Dallas Observer's Scores

  • Movies
For 1,518 reviews, this publication has graded:
  • 48% higher than the average critic
  • 3% same as the average critic
  • 49% lower than the average critic
On average, this publication grades 5.8 points lower than other critics. (0-100 point scale)
Average Movie review score: 59
Highest review score: 100 Final Destination 3
Lowest review score: 0 How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days
Score distribution:
1518 movie reviews
  1. Means to be heavy in terms of psychology, provocation and the examination of emotion, but it sinks like a stone the minute it hits the surface.
  2. It's unfortunate that, nudity and all, this is one of Toback's absolute worst efforts.
  3. Sits before us like an exquisite platter of wax fruit, colorful, flavorless, and, if you eat it, very likely to come back up.
  4. Russell, a former student of Buddhist monk-philosopher Robert Thurman's, is reaching too far, straining too hard, saying too much that adds up to so little after all the mumbos and jumbos tallied up by film's end.
  5. Every situation, every bit of dialogue, comes straight out of the Big Book of Movie Clichés.
  6. Has all the charm of a canceled CBS sitcom.
  7. Silly, misguided, formulaic and largely a piece of trash, but it's not quite a disaster. There's the dancing and the music and the sunlight.
  8. Here is the horror-action genre at its silliest and most uninspired.
  9. The most overrated movie of the year (of all time?) by people who should know better.
  10. This compression of logic--coupled with two hours of ham-fisted delivery--guarantees that Antitrust won't jangle your nerves but will intermittently split your sides with laughter.
  11. As an actress, Madonna has to work on her vulnerability more.
  12. Banal sit-comedy masquerading as religious deepthink dolled up as boy-meets-goy love story.
  13. If a movie is going to be so totally derivative, it should at least do a better job of it.
  14. Get out your hankies and weep for the heart-tugging disaster Message in a Bottle.
  15. Rent plays as a very long joke with no punch line, an exercise in mawkish sentimentality that's embarrassing to watch. Kudos to the actors for truly committing to their roles, but with this material, it might have been better if they hadn't.
  16. It's flapping its wings so desperately in pursuit of artistic heights that it nosedives directly into the ground. The relentless exertion makes the film a chore to watch.
  17. There's no reason to see this film in a theater -- you'll hate yourself for paying full price. Plus, you'll need beer, and lots of it, to appreciate the movie properly.
  18. The pseudo-mystical nonsense in Brian Helgeland's supernatural thriller far outweighs its scare factor.
  19. The final showdown between sole survivor and killer is sufficiently well done that you wonder why the rest didn't measure up.
  20. Any goy, too, can fall for this tripe, especially if they've a fondness for mawkish cliché, sitcom pacing, popcorn psychology, and lousy cinematography.
  21. Feels like a quirky sitcom -- "Arrested Development" without the development.
  22. A dismaying dearth of romantic chemistry -- during their brief scenes together, the two (Pitt, Roberts) actually seem afraid to touch each other -- and we end up with a Frankenstein's monster of a movie: lots of interesting pieces cobbled together with all the stitches showing.
  23. Not that there aren't funny moments in the film, but they're cobbled together so awkwardly that you'd never suspect the director had made a film before.
  24. A muddle—not amiably ambling, not affably shaggy, just a mess that gets messier till, at times, the whole thing looks improvised by amateurs more concerned with being clever than something resembling affectionate.
  25. Its heart is in the right place, but it has no soul.
  26. You're almost tempted to laugh at Birth by the end, but by then you're too busy cursing it to bother.
  27. It's a lame Heather Locklear romantic comedy and a lame Hilary Duff romantic comedy all in one!
  28. Among the several iterations of Jules Verne's novel about the inventor's adventures whilst traipsing through England, Asia and the Wild West, this new one is the least impressive and most depressive. Even the 1989 made-for-TV version starring Pierce Brosnan possessed more spark and steam than this lazy, lackluster take.
  29. While not entirely successful, at least deserves points for creativity.
  30. The new version by Harold Ramis trots out a load of bargain-rack gags, tarted up with pricey effects for the A.D.D. generation. Woe to those who cannot leave well enough alone.
  31. Like a half-remembered dream, the movie's often so overwhelming that even its dull, dead moments (of which there are many, unfortunately) leave you wondering what you're missing and what you've just forgotten.
  32. Cornier than the cornfields spread out in front of the dilapidated rural Texas manse inhabited by Robert Duvall and Michael Caine, playing grumpy old brothers with mismatched accents.
  33. It's chatty when it wants to pretend it's deep and spiritual, messy when it's striving for chaotic and thrilling, and boring when it has no other options left.
  34. This highly sanitized, heavily costumed, dramatically inert nonsense makes last year's dreadful golf biopic "Bobby Jones: Stroke of Genius" look like a masterpiece.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Not too far from the version of "Serpico" staged by the Max Fisher Players in "Rushmore."
  35. So how bad, in the final analysis, is Gigli? The best that can be said is that it doesn't beat out "The Ladies Man" as the most abrasively awful film of the past five years, nor does it top "Battlefield Earth" for sheer misguided lunacy.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Mimic is static, highhanded, and confused, wasting most of its 105-minute running time simply spelling out the premise.
  36. Witless, terminally irritating remake.
  37. As witch movies go -- even lighthearted, supposedly comic witch movies -- Practical Magic is conspicuously lacking in supernatural phenomena.
  38. In the little war between charm and belligerence that is the real centerpiece of Lost and Found, romantic comedy takes a beating.
  39. Yes, the "Taxi Driver" parallels are intentional: Hill spells them out in the press notes, all but branding Observe and Report a Scorsesefied remake that reeks of stale Cinnabon.
  40. The witless inanity of After the Sunset is so numbing that the sole reason for any living creature to sit through it--man, woman or household pet--is to marvel at the speed and variety of actress Salma Hayek's costume changes.
  41. It plays like a parody of suspense movies, then occasionally becomes serious, then boring, then makes a jarring 180, then frustrates, then gets vaguely interesting again.
    • 36 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    It doesn't help that the special effects aren't spectacular, the pace is numbing, and Bierko is an even less mesmerizing presence than Keanu Reeves.
  42. Less fun than "Cry_Wolf" and "Venom," if that's possible.
  43. No doubt Fox wants to tap into those Latina dollars, but you've got to spend money to make money, and this shoddily cheap-looking product ain't gonna do it.
  44. Hackman, playing it gleefully amoral, walks away with the film, for what that's worth...which is a video rental for fans of the actors involved. Yes, that's video, not DVD -- four bucks at Blockbuster is more than you ought to be paying.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    By the end the movie audience, like the electorate, is less satisfied than strung-out and exhausted.
  45. The very best thing about A Dirty Shame, a giddy sex farce from John Waters, is the credits.
  46. Should make about $750, which is how much they need to save the farm, but a little less than Disney CEO Michael Eisner needs to save his job.
  47. It would take the ghost of Stanley Kubrick to get great performances out of Jimmy Fallon, Queen Latifah, and supermodel Gisele Bündchen, and Tim, you're no Stanley.
  48. This was a better movie back when it was called "Gossip" . . . oh, wait, no -- that one sucked too.
  49. What's missing is romance. Despite the engaging friskiness of its two stars, the film is romantically vapid. Watching it is like trying to warm up to a hologram.
  50. The picture's biggest problem is that no one is sympathetic.
  51. Paycheck is a terribly muddled mess, a Hitchcock homage (with generous, obvious nods to The Birds, Strangers on a Train and North by Northwest) by a great filmmaker trying to say a great deal with so very little.
  52. So convoluted and half-assed it's tempting to dismiss it as unfinished; it feels like six different movies cut together by a blind editor.
  53. Emits the embarrassing aura of a filmmaker desperate to be considered cool, yet utterly inept at finding original ways to reach that status.
  54. Assassination Tango is Duvall's fourth, yet it still feels like a first film; worse yet, it feels like a waste of an undeniably great actor.
  55. It has but one thing going for it: a cast filled with Oscar nominees.
  56. Forces its snuggly weirdo upon us and instructs us from the get-go to love him.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Notting Hill offers another example of moviemakers consoling themselves about how tough it is to be famous while congratulating themselves on how down-to-earth they really are.
  57. Proves an absolute chore to sit through.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Instead of a gripping, conscience-bending thriller, Paradise plods along, determined to be some sort of master chess game ruminating on personal and cultural value systems and the complex and often contradicting facets of loyalty, honesty, friendship, love, responsibility, self-preservation, and exploitation.
  58. At its best (which isn't much), Le Divorce blusters along with the tolerable tedium of had-to-be-there home movies; at its worst (which is about 90 percent), it illustrates why the French went and invented the word merde.
  59. They do it up big, but their frame of reference -- mostly old sci-fi movies and TV shows -- is pint-sized.
  60. Consistently fails to deliver the charm it presumes to have.
  61. Well, Sanaa Lathan's in there somewhere as the smart and sexy ass-kickin' chick, but it's really all about the monster disembowelments, which happen often.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Terrence McNally's Tony Award-winning work has been called "one of the major plays of our time." Moviegoers who aren't stage-struck may wonder, "What's the fuss?"
  62. LaBeouf's got the beef, and his inevitably bright future may be the only reason anyone will ever look back on The Battle of Shaker Heights.
  63. That this mess should come from the hand of Istvan Szabo, the brilliant Hungarian director of "Mephisto" and "Colonel Redl," is the real shocker.
  64. Unhampered by imagination and driven solely by libido.
  65. Taken as a whole, the movie seems to be searching for a harmony it never really achieves.
  66. Duff isn't exactly known for complex fare, but even "The Lizzie McGuire Movie" was way better than this.
  67. The film's finale is truly egregious, a laugh-out-loud combination of ludicrousness and sadism that someone somewhere probably found scary, assuming they never saw a thriller before.
  68. Plays like something Dr. Phil and "Sex and the City's" Carrie Bradshaw might have written during a commercial break, a feel-good fantasy that sounds deep but has no more depth than a kiddie pool drained for winter.
  69. Stripped of every major scary moment and restructured in what feels like a deliberate attempt to remove all suspense, this "horror" movie is now a domestic soap opera.
  70. Adequately breezy and sleazy -- a movie about the horniest man in the universe looking for a little one-night stand.
  71. Standard revenge shenanigans ensue, with more boo-hoo numbers from Vin, who ain't up to it -- he hasn't been this lame since, uh, ever.
  72. It's a mess, but it isn't as bad as you think.
  73. It's time to run, screaming.
  74. Highly commercialized teenybopper fluff, likely to please the tweenie girls but sorely lacking in anything original or even interesting.
  75. Exactly as you may expect, this thing is good for a few cheap little laughs and no more.
  76. Part female revenge flick, part Saturday Night Live skit, part courtroom drama, and part religious tent revival, this movie never congeals into anything worth watching.
  77. Slips by quickly enough, but it never engages our interest more than passingly.
  78. The Dying Gaul becomes so overwrought in the last act that it ends up as pure histrionics.
  79. What keeps Love in the Time of Money from being truly awful is the fact that the actors give it their all -- they may be in contrived situations, but by golly they'll make the best of them.
  80. Its execution is stultifying, laughable and ultimately a little offensive.
  81. While the idea may be good, its execution is awful.
  82. Lackadaisical feel of the film; Freundlich is unable to generate much suspense.
  83. Nothing happens. At all. Ever. Remember when Steve Martin was funny? Apparently, neither does he.
  84. It's easily the ugliest film Gilliam's ever made, a movie shot with a lens someone forgot to wipe. It's also his loudest: Every scene is amped up to 11, and every line of dialogue is delivered as though it's a cry for help from the bottom of the well.
  85. The movie, which feels as amateurish as a student film made for cable access, doesn't deliver the goods; the gotcha moment never comes.
  86. Dude, where's the script? Just Awful.
    • 41 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    If any further indication were needed of the fact that gay has gone mainstream, this flaccid farce provides definitive proof, for it's as forced and unfunny as subpar Sandra Dee.
  87. Lured to the project with John Cusack as her original co-star (cruelly replaced by Matthew Broderick), Nicole Kidman phones it in.
  88. There's way too much schmaltz in the mix. Even the musical score bombs: Throbbing, eerie techno simply does not suit a character trapped in the 1940s.
  89. Succeeds in scaring you and boring you at the same time; unlike Moore's movie, it's agitprop bereft of artistry, porn for Republicans.
  90. Billed as a comedy, this low-wattage sitcom is both ill-tempered and mean-spirited.
  91. It's big and loud, but this Peacemaker is still a dud.
  92. Too much attention to art-deco detail, a meandering story that hesitates whenever it wants to touch an emotional chord, then squanders the opportunity with an eccentric line-reading or an extravagant camera angle.

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