Mostly, Dinosaur 13 is far too long, slogging along without momentum or suspense. These events would have been better handled in a single installment of Dateline.

A high-end version of "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre" set in the rarefied bistros, boites and brokerages of Yuppie Manhattan in the 1980s.

To paraphrase one of the few memorable lines in the movie, "Even stink would say this stinks."

Unbroken is a grueling endurance test - for the audience just as much as for its cutout champion.

Robert Altman's Kansas City is a hollow period piece, a costume melodrama that's all jazzed up without a story to tell. [16 Aug 1996, p.4]

Icky, incoherent thriller.

If all you ask of a movie is that it have scenic stars and some scenery (here the Sierras of California substitute for the Rockies of Wyoming), then Flicka is adequate. Me, I expected some conflict, some resolution, and a horse that took me on a wild ride. This one really never gets out of the gate.

The movie heads in a disastrous direction: namely, a police academy ceremony... This lets-wrap-this-thing-up moment sucks the life and the honesty out of an otherwise compelling portrait of tainted lawmen, tainted law.

Maybe Waters set out to prove Karl Marx's observation that all great events happen twice, first as tragedy and the second time as farce.

At 116 minutes, this third installment lumbers along like a serial killer in shackles.

Looks as if was cobbled together from stuff hanging around the cutting room at MTV.

A high-concept hostage drama of absolutely no value to anyone -- except maybe Bell Atlantic, whose titular street-corner pay phone is on screen for almost every agonizing frame.

If Fleming had played everything as a black comedy with a satirical send-up of high school life - like Heathers - he might have had something. But The Craft has no consistency and certainly no art as it drifts into an unprepossessing display of special-effects magic. [03 May 1996, p.08]

Anyone with a sizable role in Dodgeball gets mired in the script's dissipated tone. Two of the climactic jokes involve "Happy Days" references. How tenuous is that?

Clare Lewins' dizzyingly disjointed documentary, I Am Ali, has one thing going for it: its subject, boxing immortal Muhammad Ali.

Old School has all the ingredients of an uproarious campus comedy, but it lacks a boisterous short-order cook who could whip up a food fight or three.

A movie so dumb it raises serious questions about our place on the evolutionary ladder. [12 Jan 1996, p.12]

The contrast to Ramis' last picture, the inspired Groundhog Day, is marked. [12 Apr 1995, p.F03]

Unfortunately, it lacks a compelling story or characters of any complexity.

Feels stagy, stiff and entirely unnecessary.

The aquatic and surf scenes are spectacular. The story, a clichéed climb to inspiration. Soul Surfer is more parable than plot.

Sitting in the theater, watching Knight of Cups, you hear an incredible amount of thought-balloon babble, but you don't hear anything approaching the sublime.

On the evidence of Palindromes, the most misanthropic, depressing, hopeless film in memory, I'd hazard that for Solondz, childhood is a problem without a solution.

Burns' writing style is full of tepid Woodyisms about sex and romance, with Allen's Jewish guilt supplanted by the Christian variety. [23 Aug 1996, p.03]

A fairly dreadful melodrama drenched in self-pity.

Aja's stomach-churning remake (produced by Craven) follows the original with frightening fidelity, amping up the barbarity from a nine (on the 1-10 scale) to a 12.

Viewers get very little about Madoff himself. While the film is primarily about Markopolos, it makes little sense without much insight into his nemesis.

Somnambulistic pacing, kerplunkingly unfunny jokes, and mugging thespians making fools of themselves. Truly torturous spectacle.

The Frighteners approaches the mysteries of near-death and out-of-body experiences with a script that is - even by this summer's prevailing standard of dumbness - out of its mind. [19 July 1996, p.03]

Mighty Joe Young is a movie only an 8-year-old could love. How cheesy is it? Well, it leaves the ooze of Velveeta in its wake. [25 Dec 1998, p.4]

It would seem that Allen and screenwriters John Quaintance and Jessica Bendinger couldn't decide between making a movie about the summer that 'tweens become teens or "Scenes From a Mal"l for the MTV set.

Maybe, you think, there is something daring and brilliant going on here: an excursion into the darkest territories of the human soul. But no. In the end -- or the beginning -- there is no point to all this. Or at least not a point worth making, and making us watch.

At one point, Statham chases down a sports car while pedaling madly on a kids' bike. Pathétique!

Has to be one of the nuttiest, sappiest (literally), most unintentionally hilarious spectacles to come down the time-travel turnpike in eons.

Never again let it be said that an action movie is just like a video game. Hardcore Henry, a frenetic, dizzying, and ultraviolent actioner from Russian rocker-turned-director Ilya Naishuller is one - a first-person shooter writ large for the big screen.

The violence is plenty, and pointless.

Hit & Run is a pleasant enough diversion - but more of the PPV persuasion.

Hoffman's turn as the drag queen has its endearing and comically catty moments, but Flawless' utter phoniness subsumes all efforts at honest acting.

Duplex's tenant-from-hell scenario is as predictable as it is tedious -- a tinny, unsatisfying throwaway farce.

In his peculiar, confused and grossly violent debut, Texas writer- director C.M. Talkington doesn't seem to know whether he is dumping on the road-movie genre (felony division) or celebrating it. [09 Jan 1995, p.D02]

Tobey Maguire, terribly miscast and squeaky (that voice - it belongs to a kid!).

I'm ripping up my Lars Von Trier fan club card.

Art-directed within an inch of its life, Sleuth has the smirky gloss of a project that everyone involved with thinks is terribly good, and terribly clever. These people - Branagh, Pinter, Law and the usually great Caine (even in bad stuff) - are laboring under an epic misconception. Sleuth is just terrible.

A temptation that can be easily and safely resisted.

A standard-issue, ineptly executed serving of the genre's staples, from skeptical cops to an all-knowing psychic.

The sheer brutality of Oldboy is stunning, especially a deeply disturbing scene in which Brolin tortures Samuel L. Jackson. But this is an unrelievedly grim and hermetic experience throughout, the cinematic equivalent of blunt trauma.

Plunges into a void created by a stale and incredibly derivative plot.

Just call this movie "The Hangover: AARP Strikes Back."

When the slimy creatures pop out of the ground in Tales From the Crypt Presents Demon Knight, one of the hapless humans in their path advises that the most strategic weapon to try is "anything that destroys their eyes and frees their tortured souls." Anyone exposed to this nauseating piece of brain-dead nonsense may want the same treatment. [13 Jan 1995, p.16]

The animation in Planes: Fire & Rescue is considerably better, the landscapes grander, and the 3-D flight and firefighting scenes more exciting.

The thing about stoner comedy is that, well, it helps to be stoned.

First Kid is a surprisingly apolitical comedy that settles for general purpose humor aimed unabashedly - and pretty lamely - at kids. [30 Aug 1996, p.03]

Like a grade-school version of an Indiana Jones adventure.

No one is getting at anything in The Strangers, except the cheapest, ugliest kind of sadistic titillation.

Sgt. Bilko, from the late, great Phil Silvers sitcom about an incorrigible con artist scamming the daylights out of the U.S. Army, has been turned into a not-very-funny film vehicle, just as The Flintstones was transformed into a not-very-funny film vehicle, and The Beverly Hillbillies, and Dragnet before them. [29 Mar 1996, p.05]

Apocalyptically awful romantic comedy.

Cross "Get Shorty" with "State and Main" - Hollywood hustlers, colorful crooks, crafty poseurs, and a production crew on location - and you have the stuff of The Last Shot. One other thing: eliminate anything funny.

Essentially a series of walking character sketches. The storytelling is slack and lackluster, the cliches rampant.

A groaningly awful romantic comedy.

What distinguishes The Dilemma in this genre is its resounding unfunnyness, its emotional dishonesty, and the general unlikability of its cast of characters.

Perhaps it's for the best that We Are Your Friends doesn't try to appeal to anyone outside its stars' own kind. Fewer people will have to see it.

Tommy Boy is little more than another invitation from Hollywood for moviegoers to suffer fools. There's no reason to do so gladly. [31 Mar 1995, p.05]

With its first-person-shooter perspective and gun-andrun narrative, this one’s for the PlayStation crowd. It’s not a movie. It’s an adrenaline pump and purveyor of raw carnage.

The script is a stupid mix of Teutonic tongue twisters (say hello to Herr Schniedelwichsen), hoary German cliches (from phallic sausages to U-boat spoofs), and bad slapstick.

It fails as a gripping home-invasion thriller.

As artistic achievements go, Mona Lisa Smile is strictly a paint-by-numbers affair. No shading. Little in the way of perspective. To call it one-dimensional would be an act of charity.

A slasher spoof of sorts, except that unlike the "Scream" pics, scant effort seems to have gone into the spoofing aspect of the story.

Another high school vixen movie, this one with a potty mouth (the vixen) and pretensions of social commentary (the movie), Pretty Persuasion brings to mind a number of other titles, all better.

A case of when bad scripts happen to good actors. Given its similarities to a bygone sitcom, one might call it "Friends" without benefits.

An unfortunate collision of earnest coming-of-age cliches and off-key acting, Evergreen almost, and certainly unintentionally, presents itself as parody.

If the moral of Click is a stop-and-smell-the-roses bromide about how family comes first, the real message of this sappy, potty-mouthed seriocomedy is that a steady diet of Drakes and Hostesses will do you no good.

OK, they squeezed one more lap out of this franchise. It's been a fun ride, but it's time to shut things down. If you get my drift.

Surrogates, which borrows tone and content freely from "I, Robot," is all windup and no pitch.

Bobby Jones plays out much like a round of golf - slow, old-fashioned, tediously long, and lacking in drama.

A casualty of its own clumsy storytelling.

This movie feels like it has a million jokes, and every single one arrives with a lethal thud.

Completely unappealing people.

Hostage may well be the first action flick cited both for child abuse and audience abuse. In a singularly sadistic and degrading way it has something to offend everyone.

A dull, drab and pointless rehash, Walking Tall ironically manages to diminish the Rock's stature as both a leading man and an action star.

The kind of saccharine exercise that ought to do wonders for the cause of atheism. [15 July 1994, p.03]

Hollywood's latest entry in that tried-and-true genre, the disaster movie, is . . . well, it's like . . . a totally gnarly roller-coaster ride!

The glitter and clinking of Rodman's collection of body jewelry are supposed to blind one to the dopiness of the screenplay for Double Team. [4 Apr 1997, p.10]

Entertainingly goofy for about 30 minutes. And then, for the next two hours-plus, it's agony.

Rarely has sex on screen been so aggressively anti-erotic.

Hot Rod never establishes its own personality.

With the raunch quotient cranked up several notches, the sequel is calculated, cynical and, worse, not funny.

The Wolfman feels like a film reedited and reworked so many times it has lost all narrative rhythm and suspense.

This tale of a white mother's kid gone missing in a black New Jersey neighborhood - and the tensions and news media attention that ensue - is pretty much pure jive.

It's hard to understand what Malevolence is doing in theaters. If ever a movie deserved to go directly to DVD, it's this dreary horror treatment.

If you actually sit through this enervating ordeal, you'll swear that time is Frozen.

While "Boogie Nights" was a dirge for the death of pleasure (which coincided with the death of the porn-film industry), Wonderland is death warmed over. Literally.

Tedious and incoherent thriller.

It doesn't help any that Wahlberg, looking perpetually dumbstruck, is among the clunkiest line-readers working in movies today.

The more movie magic Howard piles on, the less we care. And, boy, does he pull out all the stops, stocking the pic with a tub of red herrings, half a dozen plot twists, and more complex set pieces than a comic-book flick. I felt relieved when it was finally over.

How'd this thing get made?

Has to be the sorriest excuse for a reprise since "Highlander — The Final Dimension."

I'll be darned if I can think of a more excruciating, ponderous, remarkably unfunny and inert cinemagoing experience to come down the pike in ages.

I should put in for worker’s comp for the extensive injuries I sustained watching the insulting, abysmal 3-D action thriller xXx: Return of Xander Cage, which left me deeply traumatized and suffering from injuries to my eardrums, my eyes, my mind, my soul, my aesthetic sensibility, and my sense of decency.