Not just any kind of trash, it's high-art trash, a kind of "When Tutu Goes Psycho" that so prizes hysteria over sanity that it's worth your life to tell when its characters are hallucinating and when they're not.

the first techno-misfire from Walt Disney Pictures, an over-elaborate film that leaves you feeling harangued, harassed and assaulted.

What audiences end up with word-wise is a hackneyed, completely derivative copy of old Hollywood romances, a movie that reeks of phoniness and lacks even minimal originality.

Writer-director Steers has chosen to overload "Igby" with phony archness and forced black humor, making it not the place to look for satisfying acting.

It’s a film that dares you to give it a bad review, simply so it can turn around and call you a bully who picks on the people who try. It invites you to giggle at Florence’s horrible singing and then promptly scolds you for laughing, creating a contradiction that goes unreconciled.

Soon becomes a sadistic experience in its own right. Experiencing this pretentious wallow -- overwritten, under-thought and overdone -- is a very sophisticated form of torture.

Since the rally ultimately proved ineffectual, the film could at the least serve as a sobering postmortem on where it fell short. But filmmaker Amir Amirani instead gives protesters a figurative pat on the back by insinuating that they helped inspire the Egyptian revolution some eight years later.

The astonishing thing about Raising Arizona is how it can move so fast, be so loud, and ramain so relentlessly boring at the same time. [20 Mar 1987]

Aside from preserving these folks for a presumably grateful posterity and convincingly depicting Austin as an open-air lunatic asylum, Slacker does not offer much to anyone who likes to stay awake.

There are two films at war in director Spike Lee's newest feature 25th Hour, one uninteresting, the other an epic of near-tragic miscalculation.

Doesn't have the courage of its conceit, only an abundance of bad ideas and worse taste.

Overall, Charlie Wilson's War is glib rather than witty, one of those films that comes off as being more pleased with itself than it has a right to be. It also suffers from being not all of a piece, with mismatched elements struggling to cohere.

Stunningly, ponderously bad.

The genitally ambiguous as well as transsexuals and gay people deserve more than XXY's good intentions.

George Clooney's first effort behind the camera was doubtless more stimulating to direct than it will be for audiences to watch.

What's most troubling about this witless mishmash of whiny, infantile philosophizing and bone-crunching violence is the increasing realization that it actually thinks it's saying something of significance.

Without complexity to its characters, with little balance and without a hint of the personal, family or community issues involved, Colors becomes a movie that never has to ask "Why?"--a vivid, noisy shell of a film filled with eager young actors rattling along on the surface of a lethally important subject. [15 Apr 1988]

Robot Stories isn't any good. I don't say this lightly. There's no pleasure in giving new directors bad reviews and it's especially unpleasant when what's wrong with their work isn't a clumsy performance or two, a sagging second act or a repugnant worldview, but a near-total absence of filmmaking talent.

A paint-by-numbers version of an artist's life, Basquiat is amusing for all the wrong reasons, especially at those horrible moments when you realize you're supposed to be taking it seriously.

Alexander Sokurov's Faust is a grueling side show of a film, a morbid, mightily uninvolving piece.

The only thing about The Naked Gun that won't make you laugh is the film itself...To mix a metaphor in appropriate style, the filmmakers have really beaten a dead horse into the ground with this one.

The film is, perhaps, intended as a deadpan burlesque of race and class and beauty ideals...but it plays more as a boorish, overextended punch line.

Unfortunately, Jodorowsky is no Bunuel -- nor a Leone, for that matter -- and El Topo’s bloody odyssey, involving endless heavily symbolic encounters with the bizarre and fantastic, expresses the eternal tug of war between the savage and the spiritual in human nature on the most obvious level and in the most ponderous fashion.

The message is lost in this laughably deck-stacked journey, a movie-long version of "They started it!"

Stillborn, pointless piece of work.

Turns out to be a tedious and under-inspired comedy.

As The Fourth Protocol begins at the outside and curls its way into the center of its wildly complex plot, it becomes almost a "Saturday Night Live" spy spoof. We're saturated with detail: Where will the nested Russian folk-art dolls, the visiting violinist's patent-leather shoes and the American Air Force officer's randy wife fit into the Greater Scheme of Things? Gradually, as our eyes glaze over, it becomes very hard to care--and even harder to suppress a giggle.

So exasperating in its contradictions, so frustrating in its fakery, so deeply irritating in its pretensions, it's frankly hard to know where to begin to dissect it.