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]