Shawn Levy

Dick works best as a catalog of style: It's the story and the acting that are the window dressing.

The film drags and lingers and goes more or less nowhere, imitating its protagonists' lives so exactly that you want to give them both a good smack.

Witless, tasteless, toothless, pointless, garish, repetitive, obvious, and painfully dull, Pirate Radio is that exceedingly rare film that never, but never puts a foot right.

Not much in The Man From Elysian Fields resembles life on Earth, but there are a few moments with Jagger that feel desperate and human -- stuff from another movie entirely, in other words.

What's left is a husk with all the superficial features of a Scream movie and none of the heart, brains, guts or laughs.

A seedy little movie with little in the way of theme, purpose, energy or wit, 'R Xmas is the latest slice-of-death drama from that earnest maestro of grub, Abel Ferrara.

Hampered from the start by the numbingly formulaic additions by screenwriter James DeMonaco ("The Negotiator"). Toss in needlessly fussy visuals and a climax that is hilariously out of whack, and you've got an excellent excuse to stay home and watch the original.

A contrived and sentimental melodrama, the film takes a promising premise and crushes it with mind-numbing repetition, sophomoric conveniences, plastic acting and the worst score, perhaps, ever heard.

Goes on too long and doesn't have much to say.

Would somebody please pull the plug on James Bond? It's not that Tomorrow Never Dies is inconceivably bad. What with dashing Pierce Brosnan cavorting as 007, nifty Michelle Yeoh playing chop-socky on bad guys' heads, and a nearly-sentient BMW in Bond's bag of tricks, it's got at least as much going for it as, oh, a good Steven Seagal film. [19 Dec 1997, p.19]

The animation is dull, the thought is fuzzy, the storytelling is vague and the music just plain stinks. It's not "National Velvet," it's sure not "The Black Stallion," it's not even "Dances With Wolves."

The Baxter is so ineptly conceived, staged, written and played that you suspect it's part of a psychology experiment to see if people will laugh at anything.

It's written almost without wit or romance, it's populated by bland actors, and it's photographed as if through a Jell-O mold. If this is adolescence, then senility can't come soon enough. [29 Jan 1999]

The film manages the rare trick of improving as it unrolls from the utterly putrid to the barely tolerable. And, friends, I wish to say that sometimes that is as good as you can hope for in this racket.

Handsomely photographed, artfully edited and acted with skill and conviction. It is also so stupid that you expect to see strings of drool dripping from the corner of the screen.

Romeo Is Bleeding has a core of such mean smugness that the genuine shock is that the picture got made at all. It isn't so much that the film is violent, misogynistic and hateful. It isn't even that it so often lapses into senselessness and laughable pretense. It's that a certain competence has been deployed in the service of such degrading and juvenile material, that a group of actors and filmmakers and financial backers all said ``yes'' to something that ought never to have happened. [4 Feb 1994, p.15]

It's dull and crude and silly and without a lick of quality.

The loudest, dumbest, slowest, least entertaining and most annoying by a very comfortable margin.

A new political thriller, has an ending so egregiously stupid that not to reveal it would be a disservice to moviegoers.

While his star, Jude Law, is infectiously watchable, Shyer's version of the material is tone deaf and splotchy.

It's a terrible picture: ugly and illogical and clumsily staged and peppered with crude, witless humor.

The trouble is that it's so lead-footed and delighted with itself even as bit after bit sinks like a lead weight.

A witless, listless muck-up that sends you reeling from the theater with thoughts of suicide instead of a chipper grin.

A limp and annoying picture.

So shapeless, pointless and witless a film that it can be explained only by surmising that the people who made it were bombed at the time.

It's simply an awful, awful film.

Like his (Carrey) early work, it's not a particularly good film -- insipidly staged, inanely plotted, too weak to withstand the weight of any inquiries into logic or continuity -- but Carrey's energetic mugging, particularly early on, makes it relatively painless.

It's awful. Awful. That's all. Keep walking. For the love of all that's holy. Keep. Walking.