Never makes the Jordans' tribulations feel like anything more than yuppie angst.

Crush is the kind of movie that gives friendship a bad name.

The astonishing brio and verve of street dancing deserves better than this.

It's a family film done as a trip film. It is a trip, but it's a bad trip.

The whole narrative is too hollow and rickety as well as gimmicky for Muccino to breathe much life into it.

So much of Three to Tango is calculated to push the proper emotional buttons that it's ultimately unsatisfying.

Rocky and Bullwinkle have not only returned, but they've been placed in the hands of filmmakers who know what they're doing.

Rebound is determinedly lightweight fare that shamelessly resorts to every crowd-pleasing cliche it can think of to wring sympathy and laughs from its audience. To say it succeeds is not meant as a compliment.

Meant to be a steamy erotic thriller, it's more annoying than anything else. Surely you will see its Big Surprise coming by the first 15 minutes, and it never begins to achieve the kind of sultry, mesmerizing fascination it so desperately needs.

There's not a moment in Against the Ropes where you forget this is perky Meg Ryan up onscreen, talking trashy and acting tough.

Abandon tags Katie Holmes as a talented actor with surprising range and vast, untapped potential - so much, in fact, that watching her, one can almost overlook the film's many flaws. Almost.

Like its predecessor, Jeepers Creepers 2 is that rare modern horror film that remembers audiences are scared far more by what they don't see than by what they do. For that alone, horror fans should be thankful.

However you pronounce Bythewood -- I assume it's by-the-wood -- his work here is strictly by the numbers.

Standard-bore action stuff, in which a macho stud superstar blows away lots of bad guys while struggling to make the world a better place.

Making a live-action version of Thunderbirds is like rounding out the edges on a Picasso painting to render it more realistic.

The Wicker Man is too loony to be a drama, too earnest to be a comedy, too predictable to be a horror film.

This is a movie that falls short only because it insists on grabbing for so much.

There's a funny premise at the core of Are We Done Yet? Too bad the movie doesn't do much with it.

There is some plot, but it is wispy at best and frequently gets in the way of the music.

All the young talent in Hollywood is not enough to energize a movie that takes forever to get nowhere.

Under the guidance of Jon Avnet, they're (De Niro/Pacino) both playing New York police detectives - partners, no less - in the cop-and-serial-killer tale Righteous Kill, and they're thunderously mediocre.

Greenaway's film is about making people's jaws drop.

A violent, dumb, offensive mess.

Go to enjoy the technical expertise, and take a first-grader (and not a particularly savvy one) along to find something of value in everything else.

What's surprising is that the film has genuine laughs and smart-aleck asides that will keep even nonfans happy (although it helps if you at least like the genre).

If you're not a fan of M. Night Shyamalan's convoluted, teasing thrillers, you'll find that getting into this movie is like cracking a puzzle in which the constructor keeps breaking his own rules or grabbing new ones from ultra-thin air.

The movie has nothing to offer except titillation.

Although it's in the same genre as "The English Patient," it's a vastly better movie --more surprising and original, more rigorous and sympathetic. This film is oddly shaped. It is also heartbreaking and exhilarating.

There's a funny movie struggling inside of Dickie Roberts: Former Child Star. Too bad it never gets out.

Director John Stockwell ("Blue Crush") and screenwriter Michael Ross have only two things in mind: titillation and giving young audiences something gross to whisper about in school the next day. On that limited basis, Turistas may well succeed. But that's nothing to brag about.

The one actor I wanted more of was Williams, who imbues Jack's dad with a robust, sometimes domineering wiliness that suggests a real person. Of course, these silly, inept filmmakers probably cast him because he plays a good guy and his first name is Treat.

Even the great Lily Tomlin can't muster a funny reaction to a Polish joke. It's an everything-including-the kitchen-sink comedy -- and the sink has rusty pipes.

This film feels like a desperate attempt to squeeze a few last bucks out of what was once a very obliging cash cow.

The gleefully campy moments will earn Johnny Mnemonic cult status. Part of the movie's problem, though, is that it can't decide if it's a cautionary tale or a satire, and it falls apart when it tries to do both. [27 May 1995]

About as good as the genre gets.

A mean-hearted, ham-handed and gratuitous effort to exploit it's teenage audience's conviction that, underneath it all, their teachers really. do hate them.

If you like hard bodies and hot engines, if you want to feel like you're inside a cockpit or a video game with someone else working the joystick, you'll find decent escape from the summer doldrums in Stealth.

It's not exactly thrilling, and it doesn't cover much new ground. But young audiences will lap it up like ice cream.

There's enough kinetic energy in Jumper to light a thousand houses. Unfortunately, there's no one home in any of them.

This movie proves to be the year's most anti-romantic comedy.

A karate movie so devoid of inner substance that it threatens to suck all known life on planet Earth into the void at its center. [20 Mar 1991]

The whirl, bang and general bother of crashing gears and gnashing metal ends up suffocating the senses.

Bland, inoffensive, formulaic and occasionally amusing - just like the animated kids' show that inspired it.

Brain-softener.

For grownups, this treacle is going to be pretty hard to swallow.

The biggest crime of Van Helsing is that it resurrects classic monsters and fails to make them scary. With a full 132 minutes of feeble jokes and gimcrack phantasmagoria, it's not spine-tingling - it's butt-numbing.

Super Mario Bros. ain't no game, but it ain't no movie, either. The huge, busy, empty, uninvolving mess is marooned halfway between narrative and spectacle, neither fully one nor the other. [28 May 1993]

Too bad Dreamcatcher amounts to a pastiche of better films like the original "The Thing" and both versions of "Invasion of the Body Snatchers." It ransacks the audience's memory warehouse.

It should come as no surprise that the dogs are as cute as caninely possible. But is it conceivable that, once you've seen 101 adorable dogs, 102 seems redundant?

The cast doesn't impress, the story doesn't compel and the characters are too bland to make people remember them.

Essentially an episode of "24." Which may be a step up from a video game, but it's getting hard to tell.

A listless, disjointed collegiate opposites-attract comedy.

If you do insist on seeing this film, don't arrive late: the clever, animated opening credits are a stitch, suggesting a sprightliness of touch and winsome wickedness of tone that's missing from the rest of the movie.

Up against the wit and teamwork of the sparkling TV original, this lame vehicle sputters and fades.

With its incomprehensible plot, flat visual style and indecipherably mixed messages (violence is good; no, wait, violence is bad!), this movie seems chiefly to be an excuse to sell even more trading cards.

Most of the movie makes too much sense and is no fun at

Plot-wise, this is strictly paint-by-numbers stuff.

Forget chemistry: There's no biology to the star casting.

Ghosts of Girlfriends Past displays nary a wisp of life, let alone an afterlife.

Armed with few laughs, this clumsy sequel makes a sloppy mess of its plot ... and star Sandra Bullock.

Gory overkill.

Sheila Bernette, as an aged pickpocket, is less a stereotype than an escapee from some provincial British comedy of the early 1950s. But she steals necklaces and knickknacks with such finesse and gusto that she also steals the movie.

Shyamalan has said he wanted to create the best B-movie ever made, but it fails to be the best C movie of the month. (Stuck or Zohan are better C movies.)

The unearned air of moralism that wafts through 15 Minutes pollutes its entertainment value.

A return to form -- bad form. Lifeless, unimaginative and almost determinedly uninspired, it's paint-by-numbers filmmaking at its dreariest.

At best it's a bit like Mel Brooks' "The History of the World Part I" (except Ramis stops somewhere in Genesis); at worst it's like a Scary Movie-type parody of John Huston's "The Bible."

There's enough here to keep the movie light and avoid the curse of interminableness. Will there be enough to warrant a third Scooby-Doo film? Must we find out?

The latest failed Hollywood attempt to make a movie from a video game.

Most of the fun to be had with Thr3e is to spot the movies from which it cribs. Beyond that, what one has is a conventional psychological thriller that cheats too often and depends on actors determined to play only one note.

Idiotic, ugly and ridiculous.

What can you say about a film where Carmen Electra's performance is one of the high points?

Buy your ticket, sit yourself down, and let ol' John take you for a ride. You'll have a blast.

Save for Jesus' skin color, which he shares with some of his fellow Jews, little about the story is re-imagined or re-evaluated.

It's as if all the digital tools of new millennial filmmaking fell into the hands of men who had less storytelling sense than a campfire bard or a cave painter.

In this day of overstuffed action flicks and dumbed-down "comedies," (Snow Day) is kinda refreshing.

Strings of four-letter words are a poor substitute for dialogue, and it's not until the movie is almost over that someone realizes there's no reason, other than assumed macho posturing, for Cube's character to go after these bad guys so hard.

The only question is how many levels of meaning can be plumbed from the phrase "Let's party!"

The surprise behind Town and Country isn't that the director started filming without a finished script, but that he ever thought he had the start of one.

Electric as Elektra, Jennifer Garner does a high-powered, blade-thrusting star turn as Marvel Comics' ninja-inspired superheroine, bringing such unbridled energy and sexuality to her performance, one barely notices the movie itself.

Collateral Damage isn't jingoistic; it also isn't exciting. It's a depressed rabble-rouser.

There's no clear plot, no memorable villains, no real logic. But there sure is action.

Equilibrium doesn't tread softly on our dreams; it tramples them.

Despite the tenderness between them, Rose and her perfect younger man have the sickest mother-son relationship since Angela Lansbury and Laurence Harvey in "The Manchurian Candidate" - and Mikey seems just as brainwashed.

All the characters are writ in broad strokes, making it impossible to sympathize with, much less relate to, anyone.

Determinedly genial and relentlessly bland.

Benigni is no Peter Sellers, but the inanity of the film isn't really his fault. He tries hard, and his rubbery willingness to absorb any punishment and come up looking as if he's just swallowed a very cold carp isn't without comic potential. But he is continually betrayed by the lame setups.

It's the performances of Ulrich and Gooding, in particular, that lift Chill Factor out of the derivative. Gooding possesses so much boundless energy that he practically dares you not to care, not to get involved, not to root for his success.

It might sound intriguing to root the saying, "Physician, heal thyself," in the plight of a hypocritical self-help guru, but the romantic drama Love Happens suffers from acute irony deficiency.

When Catch That Kid isn't careening from plot point to plot point, events turning on unseen dimes, it's trying to ingratiate itself with stunts and chases that its young audience have seen done better on Saturday-morning TV.

If ever a project seemed utterly unguided by a compass, it's "North," the dreary new film from Rob Reiner. [22 Jul 1994]

What makes RV work are some genuinely funny bits (one of which is not an overlong sequence in which Bob has trouble emptying the R.V.'s toilet) that should ring especially true to any parent forced to cajole a recalcitrant child into having a good time.

All this is out of the Haunted House 101 textbook.

It's considerably flawed. It has a middle that's padded, a look that could use a few more light bulbs, a protagonist who never earns our sympathy, and an audio mix that leans much too heavily on the bass, often making it impossible to understand what's being said.

It's supposed to be funny watching these two characters and wondering who'll be the first to start acting her age, but it's really just pitiful, watching two talented actresses...given so little to work with.

Ends up being more about her hair (Meg Ryan's) than anything else.

Thinner provides little suspense and no chills, not to mention rather offensive treatment of Gypsies, Italians and women. Acting isn't at a premium either.

The movie finally comes to life when Liu turns up.

You have to be willing to take a lot of punishment for a few good scares.