laugh or two. Then it just goes sour and pretentious. [19 March 1999, Friday, p.D]

Movies made from serious novels are often ridiculed as unworthy of their sources, but this one may be too worthy -- too reverent, too showy, too earnest.

For all its glitz and gadgets, is markedly inferior in everything but teen appeal.

Long is an actress who can’t throw away a line--though this is one case where she should have thrown away the whole script. But she gets points for sheer, daffy energy and rampaging pulchritude.

It lives on its action and dies on its gab. It also would have been better without all those songs about catching the thunder and grabbing the lightning and going for the glory. They sound like a rejected ad campaign for Old Milwaukee. In movies like this, action is often enough--but here, it's just not radical.

An empty-headed movie: one more gargantuan, excessive, over-the-top action thriller with one more superhero -- this time ex-linebacker Brian "The Boz" Bosworth -- battling dozens of deranged villains single-handedly while trucks, motorcycles and cars crash all around him. [20 May 1991, p.F6]

There's a razzly-dazzly beauty in Barbara Ling's designs and Kanievska and cameraman Ed Lachman shoot them wittily. But it's swallowed up in the story's empty outrage.

The Wizard is bright, fast and energetic, but there’s not much real life to it. It’s another movie that’s disappeared into its own marketing hook: Three kids on the road, living and loving, racing toward personal redemption and video ascension.

Somehow The Boy in Blue, amiable enough, always feels like an "afternoon" movie -- a throwaway, not good enough to plan an evening around. [03 May 1986, p.9]

Norman Jewison directed, but overall it's surprisingly labored, with that cheesy, set-bound look of a lot of many early '60s Universal pictures. [25 Mar 1988, p.22]

Madhouse grabs you by the lapels and tries to shake the laughs out of you. But it’s never very funny, despite the best efforts of that facile TV farceur Larroquette and the sexiest contortions of Kirstie Alley.

It's hard to remember when actors have stepped into such a no-win situation and mustered up such panache: Turturro may be on a sinking ship, but he manages to drown brilliantly.

There's a moral to the new teen movie Can't Buy Me Love: Money can't buy popularity. But it seems to have been lost on the movie makers themselves. What are they doing here but trying to spend their way to audience approval, success and glory? The plot is another one-sentence gimmick, the jokes juvenile, the morality a sham.

It’s one of those movies that seem fabricated for a shopping mall: decorative, pretty, vacuous.

It's a movie that's almost all style, all technique. It doesn't seem to be inhabited by people, thoughts or feelings, but by great coruscating patterns of light crashing over and over us, repeatedly--almost, but not quite, drowning out a constant buzz of cliches.

But even if Hitchcock’s chase thrillers were the inspiration, with their falsely accused heroes fleeing police through exotic landscapes, the master wouldn’t have approved of this tribute. Logic, character, coherence, psychology--all those vital thriller elements disappear as quickly as the Iowa corn.

Funny Farm --a weak-fish-out-of-water comedy about a New York City couple who see their rural paradise turned into a rustic hell--is a movie with a doubly deceptive title. This movie isn't about a farm, and it isn't very funny, either.

Romance and comedy are dumped in favor of carnage: a self-sabotaging decision for what might have been a cute, enjoyable movie.

In the end, you can’t have much movie fun with freakiness if you aren’t willing to freak the movie out a little.

Taking Care of Business is a curious achievement: a laughless comedy starring Belushi and Grodin, two actors who are almost always funny.

Most of the movie is like the ice on which Bombay's limousine rests: cold and shaky. The only time it really comes alive is in the obvious scene, the fast, furious championship, with every Duck having his day.

Sadly in need of renovation. [28 Aug 1987, p.8]

Mancini's script, here as before, never rises above simple sadistic button-pushing. [30 Aug 1991, p.F13]

If Flatliners is anything at all, it's watchable: aflame with Jan de Bont cinematography, deep-focus decor, an attractive cast. The movie's problem, like many others recently, is that it isn't any deeper, dramatically or psychologically, than its own trailer. It is the trailer: the long version.

Lisa isn’t ineffective. It’s shaped in the usual sadistic way that leaves some audiences howling with blood-lust by the climax. But it’s basically a nasty movie that tries to end up nicey-nice: a house-cat of a sex-thriller that wants to claw the hell out of you and then curl up to warm milk and velvety hugs.

It degenerates into one more cliche-ridden revenge movie. [19 Sep 1987, p.9]

Trumbo's aim was a kind of proletarian poetry, but McKenzie's broad emoting has the deadly earnestness of a school play.

Every scene in this cautionary tale about science running amok has spectacular views, unusual camera angles and moves, or dazzlingly outre computer effects. And every scene, story-wise, gets mushier and more outlandish or perfunctory--until the movie seems disengaged from itself.

It would be tempting to say that inside “Slamdance” is a remarkable movie struggling to free itself from conventional trappings. But the opposite is true. The trappings are what dazzle you; the interior of “Slamdance” is exactly what isn’t remarkable.

Being able to kick people in the head, at least while they’re standing up, is no negligible talent--though Lionheart is a pretty negligible movie. It has that grotesquely off-scale exaggeration of many post-'80s action movies.

A misfiring, underdone epic that takes its inspiration not from life or literature, but from a toy line and the cartoon series it inspired.

It's the material that's a problem, its sheer emptiness. Gottlieb and co-writer Ed Rugoff are clumsily trying to re-create something that's better if it's done cannily, with no illusions.

Sam Firstenberg--a decent enough action director who's shepherded along three previous ninja movies--here has a story so preposterous that nothing short of a mutiny could make the movie work.

Rambo is an inane sequel to a fairly good melodrama; another example of an attempt to repeat an earlier success that goes wildly out of scale.

When Side Out gets to its “meat"--intercutting the beach with the law firm, intercutting frantic lovemaking with a tough volleyball loss, intercutting the beach with life, intercutting bikinis with more bikinis--we know we’re dealing with shameless button-pressers.

Top Gun is a male bonding adventure movie that's both exciting and disturbing, mind-boggling and vacuous...Measuring this movie against its model -- Hawks' air films -- you can see the difference between a great director making his movies breathe, and a superproduction that depends on action and hardware. Top Gun is an empty-headed technological marvel. The actors -- especially Anthony Edwards, Val Kilmer and Meg Ryan -- are good, but they only connect as archetypes. The emotion heats up only when the planes are flying. [16 May 1986, p.C1]

After a fairly good, tense opening, it keeps rolling up one preposterous scene after another.

It’s an amazingly bald-faced copy of E. T. even though this is E. T. in a sticky wrapper, left under the heater two hours too long.

It's one more example of minuscule ideas inflated to preposterous proportions: An Attack of the 50-Foot Marketing Hook. [17 Jul 1992, p.F10]

Other than Shaw's turn, which gets dampened in the determinedly frolicsome finale, there's little to like in Three Men and a Little Lady. Selleck is charming. Danson, aided by latex and a Carmen Miranda outfit, has two funny scenes. Travis has a lovely smile, which she overuses.

Hickox, the son of Douglas (Theatre of Blood) Hickox, shows a derivative, choppy, jagged style in his feature debut. He makes an uneasy stew of this mix of hip, flip teen-slasher gore and movie-buff aestheticism, of callous black humor and smarmy sentimentality. There’s a big problem here: too much waxy buildup.

It's a generic action movie with more guns than brains, more car crashes than coherence and more opportunism than originality. [12 Feb 1988, p.21]

A misfiring comic fantasia on business success in the Reagan era. [10 Apr 1987, p.1]

This version not only doesn’t surpass or match Brook’s, it makes the material look bad.

Band of the Hand is a formula 1986 revenge thriller, and, though it hooks you frequently into its thin plot, it never gets far past formula. It’s a bad movie with saving graces-- Dylan’s song among them--which is better than a bad movie that just lies there and rots.

They’ve made a sometimes funny, mostly media-referential movie without much real life; a high-tech, high-pro job that has a glamor-robot feel.

In most ways, a sequel-as-usual: a little warmer, with slightly less zip and flurry.

Instead of an escape from Hollywood’s cookie-cutter plots, it’s a retreat back into them, only the sexes have been changed.

It's a real shame that most new boxing movies try to copy the crowd-pleasing, sentiment-choked tactics of "Rocky" rather than the stark drama of "Raging Bull" or the realistic grit of "On the Waterfront" and "The Harder They Fall." Against the Ropes is only the latest sorry example. The sad thing is that, with this real-life story and subject, it could have been a contender.

Cheerful but mind-numbing.

I can't think of much that might happen on a date evening that could be more annoying than this movie.

Falls flat on its face.

Technically clever but emotionally bankrupt...it's an almost laughably opportunistic movie.

It may entertain you if you don't mind senseless stories and screaming soundtracks.

Outrageously vapid and overdone movie.

Sluggish and preposterous, full of violence and cliches.

The movie suffers from a devastating flaw for a comedy: It isn't very funny.

What isn't scary--or exciting, amusing or fun--is XXX: State of the Union, a movie so preposterous, cliché-packed and over the top that it makes the original "XXX" seem as good as the original "State of the Union."

An odd little ghoul too cleaned up to survive, a bloodless vampire movie that's mostly lifeless as well.

One more movie comedy about how love can turn you into an idiot. And its major flaw, among many others, is that the idiocy takes over the movie.

The best thing about star and co-writer David Spade's Dickie Roberts, Former Child Star is the end-title sequence, a big, sassy sing-along in which dozens of old TV child stars spew out defiant jokes about their old careers and fame's fickle fingers.

It would be a lie to suggest that there aren't some crudely effective moments in Ghost and the Darkness. After all, this is a movie where two man-eating lions pop up every 10 minutes or so, growl and drag off another fresh corpse or two. But crude effectiveness is all the movie has to offer -- and even that is a mark it doesn't always hit.

It's like a class reunion in purgatory. All the familiar faces are there, but the air is sulfurous and murky, and hell is just an elevator ride away. [10 Dec 1993, p.A2]

Wedding Date is neither good art, good entertainment nor even good trash.

A flashy-looking low-budget indie about drugs, love and crime in small-town Iowa. But, speaking as an ex-small-town Midwesterner, I found it hard to buy.

Jingle All the Way has been well shot and imaginatively designed. But somehow that makes it worse. So does the fact that all the actors, Schwarzenegger included, are skilled enough to make you watch them. [22 Nov 1996, p.C]

Some movies should never have been made, and high on that list is the addled new remake of Rollerball.

A fitfully funny retread of "48 Hours," "Fled" and dozens of others.

A mind-numbing, bloody, ridiculous experience.

It's outrageously stereotypical and weirdly personal, so loonily exaggerated it keeps surprising you.

A comedy murder mystery gone seriously astray, boasts an immensely talented cast .

Just withers compared with many older, better movies about teen alienation and nihilism, from "Rebel Without a Cause" to "River's Edge."

A fast, slick, outlandish fiasco that starts out well and then seems to drop right off a cliff.

An unabashedly bad movie full of cliches, claptrap, fairly good rock 'n' roll and stomach-turning gross-out gags.

Some film premises are so outlandish, so thinly worked out and so deep-down ridiculous that they wind up sinking the show -- and White Chicks collapses under a real doozy.

Sweet-tempered but superficial.

A gaudy yet grim science-fiction horror movie of such surpassing silliness, humorless intensity and stylistic overkill that watching it may actually put you in a state of paranoia.

It's those scenes-and computer graphics ingeniously engineered by Richard Hollander and VIFX-that give "Ghost" what little kick it generates. Its hero and villain may be hackers, but its heart is hack. [30 Dec 1993, p.20]

The crass sentimentality of American Wedding increasingly fits Norman Mailer's definition: "the emotional promiscuity of the basically unemotional." The jokes are unemotional, uncouth and mostly unfunny.

There's no reason to look at this movie unless you're interested in computer graphics. But, if you are, why not wait for the video game? It may not be any better,but at least you can turn it off. [17 Jan 1996, p.7]

The idea may sound like fun, but the movie isn't. It's a travesty of a picture that's a disgrace to the memory of the great film from which it's remade. [5 February 1999, Friday, po.A]

This clunky remake can't rise from the ashes, nor would you want it to.

How is it possible that actors as expert as Close and Depardieu can wind up together in a mostly brainless big-budget stinker?

A good-natured but trivial Manhattan romantic comedy.

One hopes that this is Hollywood's last go-round with Swept Away. Watching this fiasco, I kept having nightmares about a possible cartoon version, co-starring Cruella de Vil and Shrek.

Instead of becoming bewitched, we're caught up in one more gallery of cliches and storytelling blunders. The Glitches of Eastwick. [03 May 1996, p.C2]

The Little Rascals is a nice-looking movie-shot in a nostalgic childhood haze by Richard Bowen-but watching it is almost numbing. It's the kind of empty gaudy show the misfit characters in Spheeris' good comedies might waste their time with.

This movie is glum, murky, dour, takes place mostly in the dark, doesn't make much sense and has a surprise climax so ridiculous you may watch it with perverse, astonished respect - the kind you might grant the Joint Chiefs of Staff if they showed up for a press conference wearing lampshades on their heads and yodeling. [17 Sept 1993, p.F]

Superhero comic book movie with a script so feeble it might have been written with crayons.

In White Noise, Hollywood and Michael Keaton try to make a decent thriller out of ghosts in the machine but come up with lousy reception and static.

An almost terminally sappy youth romance.

In this bizarre tale of man among the apes and a psychiatrist among madmen -- an over-emotional hybrid of "Gorillas in the Mist" and "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" -- style buries substance.

A bad, bad movie...It's loud and dumb and it wastes a good cast on a ludicrous script.

It's a distraction: a buzz in your head that won't go away. [31 March 1995, p.HI]

A contemporary teen summer romance with a modern sexual twist--though in many ways, it's just the same old malarkey.

Just another self-absorbed teen chronicle, with the added twist of a little time travel and a surprise ending.

It's a murky, empty-headed dive into the depths of the Antarctic and the heart of monster movie cliches that leaves you praying for most of the cast to get killed off fast, to put them (and us) out of our misery.

It's a glossy, well-mounted, slickly done but almost stuporously predictable affair, both formula-bound and utterly illogical.

Though I would agree it's original -- it's the first aboveground romance movie I've seen in which the heroine is repeatedly spanked, verbally tormented and tied to a chair by her lover--- it's not an experience I much enjoyed.

Barker, who wasn't involved with the earlier Candyman, has never yet matched his stunning 1987 writer-director debut Hellraiser-and he never will if he keeps coming up with projects like this. [17 Mar 1995, p.J]

What we get, while rarely boring, is a succession of senseless scenes bathed in formula-thriller blue light, full of blazing Uzis, exploding helicopters and sentimental male bonding.

Nonstrously over-whimsical. It's a gigantic, fatuous whoopie-cushion of a movie-big, smiley and flabbergastingly dumb. Watching it, you may get an odd, overwhelmed feeling, as if you were being smothered to death by party balloons. [15 Oct 1993, p.N]

The new Walt Disney version of "The Three Musketeers"-plushly mounted, but ineptly written and cast-gallops along like a gargantuan tutti-frutti wagon running amok. [12 Nov 1993, p.C]

Fairly well done but deadly dull futuristic thriller.

A grotesque slumgullion of kung fu, studio schlock and pseudo-Dumas swashbuckling that leaves you longing for Doug Fairbanks --or even Don Ameche and The Ritz Brothers.

It's one of those movies where talented filmmakers waste time with stale, phony material.

A flabbergasting waste of time and talent.

Final Destination 3 is a gorefest that should either slake your worst appetites or drive you to the exits.

An oppressively cute Manhattan time-travel romantic comedy that’s lost in time, space and cliches.

Sometimes, you can use a smaller devil to catch the Devil, the movie suggests. But in this case, the entire movie goes to hell in record time.

I'd be lying if I said I didn't laugh at some of this--though it's not as funny as Laurel and Hardy as toddlers in "Brats." But I wanted to slap myself whenever I did.

Despite a big budget, lots of technical flair and a good cast headed by Sarah Polley and Ving Rhames, it's mostly a bloody mess.

There's almost no reason to see the movie, unless you have no qualms about wasting your time.

We're reminded of Police Academy because this is another story about outcasts and rejects banding together to beat the odds in a macho profession. And we're reminded of The Sting because that's how we feel after the movie is over. Stung.

Turturro is the one thing that's right with the movie. Perhaps the weakest thing about the new "Deeds" is its utter lack of a strong viewpoint and real emotion.

The film may be bad-and mad-but it's not predictable.

The Favor is a sex comedy without sex-and pretty much without comedy. [29 Apr 1994]

Often ridiculous, mostly poorly written and, surprisingly poorly acted too. No matter how many flashy scenes the filmmakers shoot, the bad lines just keep dripping down. [21 Aug 1998]

Airborne is a fairly shameless little picture, but at least it follows the First Rule of Cinema. It gives us something interesting to watch: the climactic hill race, with the largely unidentifiable racers zooming and hurdling one another on hairpin hillside curves...Unfortunately, Airborne also follows the First Rule of Bad Movies. Instead of telling a story, the filmmakers follow an outline (or, in this case, an in-line).

It's a movie that puts Samuel Jackson in kilts, Robert Carlyle in a red Jaguar, and the audience -- if they have any sense at all -- out in the lobby, looking for another picture.

Accomplishes something I would have thought impossible. It made me appreciate its 1994 predecessor, "The Flintstones."

The movie has an absurd script, fueled by that current B-movie staple, the idiot plot--a plot that proceeds only because all, or most, of the characters, act like idiots.