A painfully stolid movie that lumbers past emotional issues like a wrestler in a cafeteria line, putting a little of everything on his plate.

Trekkies talk at length about how the world would be a saner and more peaceful place if the "Star Trek" philosophy ruled our lives. No doubt it would be a lot more entertaining, too, especially during root canals.

These actors, alas, are at the service of a submoronic script and special effects that look like a video game writ large.

Bad films are easy to make, but a film as unpleasant as Baby Geniuses' achieves a kind of grandeur.

The original "Carrie'' worked because it was a skillful teenage drama grafted onto a horror ending. Also, of course, because De Palma and his star, Sissy Spacek, made the story convincing. The Rage: Carrie 2 is more like a shadow.

The director is James Foley, who is obviously not right for this material.

The comedy here isn't all on the surface, and Viterelli [the bodyguard Jelly] is one reason why.

It crash-lands with an ending of soppy moralizing, but until the end, it's smart and merciless in the tradition of the original story.

[It's] like Tarantino crossed with the Marx Brothers, if Groucho had been into chopping off fingers...Fun, in a slapdash way; it has an exuberance, and in a time when movies follow formulas like zombies, it's alive.

Dreadful...Maybe another 200 cigarettes would have helped; coughing would be better than some of this dialogue.

The film has the obnoxious tone of a boring home movie narrated by a guy shouting in your ear.

I cannot imagine a Hollywood movie like this. Audiences would be baffled.

It is a real film. Not a slick exploitation exercise with all the trappings of depravity but none of the consequences.

Shameless in its use of mental retardation as a gimmick, a prop and a plot device. Anyone with any knowledge of retardation is likely to find the film offensive.

The movie's dialogue is smart. It doesn't just chug along making plot points.

One of the best elements of the movie is in breaking free, he is respecting his father. This movie has deep values.

A slick production of a lame script, which kills time for most of its middle half-hour. If anyone in the plot had the slightest intelligence, the story would implode.

The movie is funny and entertaining in all the usual ways, yes, but I was grateful that it tried for more: that it was actually about something, that it had an original premise, that it used satire and irony and had sly undercurrents.

The climactic events are shameless, contrived, and wildly out of tune with the rest of the story. To saddle Costner, Penn and Newman with such goofy melodrama is like hiring Fred Astaire and strapping a tractor on his back.

My Favorite Martian is slapstick and silliness, wild sight gags and a hyped-up acting style. The Marx Brothers would have been at home here. The movie is clever in its visuals, labored in its audios, and noisy enough to entertain kids.

Old-fashioned and obvious, yes, like a featherweight comedy from the 1950s. But that's the charm.

There is much cleverness and ingenuity in Payback, but Mel Gibson is the key. The movie wouldn't work with an actor who was heavy on his feet, or was too sincere about the material.

To give the movie credit, it's as bored with the underlying plot as we are. Even the prom queen election is only a backdrop for more interesting material, as She's All That explores differences in class and style, and peppers its screenplay with very funny little moments.

Children of Heaven is very nearly a perfect movie for children, and of course that means adults will like it, too.

It's easy to like the movie because we like the actors in it, and because the movie makes it easy on us and has charming moments. But it feels too much like an exercise. It's yuppie lite--affluent, articulate people who, except for those who are ill, have problems that are almost pleasant.

Its moments of fascination and its good performances are mired in the morass of romance and melodrama that surrounds it.

"Deep Rising" was one of the worst movies of 1998. Virus is easily worse.

A movie that doesn't buy into all the tenets of our national sports religion; the subtext is that winning isn't everything.