Stephen Hunter

Hoodwinked makes a little sense. Too bad, then, it's so crummy.

In Proof of Life it's the same old story, a fight for love and glory, except that time goes by . . . slowwwwly.

On the technical side, The Invasion has several first-rate, terrifying action sequences and grips totally from start to finish. But a subplot involving the Russian Embassy doesn't really pay off, and the relationship between Kidman and glum paramour Daniel Craig (another doc) isn't much.

In casbahs and desert villages, in kibbutzim and around the campfire, Spurlock has a way of getting people to open up, to use their real voices and express their real opinions, the likes of which never make it onto network news. That's his gift, and when he uses it, "Where in the World zzzzz-zzzz" opens up into a miraculous document.

Surely the dullest of Hollywood's many comic-book-derived summer movies, "Silver Surfer" is drearier than corn dying in the Iowa sun, slower than molasses in Antarctica.

What compels then isn't the overwrought plot, but the simpler things, the dynamics between the actors, the avuncularity between old pros Costner and Hurt and the class condescension between Costner and Cook. It has a fascinatin' rhythm.

It has the overwhelming stench of a film afflicted by star ego -- Michelle Pfeiffer is never wrong, which is exactly what is wrong with The Deep End of the Ocean.

A crass physical comedy of unrelenting irrelevance with a gag or two amid the many other examples of bad taste, extrapolating toward infinite on the theme of remote control reality.

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.

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]

It's not the sort of film one can be said to enjoy, but it is the sort of film that has the clarity of a dream and lingers for hours.

Overblown and idiotic, this new "erotic thriller" is neither erotic nor thrilling; it's long, boring and self-indulgent.

This slap-- sequel is primarily for the cognoscenti -- that is, for other teen-age mutant ninja turtles, or very small children. The rest of us it happily ignores.

A coarse, witless and stunningly violent black comedy.

It's kind of like a hit man's Olympics. Isn't this grown-up? In a word, no, and that's what's so much fun about it.

I found it a rough night at the flickers.

While the movie is stupid, it is -- hooray, and let's put this in all the national ads! -- not appallingly stupid.

Ultimately undone by its sheer busyness. The screenwriters never get the story to settle down, and it becomes a case of one damn thing after another.

As it plays, it simply feels like a kind of cop-out. Nobody changes that much.

The movie, in fact, is a lot like Willis' performance: impressive in an iconographic way, but really not nearly as much fun as it should be. It's like watching a spitting contest between totem poles. [20 Sep 1996]

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

Until a disappointing tailspin in the last hour, Pearl Harbor is the best piece of popular entertainment to come along in years.

Short is a professional choreographer, and his dancing seems unstuck in time. How he can break his movements down to such small elements, keep them so precise and in such rigorous rhythm, yet keep the whole thing on track and moving forward with Nureyev's beauty and discipline is something to see.

Wang is working on your mind, not your body.

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

Illustrates the law of returning diminishments.

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 Village yields a trick ending quite lame, quite tame and quite old; Rod Serling thought of it 40 years ago and he did it better.

This is a modest documentary, actually made in 2002 but only now gaining national release, which celebrates Attucks and that particular team, but most important Coach Crowe, by all accounts a remarkable man.

Firehouse Dog goes into the marginally watchable category, aimed as it is toward the middlebrow family trade, preferably dog owners with their own Sparky slopping up the station wagon windows.

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.

The remake is directed by another slickster, the Irishman John Moore, who is no deep thinker (as his "Behind Enemy Lines" confirmed) but, like Donner, he's an able hack -- smooth, stylish, clever, soulless and a hoot. And so's his damned movie. And it is damned.

A lamebrained American remake of the classic, bitter French farce "Les Comperes," Fathers' Day offers sporadic laughs of the lowest kind -- the old outhouse-bites-man thing -- but some conspicuous idiocy as well.

A strictly by-the-numbers job that, sans Freeman, would be beneath contempt. So congratulations, Morgan Freeman: Your contribution to Chain Reaction is to make it worthy of contempt. [2 Aug 1996]

This film isn't so much a sequel to the original "American Pie" as a reduction of it.

Two Woody Allens, two kvetching, whining, neurotic incompetents bungling their lives . . . that's one too many Woody Allens.

Relentlessly beautiful and wholly annoying.

Represents such a professional nadir for each of its principals that you wish better for them in the new year.

Overblown, overheated, overdirected, overacted, overlong.

As Shakespeare would have certainly written if he'd been on the movie beat, Double, double toil and trouble, movie stink and critic bubble/'Hocus Pocus' has no focus/has no rhyme, has no reason/ and is... out of season.

The baseball half of the story just slightly works. ... Nothing in [the other] half of the film works.

Overpublicized and underbrained,Basic Instinct is a bitter disappointment, worth maybe a 10th of the hype that the media have so obligingly ladled out for its benefit.

Haggis also appears to have no respect for his audience. At its crudest, the film settles for agitprop...it's no Hollywood guy's call, particularly as he's extrapolating from a single case that could have occurred anywhere, at any time.

Slick, gripping and largely believable.

There's not enough story in it to fill a shoebox.

It's so spoofy it's difficult to call 'good' or even 'bad'; just say it's smooth.

Weirdly disjointed and uncertain as to tone.

This is supposed to be funny? It was so depressing I almost started to cry.

It's not great; it's also not idiotic.

The best thing about the movie is that it's interested in the soldiers, not the self-serving popinjays who seem to think the war is a big fat career-enhancing photo opportunity. The people who got shot at deserve most of the attention.

For the most part, Daredevil doesn't take a single dare; it travels the road much trod, even if it's through the midtown air.

Endearing if slight, Superstar at least knows what it's doing the whole way.

As a visual adventure, "The Lawnmower Man" is great fun.

Woody Allen's new film has a few shortcomings but it's a heartfelt cry from what may be the last serious man left in the America as he contemplates what his native land has become.

None of it appears to be well thought out, or thought through, and it's consequently never remotely believable.

So predictable it could have been written by a chimp who's watched too much TV, the huge movie is as dumb as it is loud, and it's way too loud.

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.

Halfhearted and unsure. They want it both ways and in so doing, don't get it either way. Cute just goes so far. [22 Aug 1997, p.N37]

It can only be said that if you like this sort of thing, then this is the sort of thing you like.

As comedies go, the unfunny Heavyweights sinks like a stone. [17 Feb 1995]

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.

What a bummer! Certainly the meanest-spirited film ever associated with the Disney hallmark.

Godzilla, go home.

Candyman: Farewell to the Flesh is a just-better-than-routine horror sequel that watches in chilly admiration as some sort of apparition steps out of mirrors and performs atrocities on the unwary. [17 Mar 1995]

The upshot is that the film is technically superb and quite enjoyable as long as you don't bang your head against the plot.

The next worst thing to being there. That's how real it feels.

Anyone who doesn't smile is probably either too adult to count or too dead to care.

Mild pleasures are available in Mr. Woodcock.

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 feels more like a thriller than a drama; it's paced like a thriller, building to a murder that never happens, exciting passions that are never unleashed, waiting for a crime to occur. The only crimes, however, are of the heart. Meanwhile, the movie knows exactly what it's doing, and does exactly what it intends, without making one false move.

The secret reptile part of you yearns to see Berenger's laconic Shale enforce classroom discipline with his Uzi and back up the no-talking rule with a Claymore mine. But no. Rather, Shale tumbles quickly enough to the fact that more than routine violence is afflicting the school, that there is, in fact, a conspiracy.

It's like the longest just-say-no commercial in history, only you'd say no not because drugs are evil but because you don't want to get a serious foot fungus.

Sahara is a mediocrity wrapped inside a banality, toasted in a nice, fresh cliche.

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

Beginning with an intriguing premise, which it manages to squander in record time, it turns out to be a thinly imagined, thinly acted, silly exercise in car crashes, chases and nasty outbursts of generic violence.

Watching it is like being forced to listen to bad heavy metal music turned up to 11 while fat guys in Bermuda shorts compete in a puking contest in the john.

Smith and Lawrence have great comic energy and for at least half an hour are sublimely enjoyable -- until the movie's spirit of bloated gargantuanism takes over. [7 April 1995, p.5]

But it's not what the Wayans brothers do, it's how they do it. They do it funny.

This movie gives it to you, as no movie has in some years. Okay, if that's not your part of the swamp, don't go into it.

But the best thing about Jakob the Liar is that it's not "Patch Adams at Auschwitz."

It's fast, slick, stupid, violent fun and, despite the cynically high body count, without serious intention in this world.

Tasteless and without redeeming social value, and also dank with the stench of decomposition masked by not enough formaldehyde, Nightwatch is the best kind of movie pleasure, a completely guilty one. [17 Apr 1998]

This is a smart movie, full of astonishing reverses and switchbacks, and it adroitly walks the thin line between too clever by half and not clever enough by three-quarters.

A funky, fun film version of the famous Marvel superhero concoction, one of the earliest of the revisionist wave of supes and in some ways the most lovable or at least the most knowable.

Smashingly stupid.

Like every other second of more than 10,000 seconds in Alexander, it doesn't engage in the least.

It never makes much sense.

As an example of smash-mouth environmentalism, you'd be hard-pressed to surpass Fire Down Below. As an example of right-thinking American compassion and concern for our precious natural heritage and all the fuzzy fauna and fernyflora of the great outdoors, it's extremely forthright. And as a movie, it's a piece of drivel...Ugh! What a distasteful, silly, egomaniacal movie. [6 Sept 1997, p.D03]

Cleverness can be overrated but it can be underrated too, and the best thing about National Treasure is how clever it is.

The two women relate brilliantly, and the movie has lots of fun creating an erotic subtext between them.

It's one of those "I-can't-believe-I'm-enjoying-this" kind of things.

A rambling wreck from computer tech and a helluva souvenir –- that is, for those interested in artifacts representing the American movie at its worst.

Riveting in its low way. It traffics in imagery profoundly disturbing.

All this stuff is probably right. It's just that the director, Victor Salva, underscores his points with thunderous obviousness and manipulates us through ham-handed plot gambits.

A magical child movie in which the child is magical, yes, but the movie is not.

The most lethal weapon of all turns out to be the script.

Youngsters who love the shrieky singing and don't notice the tapioca of the story will probably get their money's worth. Parents: Bring earplugs.

A veritable clinic in irritation. Just thinking about it irritates me deeply.

If you attend the movie with your expectations lowered by Murphy's recent films, you'll be reasonably amused.

It's just silly, loud and goofy. The dragon needed a bigger part and the two stars smaller ones.

Like the best of poems, it doesn't lend itself to easy understanding. But, like the best of poems, it's extremely provocative, to both imagination and intellect.

The true crime is the eight bucks the filmmakers want to steal from you. Best advice: Don't let them get away with it.

What a superb job director Marcus Nispel has done re-creating, yet also revising, 1974's grisly, gristly, protein-centric masterpiece.

Though I don't think giving it a cuddly human personality and the vocals of Rachel Weisz helps much, the thing itself, part dog, part fish, part weasel, part dinosaur, is a terrific illusion, and the technical team manages to really sell the idea of flight. Too bad the acting is so lame, the story so derivative and the thing so long.

It's fun. Hey, it's almost spring, Rickman is fabulous and so is Richardson. Warren Clarke is continually funny. And Heidi Klum alone will melt the snows of yesteryear.

Might be considered three action sequences and four comedy routines in search of a story.

The nicest thing is the Asian American actress known as Maggie Q.

A lot of it is low, crude, admittedly comic in the rudest positive sense, which involves a lot of falling down to humorous effect.

You are likely to encounter more surprises on the way to the bathroom each morning than you do in this film.

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

Let's blame it on poor Robin Williams, who tries so desperately to be likable, whimsical, lovable, smart and funny all at once that he just wears you out. Blame it also on the behind-the-scenes engineers at Disney who think that effects are more important than story and character.

Thankfully, after its terrific start, Don't Say a Word transmogrifies so totally into Hollywood hooey that it's actually a relief. I'd hate to see a disturbance in the karmic perfection of Douglas's pitch-pure mediocrity.

The movie is loud, dark, bumpy and not even a little fun. You emerge into daylight bruised and battered, suffering a case of movie abuse.

Here's a film that so merrily thumbs its nose at propriety in exchange for visceral thrills, and at probability in exchange for the really cool plot twist, that it checks in as the guiltiest pleasure since "The 13th Warrior."

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.

It's kind of -- hmmmm, less than good, a little better than not bad, almost all right, mediocre without being grating, sort of in the C-minus-to-C-minus-minus range.

Now and then sputters to comic life but more usually wheezes along.

So primitive, it must have been written in lizard blood on animal skin.

In Evan Almighty, Mr. God goes to Washington. Frank Capra, stop rolling in your grave. At least they cared enough to steal from the very best.

Anthony Hopkins, with a toothpick and a slouch. Fabulous!

When a burning rat is the funniest thing in your movie, I think you're in big trouble, even in Miami.

I can't recall the original, or even if I saw it or not. But this variation certainly makes its points effectively, in what must be a more superheated milieu.

All the King's Men hasn't been directed so much as over-directed, although the result, when you make an effort to filter out all the film school pyrotechnics, is an honorable run at Robert Penn Warren's classic novel.

The movie is small but sensational. I don't know what writer-director Frank E. Flowers might lose by trying to take his career international, but he has real talent.

In Mercury Rising, the mercury may rise but pulses never do. A promising thriller with tough guy Bruce Willis wearing an ever-more radiant tapestry of bruises on his face, the film ultimately surrenders to the entropy of stale plotting and familiar formula.

Stuck in that no man's land between comedy and banal movie mob action, and it delivers on neither of these impulses with any force.

The new film by the phenomenally talented Scots-English trio of director Danny Boyle, producer Andrew MacDonald and screenwriter John Hodge -- they did both "Shallow Grave" and "Trainspotting" -- is a failure so absolute and witless it deserves some kind of mention in the Hall of Lame.

The most persistent question asked at When Do We Eat? will probably be "When do we leave?" This abrasive Passover comedy-drama is extremely difficult to sit through, and if its makers weren't all Jewish, it would be considered anti-Semitic.

The movie is intermittently amusing, particularly when the American human part of the cast (Breckin Meyer and Jennifer Love Hewitt) are off-screen, the longer and farther the better.

What we deserved was "The Island of Jeanne Moreau." That I'd pay to see.

Folks, I really feel that seeing this one for you is the movie critic's equivalent of jumping on the grenade to save your lives. Send me medals.

It's about women, but as written and directed by a man, it appears to make no emotional sense at all. It treats women like idiots.

If you think it's worth it to sit there for 97 minutes for three or possibly four laughs, then you are beyond help.

Meant to be a steamy erotic thriller, it's more annoying than anything else. Surely you will see its Big Surprise coming by the first 15 minutes, and it never begins to achieve the kind of sultry, mesmerizing fascination it so desperately needs.

The movie's chief crime against the planet, other than the sheer wastage of time, is the trivializing of the great Freeman. This actor has such dignity and depth and humanity, he almost makes the film watchable.

In an era of careful cost accountancy and focus-group testing, it's remarkable that a movie as truly, deeply, madly foolish as The Wicker Man escaped the asylum. But we must be grateful for the endless guffaws and gasps and outright stunned silences it unleashes on lucky audiences.

The Jackal is based on a fabrication so absurd that it almost made me laugh out loud.

Tries so hard to be cool that it forgets to be alive.

A caper film of such postmodernist pretense that it's almost a parody of itself.

Tells us nothing we didn't already know, and it tells it over and over and over.

An exceedingly bright comedy that never makes you feel stupid for enjoying its brisk pacing, smart lines, sound construction and superb comic acting, not only from Ashton Kutcher but from Cameron Diaz and well-chosen No. 2 bananas Rob Corddry and Lake Bell.

This film feels like a desperate attempt to squeeze a few last bucks out of what was once a very obliging cash cow.

It's not new. It's not interesting. I wish it would go away.

A karate movie so devoid of inner substance that it threatens to suck all known life on planet Earth into the void at its center. [20 Mar 1991]

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

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

The effect for viewers is that of having inserted one's head in a kettledrum that is being pounded on by drunken monkeys.

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]

It's got a lot of small movies bouncing around inside it, but there's no big movie on the outside.

All in all -- well, there is no all in all. There are just parts. Some fit, some don't. Some are cool, some aren't. It's the craziest thing you ever saw.

So unexpected and unpredictable and so full of tiny grace notes that its ultimate collapse seems almost irrelevant.

Nothing is real, but at the same time, nothing is fake. Nothing is, period. You don't believe a second of it for a second, so banal and predictable is it.

The movie streamlines much of Harris's book. It's a shame, because it results in the movie's fundamental flaw -- the one-dimensionality of Hannibal.

It is surprising that no matter how much we know what will happen, we never stop watching.

He still sees dead people, only now they're the best thing in the movie.

Too busy trying to make remarks to be much fun in the end. But it really only has one remark, which it reiterates about a thousand times, and it's not all that remarkable: Fame is overrated.

Thr3e needs help with more than spelling.

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.

This feels like a cramped, TV-style retelling, with small groups of people, no special effects, in some ways almost cheesy.

They made a movie without one basic ingredient: the story.

It gets duller and duller as it turns out to have used up all its amusing tricks in that first 30 minutes.

The plot feels arbitrary and seems driven to invent new places for its protagonists to go, as if to justify a budget on which Woody Allen could have made six much better films.

I liked, too, some late plot reversals, sorely needed after the numbingly simple straight-ahead plunge of the first hour of the movie. Things aren't quite what they seem and the twists are neatly done.

It is the perfect modern product: loud, banal, empty, frenzied, plasticized, flavorless, drab, violent in a bloodless way and sexy in a sexless way.

Equilibrium is like a remake of "1984" by someone who's seen "The Matrix" 25 times while eating Twinkies and doing methamphetamines.

A movie so bewildering and impenetrable that I believe it siphoned off a good 40 IQ points.

Benigni is no Peter Sellers, but the inanity of the film isn't really his fault. He tries hard, and his rubbery willingness to absorb any punishment and come up looking as if he's just swallowed a very cold carp isn't without comic potential. But he is continually betrayed by the lame setups.

Awake is a pleasing if negligible diversion.

If ever a project seemed utterly unguided by a compass, it's "North," the dreary new film from Rob Reiner. [22 Jul 1994]

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

An insufferable piffle.

So stupid it makes "xXx: State of the Union" look like it was written by Nietzsche.

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

It never makes you laugh that hard. Not even close. And so the thing becomes a bloody assault on the senses that commingles atrocity with tedium.

So loud, so long, so dumb.

Friedkin still has it: The car chase is the best thing in the movie, though so unconnected to the plot it could have been added without changing Eszterhas' script a whit. But, that excitement over, the movie ultimately self-destructs in the matter of its own ending. [13 Oct 1995]

The story the film tells ruins the movie.

The movie is almost completely uninteresting on the story level but fascinating as a work of imagined reconstruction and anthropology and as a study of the theory and practice of Studio 54.

The movie is neither good nor bad, but in its clever packaging of boy fantasy and girl fantasy, extremely cunning. As for Princess Diaz, no force on Earth can stop her now.

Rock is such a consistent delight, and so powerfully amused at the profound pleasure of being Chris Rock, that he shares the wealth with all of us.

Nobody really cares about the plot, least of all the filmmakers.

Lawrence is miraculous, as always.

It's all too silly to bother. Without style and attitude, nothing gets old faster than horror.

Wes Craven, who started the "Nightmare on Elm Street" series, should know a lot better.

Just another thriller, utterly disposable.

The film is more of an anthropological essay on the way young Americans relate while they make war, not love, and try to survive in the meantime.

Though R-rated, its real target audience is under 18 -- either in years or IQ points.

Culkin is -- well, Culkin is Culkin, cute and malleable, absolutely empty, absolutely precious, absolutely irritating. [17 Jun 1994]

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

Oh, please. Stop and smell the manure.

A modest comedy that does indeed stir a few chuckles out of its knuckleheaded trio of bad boys, it grows almost shockingly disturbing when it portrays armed robbery as amusing and the implicit death threat of the firearm as a joke. In this respect, it's the ugliest movie of the year. Or, no: It's merely the stupidest. [02 Dec 1994]

The two guys are potentially amusing but the screenplay is so naked in its manipulation of emotion that it feels infantile.

Manages to make sex look like no fun at all.

It's not brazenly bad or heroically bad or stridently bad. It's bad in all the old, dull ways of being bad: poor performances, absurd story, dreary special effects, witless dialogue and the excessive length of someone taking himself far too seriously.

One doesn't come away from it with any sense of what the victory cost in human terms.

What saddened me, however, wasn't the silliness but recognizing the great Swedish actress Lena Olin under a lot of "Elvira, Mistress of the Dark" makeup. What a waste.

This movie, written in crayon by James Kearns, is too dumb to come up with a way of defeating the system by using its own rules.

A meet-cute whimsy set among divorced fifty-somethings in New York, it blunders on toward oblivion, excruciatingly unfunny and pitifully unromantic.

The result isn't merely ludicrous, it's something far worse. It's drab. It's uninteresting. It squanders Chan's uniqueness; it could even be said to squander Jennifer Love Hewitt!

At least it cares enough to steal from the very best. Unfortunately, that's about all it cares about.

Maybe it's me, but I find it difficult to dislike any movie that has horses, guns and big hats in it.

Makes "Conan the Barbarian" seem like Dostoyevsky in its complexity.

A pocket of infection on the skin of the American body cultural.

In the end, I can't think of a movie that matters less than Just My Luck. It's just negligible.

An animated King and I? Now there's torture, especially in this wretched, lurid, absurd concoction which seems to have been conceived to annoy adults and bore children.

American director Jim Sonzero has taken the same campus setting and plot and added some rationale by "science-fictioning" it.

The whole thing is coarse and vulgar, as it hides its low fascinations behind a scrim of Holocaust piety until it becomes pure kitsch.

A vicious anti-Catholic diatribe disguised as an audition tape for MTV.

Anyway, the movie turns out to be hyperslick, quite well made in the technical sense (beautifully photographed and designed) and somewhat shallow, another exploration of that perennial and passionate teen theme, fitting in.

I literally did not count a single laugh in the whole aimless schlep, except for the hucksters who made it, on their way to the bank.

Baby, when you walk out of a movie thinking, "Say, that Heather Locklear was pretty darn good," the movie's got some problems!

Shamelessly manipulative in a crude, bullying way.

It's zany. Actually, it's so zany it's almost creepy.

It can't fake sincerity. It tries ever so hard, but it doesn't have a single believable second. Every word in it is a lie.

The movie never rises to the level of the professional, much less the comic. The gags are witless and surprisingly gross. The four actors, each accustomed to being at the center, never develop any rhythm, any chemistry, any anything.

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

The dialogue is fast but bad, the acting is loud but awful and the morality is chaste but unromantic. As for the food, it looks vulgar.

It's meant to be harmless fluff. It is.

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

There should be a special room in Hell where the makers of films like Patch Adams are sent.

The effects are murky and the giant worm looks more like a smear on the lens than anything else. Most of the intensity is generated by sudden sound effects like ringing phones, alarm clocks or oven timers.

I found myself praying that the film would jam and melt and, well past the halfway point, it did, and I was sprung, 30 minutes early.

The story is so ridiculous and the acting so completely amateurish, the fights have no dramatic impact; you don't care whether good Jet or bad Jet wins – not that you can tell them apart anyway.

Just what we need least: a warm family comedy about child molestation.That's Georgia Rule, which combines battleship actresses of the "Steel Magnolias" variety, fall-down-go-boom comedy that was obsolete in the '30s, Lindsay Lohan's cleavage and intergenerational fondling just for kicks.

Uneven but occasionally funny.

Some stories are eternal. They will not go away. They are told and retold for generations. Take the story of Jesse James --it is not one of them.

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

Here's the best thing about Stealing Harvard: A dog bites Green in the crotch for a really long time. Priceless.

Hatched by screenwriters watching "The Sixth Sense" on methamphetamines

But if the idea of tiny, little Sally Field in the Charles Bronson part strikes you as a bit silly, that's only the beginning of the idiocies. [12 Jan 1996]

About on the level of an After School Special put together by people in a real hurry to get on with their lives, Ed plays pretty dead for all except the very dumb at heart.

Crazy, ugly and scary. In fact, a sense of the grotesque runs thought the film; an extended joke about Sandler's black, dead foot (from frostbite as a kid) borders on something you find in John Waters.

[McGowan's] serene psychopathology is the movie's most consistent pleasure, and to see her is to both love and fear her.

The kinetics aren't that good, the twaddle is off the charts and the characters seem written by monkeys on amphetamines with crayons.

Definitely stuck in the fourth grade.

Not a second of it is believable; not a tenth of a second of it is refreshing; not a millionth of a second is worthwhile

It manages to find an almost pitch-perfect accumulation of ill-matched tones, sheer grotesquerie, near-heroic absurdity and self-canceling folly.

One thing the makers of Saving Silverman do not have to worry about: Hannibal Lecter will never visit them to eat their brains. That is because they have no brains.

Everyone in the film is mean-spirited, manipulative and repulsive, and I'm only talking about the women! The men are much worse, particularly Dan Aykroyd.

What a jolly comedy theme: incest.

More in the dumb and dumber tradition of "Halloween" and "Friday the 13th" sequels.

It's sickeningly violent!

What you get is the V trifecta: vile, vicious and violent. Oh, and incoherent and stupid. A mess. A mean-spirited completely worthless film that can never give back the two hours it seizes from you.

It's still got some panache.

So twitchy, fidgety, skittery and wiggly that the drug it made me yearn for was Dramamine, followed by a chaser of bourbon, 12 years old.

So good it breaks your heart for not being better. It is kept from brilliance by a soggy climax and a clumsy central narrative device.

Everything in it is a cliche including the end.

You could run this film backward, soundtrack included, and it would make no less sense. --It's almost completely uninvolving, as well as being impenetrable.

Enervated, torpid, slack, dreary and, oh yes, nasty, brutish and long.

The film turns out to have nothing going for it at all, except a small charge for soul-deep Madonna haters.

Folks, I think I'm speaking for all of us when I say this is pretty darn fine American entertainment

Not merely Pacino's over-mannered, near-histrionic performance, but the movie itself could be characterized as busy, busy, busy. It's so full of plot twists and revelations and exploding sports cars that its very perkiness comes to seem comic.

Here's what I really like about The Mod Squad: Nobody in it gives a damn.

Lohan brilliantly brings off her double turn and clearly believes in the picture, as do all who worked on it. These things used to be called B movies in the old days.

It's a loose reassembly of plot points from "Rosemary's Baby" and "The Exorcist" that never achieves the emotional intensity of either.

Weekend at Bernie's II only proves what critics have known for years: that on the planet of the bad movies, there's no life after death.

It has no moments of athletic grace amid the chaos, no apparent sense of strategy. It's basically just mayhem set to rock music.

The movie is simply not professional. It's not, even by the lowest standards of Republic B-westerns in the '30s or bad, cheap horror films in the '50s, releasable.

Neither character seems especially insightful, and their intense focus on the self and the terrific delicacy of their feelings comes to feel narcissistic and annoying.

In this movie, the sense of charm has been obliterated.