Half-baked.

Does go on too long, leading to inevitable dead spots.

A vaguely amusing formulaic comedy with a premise that turns out to be more discomforting than endearing.

Just another lurid, contrived, xenophobic tale about Americans trapped in hideous foreign prisons.

It is deeply unpleasant to see women abducted, tortured and eviscerated by a methodical and meticulous butcher.

It's a copy all the way, a disheartening attempt to capitalize on the success of the original.

Reitman's attempt to show he can re-create the success of his biggest comedy ever. What he proves instead is that, given time and money, a comedy director can devolve into a lower life form.

Mildly entertaining, offering generous swaths of Mahler performed by the Bratislava Philharmonic, but it's also inescapably ponderous.

The misguided, delirious result offers the perverse guilty pleasure of watching a roster of distinguished actors earnestly swimming against a tidal wave of silliness.

Carpenter's heart doesn't seem to be in this lackluster space adventure set in 2176. What's more, his stars -- Natasha Henstridge and Ice Cube -- don't exactly energize the proceedings.

A deadly earnest drama tripped up by clumsy plotting and unintentional bursts of humor.

There's not enough sustained musical momentum to simulate the energy of an actual rave; the characters are likable but unremarkable.

Solondz's filmmaking style tries to make a virtue out of flatness and distance, and is always more comfortable indicating where feelings would go than actually providing them.

Proyas is trying simultaneously to create a pure thriller and sci-fi nightmare along with his tongue-in-cheek critique of artifice. And this doesn't work out quite so well.

Main lure is what feels like a very authentic visual sense of the nontourist side of Kingston, where the ambience of zinc-walled shacks wallpapered with old newspapers is captured by cinematographer Richard Lannaman.

It only serves to remind one of better movies, at a time when one needs no reminders.

Wasabi dawdles and drags when it should pop; it doesn't even have the virtue of enough mindless violence to break up the tedium of all its generational bonding.

(Mamet) backslides to a system that has his speeches read in a stylized way. The result is language that sounds unhappily artificial and characters who behave like they are less than real.

Long-winded and ultimately uninvolving.

In all his athletic scenes, leaping through doors, leaping between uptown and downtown trains, leaping on an assortment of villains, Swayze is just fine. It's the movie's big cosmic questions that throw him; for these he's reduced to a look of total stupefaction--not the movie's finest moments. [13 July 1990, Calendar, p.F-1]

A concept, no matter how promising, is not a movie, and this picture has the bad luck to illustrate the difference.

What's wrong with Megiddo is not its good-versus-evil theme but the clunky, unpersuasive manner in which it has been expressed.

It isn't that nothing happens in Poolhall Junkies, it's that nothing interesting does.

Not so much a remake of a film as it is a remake of an overcooked performance--a case of ham imitating ham.

From its standard-issue action to its halfhearted dialogue and acting, that's one situation even two Schwarzeneggers aren't enough to solve.

What's especially disheartening is the large gap between what's on the screen and the significant, meaningful work its creators sincerely believe they've made.

Follows a leadenly predictable path that will be more than familiar to anyone who's seen a recent sports movie, or any Sandler movie.

Moves with the suffocating deliberateness of a river of molasses.

This is a movie for younger children -- they won't notice that the children deliver their lines with all the conviction of an airline flight boarding announcement.

Lacking noticeable energy or drive, its almost visceral distaste for dramatic momentum is puzzling, especially in a film about the black arts.

As forgettable as the humor is the film's predictable portrayal of adults as clueless, overbearing cretins.

Harlin's skill compensates for a lot of narrative preposterousness, even it is overmatched this time around.

Flashy production design can't save Soul Plane from crashing and burning in a debris field strewn with stereotypes and raunch.

Thinking too much about the contents will ruin what little pleasure there is in the experience.

Inventing the Abbotts is pointless soap opera, anecdotal and superficial, mixing sibling rivalry, class conflict and tragic romantic entanglements in a style that mimics fictional life in the '50s more than it illuminates what went on.

Noé;, with his Nietzsche-for-knuckleheads nihilism and extreme-cinema ambitions, clearly fancies himself a visionary, but mounting a camera on a roller coaster or putting a story into rewind doesn't make a film formally adventurous or interesting. Conceiving of a gay club as an antechamber to the inferno and sexualizing a woman's rape, however, do make it titillating.

There's nothing wrong with remakes, but as this movie amply proves, there's often nothing right about them, either

Parents and older siblings...may grow impatient with the uneven execution that weakens the genuine charm the film sporadically exhibits.

A decorative Italian soap opera with an asterisk for earnest aspirations. Its beautiful people say painful things to each other in gorgeous clothes, and though the film expects us to take their problems seriously, it's awfully hard to do so.

These guys have dumbed down a comic book.

If The Mexican proves anything, it's that eccentric features need a particularly delicate touch to be successful. With a film like this, how close you come doesn't matter: Off by a little is as debilitating as off by a lot.

The result is exposition overkill and a dragged-out finale that turns what should have been a Tear Duct Special into a deflating experience, making what worked in the book unacceptable on the screen.

Etched in acid, stoked by wrath, it is one of those big-ideas novels that fits perfectly in human hands, where it can be savored over time or wrestled with page by page. But big ideas don't always size down for movie screens.

Promising as it seems in theory, everything in this new version, like Lena Lamont's image in "Singin' In the Rain," falls apart as soon as the talking starts.

Phony choppers and a startling resemblance to Jon Voight aren't enough to transform Theron into Wuornos, and I didn't buy either the performance or the character for a second.

The endless gore and violence make the experience torturous -- and not just for the victims in the movie.

It's slick nonsense at best and for the first hour it's watchable. There's cheap entertainment to be had from a thriller in which two detectives are played by beauties as ravishing as Jolie and Martinez.

A fairly silly and ultra-gory schlocker/shocker.

Youthful audiences won't be attracted to a love story between two 54-year-olds in the first place, and mature audiences will be turned off by the language, not necessarily out of prudishness, but out of its sheer crassness.

The film is plagued by Anselmo's inability to focus on the heart of his story.

As for Schneider, he may be obnoxious and unhandsome, but he is, more important, talented and fearless, the driving force of this brash, not-so-predictable comedy.

The whole trippy experience is like being held at gunpoint by a Jehovah's Witness at the front door while George Gobel holds forth in the living room on Nickelodeon.

If they had to make things up, couldn't they have made up something smarter?

Niccol's script, which has the earnest simplicity of a freshman philosophy paper, is merely naked exploitation, a sci-fi snow job that projects a contemporary ethical question--would a perfect human be human?--into a solemn future where the worst-case scenario unfolds as conventional Hollywood melodrama.

At times awkward and under-inspired, creating a question as to whether so gloomy and repugnant a tale was worth telling simply for its own sake.

The film is loaded with striking visuals, high energy and all-stops portrayals from its actors, but for all of Samuell's imaginative cinematic bravura, it is, finally, mainly exasperating. Phooey on Julien and Sophie's excruciating l'amour fou.

The result is hit or miss, with a laugh here and there, ultimately creating an aura of hopeless and drawn-out improbability.

The South takes another beating in Sweet Home Alabama, but that's nothing compared with the one conferred on the sweetheart personality of its pint-sized Gen. Sherman.

Feels like detention -- without the possibility of recess.

While First Daughter is nowhere near as airheaded or disingenuous as "Chasing Liberty," it's far more confused.

Could be a tough go for those not already Scooby-Doo fans. It has a totally artificial quality, starting with Prinze's blond wig.

Once the filmmakers have got the celebrities settled into Stella Street, they have a hard time figuring out what to do with them. Stella Street is the road best not taken.

Feels like an acting exercise stretched to feature length.

The sort of noisy nonsense that Woo's earlier action movies made irrelevant, but alas not extinct.

Runaway Bride's Josann McGibbon & Sara Parriott script is so muddled and contrived, raising issues only to ignore them or throw them away, you wonder why so many people embraced it.

Mostly I Spy, with more dead spots than a Jerry Lewis telethon, is content to mark time. That gives us, and perhaps the cast as well, the opportunity to reflect on how satisfying this film could have been if anyone had thought it worth their while to provide real material for the talent to work with.

The thriller with a promising premise fails to deliver.

For all the soaring visual splendor of its past, present and future, it's hobbled by a murky plot that proves to be not all that original once it starts unraveling.

What is disturbing and frankly distasteful about The Girl Next Door is how slick and shameless it is in its eagerness to blur boundaries, to squeeze as much transgressive material as it can into a nominally bland and innocent form, to serve up a benign, sanitized and exquisitely titillating portrait of the world of pornography in the cozy sheep's clothing of a teenage movie.

Maxwell has populated his film with paragons rather than people. Worse, they talk and talk and talk; this film is in danger of talking itself to death before the Union and the Confederacy are able to decimate each other.

It's a drag how Nettelbeck sees working women -- or at least this working woman -- for whom she shows little understanding; there's a puritan, even punitive, cast to the way she sees her character, whose pathology she digs at with the tenacity of a truffle hound.

Though Waterworld has some haunting underwater visual moments, the film's impact is weakened by flat dialogue, an overemphasis on jokeyness and a plot that, despite all those screenwriters, does not satisfactorily hold together at any number of points.

Because no one involved with Starsky & Hutch actually seems to care about the movie, all Wilson can do is idle in neutral while Stiller frantically shifts gears, looking for an excuse to split.

LaPaglia, Feeney and Stoltz soldier bravely through an uninspired, airless script.

Unnecessary and silly.

Not even a sincere and heroic effort by Nicolas Cage can redeem the film's essential phoniness.

There's no doubt Sandler is talented, but if he persists in believing that, like Elvis, his presence alone covers a multitude of omissions and inconsistencies, he will squander his gift and make a series of forgettable films in the process.

Laborious in the unfolding of its plot, and under Sam Weisman's brash direction the unabashed amorality of the material is crass rather than sly in tone.

The script is muddled and unsatisfying, as ponderous on its feet as its protagonists are in their heavy diving suits.

A woeful little comedy that runs out of steam shortly after its opening sequence.

On paper it has every advantage, from gifted stars Ben Stiller and Jennifer Aniston to an established comedy writer-director with a promising idea about a romance between a carefree woman and a worried man. But instead of maximizing those pluses, Along Came Polly so completely fritters them away that even its brief 90 minutes feels unhappily long.

Like the song, the movie is bouncy and catchy but disposable pop material.

There's scarcely a whiff of originality in the zombie horror picture House of the Dead, but Uwe Boll has directed it with enough energy and style that it adds up to passably mindless if grisly fun.

Gallops along at a quick, easygoing clip. Grown-ups may have to scrub the sugar from their frontal lobes. But it's not about them, is it? Never was. Never will be.

In short, Vlad could have used a substantial transfusion of wit and energy, with a dash of dark humor.

Although decently acted and well-crafted, Thérèse is essentially an illustrated Sunday school lecture for true believers. It comes across as more an exercise in determined piety.

Complacent yet competent animation kids will enjoy despite its mundane nature.

Driven by different agendas, history and movies often tell two irreconcilable stories, which is why, despite some glints of talent, Hancock has given us yet another film and another Alamo to forget.

Manages to capture enough honest moments to make it watchable, but it's never really funny enough to recommend to anyone who's outgrown short pants and kneepads.

A thick and gooey slice of holiday hokum.

Has the makings of that rarest of ventures, an adaptation that is true to the spirit of the original as well as its own time and place. But as Payback wends its way toward its conclusion, its promise dissipates and its pleasures wane.

Revenge may be sweet, but this is one "Monte Cristo" that leaves a sour taste.

A tiresome addiction drama.

The film strains to be hip with its sterilized pop soundtrack and perky graphics. The humor that isn't lifted from the novel is equivalent to that of a subpar situation comedy.

Chintzy-looking gore-bore.

Limp spoof.

Nicholson's Joker will be the pivotal point for many. It's his energy, spurting like an artery, that keeps the picture alive; it's certainly not the special effects, the editing, which has no discernible rhythm, or the flaccid screenplay.

Hits hard and pulls no punches in telling its brutal story.