Owen Gleiberman

The result is a dead pile of information in search of a movie.

To dismiss this movie for being ''offensive'' would be to offer it high praise.

The plot is déjà vu all over again, another variation on the proletarian-joker-goes-yuppie formula used in Trading Places, The Secret of My Success, and Opportunity Knocks. In Taking Care of Business, the formula gets boiled down to its bare bones. The movie is nothing but a series of executive signifiers — it should have been called The Trappings of My Success.

Personally, I'd say that it was about time Arquette was leashed.

Since there is a mystery, the movie might have been entertaining camp had director Taylor Hackford staged it with pace, style, or a whisper of surprise. Instead, the plot just clunks forward-for two hours and 10 minutes.

Parts of the film play like the world's slowest and most insensitive reality show (Who Wants to Be an Octogenarian?).

Would like to be a Halloween treat, but it's more like a nightmare of blandness.

This ''satire'' of triple-X raunch and ''Jerry Springer'' sleaze starts off at a pitch of preening dementia and just grows more hysterical from there.

Confined to just a few sets, the movie is like the pilot for a sitcom you never want to see. Yet Ephron seems to think she's making a feel-good holiday classic: She floods the soundtrack with old pop versions of Christmas standards, trying to render stale comedy appetizing by drenching it in syrup. [23 Dec 1994, p.50]

Simply put, it may be the lamest movie ever made about poor white... Southern characters.

It's hard to say what's more excruciating: Alex's novel, which is like ''The Great Gatsby'' rewritten by Lizzie McGuire, or his quarrelsome flirtation with Emma, who has no existence as a character apart from her drive to reshape Alex into a specimen of respectable tamed manhood.

Though not quite the fiasco of revved-up gunplay that Beverly Hills Cop II was, this new movie, directed by John ''Rock-'em Sock-'em'' Landis, is just a clunky action thriller, with occasional comic moments rationed out to the audience like stray crumbs.

It’s a messy and annoying one-joke movie that repeats the joke over and over again — and guess what, it was barely funny the first time.

Instead of rooting for Pullman and Fonda, we end up praying that the crocodile is hungry enough to put them out of their misery.

Bones and All is a concept in search of a story. The film doesn’t draw us in. It stumbles and lurches and seems to make itself up as it goes along. You may feel eaten alive with boredom.

Like a virus that keeps coming back but growing weaker each time, Children of the Corn is now a horror movie that lacks the strength to infect you with even a speck of fear.

Nine Lives is a lot like a cat: It occasionally bestirs itself, and it would like to be stroked with love, but mostly it just sits there. It’s a pet farce so flat it makes you long for the Lubitsch touch of the “Alvin” comedies.

What makes Heart of Stone such an enervating experience isn’t that it’s incompetent but that nothing in it matters. It’s all bombast and noise, all hollow logistics, all virtual “Minority Report” screens and clattering fury signifying nothing. In other words: Time to start planning the sequel.

Is less an end in itself than an excuse, a jumping off point for showy, contrived, borderline exploitation sequences that fail to tie together because they're not really there to do anything but sell themselves as money shot thrills.

It's really a dramatic sinkhole.

Combines hugs and ''pain'' and dialogue so fakey-cute it makes your ears hurt.

To hear the unmistakable sounds of yet another lavishly orchestrated Donaggio swoonfest laid over the flat, static expository scenes of the choppy benumbed “international” police thriller Domino is to watch De Palma trying to create cinematic fire out of burnt-out match sticks.

It was originally called ''Animal Husbandry,'' and while the producers were throwing away that title, they might have done well to chuck the movie along with it.

Nothing in Imaginary Heroes rings true, least of all a plot that lightly combines domestic abuse, adulterous pregnancy, teen bisexuality, job abandonment, and a possible case of Mysterious Movie Disease. These are not ordinary people. Or real ones.

Feeling Minnesota suggests Sam Shepard trying to be Quentin Tarantino. It makes even gun battles seem pretentious.

Antal has assembled what may be the single most colorless group of mangy lowlifes I have ever seen.

As the brutish Kable, Gerard Butler must find out who's pulling his strings, but it's the audience whose chain gets yanked by this headache-inducing techno-violent mishmash.

The United States of Leland is tedious yet infuriating, since its characters, all of whom seem to have emerged from a screenwriter's manual, are like exhibits in a thesis meant to indict the middle class for the crime of its collective dysfunction.