William Arnold

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

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.

The movie is so surreal it's just not very involving. As an action extravaganza, it's busy but dull.

Paranoid Park is a movie about its teen hero's inability to express his feelings: to himself, to his parents, to his friends and, unfortunately, to the audience.

While Keira Knightley brightens things up as Guinevere, the casting is otherwise lackluster.

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

Anyone in the market for an overblown and totally mindless adventure-comedy will certainly get his money's worth.

The Man Without a Face also manages to be an expression of Gibson's well-known political and sexual conservatism. It goes to some lengths to pay homage to John Wayne (three times) while the anti-war left of the '60s is brutally caricatured as a bunch of effete snobs, and the women in this movie are just in the way. [25 Aug 1993, p.c1]

It's never consistently funny enough to work as a comedy and never forthright enough to be a successful relationship drama. And, like a lot of films made by directors whose apprenticeship was served in shorts, it is so slight it never quite feels like a feature, more like a half-hour film that has been padded out to fill a feature length. [02 Mar 1990]

Some of the scenes are gorgeous, but "Papaya" is so passionless and empty it has no real impact. [04 Feb 1994]

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.

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

The second-class status of women in Korean society is a reminder of Confucianism's dark side. For all its pretty cinematic images and well-meaning bows to a vanishing literary tradition, this movie is a celebration of that dark side.

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

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

Seems like very tame stuff, with little in the way of graphic sex and all the baggage of a run-of-the-mill art-house costume drama.

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.

A fairly routine heist drama and a never especially believable puzzle film.

It has its charms, but fails to strike a similar emotional chord.

It's simply not a very good movie. Its story line is populated with so many characters and meaningless names that it's nearly impossible to follow, and its author's message doesn't amount to much more than a cry of despair.

There's not a vaguely sympathetic character in sight; Kureishi ultimately seems prudishly disapproving of his heroine's last gasp of sexual adventure; and what another writer might have found liberating and healing, he finds distasteful and destructive.

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.

Reportedly, Lucas has been tinkering with this "director's cut" for nearly two years, so its sound and visual elements -- which were fairly impressive to begin with -- have been markedly enhanced, while new digital backgrounds give the film a more epic scale. Still, it's an extraordinarily unengaging and tedious affair.

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.

In the end, it's just a pointless downer.

With the original stage cast, the film is doggedly faithful to the play but has failed to translate it into much of a film.

This documentary fails to grasp AIDS as a theme.

Its heart is in the right place and it resists the temptation to junk up the story, but Depp does nothing with his character and the movie has little of the unique wit or panache that would make it appealing to an older-than-10 audience.

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.

A fairly hypocritical exercise -- and one that's so flamboyant and overbearing that it comes perilously close to being a classic awful.

It's vintage Moore: on one level the courageous act of a gutsy journalist, and, on another, a callously unfair and self-serving spectacle that makes Moore seem like a big bully, and puts his audience into the position of a vigilante mob.

It is preachy, didactic and heavy-handed as only an Oliver Stone movie can be. And yet ... and yet... despite all this, the film has an undeniable cumulative power. [20 Dec 1991]

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]

You've already seen this movie, right? Just a few months ago. It was called "The Score."

Haskell comes off as a jerk -- but Mark somehow looks even worse: not just insincere but weak, vain and vindictive.

For all its f/x pageantry, it is rather tired, as if it's the third sequel of a franchise, not the initial episode.

One lousy little movie -- utterly devoid of any real originality or charm.

It's a much more interesting and engrossing film than its somewhat nefarious reputation may indicate -- though, granted, elements of it are very hard to take, and it finally leaves you feeling pretty down and out.

Fails to be anything special. It makes passable preteen entertainment but comes off as clunky and heavy-handed in most of the places it should be graceful and enchanting.

Unfortunately, director John McNaughton cannot give the script the stylistic unity, black humor or plausibility it needs to rise above an incurably adolescent macho sex fantasy. [5 Mar 1993, p.6]

Ultimately emotionally flat and eminently forgettable.

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

The masochistic brutality it's selling still seems glaringly out of step with the current mood of the country.

The finished film, while competently acted and staged, has missed the high mark Spacey set for it. It's self-important, tedious and ultimately pointless, with absolutely none of the sardonic wit that remains the most memorable feature of "American Beauty."

After its irresistible first act, Owning Mahowny loses its energy and focus very fast.

Ostensibly a love story, the film is also handicapped by Téchiné's strong gay sensibility and clear lack of romantic interest in his characters.

It was also a miscalculation to make the film so sexually explicit. It doesn't particularly serve the story and, for all his gifts, Macy is just not the kind of actor most people want to see in a whirl of sweaty, naked sex.

Greenstreet captures all the hubbub on film but, while he makes the point that we are indeed a house divided, he can't quite persuade us that this particular situation is a metaphoric example of our national malaise.

A botched job: the various relationships and personal histories of the characters are never made clear, the last act is glaringly disjointed, the writing and direction are all over the map.

Each star has his moments, and the supporting cast is good, especially Walken, playing one of his less extreme characters; Jane Seymour as his promiscuous wife; and the stunning Rachel McAdams as their daughter and Wilson's love interest.

Most of its characters come off as being one-dimensional and stereotypical, and the film's sensibility leaves a very bad taste in the mouth.

Fascinates by its very premise: the fact that, on the basis of a Web site logo, these two bozos could so easily pass themselves off as important officials.

The film probably should have been a comedy. It would be a lot more cathartic - and a lot more entertaining - to laugh at the grim modern world of Falling Down than it is to have a heavy-handed filmmaker rub our faces in the hopelessness of it all. [26 Feb 1993, p.14]

The movie is sporadically funny in an anarchistic way. But Cho and Penn don't have the needed personality or comic identity to sustain a franchise and their non-drug humor is so crude and scatological that -- to say the least -- it leaves a very bad taste in the mouth.

But the main reason you might find the film a bad trip is that its 30-year-old Holden Caulfield-type hero is so harrowingly unsympathetic: unpleasant, unappealing, self-pitying.

Every frame of the way, it's eminently clear that Primer is the work of an engineer, not a film- maker.

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.

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

Ponderously plotted, poorly cast, visually undistinguished and devoid of any real verve or charm.

While all the "Mission" plots are convoluted and slightly preposterous -- the keyword in the title is "Impossible" -- the latest is just this side of insultingly stupid. The longer you think about it, the less sense it all makes.

Mystery Men must have seemed magically goofy on storyboards, but has somehow turned into unappealing mush by the time it made it to the screen.

A clumsy and incompetent thriller for nine-tenths of its length, but it has an ending so clever and that goes so wildly against expectations it almost exonerates the film.

Visually impressive but exceedingly unpleasant little nail-biter.

Even with the good performances, the paces are just agonizingly familiar. [24 Oct 1997]

It all comes together to be a remarkably dull movie.

The truth is this is an amateurish student film, marred by poor sound recording, stereotyped characters, heavy-handed direction, a mild racism (the two white characters - a shallow yuppie and an insensitive Jewish teacher - are harsh caricatures), and an unconvincing, tag-on happy end. [16 Apr 1993]

For 12-year-old boys, period.

All these good elements have resulted in a movie that is not so much awful as mediocre, disconnected and ultimately incomprehensible.

A fairly loathsome and shallow movie about loathsome and shallow people, but it's almost worth catching to see star Christian Bale chew up the scenery.

When its big plot switcheroo comes, it proves to be not such a great idea after all: It actually weakens, rather than strengthens, the premise, and dissipates, rather than intensifies, the drama.

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.

It's an interesting and likably ambitious movie with an ensemble of mostly engaging character vignettes, but, sadly, it misses its mark.

Despite some moments, the movie stubbornly fails to be the kind of sparkling ensemble piece one would expect from its credits -- and the fault seems to lie squarely with Fry's unfocused script, lackadaisical direction and conceptual sleight of hand.

Fairly incompetent as a musical and rather silly as a drama.

A fairly depressing experience.

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

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]

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.

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]

An exceedingly dull retro-weepie.

Smith has badly overextended his modest filmmaking gifts.

The film's first-time director, the TV-commercial-trained Marcel Langenegger, is out to emulate Hitchcock with dashes of "Vertigo," "Strangers on a Train" and more. But his homage is uninspired and disconnected, and his film is a bore.

That play has made it to the big screen, but it has come so late in the moribund body-switching comedy cycle that it seems like a tired cliche, and a big-budget production and star cast just can't seem to breathe any life into it. [10 Jul 1992]

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.

Never quite rises above its one-joke situation.

All told, this thing has to be one of the dullest caper movies ever made.

A clumsy, heavy-handed and unnecessarily sordid occult thriller that somehow has managed to generate a big pre-release buzz.

I walked out of it feeling much the same way I did after "The Cat in the Hat" and "The Polar Express" -- jarred by its excess, undernourished by its lack of heart and bored by its lack of originality.

Sadly, it's still a plodding affair that's low on plausible character motivation and compelling action scenes, and it's still not much of a showcase for its star, Charlton Heston.

As usual, Albert Finney gives a towering performance in his new movie, "A Man of No Importance," and, as usual, the movie around his performance is not much. [03 Feb 1995]

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

Its sex is brutal, its depiction of human nature is crude and pessimistic, and its climax -- which involves animal mutilation -- is enough to ruin your whole week.

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.

As directed and produced by Steve Miner, the film is gory (eyes gouged out, a tongue bitten out, children murdered), but it also features better than usual actors (including Richard E. Grant as a 17th-century warlock-hunter who also jumps into the future) and has such a giddy sense of humor that it's hard to ever get too indignant about its splatter violence. [12 Jan 1991]

It's fun in places, and moves like a bullet, but it's also clumsy and mostly quite routine - and seems a particular letdown considering it was made with a blank check from 20th Century-Fox and the services of John Travolta at the peak of his career. [9 Feb 1996, p.25]

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]

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]

There is action galore (the deaths, by my rough count, may run somewhere in the triple digits). It's very cartoonish and not upsettingly explicit. But it's all so predictable and pointless that it quickly becomes monotonous, lulling the viewer into numbness, apathy, and perhaps even a peaceful sleep. [20 Sep 1996]