This is pseudo-cynical comedy, however, not social satire. All the sharp corners are smoothed over and what's left is little more than a big screen sitcom.

Deutch never raises the film beyond its paint-by-numbers blueprint.

Burger is so respectful of the trio that he never gets under their skin. Apart from the generosity of strangers who pay tribute to the soldiers with little acts of kindness, you get the same generic observations of any road movie.

In what essentially is a two-character play, Kirk and Nicholson behave more like acting partners than real people. Their lack of appetite for each other is particularly awkward in the frequent scenes requiring casual nudity and sexual activity.

Its comedy too often blunders into meaningless slapstick, with bombs and bloodshed replacing pratfalls and pies in the face.

Entertaining in a trashy sort of way.

Quaid and Russo outshine the script with their presence and chemistry alone.

Director Jesse Vaughan keeps the ball in play through the aw-shucks lessons in humility and generosity, but the teamwork is shoddy, the plays lack surprise and, finally, Juwanna Mann misses more than it hits.

Campbell fans will get a kick out of it. The rest of the world will likely find this spoof a little too insular and indulgent.

In the end, it trivializes the psychological complexity of the girl's post-traumatic stress and betrays a game group of actors who struggle to find balance between the alternately dark drama and the silly, over-the-top melodrama.

Even throwing in a spunky fight between female sidekicks (Gabrielle Union and Kelly Hu) isn't enough to float this film over clumsy dialogue and the feeling we've seen it before.

As always with Stone, the film has some gritty performances and a certain likable audacity.

It's too quick, too pat.

Mostly it's tedious as we watch the photogenic but emotionally blank Chatagny bounce between anonymous sexual encounters.

Keanan, a competent young actress, has several strong and quite believable scenes of conflict with Ladd that make the movie work as a compelling relationship drama in its exposition half. But these scenes are soon forgotten as the script moves into non-stop suspense and terror. [20 Apr 1990]

In many ways this is an extraordinary movie: there's probably never been such a portrait of a major star in the grip of old age.

A genuinely creepy film, though not in a "No Country for Old Men" kind of way. More in an overzealous-blog-comments kind of way, or a dude-on-the-bus-looking-at-me kind of way. Just ugh.

Lightweight fare. [3 Apr 1996]

The film is not very convincing as sociology, but it is mildly amusing as comedy, has an unpolished charm to its visuals and performances, and showcases so many rock songs on its soundtrack that it qualifies as a musical. [19 Apr 1991]

A mess of incohesiveness and fragmented storytelling.

It's ultimately just numb, a sober wartime romance roused only by Blanchett's intensity and Crudup's passionate swings between righteous anger and moral zeal. The rest is just tired melodrama.

Poetic Justice is much more self-indulgent and self-consciously arty and shows [Singleton's] directorial inexperience in almost every scene. [23 Jul 1993]

The film can't decide between black comedy and bubblegum comedy, so it shoots aimlessly in between.

There's no comic spark under Showalter's drab direction, and no good argument in the film why we should ever wonder about the guy left at the altar.

Ends badly, with a clumsy, nihilistic coda that leaves one uncertain how to feel about the story, confused as to what point has been made and not at all convinced that the new South Africa will be that much different from the old one.

This documentary fails to grasp AIDS as a theme.

Jimmy Carter documentary is a smug, self-righteous monologue.

If only Outlander was as fun as the premise makes it sound on paper.

Themes at the heart of Heights of despair among the beautiful people are a bore.

It's fun in places, and moves like a bullet, but it's also clumsy and mostly quite routine - and seems a particular letdown considering it was made with a blank check from 20th Century-Fox and the services of John Travolta at the peak of his career. [9 Feb 1996, p.25]

Most of Chasing Papi is a loud, frantic mess, a movie that wants to be a screwball farce but is simply farcical and screwy.

Although entertaining, Rize is a somewhat duplicitous undertaking.

The film has good design, effective animation and generic if endurable songs, but Sandler wants to slam his sentiment and wallow in it too, and he compromises with the worst of both worlds.

Unfortunately, director John McNaughton cannot give the script the stylistic unity, black humor or plausibility it needs to rise above an incurably adolescent macho sex fantasy. [5 Mar 1993, p.6]

It's all too much and too little: a history lesson in institutional racism that falls into character cliches, a human drama that gets lost in melodramatic detours, a war movie put together by a fan rather than a filmmaker.

An exceptional Italian film becomes an average American one in this bland remake of Gabriele Muccino's "L' Ultimo Bacio."

It should have warned us that logic was also hitting hard times.

A preachy parable stylized with a touch of John Woo bullet ballet.

A one-note farce that struggles just to remain on key.

These self-involved studs manage to make ready, anonymous sex look rather dull.

If Laurence Fishburne could only have harnessed his fierce performance to drive his directoral debut, Once in the Life might have made something memorable of the done-to-death tale of small-time crooks on the run after a heist gone wrong.

A confused and improbable redemption song.

Unfortunately, the life has been sucked out of DiCamillo's story about a brave, unusual little mouse.

More than simply a raw-nerve success-gone-sour story. It's a revenge tale, and the directors come out on top.

Too much of the humor falls flat. Thomas' numerous chase sequences through the streets, over the rooftops and through the airways of Budapest seem numbingly repetitive, and the script's reliance on castration gags betrays its overall lack of imagination.

Shakespeare's comical, all-too-human tale of lust, foreplay and wordplay is buried beneath bad taste.

The formulaic screenplay has enough funny moments to keep the audience from concentrating on the predictability of it all.

In trying for realism, Machado only achieves dramatic inertness.

For its intention to promulgate the compatibility of Christianity with homosexuality, Save Me deserves a footnote in the political battle between these traditionally adversarial groups. As a movie, it doesn't amount to much more than an after school-special with sex and profanity.

John Jarratt is perfectly creepy as the outback loner gone psychotic survivalist who gets his kicks from the systematic degradation and torture of hapless victims. And make no mistake, the ordeal is excruciating.

Bright, bouncy, kooky and comically tone deaf, CJ7 is the most bizarre kids movie I've ever seen.

Has moments of inspiration, but the scattershot spoofing never achieves enough momentum to get this flight airborne.

Beck wants to dazzle the audience. I'd settle for a story.

It's an unpleasant experience, and a long one, that gets more morose and melodramatic as it goes along.

The film strains to achieve the comedic gait of "Wag the Dog" or the improvised, overlapping style that so defined Robert Altman's Hollywood movie, "The Player."

Has good intentions and the element of surprise -- it's never quite clear where it's going at any given point.

Director Bill Duke may believe the message but he never invests himself in the characters or their story, which becomes an illustrated lesson with reflective interludes and comic relief.

Neither (Gooding nor Ulrich) has the distincitve spark of an action hero, and their Butch and Sundance repartee falls so consistently flat that you end up feeling a little embarrassed for them.

Some of the scenes are gorgeous, but "Papaya" is so passionless and empty it has no real impact. [04 Feb 1994]

Breiman brings nothing new or insightful or even all that clever, for that matter, to the familiar questions of love and sex.

Try as it might, this glossy action adventure isn't nearly as clever as the "Spy Kids" franchise.

Its sex is brutal, its depiction of human nature is crude and pessimistic, and its climax -- which involves animal mutilation -- is enough to ruin your whole week.

It's well-acted by a likable cast and is well-intended, but it misses: It doesn't come off as the powerful socio-environmental statement it wants to be.

Ben Stiller provides a jolt of personality as a past victim who rouses himself from exile, but otherwise Todd Phillips' fitfully funny script never delivers the crude creativity or the raw energy that feeds this genre of proudly crass male-centric comedies.

Cut down to a frantic 88 minutes, you wonder if all the human moments were trimmed away to get to this abstract, humorless exercise in empty flourish.

Herman's intentions are admirable, but his results are unsettling in the worst ways.

Shallow Hal begs for the Farrellys to unleash their arsenal of offensiveness, but they want to be liked so much they appear afraid to offend. The result is safe, well-meaning and dull.

As sketch comedy, The Ten often is imaginative and sometimes hilarious...Still, like precursors from "The Groove Tube" to "Jackass," it doesn't make for much of a movie.

First there was "Lionheart," with Jean-Claude Van Damme as a young innocent who gets caught up in the nefarious business; then "The Big Man," an Irish film with Liam Neeson in the same predicament, and now "Gladiator." This latest clone is probably the best of the trio in terms of acting and production values, but if you've seen one you've seen them all. And they're all essentially one long sequence of people pounding each other to hamburger, interspersed with cliches. [6 March 1992]

Sober and serious and downright glum, ultimately an all-too-familiar portrait of lonely souls unable to break through their own isolation.

Bland and boring.

Those who want something to really sink their teeth into should head home on a rainy day, put on some goth anthems and reread the books.

When its big plot switcheroo comes, it proves to be not such a great idea after all: It actually weakens, rather than strengthens, the premise, and dissipates, rather than intensifies, the drama.

Visually impressive but exceedingly unpleasant little nail-biter.

The script offers neither character revelations nor plot twists. It unfolds by the numbers, like the product of an amateur screenwriter's salon. Its second-hand ideas originate in movies ranging from 1960's "The Apartment" to 1997's "The Ice Storm."

For all the grace of the animation and visual splendor, the stilted script and emotionless "performances" give this digital artifact a distinctly stiff, wooden flavor.

Despite Sheen's earnestness - and despite the movie's obvious good intentions - the script is confused and unfocused, and clumsily borrows elements of movies like From Here to Eternity and Bridge Over the River Kwai without any of those classics' higher meaning. [18 Jan 1991]

A low-maintenance crowd-pleaser, but we've seen the entire film, in thematic snippets, before.

It's too insubstantial to support its two-hour-plus running time, and too arbitrary to work as a story, so you walk out wondering not happened, but whether anything actually did.

That may be enough to keep the kids bobbing along -- and there are worse heroes for a kid to have than Arnold -- but apart from the shenanigans of civil-disobedient senior citizens, this movie offers little to keep accompanying parents interested.

Finn Taylor's lark of a movie feels like two unfinished films awkwardly fused together and ever threatening to snap apart.

We leave hungry for more of the film's substantial, if less physically perfect, subjects.

Shyamalan has learned the lessons that so many horror directors ignore: Suggestion is scarier than revelation.

Rampling is fascinating as Ellen, the aging romantic who hardens her vulnerability with a materialist philosophy regarding the buying and selling of sex. The other two actresses give more superficial performances, with Young totally unconvincing as a Southern neurotic.

The film, despite the occasional gross-out joke, can't disguise the fact that it's a sweet old sappy -- even dated -- love story. Only Molly Ringwald is missing.

Diverting, at times even visually impressive, but has neither the spirit or style of "Spider-Man" nor the ambition of "X-Men."

Step Up never quite does fly: its dance routines are low-voltage, the star chemistry is weak, the characters are clichés and the movie is practically an instant remake of Dewan's other '06 dance musical, "Take the Lead," which told the story better.

Hong Kong superstar Chow Yun-Fat is so charismatic in his second Hollywood outing, The Corruptor, that he almost makes us forget that the movie itself is one of the more pretentious, muddled and incompetent action films to come along in some time. [12 Mar 1999]

Never offers much enlightenment through its message.

If there is a delicate story of forgiveness, friendship and family buried somewhere in Erica Beeney's script, Potelle and Rankin haven't managed to find it under the throes of empty rebellion and painless triumph.

The film probably should have been a comedy. It would be a lot more cathartic - and a lot more entertaining - to laugh at the grim modern world of Falling Down than it is to have a heavy-handed filmmaker rub our faces in the hopelessness of it all. [26 Feb 1993, p.14]

Never more than a dull and confused film about Bolivia's 2003 presidential election.

Fat Albert's originality is lost on the big screen.

A decidedly mixed bag.

The plot contrivances in which the story is ultimately sewn include the death of a father, an unexpected pregnancy, the sale of a house and the rest of the rigmarole that bad writers are prone to drag in at the last moment. It's too bad, because these characters deserved a better story.

Its one saving grace is Godzilla himself, the James Bond of giant monsters.

While the film shuns the glamour or glitz that an American movie might demand, Scherfig tosses us a romantic scenario that is just as simplistic as a Hollywood production.