The ads in this film are so funny that I wish I could report that the production containing them is equally hilarious. But as it turns out, Crazy People is wobbly - a watchable but unremarkable showcase for the exceptional ads.

This is the sort of picture in which people slap each other as they take their marriage vows, suddenly develop life-threatening diseases, and, again, have violent confrontations whenever there's a break in the action. Anything for a laugh, anything for a tear, and nothing much authentic.

In Under the Cherry Moon, the self-styled auteur is obviously aiming for a romantic tragedy with occasional lighthearted moments. What he ends up with, however, is purest camp.

Quest for Camelot is certainly no improvement on the studio's jangly Space Jam of 1996. [15 May 1998, p.21]

This new Sabrina stresses the material's Cinderella love story - the part, that is, that was corny and somewhat dated even in the '50s. What director Sydney Pollack and his screenwriters (Barbara Benedek and David Rayfiel) have done is a little like redesigning the Ford Pinto and keeping the unfortunate old gas tank. [15 Dec 1995, p.19]

But this movie is no more interested in Cleveland than it is, really, in baseball: It doesn't have the passion for the sport's curiosities that Bull Durham has, nor the feeling for the sport's heartbreak of Eight Men Out. Watching Major League may be better than watching no baseball at all. But its place in the annals of baseball-moviedom is bush league at best.

In a lot of ways, Die Another Day is a return to Bond's bad-old-days, the early 1980s, when the plots were outlandish and haphazard, the stunts were fake and the whole enterprise was being treated as a cartoon.

Malkovich temporarily brings the movie to life, but, finally, it's too little, too late. Amusing though it is, his brief performance probably won't be enough to keep "Jennifer Eight Is Enough" off the ballot. [6 Nov 1992, p.23]

How bad is Something to Talk About? Well, it's not the worst movie I've seen this year, but it is the biggest waste of talent. [4 Aug 1995, p.18]

If it's not the most awful thing I've ever seen, it's close enough to make me wince.

We're No Angels is far from heavenly. It never even gets off the ground.

To watch To Wong Foo is finally to be reminded that camp-meisters often have a weakness for sentimentality that is far more appalling than anything they do in the name of outrageousness. [08 Sep 1995, p.17]

Gasp! And you thought Scream was predictable. [26 Dec 1997, p.11]

Somehow, the new production fails to sustain the creepy, kooky, mysterious, spooky and altogether ooky visual sweep that held the first film together.

No one looks particularly comfortable, not even Midler, who has most of the best dialogue. She's watchable as Stella, but that's really the nicest thing I can say for her work in this unfortunate picture. Does Bette Midler really believe that people of limited means can't raise their kids decently? Or is the Divine Miss M making some great joke whose subtle point I am failing to grasp?

Color me dissatisfied with Color of Night. For starters, it's a murder mystery with a really obvious solution. How obvious? It's so embarrassingly obvious that even I figured it out - and I can never figure these things out.

The Lawnmower Man has it all - melodramatic plot, bad acting, special effects that will undoubtedly seem cheesy in about five minutes and even a concluding sequence in which the usual lofty moral is voiced.

Altman's method is risky, but when inspiration strikes the result can be wonderful. When it doesn't, the result can be, well, Ready to Wear.

Watching The Bodyguard is like trying to have a telephone conversation when you have a bad connection. The guy on the other end keeps saying things that sound maddeningly incomplete....After a while, you want to hang up.

What's unusual about Consenting Adults (which opens today) is that virtually everything is implausible. In fact, my bull detector hasn't beeped so much since the last time I went shopping for a new car. If I were to list everything that happens in the film that strains credulity, I'd be here until Woody and Mia get back together. Plus I'd make some of you angry by revealing too many secrets. [16 Oct 1992, p.19]

This rather basic story is really just a place to hang the action scenes, which should have been the movie's glory. But those scenes turn out to be the worst things about Mighty Joe Young, in which the action is edited, MTV-style, for maximum incoherence.

Miami Blues is more interesting than any bad movie I've seen in months, but it is still a bad movie.

Aside from Robert De Niro and his totally inappropriate performance, the cast is a mixed bag.

It would be wrong to blame Martin Short alone for the failure of Three Fugitives. Francis Veber, the French filmmaker who wrote and directed the film, must accept much of the responsibility.

In a film that could have been called Grumpy Old Prexies, Garner makes a decent replacement for Walter Matthau. Garner and Lemmon, game troopers both, do what they can to wring laughs out of material that went out with the Eisenhower administration.

If the movie isn't a total loss that's because Jordan, Bugs (voice by Billy West) and their friends have an undeniable charm and because some of the classic gags that director Joe Pytka (a TV-commercial guy), producer Ivan Reitman (Twins, Junior) and the screenwriters have adapted from the Looney Tunes shorts are hard to spoil completely.

Backhanded compliments are pretty much the only ones The Boy Who Could Fly deserves. The subjects, here, are childhood and illness: topics that otherwise tough-minded people are inclined to approach with uncharacteristic sentimentality. But though the film is both sappy and cliched, it's not as sappy or cliched as might be expected. All things considered, it could have been a lot worse.

If there is any reason at all to create a big-budget, 2 1/2-hour film epic about Columbus, it is to bring the explorer and the people around him into focus as human beings. But that's just what director Ridley Scott fails to do. [09 Oct 1992, p.17]

So while we can appreciate the decent effects, the bang-up settings and a good cast, we can only hope they got some sight-seeing in on their days off. Whatever magic there was on this shoot is probably in their home movies.

Mr. Holland's Opus pretty much plays things straight. There are occasional jokes, but, basically, it's a clumsy tear-jerker. The biggest laughs in this one aren't intended. [19 Jan 1996, p.24]

It's not enough to have the characters act scared and then to throw in a bunch of special effects. It's absolutely essential to creep out the audience, and that's what De Bont neglects to do. [23 July 1999, p.17]

A production that's strong on atmosphere but weak in the plot department. Watching this often-tedious film, you begin to feel as if you've been kidnapped - which is appropriate, anyway, since the story concerns an abduction.

Possibly the most disappointing sequel since "Jaws 2". [10 Dec 1993, p.19]

There's an air of desperation about this movie - a sense that the stars are yearning to do something so patently undemanding that it just can't miss.

But weird as that is - and as insensitive as the studio's decision about the film's release date may be - the big question for most people is whether Unlawful Entry is a good movie. I think it isn't - not because the film exploits the Rodney King incident specifically, but because it is so exploitative generally. [27 June 1992, p.E1]

As an evening out: Its many faults notwithstanding, Bonfire does have at least one thing going for it. The movie is a mess, but, like Wise Guys, it's a lively mess.

The most jarring casting mistake (even more jarring than the miscasting of Dangerfield) involves Keith Gordon, who plays Thornton's son. Gordon, who has shown himself to be an intense and quirky actor in such films as Christine and Dressed to Kill, is a smoldering presence in what ought to be a light, comic role. His psycho-killer eyes just don't fit here.

If you tried to remake a cheapie zombie flick with a big budget and an eye on the mass audience, you'd end up with something like Death Becomes Her. This new horror-comedy has to be one of the most heartless mainstream pictures ever made. [31 July 1992, p.17]

When the comedy is on this level, all the actors can do is to hang on and hope for the best. [23 Nov 1990, p.7]

Failed attempts at satire aside, John Carpenter's Escape From L.A. is basically a routine action picture. [09 Aug 1996, p.22]

But eventually, the soulless violence and shoddy plotting wear you out. By the end, you'll start to feel like one of the hostages. [17 Jan 1997, p.A2]

Issues of forced cuteness aside, the recent Pump Up the Volume did the alienated-youth bit more insightfully than this movie does. Pump Up the Volume was savvy enough to have its young hero make statements such as "I say down with all guidance counselors. Make them work for a living." In Welcome Home, Roxy Carmichael, the troubled teen's confidante is the school's guidance counselor.

If the new film is considerably less imaginative than your average Punch-and-Judy show, it is, nevertheless, a step up from last year's turtle-fest.

An exploitation picture built on redneck cliches and big city liberal outrage, it's not all bad. But it is a pretty unpleasant wallow in the obvious.

Whatever brownie points Tillman scored with "Notorious", Faster is that wake-up call that he's no John Woo.

It's a modestly effective but jaw-droppingly violent picture.

Tedious time-killer of a kiddie comedy.

Hallstrom and his low-heat stars can’t find the pulse of this corpse.

The characters in The Perfect Game speak old school “Hollywood Mexican.” In other words, they speak English with accents that we haven’t heard since the golden Age of Speedy Gonzalez.

It's all very messy and entirely too obvious at the same time. Montiel makes the most of his settings, but the story keeps staggering into dead ends.

Off the wall? Friend, you don’t know off the wall until you’ve seen five twelve-year-old girl singer-dancers cover the Tina Turner/Phil Spector epic “River Deep, Mountain High” in the screwball kiddie dance comedy, Standing Ovation.

Whatever merits the production values have, the cheap frights don't deliver, the performers bring no pathos and the gimmick behind Apollo 18 flat out does not work.

Good looking (it was filmed in Winter Garden) but slow and bland, this faith-based tear-jerker is a depressingly unemotional affair, with writing and some of the acting so flat that even its emotionally loaded situations can’t inspire waterworks.

On the sliding critter-comedy scale, Furry Vengeance falls somewhere between the Chipmunks and the Chihuahua (the one from Beverly Hills).

It's a rarely amusing movie overwhelmed by grating kids, unfunny sidekicks, half-hearted Sandler funny voices and a co-star who seems more fearful of smiling with each passing year.

Give it points on setting and a couple of the performances, but the joke-starved All's Faire in Love only rarely rises to the level of fair to middling.

The villains are weak and the narrative has little drive to it.

A little like modern country music - odd moments of sincerity, heart and authenticity peek through the plastic, the hype and the manufactured hokum.

"English Reborn" isn't terrible and is certainly seriously harmless.

This is not a bad cast, but whatever wit the script aims for is lost in the queasy details director Miguel Sapochnik found more fascinating.

Well, Green Lantern isn't "Jonah Hex" bad. But it's silly enough to be part of the same "silliest Warner Brothers comic book summer movies of all time" conversation.

The polished production sometimes touches and amuses despite its naïve “love conquers all” script.

A violent, clumsy, jokey, badly-plotted and miscast mess.

A genre mash-up that never quite achieves "So very bad it's good" status.

The message delivered isn't subtle, with Kendrick delivering toss-away lines that suggest he doesn't even tolerate "the option" of divorce. But the bigger message might be that the Kendricks haven't sold out, "gone Hollywood" or watered down their Baptist beliefs based on efforts to reach an audience beyond the faithful.

This isn't the worst of the bunch, not by far. But my premonition is this won't be the finale this series has screamed out for these past few years. This decapitation train never seems to reach its destination.

Far more grim than "Grimm," and not nearly as much fun as it should have been.

Aniston doesn’t bring her old A-game to this. But at least she’s not quiet and reserved and no-energy, her approach to too many roles of late. Butler makes the most of his Neanderthal rut.

A slick one hour and 50 minute version of those political convention hagiographies ("A Man From Hope"), so it's not exactly an objective take on its subject, former Alaska governor and vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin.

Daybreakers is a stylish but unavoidably silly sci-fi vampire thriller.

Glibly put, this challenging time-skipping rumination is the big screen equivalent of watching that "Tree" grow.

The sex sequences are revealingly awkward - with their "Don't try this at home" message. But without characters we can invest in, this "Hangover Meets Zack & Miri Make a Porno" is just the "porno," and entirely too tame for that, too.

A mirthless, joyless comedy with nary a hint of romance, mystery or justification for its existence.

It's the same movie as the earlier "gotta dance" over-choreographed crunk-and-breakdance epics. Exactly the same.

This Arthur is on the rocks long before Last Call.

The Double is barely half the movie it had the potential of becoming.

A ten-years-too-late comedy.

A dull but harmless big-screen comedy aimed at the youngest movie goers.

A crowded cast of some of the finest actors in the cinema act the hell out of a gimmicky, episodic, hit-or-miss script in Brooklyn’s Finest, Antoine Fuqua’s latest attempt to relive the glories of "Training Day."

This Herefter, despite the odd engaging moment, is a terrible letdown, like investing in a belief system and discovering there's no "here" that you've been after all your life.

It's only a movie, and not a remotely effective one. And for Zellweger, whose "Miss Potter" and "Appaloosa" were barely seen, with "Leatherheads" and "New in Town" further deflating her A-list clout, that's the real shame here.

A mad mash-up of sci-fi, Western, sacrilegious silliness and vampire movie. What lifts it to "I've seen worse" status is the previous teaming of star and director Scott Stewart, who last gave us the archangel fighting off other angels fiasco "Legion."

A screen romance that echoes its title. It gets by. Barely.

Overlong and entirely too ambitious in the number of “issues” it tries to cover, To Save a Life wanders all over the place before reaching its very predictable conclusions.

It's a fitfully amusing, not remotely scary slasher picture.

It's all tiresome, muddied and artlessly made.

That Disney touch (which even Disney has trouble replicating) is missing. Even the hockey is unconvincing.

Director Michael W. Watkins, whose decades of TV credits go back to "Quantum Leap," manages one clever visual gag - a bus wreck, observed from the far side of a cornfield. We hear a crunch, see a telephone pole wobble and a little puff of smoke. Then Watkins blows the moment with a fiery overkill.

Nobody has much that's funny to say or cool to do. Even the spy gadgets are lame.

Disney's effort to turn Kristen Bell into America's Sweetheart reaches its tipping point with You Again, a flat romantic comedy that packages her in a funny setup and surrounds her with funny people.

Bell, a petite, pretty blonde, may or may not have the Meg Ryan-Julia Roberts-Sandra Bullock goods. When in Rome, a leaden variation on that rom-com recipe, fails utterly to make her case.

It’s an American "Love Actually" without the warmth that writer-director Richard Curtis stuffs into his all-star confections, without the wit, without much love, actually.

It's light in tone, feather-weight. But there aren't many laughs in it.

Thank heavens Krasinski, at least, had the screenwriter's ear. He makes every one-liner land. "The Hamptons are like a zombie movie directed by Ralph Lauren."

Anna Faris and Chris Evans don't have enough scenes together, don't have enough funny lines and aren't surrounded by enough funny people to give this "Bridesmaids-lite" a shot.

It's an infuriatingly static picture - actors walking around when they should be running, ruminating when they should be panicking, generally failing to convey fear and pick up the pace.

There’s nobody delivering the laughs in this arid action comedy.

A generally joyless pastiche of sorcery history, imitation Potter "chosen one" Messianics and mirthless silliness, it's another in a string of recent black marks against Cage's Oscar-owning reputation.