William Arnold

First-time director Ted Demme (no relation to Jonathan), also of MTV ("Yo! MTV Raps"), displays little flair for comedy or storytelling beyond a sketch length. He also seems to have the sensibility of a dirty-minded eighth-grader. [11 Mar 1994]

Writer-director Bruce Robinson, whose credits ("Withnail and I") are all outside the thriller genre, has also chosen to throw a long, ponderous interrogation scene into the third act for no other reason than to give guest-star John Malkovich 15 minutes of hammy screen-time as FBI agent St. Anne. His movie is not only preposterous and dull, it's pretentious. [6 Nov 1992]

The Sandlot is so exploitative of the myth of baseball and rings so false as a nostalgia piece - and is so unfunny as a comedy - that it makes "The Bad News Bears" look like "Pride of the Yankees." [7 Apr 1993]

It is one of the more pessimistic and repulsive views of the war of the sexes ever put on film. [14 Nov 1992]

Surprisingly, first-time director and co-writer Andrew Scheinman relentlessly fails to find anything magical or especially funny here. Little Big League seems to have no sense of the absurdity of its situation and uses the premise mostly as an excuse for one more by-the-numbers competition movie. [29 Jun 1994]

A screaming, silly cliche -- and somehow not a bit scary.

How can a critic feel good about a movie that sets out to numb us with sheer gruesomeness; that embraces nihilism and sadism so enthusiastically; that offers no moral point of view or redemption in its characters, all while feebly aspiring to be a portrait of its generation? [09 Sep 1994]

Unlike "Crying Game" (which, despite the gender confusion, definitely works as a love story for a general audience), the only emotion this movie evokes for its star-crossed lovers is an unpleasant sense of incredulity. [08 Oct 1993]

Popcorn is not scary enough to work as horror, not funny enough to work as comedy, not cute enough to work as camp, not skilled enough to work as a tribute to the bad movies of the '50s, and so indifferently acted by the cast (including Tony Roberts, Dee Wallace Stone and Ray Walston) that it just seems a waste of everyone's time. [01 Feb 1991]

The humor is very broad, the occasional attempts at suspense are uniformly unsuccessful, and the script is a by-the-numbers collection of sci-fi movie cliches, right down to the - groan - lonely child who adopts a lovable and misunderstood alien. [27 Apr 1990]

Penn has overwritten the dialogue and, though the filmed-in-Nebraska movie has a certain gritty authenticity, it rings vaguely false. You sense he has no knowledge of the '60s, Midwestern angst or smalltown life. [04 Oct 1991]

If you loved the 1990 smash hit, Home Alone, you may have similar feelings about its inevitable sequel, Home Alone 2: Lost in New York. It's the exact same movie. And then again, you might feel cheated for the same reason - or at least wish you had rented the video of the old one and saved yourself the time, trouble and cost of a baby sitter. [20 Nov 1992]

A very good movie could probably be made about the black experience in the Old West, but Mario Van Peebles' Posse is not it.[14 May 1993]

As a matter of fact, so much of Pacific Heights is laughable, and the film is so preposterous as a premise and so clumsily directed and lacking in suspense, that it plays like a parody of a Hitchcock thriller. Or did I miss the point and this was Schlesinger's intention all along? [28 Sept 1990]

It's incorrigibly unfunny.

Is Hollywood so disconnected from its past and bankrupt of ideas that it doesn't even know this movie is a screaming cliché?

Mercifully short -- a mere 80 minutes, plus the end-titles. That means I had to slap myself in the face fewer times than usual to stay awake in a movie this grindingly mediocre.

A first-class snoozer.

It may be emblematic of new-millennium Hollywood that this movie has turned out to be one more emotionless, brainless, overproduced action film.

Trespass has no story drive; its principals are cardboard caricatures and its production values are as cheap and amateurish as a bad home video. [26 Dec 1992]

It's lively but fails to disguise the fact that his (Charbanic) script is a dud and his career in videos has taught him little about the art of narrative storytelling.

Carl Reiner's Fatal Instinct is about as awful a movie parody as you'd ever want to see, but the guy certainly deserves some points for persistence. [29 Oct 1993]

Unfortunately, this latest effort is so mean-spirited and nasty that you wish Farrell hadn't bothered.

It's a tedious experience in almost every way: The acting is numbingly one-note, the CGI work is unconvincing and often downright shoddy, and the action is poorly staged and framed so close you can never tell for sure who is lopping off whose head.

In a better movie, this grand-dame performance might have been fun, but it's surrounded here by an impossibly dull and unsatisfying whodunit plot, unintentionally funny dialogue and such absurdities as having Catherine stay up late one night and whip out an entire novel.

Director de Souza tries for a distinctive blend of exotic locations (Queensland, Thailand), big-budget explosion effects and a hallucinogenic style, but the mix ultimately turns out to be a recipe for tedium - and, though he tries, he can never quite give the movie the humor and flair that might have made it at least campy fun. [24 Dec 1994]

It is shockingly devoid of any shred of originality and imagination. [10 Dec 1993]

Idiotic.

Besides being inept, it's also pretentious and boring: an ambitious art film gone horribly wrong.

Its motif is self-pity, Steers displays no particular way with a scene, and, as Igby, Culkin exudes none of the charm or charisma that might keep a more general audience even vaguely interested in his bratty character.

Has to be one of the most absurd of all big-budget action movies, and that's saying something. It's just a blink away from over-the-top self-parody, and I'm pretty sure it's not trying to be.

It's basically just more of the same maudlin sentimentality mixed with clumsy slapstick, hassled-father routines and Geritol jokes. [8 Dec 1995, p.29]

Unlike original director Rob Cohen, Singleton has no gift for giddy action and his movie is a crashing bore.

His heart may be in the right place, but 25-year-old writer-director M. Night Shyamalan can't even begin to pull all these episodes together into anything that seems remotely special, or even makes any sense. [03 Apr 1998]

The film's deliberately overblown cartoonishness and its gleefully pandering adolescent cruelty never blend into the enjoyable style of, say, a good spaghetti western (Rodriguez's acknowledged model), or even a bad Quentin Tarantino movie.

The whole enterprise is a colossal waste of everyone's time.

Not only have they (Coen Brothers) stripped it of all its wit and charm, they've loaded it down with the kind of race-baiting and bathroom humor they've always avoided in the past.

Resnick's script never engages, the stars can't find the keys to their broadly played characters, and Ephron's direction is harrowingly out of sync.

This is a much dumber movie than "The Lake House." In fact, the script is an ungainly mess and ultimately a shaggy-dog story.

So violent and junky it seems to have been designed as evidence for the growing congressional movement to censor Hollywood.

Absurdly over the top and not especially funny.

Director Ryu Murakami obviously has a few nonexploitative impulses, but more than half of his movie is graphic sex scenes (it's rated NC-17), and it seems mostly just an excuse to sneak into a mainstream theater the kind of S&M, bondage and urination scenes that have been banned from even the hardest of hard-core porn videos since the late '80s. [15 Oct 1993]

Tautou seems tired, mean-spirited and utterly devoid of that Audrey Hepburn-like charm that made her the international movie find of 2001.

Contains much abuse and brutality, an annoying celebratory air of pimp-chic and enough explicit gay sex scenes to qualify as (very tepid) soft-core porn.

It's been turned into a stupid kung fu movie.

In this movie, he (Shelton) falls so hard he becomes, for the first time in his career, genuinely offensive.

Preposterous, empty-headed and tedious.

So witless, sit-com shallow and bad in every way that it's just not worthy of much discussion.

Overly familiar, poorly cast and often annoyingly crude New York comedy that never finds its groove.

It's a botched job...the new "Phoenix" lacks the very things that made the old one special.

Efforts to expand the envelope of grotesquery make the film repulsive and suspenseless, and it sorely misses original director Tobe Hooper's grisly, wily sense of humor.

The movie is a resounding dud: immaculately composed and shot (very much in the Kaufman tradition), but riddled with crime-movie cliches, wincingly obvious in its plot twists and rather badly acted.

So uninvolving as basic storytelling that it quickly becomes boring.

It is not just that this action-comedy is a totally stupid, by-the-numbers collection of every action movie cliche ever coined. It is that the thing is so upsettingly mean-spirited and incorrigibly ugly, a movie that absolutely revels in sadism and constantly asks us to laugh at the most sordid and explicit acts of violence. [17 Mar 1990]

Rarely has paper-casting worked as dismally as it does for Jason Lee and Tom Green.

The kangaroo is devoid of charm, as are the actors, who have the chemistry of fingernails on a blackboard.

Director Fran Rubel Kuzui ("Tokyo Pop") cannot begin to find the style that would give some unity and originality to this mess. The result is a grindingly dull horror comedy and an unnecessary satire of Valley Girls - a full decade after that phenomenon has come and gone. [31 Jul 1992, p.12]

It's a sorry specimen if ever there was one, and could even stand as an argument for how the movies have deteriorated in recent years.

It's a tired rehash of animation cliches that distinguishes itself only by the extent to which it's crammed full of scatology and gleeful violence to animals, and otherwise panders to the worst instincts of its audience.

The biggest failing of the film is that it's the lamest possible excuse for a whodunit. [17 Apr 1998]

A movie in which almost nothing works.

By the time the film plummets to its rock bottom, we find ourselves in a flag-waving no-brainer of the first order, and one of the most thoroughly confused morality tales in recent memory.

An incomprehensible mess -- so boring and numbingly unworkable that it's hard to imagine what he could have been thinking.

As far as these things go, the film's violence is not outrageously excessive.

In its best moments, resembles a bad high school production of "Grease," without benefit of song.

Pierson is a high-powered egotist with appalling tastes and a great-white-father complex, and his whiny family is about as much fun as fingernails on a blackboard.

First-time director Steve Beck hurls a dozen ghosts and probably a million dollars' worth of prosthetic makeup at us for a full 90 minutes, but it's old hat and not a bit scary.

A perfectly dreadful affair that makes no sense, has almost no good laughs and finally just sinks like a rock in a Beverly Hills swimming pool.

Despite its title, the movie could hardly be less erotic. Indeed, promiscuity has never looked more totally unappealing, and its final scenes of Wilmot's advanced venereal disease are enough to make you take a vow of celibacy. A great date movie, this is not.

It's a complete by-the-numbers daddy-day-care movie that doesn't have a genuinely enchanting moment or shred of inspiration in its overlong running time.

Insipid, overcooked and dull.

The film was produced by Jerry Bruckheimer and directed by Joel Schumacher, and reflects the worst of their shallow styles: wildly overproduced, inadequately motivated every step of the way and demographically targeted to please every one (and no one).

Sylvester Stallone is filming a new episode of his "Rambo" action series, but Mark Wahlberg has beaten him to the punch with Shooter, a preposterous gut buster that follows the formula so closely it would probably lose a plagiarism suit.

An innocuous waste-of-time.

So bloated, self-righteous and exploitative, it's hard to imagine anyone staying to the end, much less demanding a sequel.

It's hard to imagine how the movie year could possibly produce a more annoyingly stupid movie. It's so witless, broadly played and insulting to anyone's intelligence that it's almost as offensive, in its own way, as "Jackass: The Movie."

The dismal high school comedy Charlie Bartlett has the look, feel and sentiment of a made-for-video cheapie that might have been grudgingly whipped together by Robert Downey Jr. as some sort of court-ordered community service project for his many drug busts.

Where "The Cat" book was anarchistic but ultimately sweet-spirited, this movie is ugly, dumb and colossally mean-spirited.

Falls disastrously flat.

It should have been a cut above the usual teen comedy. But it touches the same old bases in the same old dumb ways.

An excruciating rehash that has virtually none of the wit and charm of the original.

It is a foul-mouthed British underworld comedy so they may be hoping it will attract the hip audience of films like "Snatch" and "Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels."

A pathetic sports comedy that aspires to be a college-football version of "Major League" and doesn't even get close. [27 Sept 1991]

There's a huge subplot that makes absolutely no sense at all and, in the end, the only thing the movie has going for it is Diesel's Neanderthal charm.

It's an unimaginative, mean-spirited affair that makes you hate yourself for laughing at it, and it's so devoid of anything close to wit, subtlety or sophistication that it stands as damning evidence that Hollywood has surrendered wholesale to stupidity and crassness.

A sleazy, uninspired, pathetically unfunny sex farce.

It comes off as tedious, pretentious, self-indulgent, talky and so garbled it might have been improvised by the actors.

The film's one saving grace is Ledger (Mel Gibson's son in "The Patriot").

It has the low-budget look and feel of an indie dating comedy -- and not a very good one at that.

The script and direction by Irish filmmaker Mary McGuckian is just deadly.

As a director, Duchovny is in big trouble every frame of the way. His characters ring false, his scenes seem improperly motivated in a glaring way, and his distasteful obsession with imagery of unflushed cigarette butts bobbing in a toilet is beyond inexplicable.

His characters and his situations all ring false, and his movie just seems painful and pointless. [12 Jan 1996]

Wants to be an offbeat, hard-edged, inspirational sports movie, but it misses its target by a country mile.

Many regular moviegoers will be appalled by its gleeful crudity and saddened by the spectacle of three icon stars mugging through a farce that's not that many notches above "Jackass: The Movie."

As dreary an hour-and-a-half as you could ever want to spend at the movies.

Since the expensive new movie version of the popular video game, Tomb Raider, is very true to its origins, it's a colossal bore.

Weekend at Bernie's II stands as just about the best argument I've seen in a long time that the Motion Picture Association of America's rating system is a complete farce. [10 July 1993]

As a thriller, Next goes a certain distance on Cage's sad-sack charm and sense of humor, but it does nothing with its intriguing premise, and it's mostly just one more tedious and progressively dumb collection of Hollywood action clichés.