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.