Peter Rainer

It's all so resolutely uninspired that even the kids in the audience may want to duck out.

Another in a long line of middling movies for Travolta, who must have been so stunned to regain his stardom with "Pulp Fiction" that he hasn't stopped working since.

Life imitates art, except there’s precious little of either here.

Some of the human-interest stories are compelling, but too much of this film is as dry as a high school classroom presentation.

Hasburgh sets a shaggy, amiable tone for the first half hour or so and then sinks into the melodrama with a heavy thud. The mind begins to wander, particularly when we are shown the dewy lovers intercut with shots of flowers poking up through the ice.

Eddie Murphy and Robert De Niro have made any number of lame movies on their own, but there's a special wastefulness connected to their first co-starring vehicle, Showtime: It's lameness times two, and then some.

Perfect Stranger is far from Hitchcock, and Berry, although she gets an A for effort, can't do much with the half-baked characterizations.

Full disclosure: I have to say I did laugh during Your Highness. Twice, I think.

The best you can say about This Means War is that it would make a good date movie for couples in the witness protection program.

Graham was good in films such as "Boogie Nights" and "Bowfinger" where her apparent innocence was a smoke screen for her lustful connivance. To be effective in the movies, she needs something to counteract her wholesomeness.

Kiddies longing for a Mac attack this summer won’t be enlivened by the tepid shenanigans and mushy maunderings of Getting Even With Dad.

Blind Fury is a rehashing of movies you passed on the first time, like, uh, Over the Top.

The novelist Cormac McCarthy was served well by the Coen Brothers' adaptation of his novel "No Country for Old Men" but comes a cropper in The Road, a lugubrious trek through postapocalyptic debris.

The chemistry may be good, the movie isn’t.

There is one bit of good news. For all you abominable snowman fans out there, "The Mummy" is filled with yetis. And, boy, are they ever angry.

The Grisham-esque murder-mystery plot got so scrambled that, finally, it’s anybody’s guess what the filmmakers intended.

If only there was less mush and more meat in this stew.

The tonal problem of the second installment, which often resembled a drug-infested pulp thriller instead of a comedy, is also problematic here.

The young cast members, including Justin Long and Ryan Reynolds, are often spirited and funny, and restaurantgoers are left with a valuable lesson.

Is it possible none of these actors read the script before they signed on? Were New Line executives perhaps too hung up on hobbits to notice how whacked out this movie is?

A movie that at best is irrelevant and at worst is unwatchable.

Numbingly inane comedy.

Spike Lee’s She Hate Me is his worst movie ever--even worse than "Bamboozled," his self-serving indictment of modern minstrelsy, which at least was worth arguing about.

It’s an only-in-America success story worth recounting.

At times, Bullock seems as confused by the plot as we are. Even if you cut the writer Bill Kelly and the director Mennan Yapo a lot of slack, there are plot holes galore. May I suggest that it's time to declare a moratorium on movies about time?

The only point of interest in New in Town is sociological. In the current economic climate, this comedy about workers whose livelihood is rescued by a benevolent boss represents the ultimate wish-fulfillment fantasy. Don't spend your hard-earned discretionary cash on it.

Driven is recommended only to those gentle souls who want to know what it looks like to crash into a wall at 200 mph.

Isn't scary, funny-scary, or even just plain funny.

The treasure hunt in Fool's Gold is, of course, meant to be about more than money. But the only reason for this movie to exist is to make money.

Oldman makes a four-course dinner out of the scenery with enough slash and burn to leave you wondering if he is vying with Nicolas Cage for the title of filmdom's biggest hambone.

The fourth installment in the Batman franchise is one long head-splitting exercise in clueless cacophony that makes you feel as though you're being held hostage in some haywire Planet Hollywood while sonic booms pummel your auditory canal.

I Am Sam is about as connected to the real world as Dr. Seuss's Green Eggs and Ham, from which its title is derived -- in fact, in the realism department, Seuss may have the edge.

If there is to be a sequel to this thudding slab of cacophony, why not just go all the way and make John McClane a superhero?

It would take a lot more than holy water to rescue Season of the Witch from mediocrity.

A highly calculated attempt to recalibrate with raunch the family entertainment template and cash in.

The Muslim women in “SATC2” are props in the froth. Come to think of it, so are Carrie, Charlotte, Samantha, and Miranda.

The subculture of weekend warrior bikers is such rich comic material that the ineptitude of Wild Hogs is doubly offensive.

It's intermittently amusing, and Bening actually gives a performance instead of a star turn, but the claws should have been sharper.

But the erotic potential of animation has never been realized and Cool World doesn't even try. [11 Jul 1992]

I hope Keaton doesn't begin to make a specialty of these roles. They play into what is least attractive in her repertoire – the loosey-goosey, knockabout side of her that all too swiftly devolves into hysterics.

The reason that the film (rated PG-13 for off-color dialogue) is borderline pleasant is because, even more than in the first two films, Travolta and Alley are a marvelous team.

The movie isn't boring, exactly. It's too nutty for that.

Borderline unwatchable, although, as is true of all Gilliam movies, it certainly is different.

He (Gibson) ramrods his way through the bugged-out hysterics as if he were appearing in a movie that actually made sense. What a brave heart.

There's enough family dysfunction here to fill out a dozen soppy soap operas.

A sham.

Isn't overwhelmingly good, but it's just nutty enough to keep you watching.

There are a lot of funny ideas in Encino Man that don't come off because the director, Les Mayfield, and his screenwriter, Shawn Schepps, don't seem to have made up their minds how smart they want to be. A scene like Link freaking out during a visit to the La Brea tar pits museum should count for a lot more than it does here.

He's (Gandolfini) the true star of the film, and his stardom is achieved in the most honest of ways, through the sheer brute force of his talent.

Clumsy, obvious, preposterous, the movie will likely set the cause of woman warriors back decades.

This semiexpressionist fantasia is a botch.

Hollywood movies are once again taking on the job that Andy Griffith–era TV sitcoms used to fill, touting homespun values in Never Land.

It's camp noir, but the director, Renny Harlin, doesn't allow the jokes, feeble as they are, to take hold. He slam-bangs the action as if he was prepping "Die Hard 2," so that even Clay's self-infatuated strut and bleary leer don't have time to register. The film is pointlessly souped up. [11 Jul 1990, p.1]

By comparison, Bride Wars makes "Sex and the City" seem like Jane Austen.

What links all these characters is Myers's gift for antic, elfin burlesque. He's like a second-best Peter Sellers.

Walter Hill, who also directed the first film, surely recognizes the hollowness of what he's doing here. He tries to ram through the muddled exposition as quickly as possible; essentially, the film is wall-to-wall mayhem, with more shots of hurled bodies shattering windows than I've ever seen in a movie. [8 Jun 1990, p.1]

Adam Sandler plays a dual role in Jack and Jill, and he's a lot better as Jill than as Jack.

It's the audience for this film that will require therapy.

The cast, at least on paper, is formidable, if ill-used.

Wallows in its own muck.

On the reasonable assumption that no movie featuring an Elvis impersonator can be wholly bad, I was prepared for a high old time at 3000 Miles to Graceland, which exhibits a plenitude of Elvi. The exhibition does not last very long, however. Less than a third of the way through, the filmmakers jettison the premise and trash their own movie.

I don't mind a movie where people spend a lot of time jawboning, but what they say had better be interesting. In Spinning into Butter we are spoon-fed the deep dark revelation that racism can exist as virulently in liberal environs as in reactionary ones. Alert the media.

The Last Airbender is like a Care Bears movie that got waylaid in the fourth dimension. It's insufferably silly.

If you were expecting Ritchie to discover something in Madonna that no one else has, something like, say, acting talent, forget it.

This business of the 88 minutes ticking away is a pale imitation of the old "High Noon" ploy of playing out suspense in real time. After a while, though, I began to take a perverse pleasure in wallowing in the awfulness of it all.

Director Tamra Davis and screenwriters Sandler and Tim Herlihy scatter the bad jokes like fertilizer. Nothing sprouts.

There's a fundamental lack of human feeling in Beverly Hills Cop III that makes you want to avert your eyes from the people around you when the lights come up. Attending this movie makes you feel like an accomplice to the corruption. [25 May 1994, p.1]

Mixed Nuts is a farcical whirligig that doesn't whirl. It's energetically unfunny, like "Radioland Murders," and, like that film, it boasts top-flight talent. Maybe the idea of making a comedy about a suicide prevention center just got to everyone-it's a bummed-out comedy about being bummed out. [21 Dec 1994, p.1]

Maybe the whole project should have been junked from the get-go.

It’s a magical little movie about a most unmagical subject.

The film is decidedly hagiographic but, in a time of heightened racial unrest, it’s worth being reminded of the fighter Ali’s origins.