Stephen Hunter

In all it wastes time, talent -- not least of all Reynolds's -- and money on an obscure mission. [30 Jul 1997, p.C02]

The only impressive thing about it is the monotony and thoroughness with which it replicates cliches from older, better movies and hammers them into pop alloy to an up-with-me beat beat beat of its musical score.

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

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.

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

So rancid is Brooks's fury that it's clouded his judgment, so that each of his main characters is a stereotype of the most broad-brush, malodorous nature.

The cast is too good for the script and the script is too good for the director and the director is too good for the horny dog jokes.

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

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.

So tame and limp, it may actually give mothers-in-law a good name.

Vaughn's con-man jive doesn't get much play in this one; he spends most of his time as a bitter creep, and the writing (by Dan Fogelman) isn't sharp enough to make the hipster-at-the-North-Pole theme pay off in any meaningful way.

Directed by Vincent ("A Map of the Human Heart") Ward, who is either a genius or a crackpot, and derived from a long-ago novel by Richard Matheson, the film is overproduced and underpopulated, with either characters or ideas.

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.

You can't make an epic about a mouse.

Where is the suspense part? There is no suspense part. Suspense demands clarity of motive and action, and this screenplay never provides it.

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.

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.

The movie, as its title suggests, means to be one of those Tarantino-esque in-your-face jobs, amusing on the audacity of its outrageousness. Here's how "outrageous" it is: Zzzzzz-zzzz.

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

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.

I'll tell you what's gone in 60 seconds, all right: my attention.

There's nothing wrong with Uptown Girls that not seeing it won't fix.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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