Roger Ebert

There's a point at which the plot crosses an invisible line, becoming so preposterous that it's no longer moving and is just plain weird.

The movie is a paid holiday for its director, Harold Becker. I say this because I know what Becker is capable of.

The movie itself is genial and unfocused and tired.

Through superhuman effort of the will, I did not walk out of The Hot Chick, but reader, I confess I could not sit through the credits.

Do you like this sort of rom-com? It's a fair example of its type, not good, but competent.

I felt too much of the movie consisted of groups of characters I didn't care about, running down passageways and fighting off enemies and trying to get back to the present before the window of time slams shut.

The movie is so filled with action that dramatic conflict would be more than we could handle, so all of the characters are nice.

The interlocking stories are theoretically about people whose lives are associated; that worked in "Crash." Here the connections seem less immediate and significant, and so the movie sometimes seems based on a group of separate short stories.

It's not that I don't like it. It's that I don't care.

The whole movie is so solemn, so worshipful toward its theme, that it's finally just silly.

Invasion U.S.A. is a brain-damaged, idiotic thriller, not even bad enough to be laughable.

Has the added inconvenience of being dreadfully serious about a plot so preposterous, it demands to be filmed by Monty Python.

Watching Just My Luck, I wished I were a teenage girl, not for any perverse reason but because then I might have enjoyed it a lot more.

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

Seemed kind of stuffy.

Batman & Robin, like the first three films in the series, is wonderful to look at, and has nothing authentic at its core.

Simon's not in a lighthearted mood, and so the silliness of the story gets bogged down in all sorts of gloomy neuroses, angry denunciations, and painful self-analysis.

There are scenes here where Breillat deliberately disgusts us, not because we are disgusted by the natural life functions of women, as she implies, but simply because The Woman does things that would make any reasonable Man, or Woman, for that matter, throw up.

The movie's pleasures are scant, apart from its observance of Gene Siskel's Rule of Swimming Pool Adjacency, which states that when well-dressed people are near a swimming pool, they will - yeah, you got it.

The kind of performance Penn delivers in I Am Sam, which may look hard, is easy, compared, say, to his amazing work in Woody Allen's "Sweet and Lowdown."

Possibly the funniest movie ever made about Catholicism. It confuses the phenomenon of stigmata with satanic possession.

Another one of those road comedies where Southern roots are supposed to make boring people seem colorful. If these characters were from Minneapolis or Denver, no way anyone would make a film about them.

Shameless in its use of mental retardation as a gimmick, a prop and a plot device. Anyone with any knowledge of retardation is likely to find the film offensive.

Return to the Blue Lagoon aspires to the soft-core porn achievements of the earlier film, but succeeds instead of creating a new genre, no-core porn.

I cringed.

Is the film worth seeing? Depends. It breaks no new ground as horror movies go, but it does introduce an intriguing location, and it's well made technically. It's better than you expect but not as good as you hope.

Even Cowgirls Get the Blues is one of the more empty, pointless, baffling films I can remember, and the experience of viewing it is an exercise in nothingness.

The problem is that the material's stretched too thin. There's not enough here to fill a feature-length film.

What did I think about this movie? As a film critic, I liked it. I liked the in-jokes and the self-aware characters. At the same time, I was aware of the incredible level of gore in this film. It is really violent.

A mercilessly convoluted version of a Twister, that genre in which the plot whacks us as if it's taking batting practice. I will not hint at anything that happens. I will simply observe that it's all entertaining.

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.

By the ending of the film, which is unconvincingly neat, I was distracted by too many questions to care about the answers.

Would it have been that much more difficult to make a movie in which Tom and Sarah were plausible, reasonably articulate newlyweds with the humor on their honeymoon growing out of situations we could believe? Apparently.

The problem with The Amityville Horror is that, in a very real sense, there's nothing there. We watch two hours of people being frightened and dismayed, and we ask ourselves... what for? If it's real, let it have happened to them. Too bad, Lutzes! If it's made up, make it more entertaining. If they can't make up their minds... why should we?

This isn't a great movie. But it's sincere as an entertainment, it looks good, it's atmospheric, and I will perk up the next time I hear Gianna is in a picture.

The Cannonball Run is an abdication of artistic responsibility at the lowest possible level of ambition. In other words, they didn't even care enough to make a good lousy movie.

A lot of its jokes miss, the pace is slow, there are too many characters to keep track of and there's an unpleasant streak of nasty humor directed at characters who are fat, ugly, old or otherwise out of step with Southern California physical ideals.

While no reasonable person over the age of 12 would presumably be able to take it seriously, it nevertheless has a lighthearted joy, a cheerfulness, an insouciance, that recalls the days when movies were content to be fun.

The script must have been a funny read. It's the movie that somehow never achieves takeoff speed.

A film is a terrible thing to waste. For Roman Coppola to waste one on A Glimpse Inside the Mind of Charles Swan III is a sad sight to behold. I'll go further. For Charlie Sheen to waste a role in it is also a great pity. I stop not: For Bill Murray to occupy his time in this dreck sandwich is a calamity.

Now I am faced with this movie, the most anticlimactic non-event since Geraldo Rivera broke into Al Capone's vault.

You know I am a fan of Nic Cage and Ron Perlman. Here, like cows, they devour the scenery, regurgitate it to a second stomach found only in actors and chew it as cud. It is a noble effort, but I prefer them in their straight-through Human Centipede mode.

The comedy bogs down in relentless predictability and the puzzling overuse of naughty words.

The director, Jared Hess, who made "Napoleon Dynamite," a film I admit I didn't get, has made a film I don't even begin to get.

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

The Perfect Man crawls hand over bloody hand up the stony face of this plot, while we in the audience do not laugh because it is not nice to laugh at those less fortunate than ourselves, and the people in this movie are less fortunate than the people in just about any other movie I can think of, simply because they are in it.

Passes off pathological behavior as romantic bliss. It's about two sick and twisted people playing mind games and calling it love.

An ideal first movie for infants, who can enjoy the bright colors on the screen and wave their tiny hands to the music.

The filmmakers obviously understand and love Garfield, and their movie lacks that sense of smarmy slumming you sometimes get when Hollywood brings comic strips to the screen.

The beauty of the Wolfe book was the way it saw through its time and place, dissecting motives and reading minds. The movie sees much, but it doesn't see through.

This despicable remake of the despicable 1978 film "I Spit on Your Grave" adds yet another offense: a phony moral equivalency.

The movie is unpleasant to look at. It's darker than "Seven," but without sufficient purpose, and my overall memory of it is of people screaming in the shadows. To call this a comedy is a sign of optimism; to call it a comeback for Murphy is a sign of blind faith.

I would have loved to see a genuine love story involving Ice Cube, Nia Long, and the challenge of a lifelong bachelor dating a woman with children. Sad that a story like that couldn't get made, but this shrill "comedy" could.

Some of these people make my skin crawl. The characters of Sex and the City 2 are flyweight bubbleheads living in a world which rarely requires three sentences in a row.

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.

I went to Crossroads expecting a glitzy bimbofest and got the bimbos but not the fest. Britney Spears' feature debut is curiously low-key and even sad.

It tells a full story with three acts, it introduces characters we get to know and care about, and it has something it passionately wants to say.

The director, whose name is Pitof, was probably issued with two names at birth and would be wise to use the other one on his next project.

My two-star rating represents a compromise between admiration and horror.

Everybody knew to wait for the outtakes during the closing credits, because you'd see him miss a fire escape or land wrong in the truck going under the bridge. Now the outtakes involve his use of the English language.

There is a reason to see the movie, and that reason is Piper Perabo.

As a well-crafted, well-written and well-acted entertainment, it drew me in and got its job done.

Jessica Biel all but steals the show as Stacie.

Cool World is a seriously troubled film, so ragged I doubt if even the director can explain the story line.

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.

In a film that is wall-to-wall idiocy, the most tiresome delusion is that car chases are funny.

I cannot in strict accuracy recommend this film. It's such a jumble of action and motivation, ill-defined characters and action howlers.

Either Being John Malkovich gets nominated for best picture, or the members of the Academy need portals into their brains.

Old-fashioned and obvious, yes, like a featherweight comedy from the 1950s. But that's the charm.

Adult audiences may be underwhelmed. Not younger teenage girls, who will be completely fascinated.

An innocuous family feature that's too little/too late in the fast-moving world of feature animation.

Walks like a thriller and talks like a thriller, but it squawks like a turkey.

A high-speed, high-tech kiddie thriller that's kinda cute but sorta relentless.

The poster art for A Thousand Words shows Eddie Murphy with duct tape over his mouth, which as a promotional idea ranks right up there with Fred Astaire in leg irons.

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.

The first film had maybe a shred of realism to flavor its romantic comedy. This one looks like it was chucked up by an automatic screenwriting machine.

Laughter for me was such a physical impossibility during National Lampoon's Van Wilder that had I not been pledged to sit through the film, I would have lifted myself up by my bootstraps and fled.

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.

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.

This movie is a cross between the Mad Slasher and Dead teenager genres; about two dozen movies a year feature a mad killer going berserk, and they're all about as bad as this one.

The sad thing about A Night at the Roxbury is that the characters are in a one-joke movie, and they're the joke.

A movie, based on the popular Dean Koontz novel, that seems to have been made by grinding up other films and feeding them to this one.

A pointless exercise in "shocking" behavior.

Most horror movies are exercises in unrelieved vulgarity, occasionally interrupted by perfunctory murders. This movie, to borrow an immortal comment by Mel Brooks, "rises below vulgarity." If you are sick up to here of horror movies in general and Steven King in particular, this is the movie for you.

There is not a single scene in this movie that I found amusing, original or interesting. What we really have here is a documentary of the actors wasting their lives.

What a strange, confused, unpleasant movie this is. Two theories have clustered around it: (1) It is anti-Mormon propaganda to muddy the waters around the presidential campaign of Mitt Romney, or (2) it is not about Mormons at all, but an allegory about the 9/11/01 terrorists. Take your choice. The problem with allegories is that you can plug them in anywhere. No doubt the film would have great impact in Darfur.

Slides too easily into its sentimentality; the characters should have put up more of a struggle.

The movie offers brainless high-tech action without interesting dialogue, characters, motivation or texture.

The movie was executive produced by Quentin Tarantino. Shame on him. He intends it no doubt as another homage to grindhouse pictures, but I've seen a lot of them, and they were nowhere near this bad. "Hell's Angels on Wheels," for example: pretty good.

For years there have been reports of the death of the Western. Now comes American Outlaws, proof that even the B Western is dead.

My problem was that I didn't care who killed Mona Dearly, or why, and didn't want to know anyone in town except for Chief Rash and his daughter.

One element of Sorority Boys is undeniably good, and that is the title. Pause by the poster on the way into the theater. That will be your high point.

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.

A garage sale of gay issues, harnessed to a plot as exhausted as a junkman's horse.

A terrible movie, sappy and dead in the water.

It has no edge, no hunger to be better than it is. It ambles pleasantly through its inanity, like a guest happy to be at a boring party.

Jason X sucks on the levels of storytelling, character development, suspense, special effects, originality, punctuation, neatness and aptness of thought. Only its title works.

This movie is sick. It pretends to be a warning against compulsive gambling, but it falls for the oldest dodge in the gambler's book: "I only gambled enough to win back my losses." Maybe I shouldn't have expected anything more from an MGM movie that was shot on location at the MGM Grand Hotel in Las Vegas.

Gandolfini comes in from left field and provides a character with dimensions and surprises, bringing out the best in Roberts. Their dialogue scenes are the best reason to see the movie.

Movies like Eye for an Eye cheapen our character by encouraging us to indulge simplistic emotions - to react instead of analyzing. It provides a one-in-a-million situation and tries to teach us a lesson from it; thoughtful audience members will be aware they're not being treated fairly. This is filmmaking at the level of three-card monte. If you don't believe me, see "Dead Man Walking."

It is a "thriller" without thrills, constructed in a meaningless jumble of flashbacks and flash-forwards and subtitles and mottos and messages and scenes that are deconstructed, reconstructed and self-destructed. I wanted to signal the projectionist to put a gun to it.

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.

I realized there was no hope for the movie because the plot and characters had alienated me beyond repair. If an audience is going to be entertained by a film, first they have to be able to stand it.

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.

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

Of course it's completely ridiculous, but at the same time it has a certain disarming charm.

It makes little sense, fails as often as it succeeds, and yet is not hateful and is sometimes quite cheerfully original.

Bad movie. Ugly movie.

A Sound of Thunder may not be a success, but it loves its audience and wants us to have a great time.

A fog of gloom lowers over The Whole Ten Yards, as actors who know they're in a turkey try their best to prevail.

So ludicrous in so many different ways it achieves a kind of forlorn grandeur.

Movies like this work if they're able to maintain a high level of energy and invention, as the Mad Max movies do. They do not work when they lower their guard and let us see the reality, which is that several strangely garbed actors feel vaguely embarrassed while wearing bizarre costumes and reciting unspeakable lines.

Depp is one of the very best of America's young actors, but "The Brave" is a lightweight and unbelievable story that takes itself with terminal seriousness. [14 May 1997, p.45]

The result is not a movie that is very good, exactly, but it's entertaining and funny.

There's no chemistry between Deeds and Babe, but then how could there be, considering that their characters have no existence, except as the puppets in scenes of plot manipulation.

If he wants a future in the movies, Andrew Dice Clay is going to have to play somebody other than himself.

Bride Wars is pretty thin soup. The characters have no depth or personality, no quirks or complications, no conversation.

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.

Predictable to its very core, and in a funny way the predictability is part of the fun. The movie is in on the joke of its own recycling.

This movie owes so much to the "Road Warrior" pictures that I doubt if it could have been made without them. Since the movie so clearly required great dedication, especially in its visual effects and the use of its desert locations, I can only wonder why they didn't spend equal effort on finding an original story to tell.

Movies like this demonstrate that when it comes to stupidity and vulgarity, only the best will do for our children.

As for Shaquille O'Neal, given his own three wishes the next time, he should go for a script, a director and an interesting character.

Movies like this embrace goofiness with an almost sensual pleasure.

Staying Alive is a big disappointment.

It's a thriller, a bad thriller, completely lacking in psychological or emotional truth.

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.

Endless, pointless and ridiculous, right up to the final shot of the knife going through the cockroach. This movie is desperately bankrupt of imagination and wit, and Tom Selleck looks adrift in it.

Myers has made some funny movies, but this film could have been written on toilet walls by callow adolescents.

An idiotic ode to macho horseshite (to employ an ancient Irish word). It is however distinguished by superb cinematography.

The Wizard is finally just a cynical exploitation film with a lot of commercial plugs in it, and it is so insanely overwritten and ineptly directed that it will disappoint just about everybody and serve them right for going in the first place.

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.

Speaking in my official capacity as a Pulitzer Prize winner, Mr. Schneider, your movie sucks.

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

The plot is easily summarized: "Dumb and Dumber Meet Dumbbell."

The sad thing about Turk 182! is that, the whole project sounds like a High Concept movie, in which the idea of the Turk was allowed to substitute for a story about him. Sure, it would be neat to see a movie about a guy like this. But not this movie.

A fourth-rate "Pulp Fiction" with accents you can't understand.

It's a movie with so many inconsistencies, improbabilities, unanswered questions and unfinished characters that we have to suspend not only disbelief but also intelligence.

It goes through the motions of an action thriller, but there is a deadness at its center, a feeling that no one connected with it loved what they were doing.

Heaven help the unsuspecting families who wander into Adam Sandler's Eight Crazy Nights expecting a jolly animated holiday funfest.

Why, oh, why, was this movie necessary?

I seem to be developing a rule about talking animals: They can talk if they're cartoons or Muppets, but not if they're real.

Desperately unfunny.

So bad in so many different ways that perhaps you should see it, as an example of the lowest slopes of the bell-shaped curve.

What did we really, sincerely, expect anyway, from a movie in which Karl Malden plays a character named 'Wilbur,' and Slim Pickens plays a character named 'Tex'?

New Year's Eve is a dreary plod through the sands of time until finally the last grain has trickled through the hourglass of cinematic sludge. How is it possible to assemble more than two dozen stars in a movie and find nothing interesting for any of them to do?

Blame It On Rio has the mind of a 1940s bongo comedy and the heart of a porno film. It's really unsettling to see how casually this movie takes a serious situation. A disturbed girl is using sex to play mind games with a middle-aged man, and the movie get its yuks with slapstick scenes where one guy goes out the window when the other guy comes in the door. What's shocking is how many first-rate talents are associated with this sleaze.

The actors cannot be faulted. They bring more to the story than it really deserves.

Doesn't have anything wrong with it that couldn't be fixed by adding Ebenezer Scrooge and Bad Santa to the cast. It's a holiday movie of stunning awfulness that gets even worse when it turns gooey at the end.

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.

Well, you can't fault the actors. That must mean it's the fault of the writer and director. Take is a monotonous slog through dirgeland, telling a story that seems strung out beyond all reason, with flashbacks upon flashbacks delaying interminably the underwhelming climax.

The photography, the dialogue, the acting, the script, the special effects and especially the props (such as a spaceship that looks like it would get a D in shop class) are all deliberately bad in the way that such films were bad when they were REALLY being made.

The movie doesn't understand that embarrassment comes in a sudden painful flush of realization; drag it out, and it's not embarrassment anymore, but public humiliation, which is a different condition, and not funny.

This movie is a real curiosity. It's dead. I don't mean it's bad. A lot of bad movies are fairly throbbing with life. Mannequin is dead. The wake lasts 1 1/2 hours, and then we can leave the theater.

House of the Sleeping Beauties has missed its ideal release window by about 40 years. It might -- might -- have found an audience in that transitional period between soft- and hard-core.

Assembles the building blocks of idiot-proof slasher movies: Stings, Snicker-Snacks, false alarms and point-of-view baits-and-switches.

It is a real film. Not a slick exploitation exercise with all the trappings of depravity but none of the consequences.

These actors, alas, are at the service of a submoronic script and special effects that look like a video game writ large.

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.

If The Informers doesn't sound to you like a pleasant time at the movies, you are right. To repeat: dread, despair and doom. It is often however repulsively fascinating and has been directed by Gregor Jordan as a soap opera from hell, with good sets and costumes.

What we basically have here is a license for the filmmakers to do whatever they want to do with the special effects, while the plot, like Wile E. Coyote, keeps running into the wall.

The Last Airbender is an agonizing experience in every category I can think of and others still waiting to be invented.

It involves teenagers who have never existed, doing things no teenager has ever done, for reasons no teenager would understand. Of course, it's aimed at the teenage market.

Joe Dirt is so obviously a construction that it is impossible to find anything human about him; he is a concept, not a person.

She's Out of Control is simultaneously so bizarre and so banal that it's a first: the first movie fabricated entirely from sitcom cliches and plastic lifestyles, without reference to any known plane of reality.

What happens next is a cross between "Night of the Living Dead," "The Birds" and a disaster movie, if you follow me.

Situations aren't explored, characters aren't developed, timing is ignored, but every 30 seconds there's a would-be laugh. Because all we're supposed to do is laugh, the movie is deadening.

A dead zone of comedy. The concept is exhausted, the ideas are tired, the physical gags are routine, the story is labored, the actors look like they can barely contain their doubts about the project.

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.

"Deep Rising" was one of the worst movies of 1998. Virus is easily worse.

A perfectly good idea for a comedy, but it just plain doesn't work. It's dead in the water. I can imagine it working well in a different time, with a different cast, in black and white instead of color--but I can't imagine it working like this.

An inept assembly of ill-matched plot points, meandering through a production that has attractive art direction (despite the immobile mouths).

Underclassman doesn't even try to be good. It knows that it doesn't have to be. It stars Nick Cannon, who has a popular MTV show, and it's a combo cop movie, romance, thriller and high school comedy. That makes the TV ads a slam dunk; they'll generate a Pavlovian response in viewers conditioned to react to their sales triggers (smartass young cop, basketball, sexy babes, fast cars, mockery of adults).

It is a movie so sick, reprehensible and contemptible that I can hardly believe it's playing in respectable theaters. But it is. Attending it was one of the most depressing experiences of, my life.

Stupefying dimwitted.

Here is the dirty movie of the year, slimy and scummy, and among its casualties is poor Jessica Alba, who is a cutie and shouldn't have been let out to play with these boys.

In asking us to believe David Spade as a romantic lead, it miscalculates beyond all reason.

Wild Orchid is an erotic film, plain and simple. It cannot be read any other way. There is no other purpose for its existence. Its story is absurd, and even its locale was chosen primarily for its travelogue value...What is relevant is that I did not find the movie erotic.

The movie is a chaotic mess, overloaded with special effects and explosions, light on continuity, sanity and coherence.

An odd, well-made and thoroughly unpleasant thriller.

It's an arch, awkward, ill-timed, forced political comedy set in 1959 and seemingly stranded there.

Lopez and Affleck are sweet and appealing in their performances; the buzz said they didn't have chemistry, but the buzz was wrong. What they don't have is conviction.

A deserted island movie during which I desperately wished the characters had chosen one movie to take along if they were stranded on a deserted island, and were showing it to us instead of this one.

The kind of movie where you walk in, watch the first 10 minutes, know exactly where it's going, and hope devoutly that you're wrong.

Pesci has a lot of scenes that strike just the right note.

The action, direction and special effects are all better than the last time around, which isn't saying much, since Death Wish II was so ineptly directed and edited that it was an insult even to audiences that were looking for a bad movie.

Not that the film is outrageous. That would be asking too much. It is dim-witted, unfunny, too shallow to be offensive.

Mr. Magoo is transcendently bad. It soars above ordinary badness as the eagle outreaches the fly. There is not a laugh in it. Not one. I counted.

From what dark night of the soul emerged the wretched idea for The Nutcracker in 3D? Who considered it even remotely a plausible idea for a movie?

Very seriously confused in its objectives.

The movie is set up as a valentine to Vardalos. She should try sending herself flowers.

The film is reprehensible, dismaying, ugly, artless and an affront to any notion, however remote, of human decency.

The lockstep mentalities who made this movie tell their story entirely from a boring male point of view, supply us with male wimps and studs who are equally uninteresting, and view women only as wet T-shirt finalists. What a letdown for horny movie critics.

The screenplay by Kim Barker requires Bullock to behave in an essentially disturbing way that began to wear on me. It begins as merely peculiar, moves on to miscalculation and becomes seriously annoying.

Has an intriguing cast, a director who knows how to use his camera and a lot of sly humor. Shame about the story. When you see this many of the right elements in a lame movie, you wonder how close they came to making a better one.

Possesses the art and craft of a good movie, but not the story.

Has slick production credits and performances that are quite adequate given the (narrow) opportunities of the genre.

Strange, how good feardotcom is, and how bad. The screenplay is a mess, and yet the visuals are so creative this is one of the rare bad films you might actually want to see.

People may go to see Eddie Murphy once, twice, three or even six times in disposable movies like Harlem Nights, but if he wants to realize his potential he needs to work with a better writer and director than himself.

There is a bright spot. He (Poirier) used up all his doggy-do-do ideas in the first picture "See Spot Run."

It's a muddled, sometimes-atmospheric effort.

Jaws the Revenge is not simply a bad movie, but also a stupid and incompetent one - a ripoff.

Maybe there's too much talent. Every character shines with such dazzling intensity and such inexhaustible comic invention that the movie becomes tiresome, like too many clowns.

An incoherent mess, a jumble of footage in search of plot, meaning, rhythm and sense.

Dungeons & Dragons looks like they threw away the game and photographed the box it came in.

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

Let's face it. Nobody is going to Bolero for the plot anyway. They're going for the Good Parts.

Fair Game works as a thriller for anyone who lives entirely in the present.

This movie doesn't scrape the bottom of the barrel. This movie isn't the bottom of the barrel. This movie isn't below the bottom of the barrel. This movie doesn't deserve to be mentioned in the same sentence with barrels.

Cannonball Run II is one of the laziest insults to the intelligence of moviegoers that I can remember. Sheer arrogance made this picture.

This movie indicates that Charles Bronson just doesn't care any more, and is just going through the motions for the money. I admired his strong, simple talent once. What is he doing in a garbage disposal like this?

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

A dirty movie. Not a sexy, erotic, steamy or even smutty movie, but a just plain dirty movie. It made me feel unclean, and I'm the guy who liked "There's Something About Mary" and both "American Pie" movies.

Pants and wheezes and hurls itself exhausted across the finish line after barely 65 minutes of movie, and then follows it with 15 minutes of end credits in an attempt to clock in as a feature film.

What's most shocking about Death Wish II is the lack of artistry and skill in the filmmaking. The movie is underwritten and desperately underplotted, so that its witless action scenes alternate with lobotomized dialogue passages. The movie doesn't contain an ounce of life. It slinks onto the screen and squirms for a while, and is over.

The screenplay for this movie bears every sign of being a first draft - a quick and dirty one. The movie doesn’t feel written, it feels dictated. Three authors are listed, and from the way their movie plays, they must have sat around in an office somewhere trying to get all of their cliches in a row.

This movie has nothing to do with the song and the 1960 movie whose name it appropriates. It isn't a sequel and isn't a remake and isn't, in fact, much of anything.

The level of intelligence of the screenplay of "Saturn 3" is shockingly low - the story is so dumb it would be laughed out of any junior high school class in the country - and yet the movie was financed. Why?

Awful in so many different ways.

Dirty Love wasn't written and directed, it was committed. Here is a film so pitiful, it doesn't rise to the level of badness. It is hopelessly incompetent.

Bad films are easy to make, but a film as unpleasant as Baby Geniuses' achieves a kind of grandeur.

This movie should have been struck by a lightning bolt.

The question, of course, of why anybody of any age would possibly want to see this film remains without an answer.

Chaos is ugly, nihilistic, and cruel -- a film I regret having seen. I urge you to avoid it.

Watching it, you feel like an eyewitness to injustice.

The acting is effective, the direction by Alexandre Franchi is confident, and the cinematography by Claudine Sauve could hardly look more assured.

Munger Road does an efficient, skillful job of audience manipulation using the techniques of darkness and vulnerability, and the truth that a horror not seen is almost always scarier than one you can see.

The film's value is in its portrait of Ruth, and her independence as a solo outsider in a vast, uncaring city.

You've seen houses with pumpkins in the windows and skeletons hanging from the trees, but you may never have seen such elaborate displays as the ones constructed by Victor Bariteau, Manny Souza, and Matthew and Richard Brodeur.

Unless a story has been introduced to make the shooting part of the plot, it can get pretty dreary. 100 Rifles is pretty dreary.

Coup de Torchon left me cold, unmoved and uninvolved. All I could find to admire was the craftsmanship.