A ham-fisted cautionary tale of religious fanaticism that would have been hooted out of even 19th-century theaters as melodrama of the most lurid kind.

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

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

Jane Fonda does an about-face on her persona and her talent, playing a teetotaler and, what's worse, a pious bore.

I managed to get through the biker extravaganza Hell Ride, a narcissistic piece of soft-core porn and macho camp, by mashing it together in my mind with the equally woeful, family-friendly biker comedy "Wild Hogs." After all, both are full of hellions gone to seed.

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

A murder caper that could have been written by Agatha Christie during a pub-crawl.

It's a sad day for film lovers when the best thing that can be said about a Western is that it's pleasant.

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.

Of Madonna's considerable talents, making the camera love her isn't one: The screen seems to go dead every time she's on it.

The story is without an original thought, the characters little more than caricatures (unappealing ones, at that) and the filmmaking so uninspired that it's hard to imagine anyone embracing it with anything more than a shrug and a wonder why they didn't wait to catch it on TV.

Watching a Pokemon movie is like drowning in a sea of cute.

Like Adam Sandler's "Mr. Deeds," this is a hybrid, hipster-cornball movie that wants to celebrate common folk but unapologetically uses words like "trailer trash" to describe them.

Venom isn't worth a critic's venom, but a brief condemnation is in order.

Painstakingly painful.

But if the idea of tiny, little Sally Field in the Charles Bronson part strikes you as a bit silly, that's only the beginning of the idiocies. [12 Jan 1996]

Manipulates the audience.

About on the level of an After School Special put together by people in a real hurry to get on with their lives, Ed plays pretty dead for all except the very dumb at heart.

The New Guy doesn't have a new idea in its head, but it trods over the old ground with such wit and heart that its lack of originality can be overlooked, if not entirely forgiven.

Retro in a refreshing sort of way, a return to those sci-fi films of the 1950s, filled with cheesy special effects and over-the-top acting, but with a gem of an idea at its core, and all done with just enough wit and inventiveness to keep audiences in the cheap seats happy.

Adam Sandler does Frank Capra wrong. His unfunny remake stomps all over the honest values and endearing qualities of the original.

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

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

How can we make the entire movie disappear?

Godsend is two-thirds of a good movie, with a final third that's just downright awful. So much wasted potential only makes the whole thing that much more painful.

Newcomers to the Mike Myers experience will leave this love train early.

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.

In its own B-film, let's-make-them-jump-out-of-their-seats way, Bats is quite the hoot.