In this film, Soderbergh appears to judge the actors by how well they spew or swallow bile.

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

"Hello, I Must Be Going," sings Groucho Marx in a clip from "Animal Crackers" at the start of the film. If I'd known what followed, I would have followed his advice.

There's something junior varsity about the whole sensibility that makes the new version seem more dated than the old one.

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.

The less said the better.

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.

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

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

Perfume offers eau de crud.

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.

Gory overkill.

A mess.

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.

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

It's for those of us for whom killing people with high-powered guns in the movies is not only as good as sex but maybe better -- a sacrament for our age... [A] poorly written, badly directed film.

In the Cut is a disaster. Familiar to the bone, arty on the surface, it could serve as the doomed pilot for a nightmare TV spinoff: Law & Order: Literary Victims Unit.

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

The two guys are potentially amusing but the screenplay is so naked in its manipulation of emotion that it feels infantile.

Stay away from this movie. Brainless cartoonish violence.

What we have here is a film where the first 20 minutes are repeated again and again until everything comes to an absolutely predictable end.

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.

It never seriously establishes the ground rules of the principle of transference or the relationship between the two of them, and so what follows is gibberish. [14 Jul 1992]

How did an embarrassment of comic-book riches become simply an embarrassment as a movie?

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

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.

Most of the humor is both determinedly puerile and unfunny, performed by a generic cast.

A very funny movie ... in some alternate universe, maybe.

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.

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

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]

The bottom line is that the studio's marketing strategy is just a tad incomplete. Instead of hiding Pinocchio from critics, Miramax should have hidden it from everyone.

The indisputably gifted Jim Carrey shows the side of him that just wants to be loved - the Riddler on Ritalin, the Mask unmasked. And it turns out to be stultifying.

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.

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

The only way sober adults will keep awake is wondering how the lead mobsters on "The Sopranos" -- who also are amateur film critics -- will rank the movie next year on HBO.

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.

Aimless and unfocused.

Excruciating...The movie proves to be singularly unfunny and static almost from the non-get-go. Virtually nothing happens; the movie is all premise.

A raunchy, remorseless "Curious George."

Life as a House mounts a brutally insensitive attack on its audience's sensitivities.

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.

Derived from the folksy, avuncular works of Jean Shepherd, it's a movie in search of a story, characters and a reason to exist. In this quest, it goes 0 for 3. It's like watching Jell-O harden, then melt, only not quite so much fun. [23 Sep 1994]

Oh, this is all so terribly not good.

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

To top it off, the ending is a clumsy cheat. Of course, I was rooting for the news gal to expire and the film to die a quick death.

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

What's more annoying than the screenplay's relentless assaultiveness is its odd, sordid cuteness.

This chick flick never should have made it out of the incubator.

Bottom line: Juwanna Mann is a drag - in every sense of the word.

By the end, Pootie Tang feels as long as Kevin Costner's "Wyatt Earp."

Too bad you can see this sort of thing done more amusingly every week on ABC-TV and Comedy Central.

The film is in desperate need of flow. It plays like a collection of bits, skits that have been thrown together with little eye to continuity.

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

Here's hoping your own dreams of Africa are more interesting -- and better acted -- than this movie.

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

The Dukes of Hazzard may mark some sort of nadir when it comes to movies made from TV shows. It's an overlong, under-thought and numbingly one-dimensional extrapolation of a TV show whose pleasures were, at best, marginal. See it at your own peril.

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

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

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.

Gummo is one of the most repellent cinematic efforts in recent memory. Whatever small audiences it attracts -- and they will be drawn mostly by the prospect of watching something "shocking" -- will wind up leaving the theater in a state of disgust. [21 Nov. 1997, p.5E]

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

Bride Wars has possibly the worst comedy idea since "Springtime for Hitler," with almost no room for redeeming camp.

The best reason to see it is Kate Bosworth as Sandra Dee.

The collateral damage of action products like Ballistic is to the sensibility of the audience.

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.

"This Is Spinal Tap" was brilliantly funny. Death of a Dynasty? Well, the movie is just dead.

The One is all sound and fury, and nothing else.

A brain-dead buddy-movie tearjerker with semi-tasteful romance and tasteful gore mixed in with the derring-do.

Bomback's script is the worst thing a thriller can be - a flip-flopper, using quick character changes for plot twists. And Langenegger's direction rarely sustains a mood or tone, only a sleek veneer of luxury and knowingness.

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.

Nothing in this film -- even Robin Williams, alas -- is funny.

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.

An awful film about an awful time.

Taxi's only saving grace is an inexplicable, though delightful, turn by Ann-Margret as Andy's ever-tipsy mom. She's a stitch, and about 100 times better than her surrounding material.

The script is drippy, humor-free and old-fashioned:

Dramatically, it's a ghoul's parade of grieving folk finding solace and then danger through a tenuous connection to the after-life.

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.

A hackneyed psycho-sexual thriller with enough awkwardly executed Hitchcock references to qualify as a bad DePalma knock-off.

The film is so busy that every minute is exhausting. It's as if the filmmakers were idealistic teen-agers afflicted with a group case of Attention Deficit Disorder.

Ghost Ship would have been so much better if they'd just let the ship do more of the acting.

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

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

Solondz is still stuck in an adenoidal whine.

Pleasantly meanders around a group of people who pitch projects and pitch woo on the Riviera.

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.

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

Isn't a full-bodied comedy, and it isn't a bona fide action movie, either. It just makes a facetious spectacle of itself.

An odd little movie. And not in a good way.

This dialogue isn't helped by two actors who look terrific but can barely choke out a word that sounds remotely authentic or spontaneous.

Goes straight to hell, and in this case it is its own handbasket.

Stupid. Illogical. Simplistic. Pandering. And those are its good points.

A strictly by-the-numbers job that, sans Freeman, would be beneath contempt. So congratulations, Morgan Freeman: Your contribution to Chain Reaction is to make it worthy of contempt. [2 Aug 1996]

Lowbrow humor is one thing...but Love Stinks sinks the bar beyond comprehension.

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

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 plot is as thin and confusing as it sounds.

The vocal canines appear for about 30 humorous seconds, in a dream sequence, and are then never seen again. Unfortunately, the same can't be said about the rest of the film, which runs an additional 98.5 excruciating minutes.