The satire is intermittently amusing, but Arcand adds little to the arsenal of standard mockumentary tricks, and the interesting cast doesn't get many interesting things to do.

Darkly elegant cinematography helps compensate for awful dialogue and lackluster acting.

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

The bloom is decidedly off the pinkish rose. Martin has a few inspired moments but in order to get to them you have to wade through a mosh pit of unfunny gags.

It's a pity that such vital, thought-provoking material has been rendered so lifeless and inauthentic on the screen.

Less an American product than an international escapade, it's the kind of pigeonhole-resisting romp that Hollywood too rarely provides.

It's all very colorful, but the movie's diverse elements clash as often as they cooperate.

Steve Martin is amusing as a gangster transplanted to the suburbs, but the movie is a mess, and too jammed with ethnic stereotypes for "just kidding" to be an excuse. [5 Oct 1990, p.12]

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.

I'll say this much for Jumper – it's got a great premise. Or at least the beginnings of a premise.

Draggy pastiche of tired gags and half-baked homilies.

An impossibly, incomprehensibly overlong and cacophonous bore.

The comedy is appealing as Hollywood's umpteenth variation on the Cinderella story, but think about its patrician views of upper-class privilege and you might find it too simplistic for comfort.

How did a dignified pro like Duvall get stuck in this fender-bender?

Based on a novel by French provocateur Georges Bataille, an important thinker whose fiction rarely translates into good cinema.

The settings and visual effects are imaginatively done, but the dialogue is silly and the plot is a mishmash, with echoes of everything from the "Aliens" movies to Michael Crichton's novel "Sphere," which pushes similar buttons a little more intelligently.

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.

Carpenter pulls out all the action-adventure stops, but he and coscripter Larry Sulkis forgot to write dialogue the audience could listen to without howling in disbelief.

I squirmed in my seat throughout Identity Thief, a colossally unfunny and misguided comedy.

This low-budget drama tries very hard to convey messages of tolerance and compassion, but it's too weakly acted and directed to have much impact.

Mildly entertaining for a while; think "Stand by Me" meets "Alien," with a soupçon of "Starship Troopers" tossed in.

David Chappelle's performance as a cabbie is amusing, but the film should have been packaged with a Surgeon General's Warning - "Cigarettes is bad for you."

The picture is intriguing and obnoxious in equal measure; even Berkowitz gets tired of the game before it's over, but there are some laughs and surprises along the way.

This is the kind of movie where life lessons are posted every quarter-hour. (I timed it.)

The result is a run-of-the-mill fantasy, competently produced but disappointingly familiar, from its "Forbidden Planet" premise to the digital-clock countdown near the end.

It's rare for an Egyptian movie to look so closely and unflinchingly at class conflict and other forms of social disarray, but lively acting keeps the story engaging even when it wanders and meanders.

So sloppily made that it's barely coherent.

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?