It's a long slog, not because what the film says is provocative but because the technique is as slack as the writing.

Won't change your world, but it's attractive and Smith the Elder, lowering his voice to subterranean James Earl Jones levels, delivers a shrewd minimalist performance. His son may get there yet.

Ragged as some of it might have been, that old "Out-of-Towners" had a unified and surprisingly dark comic vision to go with its nifty one-liners. This big, glossy picture is set in movie-movie land, that shiny, peachy place where a celebrity -- like Mayor Rudy -- waits around every corner. [2 April 1999, Friday, p.A]

Stumbles from cliche to cliche:

A bad, bad movie...It's loud and dumb and it wastes a good cast on a ludicrous script.

The movie bumps along from low-grade scare to scare, and it's not lousy, mainly because Virginia Madsen prevents it from being so.

The violence of Class of 1999 is so extreme, so redundant and so meaningless that Lester ends by nullifying his own message - it seems that brutality in the name of law and order is wrong, but that brutality in the name of entertainment is just fine. [11 May 1990, p.E]

Both Jackson and Levy are better than director Les Mayfield's ("Blue Streak") meandering comedy.

Commenting on performances here is like critiquing the production design of a porno--it's beside the point. Briefly: Knoxville, bad choice, man. Reynolds, you make a good villain. Simpson, lovely posing. Scott, you're from Minnesota and it shows--but I bet stunt driving school was fun.

Jade, like many another recent erotic or techno thriller, is packed with talent, polished and technically dazzling. But, daring as it might seem in its sexual content and exposure of bad behavior among the mighty, it's curiously soft at conveying what these characters really believe. [13 Oct 1995, p.J2]

We keep waiting for the movie to stand for something more than a manual of cruelty, but it never does, even though director Cimino makes a heavy-handed attempt through Western locations and Red River Valley on the soundtrack to recall the heroism of another age. [05 Oct 1990, p.C]

Doesn't have much plot. It just sort of meanders around like a wildebeest playing Blind Man's Bluff.

The cinematic equivalent of Trix. It's just made to be enjoyed by certain folks more than others. Will girls like it? More than their parents.

Let's make this simple: If you spend money on Soul Plane, you've been played.

A sweet, effective installment, an often bright and efficient repository for the slapstick laughs and cutesy sentiments so beloved by this age group.

It breaks director Billy Wilder's most important movie commandment: Thou Shall Not Bore. It's just not funny.

A sincere but clumsy attempt to capture the pain of a man trying to cope with loss and divorce through the ages. [06 May 1994]

Even when Eastwood and Robertson, pleasant enough company, threaten to float off the screen, The Longest Ride glides along and delivers its reheated comfort food by the ton.

Conceived and developed shortly after Haddish scored, deservedly, with “Girls Trip,”” the movie is a mechanical series of witless yeast infection jokes, or thereabouts. While director Miguel Arteta has made some interesting work in the past, including “The Good Girl” and “Beatriz at Dinner,” his way with low physical comedy here is pretty artless.

After experiencing about a half-hour of Grodin's yelling, you sit in your seat imagining how much funnier Last Resort could have been if it had been written by, directed by or starred Woody Allen, Albert Brooks or Steve Martin. The answer is: a whole lot funnier. [09 May 1986, p.43]

Hoffs' Dublin appears to consist of stock street footage and a lot of stand-in California, which makes a hash of an exterior scene in which the characters complain about the incessant rain as the sun clearly shines through the damp.

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

What exactly is funny about "Basic Instinct" or "Fatal Attraction"? Other than sending up specific scenes-say, Sharon Stone's uncrossed legs from "Basic Instinct"-there is no humor to be mined. The "Airplane" films kidded the genre rather than just duplicating scenes; director Reiner is operating at the level of a high school parodist. [29 Oct 1993, p.C2]

In a case study of how to screw up a simple, powerful revenge story, director Jonathan Hensleigh punishes audiences with an unbearably sluggish action movie that requires the word "action" to be placed in quotes.

If the setup, with its theme of two radically different brothers drawn to the same woman, recalls Moonstruck, the follow-through of The January Man has none of the earlier film's pleasing symmetry or emotional force. Sarandon seems to get lost in the shuffle (in a way that suggests some last-minute trimming of her role), and the picture eventually trails off into a tangle of unresolved plot threads. [13 Jan 1989, p.K]

Though the dialogue is written with all the finesse of a self-help book, and the visuals are a garish technicolor explosion, there are some nuggets of wisdom that do resonate, regardless of personal belief.

Something about baseball seems to bring out the silly side in moviemakers -- even in a movie like The Fan, which starts out well-crafted and deadly serious and seems to have good enough actors and a savvy enough director to stay that way. But halfway through this thriller things go haywire. [16 Aug 1996, p.D]

Wedding Date is neither good art, good entertainment nor even good trash.