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.