This is a movie in which the audience knows half the gags in advance, but thanks to director Dennis Dugan's timing and Farley's execution, the audience doesn't just laugh anyway, but laughs harder. Knowing in advance is part of the fun.

Nothing really works here, and nobody seems to have put in a huge amount of effort, except maybe the marketing department -- there are many product placements.

De Palma plays both sides against the middle, and eventually the thing collapses. Instead of simply pursuing what seems to be his vision of the story, about a flawed but decent man getting martyred to a corrupt system, he tries not to offend and ends up making empty and confusing gestures. When at the end of this remarkably cynical movie, Morgan Freeman, as a principled trial judge, stands up and makes a speech about decency -- ''Decency is what your grandmother taught you'' -- it's hard not to laugh out loud. [21 Dec 1990, p.E1]

Director David Hackl’s biggest credit is Saw V, and he remains adept at gross torture and keeping a mystery moving. Definitely a B production, Dangerous has aspirations. View that as more of a comfort than a threat.

Unfortunately, it’s not much of a movie. The best thing “Happytime” has going for it is shock value, and that wears away after about 10 minutes. It doesn’t have an interesting story, and the jokes fall flat.

As vile, unredeeming and thoroughly unpleasant experiences go, I Spit on Your Grave at least has one thing interesting about it. It's a document of the most paranoid fantasies that urban, Northern people have about a rural Southern people.

Vampire in Brooklyn is neither funny nor frightening and comes up a tedious middle-road hybrid from veteran scaremeister Wes Craven, who directed.

Four screenwriters are credited with this sloppy piece of work. Divide the embarrassment into quarters.

Twenty minutes in, the movie is already operating at a deficit, and it never recovers.

Sometimes it's unpleasant, sometimes it's insincere, and for long stretches it's boring.

Fascinating in its own strange way, not as entertainment but as a cultural document.

Channels the spirit of Frank Capra in this serio-sentimental fable about a man who loses his memory but finds his soul.

A childish, empty effort.

For Friday night this will do just fine. It's definitely a good matchup -- Stone's cynical bravado versus Berry's resilient spunkiness in a world-class cat fight.

Mary is a fictionalized and heavily dramatized account of the life of the Virgin Mary, but the movie’s great and only pleasure is in watching Anthony Hopkins play King Herod as a homicidal maniac.

Hogwash and not even funny hogwash.

It’s all about as exciting as watching two drawings fight each other on a computer monitor.

Unwatchable.

A mostly inoffensive nothing of a film with one or two mild chuckles and lots of chop-socky commotion.

It's amazing how far a movie can go on nothing but speed and directness.

Very earnest, often engaging, but not quite as much of a pleasure as the original.

Even the element of surprise isn't enough to save this film, which has too many slow parts and features an ending that's extremely tepid by 21st century horror movie standards.

As a movie, it's not much. But it's the best showcase for his charm that Butler has ever had.

Cool World is less artful, short on scripted finesse, and is lacking technical acumen. [11 Jul 1992]

How one likes Taxi has everything to do with how one responds to the hapless cop character, played by Jimmy Fallon.

The movie lacks the one thing that the classic "Three Musketeers" story can't do without: panache.

The overall premise, involving mental illness and suicide, isn't all that funny, at least not in practice, and the picture begins to seem labored and long.

The fact is that too much time is spent with the British characters in the film, time that could have been spent really getting into Rani’s story. She was fighting for the independence of India, but the filmmakers lost their own colonial battle.