Too dumb and improbable to even go into.

The script (by Cheryl Edwards, who wrote "Save the Last Dance") is shallow and dumb, the conflict (success goes to Jackie's head) is especially unconvincing, and director Charles S. Dutton shamelessly allows his own small part (as Jackie's mentor) to hog the camera.

The film is your basic sensitive young people coming-of-age in the '60s formula piece. [29 Apr 1995]

It's routine, TV sitcom fodder, but the supporting cast is better than average.

Predictable and agonizingly politically correct.

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.

Opens on a display of humiliation and human degradation at its worst and then rewinds, like a video surfer zipping back to replay a favorite scene, to the nominal beginning of the spiral.

Some of it works, most of it doesn't. But the real problem of the movie is that it's so utterly lacking in freshness and originality. This is exactly the kind of formulaic indie gay comedy that was so overdone in the '80s and '90s that it became a film festival cliché.

It lacks both complexity and compromised characters. While the cultural backdrop is intriguing, the story is frustratingly conventional and familiar.

The film leaves an acrid taste with the viewer who sits through its long and winding tale of tortured courtship.

It is strangely paced (especially in the beginning), always confusing to follow, and extremely awkward as a romance.

The restless, selfish, unfriendly people created by Lachow as protagonists only make the movie hard to warm up to. It's more akin to fingernails scraping a blackboard than an updated morality play.

The film is dominated by computer-generated effects and they're most of its problem -- they don't give us anything to emotionally attach to or invest in.

Just another low-budget effort from filmmakers who mistake cleverness for smarts.

Purely an easy-to-digest testosterone flick anyway, with standard bikini babes, roaring engines and bikers who circle each other slowly in the dust before they rumble.

For anyone looking for something as real or engaging as Biggie's music -- or a good introduction to it -- will be disappointed by this mediocre celluloid life-after-death.

Director Takashi Miike's dish of sukiyaki spaghetti ala Sergio Corbucci is badly seasoned with scraps of reservoir dogs.

It's kind of like "Tootsie," only without the drag. Or the class. Or the laughs.

The numerous plot elements don't come together in the end. Even though we are gradually expected to sympathize with the plight of the murdering vigilante cop, the whole vigilante theme is suddenly dropped midway through the film. It seems to have no real place in the larger story, except as a clumsy and purposeless O.J. Simpson parallel. [26 Apr 1996]

To be fair, Clockstoppers isn't a bad film, merely bereft of creativity and personality.

It wears thin, but also provides some insight into how comics interact and view their craft. At the very least, it confirms all suspicions that they have way more fun than you.

A fairly depressing experience.

A fumbling attempt to create the European equivalent of a Japanese manga thriller in the conspiratorial mold of "Akira" and "Ghost in the Shell" has a stunning look.

It's a formula job all the way, filled with pratfalls, flying food, much male incompetence in the face of child-rearing realities, and a cast of violence-prone children on sugar highs who somehow turn into angels by the film's last sappy moments.

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

The Will Ferrell comedy engine is running on empty in Step Brothers.

If you're in the market for a whimsical, incorrigibly weird movie that basically goes nowhere, try "Arizona Dream." But if you have little patience for self-indulgent movies that substitute scatter-gun blasts of surreal black comedy for dramatic structure and realistic characterization, steer clear of this curiosity from noted Yugoslav film-maker Emir Kusturica ("When Father Was Away on Business"). [9 Sept 1994]

The contrast of the naive assurance of youth with the confusion and ambiguity of adulthood is sweet but simplistic and the wandering script hasn't much else to offer.