Shawn Levy

It's a strange, uneven film, hilarious in moments and tin-eared in others, alternately subtle and hammer-handed, acid and dull, as schizophrenic as "Signs" and probably, like that film, best enjoyed in discrete chunks rather than as a whole that needs to be digested equally all at once.

Isn't a bad movie so much as one that feels like an amateur version of material from more accomplished works -- a movie that not only isn't sure what it really is but doesn't seem terribly much to care.

A handsome picture, with lots of nifty borrowings from the "Star Wars" galaxy, but it's never particularly compelling as a story or as a vehicle for emotions, and when it's over you have a feeling of still waiting for it to get started.

An impressive work in many regards -- the acting, the photography, the pace -- but it would've been even more so had Egoyan gone with his gut and been less indulgent of his brain.

That strong presence in the center almost makes Lola Versus watchable even as it starts to get formulaic, preachy and tiresome.

We have reached a point in history when an ordinary TV show is often as good as or even better than an ordinary movie. And movies don't come much more ordinary than The Sentinel.

With so much potential, The Valet is disappointingly flat and wan, with few of the moments of cringe-and-laughter-inducing mortification that are Veber's stock in trade.

There are small pleasures, but not many. It especially underwhelms when you consider how Penn seemed to have found a new paradigm for this now-hoary comic form.

Incomplete, shrill and smug.

It's a handsome film, and made with verve, but too often the tone wobbles and far, far too many of its jokes hit with a splat.

Tepid, boilerplate production.

Fair Game, a murky potboiler based on memoirs by both Plame and Wilson, makes a hash of these piquant ingredients.

A deeply weird film, accomplished, gripping, disorienting, icily adept and barking mad at once. It makes for invigorating viewing.

Mendes has extraordinary gifts, but he has leveled them at the Wheelers like a firing squad. Strangely, he evinced no particular moralizing agenda when making films about the mob or the military. But put ordinary people in his sights and he's venomous. It's unbecoming -- and it should be worked out in private, not in a movie theater.

Buscemi shoots with a cloudy, melancholic air that suits the material and does nothing to prettify the setting. But you can't sense any of the surprising energy or subversive wit that characterizes his best performances.

As it stands, this is little more than a sketchy portrait of two fascinating cultural moments with only geography and 70-ish minutes of celluloid connecting them.

As a director, Hanks makes some nice choices (Larry Crowne lives in a very naturally integrated suburb, for one) but there's little in the film that doesn't feel made-for-TV.

Not a great movie -- not even a great sci-fi action movie based on toys. But it is brisk and eye-catching, it builds to a truly impressive action set piece, and it's the most fully-realized 3D film since "Avatar."

For all its flaws, though, Bobby is still moving. Not so much with its indifferent characters, but rather with the overall mood of a common hope crushed into shapeless grief. That painful historical moment is worth revisiting, as is the image of the man whose death occasioned it.

I Am Legend has one undeniably cool thing about it, namely the vision of Manhattan as a semi-feral wasteland.

A thriller that goes from pretty good to absolutely ludicrous in the time it takes one actor to recite about four sentences of dialogue.

If an animated movie isn't competing with Pixar to dazzle the eye, it had darn well better hit the heart or the funny bone. With its wee little stinger, Bee Movie misses both.

Has its heart someplace worthy. But its head -- not so much.

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.

Director Steven Shainberg makes something draggy out of something that wants to be light. It's got wit, but it's also earnest, and in proportion to those two traits it wins and loses you.

As the struggle toward something new and different overwhelms the film, it becomes less and less human, less and less funny and less and less worth the effort to meet it on its own terms.

Dotted with real laughs and held together by some solid acting, but it's built of a fairly flaccid narrative and some really amateurish sequences.

It's a heck of a character to chew into, and Spacey, never afraid to play a devil, enjoys himself a great deal.

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

Awfully sloppy entertainment, built on a script with only a glancing acquaintance with logic, filled with uneven performances and staged with a near-amateur touch for comedy.

For the most part it's dull, bland and unsatisfying: a food-court version of home cooking.

The art of Miranda July, the former Portlander and hyphenate extraordinaire, balances on the edge of the cunning and the precious, of depth and naivety, of the fetching and (sorry) the revolting.

It's never subtle or clever, but it's big, loud and clear.

There's a nifty shootout at the Guggenheim Museum and a lot of scenic travel, but little in it compels.

Doesn't demand much of the audience, sure, but it doesn't provide much, either. It's as if an all-star gang of would-be crooks got together to rip off...moviegoers.

The film has about five endings, each sillier than the next. Before it's over, the business end of that sniper rifle looks kind of inviting.

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

A middling contender in this summer of gigantoid sequels.

For all its attempts at wrinkles and surprises and sleight-of-hand, Ocean's Thirteen is too direct and plain and pleased with itself to ever feel like a thriller.

The hearty performances are undone by the forced eccentricity of the sets, the clothes, the music and, especially, the characters. The film is ugly and facile and childish in its love of its own naughtiness. Only Jill Clayburgh, as a creepy woman in whose home Augusten must live, feels human. The rest is no more real than a "Simpsons" episode -- and offers fewer laughs.

The standout is Baldwin, utterly convincing as a gruff cuss whose life has been forever stained by the death of his wife.

In their hands [Terry Gilliam or Tim Burton or even Steven Spielberg], Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone might have made as terrific a movie as it is a book. When Columbus got the job, however, it was guaranteed only to be a commercial success.

If it's meant as a retort to anti-Semitic doctrine, it's far too episodic, anecdotal and lacking in specifics.

Myers' Cat, with a voice that crosses Bert Lahr's Cowardly Lion with Mel Blanc's Bugs Bunny, is generally fun, possessed of an anarchic playfulness that balances his sometimes bawdy tendencies.

The first "Barbershop" was no classic but, as so often with sequels, if this were the first there would be no second.

Lost in this beguiling labyrinth, Vanilla Sky is more fascinating as a bit of evidence than as a movie -- and ultimately less pleasing than most audiences will want.

Remove the razzle-dazzle provided by Azaria, Hoffman, Baldwin, the gross jokes and that ferret, and you wind up with a pretty dull and ordinary face.

Filled with skewed humor, inventive animation and earthy jokes.

So sloppily and unabashedly sentimental that it can make you laugh and cry at the same time -- and often at the same things.

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.

Tasty, but, finally, a little unfulfilling.

A tiresome, didactic and, once the novelty of the graphics has worn off, charmless film.

The man has gifts -- but acting and, it's increasingly clear, storytelling aren't among them.

The script's contrivances and the director's lax handling aren't enough to hold you.

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

One of those American independent films with two chief points to recommend it: the earnest good will of its creators and its determination to be unlike any studio film.

Absent the real sense of creepiness and highly honed film craft of De Palma, or the strong visual and emotional sensibility of Woo, M: I III feels like one of the more forgettable James Bond films -- saddled, moreover, with a star who's sliding into self-parody.

If you love the genre, you'll likely be engaged. But if not, there's not much point.

It's a handsome film, and Bridges is back, but little has been done to deepen the story into a saga, and the leading man, Garrett Hedlund, rivals Bit for inexpressivity.

The acting is the strongest thing about the film. Pitt nicely balances the dashing and wounded sides of Tristan's character. [13 Jan 1995]

In a way, the film is a kind of experiment: Can you lop off the bulk of a classic work and still have something worth seeing? On this evidence, the answer is, despite the best intentions and some fine work, sadly no.

The stifling piety of this film -- which regards anything old and vaguely arty as next to sacred -- needs some serious airing out.

It all passes quickly, as far as that goes, but when it’s over it passes entirely. And something that sells for a premium price ought to linger.

A painlessly light introduction to Bollywood moviemaking, but it far too often feels like run-of-the-mill Hollywood fare.

(If) you're one of those killjoys who demands logic, coherence and a semblance of human life from a movie, this one will leave you cold.

What the picture doesn't do is make sense of the world it tries to depict, or even, truly, depict it. Biggie -- and, for that matter, Woolard -- deserved better.

Dazzling to look at but dreadful to listen to, the film is a tug-of-war of coolness and dreck.

The story, as so often in bad farce, treats them all as idiots, so it's almost impossible be engaged by anything other than the pretty rooms, gondolas and costumes.

The nearest thing to W. E. is Sofia Coppola's "Marie Antoinette," which tried to make a sympathetic victim of another of history's most notorious royal wives.

There are bits of this film that titillate, undeniably, but mainly you wait for the comic to bring out the big guns, and then he leaves you feeling more teased than tickled.

In the end, the intelligence of the dialogue and crack acting are wrestled to the ground by the zealous politics, the formulaic narrative and a wan and flaccid air unusual from the reliably nifty Parker.

A movie that tells -- or rather, circles -- the story of the band's formation and abortive career.

Marcus, like the real-life Jackson, survives being shot nine times. But this film is dead on arrival.

Despite some arresting visual flourishes and Downey’s inherent likeability, it’s nearly incoherent both as cinema and as story. No, this isn’t your grandfather’s or your father’s Sherlock Holmes, but if theirs featured Basil Rathbone or Jeremy Brett in the lead, it was better by miles.

The picture's strength is comedy -- but the love and crime stories too often drag, falter or just plain frustrate.

The problem is that so little in this version of All the King's Men speaks to the here and now or even speaks clearly. It feels like a repertory exercise -- and not a very successful one at that.

Fuqua has made three films before his newest, Tears of the Sun, and they've all begun well enough but then collapsed under the weight of his heavy-handed visual technique and his indifference to plot, character and logic.

In I'm Reed Fish, Jay Baruchel is cast as a leading man with two attractive girlfriends, and, sorry, I'm frankly more prepared to accept Stephen Hawking as an action hero.

Comedy means different things to different people, but I'm pretty sure that most everyone agrees that it's best when it's quick and funny. The Five-Year Engagement is neither.

Woo's camera is easily the star of the film -- poring over Van Damme's cheekbones and chest (and groovy new locks) in an effort to make an epic character of him, caressing shotgun barrels and split lips, expanding and contracting time like Silly Putty. [20 Aug 1993, p.AE17]

By and large it's formulaic and dull.

Despite moments of atmospheric tension and a core of compelling mystery, the film feels remote, cold and, oddly, obvious.

With its lackluster surfaces and thin core, his (Russell) film displays neither heart nor brains enough to earn its whimsy.

Whereas "Liaisons" mixed cruelty, wit, sensuality and drama into a deliciously tart frappe, Cheri is pretty, tepid and dull.

Freddie Prinze Jr. gives cute a bad name.

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

It's the sort of sophomoric exercise that will be appreciated chiefly by viewers already convinced they love it even before they've bought their tickets.

If you've seen more films in your life than you have fingers, much of it will be forgotten by the time you floss the last popcorn skin from between your teeth.

Almost nothing that's said or done here is convincing. And the energy is set at near-coma level.

If the film doesn't touch the original, it doesn't hit rock bottom, either.

There's handmade and then there's amateurish. This, alas, is the latter.

This one's painful.

There's plenty of blood and screaming and mayhem, and it's not particularly well-staged, shot or cut -- though I suppose actually caring about film craft denotes one as a spoilsport in this context.

Its breeziness keeps it from ever being completely bland or flat.

Perhaps this is what fans want from a movie like this: to sit back as if in a Jacuzzi and get a quick impression of history and Rome and such. If so, Howard, Brown and company likely have another monster hit on their hands.

It's certainly all Araki up there, and the film is handsome and swiftly paced. But it also feels terribly routine and even, strangely, for all the trangressiveness it strives for, retrograde.

For all its handsome decor, tasteful restraint and old-fashioned look-and-feel, is a stiff, lacking tension, sizzle, drama, energy, appeal and, finally, purpose.

A lifeless, confused mess, peppered with laughs, yes, but illogically and crudely plotted and smothered in tonedeaf music cues.

Think of the worst Spielberg thriller or one of Hitchcock's dull late career works, then make it ugly and fill it with bad performances; voila: The Happening.

Director Jay Chandrasekhar ("Super Troopers") will never be mistaken for an artist. But he's competent with crude humor and manages to balance affectionate parody and rote imitation.

Leaves you exhausted and even bored.

At 80 minutes, it feels truncated and abandoned -- a sketch of a comic thriller rather than the real thing.

It's a Ritalin-deprived sensibility, but it keeps you skating over the dull spots, in which the film unfortunately is rich.

During one or two comic set-pieces, you can see the appeal that the Ya-Yas hold for readers. But you can also sense, farther in the distance, the more vital film that might have been.

While the film has visual verve, its faux-Fellini finale only underscores how remote, repetitive, uninvolving and contrived the whole enterprise is.

This one is shot, recorded and edited without so much as a pinch of craft -- it's one of the ugliest big studio films in a long while.

Passingly engaging. But you emerge from the film knowing as much -- or, indeed, as little -- as when you went in, and that's not exactly what documentary filmmaking is all about.

It's part action film, part buddy movie, part love story, part political tract and, in sum, much less: a meandering, preachy, condescending mess that only occasionally bursts into life and even then at such a tepid level that you can hardly call it living.

Manages to tell the story in generally taut, credible fashion, rising frequently on the strength of a gallery of fine performances even when the screenwriting becomes ordinary and Schumacher's touch becomes, as so often, crude and obvious.

'Bloodless' is the word for the whole enterprise.

With Paul Rudd as the would-be mocker and Steve Carell as the mockee, and all manner of new supporting characters and plot lines thrown in, and much less energy, delight, wit, humor and fun than the original was able to muster without any evident strain. There's the occasional bubble, I confess, but almost no delight.

Suffers from sludgy pacing, flat writing and acting, and a strange and puzzling fondness for scatology and coarse language.

The script doesn't give Bigelow enough human stuff to balance the mechanical. For good or ill, like so many other submarine thrillers before it, K-19 is more about the machine than the men.

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.

It's the screenwriting equivalent of those fat substitutes used by snack food manufacturers: the finished product looks all right but the taste is off, and the aftereffects are embarrassing and uncomfortable.

Stunningly photographed, acted with occasional bravura and structured with exacting precision, it fails to sing more than once or twice, and then only briefly. [2 Feb 1996]

A hodgepodge of bits cribbed from such films as "Centurion," "Apocalypto," "300" and "Gladiator."

Starts with a flourish, staggers along for a bit and finally collapses -- even die-hard De Palma fans, will be left hungry.

A sequel that never rises to the giddy pitches of skewed humor that the original managed to toss off with such unexpected glee.

Comes to be dominated by the acting, and this is an unfortunate fate.

It's not that The Beach is a stinker, exactly. It's that nothing in it -- and that includes the gifted DiCaprio -- ever feels other than perfunctory.

Noisy, random and hard on the eyes.

Strictly for boys -- grown-up boys -- the more boyish and less grown-up the better.

By the time of the fabled match -- which you could swear lasts a full 90 minutes -- it's all you can do to keep your skin from crawling off your body and slinking to the safety of another room. Do yourself a favor: Follow it.

Eventually, the inconsistency wears, and the film provokes mostly indifference and restlessness.

As it goes on and on and on, Coach Carter becomes more patience-testing than soul-stirring, proving that you can overdose on good intentions as easily as you can on evil substances.

In Be Cool, a wonderful cast essays a lively script and manages to make a decent film out of it.

As two-dimensional animation, Sinbad is passably attractive, reaching a visual height when it arrives in the surreal, shifting Tartarus.

Now The Matrix Revolutions is here, and a verdict is justified. The death penalty seems a little strong, but can we lock this franchise up and forget where we put the key?

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.

The plot is like a sudoku puzzle with all but one square filled in.

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

Clumsiness follows clumsiness -- the acting, the staging, the details of the plot -- until you reach the point of cool indifference. There's a lot more wrong here than can be corrected in a small space in the newspaper.

The pleasures of Buffalo Soldiers mainly come early on, before the film becomes a sloppy mixture of tones and story lines. Afterward, you're left mainly puzzled and looking for a way to wash a bitter aftertaste out of your mouth.

Despite buoying our hopes that it might be a new-fangled sports film, ``The Program'' devolves into a doltish drama about Triumph Over Adversity, all but forsaking the pure, thrilling bloodlust of its early moments. [24 Sept 1993, p.AE16]

It's ambitious, sharply observed and spectacularly well-acted like so much of Sayles' canon. But it's also overstuffed and underdeveloped.

It's a little depressing to see such a thrilling talent deployed in such an ordinary and sordid movie. Training Day isn't awful, but it's absolutely nothing special.

The film features some fine performances and explores an intriguing set of themes, but it fails to ever take life, causing its laudable message to fall on deadened ears. [12 Oct 1993, p.C1]

It's so by-the-numbers and clumsy that it will only appeal to that little sect that's managed to wear out their "Evil Dead," "Friday the 13th," "Halloween" and "Nightmare on Elm Street" DVDs.

For all the beauty it struggles to bring forth, Snow Falling on Cedars is painfully prosaic.

For the most part it's a completely ordinary, completely familiar, professionally executed film. Nothing truly awful, but nothing unexpected, either.

How the mighty (De Niro and Hoffman) have fallen? More like how the mighty have pile-driven themselves into the solid mass of rock at the core of the Earth. . . .

The opportunity to give Jolie the room to swagger like the "Charlie's Angels" or "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon" ladies is utterly squandered, and a video game franchise that might've resulted in a hoot of a film -- has been blown to dust.

The film, bleeding its central character of all shades but black and darkest gray, fails as both biographical chronicle and filmed narrative.

The stories don't resonate, the film has a drab look and feel, and it lacks the passionate zing with which the least of Almodovar's works teems.

The film is as one-sided and overstacked as anything her prosecutors dreamed up. And the craft of the thing is so pedestrian as to crawl.

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.

To be fair, the film is trash and doesn't aspire to very much, but it's bad trash -- inept -- and that really isn't forgivable.

Suffers by invoking better films about similar themes.

The few chuckles the film affords come early, and too often the script desperately tries to repeat them. By the end, it's not funny or happy -- just over. And you're glad for it, the one true emotion you feel in the whole two hours.

For all its bells and whistles, only when it lingers on Jones' dry wit and pained, rheumy eyes does this film about aliens ever seem alive, let alone human.

You need to accept the fact that practically everyone in the picture, particularly the leading lady, is a boneheaded nitwit.

It's exactly the film Jarmusch wanted to make, but it's also smug, excruciating, borderline pointless. You could call it a deliberate effort to invert the conventions of the thriller; you could also call it, more rightly, a self-deluded disaster.

Among the things made vividly clear here is that Jeremy cannot act.

Isn't sexy, funny, smart or fun.

Befitting a film about Edgar Allan Poe, The Raven is dark and grisly and ghoulish. But it also has qualities that Poe's work never does: It's dull and mechanical and, most of all, phony.

Far too often, the film has to submit to the inevitable and stop so that Affleck can struggle like a yoga student to bend his face into a human emotion. He even cries. So might you.

Brainless, witless, inept, ugly and crude,

The most famous and (naturally) least engaging film on the subject, John Sturges' melodrama about the friendship between Earp (Burt Lancaster) and Holliday (Kirk Douglas) is handsomely mounted and as dull as a dish. [02 Jan 1994, p.D06]

Time to retire OSS 117's license to kill before any more innocent people suffer.

Toothless, limp and clumsy.

By the time the film reaches its convoluted, bombastic and preposterous climax, any sense of real magic that it once conveyed has utterly vanished.

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.

A story that would be charming if recited at the dinner table tries to carry a feature film, and it's not even close to the task. The result is screamingly bad.

As to claims that the book provides a path to enlightenment, I'm an agnostic. But I can swear on a stack of ancient scrolls that the movie plays like 90-odd minutes of purgatory from which you feel you may never escape.

A nitwit script, full of pedestrian dialogue and building to a laughable climax, dooms the picture.

A unique look behind the curtain, yes, but what's behind the curtain is almost unendurable. Just know that a bad guy got his comeuppance and you don't have to join the legion of his victims by watching it.

Kung Fu 2 does almost NOTHING to advance the story, to deepen the characters, or to charm, amuse or entertain.

Too often monochromatic, programmatic and just plain lost.

Tupac may not have been Denzel Washington as an actor, but he deserved a better sendoff than this film, which, by the time the silly climax rolls around, is barely worthy of Wesley Snipes. [8 Oct 1997, p.D04]

After a cheeky, campy start, The Ninth Gate leaves you with a bitter and dull aftertaste.

Yet another witless, listless outing by the alleged comic minds behind such dubious treats as "The State," "Stella" and "Wet Hot American Summer."

Tired, clumsy and appallingly ugly to look at.

The liveliest thing here is the keen sense of regret you feel at seeing two TV icons reduced to supporting characters in a lame movie that trades on their good names.

Like a dog walking on its hind legs across a freshly waxed floor -- awkward, slow, deliberate, seeking approval -- the action thriller Reign of Fire gets from start to finish, somehow, without tumbling into complete disaster.

Overheated claptrap that takes an issue of vital national importance and turns it into an inept cartoon that emboldens the worst instincts in our national character.

Capable but not transporting, never unraveling the mystery of its hero's genius or, worse, making us care enough to look deeper.

What it plays like is a trifling story strung out to great length without much narrative drive, tinged with some disturbing racial undertones.

It's a yawn for the most part, depending on dull characters and uninvolving twists.

Solondz, for reasons best discussed with a therapist, can find no good in people -- or at least none that he expresses in his films.

For a ripped-from-reality film about love and death and family strife in the face of the war in Afghanistan, Brothers is awfully artificial.

It’s offensive, really, this blatant pandering to emotions.

Takes a fabulous idea and overplays it, making an average picture out of some truly extraordinary material.

Few films so thoroughly lose their way as The Edge. After developing an engrossing plot and mood, it goes frankly bonkers, and the intensity whistles out of it like air from a punctured tire. When it finally limps home -- at least 20 minutes too late -- you're left with a sour, treacly taste where once you had savored something almost exquisite. [26 Sep 1997, p.21]

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

The bitterness of the film is a far cry from the peppy young Godard's embrace of life -- and a very far cry indeed from either praise or love.

An unsteady and uneven film, which bangs up against its ambitions gracelessly and distractingly.

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

It's a gorgeous picture and features three substantial performances, but the material is chatty, forced and excessively arch.

The plot is tired, the energy sputtering, the jokes less manic. "Spy Kids" was a shot out of nowhere; Spy Kids 2 feels like a shot from someplace tiresomely familiar.

fFat, dull drag.

A special-effects-and-chase-to-the-death movie, with little special about it.

An intermittently engaging and confused blend of biopic, chop-socky, dopey mysticism and, oddest of all, melodramatic weepie, is no ``JFK.''[7 May 1993, p.AE15]

It's a small-minded and jejune film, and it feels strangely out-of-date considering how loaded it is with right-here-right-now signifiers.

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]

You're likelier to shrink in astonished horror from it than laugh.

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

A stultifying bore.

A terrible, terrible movie. Its creators have a swell idea at the core, a wonderful leading lady, and several stalwart comic players in support, and they make of all of that a picture with the wit of an armpit fart, the verve of a boxwood shrub, and the appeal of a long night in an ER waiting room.

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

While there are some glittery bits in it, the film is frustrating, cluttered, inelegant and garish.

Best laugh at the movies all autumn.

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

A carnival of stupid coincidences, paper-thin characterizations, and inept staging, lighting and montage.

The comic moments are fewer, flatter and far, far less welcome.

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

A limp and annoying picture.

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

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.

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.

It's deeply ordinary, depressingly shabby stuff.

Bang-bang, kiss-kiss, yawn-yawn. While dull death metal churns on the soundtrack, Johnson engages in one big brawl after another.

A dreary, overlong and occasionally laughable classical epic about the great Macedonian world conqueror, it's guilty of a sin that no Stone film has ever committed: It's boring.

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

This isn't an ordinary film built on a remarkable performance; it's a poor one with a gem at its core. Penn can elevate it to mediocrity, but he cannot make it fly.

Does nothing right and, blessedly, vanishes swiftly like the aroma of a nasty belch.

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.

A forehead-poundingly bad picture.

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.

Deeply phony, strangely static, disengaged, flaccid and, quite often, silly, it’s a film that tries to bully you into emotions with flourishes of music, contorted camera angles, screams of special effects, smears of gore, and earnest close-ups of its woefully miscast star.

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.

To be fair, there are moments when the film seems better than, finally, it is.

A by-the-numbers recipe that ought to have shot off at least a few sparks, is as drab as the inmates' prison blues.

Miscast, clumsily staged and ideologically wobbly.

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 movie built on one joke -- an old one -- and an incoherent, even idiotic plot.

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.

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.

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

A nitwit story about a nitwit author who has written a nitwit novel about a nitwit author who has published a nitwit novel which, in fact, he has stolen wholecloth from another writer whose personal behavior, as fictionalized in the novel-within-the-novel-within-the-film, can charitably be described as...nitwit.

In a way, it's perfect: You can't imagine anyone seeing this mess and not feeling lesser for the experience.

Washington can't save a picture that spends so much time worrying about a heart that it loses its head.

Ugly, dull, bloodless, dumb, and phony to its core.

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]

Such a staggering, start-to-finish disaster that you don't know how to begin detailing its outrages and failings.

An ugly, stupid movie it turned out to be. Incoherent, arbitrary, hyperactive and dark enough to make you fear you've gone blind.

A movie so lame that Keanu Reeves lends it gravity with his mere presence.

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.

Seeing Hitman isn't like playing a video game or even like watching someone else play a video game. It's like watching someone stupid play a bad video game.

It's simply an awful, awful film.

Better luck trying to find out what truly happened to the real Earhart than trying to diagnose all that's wrong with this hapless film.

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.

Few movies feel quite so perfunctory or needless or pointless as this one.

All in all, it's hard to dispute that House of D declares its own worth on arrival.

It's fitting that Black Knight, the new time-travel movie with Martin Lawrence, should arrive at the start of the Christmas season, because the season gives us the perfect word to describe it: humbug.

It's as sullying and disheartening an experience as the movies can offer .

It adds up to a truly taxing couple of hours: ham acting, visual noise, aural torture, elementary plotting and unconvincing emotions.

A ghastly, unappealing mess that lacks a single absorbing character, engaging story line or entertaining snippet of dialogue.

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

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."

A resolutely awful film, it makes you want to swear off sex, comedy, Rupert Everett movies, flowers, yoga, children, roast beef -- many of the best things in life, in fact.

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

Pretty much the worst recent example of a genre.

If the new I-wanna-be-a-stewardess picture View From the Top were an airplane, it would blow up on takeoff. If it were an airline meal, it would infect you with E. coli. If it were a parachute, it would be riddled with holes.

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

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.

An ugly and insipid film.

A vile, stupid and ugly movie lacking utterly in pep, thrills, humor, finesse or morals, a dissipating waste of time, money and human resources.

A movie of such rank stupidity and appalling taste.