Stephen Hunter

The movie has the sense of being embalmed, or pickled. With its stilted dialogue not quite kitschy enough to be funny and not quite authentic enough to be realistic, the whole movie feels as if it's taking place in formaldehyde.

A crackpot Looney Tune, pretentious, abysmally slow, amateurishly acted and, above all, wrong.

Godzilla, go home.

Super Mario Bros. ain't no game, but it ain't no movie, either. The huge, busy, empty, uninvolving mess is marooned halfway between narrative and spectacle, neither fully one nor the other. [28 May 1993]

What Kalin fails to provide in the slightest degree is energy. The movie just sloshes along in a heavy, slightly overdone way.

In the end, I'm wondering what's so special about a film that has but one guilty pleasure and that's Ben Kingsley spraying saliva-lubricated variants of the F-word into the atmosphere like anti-aircraft fire for 10 solid minutes.

Oh, please. Stop and smell the manure.

An Upper West Sidey exercise in narcissism and self-congratulation disguised as a tribute.

A devastatingly dishonest, tough look at teenage life.

They took the most famous tale in the world and broke it.

It's like a summer stock "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf," with the proviso that occasionally a giant snaggle-tooth monster slobbers onstage and eats George or Martha.

The movie's signal flaw -- that is, other than its degeneracy, its sloppiness, its love of dark things and pretty stains and arterial spray patterns -- is Moseley as the demonic Otis.

It orders you to love it. It demands love, which is the best way not to get it.

This is another unhelpful screed, uncontaminated by sense or perspective, that preaches loudly to the choir.

As long as it stayed mainstream dirty it was okay, but when it got into perversions the American Psychiatric Society hasn't even named yet, it left me behind.

The movie is very loud. It is pointlessly loud, arbitrarily loud, assaultively loud.

In the end the movie goes nowhere a hundred movies haven't already been and tells us nothing we don't already know. It does so with so much violent energy, however, it's like four brutal years at film school crammed into an hour and a half.

The new Dutch film Black Book manages to turn World War II into a large piece of cheese. A lurid, pulpy, slightly perverse potboiler, the movie suffers mainly from its utter lack of seriousness.

Crazy? Crazy is too mild a word by far to describe the twisted worm at play inside the skull of the Canadian director David Cronenberg -- And that craziness is given full vent in the vomitorium called eXistenZ.

Derived from the folksy, avuncular works of Jean Shepherd, it's a movie in search of a story, characters and a reason to exist. In this quest, it goes 0 for 3. It's like watching Jell-O harden, then melt, only not quite so much fun. [23 Sep 1994]

I like watching snakes eat mice just as much as the next fella, maybe even more, but The Strangers turns the gobble-'em-up into an ordeal. It's a fraud from start to finish.

It's empty of ideas, which is fine, but it's also empty of heat.

A few minutes of inspired lunacy aside, The Yes Men is largely a case of the same old preachers preaching to the same old choir.

I liked Coyote Ugly better when it was called "Flashdance," although I didn't like it very much then.

Of the many comic book superhero movies, this is by far the lamest, the loudest, the longest. Good Lord, what an epic sit. My rear end deserves a medal...I wish I could say it wasn't so, but for most of us, this "X" marks a splat.

It's too bloody to be funny and too silly to be dramatic and too self-indulgent to be anything other than what it is, one more bad movie.

Friends, Washingtonians, countrymen, I come not to praise Gladiator but to bury it.

Meant to be a sleek, dark, disturbing David Cronenberg-style thriller, Olivier Assayas's film is just an annoying concoction.

The movie never transcended its elaborate production work to achieve an independent reality.

The first and possibly the last Will Ferrell star vehicle. It's a clumsy, tedious ride that wears out its welcome as it wears out the seat of your pants and the circulation in your lower limbs.

It's a movie with the exciting parts cut out.

Perhaps as a publishing phenomenon the concept works, but on-screen it's pretty dull, with good actors in bad roles and bad special effects.

Like so many technological marvels, at the human level it's not only merely dead, it's really most sincerely dead.

The movie is so disturbing that it seems nearly blasphemous. I wouldn't wish it on an anthrax spore. After all, anthrax has feelings, too.

Hatched by screenwriters watching "The Sixth Sense" on methamphetamines

Isn't juvenile, it isn't even infantile. It's prenatal!

The movie, alas, is shackled somewhat by Waugh's original, pedestrian plot, which is too full of discrete incidents and slow to form an overarching story.

It seems such a waste to go onto the actual streets of Lower Manhattan and shoot a movie this stupid. Think of the money, the logistics, the interruptions in the city's life -- all that trouble for what? For this? For shame.

In the end, Unfaithful leaves you dispirited and grumpy: All that money spent, all that talent wasted, all that time gone forever, and for what? It's an ill movie that bloweth no man to good.

It grinds on and on without mercy. You're in the cross hairs. There is no escape. Where is that Secret Service when you need it?

Big, dull and empty -- nobody associated with this production appears to have thought hard about storytelling.

Del Toro will probably get an Oscar nod for his Jerry, because the film is so full of Oscar moments, including a cold-turkey detox bit. He rumbles and shivers and screeches and bangs his head on the wall and takes a shower in his clothes. I never believed a second of it.

The director, Patricia Rozema, has a rare talent: She gets third-rate performances out of first-rate performers with almost startling efficiency. All are bland, some hardly exist at all, and as performance, the whole thing seems a waste.

A piece of pulp claptrap; it has no insights whatsoever into totalitarian psychology and always settles for the cheesiest kinds of demagoguery and harangue as its emblems of evil. They say they want a revolution? Then give us a revolution, one that's believable, frightening, heroic, coherent and not a teenagers' freaky power trip.

The comedy is strained to the point of lameness, most of it exaggerated clumsiness, stupidity or inappropriateness.

A mousy little nothing of a picture.

A whodunit so bafflingly constructed that you can't even figure out what it is, so the whodun part is superfluous.

It's not really a movie. I suppose it's what could be called a recorded behavior.

Palmetto, directed by the German genius Schlondorff, who memorably brought "The Tin Drum" to the screen, somehow never quite finds the right line through the materials.

Big Fish stinks from the head.

About halfway through you'll get an incredible hunger to see a movie.

All in all, it's like a bachelor's apartment: a complete mess.

Michael Winterbottom's Code 46 commits a Code 1 violation: It's boring.

Hanks is great; the movie isn't.

This one's a turkey as big as the Eiffel Tower but it's bad in a particularly American way: It's wildly overdone, it throws in everything in an attempt to appeal to everyone, it's gargantuan and anti-logical, pointlessly ornate and pointlessly violent.

There are many ways to define the shrieking awfulness of The Family Stone, from the general lack of wit to the cheap exploitation of cancer to its casual cruelty, but it's writer-director Thomas Bezucha's casting that really goes awry.

It's just a loud, derivative grade-Z horror film of no particular distinction.

A nasty bit of counter-programming, Wolf Creek is for people sickened by the sentimental excesses of the day and the holiday season and want to hide from them in mayhem, slaughter, torture and degradation.

Mad Max just sails off into nonsense.

It just never began to work for me, and the sub story behind the ghost story is far more interesting than the ghost story in front of the sub story.

It's such a great story, you have to ask two questions: Why didn't they make this movie before? And why did they make it this way?

the movie comes on as a novelty item, meaning it's so full of disparate parts and so unable to approach coherence, it just sits there and burns out.

There's some cool sword-fighting. But still, it's junk.

It's too long, it's too dull, it's too lame.

Give Woody Allen credit for ambition. Failing at one movie wasn't enough. Nearly anyone can do that; it happens all the time. He's chosen to fail at two simultaneously.

The film has no discipline, but that's okay because it has no suspense, either.

In the end, Gerry is beyond the simple question of pleasure. Seeing it may be no fun at all, but then discomfort is part of the price one pays in learning.

The film has about seven minutes of good material, mostly provided by John Cleese.

Instead of gold-medal-winning, last-minute heroics, the movie weirdly becomes about the scandal of arbitrary gymnastics judges. Is it a movie or an episode of "Real Sports"? It veers into fresh territory but not dramatically satisfying territory.

It's a kind of "Miami Vice" with many more carz and numberz where all the adjectives used 2 go.

How do I hate thee? Let me count the ways.

It's pretty appalling, and it's boring.

It's kind of a ghastly hoot, and while I suppose it does no harm, it also contributes nothing. It's a guilty unpleasantness.

You can't make an epic about a mouse.

It's like a music video of Helen Reddy's "I Am Woman" filmed in the Chevy Chase Pottery Barn.

Polanski, generally, has fallen farther than Lucifer, and into a more profoundly depressing hell, the hell of utter banality.

Gilliam does two things well: mud and trees.

Between bad hair and tonal irregularity, the movie doesn't give you much to like.

Poor Roberts, pretty and perky as the day is long, hasn't a hoot in hell of bringing Julianne off. She's simply not actress enough, she doesn't have that suppleness that would enable her to sell the complexity of emotion, the jealousy, the irrationality, the meanness and the intelligence.

The movie itself may be a species of Montezuma's revenge.

Put another movie on the barbie, mate; maybe it'll be better.

Duvall is a great actor in the homestretch of a great career; it's hard to hold this trifle against him, and certainly nobody will.

An ordeal for all save the most ardent Treksters.

There's not a moment in Boiling Point that could be said to achieve a narrative temperature of 212 degrees Fahrenheit. Boil? This limpid pool of cliche and predictability never even bubbles.

Shamelessly manipulative in a crude, bullying way.

Each plot twist trumps its predecessor into ludicrousness.

As monotonous as Muzak, and when it comes to the plot, both bewildering and trite.

It's just gunfights strung together, without a whisper of coherence or meaning. The fights are staged so that they all look the same, and the principle is always the same: The gunman's multiple antagonists never hit, and he never misses. John Woo at least had fun with this sort of thing 20 years ago. And Giamatti? What the heck is he doing here?

Fast and furious, shallow, empty, casually racist, merry, jaunty, silly and utterly weightless.

The problem is that director Peter Berg, aided and abetted by Smith and Theron and third banana Jason Bateman, seem to have made it literally, not realizing its out-of-whack tonalities and grotesque plot twists were meant to be played for laughs.

It's part travelogue in Hell, part ineffectual weepie.

The movie falls from grace to clunkiness and continues its herky-jerky, way-unfunny trek around the amusement park. Who needs it?

It's a simpering, ineffective ersatz-drama, so simple-minded and unrealistic and so full of fussy stupidity, it exiles you.

This gives nobody, least of all me, any pleasure, but a truth must be faced: Scoop is the worst movie Woody Allen has ever made.

All in all, Jennifer 8 is about four bricks shy a load and two hours too long.

It continually crashes and burns on its own banality.

So smug and so proud of itself, and you can tell that everybody involved conceives of it as a civics lesson instead of a story, that they squeeze all the life out of it.

Never manages to make its characters anything other than cartoons.