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

The Assassination of Richard Nixon makes Bicke suffer the greatest indignity: it turns him into a relentless bore.

Les Mayfield doesn't know how to stage showdowns and chases so they're exciting or funny.

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]

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

Lane gives the film her best shot; she's pretty much the only reason to see it. There's an intelligence mixed with ferocity that makes her performance compelling, far-more-so than anything else in the film.

Short on details and long on extreme, unflattering close-ups.

As with so many recent literary adaptations, it was the writing that was the art, not its infrastructure of plot and character.

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

All Fey does is apply a smattering of wit to the story.

Weitz's idea of satire is generally both ludicrous and mild: exaggerating types, then sentimentalizing them.

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

Whenever I see this film, Pryor's look of what-am-I-doing-here? panic echoes my feelings exactly.

Luckily, Penn, Watts and Leo carry more weight than that; they keep this movie's two hours and five minutes from seeming like lost time.

Spider as a character is a fantasizing detective, but the movie is no Singing Detective (the high-water mark of the sub-genre). This film rarely rises above a murmur.

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

Chicken Little is relentlessly cute. That's the good news, and those who consider the word cute anathema may want to look for entertainment elsewhere.

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.

As Shakespeare would have certainly written if he'd been on the movie beat, Double, double toil and trouble, movie stink and critic bubble/'Hocus Pocus' has no focus/has no rhyme, has no reason/ and is... out of season.

Zeffirelli has managed to make Shakespeare's greatest and most modern play one-dimensional. [13 Jan 1991]

The title and length suggest a biographical epic, but it's neither biographical nor epic. It's as if the director, Steven Soderbergh, wanted to take tissue samples of Ernesto Che Guevara's political life.

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

If only all this wonderful talent wasn't in service to a story that pushes credulity beyond the breaking point, perilously close to the realm of farce. Too many coincidences, too much convenient timing, too little honest plot development.

Ready to Wear, though it boasts a few small delights, is unready to see.

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.

This military courtroom drama is full of questions, but woefully short of answers.

Put simply, Mona Lisa Smile is too much of a stacked deck -- a movie too concerned with ensuring that audiences feel a certain way to risk anything like nuance or interpretation.

As comedies go, the unfunny Heavyweights sinks like a stone. [17 Feb 1995]