There's a movie opening today that is so indistinctive I can barely remember its name.

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.

The result is an out-of-control, lost-in-the-funhouse experience.

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.

Doing a sequel to "The Mask" without Jim Carrey sounds like a really bad idea. As Son of the Mask proves, it is.

Funny Games condescends to its audience like a pretentious, preachifying graduate student in post-modernism. It would help us out of the cultural quagmire we're drowning in, if only we could understand its highly convoluted and exclusive language. [29 May 1998, p.1E]

To call Death to Smoochy satire -- or parody, burlesque, or even lampoon -- would be too generous. The moviemakers merely glide on the thin ice of yesterday's cynicism.

Will have most audiences asking, "Can we leave now?"

Timeline lacks potency, drive, wit and personality -- all the things that make escapism worthwhile.

This kind of fiasco turns movie critics into so many Night Stalkers.

A misfire in almost every direction.

As a comic fable for hard times, New in Town is irredeemably moronic.

A pastiche of sadistic horror-movie cliches with minor traces of wit but major overflows of perversity.

Why would anyone pay to see this movie?

Watching this movie, with Diane Keaton cast as the ne plus ultra of irritating, overbearing mothers, is roughly the equivalent of listening to fingernails on a chalkboard for nearly two hours.

Dr. Seuss' The Cat in the Hat is gorged with shtick and gadgetry. When it comes to highlighting everything better left in the dark, it makes even the Matrix sequels look like works of genius.

The only bits worth watching are the scenes where Olsen is in full Carrey mode and Richardson is doing his best Jeff Daniels. The spot-on impersonations take the mind off the plot, the poo-poo gags, the clunky chase scene and the ripped-off finale.

The film saddles Craig T. Nelson with the generally thankless role of Paxton's cold, distant dad. But when he feels like the only person who doesn't understand what's going on with Tate and his son, you feel like saying, "No, me too."

It's relentlessly dumb and relentlessly humorous, and those aren't the adverbs it was after.

This movie doesn't play; it just lies there, waiting to be kicked around by anyone unfortunate enough to have shelled out good money to see it.

Finds it as impossible to locate a laugh in glittering Bora Bora as it was for Operation Enduring Freedom to nail Osama bin Laden in gritty Tora Bora.

The most satisfying escape of the day was mine, from the theater, at movie's end.

The film itself is an exercise in frustration.

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

Double Dragon may have its merits as a computerized contest of wits and strategy, but the movie is a stinker, directed with apathy (by newcomer Jim Yukich) and "written" by committee from any number of recycled movie plots. [05 Nov 1994]

Too bad the director ties everyone's laces together and they all go down in a jumble.

The whole thing is too preciously conceived. [05 Feb 1993]

Sorry, Phantom, but the purple suit has got to go. No amount of buff bod can make an audience take a superhero in bright purple seriously...And while we're at it, that script has got to go, too. Screenwriter Jeffrey Boam apparently studied the first two "Indiana Jones" movies so thoroughly -- so that he could write "Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade" -- that he's carried many of the motifs to "The Phantom." The result is not breathtaking excitement, but rather a stunning lack of originality. [7 June 1996]