The dramatic content in Memento is as blank as Leonard's post-traumatic mental state.

Nolan pushes the twilight-zone atmosphere so hard that it loses its capacity for mystery. When it's not assaulting us with jolting audiovisual expressions of fatigue, this movie plays like a pedestrian response to David Lynch's effortlessly eerie "Twin Peaks."

Try as I might, I could not love it, because as a piece of cinema, Into Great Silence would try the patience of a saint.

Unlike other movies about unpleasant characters, "In the Company of Men," for example, Chuck & Buck doesn't have that sharp observational edge.

Liam's deck is stacked. It's too bleak and filled with abrasive characters who don't deserve our sympathy to reveal much new about the human condition.

Isn't serious enough to fulfill its ambitions, or funny enough to compensate for its failures.

The result is a flabby, episodic phantasmagoria.

It's no compliment to say a movie is "all of a piece" if the piece is all worn out. For all its surface harshness, this movie is a star vehicle at once rickety and cozy.

The Hangover is like an infernal comedy machine. Surrender your soul to its foul mesh of cheap cleverness and vulgarity. and you howl like a delighted demon. Resist, and you feel all sense and sensibility being crushed in its cogs.

A hollow excuse for an erotic mystery.

The film itself is an exercise in frustration.

You have to identify pretty strongly with suffering artistes to find anything to root for in The Science of Sleep.

The only hope for Inglourious Basterds is that audiences will embrace it the way the Broadway crowd did "Springtime for Hitler": because it's so bad they think it's good.

Revolutionary Road isn't just a failed literary adaptation. It's a failure of the worst kind: It doesn't even make you want to read Richard Yates' deservedly legendary book.

There's no irony within the film, but there's a whopping irony surrounding it. Just as Star Wars has finally ended, Rocky seems to be starting all over again.

Funny Games condescends to its audience like a pretentious, preachifying graduate student in post-modernism. It would help us out of the cultural quagmire we're drowning in, if only we could understand its highly convoluted and exclusive language. [29 May 1998, p.1E]

Aimless and unfocused.

Without Duvall, this movie would be as wet as Waterworld.

You won't believe the story director George Clooney and his goofball TV host are trying to sell. Really.

Manages to pretty much ignore all the strengths of the earlier film while exacerbating all its faults.

Margot at the Wedding is a Christmas gift for high-class depressives: a compendium of malaise fit for an L.L. Bean catalog.

Indeed, Scream is better than the average slasher film, as its advertisers insist. And, indeed, it is probably Wes Craven's best film, as they also insist. But that is a little like saying the pimple on the left side of your nose is "better" than the pimple on the right side.

Ends up neither fish nor fowl. It's a misanthrope's "E.T."

8 Women would probably be a looser, giddier salute to show-biz ideas of femininity if it were performed by eight drag queens.

American art movies rarely come fancier or emptier than Northfork, a down-home arabesque made of angel fluff.

If you put the word Tired first, it would perfectly describe the movie.

Overblown sanctimony and sentimentalism as corny as the Fourth of July.

Blessed with some outstanding performances, among them Ribisi's.

An only fitfully engaging L.A. soap opera.

Made is an amateur-hour buddy movie.

Takes a literary milestone of ambiguity and makes everything about it blisteringly obvious.

It's the strangest comic misfire yet from Wes Anderson.

With a grating combination of naivete and arrogance, The Green Mile consistently overplays its melodramatic material, including a portrait of a black man that is as breathtakingly offensive as it is earnest.

Shyamalan plows the same old ground of juiced-up surprise endings.

If it worked, The Fast and the Furious would put viewers in the same position as the policeman protagonist, attracted to speed but appalled by crime. Instead it sentences you to an hour and a half in a high-decibel limbo.

The Safety of Objects is just another stilted comic-dramatic essay examining the mold in the white bread.

An uninteresting take on a tired formula that is only occasionally funny and usually pretty gross.

You don't want to look at anything else when Zeta-Jones is on-screen.

Roos suffers from fallen archness in his interminable new movie Happy Endings. He wants to be mischievous and ambitious and "human," all at the same time. He ends up with delusions of tragicomic grandeur that leave an audience fed up and dissatisfied.

Perfume offers eau de crud.

The result is as flat as a year-old beer commercial.

The film's storytelling and image-making lack originality and vitality. Nothing sticks to your memory unless you come in with recollections of the book.

There's less here than meets the eye, not to mention the ear, nose, tongue and fingertip.

Needs a story.

Never persuasively dramatize the agony, ecstasy and intricacy of composing poetry. Without that aesthetic component, all you see is that Plath's hunger for life couldn't compete with her death wish.

This is a movie for genre fans only; there's not an aspect to it that should appeal to the rest of the world. It's neither original nor inventive, and while its young cast works hard, there's not even a standout performance worth recommending.

Hanks tries his hand at a king-size heartless comic role, and flubs it terribly. He looks slack and pasty and, what's worse, sounds slack and pasty.

Offers jaw-dropping visuals, but its troubling images of violence may cause this revolutionary effort to miss the evolutionary boat.

Will pop your eyes without tickling your funny bone.

The movie plays like a dunk-the-clown game at a carnival. Through intent or ineptitude, he sets up the Bush family and administrations as caricatures.

Smith appears to have poured his creative energy into the cheerful come-on of the title and left nothing in reserve for the movie. He fails to wring any memorable comedy from shoestring porno filmmakers because his own filmmaking is just as amateurish and slovenly.

It's hard to know what these stars are ready for after this fiasco. Maybe a fitness video.

Playing by Heart is a disheartening example of how episodic, prime-time- style storytelling has taken a stranglehold on Hollywood films, even at their most "independent." [22 Jan 1999]

The comedy of manners becomes strictly a comedy of bad manners.

There's way too much blarney in Evelyn.

It's not hell, but limbo, junior high-school style.

A mistaken message is a price a filmmaker pays when he tries to load weighty themes like the cycle of violence on an overgrown boy who scoots around on a bicycle.

The animals in Road Trip are pretty hilarious; as a five-minute short on cable TV's "Animal Planet," this film would be a stitch.

A pastiche of sadistic horror-movie cliches with minor traces of wit but major overflows of perversity.

It's disconcerting to see Ferrell, a master of macho psychosis, adopt the stop-and-go dithering of Woody Allen-style neurosis.

The low points in this movie aren't just catastrophic: they're bewildering.

A visionary sort of horror movie should ponder three words: "Bram Stoker's Dracula."

The desert is clean in Gerry, but it's also empty.

This film isn't the most awful comedy of the year (that would be Bride Wars or New in Town), but it may have the grossest antihero.

Rock Star neither touches a raw nerve nor garners any resonance as a period piece. You'd be better off renting "This is Spinal Tap."

Whatever spark the newer Precinct 13 has comes from its supporting players.

Kids will get antsy, wondering why their favorite characters disappear for long stretches of the film, while adults will wonder just when this scattershot approach to storytelling will congeal into something resembling coherence.

The movie is a premise in search of a comedy. Rather than flesh it out, the filmmakers put familiar glad rags on the skull and bones.

This new version may be closer to the Cole Porter biography, but it's hardly any more true to life. There is no life in this movie. It's a brittle contraption of a biopic.

The whole thing is too preciously conceived. [05 Feb 1993]

Sorry, Phantom, but the purple suit has got to go. No amount of buff bod can make an audience take a superhero in bright purple seriously...And while we're at it, that script has got to go, too. Screenwriter Jeffrey Boam apparently studied the first two "Indiana Jones" movies so thoroughly -- so that he could write "Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade" -- that he's carried many of the motifs to "The Phantom." The result is not breathtaking excitement, but rather a stunning lack of originality. [7 June 1996]

Luhrmann steals good ideas, fair ideas and terrible ideas - anything that once moved him when he was a little boy. He's turned Australia into a more-than-you-can-eat buffet of colorful kitsch.

The residents of Beauty Shop never quite gel. Instead of camaraderie, the feeling is one of bare tolerance.

The second movie, Dead Man's Chest, is everything you feared the first would be: a theme-park spectacle lasting 2 1/2 hours.

The film is hapless. The gap between the moviemakers' ambition and their wit is dizzying. It's as if they thought they were filming The Importance of Being Unimportant.

The problem with Allen's latest, The Curse of the Jade Scorpion, is "Not enough Double Indemnity."

So witless it wins most of its laughs when Czech-speaking characters spout obscenities that get translated into English subtitles.

Despite these flaws, people sick of gross-out films and teen-sex comedy may be so hungry for farce that they laugh.

It's as if the book itself has been locked up and institutionalized, forced to conform to a system that all but obliterates its own unique personality.

Disney is creatively bankrupt and bereft of ingenuity -- especially in its live-action films. [25 Dec 1998, p.8F]

The movie bobbles along on a weird, soft-edged sarcasm.

Irreversible, though, is not a Kubrickian head trip. All Noe has come up with is a turn-on for sadists.

Look, I love dogs. But this film tried my patience almost beyond endurance.

This film isn't an enjoyable martial-arts extravaganza like "District B-13" or the "Transporter" films.

Avary has taken a pig's ear of a book and turned it into a pig's ear of a movie.

The movie is a corpse. It's a fish that stinks from the head. They ought to bury it in the Jersey Meadowlands. [25 Dec 1992]

There's not a moment in Boiling Point that could be said to achieve a narrative temperature of 212 degrees Fahrenheit. Boil? This limpid pool of cliche and predictability never even bubbles.

As each male-female relationship works itself out in ways either contrived or predictable, here's betting you wind up more disappointed than enlightened.

A movie made at wits' end. There are four or five authentic laughs in the whole 170-minute extravaganza.

Solondz is still stuck in an adenoidal whine.

If this version had been called The Poseidon Adventure, audiences could have sued for truth in packaging.

Because this Four Feathers is an utter botch, it might make savvy viewers feel that the subject matter is hopeless.

As ugly, excessive and vulgar as "The Usual Suspects" was stylish, subtle and suave.

Heaven knows what the suits at Disney were thinking, for what they ended up with was a bland Jackie Chan movie and a lifeless travelogue.

At some point the foul language, lascivious sight gags, references to sex toys, violence against animals and cruelty toward children simply ceases to be funny.

The Emperor's Club is a beautiful fraud -- as gracefully proportioned as a Christopher Wren academy, yet as devoid of content as a prep-school promo film.

A gigantic mess.

Catherine Breillat's pretentious, meandering, self-indulgent portrait of a libidinously deprived young woman is nothing more than pornography tricked out as feminist parable.