The genre's recent past has set the bar quite high, and Treasure Planet doesn't quite make it over.

Jackpot has much that is sweet and funny, but it is not overly original--and it is overly long and not as coherent as it might be.

Something we want to like more than we can. It's a mild family film with an excellent cast that never develops traction.

Full of car chases, weak jokes and scenes so meandering they make "Saturday Night Live" look like a paragon of brevity and wit.

A technical amazement that points computer-generated animation toward the brightest of futures, it's also cartoonish in the worst way, the prisoner of pedestrian plot points and childish, too-cute dialogue.

It's the most outwardly sleazy of all Lynch's movies, the rawest and raunchiest, the least circumspect. Full of striptease and scandal, violence, orgy and feverish nightmare, the movie is a kind of mass opening of the sewers that always lay beneath Twin Peaks' placid streets... But it does cap off a pop-cultural landmark, with all the bad taste and high style required. [31 Aug 1992]

Aside from a couple of rescue set pieces that bookend it, the film is strictly low-wattage in terms of action.

Though amusing from moment to moment, is erratic, unfocused and uncertain where it's going.

An implement of destruction loaded with more borrowed film riffs than could be compiled by 47 clones of Robert Rodriguez..

This is the latest addition to a new type of drug movie -- one that exploits addiction for a lot of self-adoring showboating.

Listless, disjointed and disconnected, this meandering two-hour, 32-minute exercise in futility will fascinate no one who doesn't have a blood relation among the cast or crew.

While Yamamoto's bullets never miss, Kitano's attempt at tragic grandeur of "Godfather"-esque proportions misses to an almost embarrassing degree.

A routine sci-fi/horror action-adventure, takes us where we've been countless times before.

Scorsese and his team have created a heavy-footed golem of a motion picture, hard to ignore as it throws its weight around but fatally lacking in anything resembling soul.

The film's repetitious, episodic structure seems to unnecessarily alleviate the building tension, making it a far less frightening film than it might have been.

Depp's performance reminds us that, yeah, it's only a movie -- just not a good one.

More than anything, The Grudge suggests that it's time for Shimizu to move on.

All-out burlesque rather than spoof from the outset, the film becomes less and less amusing. Wayans has a wild zaniness that can be hilarious, but how many bodily function jokes, ultra-crude sexual innuendoes and quite a lot of men and women simply punching each other out can one movie endure?

Such unabashed ludicrousness can be fun, in a brainless sort of way, especially when it's coupled with lots of sudden defibrillator jolts underscored by crashing cymbals. If there's one thing The Forgotten has, it's plenty of cardiac moments.

A provocation, a coup de theatre and three hours of tedious experimentation.

Unfortunately, "Cinderella" feels like a pro forma TV movie from the get-go and relies almost entirely on Duff's likability to hold the audience's attention.

Akira is a jumble of high-tech visuals that will appeal only to hard-core Japanese animation fans. Viewers in search of a coherent narrative or polished animation should look elsewhere. [14 Mar 1990, p.F3]

The story is too silly, too woefully underwritten, to stake a claim on seriousness.

The problem rather is the wholesale embracing of what has become de rigueur in animation, the practice of treating major characters as if they were stand-up comics working a room in Las Vegas.

Frankly, the film's real surprise is that it doesn't collapse under the weight of its sanctimonious posturing and howling pretension. The film is crammed with high-cultural references and people playing "smart," but none of it adds up.

A coy, frantic attempt at screwball comedy, lightly seasoned and more than a little gummy.

Williams knows when material is working, and he knows the sound of an honestly aroused crowd. This ain't it!

Hilary Duff can't rise above an overbearing script with underdeveloped roles.

It was somebody's nitwit idea to rip out the story's guts and brains for a sour sellout of a finale -- which finds the filmmakers behaving exactly like Stepford men and turning an original into a dummy.

An ambitious and intelligent film probing that chronic contemporary phenomenon, the seemingly senseless crime, but it is ultimately unsatisfying for all its efforts and various pluses.

The appeal of Yu-Gi-Oh! for kids who play the card game shouldn't be too much of a mystery -- at least to any adult who admits to tuning in to celebrity poker on TV.

It's an irrefutably bad movie, littered with paper-thin characters, crummy dialogue and a mawkish undercurrent that wells up any time it starts to resemble something smarter and snappier. Yet it is somehow redeemed by Murphy's agreeably quirky performance in a horribly underwritten role.

Despite some agreeably idiotic moments, Without a Paddle is also mostly without a rudder. Its few memorable highlights end up floating haplessly in a genial but uninspired and watery plot.

More disturbing, yet another robot, or maybe two, seems to have written a Hollywood script and hijacked a major studio production. Given the film's assembly-line screenplay and mechanistic storytelling, no other explanation seems viable. Certainly no one with a heartbeat or taste would blow so much talent, time and resources on such rubbishy writing.

It's a simple collection of sight gags and pratfalls that mines the overly familiar turf of awkward adolescence without bringing anything truly original to the experience.

Ought to be disreputable fun. Instead it ends up, all its explosions and exposed flesh notwithstanding, rather inert.

The go-for-broke plot twists are daring, but because there's no sense of background to the characters, one gets the sense it's all being made up as Baigelman goes along.

The Chamber is like a balloon that all the air has leaked out of. Maybe it wasn't magnificent before, but in its current state it is sad indeed.

But the result is no more than a forced fable, a self-consciously smarty-pants concoction that is too clever by half and too pleased with itself in the bargain.

That this is the first film for director Joe Mantello, who was nominated for a Tony for directing the stage version, may be compounding the problem. But frankly, if someone wanted to do a parody of a gay film like this, it's hard to imagine the sloganeering being much different.

Fluffy and mild to the point of somnolence, it can't even get the full benefit of its strongest asset, Glenn Close's performance as the grasping virago Cruella DeVil.

Eraser does have a few big-ticket stunts that hold the attention, but director Charles Russell, fresh from "The Mask," isn't able to infuse them with the intensity and believability that James Cameron brought to comparable sequences in "True Lies."

Without real dialogue and believable connections between actors, Evita is limited in its effectiveness, and all the crying for Argentina in the world can't change that.

Well-meaning and convinced it has something of value to say, its "Reach Out and Touch Someone" sensibility ensures that all its satisfactions will prove hollow, and so they do.

The Crossing Guard, Penn's second film behind the camera, is a troubling, troublesome movie whose makeshift structure cannot contain the powerful flood of passions that he and his cast have poured into it.

Make no mistake, the high-flying stunts in director Renny Harlin's film are definitely state of the art, and while they're going on, the film works up a serious level of excitement. But as soon as the action stops and the inevitable talking begins, Cliffhanger falls to earth with a considerable thud. [28 May 1993 Pg. F1]

The Wayne's World concept, which, egged on by a rabid studio audience, works so beautifully in skit format, ends up feeling dragged out and energy-less at feature length. [14 Feb 1992 Pg. F1]

Working with cinematographer Karl Walter Lindenlaub, director Caton-Jones has givenRob Roy a beautiful wide-screen look, filled with gorgeous vistas. But this film is like a color Xerox copy of the real thing: hard to tell from an original until you look closely at the details.

At all times the wretched high-concept, low-intelligence story contrives to bring everything down to its sudsy level. [22 Nov 1985]

A wax-museum movie that is both bland and reverential despite its focus on the great man's love life, Jefferson is hampered by its disconnected protagonist.

Sanitized for our protection and in the hands of director Adrian Lyne, 9 1/2 Weeks is a swooningly silly cautionary tale about the bad and the beautiful; a pair whose sexual tastes might have surfaced after a night of watching "Bolero" on videocassette. [21 Feb 1986, p.1]

Really effective horror films make us participants in the horror. Jacob's Ladder doesn't draw us in in that way. It's a movie about interior states that's all on the outside. [30 Oct 1990, p.1]

Too slight to be taken seriously and too off-putting (especially when the phone callers get hostile and the work demeaning) to be funny, Girl 6 feels like the first draft of a potentially interesting project. It just hasn't been made good on here.

Hartley turns what might have been a lurid pulp thriller into a freeze-dried art thing. He squeezes all the juice out of pulp. [19 May 1995]

The idea that sexual harassment is about power, not sex, and that a woman in power can potentially misbehave just like a man may be news to certain segments of the population, but they are not news enough to light a much-needed fire under this production. [9 Dec 1994, p.1]

Marshall doesn't have the gift for shamelessness, and that's why the film, with its pileup of sentimentalities, seems so processed. [04 Jun 1994]

Wall Street wants to be a shrewd piece of movie making, our own insider's tip, but it's tinny and thin and close to moral bankruptcy. As for its veracity, it's probably no closer to Wall Street than "The Bad and the Beautiful" was to the skills of movie making. And it's a lot less fun. [11 Dec 1987, p.1]

Inspired by the Parker Brothers board game of the same name, Clue is more frenetic than funny, more strained than suspenseful or scary. In fact, it's not the least bit scary or suspenseful but instead quickly grows tedious. The more you struggle to keep track of the constantly multiplying plot developments, the harder it gets to care who did it. [13 Dec 1985, p.6]

In this stately and fairly slavish representation, directed by Richard Attenborough, what pokes through with the pain of a broken bone is how thin the material really is. [12 Dec 1985]

The satire is sagging, the irony's atrophied and the funny is flabby.

An underwhelming experience. I pity the fool, as TV star Mr. T might say, who mistakes this for genuine entertainment.

Against all reason and expectation, the result is a distinctly unfunny film.

Good slapstick is actually an art -- unfortunately not one practiced here -- and bad slapstick is just tedious.

Has much that tries for outrageous camp, but too much of it plays like a crude travesty of overly familiar Southern decadence. It needed a director who knows how to stylize intense theatricality rather than merely revel in it in wobbly fashion.

The well-intended Group is nevertheless problematic. It's relentlessly grueling, as therapy can be, and not everyone will be able to see a reason to watch it.

With The Rose Technique, producer-writer Ray Stroeber came up with a promising idea, but director Jon Scheide plays this pitch-dark comedy far too straight.

Rich in authentic locales but is unevenly directed by Andrew Molina and is hazy in its chronology. Hayata's story in all its myriad implications might well have been better told in documentary form.

Highly problematical. The trouble with "Trouble" is one of temperament. Denis' formality and seriousness make the horror genre a risky business for her, especially when sex is combined with outrageous gore.

Controlled Chaos unfortunately also reveals that Zendel's talents do not equal her ambitions.

A lot of uneven acting is also no small detriment to this frequently awkward film's credibility.

Not exactly terrible, merely stale and pointless.

In trying to qualify as mordant satire, charming rom-com, uplifting buddy movie about underdogs trying to stick it to the man and the most meta story ever told, L.A. Twister sprains itself badly.

This premise is ripe with possibilities, but in an apparent -- and definitely misguided -- attempt to make his movie more commercial, Wilkinson has made the younger brother a murderer on the run.

It thinks it's cute, but it's as charming as an old drunk going on about how he knew Eastwood back in the day.

Like a lot of other Asian sci-fi anime: a stunningly imagined world of the future populated with one-dimensional characters caught up in a trite plot.

With each succeeding picture, Linklater seemed to grow as a filmmaker, just as his characters became more defined and developed. But with his fourth picture, subUrbia, he takes two giant steps backward.

The young stars are attractive and capable, but Hotel de Love is as synthetic as an old "Love Boat" episode.

Lame and overly contrived comedy.

A fictional look at film school life, realized in that archetypal film school style. If it were being workshopped in a seminar, some criticisms might include: awkward mise-en-scène, stock characters - and did you actually repeat that reaction within 10 seconds of first using it?

Shot in just 24 days, the film staggers under the weight of stale gags and a meandering plot.

Wants to be an honest, earnest look at the difficulties of growing up and moving on, but it remains stuck in such a fantasy-laden milieu that the characters never feel particularly real, and their problems seem phony and arbitrary.

A new teen fantasy movie, is indeed loaded -- with things you've seen many times before.

Because Emory doesn't grapple fully with the issues that loom over the film, there is something soppy and soft-headed about Inlaws & Outlaws.

A cast this charismatic is bound to make something of the situation. In short bursts, the movie is alternately sunny and charming, dark and weird, confounding and dull.

It's not vivid or harrowing enough to command attention. Worse, at a mere 76 minutes, the movie skips past what seems like lots of crucial exposition in favor of vague flashbacks and confusing inserts. The awkward documentary-style interviews don't help.

As Ruscio piles it on, he gets himself further and further away from any sense of genuine emotional truth.

Moody, mannered and supremely irritating, Christophe Honoré's Dans Paris plays like a pastiche of French cinema clichés through the ages.

There are enough reasons to avoid this oh-so-wacky comedy as it meanders from piney Georgia to Port Arthur, Texas, to Monument Valley, Utah, and they include Gourley's sense of direction.

As clumsy and awkward as his previous films were stylishly silly.

A middling, if stylish, psychological thriller making a perfunctory big-screen pit stop before its DVD release next week.

A dreary experience.

The problem comes largely in the conception of the hooker-niece character, Amanda, played by Brittany Snow. Tolan never quite figures out whether she is supposed to be a variation on the hooker-with-a-heart-of-gold or a genuinely troubled teen.

This is the kind of movie in which characters revere poetry, yet hardly anything about the writing (it's based on a stage play by Joseph O'Connor) or directing (by Tamar Simon Hoffs) qualifies as poetic.

Instead of depicting a boy's first steps toward manhood -- ceremony aside -- it turns into an uninvolving portrait of self-absorption.

Trumbo's aim was a kind of proletarian poetry, but McKenzie's broad emoting has the deadly earnestness of a school play.

Shoot on Sight has good intentions but winds up a thematically simplistic, dryly plotted and perfunctorily shot melodrama, one of those movies where dialogue is there to categorize people, not parse the complexities of human beings.

Davi's heartfelt performance makes for a winning solo, but the movie too often lacks harmony.

A mess of a film that can't quite figure out what it wants to be: an illicit love story, a political thriller or a coming-of-age set piece