The movie is a work of ambivalence. Is English making fun of these women? Or is she making a pilot for Lifetime?

The general consensus on this one: Rats.

Sometimes a cute-stalker movie can win the audience's heart. Management only makes you ponder the line between true love and a restraining order.

Good Deeds is the first of the 11 movies he's written and directed to try a one-tone-fits-all approach. Sadly, that tone is funereal, and it's always a beat out of step with the rhythms of both real life and most movies.

A grimly preposterous serial-killer thriller set in 19th-century Baltimore, this riff on the final days of the author of "The Tell-Tale Heart" and other masterpieces of the macabre might qualify as literary desecration if it weren't so silly.

A lot of striking pictures in this would-be feminist "Braveheart," but a film that's pretty flat and earthbound because of the limitations of the figure at its center.

Godard Mon Amour is very much like a Woody Allen film, with Godard embodying Allen’s negative traits of pretentiousness, neurosis, and misogyny without the redeeming virtue of humor.

If ever a movie were lost in translation, it’s Mood Indigo, the latest from the scattershot genius Michel Gondry (“Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind,” “The Science of Sleep”). With his penchant for sad-sack dreamers and gonzo visual gags, Gondry can make a director like Wes Anderson look like a prig, and “Mood” allows him freer access to his fancy than usual.

The film's biggest miracle is the straight face Nick Nolte maintains in his role as Socrates.

Though not everyone agrees, Ben Stiller’s “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty” came close to finding the secret for making a movie about the secret of happiness. Peter Chelsom’s Hector and the Search for Happiness tries hard, but fails. Miserably.

It’s been a while since there’s been this much dead air onscreen; over and over, Smith sets up a sequence, lets his actors shpritz, and stands by as the energy fades into giggly catatonia.

A movie where the miracles -- and treacly moments -- keep topping each other.

Watching Granger and Priya chase each other around a hotel like squirrels in a park, you wonder what these two see in each other.

Meretricious without being entertaining, it's an easy game -- and an easier film -- to sit out.

This musical should have taken center stage in Theater Camp. The dreadful story surrounding it deserves to get the hook.

A fatally insubstantial film.

The repartee, as ever, is weak. Even with all the extra layers of digital detail, it’s still tough to keep these four straight. And the CG characters’ slimy rendering and motion-capture expressiveness could go down with “The Polar Express” as a study in inadvertent, technologically misguided screen creepiness. Wackier would have been OK, guys — it’s the Ninja Turtles.

As tiresome as the relentless, indulgent inscrutability and lack of story momentum can be, it says something for the movie’s visceral power that there isn’t an urge to quit on it.

The plot doesn’t take clever turns, the visual thrills aren’t all that thrilling, and you’re ultimately left to get your heist-movie kicks elsewhere.

A bumptious splatter farce that manages to improve from awful to moderately engaging as its cast is winnowed down to the five guys themselves.

The biggest unresolved question here is why we're paying $9.50, plus popcorn, for something we can presumably get at home for free.

It's coherent, well shot, and tartly acted, but it wears you down like a dinner guest showing off his doctorate.

Shot in a rich palette, the film does provide diversion with some of its funkily detailed sets and supporting actors.... Otherwise, the film distinguishes itself for its miscasting and misuse of its cast.

There’s a reason the movie has been pushed off the back of the truck into late February. It’s damaged goods.

It might even work if In the Cut was remotely convincing as a thriller, but Campion can't help wrinkling her nose at genre.

Crude, lewd comedy that makes ''Animal House'' seem wholesome.

No matter how hard Richard Gere huffs and puffs, his performance as the hunky manic-depressive known only as "Mr. Jones" won't blow you away. Bouncing foolishly from super-duper euphoria to catatonia and back, Gere expends too much energy to ever be believable. [8 Oct 1993, p.56]

Ghost Rider is the kind of movie that's great stupid fun as long as someone else is buying the tickets.

Dazzling to behold yet puny of imagination, the movie takes the “Star Wars” formula — hero myths nicked from Joseph Campbell, cutting-edge visual effects, comic-strip dialogue, goofy-looking aliens — and reduces it to generic Big Box shelf product.

It's hard to believe anyone would think importing a French comedy was a good idea.

And that’s what The Girl in the Spider’s Web is: soulless, bloodless product. Subtitled “A Dragon Tattoo Story,” it exists almost solely to drive a stake in the ground for the further franchising of author Stieg Larsson’s “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.”

Gillespie and his editor Kirk Baxter cycle through scenes of these one-dimensional characters, headache-inducing montages of cable news footage, YouTube re-creations, and TikTok videos. The pacing is frenetic, but the content is mind-numbingly dull.

National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation is yet another factory product that plays more like a marketing strategy than a comedy. Like the other farces bearing the National Lampoon brand label, it's a comedy of obliviousness - family man Chevy Chase refuses to alter his sentimental notions of family rituals despite repeatedly being slammed in the face with evidence of how far short of his expectations they fall. Here, the word "vacation" is a misnomer. The Griswold family, headed by Chase, doesn't go anywhere. Neither does the film.

All that’s missing is Clyde the orangutan from Clint Eastwood’s “Every Which Way But Loose,” which, trust me, this movie could have used.

Unfortunately, director Aidan Zamiri and his co-writer Bertie Brandes are equally bad at mockumentaries and generating suspense.

Perhaps the biggest disappointment is that The In-Laws was directed by Andrew Fleming, who delivered the fizzy Nixon-era comedy ''Dick'' a few years back and who also had a hand in ''Grosse Pointe,'' the wicked, briefly-lived WB parody of TV teen dramas. The man obviously knows from satire, but not on the evidence of anything here.

Flirt has its moments, and Ewell and Nikaidoh are auspicious additions to the Hartley rep company. But Flirt will appeal mostly to Hartley completists. [23 Aug 1996]

Occasionally veers so far into absurdity that it manages to make its central character - capable, smart, working mom Kate Reddy - look like a nitwit.

In no way, shape, or fashion does Queen of the Desert qualify as a good movie, but for fans of Werner Herzog — those of us who have followed cinema’s Teutonic imp of the perverse since the 1970s, when he was staging all-dwarf fables and sending conquistadors across mountains — it is fascinating and something close to a must-see.

It’s a Christmas nightmare, stuck with two obnoxious relatives who think they’re funny, and won’t shut up.

A textbook example of how a director can strip away plot, motivation, character, and meaning and still leave arrant pretension standing tall.

Works so hard to be inoffensive that you may well be offended.

One hopes that, for their own good, when any of these actors are offered a script like this again, they’ll have the sense to just say no.

A one-trick action thriller that feels like a poor cousin of an episode of ''24." Call it ''12."

The fundamental value put forth in Brown’s “Sunday” sequel is not fearlessness but “family.”

Road House is the kind of action movie whose rigging is so blatant that there can be no air of heroism about it. Although Swayze and Sam Elliott, in the role of his mentor, have the decency to look sheepish most of the time, there's no end to the cynicism and merchandising on screen, especially in the sex scenes. [19 May 1989, p.45]

Almost but not quite as obnoxious as its title. Little kids will love it. You’ll need a hazmat suit.

It seems endless. It's also unusually crude and stupid, even for an Arnold Schwarzenegger movie.

The bad news, for those looking forward to The Santa Clause 3: The Escape Clause with anything like enthusiasm, is this: Bernard the Elf is history.

In this bilingual morality movie about love, family, and fate, however, the unpredictability turns out to be highly predictable.

There are some sweet impulses in first-time director Marc Rocco's Dream a Little Dream, but it's a mess. [3 March 1989, p.47]

As biography, Diana is shallow and reductive, checking the boxes of an extremely well-known story with numbing predictability. As musical theater, Diana is a forgettable farrago of painfully on-the-nose lyrics and clashing song styles that ventures perilously close to camp.

This last angle had us thinking back to “Risky Business,” as did the Chicago setting and the reveling gone off the rails. Here, though, there’s no edge to the wildness, nothing memorable.

The movie's chief audience, consequently, will probably be gullible and young, responding to the cliches only because they haven't seen them before. They have a word in Vegas for these people: Suckers.

Dukakis gets off some of the film's best lines and keeps the worst from sinking the whole affair; Polley's role is limited, but her character's audition for a feminine hygiene commercial is by far the best thing here.

2 1/2 hours of tumescence disguised as a motion picture.

Cox doesn’t so much chew the scenery as inhale it. Dano looks on in awe.

In the Mouth of Madness is firmly lodged in the armpit of boredom. [03 Feb 1995, p.55]

Franco can be exhilarating in movies -- tremulous, unhinged, a little wild. Here his jaw never stops quivering and his eyes stay welled up, advertising a breakdown that never comes. Not that Myles has a presence a man would fall apart over. She's too professional to drive anybody crazy.

Eckhart doesn’t really do any of that classic grunting as Frankenstein 2.0, but maybe he should have.

It's actually a pretty lousy thriller.

The film logs almost all of its laughs when it's at its crudest, meanest, and most unfiltered. Everything else - and that is to say most of the movie - is a big, fat, derivative waste of time.

Occasionally wills itself to rude, crude life. But most of the time it's pretty limp.

Despite a few diverting moments and some ambitiously dramatic themes, this one is simply too uneventful and too populated by thinly sketched characters to keep its target audience engaged.

Hints at a place where desire, fear, pleasure, and power all intersect, but it never actually goes there.

Finding Home is well meant and earnest but is stretched to almost twice what would have been a comfortable length.

Butter dearly wants to be a hot-button social satire that plays rough with sacred cows: Midwestern power-moms, the religious right, race, sex, you name it. Mostly, it wants to be an Alexander Payne movie from the 1990s. "Citizen Ruth," say, or "Election." Instead, it's a shrill, cartoonish mess.

And while I understand Downey wanting to make a movie for his kids, the world might be better served if, at long last, he made one for himself.

The tame, confused script eventually sinks the film, although Field shows skill directing actors.

The film’s lone strength is the fleeting dramatic scenes offering a little back story — and pathos — on Rafe’s home life with his sweetly understanding single mom (Lauren Graham, who you’d guess wouldn’t have bothered otherwise).

When the best thing about a movie is the title, that’s never a good sign. It’s all downhill from there? Exactly, and that’s the case with Downhill.

Seeing her (Kidman) in junk like this is a bit like watching the Queen of England eat a Taco Bell chalupa.

Son-in-Law (bet you can't guess the ending) would be brain-on-vacation fun if it weren't so smug and patronizing. [2 July 1993, p.44]

Noe's summation is an ideological sucker-punch from a filmmaker who gets off on abusive relationships. He may as well have thrown a big ''whatever'' up on the screen.

A "great poet" movie, the poet in this case being Dylan Thomas, and it's utter bollocks.

It treats the Bakkers as something between grotesques and simpletons, which does rather limit the biopic angle. Satirizing televangelism is such low-hanging fruit it’s windfall. As for camp, it’s hard to avoid in a movie with Tammy Faye as its title character.

The horrible anticipation he [Aja] builds is derailed by a gimmick that makes the twist in, say, ''Fight Club" seem perfectly logical. To say more would be to ruin the movie, and why should I do that when its own makers have done it for you?

The limp script actually has the characters spout ''Let's get outta here!'' more than once. Or maybe that's just a wise member of the audience talking.

It’s just like the Kenny Rogers song says: “You’ve got to know when to hold ’em, know when to fold ’em.” It’s time for this Gambler to walk away.

A noisy and lazy stopgap movie that goes absolutely nowhere and takes 2 1/2 hours to get there.

Primeval is a hoot if you're in the mood, though, and it gets points for trying to stuff a little globo-think into the minds of Friday night mayhem fans (who will probably rebel, since only one skull pops like a grape).

Not good enough to take seriously and, sadly, not bad enough to be any fun.

Big Eyes may not be Tim Burton’s absolute worst movie — we’ll always have “Planet of the Apes” — but it’s pretty close to the bottom. It’s also the film that reveals his weaknesses as a director and, by their absence, his strengths. Gaudy, shallow, shrill, smug, the movie proves beyond a whisker of doubt that Burton has little interest in human beings unless they can be reduced to cartoons.

At the very least, a movie like this requires coherence to stay afloat. Barring that, it needs a star to distract us.

But Skin Deep hasn't the energy level or the inventiveness to sustain the demands of sex farce. There's only one sight gag as funny, involving glow-in-the-dark prophylactics. There's also only one role that's sympathetic. As usual, it's the Julie Andrews role of long-suffering wife, played by Alyson Reed. One last complaint: In the guise of being unflinching about dancing on the edge of outrage, the film reveals a mean streak involving cruel things done to dogs. Skin Deep spends what seems like a lot of time living up to - or is it down to? - its name. [3 March 1989, p.47]

The one-sidedness of Farmageddon isn't just an artistic failing. It's an argumentative failing, too.

Priscilla gives us little idea of the inner workings of Priscilla Presley. She’s an enigma in what is supposed to be a story of her empowerment.

Del Toro does remind you of Brando here; unfortunately, it's the Brando of ''Apocalypse Now,'' the one with the green face and puffy line readings. Jones fares better, even if he wears the same grieving-for-humanity expression throughout the film.

A veritable rip-off of 1995's "The Usual Suspects," Beach's crime caper not-so-subtly apes Bryan Singer's use of multiple red herrings and flashback-heavy interrogation scenes, but lacks the stylistic flair and sophisticated narrative skills to pull off a similar feat of cinematic intrigue.

Works hard to give quirk a bad name.

It was possible to hope that Blade II would turn out to be good. Well, forget it.

How to Make a Killing should be a lot more fun than it is. The murders are poorly staged and unfunny, and Powell’s performance is so one-note and smug that you can’t root for him even if you think his killing spree is justified.

Nothing works. Or some of it works, but that doesn't matter because what's working is so deeply, painfully boring.

Audiences are going to want to brace themselves, too – for a movie that refuses to recognize when it’s going too far, with its wince-eliciting jokes about jailhouse rape in particular.

Had “Emancipation” shaken off its Oscar-baiting “slave movie” shackles and instead gone full-tilt into a vengeance-laden “freedom movie,” it might have worked.

When we’re not being fed warmed-over narration and editing tricks that remind us of the Scorsese-directed examples, we’re trapped with a visibly disinterested De Niro. He barely gives one performance, let alone two.

It's not boring to watch, but in the end it's too lame and too tame. [21 Apr 1995]

For all its sugary sweet coating, this movie is nothing more than mindless, mundane distraction.