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.