There's not an authentically scary moment in it.

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

What finally sinks the film is that the more it tries to dazzle us, the more uninterested we become.

Though a hypnotically beautiful film, it's dramatically listless and dull, and completely lacking in passion.

Plays like a feature-length sitcom with gay double entendres.

A decidedly mixed bag.

The script starts repeating its best gags about halfway through, and the direction gets ever broader as it goes along until the film finally loses all effectiveness as satire.

As stiff and slogging as animated films come.

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

The script is soggy and sloppy and Waters is no master of suspense, but he does have a pair of engaging stars flirting in a world of chic New York glamour.

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.

Even though the supporting cast is likable and the film hits all the beats of its formula, it's weak, as if everyone has been to the well one too many times.

Anyone in the market for a bittersweet romantic comedy could do worse.

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

This isn't a movie, it's a marketing ploy. Would you like a plush Garfield toy with that popcorn?

The unlikely marriage of Murphy and Craven is indeed strange, and it results in what often seems to be two diametrically opposed movies in one. Still, it's not quite as bad an idea as it sounds, and the movie is passably entertaining. [27 Oct 1995, p.30]

Sour slapstick assault with a tin heart and counterfeit sentimentality.

Crossroads may now fall into the same paragraph as "Glitter," Mariah Carey's disastrous star vehicle.

While it displays precious little originality or ingenuity, A Guy Thing is less graceless than most of its ilk and benefits from a likable cast.

Marks a surprising maturity, restraint and confidence to Carrey's acting. Even more than "The Truman Show," he plays it perfectly straight here, and his natural charisma carries the movie with just the right dose of Jimmy Stewart charm.

A cinematic cat-astrophe.

Low octane comedy running on fumes.

The results are shapeless, excessively lurid and often unpleasant, with Argento shamelessly vamping the white-trash junkie mother and truck-stop hooker. She apparently forgot whose story she was telling.

A rather likable and very sweet-spirited story.

Feels the scratches of too much time and tinkling and is as disjointed as a dislocated shoulder.

Has the distinction of being the very worst of all the many film versions of Alexandre Dumas' classic novel, "The Three Musketeers." Nothing else in Musketeer movie history comes even remotely close to its staggering wretchedness.

It's recidivist Murphy: bad-skit comedy populated by caricatures in search of a movie.

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.

There are more laughs to be wrought out of Myers' militant flight-attendant training school, and they're just not there.

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.

Yes, in this day and age, a tall man can pretend to be a very short man pretending to be a baby who uses his innocent disguise to molest women and whack men in the nuts. Isn't that funny? No, actually, not so much.

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."

In a summer of cardboard figures in splashy spectacles, that makes for a refreshing change, an intriguing, entertaining and altogether sweetly mystifying misfire. In other words, another quintessentially Alan Rudolph picture.

The gags on which it rests its laughs have been lifted from every other raucous comedy, campus-oriented or not.

In a better movie, this grand-dame performance might have been fun, but it's surrounded here by an impossibly dull and unsatisfying whodunit plot, unintentionally funny dialogue and such absurdities as having Catherine stay up late one night and whip out an entire novel.

When the little girl tells her decapititated doll, "It's not just a bad dream," she is right. It's just a bad movie.

The lapses in logic make a weak subplot about a serial killer on the loose just plain silly instead of provocative.

The cruel simplicity of the atrocity is made needlessly chaotic by artless camerawork that swishes rapidly back and forth across the action, to the accompaniment of a syrupy soundtrack.

It's more thrill ride than movie and Wong plays it that way: no sentiment, no complications and no pesky story to get in the way of an arsenal of flashy special effects.

In the acting contest that ensues, each star comes off reasonably well, though, surprisingly, Lohan (who had well-publicized emotional problems on the set) wins out over Huffman's comic drunk and Fonda's leathery evocation of her father, Henry, in "On Golden Pond."

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

Bland and boring.

Scores high on nastiness, but it has as many surprisingly funny moments as offensive ones.

A pretty dreadful affair -- ludicrous as history and a veritable gallery of visual cliches.

Somebody in Hollywood thought taking "Some Like It Hot" and "Animal House," sticking them in a blender and serving in Dixie cups was a good idea. That somebody should be fired.

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

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.

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

A competent concoction of familiar ingredients, smothered with gothic mood and served up with a generous helping of teenagers: skewered, slashed and stabbed.

In Costner's best moments, he makes us absolutely believe this character and feel his pain.

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

Bad animation and casting make Moses movie a zero, not a Ten.

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

Definitely deserves points for trying to be something thought-provoking and different, but it doesn't really stand up to analysis and it comes off as a pretentious mess.

A bafflingly unfunny comedy.

So poorly constructed and so elementally banal that it's a shock the script was written by the same guy (Nicholas Kazan) who wrote such taut thrillers as "At Close Range" and "Reversal of Fortune."

Works best of all as a vehicle for Richard Gere, who has simply never looked better or held the screen more securely.

The slapdash comic flailing of screenwriter and TV scribe-turned-director Ed Decter is only compounded by a script so disconnected you have to wonder if pages were lost on the way to the set.

Though he tries hard for bravado, hero Edward Burns is terminally wooden.

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

Cohen drives the film at a galloping pace, but it's not fast enough to outrun its absurdity.

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.

The movie around Stallone is fairly dreadful, so overly stylized and poorly written that it's always a struggle to stay oriented.

Mr. Deeds, is -- perhaps predictably -- pretty much of a disaster. It's a bit like someone scrawling a mustache on the Mona Lisa.

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

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.

It's hard to believe that five different writers took credit for this feeble story and script. Who says failure is an orphan?

It is relatively suspenseless and often distastefully crude.

To its credit, the film has an engagingly bleak and minimalist look, and a brisk pace. But the chills are few. Every step seems contrived, predictable or unintentionally funny.

If you're a Toronto native or a big-time hockey geek, there are enough little in jokes to probably carry you through the leaden pacing and barrel-scraping gross-out humor, but it's an awfully dull ride for the rest of us.

Not that there are any actual jokes to be had. The film simply jumps to the punch lines, a non-stop barrage of crude dialogue and vulgar sight gags that passes as humor among adolescent boys. Who exactly is the audience for this R-rated film? The terminally immature?

Stephen Brill's flat-footed script begins as an idiot comedy with the gross-out gags of a Farrelly brothers film.

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.

A sloppy, indifferent action movie with a sadistic edge and a sour hypocrisy.

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.

In the end, dark comedy drives the film, but it's overwhelmed by a desire to be liked, really liked.

A joyless amalgam of horror movie cliches, none used more exhaustively than the false alarm.

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.

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

An awful, misanthropic, deadly unfunny and badly acted war-of-the-sexes travesty.

Tepid and only sporadically amusing.

The film is a shapeless mess and about as convincing as a cartoon, the usual mix of slapstick, doofus humor and raunchy sex jokes lacking even the bite or attitude to make it adventurous.

Above all, Kranks lacks that basic kernel of credibility that even a goofy farce needs to work.

It's lively but fails to disguise the fact that his (Charbanic) script is a dud and his career in videos has taught him little about the art of narrative storytelling.

A one-joke, one-note turkey.

A real dud, with few laughs, no characterization, little story, a cluster of stereotypes and clichés and just plain nothing for Foxx to do.

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.

So violent and junky it seems to have been designed as evidence for the growing congressional movement to censor Hollywood.

A harried, screechy film that goes nowhere at a breakneck pace, full of sound and furious slapstick overkill but devoid of wit.

It's bad enough that the lazy script substitutes goofy situations for actual gags, much of which falls flat under Rob Pritts' plodding direction, but Corky Romano finally sours in cynicism and hypocrisy.

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

The film is inoffensive, and Baldwin is fun and engaging.

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

The inconsistencies and continuity errors are staggering.

It tries to be a sappy love story, an incredibly vile gross-out comedy and an envelope-pushing soft-core porno movie all at once. It ends up being an unappealing abomination.

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

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

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.