It's just too bad that you can see everything coming from a mile away.

The result is an out-of-control, lost-in-the-funhouse experience.

Smith and Lawrence have great comic energy and for at least half an hour are sublimely enjoyable -- until the movie's spirit of bloated gargantuanism takes over. [7 April 1995, p.5]

Four Christmases works because of some genuinely funny setups, a pace that never dwells on one gag (or even one family) too long and a careful mix of slapstick and bawdy humor. But mostly, the film works because of the astonishing acting talent the filmmakers brought together to make it.

When Crews is onscreen, White Chicks is a film that fears nothing and no one. When he's not, it's a film too tentative and soft-hearted to scale the farcical heights to which it aspires.

Barf-bag baroque.

The movie's one bright spot is Gonzalez, a refreshingly natural young actor who needs to get out of B-movies.

As earnest as the performances are, something seems to be lost in the translation.

To be fair, Friedkin does amp up the tension when called for. If only it were all for some purpose, or in service to a story that actually went somewhere.

Tries to rock our world, but it regresses to a single-celled B-movie.

An overly gimmicky and fatally repetitive terrorist thriller that quickly wears out its welcome.

Was the Swedish director, Mikael Hafstrom, taking revenge on the American star system?

Nightwatch is passable stuff for undiscriminating fans of the ickier-the-better genre; for the rest of us, it offers nothing new. [17 Apr 1998]

In Schumacher's relentlessly arrhythmic and tone-deaf film, Gerard Butler plays the title role as if he were just plucked out of Monty Python's lumberjack chorus.

A raunchy, remorseless "Curious George."

The weirdly exhilarating thing about Wicker Park is the reckless abandon with which it embraces the convenience of coincidence, and then the extreme measures it takes to reassure the audience that it's not a movie about coincidence at all.

Blessedly unimportant, Fantastic Four cruises along on modest yet genuine comic-book pleasures.

Smashingly stupid.

The movie is a monument to egomania - and I don't mean Alexander's.

No visual style, amateur effects.

Not enough to keep Clockstoppers from turning viewers into clock-watchers.

Anna Faris, her deadpan comic timing still a joy to watch, returns as Cindy Campbell, one of two main holdovers from the first three movies.

A wholesome, headlong extravaganza - a sort of North by Northeast sans high style and erotic innuendo.

More of a sales pitch than a movie.

There's an honesty to the film that elevates it a cut above standard slasher fare.

Jack Frost can't possibly straddle its emotional shifts between morbidity and sheer nonsense. [11 Dec 1998]

Double Dragon may have its merits as a computerized contest of wits and strategy, but the movie is a stinker, directed with apathy (by newcomer Jim Yukich) and "written" by committee from any number of recycled movie plots. [05 Nov 1994]

Passed my popcorn-movie test. Using the vast, expensive technology of a big studio production, it roused enough cheap energy to drive me to eat a bag of popcorn fit for a circus animal and wash it down with a quart of Diet Coke.

The Cell is eye candy - but it could give your brain a bad case of indigestion.

Giamatti provides those small moments of triumph that Duets pretends to celebrate but instead stifles with its sense of superiority.

Peaceful Warrior fails pitifully at being transcendent. This New Age movie about living in the moment gets you looking at your watch and squirming in your seat.

There's a moving, complicated love story at the center of Angel Eyes. It's too bad a peripheral plot line draws attention away from it.

Swing Kids really doesn't go anywhere. [05 Mar 1993]

Fame has today's usual gritty form of slick to it, but in every other way it's an Amateur Hour and a half.

A gut-busting black-and-white culture clash comedy. It's not elegantly done. Some of the acting is too broad to enjoy. It has plot problems and racial-stereotype problems.

The only reason to see Nights in Rodanthe is to check in with Diane Lane.

The most refreshing thing about Man of the Year is its mingling of comedy and suspense with common decency. Levinson asks his countrymen not just to know their limits, but also to reach them.

Reprehensible.

A veritable clinic in irritation. Just thinking about it irritates me deeply.

The bad guys just seem like a bunch of X-Games rejects, and Blart's ingenuity proves way more effective than it has any right to be.

Fitfully thrilling.

Tries to be both poignant and wicked, and succeeds at neither.

As overstated and expository as a historical pageant, from the drippy music to a sputtering, running gag involving funky old jalopies to cliched speeches and teary-eyed deaths and a final voice-over crying out for peace. Why not add a song score and an exclamation mark in the title?

Arthur and the Invisibles tries way too hard.

Kids, except for the very youngest, are going to be bored.

The script gives the actors less of a chance than the dragons give to Homo sapiens.

Salma Hayek merrily struts off with most of Brett Ratner's wispy caper comedy.

Simply go out and rent the original. In the thin ranks of killer-power-tool flicks, it's still the standard to beat.

The serial-killer thriller of the week, should have gotten a life of its own instead of trying to steal it from Michael Pye's novel of the same name and several other movies.

At two hours, The Chronicles of Riddick is way too long for ridiculous.

A sword-and-sorcery saga that desperately wants to be another "Lord of the Rings," Eragon succeeds in being only the palest of imitations.

A feel-good us-against-them tale that panders mercilessly to its audience, yet displays a few moments of honest humor.

I know Empire is supposed to be a movie, but for a while, I thought I was listening to one of those talking books.

Children should enjoy Jungle Book 2 just fine. Adults will wonder why anyone bothered.

The apotheosis of adolescent junk. Every sequence spews or splats carnage-filled effects. It's over-the-top, but not pleasurably so -- it's calculatedly over-the-top. The only way to get off on it is to revel in its prodigal waste of materiel.

As disposable as aluminum cans without the promise of a cash return.

A mess.

Most of the film simply wallows in gangsta hyperbole - it's all bling bling, bang bang.

The problem with Confessions of a Shopaholic isn't conspicuous consumption. It's ostentatious idiocy.

Character-rich, but plot-poor.

Failed marital farce.

By the end, this movie's balancing act is the equivalent of network news' equal-time laws. The "fairness" becomes deadening.

The movie has a lot going for it, including wonderful sets and locations - in Bucharest, Romania! - that create a heightened-reality English hamlet with pub, church, manor and shops (make that shoppes!). And the lead actor, Ludwig, registers the growth spurts of the stripling hero with the sensitivity and precision of an emotional seismograph.

The movie annoyingly waits until the end to reveal the names of those experts who have been doing all the talking; it would have been nice to know these folks' qualifications first.

But worse, it never offers much of a mystery at all, for the identity of the killer arrives with no great surprise, and without a clue as to his motive.

So what do we have here? Lots of cars going very fast.

As subtle as a cinder block crashing on your head.

The supernatural stuff is ho-hum, the dubbing is sloppy and the action will only make you pine for the younger, hungrier and more injury-prone Jackie.

Maybe this is a psychological thriller after all: Every thinking member of the audience will be driven insane.

To call Death to Smoochy satire -- or parody, burlesque, or even lampoon -- would be too generous. The moviemakers merely glide on the thin ice of yesterday's cynicism.

Its pleasures are slight and fleeting, and so many movies have done what it does, and done it much better, that there's nothing to get even remotely excited about - much less to draw audiences into theaters.

Even the cartoon Pink Panther in the credits seems off - at once too glitzy and too fey, more Peter Allen than Pink Panther.

The best thing that can be said about this Yours, Mine and Ours is that it's inoffensive.

The story is a comic-book tale at its most basic level.

Just another tepid entry into this year's Death-as-Turn-On Sweepstakes.

It ain't art. But as a cinematic house of horrors, it more than fills the bill.

Silly stuff, made all the more regrettable by the apparent skill with which the movie was made everywhere but in the screenplay department. The sheer lunkheadedness of Sebastian Gutierrez's script is impossible to ignore.

As sweet and hopeless and silly as a doting dad framing his second-grader's latest finger-painting and calling it a Matisse.

The out-of-control plot doesn't unfold gracefully or organically; it simply speeds along with no regard for anything other then getting to the next plot twist.

Director Andrew Bergman (Honeymoon in Vegas) has a deft comic sensibility, but less skin and more speed would have served him better.

It wasn't shot in Annapolis and doesn't have an original thought in its head. Other than that, Annapolis is a fine film.

Has the feeling of something done many times before.

The setup is bad even by slasher-film standards: poorly acted, atrociously written and unimaginatively directed. But once Freddy and Jason have at it, the movie takes on a recklessly kinetic energy that finally delivers on its title's promise.

Be Cool proves that when "cool" evaporates all it leaves are embarrassing little puddles.

Best when DeVito plays off the supporting cast surrounding him.

Domino should have been a terrific anti-heroine, but the movie never gets deep enough inside this walking time bomb to reveal what makes her tick.

This is a movie about guns blazing, men punching, speedometers straining and explosions exploding. On all those levels, it succeeds just fine - which makes for a great amusement-park ride, but perhaps not much of a movie.

A colossal dud.

It's about as much fun for the viewer as being dropped into a virtual-reality version of a highway-safety crash film. Hall writes and directs with the finesse of a rusty hatchet.

For all his excesses and wrong turns, Lee has made a grown-up movie with an adult sense of loss and an adult sense of hope. He may be addicted to broad flourishes, but he has the big emotions to back them up.

Bad Company is about an undercover brother, but it will never be confused with "Undercover Brother."

Fanaro's script never really hones in on the concept's potential.

Formulaic 'Chuck & Larry' is a crass, unfulfilling effort.

Everyone from the ensemble appears to be acting in a different picture. Zaillian strands them all.

For all Quek's insistence that she was seeking to ennoble women by helping them gain control over their sexuality, Lewis' film shows that all Quek really wanted was be famous.

Analyze That is no surprise, and pleasant is about the most you can say for it.

Tedious almost beyond endurance.

It's relentlessly dumb and relentlessly humorous, and those aren't the adverbs it was after.