As dopey as its heroes, and the cast's admirable energy isn't enough to keep the story punching through the final round.

Sam Firstenberg directed the mindless mayhem. [15 Nov 1984, p.47]

One thing is certain: It's a bomb trying to be a hit, and at that it'll never succeed.

Davis contributes his usual dignity -- not easy when you're playing a character who thinks he's John F. Kennedy dyed black -- but it's not enough to save this silly thriller-comedy.

The star's over-the-top energy isn't enough to make this hopelessly vulgar, numbingly repetitious farce worth watching.

The story is irresponsible and the filmmaking is awful.

Romano tries hard, but it takes real big-screen talent to draw laughs and emotions from material as flimsy and formulaic as the script.

So vulgar and incoherent that even Hackman's gifts can't score a touchdown.

In sum, Van Helsing is yet another video game disguised as a wide-screen epic. Here's hoping the box office drives a firm wooden stake through its hokey Hollywood heart.

The film tries to revive the sort of good-hearted optimism associated with Frank Capra classics of the 1940s era, but pictures like "It's a Wonderful Life" and "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington" were never so simplistic, syrupy, or tedious to sit through.

Surely it couldn't be meant as dramatic realism! But it is. And amazingly, the movie gets worse as it goes along.

Talking dogs were cute, once. It's a tad disconcerting, however, when a canine starts lip syncing to the voice of Carl Reiner so it can complain about flatulence.

With the mounting number of first-rate, even masterly foreign-language films locked out of movie theaters due to wary distributors, it's worth pondering why such laughable dreck as German actor-writer-director Vadim Glowna's House of the Sleeping Beauties actually made it through.

Downright awful.

A private eye enters a horrific world of degrading sex and bottom-feeding pornographers.

A total lack of chemistry between the stars -- neither of whom is particularly good at romantic comedy in the first place -- and you have a promising package that grows steadily less lovable as it goes along. Down with this movie!

Creepy.

Violent and vapid, but the visual jolts may please horror buffs.

The junior Giannini, who has inherited Giancarlo's handsome looks, portrays his mercurial character with energy and flair. Madonna doesn't. Indeed, it's hard to remember the last time a certified celebrity gave a performance so monotonous, unimaginative, and all-around tiresome to watch.

This fact-based drama is very well-meaning but also cloying, sentimental, and simplistic. Gooding's fake-toothed grin deserves an Oscar for best makeup, though.

Stiller strives to be a wild and wacky villain, Vaughn endeavors to be a likable and average hero, and both fall flat on their faces, like everything else in this unspeakably stupid comedy.

This movie has promising ingredients. But you'll leave wanting much, much more.

In short, it's dull, derivative, and as lifelike as a heap of historical figurines. Few will remember this Alamo for long.

Weitz doesn't have the chops for satire, let alone black comedy.

Like a nincompoop version of "The Usual Suspects."

The filmmakers seem well in control of their chaotic material, but what can be said when the movie features wall-to-wall teenage alcohol abuse.

Bacon lavishes his camera on her (Sedgwick) in various states of dress and undress, but the script, by Hannah Shakespeare - talk about having to live up to a name! - is a cheat. It rarely expands on the boy's crises in having to deal with such a mother.

I found much of it as emotionally rigged as a crooked horse race.

The concept of dueling negotiators has strong dramatic potential, but Gray seems more interested in gimmicks and gunshots than in the psychological face-off between sharp-witted foes.

The action is snappy and quick, but why does this youth-targeted adventure pit white male heroes against a trio of villains comprising a black man, an Asian man, and an ugly woman?

This noisy, disorganized story is riddled with clichés, stereotypes, and self-indulgence from beginning to end.

Hop away from this one fast!

Breillat is a smart, serious observer of sexuality's often disruptive role in human life, but this existential drama is sadly pretentious.

South Korean melodrama uses a unique location, dominated by fishermen's floating huts, as the background for an overheated story that grows steadily more grotesque and unpleasant as it proceeds.

Muddled screenwriting and uninspired directing.

After a powerful opening, when we see the first victim suddenly go blind while driving in traffic, the film devolves into a dystopian freak show and wastes many wonderful performers, including Mark Ruffalo and Julianne Moore.

I persist in believing that Melissa McCarthy is capable of starring in a movie that not only makes a scads of money but is – you know – good.

A lovestruck Californian kidnaps a neighbor's dog as a way of getting her attention.

The violent story is long on nastiness, short on credibility.

The slasher-movie genre may never die, but can't its perpetrators think up variations more clever than this by-the-numbers rehash?

Brody has offbeat charisma, but it's no match for the corny dialogue he's given here, not to mention the "Wild at Heart" snakeskin jacket he wears.

Youngsters may enjoy it. But the humor is generally of the genre heard in the boys' locker room at the high school gym.

The movie has a well-meaning message about love and loyalty being the bedrock of real family values, but its good intentions sag as the story trades its air of mischievous comedy for trite sentimentality, arbitrary plot twists, and enough maudlin melodramatics to sustain a tabloid TV series.

The story is mildly entertaining in its hackneyed way, but there's no excusing the picture's exploitative treatment of almost all the female characters.

The rest of Franco Zeffirelli's latest Shakespearean outing is so eager to be cinematic, with its peripatetic camera and souped-up screenplay, that it forgets to make sense.

Shallow and sentimental in the sappiest Hollywood tradition.

So stupid you'll wish you'd brought a duffel bag of your own.

Adam Sandler's creative songs and silly expressions on "Saturday Night Live" may have turned him into a celebrity, but this movie based solely on his antics doesn't work.

This boatload of clichés is strenuously unfunny.

Spoiled by its simplistic portrait of people from the Mideast as incorrigibly violent and untrustworthy.

What remains discomforting is their sheer failure to be funny.

Fiction and fantasy to evade reflection on the world we actually live in.

The story is inspirational in a superficial way, but the filmmakers focus so exclusively on their attractive heroine that the picture loses any real connection with Africa.

The plot is predictable, the characters are cliches, and all the actors look and sound like refugees from a movie Martin Scorsese would have made vastly better three decades ago.

It's astounding that the ingenious creator of "JFK" and "Wall Street" could make an epic on war and empire that's so utterly simplistic and unreflective.

By comparison, Bride Wars makes "Sex and the City" seem like Jane Austen.

It seems to have had the opposite effect on the director's taste, as she strives for new levels of raunchiness.

The results are unbelievably tedious, but Mansfield buffs may find it intermittently worthwhile.

Crass and soulless.

Pokes and prods the viewer to watch the brutal, indiscriminate methods of Rio's SWAT-like cops and then demands only one conclusion: That cops in Rio's drug-infested slums must do what they do and if that means rampant point-blank executions, so be it.

Perhaps they truly believe war is an inescapable aspect of human life. If so, why make movies that rub our faces in its horror? If artists have no antidote to war's evil or insight into the suffering it brings, their motive in depicting it must be merely to sensationalize its terrors and make money from the morbid fascination it holds for audiences. We deserve better.

Khouri's new picture takes all this talent and turns it into the kind of manipulative mush that Hollywood used to market under the condescending label "woman's picture" years ago.

There are a few clever lines and Cleese has some sensational moments, but that's not enough to make the farce seem fresh.

What ensues is a Halloween-style blood bath accompanied by graphic sex scenes.

Philippe Rousselot's carefully shaded cinematography looks great, but the screenplay is pretentious and there's little to applaud in the top-heavy acting by John Malkovich and Julia Roberts.

The movie's one good performance is given by the house, full of ominous inscriptions, inscrutable chambers, and fiendish machines. The human characters are played with various degrees of manic overacting.

As he showed in the recent "Catch Me if You Can," also a Hanks vehicle, Spielberg has little talent for emotional realism, not to mention psychological suspense. He should scurry back to "Jurassic Park" as soon as the next flight leaves.

The film means well, but each scene gets clobbered by sappy screenwriting.

It's encouraging to see Hollywood tackle themes of faith and religion, but here, too, Shyamalan is timid, reducing them to fuzzy New Age clichés. Add wooden acting, stilted dialogue, and a faux-arty style, and you have a thudding disappointment.

Everyone works hard, but the results are sadly short of style and personality or irony and intelligence.

The gimmick behind the screenplay is clever, but the filmmakers don't rise to the challenge they've set themselves, merely spinning two unimaginative stories for the price of one.

All the good points together can't make up for the film's mostly soggy acting, particularly by Sean Young and Matt Dillon in the leading roles, or for the technically inept way the voices have been dubbed over the picture - the characters sound like they're reading their lines from a phone booth. Even second-rate Hollywood movies generally have a certain amount of craft and professionalism, but there's precious little here. I say, kiss this one goodbye. [17 May 1991, p.13]

Preposterous plot, bad acting, and dialogue that provokes more laughs than shivers.

Travolta and Jackson have some effective scenes, but Nielsen is lacking in charisma, and James Vanderbilt's screenplay ought to be court-martialed.

The animals are cute and Murphy gives a lively performance, but as with his remake of "The Nutty Professor," the original is still the best.

Has amusing bits of social satire, but they're crowded out of the stable by lots of bathroom and barnyard humor.

Some movies are so flagrantly awful that they achieve classic status. To this rarefied company we must now add The Astronaut Farmer.

What little plot there is involves drug-running and is just about as disposable as everything in this paltry excuse for a movie.

Strains to be shockingly original but winds up as cheap and cheesy as its characters.

So sloppily made that it's barely coherent.

In short, this isn't a poignant drama about courage and imagination -- it's a contrived fantasy about courage and imagination.

The funny scenes are as far apart as oases in the Sahara. [22 May 1987]

Amanda Plummer is even more weirded-out than usual as a serial killer wandering through England with her sadly befuddled girlfriend. [10 May 1996, p.13]

The nasty, sometimes violent story was written by Christian Forte, a newcomer who is clearly under Quentin Tarantino's unpleasant spell, and directed by Kevin Spacey, an unusually gifted actor who doesn't yet show any special talent for filmmaking.

Uninspired thriller-comedy.

The comedy isn't quite as crude as it sounds, but there's not much of value here beyond a little lively acting.

Its main message is that everyone should believe and behave in exactly the same way. Groupthink wins again!

Cartoonish effects and overacting make this more corn than catnip.

Peter Segal's comedy has a few witty moments surrounded by a lot of silliness.

"The idea evolved and expanded," he (Snyder) says, "and took on a life of its own." Unfortunately, all of that life must have dribbled away as the project developed, because the resulting nonsense has none.

Moves at a lumbering pace, peppered with ungainly gags and dramatic moments with little emotional power. The ironic commentary on show-biz superficiality is sabotaged by Niccol's failure to make his own story seem real.

Don't be taken in by Taken.

Lively, colorful, violent, stupid.

A suggestion to screenwriters: Stop telling stalkers that their passion isn't misplaced and that the girl will come around in the end. It is, and she won't. Just give it up.

When promising independent filmmakers decide to jump on the bandwagon and pump up the gore, the results are sure to be touted as visceral and unflinching. Don't be fooled. Kramer has even commented that the movie should be viewed as a modern-day Grimm's fairy tale. It's grim all right.

The special effects are extra special. The screenplay is idiotic, though, and Diesel speaks his dialogue like a Sylvester Stallone clone who never finished third grade.

Cumming's antic acting is the only asset of this boisterous comedy.

The movie is designed to show off Liotta's acting skills, but pointless mayhem and sheer nastiness crowd out any virtues it might have had.