Ray Conlogue

There's not a scrap of imagination in the script.

The producers of Hidden in Plain Sight decided that they couldn't deal with Sept. 11 in the film without losing focus on its principal subject. The result is that the film stands as a testimonial to the world as it existed before that date, a world very different from the one we now live in.

A clear case of huevos con hubris.

Think of it as trope grope. Things are so relatively democratic nowadays that filmmakers have to rummage through the past for a truly shmaltzy story. And they don't come any shmaltzier than this.

You don't need to have seen a lot of art films to love The Diaries of Vaslav Nijinsky. All it takes is compassionate curiosity and perhaps some lingering memory of the world as a child experiences it.

For those who don't know his (Lelouch's) work, And Now Ladies and Gentlemen will be fun because his style is unique and unpredictable. But for those who have known him in better form, this one is not a must-see.

Gripping to watch but ultimately misses the target. [29 Apr 1978]

Properly handled, any one of these characters could be made, just barely, believable. But here they simply go off, like rockets, exploding out of nowhere and racing across the screen, one after the other.

Rarely does a fine movie like this have so awkward a title, or so off-putting an opening scene. But there is method in both these madnesses, and a searchingly intelligent and moving story to be told.

A bit like having a detached retina. One keeps blinking and trying to get it into focus, but it never quite does. What, one wonders, is this movie doing here?

Visually the film is a knockout. I'm not sure this will matter to the young adult audience, but the film is philosophically confusing.

This is a film where there isn't the slightest doubt about the dramatic outcome. But the marketing will be a cliffhanger.

The difficulty with the film starts with the amount of improbability one must swallow. [24 Dec. 1998, p.D10]

Isn't quite funny enough to make it as a comedy, or touching enough to make it as a romance. It's a pleasant effort that doesn't hit any of its targets.

Sinbad lacks, alas, the sparkle and inventiveness of the stories that inspired it.

Here is a truly unfunny comedy from Universal Studios, which seems determined to prove that Hollywood can be opportunistic and clueless at the same time.

But uneven acting isn't fatal here, since Andrew Bergman's screenplay is strong enough and Andrew Fleming's direction seamless enough to carry it forward.

Although filmmaker Pan Nalin is a believer in Ayurveda,there is little in the film to convince anybody else.

Speaking personally, I wouldn't voluntarily go to this flick. But for those with a greater gross-out threshold, it's a better film than anyone should normally expect in this genre.

It's possible to insult even a teenager's intelligence.

Considering that the original story managed to be scarier without people's hair spontaneously restyling itself into dragons, it's worth asking why this kind of film has become the norm. Is it because filmgoers demand it, or is it because filmmakers leaning on technological crutches can't be bothered to learn their craft? More and more, I'm leaning to the latter. [23 July 1999, p.C3]

It uses violence as a drug, injecting it into the audience and hoping to addict it. Once the dependence is created, it is simple to feed it with formulaic films.

This is a film whose sunny and insipid storytelling style is at odds with its material.

A mere action suspense adventure lacking the depths of the original. [14 July 1989]

This is a miserable sequel to the modestly well-reviewed Final Destination.

But there's no sign of the writerly derring-do that is really essential to daisy-chain storytelling. 200 Cigarettes burns itself out well before midnight.

Entertaining and well done. Without losing its comic rhythm for a moment, it is also a withering spoof of black victimism and the corrupting effect of racial solidarity on the American legal system.

Rarely does a film so graceless and devoid of merit as this one come along.