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]

Hands-down, the best James Brolin-in-an-Italian-accent movie ever.

You have to identify pretty strongly with suffering artistes to find anything to root for in The Science of Sleep.

After a fast, smart start, White Sands implodes like a black hole, sucking all goodwill from the atmosphere of the theater, turning those of us who started to love it into embittered cuckolds.

Bullock does her damndest to be nerdy and instead becomes excruciatingly artificial - a malfunctioning verbal fun machine.

Barf-bag baroque.

The movie is a premise in search of a comedy. Rather than flesh it out, the filmmakers put familiar glad rags on the skull and bones.

Jane Fonda coming back to the screen after a decade-and-a-half absence in Monster-in-Law is like Brando returning from the dead to star in a Police Academy movie.

Reprehensible.

Not since Rocky II has there been a more blatant attempt to recapitulate a box-office hit without adding any new attraction or appeal.

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

The comedy of manners becomes strictly a comedy of bad manners.

Ultimately groans under the weight of its own quiet gorgeousness.

It's last in laughs, last in drama but first in Murphy ego, as he gives a performance that everybody has seen before, only louder. [04 Dec 1992]

Catherine Breillat's pretentious, meandering, self-indulgent portrait of a libidinously deprived young woman is nothing more than pornography tricked out as feminist parable.

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]

A story about unmotivated characters trapped in an ill-conceived plot.

About as clunky as a movie gets. It lurches from scene to scene with no sense of narrative grace, gives its roster of prominent actors nothing to work with and screeches to a halt with all the grace of a sprinter whose shoelaces have been tied together.

The desert is clean in Gerry, but it's also empty.

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.