The movie is a resounding dud: immaculately composed and shot (very much in the Kaufman tradition), but riddled with crime-movie cliches, wincingly obvious in its plot twists and rather badly acted.

There is no histrionic excess or crackpot camp, only hoary sentiment, the puppy-dog cuteness of the mentally handicapped, and the proposition that the "cure" for lesbianism is one good man brave enough to get in touch with his inner cow.

So uninvolving as basic storytelling that it quickly becomes boring.

Tries mightily to have the charm of "Bull Durham," but instead fields raunchy sex jokes, predictable story line, dumb dialogue and a lackluster love affair.

It has absolutely nothing to say -- no redeeming commentary about nihilistic, narcissistic society and its appetite for instant gratification -- which would have made it sociologically interesting, or at least sort of Faustian in theme. Instead Sex and Death 101 is as empty-headed as its protagonist.

It is not just that this action-comedy is a totally stupid, by-the-numbers collection of every action movie cliche ever coined. It is that the thing is so upsettingly mean-spirited and incorrigibly ugly, a movie that absolutely revels in sadism and constantly asks us to laugh at the most sordid and explicit acts of violence. [17 Mar 1990]

Rarely has paper-casting worked as dismally as it does for Jason Lee and Tom Green.

The kangaroo is devoid of charm, as are the actors, who have the chemistry of fingernails on a blackboard.

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]

The script drowns out its ideas with arch melodramatic devices and ridiculous twists while Babbitt smothers even the daylight scenes in an oppressive gloom.

Redfield's fans will rejoice, if only to see the beloved novel illustrated on the screen, no matter how tediously. The rest of us probably should stay away.

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.

A girlie romantic comedy with tired slapstick pranks but not an ounce of self-respect or intelligence.

Ever wondered what the bastard stepchild of "Rear Window" and "Harry and the Hendersons" would look like? Probably not. Nevertheless, here it is in the form of a Bigfoot horror flick gone horribly awry.

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.

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.

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

A movie in which almost nothing works.

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.

Who is Cletis Tout? Who cares?

A perfect example of form without content.

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.

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

Dracula, who, as played by Dominic Purcell, has all the dark charisma and burning threat of a baked potato.

As far as these things go, the film's violence is not outrageously excessive.

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

Mostly unfabulous.

In its best moments, resembles a bad high school production of "Grease," without benefit of song.

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.

First-time director Steve Beck hurls a dozen ghosts and probably a million dollars' worth of prosthetic makeup at us for a full 90 minutes, but it's old hat and not a bit scary.

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.

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.

The roll call of perversions and adolescent sex gags are more creepy than kooky and the sudden shift to triumphant romantic sincerity at the climax rings as false as this film's sappy (sorry, happy) ending.

Call this one "Die Hard" on Alcatraz, and this time the "cuckoo crazy" maverick has got the homeboys on his side.

Has all the telltale signs of desperate re-editing: mismatched shots, clumsy transitions and a devastating car wreck that occurred either on a dry sunlit day or in the midst of a nighttime downpour, depending on the flashback.

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

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.

Insipid, overcooked and dull.

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

The film was produced by Jerry Bruckheimer and directed by Joel Schumacher, and reflects the worst of their shallow styles: wildly overproduced, inadequately motivated every step of the way and demographically targeted to please every one (and no one).

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.

What it doesn't have is a script that has anything original, cohesive, or, gasp -- funny -- to say.

The whole affair comes off as thin and artificial as a super model after a botox party.

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

I'd be tempted to call the whole thing cartoonish, but that would be insulting to the real thing.

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

An airless, mannered mess.

As stiff and slogging as animated films come.

Sour slapstick assault with a tin heart and counterfeit sentimentality.

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.

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

Exploitive while it pretends to be empathetic.

Upbeat but generic songs (one performed by Little Richard) and jazz lines add a little energy but the film feels less like a feature than an expensive ad for the upcoming video.

An innocuous waste-of-time.

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

It's hard to imagine how the movie year could possibly produce a more annoyingly stupid movie. It's so witless, broadly played and insulting to anyone's intelligence that it's almost as offensive, in its own way, as "Jackass: The Movie."

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.

Where "The Cat" book was anarchistic but ultimately sweet-spirited, this movie is ugly, dumb and colossally mean-spirited.

Falls disastrously flat.

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

An excruciating rehash that has virtually none of the wit and charm of the original.

A one-joke, one-note turkey.

Perhaps worst of all, this film seems to assume its teen viewers are a bunch of drooling half-wits, going to great pains to explain everything in so much after-school-special detail.

Welcome to the tawdry end of paradise, where no melodrama is too obvious and no conflict too contrived.

Afraid to pitch into farce, yet only half-hearted in its spy mechanics, All the Queen's Men is finally just one long drag.

It is a foul-mouthed British underworld comedy so they may be hoping it will attract the hip audience of films like "Snatch" and "Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels."

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

It's so sloppy that the flashback montage includes clips from scenes that were cut from the film!

There's a huge subplot that makes absolutely no sense at all and, in the end, the only thing the movie has going for it is Diesel's Neanderthal charm.

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.

A sleazy, uninspired, pathetically unfunny sex farce.

It comes off as tedious, pretentious, self-indulgent, talky and so garbled it might have been improvised by the actors.

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

The actors, all unprofessional with the exception of Kim Chan as the Zen master, step on each other's clipped lines so regularly that it becomes a stylistic affectation, like Mamet directing Beckett.

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

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

The script and direction by Irish filmmaker Mary McGuckian is just deadly.

As a director, Duchovny is in big trouble every frame of the way. His characters ring false, his scenes seem improperly motivated in a glaring way, and his distasteful obsession with imagery of unflushed cigarette butts bobbing in a toilet is beyond inexplicable.

His characters and his situations all ring false, and his movie just seems painful and pointless. [12 Jan 1996]

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

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."

Pretentious mess of a movie.

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

Since the expensive new movie version of the popular video game, Tomb Raider, is very true to its origins, it's a colossal bore.

Weekend at Bernie's II stands as just about the best argument I've seen in a long time that the Motion Picture Association of America's rating system is a complete farce. [10 July 1993]

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.

Levant turns up the slapstick, doubletakes, and epic fart jokes to a tortured extreme.

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

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.

Surprisingly, "North" fails most miserably on the level of children's parable. It has no solid emotional core to which an audience can relate: It doesn't touch the heart or come close to communicating a moral. It's just silly and trite and a colossal waste of time. [22 Jul 1994]

Stiller and Black have the chemistry of fingernails-on-blackboard and the movie is disastrously unfunny.

Though the pop idol recently said that movies are his ultimate goal, the best thing about On the Line is its music.

It is so contrived and utterly stupid in every way that it surely must be the nadir of the genre.

Terrible in a terrible way: It's pretentious, incomprehensible and just numbingly dull.

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

Funny for 15 minutes and then fades into mean-spirited cruelty and stupidity.

It doesn't have the imagination or daring to make a full turn to self-parody.

Universal Pictures has a lot of gall to pick up a movie as thoroughly awful as Empire and -- with a straight face and a $20 million or so ad campaign -- thrust it on the holiday movie market as if it were a significant piece of filmmaking.