Russell Smith

Pack the kids off to the multiplex with an easy conscience and forgiving critical sensibility.

To put it as kindly as possible, Fuqua is a well-intended tyro who wrongly assumes that his obvious love for action movies qualifies him to make them himself.

Shabby, nondescript hack job.

As with so many recent films, this innocuous little romantic comedy suffers far more from the effects of art-by-committee than the ruinous domination of any one person.

Don't trust the impression created by Sphere's intriguing trailers that it has much to do with the awe and terror of direct contact with an advanced alien intelligence.

Lack of imagination or subtlety.

It's diverting enough, and intermittently suspenseful, but also strangely empty and decadent in a way that truly merits that overused term.

In essence, the whole Knock Off experience can be summed up neatly in four words: loud, stupid, blurry, frenetic.

A “thrill ride” movie with all the predictability, brevity, and industrial efficiency that cliché implies.

A slight, oddly lifeless movie with dubious appeal for even the most incorrigible Simon devotees.

Nothing but tarted-up melodrama.

Breakdown further illustrates the axiom that every truly original movie must be remade again and again until it achieves a state of sublime, all-encompassing idiocy.

It's hard to imagine anyone ---coming away from Hanging Up with any sense of revelation, soul-enlargement, or even the simple pleasure of a compelling tale well told.

If you enjoy an occasional taste of mental junk food, you might find Las Vegas Vacation worthy of a springtime dollar-cinema visit. Otherwise, hold out another decade for sexagenarian Chevy in Palm Springs Vacation.

Highly recommended for graduate psychology students in aberrant sexuality, but others can probably skip sans regret.

Perhaps the most vexing flaws in this movie are its irresolute plot structure and tone.

These thugs, needless to say, are pulverized as effortlessly as so many Easter chicks. This is a problem I've always had with Seagal's martial arts sequences; there's seldom a nanosecond of suspense, and the fight choreography has all the sophistication of Seventies drive-in fare such as Billy Jack and Walking Tall.

There's little to recommend this movie, which is part and parcel with Marshall's schlock-dominated body of work.

Definitive modern cinematic eye-candy with all the connotations of empty calories that term implies.

In context, it's utterly, dismayingly typical.

Most of the actors seem to have been issued one facial expression at the beginning of the film, along with pain-of-death instructions not to change it under any circumstance.

And next time around... show the courage of your lowbrow convictions and get back to the gonzo, unapologetically senseless mayhem that made this saga so much fun in the beginning.

This remake of Fred Zinnemann's well-regarded Day of the Jackal (1973) not only fails to match the modest entertainment value of Frederick Forsyth's workmanlike source novel, but actually moves into late contention for the title of 1997's most tedious movie.

The humor in this movie is basically anthropological notes on doper culture and behavior: junk-food frenzies, smoking rituals and hardware, non sequitur conversation, and short-term memory loss. In other words, stuff that passed into the realm of cliché back in the time of the Johnson administration.

Near-unwatchable romantic melodrama.

What I can't accept, however, is talents such as Reno, Garcia, Tomlin, and Molina wasting away in a movie like this. As punishment for their complete lack of artistic integrity, all four of them should be forced to sit in a room for all eternity watching The Pink Panther 2 over and over.

Most folks are just plain bored -- and I mean cross-eyed, wall-climbing, deep-down-to-the-molecular-level bored -- with this ubiquitous Endearing Wiseguys school of movie comedy.

The unnecessary nastiness, even sadism, of much of the violence also bears mentioning if you're expecting more of the benignly cartoonish silliness of Cube's lone directing effort, "The Players Club."