The year's least necessary and most unimaginative remake slogs half-heartedly to its pre-destined conclusion without making a ripple.

"Man" is like a sour, half-formed version of a TV sitcom full of dislikable, disconnected characters.

Should appeal to anyone who likes films as mushy and unsurprising as baby food.

When Allen revives his plodding "Manhattan Murder Mystery" as the even duller Scoop, I snore.

The movie is somewhat below average. The plot doesn't always hold together.

What comes from the mouth of Johnny Depp...not the crucial spark of wit or insight that could encourage us to spend two hours with this cruel bore.

Satire's funniest when it's true, but Rock exaggerates and mistimes too many jokes.

The film is a saggy, oddly mean-spirited takeoff of "Walk the Line."

An unmemorable, frenzied, characterless hodgepodge that delights the eyes while numbing the brain.

The shreds have vanished in Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle, which runs at that speed during its stunts but is utterly out of gas in every other way.

Isn't a bad movie, until John Woo remembers that he's John Woo and we remember that Ben Affleck is Ben Affleck.

M. Emmet Walsh and Elizabeth Franz enliven the film as a couple across the street...These wonderful old actors briefly raise the level of the picture to the kind of warm but honest drama it ought to have been.

The Girl Next Door is to "Risky Business" what near-beer is to beer. If you're desperate for a mild buzz, you might make it do.

At the center of the film, like a man trying to pull a donkey out of a peat bog, stands Craig: inexpressive, uninflected and obviously tired. Perhaps he’s trying to play a chap who never allows himself access to his emotions, for fear loved ones may be snatched away, but he just looks like an actor who wishes he could quit his job.

Has any movie this millennium had less reason to exist than First Daughter?

The sequel doesn't develop the characters, interject any warmth into its frenetic story or take us anywhere we haven't been.

Williamson deals mostly in cliches, as if high schoolers weren't smart enough to appreciate anything subtler.

Alas, this is one of those movies where a clever character must suddenly have an attack of doltishness for the plot to proceed, and Spader becomes the victim of bad writing. [27 Sept 1996, p.5E]

We don't need a discussion of plot in a review of a movie made from a video game, do we? Nor do we care whether the characters are complicated (no), the acting is sophisticated (no), the direction is competent (no) or the camerawork is clever (no).

Jokes don’t pay off at all or take so long to do so that they lose their snap.

Recycling is a good idea in principle, but certain products should be sent directly to a landfill without re-use. Be Cool, the feeble film follow-up to "Get Shorty," is one of them.

Quirkiness is as essential to a small indie film as beef stock to French onion soup. But if you don't have enough of any other ingredient, you end up with a watery, barely edible broth.

Like so many sequels, The Chronicles of Riddick demonstrates Hollywood's law of diminishing returns: Its quality is inversely proportional to its budget.

Feeble, vapid picture.

If you have a strong stomach, a weak sense of disbelief, an active interest in Denzel Washington or Angelina Jolie and a temporarily inactive brain, you may enjoy it awhile.

It's "Braveheart" without historical significance and "Passion" without spirituality, though it dabbles in both, and it represents as brazen an act of career suicide as I can recall from a star director. If he were a first-timer, he'd never work again.

Writer Guillermo Arriaga earns most of the blame. He played similar games with narrative in the vastly better "Amores Perros" and "21 Grams," jumping back and forth in time to show relationships among subplots and characters. But "Burials" barely has one plot.

It's ploddingly directed, indifferently acted and insufficiently frightening.