The film is at once shamelessly transparent, manipulative, and far-fetched, and impossibly suspenseful. You'll want to take a shower afterward - that's how icky you'll feel.

A tad more character development would have been nice.

A by-the-numbers extravanganza that journeys from London to Venice to Siberia to Cambodia without ever really going anywhere.

So deadpan a film is Napoleon Dynamite, the story and the name of a gangly high school misfit in Preston, Idaho, that I can't say whether it was intended as a character study or a comedy.

Lame and misguided homage, which reduces satire to vulgar silliness for kids.

Although it would be understatement to call their characters unsympathetic, Van Der Beek and Sossamon play their parts with such doomed passion that they have some affecting moments.

Fast is a good quality in an action/adventure. But there is lightning-paced and then there is warp speed. Doug Liman's Jumper is the latter, a not-so-good quality in an action/adventure for the simple reason that the audience can't figure out what's going on.

Designed as the ideal confection to attract a young girl or teen, What a Girl Wants will more likely hook their mothers.

It's not that Salvation Boulevard is bad: It's quite funny at times and has some good performances. But it's so predictable it has no bite, either as social satire or as slapstick comedy.

Ultimately, Evan Almighty is too sappy, too sanctimonious.

As for Kunis, she gets to wear some out-of-this-world couture, and gets to make her entrance at a marriage ceremony on a floating dais, kind of like Katy Perry at the Super Bowl.

The movie pulls off the worst kind of con: the one that disappoints.

What makes the new movie almost bearable is the byplay between Sandler and Chris Rock.

How Depardieu rises above this nonsense about a girl who tries to make a beau more interested by telling him that her father is actually her lover is something that a physicist should explore. It defies gravity. [4 Feb 1994, p.04]

The result is two competing films, one about a failure's struggle to succeed in the Brigade Championships, the academy's boxing tournament, and the other about a quitter redeemed by military discipline. In the hands of director Justin Lin, the two story lines don't altogether merge.

For a while, Firewall whips up the accordant dollops of suspense and dread, but it's not long before the timely issue of identity theft takes a backseat to old-fashioned Hollywood villainy, unnecessary (and nonsensical) red herrings, and STUFF THAT DOESN'T MAKE SENSE.

Mildly enjoyable despite its basic mediocrity.

There's no rhythm or rhyme to it. The subplots don't organically connect to the main narrative. It's a series of brightly lit tableaux in which we see the end result of an action but never the action itself. [18 Aug 1995, p.03]

Who knows if it was Del Toro's idea, or Stone's, but at a particularly crucial - and criminal - moment, as a very bad thing is about to occur, the actor twirls his mustache menacingly, like a Mexican Snidely Whiplash. Yes, Savages is that kind of story.

Over the Hedge isn't by any stretch bad. It's just banal.

I liked this movie better when it was called "Rock'n'Roll High School" and starred the Ramones and Mary Woronov.

The material is so charged that it threatens to electrocute any who would touch it. Yet from the moment that Bette Midler, as Bernice the bio-Mom, appears, she becomes the instrument of its emotional release, catharsis teetering on high heels.

Reiner, who demonstrated an affinity for storybook yarns with The Princess Bride and sensitively addressed coming-of-age issues with Stand By Me, has trouble getting beyond the episodic nature of Zweibel and Scheinman's screenplay. [22 Jul 1994, p.03]

A squirmy mix of therapy-session slogans, pop psychobabble, and lots of crying, yelling and pouting on the part of its two stars, who appear in various alarming hairpieces.

Although Will Ferrell materializes for a goofball cameo, The Goods: Live Hard, Sell Hard lacks a key element that his "Talladega Nights" and "Anchor Man" both had - that is, somebody to like.

Just about the only cast member who doesn't go misty at one point or another is the horse that Down Under cinema charmer Bryan Brown takes for a trot late in the film.

Hands-down the most nightmarishly awful film of the year.

The scenario looms as a brain-dead invitation for the stars to embarrass themselves, and Company Man wastes little time in fulfilling that glum suspicion.

A mix of "Alice in Wonderland" and William S. Burroughs, "Psycho" and the psychotic. It's pretty much a squirmy experience all around.

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

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.

Verhoeven's most deeply disturbing film yet.

Envy makes a pretty entertaining three-minute trailer. If only they'd left it at that.

A riotously awful biopic rife with stereotypes and boxing movie cliches, Against the Ropes represents -- among other things -- a woeful turn in its star's career.

This startlingly lame tale about a young upstart challenging a veteran leader of the pack doesn't update the genre, it simply recasts it.

It may not be the worst war epic ever made - that probably would be "Battlefield Earth" -- but it's darn close to being an unqualified disaster of that magnitude.

If Matthew Weiner's Are You Here is good for anything, it's to illustrate how the themes and conflicts he has worked out with such depth and dexterity in all these seasons of "Mad Men" can go terribly amiss with the wrong actors, wrong backdrop, wrong tone, wrong time.

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 script depends entirely too much on a succession of reporters, announcers, and spectators to provide context and detail in clunky, implausible dialogue.

Nicely timed to cash in on the Ebola panic, Cabin Fever: Patient Zero - the prequel to the gross-out franchise about a lethal flesh-eating virus and its party-hardy victims - isn't going to do much for the tourism trade in the Dominican Republic.

This saga of a former soccer star coaching his son's team in order to worm his way back into the heart of his ex-wife aims to be warm and funny. Alas, it is mechanical and exhausting, like a windup toy of a monkey crashing together cymbals for 106 minutes while incrementally winding down.

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

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]

Guy Ritchie's Revolver premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival two years ago September. That's 26 months on a shelf somewhere, depriving moviegoers the thrill of jaw-droppingly awful Ray Liotta line readings, of bloody shoot-outs, bags of money, cutaways to frosty babes sucking on lollipops, and even a bit of violent anime.

Maybe if there was something going with the dialogue - snappy Chandlerisms, say, or even just sentences that made sense - the fussy digital artifice of The Spirit wouldn't seem so, well, dispiriting.

Profoundly knuckleheaded.

Apart from Williams' presence, director Christopher Erskin's feature debut isn't worth the price of submission. It's not a road trip; it's a road trap.

Lewd, crude, blessedly brief.

How'd this thing get made?

Scenery rushes by, noise blares, characters pop up wearing new costumes that they couldn't possibly have had time to change into as they eluded their adversaries.

Uptown Girls gives the impression that everyone behind the camera just threw up their hands in helpless resignation.

Director Rob Meltzer, who made the kind-of-amusing meta short "I Am Stamos," directs things in shameless, let's-get-this-thing-over-with style, throwing in some gratuitous topless (female) nudity and allowing the usually amusing Kristen Schaal to let loose with a barrage of potty-mouthisms.

While stylishly filmed and edited, Boogeyman is filled with every imaginable fright cliche... It's like a meal consisting entirely of airy hors d'oeuvres.

Piously acted, stiffly directed, and infused with a view of world politics that might charitably be described as delusional.

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

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]

A pity-party of Hollywood narcissism.

A supremely silly eco-thriller with aspirations to Dances With Wolves. [22 Feb 1994, p.D03]

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.

Here is a movie with everything going for it and nothing working.

Basic Instinct 2 is supposed to help Stone show it's possible for a woman to be sexy in her late 40s. But it's Rampling - who is 60 - who comes off as the more provocative and alluring. Stone's purring, snarling, bedroom kink is embarrassing.

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

Combines fingernails-on-blackboard audio agony with bamboo-under-fingernails physical torture.

It's too gauzy, and - with its Ron Bass script - too goopy by half.

Not only do they (Gere and Ryder) lack chemistry, they lack physics, zoology, botany and geology.

Criminal, with its criminally lazy title, is mostly Costner's to growl and scowl his way through.

Gets stupider as it moves along. By the end, you just don't care whether that cold-hearted snake Petrovich (that would be Reno) gets his comeuppance. Just bring on the Battle Bots, please!

While this cheesy, heavy-metal melange of horror, space hooey and cowboy shoot-'em-ups isn't exactly dull, it isn't anything to write home about either.

By the end of the film's two-hour stream of Be-Here-Now-isms, anyone left in the audience will be wanting to yell, "Put a sock in it!" to old Soc.

Just because you can come up with names such as Azeroth, Durotan, Orgrim, and Grommash Hellscream doesn't mean you're J.R.R. Tolkien, people.

Murderously unfunny.

As an account of how for-profit big business literally rips a consumer's heart out, Repo Men is too graphic for me.

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

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]

If there were a truth-in-titling law, the movie would be called "3000 Bullets to Brain Death."

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.

Slapdash, with dialogue and plot points that were cliches in Dickens' era, the pic sends up, then reaffirms, all the values the media sell us each holiday: compassion, forgiveness, tolerance.

It fails as a gripping home-invasion thriller.

Plays like "Sixteen Candles" meets "Beetlejuice." Yet for all the film's frantic pace, this plot plods, even for 'tweens at whom this suburban-girls-take-Manhattan fantasy is obviously targeted.

Perfect Stranger is the Egg MacGuffin of whodunits, a cheesy affair that casts so many baited lures that they tangle each other and don't hook you.

This so-called comedy is a frayed string of anxious jokes about whether male bonding is manly or sissy.

What a mess.

Ostensibly a comedy, and a feeble and innocuous one at that, Post Grad is one of those what-were-they-thinking?

Unsullied was made by a director with real promise. It's a shame Rice picked this turkey to shoot as his first

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.

Domino is less a movie than a hyperkinetic slide show - presented during a nuclear attack.

A stagy, arty, and uncompelling account of the Welsh writer and his menage-y relations.

An unintentional high-tech hoot.

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.

Feels stagy, stiff and entirely unnecessary.

A temptation that can be easily and safely resisted.

A bubble-brained comedy with as much bearing on the real world as a Pokemon cartoon.

This is no "Raging Bull."

No doubt conceived as an underwater version of "National Treasure," Andy Tennant's film plays like a Three Stooges movie with scuba gear.

The acting is better than the script deserves and Lexi Alexander's cut-to-the-hearse direction lends the film considerable kick.

What a mess.

Aloupis is not untalented as writer or helmer. But his first outing is an unsurprising, paint-by-the-numbers picture.

Chloe & Theo is a mess of a message movie, simplistic, sappy, silly.