An airless, mannered mess.

Had Araki chosen to illuminate, rather than exploit, the traumatic aftermath of child molestation, his wallow in the horrors of Mysterious Skin might have had a purpose. As it stands, his film is just another trashy look at America as the land of imbecilic perverts.

The attainment it achieves is in the depths of pointless, mean-spirited exploitation.

Its motif is self-pity, Steers displays no particular way with a scene, and, as Igby, Culkin exudes none of the charm or charisma that might keep a more general audience even vaguely interested in his bratty character.

If you're addicted to Billy Bob Thornton's slovenly charm, and thrill to the prospect of watching him talk endlessly about his bodily functions and penchant for anal sex with obese women, this is your movie. If not, it's like 90 minutes in hell.

For the most part, the film is a chaotic blur of disconnected movement that re-creates the feeling of an unforgettably bad concert experience.

Exploitive while it pretends to be empathetic.

There is a point, however, at which the movie becomes simply sickening. Between the electric shocks and hot-iron branding, feats of grossness are accomplished that are so vile even the hardiest among the cast cannot suppress the upchuck.

Unfortunately, this latest effort is so mean-spirited and nasty that you wish Farrell hadn't bothered.

Pierson is a high-powered egotist with appalling tastes and a great-white-father complex, and his whiny family is about as much fun as fingernails on a blackboard.

Since we never see Thomas, we can't care for him. And he's hardly a sympathetic "hero" in his treatment of women and his insistence that other characters honor his personal boundaries while he ignores theirs.

Roman Polanski's English-language film released internationally two years ago also lays claim to being a kinky sex comedy, but the sex is predictably darker, and the laughs few and far between. [18 Mar 1994]

A potentially interesting idea deflated by the absurd proclamations of an arch screenplay and smothered under the ponderous gravity of M. Night Shyamalan's dreary direction.

But as an artist, von Trier's contempt for humanity is becoming harder to hide with stylistic flourish. He doesn't even try here, and his arrogance is topped only by his misanthropy.

A gruelingly dull slog through basic horror-movie conventions, should be dumped in the Seine.

When the veterans of this war are finally allowed to tell their own stories, we will have something worth listening to. Body of War is just election year claptrap.

An incomprehensible mess -- so boring and numbingly unworkable that it's hard to imagine what he could have been thinking.

Tautou seems tired, mean-spirited and utterly devoid of that Audrey Hepburn-like charm that made her the international movie find of 2001.

Contains much abuse and brutality, an annoying celebratory air of pimp-chic and enough explicit gay sex scenes to qualify as (very tepid) soft-core porn.

First-time director Ted Demme (no relation to Jonathan), also of MTV ("Yo! MTV Raps"), displays little flair for comedy or storytelling beyond a sketch length. He also seems to have the sensibility of a dirty-minded eighth-grader. [11 Mar 1994]

In the annals of insufferable family entertainment, the VeggieTales set a new standard.

It has the low-budget look and feel of an indie dating comedy -- and not a very good one at that.

Idiotic.

There is potential for laughs in a satire of rich people spending big money on religious galas, but that is not even the real subject of the picture.

Plays like a pilot for a situation comedy about a 40-year-old carpenter who decides to return to the boxing ring.

Surprisingly, first-time director and co-writer Andrew Scheinman relentlessly fails to find anything magical or especially funny here. Little Big League seems to have no sense of the absurdity of its situation and uses the premise mostly as an excuse for one more by-the-numbers competition movie. [29 Jun 1994]

It is a pretentious and incoherent blend of ghost story and frontier adventure that becomes more preposterous and idiotic with each passing scene.

The film's one saving grace is Ledger (Mel Gibson's son in "The Patriot").

A very good movie could probably be made about the black experience in the Old West, but Mario Van Peebles' Posse is not it.[14 May 1993]

Penn has overwritten the dialogue and, though the filmed-in-Nebraska movie has a certain gritty authenticity, it rings vaguely false. You sense he has no knowledge of the '60s, Midwestern angst or smalltown life. [04 Oct 1991]

The film's deliberately overblown cartoonishness and its gleefully pandering adolescent cruelty never blend into the enjoyable style of, say, a good spaghetti western (Rodriguez's acknowledged model), or even a bad Quentin Tarantino movie.

Not only have they (Coen Brothers) stripped it of all its wit and charm, they've loaded it down with the kind of race-baiting and bathroom humor they've always avoided in the past.

As a matter of fact, so much of Pacific Heights is laughable, and the film is so preposterous as a premise and so clumsily directed and lacking in suspense, that it plays like a parody of a Hitchcock thriller. Or did I miss the point and this was Schlesinger's intention all along? [28 Sept 1990]

An excruciatingly awful thriller.

It may be emblematic of new-millennium Hollywood that this movie has turned out to be one more emotionless, brainless, overproduced action film.

The Sandlot is so exploitative of the myth of baseball and rings so false as a nostalgia piece - and is so unfunny as a comedy - that it makes "The Bad News Bears" look like "Pride of the Yankees." [7 Apr 1993]

Besides being inept, it's also pretentious and boring: an ambitious art film gone horribly wrong.

The most ridiculous period film since rappers took on the Old West in "Posse."

So uninvolving as basic storytelling that it quickly becomes boring.

The dismal high school comedy Charlie Bartlett has the look, feel and sentiment of a made-for-video cheapie that might have been grudgingly whipped together by Robert Downey Jr. as some sort of court-ordered community service project for his many drug busts.

Trespass has no story drive; its principals are cardboard caricatures and its production values are as cheap and amateurish as a bad home video. [26 Dec 1992]

Sylvester Stallone is filming a new episode of his "Rambo" action series, but Mark Wahlberg has beaten him to the punch with Shooter, a preposterous gut buster that follows the formula so closely it would probably lose a plagiarism suit.

A perfectly dreadful affair that makes no sense, has almost no good laughs and finally just sinks like a rock in a Beverly Hills swimming pool.

Before the movie reaches its climax, it has created a mess that requires divine intervention.

Makes no effort to learn about the culture. It idolizes the idea of spiritual purity without offering any insight into what it really means.

Popcorn is not scary enough to work as horror, not funny enough to work as comedy, not cute enough to work as camp, not skilled enough to work as a tribute to the bad movies of the '50s, and so indifferently acted by the cast (including Tony Roberts, Dee Wallace Stone and Ray Walston) that it just seems a waste of everyone's time. [01 Feb 1991]

It's an unenlightening film that proves youthful anarchy is just as dull as a midlife crisis, and sadly, as predictable, too.

There's no slow descent into ruthless warfare and we get neither the giddy charge of their bad behavior, nor the guilty sting of complicity in their ruthless desire. All that's left is an idea still in search of a script.

While there are maybe two moments of genuinely clever humor, Storytelling is the work of a previously promising filmmaker who, having no new ideas, has morphed into a sniggering schoolboy intent upon being mean.

His heart may be in the right place, but 25-year-old writer-director M. Night Shyamalan can't even begin to pull all these episodes together into anything that seems remotely special, or even makes any sense. [03 Apr 1998]

Mercifully short -- a mere 80 minutes, plus the end-titles. That means I had to slap myself in the face fewer times than usual to stay awake in a movie this grindingly mediocre.

It's been turned into a stupid kung fu movie.

It's basically just more of the same maudlin sentimentality mixed with clumsy slapstick, hassled-father routines and Geritol jokes. [8 Dec 1995, p.29]

It's a tired rehash of animation cliches that distinguishes itself only by the extent to which it's crammed full of scatology and gleeful violence to animals, and otherwise panders to the worst instincts of its audience.

It's by far the worst comedy either he (Carrey) or the Farrelly Brothers have ever made.

All that's left are cute animals with animated mouths spitting out fitfully inspired one liners, sophomoric sexual innuendo and enough poop gags to last a lifetime.

How can a critic feel good about a movie that sets out to numb us with sheer gruesomeness; that embraces nihilism and sadism so enthusiastically; that offers no moral point of view or redemption in its characters, all while feebly aspiring to be a portrait of its generation? [09 Sep 1994]

Writer-director Bruce Robinson, whose credits ("Withnail and I") are all outside the thriller genre, has also chosen to throw a long, ponderous interrogation scene into the third act for no other reason than to give guest-star John Malkovich 15 minutes of hammy screen-time as FBI agent St. Anne. His movie is not only preposterous and dull, it's pretentious. [6 Nov 1992]

Director Ryu Murakami obviously has a few nonexploitative impulses, but more than half of his movie is graphic sex scenes (it's rated NC-17), and it seems mostly just an excuse to sneak into a mainstream theater the kind of S&M, bondage and urination scenes that have been banned from even the hardest of hard-core porn videos since the late '80s. [15 Oct 1993]

Disastrously unfunny sex farce.

There are a number of funny and unexpected moments in the film, but they are ultimately swamped by the mean-spirited tone and increasingly over-the-top raunch and drug humor.

If it sounds like Prey for Rock and Roll might be fun despite its shortcomings, it is not. Even those with a predilection for bad movies about rock 'n' roll should avoid this one.

It should have been a cut above the usual teen comedy. But it touches the same old bases in the same old dumb ways.

Director Fran Rubel Kuzui ("Tokyo Pop") cannot begin to find the style that would give some unity and originality to this mess. The result is a grindingly dull horror comedy and an unnecessary satire of Valley Girls - a full decade after that phenomenon has come and gone. [31 Jul 1992, p.12]

Wants to be an offbeat, hard-edged, inspirational sports movie, but it misses its target by a country mile.

Is Hollywood so disconnected from its past and bankrupt of ideas that it doesn't even know this movie is a screaming cliché?

Favors giggly juvenile humor over inspired satire and ends up not with a moral, but a moral vacuum.

It's a sorry specimen if ever there was one, and could even stand as an argument for how the movies have deteriorated in recent years.

It's a botched job...the new "Phoenix" lacks the very things that made the old one special.

So bloated, self-righteous and exploitative, it's hard to imagine anyone staying to the end, much less demanding a sequel.

It is one of the more pessimistic and repulsive views of the war of the sexes ever put on film. [14 Nov 1992]

If you loved the 1990 smash hit, Home Alone, you may have similar feelings about its inevitable sequel, Home Alone 2: Lost in New York. It's the exact same movie. And then again, you might feel cheated for the same reason - or at least wish you had rented the video of the old one and saved yourself the time, trouble and cost of a baby sitter. [20 Nov 1992]

The humorless and self-important execution attempts an operatic scale but only succeeds in sinking the remnants of the story's integrity. By the time it makes landfall, this incoherent production has blown itself out.

As dreary an hour-and-a-half as you could ever want to spend at the movies.

The disingenuous attempt to give the tawdry story some kind of social import only makes the tinny caricatures more insincere, while his erotic display of 15-year-old girls isn't a satire of a sexualized culture, it's just dirty.

A disaster on all levels.

A sleazy, uninspired, pathetically unfunny sex farce.

It's an unimaginative, mean-spirited affair that makes you hate yourself for laughing at it, and it's so devoid of anything close to wit, subtlety or sophistication that it stands as damning evidence that Hollywood has surrendered wholesale to stupidity and crassness.

Just a crappy flick for the Beavises of the world.

By the time the film plummets to its rock bottom, we find ourselves in a flag-waving no-brainer of the first order, and one of the most thoroughly confused morality tales in recent memory.

A pathetic sports comedy that aspires to be a college-football version of "Major League" and doesn't even get close. [27 Sept 1991]

Legends of the Fall is one of those movies that is so sloppy and so poorly written and so clumsily directed that every dramatic scene seems to either insult your intelligence or come off as being unintentionally hilarious. [13 Jan 1995]

It's a complete by-the-numbers daddy-day-care movie that doesn't have a genuinely enchanting moment or shred of inspiration in its overlong running time.

Mary Reilly has the distinction of being the most pretentious, the most ponderous, the most utterly suspenseless. [23 Feb 1996]

Absurdly over the top and not especially funny.

Despite its title, the movie could hardly be less erotic. Indeed, promiscuity has never looked more totally unappealing, and its final scenes of Wilmot's advanced venereal disease are enough to make you take a vow of celibacy. A great date movie, this is not.

A big dud.

The movie is just this side of terrible. It misses all the charm and fun of the original. Allen's mugging is incorrigibly unfunny.

Unlike "Crying Game" (which, despite the gender confusion, definitely works as a love story for a general audience), the only emotion this movie evokes for its star-crossed lovers is an unpleasant sense of incredulity. [08 Oct 1993]

So badly plotted and written that it rarely makes much sense, even with the elementary story line.

The most insipidly innocuous film ever made about facing mortality and living it up before passing away, The Bucket List has as much poetry and poise as its clumsy, clunky title.

As a thriller, Next goes a certain distance on Cage's sad-sack charm and sense of humor, but it does nothing with its intriguing premise, and it's mostly just one more tedious and progressively dumb collection of Hollywood action clichés.

Many regular moviegoers will be appalled by its gleeful crudity and saddened by the spectacle of three icon stars mugging through a farce that's not that many notches above "Jackass: The Movie."

This shambling mess -- offers nothing but a lesson in how not to make a movie.

Falls disastrously flat.

Writer/director Wayne Kramer's approach to storytelling is to withhold any information that might give away the plot.

Overlong, unscary, poorly paced and banally written.

The biggest failing of the film is that it's the lamest possible excuse for a whodunit. [17 Apr 1998]