H.G. Wells's tale of nature's little critters turned steroidal gets cheesy screen treatment from director Bert I. Gordon, a veteran of the ginormous creature genre of the '50s. [09 Sep 2007, p.N32]

The characterization couldn't be more flagrant if the soundtrack creaked out an oldie by a certain ancient pop quintet: You're a candy girl.

Howard never decides on tones that complement each other, and the dissonance is jarring.

Mostly, though, Lynch fills the screen with a lot of cynically off-putting and sadistic violence. In place of incident, character and a bemused view of small-town life, corrupt beneath its cherry-pie surface, we are essentially asked to witness torture - mostly of Laura Palmer, as her troubles lead her to self-destruct with drugs and promiscuity, including a couple of side trips to the Canadian bordello known as One-Eyed Jacks. For all the violence in Lynch's "Blue Velvet," that film maintained a comic dimension. The violence in "Wild at Heart," for all its extravagance of gesture, was hollow - stylized, not real...Here, there's no comedy, nothing surreal, just wave after wave of titillation. Except that it doesn't titillate. It depresses. There's no psychic charge on any of it. It proceeds from no artistic conviction, just from a cynical desire to squeeze a few more bucks from the already overworked corpse of Laura Palmer. It shows how quickly a creative impulse can be exhausted - from quirky originality toying with humanity's darker impulses to dispirited quasi-porn. [29 Aug 1992, p.23]

An oddly unsexy melodrama in which every supposedly shocking revelation (rape, incest, homosexuality, pedophilia) is treated with the same blithe shrug of recognition. It's numbing, especially with the film's deadly serious mood.

Just bland behavioral propaganda, and Holmes makes such a guileless and robotic spokeswoman, it wouldn't be nuts to think the White House was just another mansion in Stepford.

One of those loud, cringe-y female-empowerment comedies that feels like it was made by people who hate women.

That this witless, formulaic sequel to the hit comedy Analyze This even dares to spoof ''The Sopranos'' is embarrassing. It's like Freddie Prinze Jr. slamming Gene Hackman as a bad actor.

Just as I was beginning to hope that she’d (Heigl) find a part that called for intelligence and sophistication and backbone, she plays another uptight naif.

Tries to wring laughs from just about every dusty stereotype about blacks and whites imaginable. But it's all cheap, lazy, and unoriginal.

It's the latest in the blank-from-hell genre, in which misogyny and entertainment are made to seem indistinguishable while the blank makes life hell for someone who then is cornered into striking back.

Part sketch-comedy cartoon, part Cracked magazine spoof, installment four is the most scornfully made yet.

Whatever character they bring to their lines, the actors' voices are mostly unrecognizable after being digitally 'munk-ified.

Silent Night wants to be the new action movie associated with Christmas. But don’t worry, fans of “Die Hard”; that movie’s place is still secure.

Since a film like Mr. Magoo relies - literally and figuratively - on sight gags, they ought to be hilarious and razor-sharp. But the film's gags couldn't work their way through melted butter. [25 Dec 1997, p.C6]

Like ''Showgirls'' and ''Glitter,'' the most entertaining moments here are unintentional.

The question in Red Planet isn't whether there's any life on Mars, but whether there's any life in the film. The answer is no.

Pretty lame stuff. Already it seems to be passing with the speed of light into the limbo of utterly forgettable "who-will-I-take-to-the-prom?" movies.

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.

This is mythology that’s famously transportive in every sense, but the animators struggle to take us anywhere truly captivating, or even clearly defined.

Deep in the swampy hearts and minds of some filmmakers, embarrassing stereotypes still fester, gathering moss and slime.

The fun of these movies is that Linney often seems too refined for such greasy junk, but there she is anyway, hamming it down as it were.

The 6-year-old I went with had the villain pegged in the first 15 minutes. Needless to say, she completely ruined the movie for me. Meddling kid.

So, yea, it is a stinker. But it is prophesied that in six months time you shall come across 10,000 B.C.’ in the land of Pay-Per-View. And you shall say: ‘‘Pass the popcorn.’’

Drive Angry is something new for Cage - a movie that feels like it's straight FROM cable.

By the time I saw poor Tim crushed, head to toe, by a falling sheet of plate glass, I was certain I hadn't signed up for anything this punishing.

Garner bulls her way through the film with determination and a minimum of facial expressions, like someone who’s been told to clean up something awful and just wants to get it over with. So what if Charlize Theron did it better in “Atomic Blonde,” last year’s female-led brawler that is in every conceivable way superior to Peppermint?

This mangy comedy only demonstrates that Lohan's star power is too bright for falling into mounds of mud, rooting around in cat litter for a contact lens, and getting punched out by a roughneck jailbird, as she does here.