The characters seem both reduced and idealized, and the plot has turns a dispassionate dramatist would avoid.

You get the plot, all right, but that's all you get - no body, no texture, no rhythm, no shading.

As with many R-rated studio comedies, the transgressive humor isn't nearly as offensive as the phony sentiment that's supposed to redeem it, supplied here in stale scenes of the sitter bonding with his little charges.

A geek festival that mainly invites us to hoot at a bunch of alleged crazies.

A numbing combination of sloppy writing, vulgar art direction, high school acting, and bungled special effects—in short, par for the course for venerable hack Michael Anderson.

It's as if Russ Meyer had made "Death Wish III" with an adenoidal cast, though it isn't that good.

What's left is a curiously disconnected illustration of American racism, which nevertheless fails to realize the power and irony inherent in its pop-Marxist analysis.

Dismal.

Without the grandiose narrative structure of the six live-action releases, this feels even more pointless, a mechanical attempt to milk the kids for every last dime.

Writer-director Peter Greenaway never uses narrative lightly...references to the act of filmmaking exhaust their impact pretty quickly.

A limp, cheaply made version of the Broadway. Director Randal Kleiser shows no real sense of how a musical is constructed: the songs are bunched together, the production numbers don't move, and the whole project shifts awkwardly between naturalism and stylization.

Its ponderous explanations about why there are vampires in Arizona in the new millennium (blah, blah, blah).

A major washout.

A career low for Mark Wahlberg and director John Singleton (Boyz N the Hood), this ridiculous mean-streets adventure starts out like a Hell's Kitchen melodrama from the 30s and eventually spins off into a series of gunfights, beat downs, and trite Motown numbers.

The story is painfully slow.

Directors Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor were responsible for the delirious "Crank" and "Crank 2" but left the magic behind when they threw together this tedious mash-up of "Tron," "Rollerball," "The Matrix," etc.

The film's a swell way of torturing yourself for 108 minutes.

At first I thought I was watching yet another version of "A Christmas Carol"; then I wondered if it was a remake of "It's a Wonderful Life"; finally I gave up trying to find anything at all in it that was unfamiliar.

Once again, the overall premise is milked for some mild titillation involving the hero's sexual innocence, making one wonder if the genre's popularity might involve some deeply sublimated form of kiddie porn--arguably the distilled ideological essence of squeaky-clean Reaganism.

At least (John) Waters cares about most of his freaks; for Lynch they're basically exploitation fodder for a puritanical "dark vision of the universe" that seems to come straight out of junior high, complete with giggles.

A festival favorite in 1992, this flamboyant Australian crowd pleaser and first feature by Baz Luhrmann ("Moulin Rouge") struck me then as one of the more horrific and unpleasant movies I'd seen in quite some time.

A promotional tool that establishes its superfluousness simply by existing, this clumsy, smirking movie has a bitter soul.

Not particularly sensitive or funny comedy-drama.

Ill conceived or badly handled.

Corrupt warden, sadistic guards, new inmate debauched by her surroundings, prison-break hostage drama--could have come straight from an old George Raft vehicle.

This is gold-plated navel gazing in the worst 60s style.

A very bad film--snide, barely competent, and overdrawn--that enjoys a perennial popularity, perhaps because its confused moral position appeals to the secret Nietzscheans within us.

This is mostly a listless hodgepodge of half-improvised whatever, the seven lead characters so flatly conceived they're like the Keystone Kops (without the chops).