A movie as unsubtle as its title suggests, Fear is too seriously intended to work as trash and too ungainly and ugly to register as entertainment. [15 Apr 1996]

Their (The Brothers Strause) effects are pretty good, on a fairly limited budget. And that's about all you can say for Skyline.

A comedy murder mystery gone seriously astray, boasts an immensely talented cast .

Fox's cleavage is the only camera object that catches Bay's attention for more than a millisecond.

The stalwart American hero of Turistas comes off as a dislikable blank in the hands of Josh Duhamel, of the TV series "Las Vegas." More relaxed is Melissa George, who co-stars as the Aussie.

The overall vibe of this folly is curdled and utterly blase; it's a 118-minute foregone conclusion, finesse-free and perilously low on the simple performance pleasures we look for in any musical, of any period.

Rendered bland and frustrating by its endless attempts to make the odd odder.

As robust and clever an actor as Cox is, he can't make Jacques any less of a blowhard; Kari's wit simply doesn't come through in English, at least with this script.

The movie also features Doug E. Doug (Cool Runnings) as a bumbler of an FBI agent, a fluffy gray-and-white alley cat as D.C., and a climax overloaded with car crashes, pratfalls and forced mayhem.

Just withers compared with many older, better movies about teen alienation and nihilism, from "Rebel Without a Cause" to "River's Edge."

It's almost always rewarding to watch an underdog triumph--what else could explain why movies exactly like this keep being made?--but Longshots is one underdog that's hard to love and harder still to champion.

The movie itself is hyperactive and a jumble.

Let's face it, the bottom line on a disaster film is how special are its special effects. With Meteor, the answer is not very. [22 Oct 1979, p.6]

Instead of dramatizing this subject’s life, it dramatizes the extravagance of moviemaking. The script shoves the dicey stuff off to the side: race, infidelity, a complicated figure’s inner demons.

Packed with gratuitous dumb moments -- which is too bad, given that the premise has promise.

Raiff most likely wanted to make a movie about a well-intentioned guy in his early 20s who gradually finds his way to a better life. What undermines his efforts is a creeping smugness and self-regard, positioning every side character as an intern in the Andrew Improvement Program.

The movie coasts on a blase, easygoing highway of cynicism regarding how America conducts its business of war. Despite all the Martifications and Scorsese-ing, we're left with virtually nothing, except the feeling that a pretty good anecdote has been inflated into a bubble-headed American Dream morality tale.

It's no better, no worse and essentially no different from the jocular, clodhopping brutality of the first one.

A packed convention of contemporary cliches. [31 Jan 1986, p.J]

I wish The Boy Next Door were a different, zingier sort of mediocrity, but whenever it threatens to go the full Zalman King "Two Moon Junction" route, it pulls back and behaves itself and settles for a grindingly predictable series of escalations.

This one is strictly a welding job, grabbing parts of “Blade Runner,” a bolt and a nut or two from “Vertigo” (though not as much as “Phoenix” did) and notions of commercially desired fantasies of pasts real and imagined, straight from “Westworld.”

Recycling the regressive humor of his (Sandler’s) previous films, it piles on so much sentimentality that you wonder how anyone could consider him a renegade. [25 June 1999, Friday, p.A]

A fast, slick, outlandish fiasco that starts out well and then seems to drop right off a cliff.

An unabashedly bad movie full of cliches, claptrap, fairly good rock 'n' roll and stomach-turning gross-out gags.

The quality of a movie comedy varies indirectly with the number of times someone in it is punched or kicked in the groin. On that score alone, "The Nude Bomb" is a bust. [09 May 1980, p.29]

It's hard to imagine what prompted Eastwood to direct and star in such a creaky vehicle unless this was his commercial payback to Warner Bros. for letting him make his excellent, financially disastrous White Hunter, Black Heart this year. [07 Dec 1990, p.C]

The sole memorable scene involving a little Focker in Little Fockers, though memorable doesn't mean amusing, involves Ben Stiller's male-nurse character administering a needle full of adrenaline to his dyspeptic and unhappily aroused father-in-law Jack Byrnes, played by Robert De Niro.

The sole curiosity in Blue Steel is the sight of Jamie Lee Curtis in cop`s uniform. There is nothing more to it than that-no tension, no character.

It plays like a bland, third-season Marvel series as watched on a 12-year-old TV set playing in the wrong dramatic aspect ratio, which I realize isn’t a real thing. But now it is.

Squanders a decent comic premise.

All you want from a movie like this, really, is a little brainless fun, and it keeps holding out on you. Everyone looks fatigued. Even Cage’s toupee seems ambivalent about having signed on for a sequel.

Director Paul McGuigan ("Lucky Number Slevin") has never been keen on plot logic, and that might be fine here if he offered anything other than Peter Sova's lush images of Hong Kong.

Some film premises are so outlandish, so thinly worked out and so deep-down ridiculous that they wind up sinking the show -- and White Chicks collapses under a real doozy.

Even as slapstick, it's a major snoozefest.

The problems begin and end with the script, credited to three writers. “Dolittle” turns its title character into an eccentric and wearying blur of tics, tacked onto a character who comports himself like a bullying, egocentric A-lister rather than someone who, you know, actually enjoys the company of animals.

This movie is just not cool or hip or in any way extreme. Sitting through Grind is a real grind.

Sweet-tempered but superficial.

What we have here is a much less radical movie than writer Hughes probably believes he has created. Yes, he's given us an individualistic girl, but she swoons like a robot after the first reasonably human WASP or WASC asks her for a date. [2 Feb 1986]

A gaudy yet grim science-fiction horror movie of such surpassing silliness, humorless intensity and stylistic overkill that watching it may actually put you in a state of paranoia.

It's those scenes-and computer graphics ingeniously engineered by Richard Hollander and VIFX-that give "Ghost" what little kick it generates. Its hero and villain may be hackers, but its heart is hack. [30 Dec 1993, p.20]

The tragedy is that the performance comes to nothing. Nearly everything else in the film is vile.

Though The Kid & I falters as both a comedy and an After School Special, it works as a rather touching episode of "This is Your Life," with a parade of cameos from Arnold's career that'll coax a sniffle or two from his family.

A poor man's "When Harry Met Sally."

The actors had little to work with in this passe social satire, but sharper performances might have saved Marci from total humorless ruin.

The third and easily the worst in the series of hapless adventures of the Griswold family of suburban Chicago. [1 Dec 1989, p.A]

Nobody watches a disaster movie starring digital tornadoes expecting Oscar Wilde. But Into the Storm, directed with bland efficiency by Steven Quayle of "Final Destination 5," reminds us that unless a movie establishes certain base-line levels of human interest, it runs the not-unentertaining risk of coming out squarely in favor of its own bad weather.

Anytime Jaa isn't on screen, The Protector sputters.

Line to line, Stallone has a particularly numbing penchant for the f-word. But the key f-word in Homefront is "familiar."

The crass sentimentality of American Wedding increasingly fits Norman Mailer's definition: "the emotional promiscuity of the basically unemotional." The jokes are unemotional, uncouth and mostly unfunny.

Degenerates into a slow-moving game of connect-the-gross-outs.

Leave it to an American production team to remake the same premise into an inarguably worse movie. And this insufferable remake called The Man with One Red Shoe marks the second time in as many years that producer Victor Drai, a former estate developer, has taken a French movie and turned it into garbage. Last year he took the genuinely amusing ''Pardon Mon Affair'' and reworked it with the help of the increasingly annoying Gene Wilder into ''The Lady in Red,'' one of the year`s worst movies.

Isn't much more creative than your average gross-out comedy.

That it is a pseudo-hip filmmaking fantasy doesn't make it any less pretentious, or any less a turnoff.

I found it bizarre and limp and all over the place and not in a good, messy, lifelike way.

An exhaustingly pushy, phallocentric and witlessly smutty spoof of early '80s medieval fantasies such as "Krull" and "The Beastmaster."

Green has made so many interesting movies, from “George Washington” to “Snow Angels” to the best bits in “Pineapple Express” and more recent genre exercises. Halloween Kills settles for the reductive, distressingly anonymous hackwork of its title.

As directed by Ronny Yu, Bride of Chucky shows flashes of visual inspiration, and the script by Don Mancini is laced with tiny nuggets of humor. But overall, Chucky seems to be coming apart at the seams.

Scott treats the material as if it were grist for a 30-second spot or a rowdy music video.

If the writers had the guts (and the jokes) to fashion a bittersweet comedy with a fully earned happy ending, Unaccompanied Minors probably wouldn't have been made. As is, it's a prefab slapstick-'n'-pathos stew that doesn't taste like anything.

A dull, amateurish mixture of the sentimental and the obvious.

Felitta and Reiser mean nothing but well with this project, but too many lines sound fraudulent, and Reiser, it must be said, is a hopeless ham in the reaction shot department.

There is some directorial skill here--Argento should be congratulated for a few interesting storytelling choices--but the end result feels grimy and strangely pathetic.

Numbingly gory when it isn’t just plain numbing.

We have to take the sexual tension on faith, as with everything in this formulaic glob of a script.

There's no reason to look at this movie unless you're interested in computer graphics. But, if you are, why not wait for the video game? It may not be any better,but at least you can turn it off. [17 Jan 1996, p.7]

The idea may sound like fun, but the movie isn't. It's a travesty of a picture that's a disgrace to the memory of the great film from which it's remade. [5 February 1999, Friday, po.A]

The Doom Generation can't help but choke on the poisonous fumes of its own cloudy existentialism. [10 Nov 1995, p.G]

Hanna presents the problem of the well-made diversion that is, at its core, repellent.

Kingsman: The Golden Circle offers everything — several bored Oscar winners, two scenes featuring death by meat grinder, Elton John mugging in close-up — except a good time.

It’s a lame and weaselly thing, made strangely more frustrating by some excellent performers.

Not funny because it's not true.

With not a single original idea in its makeup, Certain Fury has to rely on something else to give it a kick. This it finds in foul language and heavy violence.

This clunky remake can't rise from the ashes, nor would you want it to.

The scenery's nice. But once you've said the scenery's nice, you're no longer talking about a movie worth talking about.

Kollek's fondness for whimsical plot turns adds still more random elements to a movie that at times seems edited by a blindfolded monkey.

On the whole, I'd rather be on Pluto, which isn't even a planet.

The actors take your mind off things when they can: I like the way Hathaway jabs her elbow at the elevator buttons for punctuation, and the ardent commitment to language Ejiofor brings to his character’s public poetry readings. But a movie shouldn’t rely on Hathaway and Ejiofor to shell-game your attention away from the movie itself.

Davis, in particular, manages to create a fully dimensional character in the midst of a highly polemical screenplay.

How is it possible that actors as expert as Close and Depardieu can wind up together in a mostly brainless big-budget stinker?

It feels like any new ideas were jettisoned for the same old schtick. "Zombieland" may have helped to give birth to the zomb-aissance, but "Double Tap" just might be the kill shot.

A good-natured but trivial Manhattan romantic comedy.

This is a franchise with lead weights tied around its ankles.

One hopes that this is Hollywood's last go-round with Swept Away. Watching this fiasco, I kept having nightmares about a possible cartoon version, co-starring Cruella de Vil and Shrek.

After the insufferably dense mermaid mythology of "Lady in the Water," Shyamalan clearly wanted to keep things simple. He whizzed straight past "simple" to simplistic.

Seven Pounds has a heart as big as all outdoors. Unfortunately it's made out of high-fructose bull.

In making a movie that preaches love for odd ducks, Schumacher has turned Flawless into the oddest duck of all.

As directed by Robert Mulligan, the stately pace here feels sluggish and the music is no elegiac Pachelbel's "Canon" but a medley of dreadful cocktail lounge piano and swooning strings. [21 Oct 1988, p.G]

This is one of those would-be blockbusters that wants to have it both ways: It includes enough political commentary to have pretensions of seriousness, yet it's engineered to satisfy the explosion cravings of Schwarzenegger action fans, if any are left.

Horror movies don't have to make sense in the real world, but when you have to help their internal logic along this much, it's pretty much a cue for heckling -- or checking your watch.

The most excellent and lamentable tragedy Romeo and Juliet has been turned into a film that is lamentable without the "excellent" part.

Not even Smith's charisma can mitigate the chaos that is Hancock.

Freshman Orientation is not incompetently made. Nor is it badly acted. But there’s not a fresh idea in it, and everyone on screen seems to be in a different comedy.

Director Zalman King has literally created a bad B-movie here, photographing breasts, buttocks and bubbleheads. The film is erotic until its first coupling; that's when we realize these dullard characters might as well be mannequins. Two Moon Junction deserves a genre all its own: very soft-core porn. [6 May 1988, p.A]

The revenge in Oldboy is neither sweet nor sour; it's just drab.

If you are at all squeamish about incest and/or prefer sex scenes without violent undertones, you should avoid this movie.

There's really just not a lot here. I'm sure Racer's story will entertain the very wee ones -- but so do keys.

When Jason Sudeikis and Ed Helms appear in the same movie there's a significant threat of clean-cut sameness. Mediocre material makes them like two halves of the same comic actor: Ed Jason Helms-Sudeikis.

The worst part of the night isn't the Aqua Net hair or the sweaty '80s dancing. Murder is the theme of the evening.