Steven Rea

Until Seven Days in Utopia sucker punches you with a surfeit of faith-based platitudes, its upbeat brand of golf mysticism isn't altogether unappealing.

A tale of disaffection, devastation and epiphanies of the catastrophic kind.

If Matthew Weiner's Are You Here is good for anything, it's to illustrate how the themes and conflicts he has worked out with such depth and dexterity in all these seasons of "Mad Men" can go terribly amiss with the wrong actors, wrong backdrop, wrong tone, wrong time.

In essence, a wild soap opera disguised as a political allegory, it's a movie, with its over-the-map performances, that is worth catching only for the inadvertent laugh or two.

The film is based on Ryne Douglas Peardon's novel Simple Simon, which I haven't read. I can only hope it's less exploitive of people with autism than Mercury Rising is. For all the filmmakers' apparent efforts to treat the issue with sensitivity (there are teachers and nurses who patiently explain to Willis the various symptoms, the behavioral patterns of autistic children), the issue has no place in a standard-issue Hollywood thriller. It feels like a gimmick, and a shameless one at that. [3 Apr 1998, p.03]

Fails to provide one essential ingredient: suspense.

A squirmy mix of therapy-session slogans, pop psychobabble, and lots of crying, yelling and pouting on the part of its two stars, who appear in various alarming hairpieces.

Despite some jaunty performances and its pretty Cotswolds locale, the film, in the end, is hardly a pleasure at all.

Speed Racer offers a crazy, turbo-charged mix of cartoon kitsch, gamer action, and a wild new way to think of - and look at - movies.

The whole affair has a painfully self-conscious, self-referential air. Jokes land with a thud, and so, alas, does Rocky, who seems to have forgotten how to fly.

A riotously awful biopic rife with stereotypes and boxing movie cliches, Against the Ropes represents -- among other things -- a woeful turn in its star's career.

This startlingly lame tale about a young upstart challenging a veteran leader of the pack doesn't update the genre, it simply recasts it.

This low-budget, high-gore sequel can be effectively frightening at times, and just plain boring, too. The suspense builds, the blood gushes, the momentum dissipates. It's an unsatisfying mix.

Yes, there's a hastily added new ending - an ending that doesn't make sense when you think about it. Not that it's worth the effort

A harmless and mildly amusing family comedy.

A kind of mad coming-of-age yarn embellished with lightning bolts and monsters made of cadaverous flesh.

Criminal, with its criminally lazy title, is mostly Costner's to growl and scowl his way through.

This heavy-handed muddle of a cop thriller is just impossibly bad.

"The Godfather" without Brando, "GoodFellas" without Scorsese, "The Sopranos" without Gandolfini - 10th & Wolf is all that, and less.

The script appears to have been designed, created and produced entirely in 1-D: a mishmash of kidcentric antics, follow-your-dream cliches, and innocuously icky humor.

8 1/2 Women is a collage-y, self-reflexive sort of film that is designed to shock but more often just annoys.

Owing a debt to Scarface (the DePalma remake more than the Hawks original) and to the gangland opuses of Scorsese, Belly gets inside the gangsta culture with a wired authenticity. [04 Nov 1998, p.E04]

Lady in the Water boasts an eclectic cast - almost entirely squandered.

Death Sentence's message - that vengeance is ultimately futile, spinning out a vicious circle of rage and hate - may be commendable, but there's nothing noteworthy about the way Wan, Bacon and their troops go about delivering it.

Serena is one long eye-roll of calamities and corn.

A handsomely staged and craftily constructed tearjerker.

The sort of generic crime thriller - stick-figure characters, pointless muddle of plot, people entering and exiting SUVs and Lear jets with a sense of urgency - that feels like it could drag on forever, and drag us down into a purgatory of stupefaction with it.

Painfully cute drama.

Reality aside, The Watch is harmless enough - and even occasionally humorous, in a riffy, sketch-comedy kind of way.

Nasty stuff. It's xenophobic (message: Americans, steer clear of the Third World); it's photogenic (the Sports Illustrated-likeswimsuit issue beach scenes, the colorful villages, the lush landscapes); it's gruesome (operating table POV shots); and it's violent.

An effectively unsettling mix of Southern gothic and Old Testament hugger-mugger, with shades of "The Exorcist" and even "Rosemary's Baby" thrown in.

With clunky dialogue...I Am Number Four puts the burden on its special effects (passable) and the chemistry between Pettyfer and Agron.

Level of humor: subteen.

Push has a cool, sinewy style, energy to burn.

Theron proves the master of operatic hissy fits, Blunt lets the pain show beneath the glacial cool, Chastain brings her usual Juilliard-schooled commitment to the occasion, and Hemsworth is Hemsworthian, if oft-times incomprehensible, delivering his lines in a gorse-y whorl of vowels and consonants.

An embarassingly unfunny, stumblebum adaptation of Toby Young's memoir.

Williamson's screenplay doesn't match the cleverness of his conceit; it lacks the requisite archness and wit.

The movie's main purpose seems to be to make audiences squirm uncomfortably. Yelp and shriek in armchair-clawing glee? Not likely.

Stiff but handsome film, there's little sense of the conflict and complexities that drove Alma Mahler.

Ma Mere, with its sun-drenched sense of dread and band of reckless, unlikable characters, isn't very good, but that doesn't stop the actors -- especially the intrepid Huppert -- from going all the way.

Ostensibly a comedy, and a feeble and innocuous one at that, Post Grad is one of those what-were-they-thinking?

Instead of paying homage to these creepy creatures of bygone Hollywood, Sommers seems to be unwittingly lampooning them. The first few minutes of Van Helsing, shot in black and white, look like outtakes from Mel Brooks' gagfest "Young Frankenstein."

While this cheesy, heavy-metal melange of horror, space hooey and cowboy shoot-'em-ups isn't exactly dull, it isn't anything to write home about either.

In some ways, Identity Thief is a raunchier variation on another recent odd-couple road pic: Barbra Streisand and Seth Rogen as overbearing mom and nebbish son in "The Guilt Trip."

A crazed symphony of the supernatural. The elements don't hang together, but Kasdan delivers real scares, and real hoots, in the midst of the mayhem and madness.

In truth, the only hazardous material to be found in Diana - the title role assumed bravely, if mistakenly, by Naomi Watts - is the screenplay.

What Hannibal Rising is, mostly, is a hoot.

You'd think a movie about transplanting human consciousness would be smarter than this.

Bleak and painfully earnest.

That the film, directed in swift strokes by F. Gary Gray from a screenplay credited to Kurt Wimmer, doesn't really work - unrelentingly grim, unintentionally funny - is almost beside the point. It's a wild concept.

Farley, with his bowl-cut of strawberry hair and grinning double chin, does have a certain airhead charm, but Spade and his slackeresque, snooty weenie shtick, is, at best, an acquired taste. Farley seems to enjoy Spade's company, and Spade seems to be enjoying his own company, and SNL kingpin and Black Sheep producer Lorne Michaels obviously believes these guys have a future together . . . but I don't know, give me Stan and Ollie, or Bud and Lou or Dean and Jerry. Or a nice big scoop of Ben and Jerry's, for that matter. [2 Feb 1996, p.13]

Loaded with cartoon violence (exploding mail-bombs, children hanging perilously from rooftops), numerous groin-kicks and a few mild expletives, Jingle All the Way isn't exactly heartwarming, egg-noggy holiday fare. [22 Nov 1996, p.04]

A mildly scary, totally meaningless excursion into the realms of psychological horror and alien-abduction conspiracies.

Filled with close-ups of Jesus and his apostles (all the better to hide the absence of elaborate period sets), mixing quotes from the Scripture with flat exposition, this low-budget affair is earnest and, alas, more than a little bit cartoonish.

Has to be among the worst movies ever made.

Too freewheeling for its own good, like a Robert Altman ensemble piece without a gravitational core. But Hawke's actors are a talented troupe, and even when things get self-indulgent and fuzzy-headed (and boy, do they!), interesting stuff is going on.

"Kill Bill" without irony, and without Quentin Tarantino's flair for cool dialogue and chop-socky action (and without Uma Thurman, for that matter), Elektra is a pretty-looking, pretty dull adaptation of the Marvel Comic about a dishy, deadly assassin.

A mercifully fleet and lamentably uninteresting adaptation of the DC Comic about a war-weary Confederate soldier.

A by-the-numbers extravanganza that journeys from London to Venice to Siberia to Cambodia without ever really going anywhere.

As for Duff, she's bright-eyed and bubbly, though her singing talents are nowhere near as awesome as Raise Your Voice's who's-going-to-win-the-big-scholarship plotline requires.

Despite the charismatic efforts of the British actor Ahmed, The Reluctant Fundamentalist gets bogged down in proselytizing and plot.

Feels downright ancient.

Director Robert Schwentke and his writing team do their best to move things along. Actually, who knows if it's their best? Maybe they're suffering from Divergent fatigue along with the rest of us.

Stay home and watch Friends. It's cheaper, funnier and mercifully shorter. [8 March 1996, p.08]

Bedtime Stories does have a comic buoyancy, even as its plot trots on a predictable course. Perhaps the different accents and sensibilities have something to do with that.

Murderously unfunny.

Hands-down the most nightmarishly awful film of the year.

Reiner, who demonstrated an affinity for storybook yarns with The Princess Bride and sensitively addressed coming-of-age issues with Stand By Me, has trouble getting beyond the episodic nature of Zweibel and Scheinman's screenplay. [22 Jul 1994, p.03]

It seems sadly apt that the Daddy Warbucks figure played by Jamie Foxx in the new Annie is a cellphone mogul. Because Foxx is pretty much phoning in his performance.

Uptown Girls gives the impression that everyone behind the camera just threw up their hands in helpless resignation.

If that sounds a lot like Rushmore, it is, except that the heart has been sucked out of the thing -- replaced by glib chatter, gratuitous Baudelaire references, and distracting product placement.

Plays around with some interesting notions, such as the nature of reality, the nature of humanity, and the nature of spiffy apartments with sleek bathroom fixtures.

A stale and stupid thriller.

Sandler, shambling and smirky, delivers another of those one-take performances of his - likable and lazy, forever on the verge of cracking himself up.

In truth, despite more corn than Mel Gibson grows on his farm in "Signs" (another Shyamalan effort), After Earth is worth a look.

Manages to rocket along at full speed. At the same time, however, the movie feels as if it's not going anywhere at all.

Some of the most tasteless and un-PC comedy in the film is also the funniest - Farrelly Brothers-style humor that plays off the Bateman character's physical limitations.

The ads for The Sweetest Thing promise that if you loved "There's Something About Mary" and "My Best Friend's Wedding," then you can't miss this latest Cameron Diaz vehicle. Well, miss it.

This is no "Raging Bull."

The film quickly turns unintentionally, and unrelentingly, awkward.

Hemsworth, who is Gale Hawthorne in "The Hunger Games" and the brother of the Hemsworth who stars as "Thor", has maybe one arrow in his acting quiver - he can look engaged.

Is Steve Jobs a great film? I don't think so. It's an achievement, certainly, full of Sorkin flourishes, breathtaking and brilliant one-liners that reveal a lot about the characters who deliver them.

Not exactly a hundred million dollars' worth of classic comedy.

A flat-out cynical attempt to launch a new Lethal Weapon-like franchise.

Wood, for her part, can appear sad, or seductive, or mysterious, or happy, or lovestruck, or deeply troubled. Gabi is also very good with a gun, so look out.

A dark, shaky, standard-issue superhero picture.

They has a low-budget, generic feel -- but also enough sense to know that unseen menace is a lot creepier than explicit gore.

Despite the jumpy, ride-along camera work and the ever-present threat of engagement, a certain tedium sets in during the film.

An unintentional high-tech hoot.

Envy makes a pretty entertaining three-minute trailer. If only they'd left it at that.

Hobbled by a laughably bad script and a uniformly uncharismatic cast.

The Road isn't a masterpiece...But I cannot think of another film this year that has stayed with me, its images of dread and fear - and yes, perhaps hope - kicking around like such a terrible dream.

The movie bogs down in tiresome good guys vs. bad guys action cliches.

Plot contrivances, including an ominous cowboy-hatted figure who stalks Bitsey and her tagalong intern (Gabriel Mann), undermine the story's serious political themes.

Maybe if there was something going with the dialogue - snappy Chandlerisms, say, or even just sentences that made sense - the fussy digital artifice of The Spirit wouldn't seem so, well, dispiriting.

The homoerotic subtext of the whole buddy movie oeuvre has never received quite the explicit lampooning it gets in this quirky, crash-and-burn action-comedy. [6 Sept 1996, p.8]

Most of it plays like Jackass.

Has a low-key tone that works in its favor for a time.

Parents in a masochistic mood can compound the headache-inducing experience by paying extra for the 3-D version.

This is an A-list cast toiling on a C-list screenplay.

The film drifts along on a stream of humiliation jokes - physical, emotional, sexual, hairpiece-ial.

Profoundly knuckleheaded.

It has its moments of swaggering camaraderie, but more often just feels generic, derivative and done to death.

Nicely timed to cash in on the Ebola panic, Cabin Fever: Patient Zero - the prequel to the gross-out franchise about a lethal flesh-eating virus and its party-hardy victims - isn't going to do much for the tourism trade in the Dominican Republic.

13 Ghosts is the type of project that all parties concerned will have to live down for the rest of their lives.

Premonition is an odd little thing, with a protagonist in a protracted fugue state and a plot that doesn't know whether its coming or going. Or maybe it does.

Travolta, a bit portly (or is it starboardly?), phones in his performance from his place in Maine; Vaughn is ice-cool but not especially convincing; the kid is OK, and Polo is a blank.

This unabashedly stupid comedy is, well, unabashedly stupid.

An enjoyably cheesy teen melodrama with a touch of indie edge.

In the future, in the past, at all points along the space-time continuum, the Theory of the Teenage Male Mind throws everything out of whack.

It's nothing if not predictable.

Trapped between edgy art flick and exploitation psychothriller, The Quiet manages to be neither, and manages to be pretty awful in the bargain.

Scary Movie 2 has something for potheads and the potty-mouthed alike. Anyone looking for a true sequel, however, will be disappointed.

Seyfried holds the camera's attention, playing this storybook business pretty much straight, although David Leslie Johnson's script puts the actress sorely to the test.

Some projects are just too misguided for the star to mug and shrug his way out of. Consider Rock the Kasbah at the top, or the bottom, of that list.

A handsome Holocaust melodrama hobbled by a transparent and cartoonish script.

If you strip away all the gunplay, Hitman: Agent 47 would be about 10 minutes long.

For all its mayhem, for all the smashing windows and kabooming fireballs, the grenade launchers and giant helicopters, A Good Day to Die Hard not only fails to top its predecessors, it also forgets the basic Die Hard rules.

Although there are several truly jolting scares, there's also an abundance of hackneyed dialogue and more silly satanic business than you can shake a severed limb at.

A smart aleck-y kidnapping caper that whooshes around to a thumping electronic beat.

An impossibly enjoyable live-action cartoon that plays on our real-life anxieties about vengeful cadres of foreign radicals blowing up people - and places.

It's too gauzy, and - with its Ron Bass script - too goopy by half.

No one is bad in The Big Wedding, but no one is remotely believable, either.

I could make a joke here about the new Pokemon movie.

Cage appears as a knight of the Crusades, slogging across the continents, slaying infidels and unbelievers and anyone else who gets in his way. There isn't a minute when it looks like he's having fun.

Teeming with socially awkward misfits, Gentlemen Broncos is not without its absurdist charms, although Hess (who co-scripted with his wife, Jerusha) pushes the envelope in ways it doesn't need pushing.

A bubble-brained comedy with as much bearing on the real world as a Pokemon cartoon.

Never going to be remembered as a tying-the-knot screwball classic (it probably won't be remembered past March), but one could do worse.

Catwoman, which talks about the "duality" inside all women (wild vs. docile, rapacious vs. cuddly), does have its guilty pleasures. Most of these come courtesy of ice queen Stone.

Isn't as jaw-droppingly awful as its trailers suggest.

What a stupefying thing it is.

So jaw-droppingly out there, so bracingly bizarre, and, much of the time, so fall-over-funny that even its flaws don't matter. Easily the oddest movie of the year, it is also one of the best.

Mike Myers, responsible for the picture's one, or possibly two, laughs.

It's overstating things to say the stars of Fantastic Four are Miles Teller, Kate Mara, Michael B. Jordan, and Jamie Bell, because I can't remember the last time four actors appeared less invested in a movie for which they've teamed up.

By Twisted's final twist, though, it's all Judd can do to keep a straight face.

Full of clunky humor, battle-of-the-sexes musings and spicy accordion music, Everybody Wants to Be Italian is relentless - but not necessarily relentless fun.

Basic Instinct 2 is supposed to help Stone show it's possible for a woman to be sexy in her late 40s. But it's Rampling - who is 60 - who comes off as the more provocative and alluring. Stone's purring, snarling, bedroom kink is embarrassing.

A mix of "Alice in Wonderland" and William S. Burroughs, "Psycho" and the psychotic. It's pretty much a squirmy experience all around.

Impossibly arty and, at times, narratively incoherent, Filth and Wisdom still has its goofy charms.

Obama, it is implied, is deliberately making America more vulnerable to attack from Muslim extremists. No mention is made of the fact that it was under Obama's watch that Osama bin Laden was killed.

Despite all the stock characters and scenarios, Fox and company manage to bring things to life. And cut some hair.

Contrived story lines and an altogether phony resolution erase whatever energy and wit the film displayed, leaving the viewer with an empty, disappointed feeling.

A syrup-thick New Age ghost story of the same sappy stripe and mawkishness as another Costner foray, "Message in a Bottle."

Director Rob Meltzer, who made the kind-of-amusing meta short "I Am Stamos," directs things in shameless, let's-get-this-thing-over-with style, throwing in some gratuitous topless (female) nudity and allowing the usually amusing Kristen Schaal to let loose with a barrage of potty-mouthisms.

This violently comic caper has some spunky charm going for it -- but has a lot of self-consciously hip, studied wackiness going against it.

Eye for an Eye's filmmakers have climbed on some high horse of social commentary, pretending this stalk-or-be-stalked suspenser is a meaningful drama about a wayward justice system where the rights of criminals supersede the rights of victims and their families. But what about the rights of moviegoers? We deserve better than this. [12 Jan 1996, p.05]

Guy Ritchie's Revolver premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival two years ago September. That's 26 months on a shelf somewhere, depriving moviegoers the thrill of jaw-droppingly awful Ray Liotta line readings, of bloody shoot-outs, bags of money, cutaways to frosty babes sucking on lollipops, and even a bit of violent anime.

At this point in her career, Lopez can clearly bend the universe -- but no amount of bending can make Enough anything more than formulaic.

Where does Ed, which is about a baseball-playing chimp and his human sidekick, fit in the pantheon of simian cinema? Way, way down there - on a level with toe lint. [15 Mar 1996, p.5]

The greatest lacrosse movie of the 21st century - and, unless I'm mistaken, the only lacrosse movie of the 21st century.

Reaches breathtaking lows of incoherence, sexism, racial stereotyping, and -- did I say incoherence?

Where the first pic breezed along with gags and gunplay, this forced follow-up is artificial to the hilt - fueled on a kind of trying-too-hard hilarity that makes even good actors look bad.

A thuddingly dull remake of the 1971 crime drama starring Michael Caine.

Chloe & Theo is a mess of a message movie, simplistic, sappy, silly.

Unravels in a series of spooky dream sequences, dopey detective work, and a couple of richly hambone-ian De Niro soliloquies.

Piles dumb gag upon dumb gag - it's like benign pummeling. Occasionally, you just have to laugh.

A messy fish-out-of-water gangland romp.

Stephen King without the snap, David Lynch without the kink, teen horror without the teen hormones, Darkness Falls falls apart in a crescendo of creepy-crawly hoo-ha. It's more like Darkness Kerplunks.

A collection of double entendres that would make a stevedore blush.

Yes, it's stupid. But sometimes it's stupid with a capital S, and it's in those moments of transcendent idiocy that you can't help liking Saving Silverman. At least, a little bit.

Has its compelling moments, and its playfully inventive ones, too.

A lethargic, lurching holiday-themed comedy.

It's getting tiresome, this stuff.

Fuzzy, feel-good movie about baseball, babes and believing in yourself.

About as not-funny as a comedy can get.

Hopped up like a kid on a sugar rush, Hoodwinked Too! tries to emulate the "Shrek" formula - mashing Hans Christian Anderson and the Brothers Grimm with pop-culture references and wisecracking anthropomorphic sidekicks.

Another tale of Tinseltown drugs, sex and excess - has transferred itself to the screen with mind-boggling, laugh-inciting horribleness.

Little kidniks with an appetite for zap-pow silliness might find this to their liking. Everyone else, beware.

Just a big chunk of waste flushed from a Hollywood studio.

Long, lumbering and endlessly unfunny.

Affleck, for his part, behaves as if a Zero from "Pearl Harbor" dropped one too close to his noggin. He looks permanently shell-shocked.

If the '60s sitcom McHale's Navy was a poor man's Sergeant Bilko, the new big-screen McHale is a poverty-stricken, starving-to-death, brain-dead person's answer to last year's not-so-hot Steve Martin movie, Sgt. Bilko. [19 Apr 1997, p.D08]

88 Minutes proves itself to be a maddeningly mediocre, ineptly manipulative "real-time" thriller.

A tad more character development would have been nice.

Struggles mightily to find its loony essence. But Bullock's apple-cheeked larkishness is all flailing limbs and bug-eyed reaction shots - there's no there there. Cooper's character is woefully underwritten, Church's is yet another vain anchorman-wannabe cartoon.

Dark and murky, grainy and grim.

Has a dark, low-budget feel and an incongruous combination of self-consciously jokey patter and gross-out gore.

Gets stupider as it moves along. By the end, you just don't care whether that cold-hearted snake Petrovich (that would be Reno) gets his comeuppance. Just bring on the Battle Bots, please!

As far as director Nicole Kassell and writer Gren Wells are concerned, the C in Big C must stand for cute. The film reaches into the pits of moviegoing hell when it finds Marley on a celestial white couch, ringed in billowing white curtains, communing with God. And God is embodied by Whoopi Goldberg.

Awesomely ridiculous thriller.

Much of the dialogue is the silliest sort of fantasy mush, and a good deal of the picture appears to have been shot while the lighting guys were out to lunch.

Slackers is, well, consummately cheesy. Ugh.

Totally lame.

Lewd, crude, blessedly brief.

Plodding and virtually plotless (employee gets caught in maw of machine, blood squirts, boss tells everyone to get back to work, employee gets caught in maw of machine...), The Mangler might have been amusing if it had been played for laughs. Instead, this dreary yarn is hardly played for anything. [6 Mar 1995, p.D02]