It doesn't leave you much to hold on to in a comedy about apathy that can't even muster the energy to care.

This well-meaning mistake gets lost in the metaphors.

The bogus Seattle setting creates an additional problem for local moviegoers. Because we know Seattle doesn't have a subway, giant FBI building or newspapers called Telegraph or Tribune, we're jarred out of the story so regularly that it leaves us slightly punch-drunk.

Be warned that what looks to be a family comedy pushes its PG-13 rating to the edge with blatant sexual references and creatively crude sexual metaphors.

Despite several touching scenes, the script comes perilously close to being maudlin and, while competent, Polley doesn't have the flair to make anything special out of her big role.

Surreal, vaguely amusing, European-made drama.

Much ado about very little because it takes no stand and gives little insight into the Chopper's psyche.

But too much of this movie is unstructured and stylistically haphazard. And by the time we get to its highly predictable conclusion, Gas Food Lodging is just one more formula coming-of-age drama. [28 Aug 1992]

The film lacks the nerve for any genuinely nasty fun or comic bite.

A series of Grand Guignol skits played for mean-spirited laughs.

Fails to generate the elementary visceral thrills we've come to expect from science-fiction thrillers, let alone a compelling human drama.

The second-class status of women in Korean society is a reminder of Confucianism's dark side. For all its pretty cinematic images and well-meaning bows to a vanishing literary tradition, this movie is a celebration of that dark side.

If they gave an Oscar for the most unnecessary movie of the year, the award for 1993 would have to go to "Point of No Return," the latest product of Hollywood's current mania for remaking successful recent foreign films. It's not that this movie is such an awful rehashing of "La Femme Nikita," Luc Besson's stylish French thriller that was the biggest foreign-language hit of 1990 in the United States. It's that the first movie had such high visibility and is still so fresh in our minds, and this Americanized version is so totally the same film (except for the ending, it's virtually scene for scene the same) that it seems like a criminal waste of $30 million. [19 March 1993]

A 108-minute film of a two-minute song.

With Biggerstaff's breathless narration explaining every detail of the action, Cashback seems aimed at an audience that would rather be told a story than shown a movie.

A family-friendly comedy with some gut-shaking chuckles and a heartwarming message. Sadly, it's also a fine example of what happens when talented people settle for utter mediocrity.

DeVito definitely has a gift for absurd black humor that kicks in here and there, but Adam Resnick's script is slavishly mean-spirited.

The most dishonest thing about this ranting montage of a movie is its technique of panning between opposing viewpoints to simulate debate, when in fact each of the more than 35 celebrities was separately interviewed.

It plays like a big-budget, after-school special with a generous cast, who at times lift the material from its well-meaning clunkiness.

Despite picturesque episodes and nicely observed characters, the film lacks suspense.

A canny but hollow pastiche.

A tired tale that never comes to life.

Haskell comes off as a jerk -- but Mark somehow looks even worse: not just insincere but weak, vain and vindictive.

Like shave ice without the topping, this cinematic snow cone is as innocuous as it is flavorless.

Many will find Griffin profane, sexist and decidedly offensive. Many more will find his raunchy insights inspired, his body language hilarious and his gift for mimicry and caricature worth the entire show.

An uninvolving film.

The teen parties and sidekick silliness are time filler, and not very good filler either -- why even Bruce Willis shows up in a scene that has nothing to do with the story.

Its heart is in the right place and it resists the temptation to junk up the story, but Depp does nothing with his character and the movie has little of the unique wit or panache that would make it appealing to an older-than-10 audience.

Most successful as a tribute to the martyrs of the anti-apartheid struggle. It fails, however, as a well-reasoned documentary on the subject of the relationship of music to social change.

Seems like very tame stuff, with little in the way of graphic sex and all the baggage of a run-of-the-mill art-house costume drama.

The mystery is never very compelling, Paul McGuigan's direction tends to be obvious and flat, many of the characters are stagy and unconvincing, and Bettany doesn't have anywhere near the star power to hold the movie together.

Fails to be anything special. It makes passable preteen entertainment but comes off as clunky and heavy-handed in most of the places it should be graceful and enchanting.

Sivan makes it all quite beautiful with verdant imagery and tastefully melodramatic direction, but at the cost of emotional and social ambiguities, not to mention living, breathing characters.

There's no real wit or cleverness to the script.

The movie never gets off the ground. Kaufman's script is never especially clever and often is rather pretentious.

The Life Before Her Eyes is like one of those puzzles. There is something wrong in each scene, and the viewer zeroes in on the elements that don't fit, wondering if there is a purpose behind them.

Weaver was half-heartedly pushed as an underdog Oscar choice. If the film was worthy of her performance, Weaver may have had a shot.

While the film is technically polished and visually breathtaking, it lacks depth and becomes little more than a lawless fairy tale packed with pretty people.

While Madison is earnest and inoffensive, it offers no surprises, few fascinating characters and a hackneyed script.

It lacks, despite the remarkable techno effects by wizard Stan Winston, originality and charisma.

Morrow and Linney are gifted, extremely likable actors, and the movie has some ingratiating moments and a seductive soundtrack. But there's a by-the-numbers inevitability to every scene, and it never clicks into place to be anything special.

Fierce People is no ordinary dud. This seedy soap opera is the most outlandish, campy romp through the mud since "Showgirls."

You walk away wishing they had more than this scant and often shoddy material with which to enjoy their rollicking and racy good time.

The biggest tragedy about Milos Forman's foray into the life and times of Spanish artist Francisco De Goya is the waste of so much great raw material.

Ball's snide humor and cynical arrogance undercut his message at every turn.

Goal seems destined to be an ongoing soccer-themed soap opera, but it's one that only the game's biggest enthusiasts likely will find compelling.

The writing here is truly dismal.

It never quite takes off.

Not terrible, but distinctly disappointing, not nearly as engaging or thrilling as its premise seems to promise.

In the end, it's just a pointless downer.

The ploddingly literal screenplay by John Logan doesn't help matters.

The best scenes belong to Tucker and director Brett Ratner keys in to his timing, whether it's a Chinese twist on "Who's on First" or a seduction scene in which Tucker blurts out every impulse.

First-time director Billie Woodruff, a music video veteran, busts his moves in the dance scenes while the movie throbs to the beat of the wall-to-wall soundtrack.

A coming-of-age movie in which nobody comes of age.

What it lacks is the wit or even the cynicism to lighten the emotional load.

At least Lin's local color make the idiocy fun to watch.

A good-faith effort, if not completely successful.

Like D.O.A., Against All Odds, No Way Out and other recent remakes of film noir classics, this overblown and heavy-handed film is just one more reminder of how much more thoughtful and entertaining movies used to be. [21 Sep 1990]

Writer/director Jordan Roberts aims for heartwarming drama and settles for tepid entertainment.

Yes, you've seen this movie a hundred times before, and "The Cutting Edge" is even more annoying than most predictable sports movies because it was so obviously shot on the cheap: the overall production values are as low as any film released by a major studio this year. [27 March 1992]

It's a strange and strangely unaffecting little drama -- but played very flat, with no particular emotional impact sought or achieved.

It all feels false and calculated, an overearnest attempt to find old-fashioned romantic innocence in the modern world by someone too jaded to believe.

It's a much more interesting and engrossing film than its somewhat nefarious reputation may indicate -- though, granted, elements of it are very hard to take, and it finally leaves you feeling pretty down and out.

When the spectacle turns ridiculous, the movie just becomes another big-screen video game.

"Shrek" had some refreshing, genre-twisting innovation but Cats & Dogs plays it safe and nice instead and, by not taking risks, doesn't quite make it out of the doghouse.

That play has made it to the big screen, but it has come so late in the moribund body-switching comedy cycle that it seems like a tired cliche, and a big-budget production and star cast just can't seem to breathe any life into it. [10 Jul 1992]

There's just no juice to this thing, merely a bunch of fitfully funny gags and a climactic football match that, under Skolnick's direction, fails to show us why the Europeans find this so exciting.

Greenstreet captures all the hubbub on film but, while he makes the point that we are indeed a house divided, he can't quite persuade us that this particular situation is a metaphoric example of our national malaise.

Low-production values, including glaring inconsistencies in the makeup department, add to the bargain-basement atmosphere of this kidsploitation quickie.

Gets entertaining when Liu kicks in.

Farce is a genre best served with building momentum and crack timing. This lazily paced piece seems more concerned with winking at the audience and putting quotations around the performances than anything so crass as playing this farce for laughs.

You'd hope God would think bigger for His divine intervention in American politics.

Can't find its rhythm and stride. It plays it far too safe and slick.

A slick, cynical, nasty piece of heist-film plotting that hides its more obvious logical gaps in techno-babble and distracting spectacles of wanton violence and big explosions.

This half-baked production sat on Miramax's shelf for a couple of years. It's no more done now than then, merely more stale.

The best thing -- maybe the only good thing -- about the expensive sci-fi movie, Jumper, is its high-concept premise, which gives its hero the power of teleporting himself anywhere on the globe in the blink of an eye: from the Coliseum of Rome to the North Pole.

Outrageously confident and wearing a kilt through the mayhem, Jackson proves once again that he has few equals in bringing off a broad, over-the-top lead.

Makes a serviceable summer shoot-'em-up, but it's surprisingly trashy and rather stupid, and its efforts toward being a gripping military drama in the Tom Clancy tradition are fairly pathetic.

It wobbles between a conventionally quirky lighthearted goof and an oddball farce in which character is sacrificed for sight gags.

A fairly loathsome and shallow movie about loathsome and shallow people, but it's almost worth catching to see star Christian Bale chew up the scenery.

The movie has a soul, and its good-natured charm may well win over the most cynical heart.

Williams' self-conscious and rather bland performance never comes close to bringing his character to life.

It disrespects Seattle. Not only is this yet another filmed-in-Vancouver movie that's supposed to be set here, it takes place in a blinding rainstorm of the kind only a Hollywood rain machine can make. As we all know, it never rains like that in Seattle.

The premise clicks, the stars couldn't be more likable, and It Takes Two is as cute and imaginatively directed a family movie as we've had all year. [17 Nov 1995]

Predictable and surprisingly confusing in its ultimate message.

With the original stage cast, the film is doggedly faithful to the play but has failed to translate it into much of a film.

This larger-than-life cartoon of a trained dog has more character than the two-legged co-stars.

An innocuous, hit-and-miss affair.

This emoting doesn't mix well with the comedy and action, of course, and the best that can be said of the film is that it's marginally entertaining, and (for Murphy) reasonably inoffensive. But he's competent enough to make us suspect he might be surprisingly good if he ever did get a real Denzel Washington part. [17 Jan 1997]

The movie also qualifies as a kind of low-rent, male version of "Dreamgirls," but -- while many of the numbers are pleasant -- it doesn't have the moxie to work as a musical.

Fascinating as these spiders and frogs must be to one another, a human being need not be put into such close proximity to their private dances.

Peter Riegert's is a labor of love film where you feel love much stronger than you feel the film.

Ostensibly a love story, the film is also handicapped by Téchiné's strong gay sensibility and clear lack of romantic interest in his characters.

It's endlessly confusing.

The script is undone by confusing romantic developments, a convoluted murder mystery and a facile and maudlin resolution.

The script is as sloppy as Song's unkempt cop, sprinkled with intriguing ideas and imaginative details that, like the investigation, simply get lost in blind alleys.

I scratched my head in wonder as to why this pair of one-dimensional characters couldn't find happiness in such a shallow story.

A bubbly, high-spirited paean to the joys of pharmaceutical phun that grooves to a throbbing beat but constantly trips over flat, prosaic dialogue and literal, lifeless sight gags.