This is the kind of story that might have been interesting had it not been populated with dreary characters played by actors who were clearly coached to be as dull as possible.

The comedian's thankful willingness to do anything for Blue Streak...is its redeeming grace.

My question is, why has director Costa-Gavras taken it upon himself to dissect American cultural foibles when he has so clearly proven himself unequipped for the job?

This is neither a psychological thriller nor an erotic one, so any interest in the story is purely the work of its stars.

Unfortunately, this movie needed an attractive, irresistibly charismatic performer to give us some reason for watching. Madonna is made up to look like Eva, but this is hardly enough to carry the movie.

Hackman is, as ever, a master performer, an actor at the peak of his powers. However, he can't carry the whole movie.

This is the kind of movie that mistakes heartbreak for being housebroken.

Things to do in the movie theater until you mercifully die of boredom sums up this witness' response to the ordeal of sitting through this movie.

This movie would have had a chance of being interesting had it been about Sally Hemmings.

The adorable overacting of the twins [Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen] make this otherwise dopey movie watchable.

Too smitten with the Eisenhower-era nostalgia.

Wields its Middle America values and moralistic flogging of idiosyncratic lifestyle choices like a flipped bird.

A wildly dull, predictable script whose holes seem to be courtesy of random sniper fire.

Legends of the Fall never makes you think too hard; its woes-of-a-proud-family formula takes a back seat to a self-conscious visual style that strains toward the level of myth.

It has the distinctive look of a Walter Hill picture, but in the end boils down to little more than a Bruce Willis action vehicle.

Works as a quixotic study of emotional quirks.

Its finest moments come in sequences such as Alice and Darlene's prison break and the girls' final wrenching plea for freedom.

Right up to its deliberate thud of a closer, Polanski had me.

The dialogue is hip, natural and observational.

As bad movies go, Gregg Araki's Nowhere is right up there with the best of them.

With a few quiet, moving scenes and a lovely ending, the film betrays an artist's touch, no matter how hard Kitano tries to make it look easy.

With the exception of a couple of inspired moments, Mary Reilly is merely a curious variation of an often-told story.

A scary example of bad movies happening to good people.

As cosmetically sanitized revisions of history go: This is as good as it gets.

The needle on the laugh-o-meter barely budges.

The script, based on British pulp writer James Hadley Chase's novel "Just Another Sucker," is a muddle, and no actors, no matter how compelling or talented, could make its silly dialogue work.

You can draw a straight line from "Reservoir Dogs" to "Pulp Fiction" to Suicide Kings.

It's that predictable sweetness that makes any of this more than just bearable.

Chain Reaction is one explosion after another, none of which seem to advance the . . . uh . . . plot. But, of course, in a movie this lead-footed you spend more time wondering what the filmmakers were thinking, or if they were thinking, than about the few plot-like fragments that do present themselves now and then.

A laughably disconnected hostage drama that rails against the perceived nightmare of inner-city public schools.

An edgy, hypnotic entertainment that's like a Club Med production of "Lord of the Flies."

One of the most blithely, giddily ridiculous movies to come along in ages.

The ordinariness of the material gives way to the winning personalities of the stars.

The movie itself simply misses the mark.

Given Midler's comic skills, which haven't been displayed much in her recent films, Hocus Pocus could've been a nice fat slice of goofy fun. But in the hands of director Kenny Ortega, the choreographer/music-video director who created the movie-musical disaster ''Newsies,'' Hocus Pocus is just loud and chaotic -- a good-natured mess that sputters and flares and grounds out before our eyes. [16 July 1993, p.C1]

The picture is a relentless blast of color and movement that's based on the old TV show, but boils down to a supercharged version of old-time Saturday-afternoon movie serials.

Dante's Peak expands the concept of badness in movies.

You feel the full weight of the movie's three hours, since the filmmakers only had 90 minutes' of plot.

A weakly performed rehash of master-slave role-reversal tales.

A piece of baseball fluff...Costner cinema, pure and simple.

It's a tale of two missused Academy Award winners trying to justify their participation in a moribund, noisome redux of any disposable prison movie you care to remember by lobbing Oscar clips at each other.

The chief terrorist is played nicely with war-weary desperation by Marcel Iures, a Romanian actor with the sucked-in cheeks and ennui of a Jeremy Irons.

Carrey's style is to keep the jokes moving so quickly and with such force that you can hardly stop to consider how stupid they are.

A great film of the urban, North American night. His voyeuristic camera roams the streets that come alive with sexual promenades after sunset, and it lingers in noisy, jam-packed bars, watching men search for the man of their fantasies.

An impressively competent "how will male teen star get with female teen star at high school dance?" romance.

Blakeney can't decide if this is a quirky romantic comedy or a quirky mob essay, and you can see the movie thinking itself into a rhythmless hole with cement shoes.

In Total Eclipse, directed by Agnieszka Holland, they fail to persuade us that their versions of the 19th century French poets Arthur Rimbaud and Paul Verlaine were great artists. They just seem like rattle-brained hedonists with superiority complexes. Genius ought to be as alluring as any other well-developed human attribute, like beauty or sexuality. If this is genius, we are in trouble.

There's an unstable genius brewing beneath Mary Katherine's scarlet headband. As "SNL" women go, only Gilda Radner seemed as willing to rib so much of herself for our pleasure.

As always, Duvall is magnificent. Even in this small part, he manages to give one of the most stirring performances in the movie.

It's also troublesome that Murphy, a generally charismatic actor, is downright dull here. He and Goldblum are curiously flat in their line readings; they don't seem convinced by the story they're asked to act out, and with good reason.

In tackling 1000 A.D., (McTiernan)'s suddenly an unwieldy, clunky filmmaker.

Overstays its welcome until the jokes curdle and the satire becomes a blunt instrument, but not before Busch throws some priceless one-liners.

This is middling Woody, at best: For every funny line or sequence, there's at least one misfire.

Reinforcing the chasm between movie magic and wishful thinking.

Maybe there's a real use for Carrie 2 after all. Stand it up against the original, and you have a pretty good lesson in what's happened to the movies in the last couple of decades.

I wouldn't say this movie is actually harmful, but skipping it is probably the wisest policy.

Trash is trash, even if it used to be in French.

De Bont's effects-riddled remake of the '63 spook-out adaptation of Shirley Jackson's novel is not nearly as creepy as either its cinematic or its literary precedents. But it's a hokey, hokey entertainment and a $100 million Lili Taylor movie.

The plot twist is clever, but it's way too little, too late, and too implausible (whence comes this doggie amnesia?) to redeem this maudlin tale.

In a sense, Sandler is damned if he develops, damned if he devolves. But he needn't apologize for being who he is by turning a goldmine sitcom into a tame "Baby Boom" for guys.

This is the most-off-the-mark adaptation of a novel since Brian DePalma's what-was-that "Bonfire of the Vanities."

A counterfeit of a Woo movie, even though Woo himself co-produced it.

The absence of substance, or its banishment, and the director's reliance on allure (in the film's casting and in its look and sound, which features haunting music by Beethoven and Chopin), leave Innocence with the quasi-profound, giggly overreach of a magazine layout come to shameless, shallow life.

It is a traffic jam of broken hearts, fluxing racial identities and deplorable outfits that has everything but a salsa overhaul of "I Will Survive."

The punch line isn't that funny.

A complete misfire.

It's a movie drenched in narcissism and wish-fulfillment, almost a textbook on how to make a formulaic, romantic film.

Often grating in its presentation.

The result is a thrill ride with enough plunges and turns and loop-the-loops to make it worth a spin. What the picture lacks is the magic and resonance you feel in the best of popular entertainments.

Not the sweaty midnight stroll through the garden of carnal delights that its title wants you to believe.

This sure beats "Major League II." In fact, this movie is a lot more entertaining than the Michelle Pfeiffer showcase "Dangerous Minds." That was a big hit. Using Hollywood logic, I have to assume that this one won't be.

In another universe - though it is difficult to imagine which one - Garry Shandling might be sexy.

This is a piece of gloriously literary and serious filmmaking, but again it falls prey to misjudgments in pacing and rhythm.

Entertainment made well enough that you can overlook its absurdities.

One long offensive treatise on just how vile two human beings can be.

With more sophisticated writing, one suspects they could really soar: Even here, slowed by clunky, character-establishing lines and an all-devouring plot, they hit more often than they miss.

A lot of noise and nothing to justify it.

More altruistic would be if Williams stopped torturing us with weepy endearments so he could look for that complex clown who used to mug just for laughs.

This movie is bad on a galactic scale.

What we get are quirky characters who are such cartoons that they undermine the effectiveness of the scare scenes (Brad Dourif's turn as the weird doctor is an example) and well-composed camera angles that mean nothing.

Muddled futuristic thriller.

A movie that barely lives.

There's the world-alteringly scary possibility that (Leder) might be trying to kill us with a star-studded "After School Special."

Director Troy Miller, making his feature debut, does a decent job with schmaltzy material.

This Paramount-DreamWorks collaboration, with Stephen Spielberg credited as executive producer, is competently made, strongly focused on its characters' relationships and surprisingly light on special effects.

These pictures need a light touch and a lot of attitude, but this time you can hear heavy breathing in the background.

It's mesmerizing nonetheless for its flagrant disregard for narrative, character, pacing, performance and good lighting.

Miserable as it crawls for two eternal hours toward being "life-affirming."

Because the movie is otherwise so well made and so full of sweet emotion and "good" values, I was happy to ignore the shortcomings.

I think the script by television writer Channing Gibson (no relation) is the funniest of them all.

Too much of nothing and far from the potentially star-making material that Foxx deserves.

Watching movies like this strain to fit new technologies like VR into old genres and plot conventions, you can't help wondering whether the real artificial intelligence experiment these days isn't Hollywood itself. Plug the psychological profiles of 200 hit movies into its hive-mind, and out comes one plastic-bodied, loop-brained clone after another.

Stupid.

The closest this movie comes to delivering any titillation are a few open-shirted shots of Grammer that display major chest fur. You know you're bored when you have to devise a comparative body hair study to amuse yourself.

A movie drunk on its very existence, one that misses more frequently than it hits and couldn't care less.

It's the year's funniest, most absurd sight gag.

Has no intention of taking a more sophisticated path to make its point.

The best movie she ever directed was "This Is My Life," a biting comedy she also wrote that was soundly defeated by both critics and audiences. I think she's lost her nerve and her edge ever since.