It's far more ambitious than its predecessor and suffers from too many ideas rather than too few, making it an inspired, fascinating, and revealing mess.

The movie takes a while to hit its stride, and its conclusion is fairly slapdash, but somewhere in between are some of the funniest bits of low slapstick Brooks has ever come up with, and an overall uncloying sweetness helps to save much of the rest.

Myers pumps out a river of inventive shtick, but it doesn't cohere or connect; he seems less a character than a comedian doing couch time on a late-night talk show.

The sadism of "1,000 Corpses" is ameliorated here by the addition of an action plot and open spaces, and the comedy is more skillfully played, mingling agreeably with Zombie's ardor for southern trash culture (the final showdown plays out to the strains of "Freebird," for heaven's sake)

You want misery? he gives you misery—dark, drear, suppurating medieval oppressiveness; monotony? he gives you that too, lots and lots of monotony; subhuman grotesquerie and primitive superstition? not to worry: this guy didn't direct Quest for Fire for nothing.

An amiable demonstration of how two charismatic actors and a relaxed writer-director (Brad Silberling) can squeeze an enjoyable movie out of practically nothing.

This is mainly a narrative brain-teaser like "Memento" or "The Jacket"; merely keeping up with the game requires so much energy that the thinness of the material becomes fully apparent only toward the end.

This originated as a late-night play, and the humor is correspondingly sophomoric, but I loved Dennis McCarthy's melodramatic score.

John Zorn's ethnically tinged score is effectively minimalist without succumbing to Philip Glass-style monotony, and Harris Yulin is effective as the hero's semi-estranged father.

Pearce pads out his plot with lots of borrowed bits (notably from The 39 Steps, with Gere and Basinger as manacled fugitives), but the borrowings don't have any resonance of their own: they simply hang on the story like empty thematic husks.

The stories are pretty good folk, though a little too coyly calculated. But the plantation stuff is beneath contempt. Better save this for nostalgia only—kids won't be missing anything if they never encounter this relic.

Coogan's screen persona is vain, dim, angry, and deeply miserable, and his handful of scenes here with a smilingly harsh Catherine Keener are little masterpieces of comic sadomasochism.

Though Coppola sticks to the principal narrative line and resists tangential, anecdotal episodes, he might as well have gone off in those directions for all the coherence he ultimately achieves.

There are some solid, outrageous laughs here--most of them involving anal sex--but don't expect a second lightning strike.

In Shonali Bose's tightly constructed debut feature... the slaughter of thousands of Sikhs during the riots sparked by Indira Ghandi's assassination take on greater personal significance.

The cast—with the happy exception of the always delightful Paula Prentiss—is uniformly dreary; and by the time the mystery begins to take shape, it's hardly possible to care.

Fresh Manhattan locations prove as photogenic as the leads, and the supporting actors--especially Tina Benko as a glacial, impeccably dressed amazon--don't miss a beat of Maggenti's snappy dialogue.

Remaking Get Smart without Don Adams and Barbara Feldon is like remaking "My Little Chickadee" without Mae West and W.C. Fields--the best possible outcome is disappointment.

Memories of Me, directed by ex-Fonz Henry Winkler, is a "Long Day's Journey into Schmaltz," in which an already overripe father-son conflict is further sugared by large doses of show-biz sentimentality. [07 Oct 1988, p.A]

Sidney Lumet's wired-up, hysterical direction overwhelms the minor pleasures of Ira Levin's play.

There's little rapport between Duchovny and Driver after their initial meeting. More exciting and suspenseful is the relationship between Driver's confidant (Hunt) and her husband (James Belushi), who can't seem to get all their kids to go to sleep at the same time.

Labyrinthine yet oversimple, the story seems to hide a more provocative one. But perhaps this is the nature of the beast.

The movie is truly an open text--its generous poetry inspires free association rather than predictable emotion.

A rich but regrettably lumpy pastry, with moments of genuine drama redeeming an almost defiantly hokey plot.

The film features subtle, honest performances by Daniel MacIvor (who also cowrote the screenplay) as the perplexed prof and engaging newcomer Aaron Webber as the sensitive student.

The problem with this film's earnest script about corruption in college basketball is that the usually witty Ron Shelton (Bull Durham, White Men Can't Jump) wrote it long before he developed his familiar jivey style. Not even an unsentimental basketball fan like director William Friedkin can wash away all the corn syrup.

Never recovers from a jarring and improbable act of ritualized violence that occurs halfway through the film.

The film can't simply be discounted as a skim job on the original; Romero's dark social commentary, which grew in impact over his entire Dead trilogy, is still very much present here, even if it no longer has the same bite and urgency.