Rick Groen

The movie degenerates from the merely farcical to the appallingly tasteless...As the end draws mercifully near, one character proclaims: "This ship needs blood to survive." A film needs more than that. [22 May 1980]

Mainly bad, and a shockingly bland departure from a hitherto spunky guy.

There's a wonderfully subversive film buried somewhere in Spanglish, but it's never allowed to get out.

Up and down, Late Marriage is definitely rocky, but there's never a point where we lose interest and want out -- as relationships go, that's not bad.

Altman shakes the camera like a two-bit horror director, and it seems a different sort of signature - less masterful than weary, less signed than resigned. Zero-sum, indeed.

In the midst of material that's dusty and dated, People I Know somehow feels apocalyptic. How is this possible? Easy: When America's liberal conscience is in the sole care of a publicist, you just know the world's going to hell in a handbasket.

Sylvia the movie competently shows us how; but, as always, it's Sylvia the writer who brilliantly tells us why -- then, now and tomorrow, her foreboding words are her finest legacy.

If you like your sentimentality sweet and sticky, then The Secret Life of Bees is definitely your jar of honey.

A lovely oddity.

Okay, some of this is mildly diverting.

The Devil's Advocate is a dull morality tale, but a number of bright moments come courtesy of the Prince of Darkness.

But the best, most irrefutable reason why Sex and the City 2 deserves one-half a shining star. It’s worse than Sex and the City 1, and that alone is a remarkable achievement.

If you like your archetypes writ large and your sentiment over easy, then Unstrung Heroes is the flick for you. [15 Sep 1995]

Occasionally, Murphy cuts loose with an ad-libbed riff that's almost funny, but then it's back to the slim-fast plot and the stick-on crudities. [03 Jul 1992]

Sure, this is marginal, but it's precisely in the margins that the movie excels.

More illuminating than not.

Smarting like hell, the artist and his art are at it again. Consequently, like most of Michael Haneke's films, The White Ribbon is profoundly disturbing, impeccably shot, superbly cast, allegorically ambitious and, yet, slightly disappointing – just enough to make you wonder if that salt-in-the-wounds theory is as dogmatic as the dogma he likes to condemn.

Guess who sings tired old tune.

The surreal visuals are relentless, overpowering the narrative much as they do in the frames of comic books (sorry, graphic novels).

It's not really serious, not especially funny, and not noticeably scary. Strikeout.

What completely undermines that appearance is Shankman's chronic inability to shoot the damn scene. His camerawork is so stiff it should be interred in a pine box.

At best, Leaving Las Vegas is pure alchemy -- it makes of flawed humanity a hymn, and of forlorn hope a beacon.

Ten minutes in, and the verdict is already clear: This is a flick that goes both ways. It's funny, then it's not; it's cooking, then it isn't; it's different, then it ain't.

Cholodenko casts much better than she writes. Yet, alas, even a talented veteran like Moore can't sell a hoary line like, "Sometimes you hurt the ones you love the most." Maybe if she'd set it to music – nope, sorry, that's already been done.

Of course, entire books have been written, and perused by disappointed women, about the male reluctance to put away their fantasized Biancas. In that sense, Lars and the Real Girl is real indeed. In every other, it's a sweet, bordering on saccharine, bagatelle.

Despite the Spielberg trademarks, a lavish attention to period detail and the occasional flash of visual potency, this is a picture you never get caught up in.

The film doesn't work, it ain't charming.

Ghostbusters II is a comfy experience for all concerned - easy bucks for the producers, easier yuks for the consumers; nothing ventured, money gained. [19 Jun 1989, p.D9]

Shtick is what Twins is all about, but there's good shtick and bad shtick, and there's enough good shtick in Twins, the majority of it involving Arnold Schwarzenegger's exposure to modern U.S. mores, to keep the momentum going. [10 Dec 1988, p.C3]

And, in a pointless riffing on the title, there are ginger kitties galore -- this flick has enough cats to launch a Broadway musical.

Often funny, always telling, this is the kind of not- quite-successful comedy that is fraught with not-quite-intentional meaning. From the pun in the title to the echoes in the script, Class is a pop sociologist's dream. [22 July 1983]

Here's what's good about The Good German: The look is fantastic; technically, the movie is a retro marvel. Here's what's bad: The script sucks; it keeps promising to be clever, engaging, subtle and completely fails to deliver.

Now, forcibly deported to Chicago and peopled with American stars, the same story is huffed and puffed and squeezed into an entirely different cultural context. Guess what? Sayonara sushi, hello turkey.

Not even Pacino can save it.

The stylings of Martin Scorsese and Quentin Tarantino come to the Mideast, but more credibly grounded in a complex setting fraught with raw contemporary politics and ancient class tensions. It makes for a compelling movie but hardly a pretty picture.

There's a Faustian bargain in Angel Heart, and not only on the screen. Undeniably, Parker is hobnobbing with the false gods of Style. But isn't it just the damnest thing: he's having (and giving) a hell of a good time. [07 Mar 1987]

With no previous acting experience, she's (Stilley) a natural between the sheets but a rank amateur between the vowels.

It's all such a throwback, and yet there's something rather sweet about the way this pot boils.

Where's 007 when you need him? Neither shaken nor stirred, The Good Shepherd is a flat draft of history that looks at the Central Intelligence Agency's early years through the horn-rimmed gaze of a fictional spook.

An amiable crowd-pleaser, nothing more, nothing less. [27 Nov 1987]

Too bad. What dreams may come, indeed, when such enticing foreplay ends with a consummation devoutly to be missed.

Violent and sexy and funny and sad, Head-On is a big collision that doubles as a bizarre love story.

Add them up and the sum has a certain mathematical inevitability: Really annoying characters, really annoying movie.

Not that The Nutty Professor should ever be confused with a good movie, but it is a perfect vehicle for the redisplay of Murphy's neglected talents, steering him away from the smug persona of his recent disasters and whisking him back to the cozy locale of his Saturday Night Live roots.

This documentary is only partly a story of the chosen one; mainly, and more intriguingly, it's a chronicle of the choosing one, of the nervous young monk charged with the job of leading the search party.

The Shrek franchise is alive and well -- Model 2 is zippier, sleeker, with ever-improving graphics, vast commercial potential and the same sly ability to reach out and hook the whole family.

The mutations never stop. But that won't upset those 8-year-olds; changing so rapidly themselves, kids love tales of metamorphosis, the more the merrier. For them, caught in the commercial grip of the latest craze, it matters only that their cute little mutants have taken the giant step onto the big screen. That's probably all they need; that's definitely all they're given. [30 Mar 1990]

Sorry, but the real Grimms did a whole lot more with a great deal less.

Guaranteed neither to offend nor delight.

Biggs, in particular, seems positively frozen by his imitative efforts -- less Woody than wooden. Ricci is a bit looser, and has the added advantage of hiding behind those saucer-eyes.

The visual big top is the scourging and the crucifixion -- again and again, Gibson returns to the blood-letting. Again and again, we're exposed to the clinical repetition of a single act, until an alleged act of passion comes to seem boring and passionless. Is that not a definition of pornography?

The best satire implicates the audience; this stuff keeps our sense of superiority smugly intact.

Ocean's Twelve lacks the courage of its star-driven convictions. Next time, Steven and George and Brad and Matt should ditch the hypocrisy and just shoot themselves shooting the breeze, poking fun at each other from within the smug sanctuary of their precious celebrity.

Ledger proves what we've suspected all along -- this is his picture, and he steals it brilliantly.

It's a nifty caper flick that also ponders the aesthetic nature of deception -- in other words, a solid work of craft that doubles as a little meditation on art.

Before that marvel of human engineering - China's Three Gorges Dam - completes its legacy of human upheaval, there are vanishing sights to be seen.

These are valid ideas, but they don't always arise organically out of the script, and can seem clumsily expressed.

Crowe is too much the good employee to spin the yarn properly, to give the picture the very integrity it endorses. He might have made a more convincing movie had he first convinced himself.

Gimmickry is death to this sort of artsy endeavour -- it turns a movie with a small budget into a small movie.

Amounts to a complete misreading of Wilde, who used the conventions of artifice to lampoon artificiality. Parker totally misses the point by tacking on such cinematic curlicues -- apparently, in his eagerness to seem movie-friendly, he's too hung up on the importance of not being earnest.

As in so many essentially childish movies, it's an actual child who's always the smartest pants in the room.

[Walken's] every minute on screen is filled with that level of jittery invention, and, watching him at play, not even the flintiest temper could resist a wide grin. Envy can surely be a trial, but Saint Christopher is there to ease our troubled journey and see us smilingly home.

Regresses into a lame action-thriller.

Hawking is as much a phenomenon as the phenomena he explores. Knowing that, A Brief History Of Time has the deceptive simplicity of an elegant equation - it merely sets up the parallels and permits us to wonder, gazing upon the heavens above and the mysteries within. [28 Aug 1992]

This is a world out of time and, despite the trappings of flinty realism, the film too unfolds like an elemental myth from the stormy past – a Greek tragedy driven by dark fates and struggling toward a catharsis.

That may be your lump of coal, but it seems a precious gift to me.

The movie itself seems more familiar than fascinating, more innocuous than inflammatory, and, at 2½ hours, more tedious than anything else.

An acquired taste that you may not acquire. I did, but it took me a while.

Don't look for logic here. But if gore is your game, a motherlode awaits.

[Cohen] can't quite decide whether to play the picture for high camp or pure adventure or just plain belly laughs. Predictably, he blasts away in all directions at once and hits precious little. [31 May 1996]

Borat at its best is pure satiric genius, the Swiftian kind that has you busting a gut with laughter even while checking your conscience for implicating flaws.

WITH the russet beauty of New Mexico as the setting, White Sands sports a nice look. With the angular Willem Dafoe in the lead role, White Sands boasts a solid performance. And with director Roger Donaldson (No Way Out) behind the camera, White Sands maintains a brisk pace. Now if it only had a script that made a lick of sense, White Sands might have been a good movie. It doesn't; it isn't. [24 Apr 1992]

After a solid start and a strong buildup through two acts, the movie fumbles the resolution. Ethical lines that were convincingly wavy suddenly straighten out, too quickly and too neatly.

The spaghetti western may be dead, but the noodle eastern looks to be alive and well.

The original was shot in 3-D; this, by contrast, is 1-D all the way.

Alien Nation lives out precisely the fate of the alien nation it depicts - both full of potential, both hoping to please, and both immediately co-opted, enslaved by the same commercial forces that granted their release. [12 Oct 1988]

Even Dan Aykroyd and Kim Basinger together, acting their hearts out, can't move this turgid script to liftoff velocity. [15 Dec 1988]

Warning: Cars comes unequipped with two essential options -- charm and a good muffler.

The film takes its cue from the widow, neither sermonizing or even villainizing, content to serve quietly as an admirable exercise in restraint and a moving example of the grace under pressure that is the essence of courage.

Elf is jolly but could have been jollier, funny but could have been funnier, charming but ... well, point made.

The pop-culture answer to a murder-suicide, the kind of flick that serves itself up as the object of its own satire.

Alas, around about the third act, the idea grows tired and the whole thing gets derailed. Too bad, because it's a good ride until it isn't.

If the facts of the story are essentially true, their presentation is as formulaic as ever.

With Hot Fuzz, you'll just have to settle for semi-hilarity.

This movie sticks.

Obviously, commercial film has a proud history of appealing to our less noble instincts. But why does this particular thing fail so provocatively, going beyond mere stupidity into downright offensive? #2. Not just because it is charmless, humorless, cynical and mean- minded. Lots of movies are that. Yet Garbage Pail crosses the fine line where a difference in degree becomes a difference in kind. In fact, it invents a brand new genre: kiddie nihilism, a callow theatre of disgust. Antonin Artaud, meet Mr. Dressup. [26 Aug 1987]

For all its cinematic assets, Maverick seems a less charming vessel than the show I watched at my daddy's knee.

This is the kind of picture that is faux subtle when it should be bold, and really ham-handed when it should be delicate.

In Hollywood, and perhaps beyond, there's nothing more predictable than a rebel with a cause. XXX pretends otherwise, but isn't really fooling anyone -- ultimately, this is a movie as generic as its title.

Appaloosa wobbles and wanders, promising to take a fresh look at those old myths, only to lapse back into weary convention.

The result is a fairly co-ordinated effort that, despite a few miscues, yields a consistently watchable film.

A seriously black comedy. Black, because affliction and angst abound. Comic, because this rampant bleakness is presented as nothing more than an amusing bauble.

With no help from the dialogue, Kidman doesn't have a clue how to make clueless interesting. Not for lack of trying. Her efforts, which often consist of channelling Elizabeth Montgomery by way of Marilyn Monroe, are painful but insistent.

A revisiting of George Pal's 1960 adaptation of the H. G. Wells novel. Pal's take on the book was visually delightful and occasionally clever; this one is always workmanlike and mainly pedestrian.

A layabout movie -- not risibly bad, just relentlessly sub-par.

So that great start turns all clunky and dull and, you know, mediocre. Still, you'll love Emma. Emma is about as cute as a kid can get.

Cloverfield is an exercise in realism that lacks reality's broader and richer context. Or, put another way, the experiment is artful, but it ain't art.

The comedy is warm and witty and wafer-thin, as easy on the palate as a raspberry sorbet on a summer afternoon.