William Arnold

There's no disguising the fact that, beneath all its talk, this is a very traditional, very predictable romance; it's sorely in need of some comic relief; and, if you're a non-smoker, you will get very tired of its heroine blowing smoke in your face.

In some ways, De Niro does a competent job in his second directorial effort but his characterizations are clumsy, and his members of the Power Elite always seem less real people than stick figures in a propaganda movie.

The characters are uniformly repulsive, the cliche-ridden script builds no real tension or psychological interest, and the bottom line is that Lee's innovative but ultimately tedious and even ludicrous MTV-style visuals add absolutely nothing to the story dynamics.

Ferrell, of course, has his moments. But he doesn't have an engaging "center" as a comedian.

It never generates much interest in its story or affection for its characters, and it's simply not half as funny as it needs to be.

It is relatively suspenseless and often distastefully crude.

It's just one more competent but routine, midlevel ($70 million) late-summer action movie filled with the usual explosions, shootouts and male bonding.

The cruel simplicity of the atrocity is made needlessly chaotic by artless camerawork that swishes rapidly back and forth across the action, to the accompaniment of a syrupy soundtrack.

It's a movie brimming with good intentions, solid production values and searing performances. However, it never quite clicks into place with any real satisfaction.

The movie itself cannot begin to match its delicious high concept. It's offensively funny in places but it can't sustain itself for a feature length running time and it's not nearly as clever or as fun as it should be.

It's in English, but the actors speak it with tortuous accents that are a constant struggle to understand and make them seem like foreigners in their own land. Spanish with English subtitles would have served this story much, much better.

Lacks the driving unity that gave "Gettysburg" its focus, dramatic arc, climax and catharsis.

Did it move me? And the answer is no. I thought it has a certain ghoulish, voyeuristic fascination, but I found it strangely remote and uninvolving on both emotional and spiritual levels.

When the film suddenly turns into "Rocky" -- as all boxing films of the past two decades invariably do -- it invalidates its theme.

There's also a terrific performance from Collette, who, in only a handful of scenes, wonderfully communicates the unusual resourcefulness of a demented woman who has spent her life assuming a succession of physical handicaps as a survival technique.

Sadly, it's a disappointment. Nicole Kidman could hardly be more enchanting in the lead, but the script is one of writer-director Nora Ephron's weakest.

Without the saving grace of comedy, Martin's natural abrasiveness is off-putting, and he just doesn't have the stuff of a romantic lead.

To be fair, Aronofsky has a knack for stylistic overkill, and his hammering onslaught is undeniably riveting, at first anyway.

Somehow the elements do not add up to by anything especially memorable.

Unfortunately, the goofiness never quite finds its groove. The romantic chemistry is tepid, the comedy misses as often as it hits, the picaresque plot keeps dogging down and even actors as skilled as Platt, Irons and Lena Olin fail to register strongly in their roles.

The air of deja vu is thick as molasses in Glory Road, a lively but overly slick and grindingly predictable sports drama.

Too dumb and improbable to even go into.

A rather dull movie.

In fact, when not kicking butt, (Li)'s kind of a blank spot in the center of the screen.

The script's labored efforts to push the proceedings into a thought-provoking military drama -- and draw some clear moral issue -- are, at best, flimsy.

The script (by Cheryl Edwards, who wrote "Save the Last Dance") is shallow and dumb, the conflict (success goes to Jackie's head) is especially unconvincing, and director Charles S. Dutton shamelessly allows his own small part (as Jackie's mentor) to hog the camera.

Its animation is simply glorious, but its story and characters are trite.

One more bloated effects-o-rama lumbering through a formula plot (super-villain out to rule the world) without much zest, imagination or awareness of its own absurdity.

It's so irrelevant, unambitious and lazy it almost seems to be thumbing its nose at the daring filmmaker Woody once was.

The film is your basic sensitive young people coming-of-age in the '60s formula piece. [29 Apr 1995]

Far from the worst movie of 2006, but it may be the most disappointing. It should have been wonderful -- a delicious tribute to classic Hollywood -- but it simply doesn't come off.

It's routine, TV sitcom fodder, but the supporting cast is better than average.

Predictable and agonizingly politically correct.

Definitely deserves points for trying to be something thought-provoking and different, but it doesn't really stand up to analysis and it comes off as a pretentious mess.

Some of it works, most of it doesn't. But the real problem of the movie is that it's so utterly lacking in freshness and originality. This is exactly the kind of formulaic indie gay comedy that was so overdone in the '80s and '90s that it became a film festival cliché.

It's overblown and greedy and feels like more of a merchandizing scheme than a movie.

It is strangely paced (especially in the beginning), always confusing to follow, and extremely awkward as a romance.

The real problem here is that director Krueger has no flair as a writer or a director for inspired screwball comedy.

Clearly not Zhang's forte, his directorial touch is neither light nor magical enough to bring off this kind of whimsy, his characters often seem contrived and unbelievable, and his movie comes off as slightly forced and naggingly unsatisfying.

Judd Apatow brings no cleverness or wit to his one-joke situation, and he can't give it the kernel of credibility that even a low comedy needs to sustain itself for a feature length.

It's a violent, R-rated action piece, but well directed, rather lavishly produced, filled with imaginative stunts, and it doesn't have a dull moment in it. [17 May 1991]

Adults will quickly tire of the dragon antics; kids will be bored by all the moralizing and faux metaphysics. [31 May 1996]

The numerous plot elements don't come together in the end. Even though we are gradually expected to sympathize with the plight of the murdering vigilante cop, the whole vigilante theme is suddenly dropped midway through the film. It seems to have no real place in the larger story, except as a clumsy and purposeless O.J. Simpson parallel. [26 Apr 1996]

Truly, this is a bad script.

The bad news is that Ferrell's modestly likable performance is the ONLY good thing about this misguided comedy that's so tiresomely written, badly acted by a stellar cast and ploddingly directed (by art-house whiz Marc Forster) that it just never quite gets off the ground.

A fairly depressing experience.

It's just never as gripping as it needs to be.

As hard as it tries to capture that blend of domestic comedy and paternal angst that made its predecessor a classic, it is still a pale shadow and a barely passable Steve Martin vehicle. [20 Dec 1991, p.10]

The movie depends on one of those big surprise endings for its effectiveness, but the script gives itself away in the first act.

It's a formula job all the way, filled with pratfalls, flying food, much male incompetence in the face of child-rearing realities, and a cast of violence-prone children on sugar highs who somehow turn into angels by the film's last sappy moments.

It all comes together to be a remarkably dull movie.

Never quite rises above its one-joke situation.

Next to "Bad Santa" or "Dr. Seuss' The Cat in the Hat," it's a paragon of sophistication.

Farrell is badly miscast as an ethnic Italian with an inferiority complex, the star-crossed love story has very little emotional pull, and even the (heavily CGI-enhanced) period atmosphere ultimately seems rather forced and self-conscious.

If you're in the market for a whimsical, incorrigibly weird movie that basically goes nowhere, try "Arizona Dream." But if you have little patience for self-indulgent movies that substitute scatter-gun blasts of surreal black comedy for dramatic structure and realistic characterization, steer clear of this curiosity from noted Yugoslav film-maker Emir Kusturica ("When Father Was Away on Business"). [9 Sept 1994]

It's an original and rather clever premise, but first-time director Chris Koch doesn't do anything with it.

It's hard to recall another time when the cross-purposes of two collaborating filmmakers of a major film has been quite so evident, or when the theme of the movie itself has been so totally schizophrenic -- half populist outrage, half Nazi.

It's not terrible, but it's mediocre and not much more than a string of cheesy sex gags.

Amateur, the fourth film of American independent filmmaker Hal Hartley, is by far his best - though, in the wake of "The Unbelievable Truth," "Trust" and "Simple Men," that is, admittedly, not saying much. [05 May 1995]

Witherspoon shines. She's never looked better, and she carries herself with both her usual comedic flair and a surprising elegance.

At 86 minutes, Sleuth '07 plays like a Cliffs Notes version of the original (which was skillfully adapted by Anthony Shaffer from his own hit play) with far too much of its pacing and delicious texture ruthlessly cut.

The futuristic thriller is overly familiar and never especially gripping -- and too somber and cerebral for the young action crowd -- but it looks terrific and is in no way an embarrassment.

Cult-favorite director Victor Salva ("Jeepers Creepers" I & II) is a competent visual storyteller and the film believes in itself so strongly (and with such a straight face) that it's hard not to halfway enjoy it.

But Medak never finds his groove in "Romeo." Every scene smacks of deja vu, the cynicism and irony become smothering, it's never funny or exciting enough to hold our attention, and it finally just collapses into the same pointless violence of "Gunmen" - including a scene in which a character is buried alive. [4 Feb 1994]

The new production is handsome and offers a few riveting moments, but it's basically a botched job that misses all the impact of both the original movie and the 1946 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by Robert Penn Warren that inspired it.

It wants to be both an art-film homage and a rollicking, outrageous sex farce, and it's not really enough of either to make an impression.

There are a handful of laughs, and maybe three solid scenes. Otherwise, it's an unfunny, relatively charmless, ultimately grueling excuse for a comedy that often plays like a 105-minute public service ad on why it's not a good idea to have children. [20 Dec 1996]

This harmless but mediocre enterprise was doomed to failure from the start. Hollywood magic can do a lot, but it can't raise the dead.

This ill-fitting Tuxedo is strictly off-the-rack.

The script consists largely of goofy little scenes in which various groupings of the four characters banter in that nervous, Woody Allen-ish, never particularly funny or endearing or believable dialogue style of the '90s dating movie.

It would be very possible for a reasonably intelligent person to sit through its tidal wave of imagery and not get this vision at all.

The filmmakers have wildly miscalculated the chemistry these real-life lovers generate on film.

Imparts its fair share of laughs but bogs down after a solid start and never makes anything special out of its premise.

This is still Reiner's worst movie since 1994's "North." Wilson is lackluster, the film's depiction of the collaborative process is (unlike "Adaptation") tortuously false, and it's so disrespectful to the realities of writing and publishing that it has no satiric bite.

Baldwin and Broderick each click in their roles and consistently rise above their material in every scene. But the movie around them falls flat and can't begin to sustain its premise.

An intriguing concept, a storybook vision life in the great age of trans-Atlantic travel, a fine Ennio Morricone score and a credible performance by Roth.

Most of the publicity for Cold Creek Manor seems to imply that it's an occult thriller, specifically a Stephen King-ish haunted house movie. But no. This is a severe case of mistaken identity: In fact, there's not a supernatural bone in the movie's body.

It’s a comedy, a romantic star vehicle, a thriller, a horror movie and a quasi-environmental parable that's calculated to appeal to all demographic groups. It's not enough of any one of these things to be particularly engaging.

It's very flimsy, the harrowingly unoriginal screenplay rings false in almost every dialogue exchange, and first-time director Lesli Linka Glatter paints her scenes with the broadest of strokes and a clunky, heavy-handed, TV sitcom sensibility. [20 Oct 1995]

Diaz is quite believable in the part, and gets solid support from Brewster, who is even more appealing as the adoring, wounded and somewhat vacuous younger sister.

Ford tries very hard to be eccentrically funny -- to the point of forced, slapsticky mugging -- but he looks terrible, his timing is way off and his character is so uptight, abrasive and unappealing that he makes miserable company.

Basically lives up to the old adage that the final work in a trilogy is invariably the weakest.

To its credit, the film has an engagingly bleak and minimalist look, and a brisk pace. But the chills are few. Every step seems contrived, predictable or unintentionally funny.

It is a fairly routine exercise in New Millennium movie mayhem.

The movie is never engaging on anything but a superficial level, and it gradually gets decidedly tiresome.

Conceptually, the film is unique - it's a kind of nostalgia movie within a nostalgia movie. [16 Apr 1999]

A redundancy, and a bore. The characters are harrowingly unsympathetic, the action sequences are by-the-numbers, and Carpenter's usual saving grace -- his sense of humor -- is nowhere in evidence.

Fans of figuring skating will enjoy much of the silliness, however, because its better moments have fun lampooning all the hoopla that surrounds the sport and there are cameos from the likes of Dorothy Hamill, Nancy Kerrigan, Brian Boitano, Peggy Fleming and Sasha Cohen.

But the movie doesn't quite work. In fact, despite some funny moments, "Honeymoon" has so many blown scenes and missed opportunities that it makes one suspect that Bergman may not be the best interpreter of his own material. [28 Aug 1992]

There's an enjoyably literate style here and some humorous moments.

Cliched, mostly routine and never especially satisfying.

It's an abysmal movie.

It's a colorful and exuberant but by-the-numbers and fairly charm-free concoction.

The film wants to be "The English Patient" but doesn't have the elements that made that film a classic: sensitivity, perfect casting, a unique visual style and, underlying its grand action romance, a stubborn sense of honesty.

A mildly amusing but forgettable and way-too-scatological black farce.

The Black Dahlia, looks so terrific and is filled with so many imaginatively showy sequences and masterful directorial touches that you almost don't notice that, in every other way, it's just not a very good movie.

The mock trailers are for impossibly schlocky Z-movies with titles like "Machete," "Don't Scream," "Thanksgiving" and "Werewolf Women of the S.S." They're by far the funniest part of the program, possibly because they're mercifully brief.

The script starts repeating its best gags about halfway through, and the direction gets ever broader as it goes along until the film finally loses all effectiveness as satire.