William Arnold

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

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

More mediocre than magical.

As always with Stone, the film has some gritty performances and a certain likable audacity.

It's too quick, too pat.

Keanan, a competent young actress, has several strong and quite believable scenes of conflict with Ladd that make the movie work as a compelling relationship drama in its exposition half. But these scenes are soon forgotten as the script moves into non-stop suspense and terror. [20 Apr 1990]

In many ways this is an extraordinary movie: there's probably never been such a portrait of a major star in the grip of old age.

The film is not very convincing as sociology, but it is mildly amusing as comedy, has an unpolished charm to its visuals and performances, and showcases so many rock songs on its soundtrack that it qualifies as a musical. [19 Apr 1991]

Poetic Justice is much more self-indulgent and self-consciously arty and shows [Singleton's] directorial inexperience in almost every scene. [23 Jul 1993]

Ends badly, with a clumsy, nihilistic coda that leaves one uncertain how to feel about the story, confused as to what point has been made and not at all convinced that the new South Africa will be that much different from the old one.

This documentary fails to grasp AIDS as a theme.

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]

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]

Too much of the humor falls flat. Thomas' numerous chase sequences through the streets, over the rooftops and through the airways of Budapest seem numbingly repetitive, and the script's reliance on castration gags betrays its overall lack of imagination.

It's an unpleasant experience, and a long one, that gets more morose and melodramatic as it goes along.

Has good intentions and the element of surprise -- it's never quite clear where it's going at any given point.

Neither (Gooding nor Ulrich) has the distincitve spark of an action hero, and their Butch and Sundance repartee falls so consistently flat that you end up feeling a little embarrassed for them.

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

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.

It's well-acted by a likable cast and is well-intended, but it misses: It doesn't come off as the powerful socio-environmental statement it wants to be.

First there was "Lionheart," with Jean-Claude Van Damme as a young innocent who gets caught up in the nefarious business; then "The Big Man," an Irish film with Liam Neeson in the same predicament, and now "Gladiator." This latest clone is probably the best of the trio in terms of acting and production values, but if you've seen one you've seen them all. And they're all essentially one long sequence of people pounding each other to hamburger, interspersed with cliches. [6 March 1992]

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.

Visually impressive but exceedingly unpleasant little nail-biter.

Despite Sheen's earnestness - and despite the movie's obvious good intentions - the script is confused and unfocused, and clumsily borrows elements of movies like From Here to Eternity and Bridge Over the River Kwai without any of those classics' higher meaning. [18 Jan 1991]

Step Up never quite does fly: its dance routines are low-voltage, the star chemistry is weak, the characters are clichés and the movie is practically an instant remake of Dewan's other '06 dance musical, "Take the Lead," which told the story better.

Hong Kong superstar Chow Yun-Fat is so charismatic in his second Hollywood outing, The Corruptor, that he almost makes us forget that the movie itself is one of the more pretentious, muddled and incompetent action films to come along in some time. [12 Mar 1999]

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 bogus Seattle setting creates an additional problem for local moviegoers. Because we know Seattle doesn't have a subway, giant FBI building or newspapers called Telegraph or Tribune, we're jarred out of the story so regularly that it leaves us slightly punch-drunk.

Despite several touching scenes, the script comes perilously close to being maudlin and, while competent, Polley doesn't have the flair to make anything special out of her big role.

Surreal, vaguely amusing, European-made drama.

A series of Grand Guignol skits played for mean-spirited laughs.

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.

If they gave an Oscar for the most unnecessary movie of the year, the award for 1993 would have to go to "Point of No Return," the latest product of Hollywood's current mania for remaking successful recent foreign films. It's not that this movie is such an awful rehashing of "La Femme Nikita," Luc Besson's stylish French thriller that was the biggest foreign-language hit of 1990 in the United States. It's that the first movie had such high visibility and is still so fresh in our minds, and this Americanized version is so totally the same film (except for the ending, it's virtually scene for scene the same) that it seems like a criminal waste of $30 million. [19 March 1993]

DeVito definitely has a gift for absurd black humor that kicks in here and there, but Adam Resnick's script is slavishly mean-spirited.

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

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.

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 mystery is never very compelling, Paul McGuigan's direction tends to be obvious and flat, many of the characters are stagy and unconvincing, and Bettany doesn't have anywhere near the star power to hold the movie together.

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.

There's no real wit or cleverness to the script.

The movie never gets off the ground. Kaufman's script is never especially clever and often is rather pretentious.

While Madison is earnest and inoffensive, it offers no surprises, few fascinating characters and a hackneyed script.

Morrow and Linney are gifted, extremely likable actors, and the movie has some ingratiating moments and a seductive soundtrack. But there's a by-the-numbers inevitability to every scene, and it never clicks into place to be anything special.

The writing here is truly dismal.

It never quite takes off.

Not terrible, but distinctly disappointing, not nearly as engaging or thrilling as its premise seems to promise.

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

Like D.O.A., Against All Odds, No Way Out and other recent remakes of film noir classics, this overblown and heavy-handed film is just one more reminder of how much more thoughtful and entertaining movies used to be. [21 Sep 1990]

Yes, you've seen this movie a hundred times before, and "The Cutting Edge" is even more annoying than most predictable sports movies because it was so obviously shot on the cheap: the overall production values are as low as any film released by a major studio this year. [27 March 1992]

It's a strange and strangely unaffecting little drama -- but played very flat, with no particular emotional impact sought or achieved.

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.

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]

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.

The best thing -- maybe the only good thing -- about the expensive sci-fi movie, Jumper, is its high-concept premise, which gives its hero the power of teleporting himself anywhere on the globe in the blink of an eye: from the Coliseum of Rome to the North Pole.

Outrageously confident and wearing a kilt through the mayhem, Jackson proves once again that he has few equals in bringing off a broad, over-the-top lead.

Makes a serviceable summer shoot-'em-up, but it's surprisingly trashy and rather stupid, and its efforts toward being a gripping military drama in the Tom Clancy tradition are fairly pathetic.

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.

Williams' self-conscious and rather bland performance never comes close to bringing his character to life.

It disrespects Seattle. Not only is this yet another filmed-in-Vancouver movie that's supposed to be set here, it takes place in a blinding rainstorm of the kind only a Hollywood rain machine can make. As we all know, it never rains like that in Seattle.

The premise clicks, the stars couldn't be more likable, and It Takes Two is as cute and imaginatively directed a family movie as we've had all year. [17 Nov 1995]

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 emoting doesn't mix well with the comedy and action, of course, and the best that can be said of the film is that it's marginally entertaining, and (for Murphy) reasonably inoffensive. But he's competent enough to make us suspect he might be surprisingly good if he ever did get a real Denzel Washington part. [17 Jan 1997]

The movie also qualifies as a kind of low-rent, male version of "Dreamgirls," but -- while many of the numbers are pleasant -- it doesn't have the moxie to work as a musical.

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's endlessly confusing.

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.

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

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

It is relatively suspenseless and often distastefully crude.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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]

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.

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

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

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]

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

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

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.

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 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]

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.

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.

It's an abysmal movie.

This retread has been bloated far beyond its B-movie origins, beefed up with more characters and an all-star cast, stripped of any real suspense and loaded down with music cuts and one-liners aimed at pleasing a crowd of rowdy male teenagers.

It's a by-the-numbers action affair, and one that is considerably more mean-spirited and humorless than the norm. [4 Aug 1995, p.29]

The film is a dud in the tradition of such weak horror sequels as "Exorcist II" and "Dracula's Dog."

There's not an authentically scary moment in it.

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]

Every swing of its plot is preposterous, it stumbles to a trick climax that any regular moviegoer will figure out in the first 10 minutes, and the ending is so absurdly unmotivated that it plays like a slap in the face.

An uneasy mix that's too long, too confusing and too undramatically paced to be consistently gripping, and so blatantly panders to teenagers.

To be truthful, the movie is not much, even by the limited standards of the genre. It's played almost too broadly for its own good. [07 Nov 1992]

Sandler and Barrymore generate some believable, if low-voltage, chemistry: they're both so shallow and conceited and dingy that you think -- yes! -- in real life, these two people probably would go for each other in a second.

Doesn't have any of the creepy suspense that graced the first "Friday" movies, and very little of the Daliesque dream imagery of the early "Nightmares." It's just a slam-bang succession of gross-out mutilations, played for giggles.

So full of limp slapstick silliness and stock characters that it's hard to stay awake through it.

Dempsey also needs some fashion advice. As always, he sports his trademark five o'clock shadow in every scene (which in itself is excessive). But with Dempsey at age 42, it's beginning to make his face look more sinister than sexy, less Dr. McDreamy, more Richard Nixon.

For fans of Rosie O'Donnell, Another Stakeout is also noteworthy as the first real starring vehicle for the fast-rising, dead-pan comic. But she seems awkward as a lead and never very funny. You get the sense that her considerable talent might be better suited to television, stand-up comedy and supporting roles. [23 July 1993]

The two central performances are competent but uninspired -- and annoyingly mannered. Pearce's Warhol is a one-note, irresponsible villain and Miller's Sedgwick is a shallow, pretentious party girl who chain-smokes her way through every scene.

Director John McTiernan is normally a competent director but he's simply not at his best here. He shows little flair for comedy, his performances are one-dimensional, and his action sequences are predictable and sometimes amazingly sloppy. [18 Jun 1993, p.5]

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

The movie around Stallone is fairly dreadful, so overly stylized and poorly written that it's always a struggle to stay oriented.

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

New director John Moore just doesn't have original director Richard Donner's filmmaking flair, so the same scenes done the same way on phony-looking Prague locations without the benefit of Jerry Goldsmith's Oscar-winning score just seem terminally slow and flat.

A monstrous disappointment.

An undistinguished treasure-hunting epic that rips off the 1977 movie, "The Deep," in virtually every frame. It's pretty to look at, but so low-voltage and instantly forgettable that it's hardly worth anyone's time.

Madonna herself is not so much terrible as merely uninvolving. She's quite credible as the harpy of the first act, but she can't pull off the transition and the spark that makes a movie star instantly sympathetic.

The movie's one saving grace is Olyphant ("Live Free and Die Hard," HBO's "Deadwood"), whose sociopathic elegance is gradually winning, and whose dry, monotonic, Eastwood-like delivery of one-liners is frequently, if perhaps unintentionally, very funny.

The movie is a misfire.

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.

But the movie is mostly just bad, and probably the nadir of Pakula's otherwise distinguished career. As played by Kline and Mastrantonio, victim and wife here are just too dumb to be even remotely sympathetic; and the script is so predictable and yet so utterly preposterous every step of the way that it insults the intelligence of even the most undiscerning moviegoer. [16 Oct 1992]

As a thriller it's dull and incomprehensible; as a romance it's empty and emotionally uninvolving; and as a character study it's strangely repulsive.

Good performances are mostly wasted. Phoef Sutton's adaptation of the Abrahams' novel is poor, it works to an absurdly unlikely and dramatically dishonest must-hit-a-home-run conclusion, and - though it tries here and there - it has absolutely nothing new to say on the subject of fan obsession. [16 Aug 1996. p.30]

Lively but incredibly dumb.

As weak a star vehicle as Hollywood has cranked out this millennium.

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]

If, like me, you haven't read this book, the movie makes little sense, and has zero inspirational kick. It's just a depressing parable about a fellow who sinks lower and lower in life until he figures out a nebulous new way to sell God to the masses.

Does have one saving grace, however. As Nick's long-suffering wife, Blanchett gives the movie some badly needed charisma, and its one point of sympathy -- even nobility.

No movie that stars Sean Connery can be completely worthless but Medicine Man comes about as close to it as anything the actor has done in a long time - probably since Meteor in 1979. [07 Feb 1992]

For 12-year-old boys, period.

Above all, Kranks lacks that basic kernel of credibility that even a goofy farce needs to work.

The cast tries hard and a sprinkling of laughs results, but the project is defeated by a concept that is not very novel, a script that is not especially witty, direction that is neither sharp nor insightful and one-note characters that are simply not very interesting.

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.

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.

The movie also has a supernatural element: the leader of the renegades (Eric Schweig) turns out to be a sorcerer with occult powers. It's very clumsy, and speaks to the pandering streak in Howard that has always prevented him from being a truly first-rate film artist.

Producer Barker (who is only credited with the story idea for the original), director Bill Condon (filling in for the original's Bernard Rose) and his writers have crammed this movie so full of killings and razzle-dazzle MTV imagery that it has very little of what made the first Candyman so effective: genuine suspense. [17 Mar 1995]

The film never kicks in as a character study or a star vehicle.

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

Smith has badly overextended his modest filmmaking gifts.

An exceedingly dull retro-weepie.

It's hard to imagine how anyone could sit through this thing except squirming critics and violence addicts in need of a particularly gruesome fix.

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

Progressively sabotaged by poor technical quality, terrible plotting, a glaring lack of directorial skill and finesse, scenes that have no credibility and/or motivation and an astounding sloppiness to its historical detail.

Somehow the screwball concoction does not jell. The stars are pleasant but unexciting, the goofy ensemble has a few moments of hilarity but never catches fire, the laughs are very scattered and the film's title is a self-fulfilling prophecy.

The movie is just grindingly by-the-numbers: an uninspired brew of all the clichés of the kidnap-thriller genre, liberally seasoned with brutality, stirred at adrenaline-rush speed by a director with a heavy hand and very little imagination.

Numbingly predictable and repetitive non-stop action.

In the end, there's also something distinctly distasteful about a movie in which the central figure casts himself as noble martyr while character-assassinating his parents.

Quickly becomes an endurance test: like watching an old Carol Burnett skit that's not working, or a high school play that's trying to be bad.

A resounding dud.

When, in its eventful final act, Merhige finally reveals what this thing is REALLY all about, it comes not with any blissful storytelling satisfaction but a grinding sense that this strange movie is a structural mess.

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.

The cumulative effect of the movie is repulsive and depressing.

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.

The film's deliberate pace, its constantly confusing structure, its thematic vagueness and its clumsy and often embarrassingly amateurish Garden of Eden sequences combine to make The Loss of Sexual Innocence at best, a tough sit; at worst, a self-consciously arty parable of a self-indulgent filmmaker. [30 Jun 1999]

A poorly written collection of comic-book movie cliches that offers nothing new to the genre, generates very little in the way of action thrills and plays like a self-important, humorless rip-off of "Kill Bill."

Johnny Suede seems in every way a pale imitation that is so vacuous and self-consciously hip that it just fades into nothingness. [13 Nov 1992]

The film's technological selling point -- having a computer-animated Scooby in a mostly live-action world -- is strangely unimpressive. In fact, it's virtually unnoticeable: a testament perhaps to the audience's increasing knowledge that in today's CG-driven Hollywood, all movies are cartoons.

A sad, sad, sad, sad rip-off.

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

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

Legends of the Fall is one of those movies that is so sloppy and so poorly written and so clumsily directed that every dramatic scene seems to either insult your intelligence or come off as being unintentionally hilarious. [13 Jan 1995]

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.

The movie is just this side of terrible. It misses all the charm and fun of the original. Allen's mugging is incorrigibly unfunny.

Surprisingly, "North" fails most miserably on the level of children's parable. It has no solid emotional core to which an audience can relate: It doesn't touch the heart or come close to communicating a moral. It's just silly and trite and a colossal waste of time. [22 Jul 1994]

Stiller and Black have the chemistry of fingernails-on-blackboard and the movie is disastrously unfunny.

It is so contrived and utterly stupid in every way that it surely must be the nadir of the genre.

Terrible in a terrible way: It's pretentious, incomprehensible and just numbingly dull.

It doesn't have the imagination or daring to make a full turn to self-parody.

Universal Pictures has a lot of gall to pick up a movie as thoroughly awful as Empire and -- with a straight face and a $20 million or so ad campaign -- thrust it on the holiday movie market as if it were a significant piece of filmmaking.