Even as they've smoothed the novel's rough edges, moreover, the filmmakers have tried to cram a maximum number of its incidents into about two hours of screen time. This gives the picture a hectic pace that adds to its feeling of weightlessness and unreality. Poor casting, especially in the major roles played by Tom Hanks and Melanie Griffith, doesn't help.

Though much blood is shed, the film is bloodless.

As the doomed princess, Q’orianka Kilcher, who costarred as Pocahontas in Terence Malick’s “The New World,” has imperially striking features but limited acting skills. If her performances should ever rise to the level of her looks, she’ll be great.

Although he gave the plot real momentum on the stage, director Saks has fudged and fuzzed things by translating it so listlessly to the screen. [2 Jan 1987, p.25]

A love-it-or-hate-it movie. Put me in the (sort of) hate-it column. My slight qualification here is because Darren Aronofsky's movie starring Natalie Portman as an increasingly unhinged ballerina gets points for being unlike anything else that's out there.

The blue humor in We’re the Millers is just bland. And yes, Aniston performs a (modified) striptease. That’s pretty bland, too.

The irony of the picture is the fact that Stone's visual imagination is tremendously impressive here. It is one of Hollywood's most stylistically adventurous films ever. What a pity its brilliant ideas are expended on a failed satire with little but rage on its agenda. [26 Aug 1994]

What this film really celebrates is crunch-and-thud video-game-style action, not especially well choreographed by director Guy Ritchie.

[Apted] also has an unfortunate penchant for bland stateliness, and never more so than in Amazing Grace, a well-intentioned piece of historical waxworks.

There's nothing to think about once the watery plot has run its course, and even Streep's plucky performance isn't enough to keep it steadily afloat. [30 Sep 1994, p.13]

The melancholy in this film is just as trumped up as the frenzy.

The film rapidly devolves into a lame buddy picture, part thriller, mostly goof.

Too bad director John Carpenter doesn't match this tantalizing premise with snappy, thoughtful filmmaking; long stretches of the movie are trite and silly.

This one doesn't have enough zesty ideas to revive the breed.

Shyamalan is a one-trick pony who needs to find a new rodeo.

Vitkova’s direction is big on long lingering shots of dreariness. With a 2-1/2-hour running time, that’s a lot of dreariness.

The characters who come off best in Dinner for Schmucks are those dead mice.

Sean Penn is one of those actors, like Nicolas Cage, who is best (sometimes worst) when he's over-the-top. Unlike Cage, Penn doesn't pour himself into dreadful commercial vehicles. No, his dreadful movies are usually not destined for the multiplex. Case in point: This Must Be the Place.

Just in case we don’t register the mismatch, Rogen is outfitted to look especially shlubby, and he sports an unbecoming beard that never comes off. With his crack timing, he still manages to get a few laughs, but he would have gotten a whole lot more if the jokes were any good. Theron, meantime, is photographed in full glamour mode throughout. This is probably just as well, since, as an actress, she doesn’t appear to have a comic bone in her body. Therein lies the true mismatch in this coupling.

It's disconcerting to see Virginia Madsen, who was so marvelous in her 2004 comeback role in "Sideways" reduced to playing the terrified wife here.

Was Paper Man worth making? Captain Excellent and I would probably differ on that one.

The unchanneled energy of Robin Williams can't redeem this messy yarn.

It’s impossible to take this movie seriously, certainly not as seriously as it takes itself.

At some point in their careers, most male actors want to play (a) Hamlet, and (b) a hit man. I hope that Clooney has gotten "b" out of his system.

There is one bit of good news. For all you abominable snowman fans out there, "The Mummy" is filled with yetis. And, boy, are they ever angry.

It's a lot easier to follow than "Syriana." But intelligibility is about the only thing this international thriller has going for it.

As the gambler who needs his basketball phenom brother to shave points, Whitaker has some expressive scenes, and Roth knows how to make malice gleam. But almost nothing else in this movie does.

So hyperfrenetic that, in the end, you wonder if the Wachowskis aren't trying to pull off an elaborate hoax – a deranged techno fantasia posing as retro-ish family fare.

This is a funny idea, but the movie is too thinly written to build any real credibility, and the cast rarely seems in tune with the vapid vulgarities that dominate the dialogue.

This semiexpressionist fantasia is a botch.

Although the first hour builds effective suspense, the story sags into a warmed-over combination of The Silence of the Lambs and both versions of Cape Fear, and the violent climax looks like it was shot in an Everglades theme park. [17 Feb 1995, p.13]

What begins as healthy skepticism in Mr. Pyne's screenplay is subjected to so many twists that it grows into sour cynicism, spread thinly over so many characters and events that it los es its impact...This isn't the first time that shallow notions of entertainment value have taken over what could have been a thought-provoking thriller. It's too bad the strengths of "White Sands" aren't parlayed into a more meaningful experience.

Directed by Cooper, who also co-wrote the script with Josh Singer, the film serves up so much Sturm und Drang about the great man’s messed-up private life that it barely bothers to explore his creative genius.

It's not easy to sit through the movie spawned by this notion, though, proving once again that a picture can be simultaneously high in concept and low in entertainment value. [18 July 1996]

It falls short of Assayas's most inventive work, but reconfirms his ability to ferret out hidden facets of the personalities he explores. [09 Jul 1999, p.14]

Miss Firecracker is a movie that tries too hard. You want to like it, but in the end it just tires you out.

Stephen Fry gives a convincing performance as Oscar Wilde in this biopic based on the 1987 Richard Ellmann biography. But the film focuses less on Wilde's talents as poet and playwright and more on the breakup of his marriage and family as a result of his infatuation with Lord Alfred "Bosie" Douglas. [12 Jun 1998, p.B2]

Crass, juvenile, ribald. [19 Jun 1998, p.B2]

Watching the filmmakers set up the situation is like watching someone build a table, one laborious hammer-blow at a time. It's not much fun to see such gifted performers as Matthew Broderick and Annabella Sciorra wrestle so valiantly with such weak material. No help comes from Kevin Anderson's overcooked acting in the obnoxious-roommate role. [30 Apr 1993, p.13]

Landmark musical performances from countless stars draw attention from a mediocre plot. [20 Feb 1998, p.B2]

The acting is sincere and the camera work is pretty, but this art-movie variation on "The Sixth Sense" doesn't have enough energy to fulfill the high promise of Berliner's previous picture, the enchanting "Ma vie en rose."

Used Cars is full of used characters, used ideas, and used jokes, many of which are in astonishingly bad taste.

Punchy, cleverly stylized, but utterly empty yarn about a feisty young woman who welds by day, disco-dances by night, and dreams of the day when she can devote her life to her art.

John Hughes pours his usual slickness and sentimentality all over everything. [27 Feb 1987]

Edwards's mess isn't so fine. In trying to revive the great tradition of rough-and-tumble farce, he strains so hard for vigorous slapstick and wild gags that he forgets to be funny...In the end, there's something basically askew when a movie gives its heroes a valuable piano to move -- a classic Laurel and Hardy situation -- and then makes it an easy job, without a single teetering bridge to carry it across! Stan and Ollie, where are you when we need you?

You thought brawny Bruce Willis couldn't play a brainy psychologist? You were right. Or maybe it's the idiocy of the movie surrounding him that sinks his performance long before the halfway mark.

The stagebound setting gets boring; the action doesn't build a steady momentum; and the characters do far too much hanging around until the camera's ready to point at them again.

A second-rate adaptation of the second-rate Choderlos de Laclos novel: two hours of pretty people sitting in pretty rooms and talking about sex. [23 Dec 1988, A& L, p.19]

Scott Wilson gives a surprisingly lively performance as the apparent villain of the story, while good guys Judd Nelson and Ally Sheedy strive to out-bland each other. The action is generally vicious, vulgar, and vapid. [9 May 1986, p.25]

The Abyss' isn't abysmal, but it's a replay of hits we've already seen - a recycled "close encounters of the wet kind'' with far too few ideas of its own. [18 Aug 1989, Arts, p.10]

As before, the movie is more impressive for its finely detailed vision of Los Angeles as a futuristic slum than for its story, acting, or message. It's all downhill after the first few eye-dazzling minutes. [2 Oct 1992]

The director, Taylor Hackford, doesn't have the cinematic savvy to sustain so many tensions in a meaningful way; and the screenplay strays far over the line between incisive political comment and heavy-handed Red-baiting.

The story is mostly a rehash of the original "48 Hrs.," with the same hard-boiled mixture of violence and wisecracks. Directed by Walter Hill, who specializes in this kind of thing and gives it a certain conviction, if little else. [13 Jul 1990, p.10]

Failed comedy-drama with two intermingled plots, one about a high school boy seeking his own way in life, the other about an older woman with career and romance problems. Directed flatly and lifelessly by Randal Kleiser. [16 Aug 1984, p.31]

While the production is attractive in a calendar-photo sort of way, there's not a speck of genuine feeling in its glossy images.

The Witches of Eastwick, based on John Updike's novel, takes just about every wrong turn it can find. Perhaps this was predictable, with a wild-driving director like George Miller at the wheel. What's surprising is how many opportunities for vulgarity and stupidity the film invents for itself, even beyond the book's built-in temptations to excess. [12 June 1987, p.21]

I guarantee you, if Charles Dickens were alive today, he might well be writing movies but he sure as shootin' wouldn't have written "Ghosts."

Few things are more dispiriting than a holiday movie straining to become a perennial. Such is the case with Fred Claus, an insipid Christmas comedy.

The people who made Year One seem to think that all you have to do to make a hit comedy is get a bunch of jokesters together. But where are the jokes?

Just because The Fountain is different doesn't mean it's good. In fact, it's borderline unwatchable, though this hasn't prevented the Oscar buzz from buzzing.

There are a few hilarious bits, but even those are drowned out by constant gunfire and Morgan’s motormouthing. Willis is going through the motions; Scott is funny, if irritating; Morgan is irritating and not so funny.

The movie starts with insights about the need for more humane values in health care, then buries them under an avalanche of frivolities, vulgarities, and clichés.

Notable only for being a catalog of just about every kid-pic cliché ever committed to film.

If, as the ads would lead you to believe, you go to see The Break-Up expecting a romantic comedy, you will be severely disappointed. If you go to it expecting a good movie, you will also be severely disappointed.

The main performances are generally weak, although the smaller ones are sometimes brilliant, and the yarn never builds much momentum as it leapfrogs from one subplot to another. [28 Dec 1990, Arts, p.14]

The coarseness wouldn't be so bad if at least the steady stream of obscenities were funny.

It's all so resolutely uninspired that even the kids in the audience may want to duck out.

Blending animation and live action, this ferocious fantasy is hopelessly vulgar in ways never dreamed of by "Who Framed Roger Rabbit."

The Bucket List is a movie for oldsters that, paradoxically, looks as if it was made for 15-year-olds. If this is what is meant in Hollywood as "thinking outside the box," then it's time to get a new box.

The script by Allan Loeb careens all over the place without ever coming to rest on anything interesting.

Armageddon may sell tickets, thanks largely to a high-powered marketing machine that's been conducting its own countdown for the past several months. But it's not a pretty picture.

Whitaker and Schreiber, both of whom are capable of brilliance, are stuck in one-dimensional roles. It’s not only the characters who have mechanical organs; the film itself is equally lifeless and cold.

The best thing you can say about Mad Money is that it has a good cast. The worst thing you can say about it is that the cast is extremely ill-used.

Its wasted cast includes Dyan Cannon, Sally Kellerman, Len Cariou, and Brenda Vaccaro, who miraculously manages to give a fine performance in this malarkey.

Poetic conceits only work if they're poetic.

This business of the 88 minutes ticking away is a pale imitation of the old "High Noon" ploy of playing out suspense in real time. After a while, though, I began to take a perverse pleasure in wallowing in the awfulness of it all.

I don't mind a movie where people spend a lot of time jawboning, but what they say had better be interesting. In Spinning into Butter we are spoon-fed the deep dark revelation that racism can exist as virulently in liberal environs as in reactionary ones. Alert the media.

The movie often seems glib in the face of tragedy. And when, near the end, Shepard tries to pour on the hearts and flowers by showing us just what made Simon crack up on camera, the bathos is icky. The whole movie is icky.

Dislikable movie characters don't always result in dislikable movies but that's certainly the case with Sam Levinson's Another Happy Day, a dysfunctional family meltdown movie about an impending wedding that only grows more aggravating as it unwinds.

What a silly movie this is. [11 Apr 1980, p.19]

Even by Farrelly standards, the film is a washout.

The end result, at best, is high-toned pulp.

The combination of caveman dialogue, overcooked action, and anything-for-an-effect performances is maddeningly crude even by cop-movie standards. [22 May 1987, p.23]

It's as if the filmmakers were hungover from the first film and wanted to make a violent action movie instead.

Allegorical in the worst ways, Antichrist is about as profound as a slasher movie.

To see Johnny Depp and Angelina Jolie in The Tourist is like watching a chemistry experiment gone horribly wrong.

Sit this one out.

What Happens in Vegas is not only annoying, it's also incompetent – a bad mix.

The animated characters in "Clone Wars" are about as lively as the actors in the live-action movies, so I guess Lucas has achieved his goal of eliminating humans from his movies altogether.

The script is replete with howlers. My favorite, from Kitsch, after the aliens strike: "I've got a bad feeling about this." Indeed.

Parker is bland throughout. Maybe all those episodes of "Sex and the City" have soured her on this sort of thing.

Critics who come out against Kick-Ass are leaving themselves open to that worst of contemporary accusations: a failure to be cool. But pretending that Kick-Ass is just another good-time comic book blowout is the greater failure.

The Wolfman isn’t scary. In fact, it isn’t much of anything.

Maybe Hackford, and his screenwriter Mark Jacobson, were attempting to convey the dullness of vice. If so, they vastly overcorrected. But what about the dullness of the performances?

In all, it's “Diner,'' female style. Directed by Donald Petrie from a blatantly manipulative screenplay that took four people to cook up. [24 Oct 1988]

Verhoeven's lurid thriller has moments of welcome self-parody, but most of the action manages to be sensationalistic, homophobic, and tedious at the same time. [20 Mar 1992, Arts, p.12]

The message of the film is that life isn't neat and predictable like a well-arranged business trip; yet everything in the picture is so calculated that there's no life to it. [23 Dec 1988, A& L, p.19]

Everywhere he goes he asks if anybody knows bin Laden's whereabouts – as if anybody is going to tell him! Why should we accompany him on his self-aggrandizing trip?