Shawn Levy

This isn't the "Right Thing" in any sense.

I reckon that for everyone who's enthralled by the film there will be others who wish they'd heard about it rather than seen it.

fFat, dull drag.

It's possible to be dazzled by a movie and still not like it very much.

It more or less plays like a five-episode arc of the series, which is a strength and a weakness.

Banderas' direction is a bit of everything and a lot of not much.

Schumacher's depictions of street life are cartoonishly ludicrous and riddled with cliches -- a pair of garish hookers, for instance, can't be excused simply because one is played with engaging vigor by Paula Jai Parker.

The thrill, alas, is gone -- and Fellini seems to know it better than anyone. [11 Jun 1993, p.15]

The film is built as a series of (possibly tall) tales that don't add up to a plot, a theme or a purpose.

Acted with earnest commitment and scored and edited with jazzy, laconic grace, "Lights" tells us absolutely nothing we haven't heard before -- and often -- in sports films

While Stallone likely hopes to go out with a bang, this small, manipulative movie doesn't have any real punch to it.

A murky, turgid work that is no doubt exactly the film Malkovich wished to make but is so indirect and affected as to border on incoherent.

Here the homages/critiques of old craft and form are often laughably mangled, and nothing sexy, profound or illuminating results. For all its prettiness, it's the sort of picture that gives the arthouse a bad name.

You should come out of a film like Apres Vous with your heart as light and fluffy as a souffle. But this farce, credited to four chefs, er, writers, is as heavy and leaden as meatloaf.

For all its flaws, Hitch largely comes off as a light romp.

The Dardennes are talents, clearly. Watching Rosetta is like watching them flip you the bird.

Though it's handsomely made and peppered with seamlessly achieved visual glories, Narnia is ineptly acted, crudely staged and burdened with a score that only a masochist could love.

It isn't, finally, satisfying: It's too uneven, indulgent, fey.

Grim, sordid and, as it progresses, increasingly dunderheaded.

Phoenix makes an interesting case of Leonard's twitchiness and mooning, but neither Paltrow nor Shaw is particularly credible as a Brooklynite, and Rossellini and Moshonov seem like they've wandered in from another film altogether.

By and large it's formulaic and dull.

Lively, cheeky, dense and, ultimately, too flip, clever and torturously twisted to be fully engrossing.

The film's best sequences -- the troubles of the young woman -- are gems adrift in a sea of Jell-O.

McGregor is a real charmer, a young Malcolm McDowell with a Scottish lilt; Brain Tufano's photography manages to be both rich and stark at once; Hodge's script has some genuinely arch lines. [03 Mar 1995]

There's a lot of fascinating talk here and a genuine passion for ideas and words. But it's also a case where the messenger is so grating that we feel the perverse urge to kill the message that he carries just to spite him.

A dull, uninspiring film that combines pedestrian acting, lackluster special effects and deadly pace with a pseudo-religious theme.

There's no reason to actively dislike the film, but that's not enough, not at today's ticket prices. Just because you're not despicable, after all, doesn't mean you're the pick of the litter.

A draggy affair livened occasionally by bursts of color or raw emotion, but just as often convoluted and hackneyed. It's a case of a film taking on, admirably, more than it can chew.