Roger Ebert

There is nothing I much disliked but little to really recommend. At least the movie was not nonstop slapstick, and there were a few moments of relative gravity, in which Robin Williams demonstrated once again that he's more effective on the screen when he's serious than when he's trying to be funny.

It's another overwrought clunker like "How the Grinch Stole Christmas," all effects and stunts and CGI and prosthetics, with no room for lightness and joy.

An expensive, exhaustive, 150-mintue odyssey that doesn’t so much conclude as cross the finish line and collapse. It has been outfitted with expensive stars and a glossy production, but it doesn’t really make us care.

More about continuing the legend of the irascible but lovable old man into the grave, if necessary.

It is enormously ambitious -- maybe too much so, since it ranges so widely between styles and strategies that it distracts from its own flow.

My deepest objection to the movie is that it is so blood-soaked. When dialogue arrives to interrupt the carnage, it's like the seventh-inning stretch.

Despite all its sound and fury, Legend is a movie I didn't care very much about. All of the special effects in the world, and all of the great makeup, and all of the great Muppet creatures can't save a movie that has no clear idea of its own mission and no joy in its own accomplishment.

If Depardieu seems right at home in My Father the Hero, perhaps that is because only two years ago he made a French film called "Mon Pere, Ce Heros," with exactly the same plot. I saw it, and would say it was more or less exactly as appealing as this English version.

It is just plain talky and boring. You know there's something wrong with a movie when the last third feels like the last half.

One of those movies where the audience knows the message before the film begins and the characters are still learning it when the film ends.

And Dennis Rodman? He does a splendid job of playing a character who seems in every respect to be Dennis Rodman. He seems at home on the screen. He's confident, and in action scenes he'll occasionally do a version of the high-spirited hop-skip-and- jump he sometimes does on the court. He looks like he's having fun, and that's crucial for a movie actor. His agent should have told him, though, that if you can't be the hero, be the villain. That's always a better role than the best friend.

Among the better things in the movie, I count Vaughn's well-timed and smart dialogue.

The Forgotten is not a good movie, but at least it supplies a credible victim (Moore).

If they ever give Dolly her freedom and stop packaging her so antiseptically, she could be terrific. But Dolly and Burt and Whorehouse never get beyond the concept stage in this movie.

The movie itself, unfortunately, is not as compelling as the tempest that went into its making.

The Dream Team is essentially a formula picture filled with missed opportunities. The fact that it has several passages that really work, and that the actors create characters we can care about, only underlines the bankruptcy of its imagination.

The performances are all just fine; I wish they'd been at the service of another movie.

Projects like this bring out the best in actors, who take salary cuts to work in Chekhov (even at one remove). What we can guess, watching the film, is that the same players would make a good job of "Three Sisters" but are undermined by the faculty club, which works like a hotel lobby. There's no way to sustain dramatic momentum here.

Hilary Duff is beautiful and skilled, and I hope she finds something worthwhile to do with her talent before she truly does become the next Britney Spears and has to start worrying about the next Hilary Duff.

If the plot and screenplay are juvenile, the production values are first-rate, and the lead performance by newcomer Elizabeth Berkley has a fierce energy that's always interesting.

There's a point at which its enigmatic flashes of incomprehensible action grow annoying, and a point at which we realize that there's no use paying close attention, because we won't be able to figure out the film's secrets until they're explained to us.

High School is a pun. Get it? This is one of those stoner comedies that may be funny if you're high - but if not, not.

The disappointment is that Burton has not yet found the storytelling and character-building strength to go along with his pictorial flair.

Red is neither a good movie nor a bad one. It features actors we like doing things we wish were more interesting.

Faithfully represents Heinlein's militarism, his Big Brother state, and a value system in which the highest good is to kill a friend before the Bugs can eat him. The underlying ideas are the most interesting aspect of the film.

The problem may be that the movie isn’t nearly tough enough. It needs to be more hard-boiled, more merciless in its dissection of egos, more perceptive about the cutthroat nature of show business.

Pacific Heights could stand comparison to "Rosemary's Baby." Both films are about a young couple who are deeply concerned by events that seem to be happening in another flat in their building. The difference between the movies is instructive: Roman Polanski insinuates us into the gradually growing horror of his couple in "Rosemary's Baby," while John Schlesinger, in "Pacific Heights," seems concerned only with generating the most obvious shock effects.

This remake was a bad idea that only got worse.

This is an overdirected, overphotographed, overdone movie that is so distracted by its hectic, relentless style that the story line is rendered almost incoherent.

What's strange about Sister Act 2: Back in the Habit is that it abandons most of what people liked about the first movie and replaces it with a formula as old as the hills.

This movie just recycles "Grease," without the stars, without the energy, without the freshness and without the grease.

Is this some kind of a test? The Hangover, Part II plays like a challenge to the audience's capacity for raunchiness.

It isn't bad so much as it lacks any ambition to be more than it so obviously is.

Once you realize it's only going to be so good, you settle back and enjoy that modest degree of goodness, which is at least not badness, and besides, if you're watching Rush Hour 3, you obviously didn't have anything better to do, anyway.

The movie unleashes all sorts of considerations it doesn’t really deal with, and the material edges closer to horror than it probably intends.

The film is like a crossword puzzle. It keeps your interest until you solve it. Then it's just a worthless scrap with the spaces filled in.

There's only one character we can identify with - a San Francisco police detective played by David Caruso - and he doesn't drive the plot so much as get swept along by it.

The more you think about what really happens in Cocktail, the more you realize how empty and fabricated it really is.

Shameless wish-fulfillment, a Harlequin novel crossed with a mystic travelogue, and it mercifully reverses the life chronology of many people, which is Love Pray Eat.

The same material, filmed in America, might seem thin and contrived; the adventures are arbitrary, the cuteness of the men grows wearing, and when Nino has an accident with a chainsaw, we can see contrivance shading off into desperation.

Spider-Man 3 is, in short, a mess. Too many villains, too many pale plot strands, too many romantic misunderstandings, too many conversations, too many street crowds looking high into the air and shouting "oooh!" this way, then swiveling and shouting "aaah!" that way.

Celtic Pride is a little too lumbering to really take off as a comedy; the director, Tom De Cerchio, doesn't show a light touch. But there is the germ of an idea here, especially in the scenes where the professional star ridicules two grown men for taking a basketball game so seriously. And then there are some nice reversals in the final scenes, as Mike and Jimmy balance between their sports loyalties and their survival instincts. But I wish the movie had been a little more focused, a little quicker on its feet. [19 Apr 1996, p.31]

All of this has a fascination, and yet Red Trousers is a jumbled and unsatisfying documentary.

I think the fault is in the screenplay, which tells a story that can be predicted almost from the opening frames. The people who wrote this movie did not bother, or dare, to give us truly individual Japanese characters; there is only one who is developed with any care.

There isn't a lot in the movie that is funny.

A pleasant but inconsequential comedy, awkward for the actors, and contrived from beginning to end.

The Black Windmill commits the one crime no thriller can be pardoned for. It's not thrilling. It's also terribly passive and static, and Siegel directs Caine almost to a standstill.

I suppose there is a market for this sort of thing among bubblebrained adolescents of all ages, but it takes a good chase scene indeed to rouse me from the lethargy induced by dozens and dozens of essentially similar sequences.

Sam Peckinpah's The Getaway is a big, glossy, impersonal mechanical toy. It's like one of those devices for executive desks, with the stainless steel balls on the strings: It functions with great efficiency but doesn't accomplish anything.

The movie makes its point early and often: That its characters are hung up on food, and eat for unhealthy and obsessive reasons. It's true. We know it's true. We wait in vain for additional insights.

The two leads are not inspired. Jake Gyllenhaal could make the cover of a muscle mag, but he plays Dastan as if harboring Spider-Man's doubts and insecurities. I recall Gemma Arterton as resembling a gorgeous still photo in a cosmetics ad.

It's so neat, so formula, so contrived, I was thinking about "The Graduate" instead of about characters I had spent two hours with. So, I suspect, was Nichols.

When the movie's over, you realize that the first hour only seemed convincing: The whole movie is made out of thin air.

If it does nothing else, Another 48 HRS reminds us that Murphy is a big, genuine talent. Now it's time for him to make a good movie.

The movie is simply a failure of imagination. Nobody looked at the screenplay and observed that it didn’t try hard enough, that it had no surprises, that it didn’t attempt to delight its audiences with twists and turns on the phoned-in plotline.

The storytelling is hopelessly compromised by the movie's decision to sympathize with Jeanne. We can admire someone for daring to do the audacious, or pity someone for recklessly doing something stupid, but when a character commits an act of stupid audacity, the admiration and pity cancel each other, and we are left only with the possibility of farce.

The movie was directed by Michael Brandt, who co-wrote the script with Derek Haas. Together they wrote a much better movie, "3:10 to Yuma." The Double doesn't approach it in terms of quality. None of it is particularly compelling.

Here is a 145-minute movie containing one (1) line of truly witty dialogue: "Her 40s is the last age at which a bride can be photographed without the unintended Diane Arbus subtext."

Jet Lag is sort of a grown-up version of "Before Sunrise"...The difference between the two films is sort of depressing.

I enjoyed Ashes of Time Redux, up to a point. It's great-looking, and the characters all know what they would, although we do not.

The actors are better than the material.

Whoopi Goldberg is the only original or interesting thing about Jumpin' Jack Flash. And she tries, but she's not enough.

Here is a great story born to be creepy, and the movie churns through it like a road company production. If the first three movies served as parables for their times, this one keeps shooting off parable rockets that fizzle out.

Consider for a moment how this movie might play if it took itself seriously. Would it be better than as a comedy? I suspect so.

The movie itself is good and shows promise, except for the ending, when Trier shouldn't have been so poetic. Not only does Reprise generate itself, it contains its own review.

The plot, in short, is underwhelming. It merely follows the reporters as the screenplay serves them the solution to their case on a silver platter. Yet curiously, Deadline flows right along.

The screenplay tries to paper over too many story elements that needed a lot more thought. This movie has been filmed and released, but it has not been finished.

Essentially an interlacing of irony and gotcha! Scenes.

This is not the sort of movie you make it your business to see in a theater. But if you're ever surfing cable TV and come across it, you'll linger.

Here's a bad movie with hardly a bad scene. How can that be? The construction doesn't flow. The story doesn't engage. The insistent flashbacks are distracting. The plot has problems it sidesteps. Yet here is a gifted cast doing what it's asked to do. The failure is in the writing and editing.

The movie is focused on two kinds of chemistry: of the kitchen, and of the heart. The kitchen works better.

Now this is a terrific premise for a thriller, and director George Romero (The Night of the Living Dead) sets it up with skill and style. Unfortunately, the film's biggest disappointment is that it doesn't develop its preternatural opening theme.

The past traps the present, fate smothers spontaneity, and all of the dialog sounds like Dialog - not what people would say, but what characters would say. The film is depressing for some of the right reasons, and all of the wrong ones.

I think Bloch and Rosenberg should get organized and take on the cabbage. If nothing else, a horror movie about cabbages could help Rosenberg work through his obsession and save a lot of analyst's fees.

It is a touching story, and the musicians (some over 90 years old) still have fire and grace onstage, but, man, does the style of this documentary get in the way.

John Carpenter's Prince of Darkness gets off to an intriguing start. But then the movie loses its way.

The screenplay, by Sara Parriott and Josann McGibbon, has a good feel for female best-friend relationships, and the dialogue has life and edge to it.

I didn't much like RoboCop 2 (the use of that killer child is beneath contempt), but I've gotta hand it to them: It's strange how funny it is, for a movie so bad. Or how bad, for a movie so funny.

October Baby is being promoted as a Christian film, and it could have been an effective one. Rachel Hendrix is surprisingly capable in her first feature role, and Jasmine Guy is superb in her scene. Unfortunately, the film as a whole is amateurish and ungainly, can't find a consistent tone, is too long, is overladen with music that tries to paraphrase the story and is photographed with too many beauty shots that slow the progress.

The 'Burbs tries to position itself somewhere between Beetlejuice and The Twilight Zone, but it lacks the dementia of the first and the wicked intelligence of the second and turns instead into a long shaggy dog story.

The movie lacks the warmth and edge of the two previous features ("Walking and Talking" and "Lovely and Amazing"). It seems to be more of an idea than a story.

Husbands has all the confidence of Cassavetes' masterpiece, Faces, but few of the other qualities of the film that preceded it. It has good intentions, I suppose, but it is an artistic disaster and only fitfully interesting on less ambitious levels.

Any professional film editor watching this movie is going to suffer through one moment after another that begs to be ripped from the film and cut up into ukulele picks. Never mind the film editor: A lot of audiences, with all the best will in the world, are going to feel the same way.

I prefer "Life Is Beautiful," which is clearly a fantasy, to Jakob the Liar, which is just as contrived and manipulative but pretends it is not.

Disclosure contains an inspiring terrific shot of Demi Moore's cleavage in a Wonderbra, surrounded by 125 minutes of pure goofiness leading up to, and resulting from, this moment.

A pleasant, genial, good-hearted, sometimes icky comedy that's like spending a weekend with well-meaning people you don't want to see again any time real soon.

Here are people who do not allow the use of their last names, yet they cheerfully have sex in front of the camera -- and even willingly participate in scenes that make them look cruel, twisted, reckless and perhaps deranged.

Johnny Knoxville, famous for "Jackass,"...is, in fact, completely convincing and probably has a legitimate movie career ahead of him and doesn't have to stuff his underpants with dead chickens and hang upside down over alligator ponds any more.

Eddie and the Cruisers is all buildup and no payoff.

The problem is that Winterbottom has imagined both stories and several others, and tells them in a style designed to feel as if reality has been caught on the fly.

The outcome of this journey is going to be predictable and disappointing. Mottola does his best to make the trip itself enjoyable.

The movie is harmless and fitfully amusing.

"Star Trek V" is pretty much of a mess - a movie that betrays all the signs of having gone into production at a point where the script doctoring should have begun in earnest. There is no clear line from the beginning of the movie to the end, not much danger, no characters to really care about, little suspense, uninteresting or incomprehensible villains, and a great deal of small talk and pointless dead ends. Of all of the "Star Trek" movies, this is the worst.

Either this is a tragic family or a satirical one, and the film seems uncertain which way to jump.

It's not just sad, it's brutal. There's an undercurrent of cold, detached cruelty in the way Michael uses the magical device.

Kline's Frenchman is somehow not worldly enough, and Ryan's heroine never convinces us she ever loved her fiance in the first place. A movie about this kind of material either should be about people who feel true passion or should commit itself as a comedy. Compromise is pointless.

Hal Hartley is on his way to creating a distinctive film world, and although Trust is not a successful film, you can see his vision at work, and it's intriguing.

It's all recycled material from other movies - all except for some nice personal touches added by the actors. They bring style to a movie that needs it.

How much more interesting is a film like "(500) Days of Summer," which is about the complexities of life, in comparison with this one, which cheerfully cycles through the cliches.

The movie never really comes together, and I think the fault for that begins with Williams. When the star of a movie seems desperate enough to depend on one-liners, can the rest of the cast be blamed for losing confidence in the script?

The movie is clearly intended for girls between the ages of 9 and 15, and for the more civilized of their brothers, and isn't of much use to anyone else.

A mild pleasure from one end to the other, but not much more. Maybe that's enough, serving as a reminder that movie comedies still can be about ordinary people and do not necessarily have to feature vulgarity as their centerpiece.

This movie is all elbows. Nothing fits. It doesn't add up. It has some terrific free-standing scenes, but they need more to lean on.

Maybe Muppets from Space is just not very good, and they'll make a comeback. I hope so. Because I just don't seem to care much anymore. Sorry, Miss Piggy. Really sorry.

Foster, I believe, sees right through this material and out the other side, and doesn't believe in a bit of it.

Speedway is pleasant, kind, polite, sweet and noble, and if the late show viewers of 1988 will not discover from it what American society was like in the summer of 1968, at least they will discover what it was not like.

Who was Joseph Fiennes channeling when he chose this muddled tone? Obviously he was reluctant to gave a broad, inspirational performance of the kind you find in deliberately religious films.

I didn't find “The Jerk” very funny...There's a smarmy undercurrent in this movie that seems to imply that Steve Martin may be playing a jerk, but that we all know what a cool guy he is. Well, if you're going to play a jerk, play one as if you think you are one, or you might wind up looking like a jerk.

The plot in Throw Mama from the Train is top-heavy, but the movie doesn't make as much as it could from its weird characters.

Johnny Mnemonic is one of the great goofy gestures of recent cinema, a movie that doesn't deserve one nanosecond of serious analysis but has a kind of idiotic grandeur that makes you almost forgive it.

There is nothing to complain about except the film's deadening predictability and the bland, shallow characters.

At one time or another, Casino Royale undoubtedly had a shooting schedule, a script and a plot. If any one of the three ever turns up, it might be the making of a good movie.

Texas Killing Fields begins along the lines of a police procedural and might have been perfectly absorbing if it had played by the rules: strict logic, attention to detail, reference to technical police work. Unfortunately, the movie often seems to stray from such discipline.

Here is a movie that ignores the Model Airplane Rule: First, make sure you have taken all of the pieces out of the box, then line them up in the order in which they will be needed. Bringing Down the House is glued together with one of the wings treated like a piece of tail.

The movie's not without charm. There's a fresh, sweet relationship between one of the girls (Phoebe Cates) and her boyfriend, in which she is permitted to have the normal fears, doubts and reservations of anyone her age. I'm not sure how that plot got into this smarmy-minded movie, but it was like a breath of fresh air.

The kind of film you can appreciate as an object, but not as a story. It's a lovingly souped-up incarnation of the film-noir look, contains well-staged and performed musical numbers, and has a lot of cigarettes, tough tootsies, bad guys and shadows. What it doesn't have is a story that pulls us along, or a hero who seems as compelling as some of the supporting characters.

Nothing heats up. The movie doesn't lead us, it simply stays in step.

Here is a film that begins with merciless comic savagery and descends into merely merciless savagery. But wow, what an opening.

If you're a fan of Hector Lavoe and Latin music, or Lopez and Anthony, you'll want to see El Cantante for what's good in it. Otherwise, you may be disappointed. The director (Leon Ichaso) and his co-writers haven't licked a crucial question: Why do we need to see this movie and not just listen to the music?

The plot is simple-minded and disappointing, and the chase and action scenes are pretty much routine for movies in the sci-fi CGI genre. The robots never seem to have the heft and weight of actual metallic machines, and make boring villains.

The Navajo code talkers have waited a long time to have their story told. Too bad it appears here merely as a gimmick in an action picture.

I was pleased again and again by set-ups, camera angles, lighting effects, editing rhythms and the fanciful staging of action scenes. But I never for a moment cared about the characters, and the plot was all too conveniently structured - just a guideline to the action.

A strange mutant beast, half Nickelodeon movie, half R-rated comedy. It's like kids with potty-mouth playing grownup.

There is nothing really wrong with the scenes in the institution, except that they're in the wrong movie.

Problem is, it's so laid-back it eventually gets monotonous. If the style and pacing had been as outrageous as the subject matter, we might have had something really amazing here.

Begins with promise, proceeds in fits and starts, and finally sinks into a cornball drone of greeting-card sentiment.

If I were simply to describe the story of Compromising Positions, it might sound like lighthearted, slightly kinky fun. But the movie has such a bitter core, such a distaste for its characters, that I ended up feeling uncomfortable in its company. I think it's supposed to be a comedy, but I felt depressed by its world of rich, neurotic, bitchy suburbanities.

Clever, done with skill, yet lacking in the cerebral imagination of the best science fiction.

It's a showcase leading role for Parker Posey, who obviously has the stuff, and generates wacky charm. But the movie never pulls itself together.

Hollow Man can think of nothing more interesting to do than spy on his girlfriend and assault his neighbor.Too bad. Really too bad, because the movie is supported by some of the most intriguing special effects I've seen.

Scanners is a new horror film made with enough craft and skill that it could have been very good, if it could find a way to make us care about it.

The gift of Christopher Reeve, in his best scenes and when the filmmakers allow it, is to play Superman without laughing, to take him seriously so that we can have some innocent escapist fun. Helen Slater has the same gift, but is given even less chance to exercise it in Supergirl, and the result is an unhappy, unfunny, unexciting movie.

The Muppets are a wonderful creation, but they lose their special quality in "The Great Muppet Caper." They behave like clones of other popular kiddie superstars -- like the basic cartoon heroes they once seemed destined to replace.

You can sense an impulse toward a better film, and Adrien Brody and Keira Knightley certainly take it seriously, but the time-travel whiplash effect sets in, and it becomes, as so many time travel movies do, an exercise in early entrances, late exits, futile regrets.

Watching MirrorMask, I suspected the filmmakers began with a lot of ideas about how the movie should look, but without a clue about pacing, plotting or destination.

Somehow isn't as exciting as a duel over a woman should be.

Made me feel like I was sitting in McDonald's watching some guy shout at his kids. Price of Glory gives us two hours of that behavior, and it's a miscalculation so basic that it makes the movie painful when it wants, I guess, to be touching.

It says something for Robert Downey Jr. that in a movie where a man becomes a dog, Downey creates the weirdest character.

You hear some nostalgia, but with most of them you don't get the idea that if they had the chance they'd do it all again.

You know a movie's got problems when you find yourself wishing the heroes would agree with the villain.

I watched the movie with interest, yes, but not emotional involvement, and my appreciation of Moore was based more on her essence than on her character.

The movie leaves no heartstring untugged. It even has a beloved old dog, and you know what happens to beloved old dogs in movies like this. Or if you don't, I don't have the heart to tell you.

I kept asking myself what the film was really trying to say about the human condition as reflected by John Merrick, and I kept drawing blanks. The film's philosophy is this shallow: (1)Wow, the Elephant Man sure looked hideous, and (2)gosh, isn't it wonderful how he kept on in spite of everything?

But what the movie lacks is a story arc to pull us through.

It's chirpy, it's bright, there are pretty locations and lots happens. This is the kind of movie that can briefly hold the attention of a cat.

A work of limitless invention, but it is invention without pattern, chasing itself around the screen without finding a plot.

It's not particularly funny to hear women described and valued exclusively in terms of their function as disposable sexual partners. A lot of Connor's dialogue is just plain sadistic and qualifies him as that part of an ass it shares with a doughnut.

It is the kind of movie one enjoys more at 8, or even 12, than at 16 and up.

You know all those horror stories about a cigar-chomping producer who screens a movie and says they need to lose 15 minutes and shoot a new ending? Wedding Crashers needed a producer like that.

A disorganized, rambling and eccentric movie that contains some moments of truth, some moments of humor, and many moments of digression.

A good-looking movie with hard-working performances and a bubble-brained script, which nevertheless stumbles over a truth from time to time. Class Act could be a trial run for something really relevant.

The most curious thing about Hiding Out is that the plot continued to intrigue me even after I'd more or less given up on the movie's ability to find anything interesting in its material. What would it really be like to be in high school again? To revisit your past, knowing what you know now? Hollywood ought to make a good movie about that idea. In fact, Hollywood has: Peggy Sue Got Married. This one fails by comparison.

If this movie had been a satire, it could have been deadly.

The screenplay carries blandness to a point beyond tedium.

And above all, the film is lacking in joy. It never seems like it's fun to be Billie Frank.

There are laughs in the movie, and a lot of good feeling, but it seems more interested in its Italian stereotypes than its gay insights.

The Star Chamber works brilliantly until it locks into a plot. Then it stops dancing and starts marching.

Troche's tone is so relentlessly, depressingly monotonous that the characters seem trapped in a narrow emotional range. They live out their miserable lives in one lachrymose sequence after another, and for us there is no relief.

Without a great Bond girl, a great villain or a hero with a sense of humor, The Living Daylights belongs somewhere on the lower rungs of the Bond ladder. But there are some nice stunts.

The identical premise is used in Sidney Lumet's "Before the Devil Knows You're Dead," which is like a master class in how Allen goes wrong.

It's not fair to say Steven Spielberg's 1941 lacks "pacing." It's got it, all right, but all at the same pace: The movie relentlessly throws gags at us until we're dizzy. It's an attempt at that most tricky of genres, the blockbuster comedy, and it tries so hard to dazzle us that we want a break.

There is a funny movie lurking at the edges of Splash, and sometimes it even sneaks on screen and makes us smile. It's too bad the relentlessly conventional minds that made this movie couldn't have made the leap from sitcom to comedy.

An earnest but hopeless attempt to tell a parable about a man's search for redemption. By the end of his journey, we don't care if he finds redemption, if only he finds wakefulness.

A lot of the dialogue is intended as funny, but man, is it lame.

If the movie is a lost cause, it may at least showcase actors who have better things ahead of them.

The filmmakers made no effort to empathize with their prehistoric characters, to imagine what it might have really been like back then.

In the earlier films, we really identified with the small cadre of surviving humans. They were seen as positive characters, and we cared about them. This time, the humans are mostly unpleasant, violent, insane or so noble that we can predict with utter certainty that they will survive.

Armand Assante, on the other hand, is one of the best movie actors of his generation. But he isn't very funny in Fatal Instinct.

(Li)'s scenes are so clearly computer-aided that his moves are about as impressive as Bugs Bunny doing the same.

Hoot has its heart in the right place, but I have been unable to locate its brain.

It's slick, it has impressive production values and the acting is appropriate to the material. So why did I find myself so indifferent to the movie? Maybe because it never generated any sympathy for its characters. This is filmmaking by the numbers, without soul.

Plays like a tired exercise, a spy spoof with no burning desire to be that, or anything else.

There are those who will no doubt call The Postman the worst film of the year, but it's too good-hearted for that.

An Innocent Man has all the elements to put us through an emotional wringer, but the movie never works up any enthusiasm for them. It's the most relaxed crime movie of the year.

This is not the story of a fugitive trying to sneak through enemy terrain and be rescued, but of a movie character magically transported from one photo opportunity to another.

At every moment in the movie, I was aware that Peter Sellers was Clouseau, and Steve Martin was not. I hadn't realized how thoroughly Sellers and Edwards had colonized my memory.

A witless recycling of the H.G. Wells story from 1895, with the absurdity intact but the wonderment missing.

The movie deserves more stars for its bottom-line craft, but all the craft in the world can't redeem its story.

Because the opening scenes of Sleeping with the Enemy are so powerful, the rest of the movie is all the more disappointing. The film begins as an unyielding look at a battered wife, and ends as another one of those thrillers where the villain toys with his victim and the audience.

It's surprising to see a director like Michael Apted and an actress like Jennifer Lopez associated with such tacky material.

You know there's something wrong with a sex movie when the good parts are the dialogue.

Starts promisingly as an attack on modern commercialized sports, and then turns into just one more wheezy assembly-line story about slacker dudes vs. rich old guys.

It's a simple, wholesome parable, crashingly obvious, and we sit patiently while the characters and the screenplay slowly arrive at the inevitable conclusion. It needs to take some chances and surprise us.

In Step Brothers, the language is simply showing off by talking dirty. It serves no comic function, and just sort of sits there in the air, making me cringe.

Footloose is a seriously confused movie that tries to do three things, and does all of them badly. It wants to tell the story of a conflict in a town, it wants to introduce some flashy teenage characters, and part of the time it wants to be a music video. It's possible that no movie with this many agendas can be good; maybe somebody should have decided, early on, exactly what the movie was supposed to be about.

The astonishing success of the original "MiB" was partly because it was fun, partly because it was unexpected. We'd never seen anything like it, while with MiBII, we've seen something exactly like it.

A brutal, crude, witless high-tech CGI contrivance, in which no artificial technique has been overlooked, including 3-D.

Made me want to spray the screen with Lysol. This movie is shameless. It's not merely a tearjerker. It extracts tears individually by liposuction, without anesthesia.

As screenplays go, this is as idiotic as it gets. There are a couple of marginally funny moments in the movie, like the belching contest, but they don't go anywhere.

I am just about ready to write off movies in which people make bets about whether they will, or will not, fall in love.

The movie pretends to show poor black kids being bribed into literacy by Dylan and candy bars, but actually it is the crossover white audience that is being bribed with mind-candy in the form of safe words by the two Dylans.

The movie is silly beyond comprehension, and even if it weren't silly, it would still be beyond comprehension.

There are few things more depressing than a weeper that doesn't make you weep.

Burnt Offerings is a mystery, all right. What's mysterious is that the filmmakers were able to sell such a weary collection of ancient cliches for cold hard cash.

This is the kind of movie that is so witlessly generic that the plot and title disappear into a mist of other recycled plots and interchangeable titles.

What possible reason was there for anyone to make Did You Hear About the Morgans? Or should I say "remake," because this movie has been made and over and over again, and oh, so much better.

What we have here is a witless attempt to merge the "Twilight" formula with the Michael Bay formula.

Narrow Margin is a clumsy version of the Idiot Plot, dressed up as a high-gloss chase thriller. The Idiot Plot, of course, is any plot that would be resolved in five minutes if everyone in the story were not an idiot. And rarely has there been a film in which more idiots make more mistakes than in this one.

This movie is a study in wretched excess. It is so smoky, so dusty, so foggy, so unfocused and so brownish yellow that you want to try Windex on the screen. A director is in deep trouble when we do not even enjoy the primary act of looking at his picture.

It offers certain pleasures, but suffers from an inability to structure events or know when to end a shot. And it has an ending that is simply, perhaps ridiculously, incomprehensible.

The Hunger is an agonizingly bad vampire movie, circling around an exquisitely effective sex scene.

A slick production of a lame script, which kills time for most of its middle half-hour. If anyone in the plot had the slightest intelligence, the story would implode.

Tuff Turf is the worst teenage exploitation movie since "Where the Boys Are".

This is a dismal, dreary and fairly desperate movie, in which the actors try very hard but are unable to overcome an uninspired screenplay.

A watered-down take on the sci-fi classic "Solaris," by Stanislaw Lem, which was made into an immeasurably better film by Andrei Tarkovsky.

It's a lot of things, but boring is not one of them. I cannot recommend the movie, but ... why the hell can't I? Just because it's godawful? What kind of reason is that for staying away from a movie? Godawful and boring, that would be a reason.

An awesomely silly, tasteless and half-witted movie.

Here's a movie without an ounce of human kindness, a sour and mean-spirited enterprise so desperate to please, it tries to be a yukky comedy and a hard-boiled action picture at the same time.

Emma writes everything down and then offers helpful suggestions, although she fails to supply the most useful observation of all, which would be to observe that the entire novel is complete crap.

A film so amateurish that only the professionalism of some of the actors makes it watchable.

When flashbacks tease us with bits of information, it has to be done well, or we feel toyed with. Here the mystery is solved by stomping in thick-soled narrative boots through the squishy marsh of contrivance.

[Figgis] has made a thriller that thrills us only if we abandon all common sense. Of course preposterous things happen in all thrillers, but there must be at least a gesture in the direction of plausibility, or we lose patience.

An uninspired assembly of characters and story lines that interrupt one another.

The whole movie has the feeling of a clone, of a film assembled out of spare parts from other movies, out at the cinematic junkyard.

Hook's visual sense is not acute here; he doesn't show the spontaneous sense of time and place that made his first film, The Kitchen Toto (1988), so convincing. He seems more concerned with telling the story than showing it, and there are too many passages in which the boys are simply trading dialogue.

I admire the craft involved, but the movie leaves me profoundly indifferent. After three earlier movies in the series, which have been transmuted into video games, why do we need a fourth one? Oh. I just answered my own question.

Good performances and an interesting idea are metamorphosed into one of the silliest movies in a long time.

Let's say Roller Boogie is no better and no worse than the beach blanket/bikini/bingo/bongo movies, and from there you're going to have to take it by yourself.

The one saving grace in Halloween III is Stacey Nelkin, who plays the heroine. She has one of those rich voices that makes you wish she had more to say and in a better role. But watch her, too, in the reaction shots: When she's not talking, she's listening.

The movie works so hard at juggling its cliches that it fails to generate interest in its story.

There's a funny line or two, a fetching performance by Stacey Nelkin as a young wench, some nonsense about a buried treasure, and then Yellowbeard is soon over and soon forgotten.

Here is a story hammered together from discards at the Lunacy Factory. Attempting to find something to praise, I am reduced to this: Cage's performance is not boring.

The Secret of My Success seems trapped in some kind of time warp, as if the screenplay had been in a drawer since the 1950s and nobody bothered to update it.

Dead Man is a strange, slow, unrewarding movie that provides us with more time to think about its meaning than with meaning.

If you walk out after 10 or 15 minutes, you will have seen the best parts of the film.

One of the dirtiest-minded mainstream releases in history. It has a low opinion of men, a lower opinion of women, and the lowest opinion of the intelligence of its audience. It is obscene, foulmouthed, scatological, creepy and perverted.

Jennifer 8 promises a plot of excruciating complexity, but the storyline turns relentlessly dumb. By the end the characters might as well be wearing name tags: "Hi! I'm the serial killer!" This is the kind of movie where everybody makes avoidable errors in order for the plot to wend its torturous way to an unsatisfactory conclusion.

The actors cast themselves adrift on the sinking vessel of this story and go down with the ship.

It takes some doing to make a Jack Black comedy that doesn't work. But Nacho Libre does it.

The events involving the big speaking competition are so labored that occasionally the twins seem to be looking back over their shoulders for the plot to catch up.

The movie has good special effects and suitably gruesome characters, but it's bloodless.

The Immortals is without doubt the best-looking awful movie you will ever see.

Scream, Blacula, Scream is just an interim exploitation effort, and a warm-up for the better vampires in Marshall's future.

Mad Money is astonishingly casual for a movie about three service workers who steal millions from a Federal Reserve Bank. There is little suspense, no true danger; their plan is simple, the complications are few, and they don't get excited much beyond some high-fives and hugs and giggles.

The standards for comic book superhero movies have been established by "Superman," "The Dark Knight," "Spider-Man 2" and "Iron Man." In that company "Thor" is pitiful. Consider even the comparable villains (Lex Luthor, the Joker, Doc Ock and Obadiah Stane). Memories of all four come instantly to mind. Will you be thinking of Loki six minutes after this movie is over?

It's a shaky-cam meander through an unconvincing relationship, with detours considering the process of making the film. At 91 minutes, it seems very long.

Big Daddy should be reported to the child welfare office.

The first All Talking Killer picture. After the setup, it consists mostly of characters explaining their actions to one another.

The kind of movie Mad magazine prays for. It is so earnest, so overwrought and so wildly implausible that it begs to be parodied.

The characters are bitter and hateful, the images are nauseating, and the ending is bleak enough that when the screen fades to black it's a relief.. Videodrome, whatever its qualities, has got to be one of the least entertaining films of all time.

Stroker Ace is another in a series of essentially identical movies he has made with director Hal Needham, and although it's allegedly based on a novel, it's really based on their previous box-office hits like Smokey and the Bandit and The Cannonball Run.

The movie doesn't know how odd it seems to cut from the bloodshed in the ring to the dialogue of the supporting players, who still think they're in a comedy.

How could director Lawrence Kasdan and writer William Goldman be responsible for a film that goes so awesomely wrong?

You want to see guys with muscles shooting machineguns at guys without muscles? These are the movies for you. You have more than muscles between your ears? Try something else.

Wildcats is clearly an attempt by Hawn to repeat a formula that was wonderfully successful in "Private Benjamin": Wide-eyed Goldie copes with the real world. It was less successful in "Protocol," and now it's worn out altogether.

Here is a film so dreary and conventional that it took an act of the will to keep me in the theater.

Caveman seems more in the tradition of Alley Oop, crossed with Mel Brooks's Two Thousand Year Old Man. But the only artistic cross-reference it can manage is from the opening scene of Stanley Kubrick's 2000.

There's nothing wrong with Fast Food Fast Women that a casting director and a rewrite couldn't have fixed.

Why, oh, why, was this movie necessary?

The movie never takes off; it's a bright idea the filmmakers were unable to breathe life into.

There is some dark humor in the movie, of the kind where you laugh that you may not gag.

Opens with 15 funny minutes and then goes dead in the water.

Here is a bad movie into which a great character seems to have dropped from another dimension.

Very seriously confused in its objectives.

Is there another great modern writer so hard to translate successfully into cinema? Saul Bellow? Again, it's all in the language. The only thing Saul and Gabo have in common is the Nobel Prize. Now that's interesting.

Sanctum tells the story of a terrifying adventure in an incompetent way. Some of it is exciting, the ending is involving, and all of it is a poster child for the horrors of 3-D used badly.

[Robin Williams] has been ill-served by a screenplay that isn't curious about what his life would really be like.

This movie should have been struck by a lightning bolt.

The Perfect Sleep puts me in mind of a flywheel spinning in the void. It is all burnished brass and shining steel, perfectly balanced as it hums in its orbit; yet, because it occupies a void, it satisfies only itself and touches nothing else. Here is a movie that goes about its business without regard for an audience.

The movie attempts to jerk tears with one clunky device after another, in a plot that is a perfect storm of cliche and contrivance. In fact, it even contains a storm -- an imperfect one.

Its primary flaw is that it's not critical. It is a celebration of an idiotic lifestyle, and I don't think it knows it.