Richard Corliss

Jumper is so lame -- undernourished in its characterizations, stillborn in its action scenes -- that it inevitably leads the idled mind to wondering how this movie got past the pitch stage.

So muted it disappears from your view even before it recedes from your memory.

This one is bad — a little comedy that flops in big ways.

Nothing makes a moviegoer feel more isolated than sitting stony-faced through a comedy that makes the rest of the audience laugh and cheer. Am I blind? Or are they seeing things?

Blow works for a scene or two, then stalls.

So Broken City stokes a lot of hopes. Too bad for all of us, the makers and the watchers alike, that it's a grimy botch.

Sluggish, formulaic.

If you consider what the exalted quartet of Branagh, Pinter, Caine and Law might have done with the project, and what they did to it, Sleuth has to be the worst prestige movie of the year.

Either the Coens failed, or I didn't figure out what they're attempting. I must be like Harry or Osborne, pretending to a sophistication I lack. Burn After Reading is a movie about stupidity that left me feeling stupid.

A triumph of bravado over self-regard, Brody's performance won't earn him a Oscar to place next to the one he earned for "The Pianist" nine years ago, but it's the only thing that makes High School marginally worth catching.

It’s the lamest and most vacant of the quintet — though if you mistakenly think you’re buying a ticket to a demolition derby instead of a night at the movies, you’ll feel right at home.

Edwards’ Godzilla dawdles toward its Doomsday climax; the movie could win a prize for Least Stuff Happening in the First Two-Thirds of an Action Film... It’s a concept lacking a magnetic story, a package without a product.

In this film we learn that it takes 8,000 lbs. of pressure to crush a car but only one credited screenwriter (Scott Rosenberg) to pound out such a lame script.

The movie is like a car wreck in which no one is injured but the onlookers.

Why did these talented folks decide to take on Carrie when they had nothing innovative to bring to it and, by refrying the same blood sausage, risked invidious comparison to the original? To put it another way: If the most modest expectations cannot be met, indeed must be crushed, then What Is Life?

This solemn, incoherent, brown film is set in New York and Pennsylvania in 1776-81, but it often looks determined to analogize, one more time, the Viet Nam War.

There's evocative atmosphere in the period detail and perky faux-'60s tunes. A pity these are wasted in a movie that, like many a pop tune, has a cute idea but a simpleminded lyric.

All its desperate plot maneuvers (Ben and Sandra making like Tarzan on a train roof) can't give the film wit; all the slo-mo sleet, rain and confetti can't give it style. [March 22, 1999]

Another dreadful entry in the festering form of romantic comedy: the forced intimacy of two people who have nothing in common but hatred for each other.

Alas, The Outsiders is not quite a good one. Because it falls in with the undulating rhythm of the life of its heroes, for whom a fatal fight and a quiet night have almost equal importance, the picture never manages to reach the peaks of satisfying Hollywood melodrama.

The collision of violent spasms and art-film ennui leave the viewer’s brain bloody but unfilled.

When the filmmakers grow tired of fowl puns -- about an hour after the audience does -- they switch to space opera, and Howard battles a scientist (Jeffrey Jones, funny against all odds) whose body is invaded by a giant lobster-scorpion space troll.

It's pretty awful.

Pretty lame. Sharkboy has an especially frantic, amateur atmosphere, with a mostly maladroit cast.

Landis seems no surer of his visual style than he does of his movie's tone, so he tries everything: shots angled from a dog's-or a god's-eye view, eerily lighted special effects, more dancers, more extras, more noise, more cars and car crashes. Alas, more is less, and The Blues Brothers ends up totaling itself.

Did anyone have a good time making this movie? The actors seem to be reading their lines at gunpoint, in an enterprise whose mood is less summer camp than internment camp.

The canniest moments in the three-plus hours of Nixon, Oliver Stone's dense, ultimately disappointing biopic, capture Nixon at his most pathetically endearing--the Commander in Chief as klutz.

Like Saturday Night Fever and, for that matter, the Rocky films, Flashdance has made it big by taking experiences of black youths and playing them in whiteface. But unlike its grittily romantic predecessors, Flashdance is pure glitz.