Romeo Is Bleeding revels in its own trashiness. It aspires to join that small circle of near-outlaw works set on the grimy edges of film noir, along with "Reservoir Dogs" and "True Romance" -- defiant champions of ultraviolence, campy outrageousness and dime-novel nihilism. Alas, it's nowhere near as good as those two, but it has a certain zany charm. [22 Apr 1994]

A great cast can't quite pull City by the Sea out of the drink.

Now and Then tells twin stories. One is a delight. One is a disastrous distraction. [20 Oct 1995]

If only the director, or his deus, could have delivered us from the inevitable shock ending, which blends Darwin and Einstein with purest P.T. Barnum.

There's good trash: throwaway, intellectually undemanding action movies that, despite their heavy body counts and hard edges, are executed with a touch of class and a sunny disposition.

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

It all comes off as a case of filmmakers wanting to have their communion wafer and eat it, too.

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]

Too bad director Scott Hicks and screenwriter Carol Fuchs didn't look more closely at their source material, a 2001 German film called Mostly Martha. That film used the same basic premise but injected real conflict into the mix, in ways sexual, culinary, even ethnic. That film tried to do something, even while it was entertaining us.

Blethyn's performance belongs in another movie, not this bipolar comedy-drama.

You should have been able to treat this film as a grab-bag and pull out some plums. Instead it goes grabbing after you.

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.

It's obvious and stereotypical. It's leaden and unconvincing. It's not nearly as outrageous as it thinks it is.

If you expect anything more substantive from a movie - characters of more than one dimension, storylines that at the least play new riffs on old themes, plot developments that flow from the narrative - you'd best look elsewhere.

Is there anyone out there who hasn't seen this movie a dozen times before? Maybe even as recently as last week, since it's basically the same story line as the funnier, if less heartfelt, "Four Christmases."

The story may be about cold-blooded murder, but Bullock's pulsating performance is about the getting of wisdom.

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.

Like "Mr. and Mrs. Smith," The Island is the kind of suicidal high-concept movie increasingly prevalent these days: a film so thoroughly pre-conceived and pre-sold that most audiences know more about what's going on than the characters do for half the movie.

Scores some serious points for its dance moves but does a lousy job of remembering there's a lot more to this big old world than moving your feet.

A carefully conceived and earnest movie that announces its many points just a bit too carefully and earnestly.

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

This rendering of the turbulent second marriage of England's King Henry VIII proves too heavy-footed for the old movie two-step of setting up a morality tale, then exploiting it for heat and titillation.

Nothing really connects; it's not fluid and roaring but a collection of set-pieces. [25 Feb 1994]

It's plenty thrilling, and it appeals to the flag-waving patriot in all of us.

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

A bland also-ran in a post-"Sopranos" universe.