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.