Tawdry, trashy yawn-fest that makes the viewer long for the days when bad girls were dangerous dames with sultry style.

A not-so-funny thing happened on the way to Atlantic City, and Dan Aykroyd decided to make an offensively tedious movie about it. [16 Feb 1991, p.14]

By far the funniest part of Strange Wilderness is the trailer for "Harold & Kumar Escape From Guantanamo Bay" that's running before it.

There isn't a scene in Cocktail that isn't cheap and dumb, and whether its camp entertainment value compensates for its contempt for women is a question. Cocktail makes beer commercials look deep, makes "Top Gun" look like "Hamlet." [29 Jul 1988, p.21]

There's scant character development, pedestrian dialogue, and an almost complete lack of humor.

Cosmic slop.

Like criticizing the light fixtures on the Titanic. This ship was going down anyway.

The scenes with Keaton and Irons, too, rise above the mediocrity-unto-badness of Love, Weddings & Other Disasters on the strength of the actors’ charisma alone. Irons thaws satisfyingly as a snob finding unexpected love, and Keaton remains adorably, engagingly herself, turning her character’s blindness into a la-di-da form of grace. They are diamonds at a garage sale, and they deserve better.

Date Movie has enough laughs to make rambunctious dudes hoot and holler, but not nearly enough to ensure the happy ending it promises.

The problem with this numbskull travesty isn't that it's fatuous and smug (which it is). It's that it's slack and dull.

Not that there’s all manner of comedy craftsmanship demanding study here, but the movie does seem to be a funny jumble of contradictory impulses.

A crass, witless knockoff of better films.

Never thought we'd say this about a movie, but Bucky Larson probably doesn't wring as much out of recurring bodily-fluid gags as it could.

So heavy and lifeless that you keep waiting for those three little front-row kibitzers from "Mystery Science Theatre 3000" to appear at the bottom of the screen to start goofing on it.

The overall effect is ghoulish.

Think of the lamest horror movie you've ever seen. Now think of Tara Reid in the lamest horror movie you've ever seen. See how much worse it could have been?

The best thing in Meet the Spartans is the swift kick in the bombast it delivers to the oh-no-not-us homoeroticism of "300."

Lowbrow vampire spoof.

A sex comedy that appears to have been made by people who've never actually had sex.

You've seen dozens of movies like this on cable in the wee hours.

Put it this way: National Lampoon's Gold Diggers makes "The Anna Nicole Show" look sophisticated.

But this film, with its many cliches and borrowed substitutes for creativity, suggests his (Schroder) career in the boxing arena might have peaked with ''The Champ."

This is the first, smallest, and most essential planet in the Van Sant solar system. The seediness of "Drugstore Cowboy " started here. So did the one-way crushes in "My Own Private Idaho " and the gorgeously epic longueurs of "Last Days. "

The heart of On Broadway is in the right place. But when the story behind a film is more interesting than what's on the screen, that's a problem.

Rat may be lightweight, but it's never cheesy.

Writer and director Tim Disney raises a provocative point about how radical and inconvenient true faith can be.

This isn't a great movie -- it's barely good, really -- but it gets something about New Hampshire I've rarely seen onscreen: a defiant pride in the way things don't work out. Live Free is a comedy of vastly diminished criminal expectations. That's the fun of it, and the frustration, too.

Buried under a mound of haunted house cliches is a creepier, more sophisticated movie about the sexual power of teenage girls, and their fathers’ inability to comprehend, clambering to get out.

The opportunity to see what Lollobrigida could do with a crooked smile or a roll of her eyes -- let alone a simple street dress -- is well worth the price of entry.

A bleakly allusive look at frozen lives, Curling is very much a specialty item - a movie that goes nowhere slowly.

Is The Story of Film worth 15 hours of your viewing life? Well, that's between you and your kino conscience. The first part certainly is. Cousins is extremely good at laying out the emergence of a film grammar. More important, he communicates the sense of wonder and excitement that characterized the emergence of so astonishing a medium.

Nearly all the interviews are with the professionals. That's fine, since these guys are almost as good at talking as they are at smiling.

This IMAX spectacular largely does what it’s supposed to fascinate, educate, and visually wow the audience, in 45 minutes or less.

As a directorial debut, Losing Ground astonishes with its assurance, subtlety, and style.

An illuminating celebration of music and the art of teaching, comes at a time when both art and teaching are held in low esteem.

That’s one of the problems with Brian Ackley’s no budget sci-fi psychological thriller. No horror can compensate for the preceding 75 minutes of tedious, repetitious bickering. It’s about as thrilling as a couple’s therapy session with a married pair who hate each other and for good reason.

The RKO Swiss Family Robinson isn't considered a lost classic — a lost pretty-good-movie is more like it — but the fact that Disney is finally releasing a movie they bought specifically to sit on is unexpected and welcome. [20 Oct 2019, p.N1]

If anything, the film does a bit too much, going for variety and breadth sometimes at the expense of depth. There are a lot of bases to touch here, and touching pretty much all of them means several get touched too lightly. Jazz trumpeter and New Orleans native Terence Blanchard serves as a passionate, highly informed guide.

The most remarkable thing about Brendan J. Byrne’s documentary — for anyone who’s followed Bill Bulger’s career it’s shocking, really — is the degree of cooperation Byrne got from the Bulger family for this joint portrayal of the two brothers. It started out as a profile of Bill, Byrne says, but he quickly realized he couldn’t tell the story of the younger brother without also telling the story of the older.

When the film keeps things simple, it’s at its best: uncluttered and assured.

There's no gore in Campillo's tale, just a group of emotionally remote but otherwise seemingly healthy undead who inexplicably wander back into the world a world unsure how to reassimilate them, be it in the workplace or more intimate fronts. The complications he imagines are achingly smart; witness the grieving parents feeling even further despair at the realization that their returned little boy isn't truly all there. The film does, ultimately, lack closure, but maybe that's part of the point. [26 June 2005]