Stanley Kauffmann

In crudest terms, there's no one to root for, and unlike Mamet or Pinter, for instance, the story isn't remotely strong enough to thrive without such a center… [The film s]trains hard to be smart and is ultimately repellent. [11 May 1992]

At the last, we're left with a film that tries to doll up a conventional genre with hints of depth, hoping to disguise the cross-dressing by putting it in the shape of an epic. Murnau, Mizoguchi, Ford, even you authors of the Book of Genesis, rest easy. [12 Oct 1992]

In the first 30 seconds, this film gets off on the wrong foot and, although there are plenty of clever effects and some amusing spots, it never recovers. Because this is a major effort by an important director, it is major disappointment...What is most shocking is that Kubrick’s sense of narrative is so feeble.

As is frequently the case when there is public fuss about a film or play, the work itself is not very good.

Virtually everything that happens in Adaptation is almost juvenile showing off - daring to make a film that is in search of a script.

The plot, the gags, the action are so stupid and strident, so unfunnily parodic, that the film's only interest is in wondering how they did it-the mix of animation and live action. [1 Aug 1988]

For this mortal, the film converts piety into pathology and then converts it back again at the end with a Song of Bernadette conclusion. I don't know what the title means. I do know that this ridiculous film won the Grand Jury Prize at the 1996 Cannes Film Festival.[ Dec. 9, 1996]

The picture is cloudy in intent. That cloudiness is deepened by Susan Sarandon's performance as Sister Helen. If she were giving the role what it seems to demand, a glow of true religious light, the film would have some organic cohesion, a strong spiritual cord running through it. But Sarandon does little more than present her face. [Feb. 5, 1996]

After years of preparation in the hands of a man celebrated for his penetration and style, the picture adds almost nothing to our knowledge of its subject and adds it in a manner almost devoid of visual distinction. [27 July 1987]

So this is not, as vaunted, a documentary about a film destroyed by temperaments and tizzies. It is the account of a medical catastrophe that could have spoiled the opening of a supermarket.

Contrivances accrue so thickly that the source seems to be not 1978 Toback, but 1930s Warner Brothers. The film sweats to be up-to-date with ultra-hectic editing, pace, elision, and sangfroid, but they can't verify the pasteboard base.

The surprise is that a picture made to be exciting for 136 minutes is so unexciting most of the time. It starts with a bang and keeps banging, so there's little suspense and no crescendo. [12 Aug 1991, p.28]

The whole is just a wan rejection of traditional story, as well as a weak slap at those who still bother to attack the story tradition.

A braggart piece of empty exhibitionism.

Billed as a comedy, but it could also be billed as a drama, a satire, an allegory, or a film (partially) noir. It wouldn't matter, or help... Not since Robert Altman has any American filmmaker been as overrated as this pair. [30 Sept 1991]

The really relevant defect of this thriller is that it isn't scary.

A lifeless, tedious picture... A complete dud. [29 Oct 1990, p.26]

It's the flat, self-exposing dud that fate often keeps in store for the initially overpraised. [26 Jan 1998, p.24]

For all the film's frantic editing, it never really takes off, principally because of Gibson. He never seems concentrated, really present. He was better as Hamlet. [1996Dec9 Pg.27]

Disembodied, patchy, pointless work, which isn't even successfully pretentious.

For me, the execution of the picture is so weak, so imitative, so facile that it makes all the thematic discussion seem idle. [25 Nov 1996, Pg.30]

His (LaBute's) work needs attention even at its nadir, which I hope this new film is.

The tenuous conclusion is that all this metaphysical hugger-mugger was divinely ordered to reconcile Costner and his father. All those dead players were summoned from that Great Locker Room in the Sky in a painfully false move. [9 May 1989, p.26]

Imagine finding the will to get up every morning to do another day's work on this stale story tarted up with relevance.

The film's intent was presumably satirical in the vein of "Catch-22" or "M*A*S*H," but the satire is so weak, the action so devoid of comic perspective, that we are left with a naked gaggle of ugly episodes.

DeLillo felt he needed a plot, and he invented one that is shockingly bad for a novelist of his accomplishment. It isn't the use of a plot that degrades the picture: it is the degrading plot itself--which isn't even a good cartoon of a too-busy plot.

In future Lee can best serve his versatility by never doing anything like this again.

Gerry is all manner without any trace of depth.