This sci-fi film noir craves a passionate center, an intoxicating core or some pulse that makes us want to keep taking that first step into dark waters, but it leaves us drowning in its quiet tedium instead.

The cumulative effect of the movie is repulsive and depressing.

Is Queen of the Damned worthy of its hype or should it have a stake driven through its dark heart? The answer lies somewhere in between.

Everything in Agent Cody Banks, from tacky special effects, inscrutable action scenes and drab visuals (including substituting Vancouver for Seattle), panders to its audience.

But the main reason you might find the film a bad trip is that its 30-year-old Holden Caulfield-type hero is so harrowingly unsympathetic: unpleasant, unappealing, self-pitying.

The film's deliberate pace, its constantly confusing structure, its thematic vagueness and its clumsy and often embarrassingly amateurish Garden of Eden sequences combine to make The Loss of Sexual Innocence at best, a tough sit; at worst, a self-consciously arty parable of a self-indulgent filmmaker. [30 Jun 1999]

Not extreme enough to skate the edge of tasteless farce and not straight enough to play the material for edgy satire, The Ringer is a cheat right down to the final stretch. Breaking the rules should be more fun than this.

For all the bludgeoning insistence of Kramer's contrived plots and blunt direction, there's not much conviction to the outrage.

Don't watch this film unless you have a high tolerance and an undemanding appreciation for penis jokes and humor based more on a capacity to disgust than to surprise.

A stiff of a supernatural comedy.

A poorly written collection of comic-book movie cliches that offers nothing new to the genre, generates very little in the way of action thrills and plays like a self-important, humorless rip-off of "Kill Bill."

A bafflingly unfunny comedy.

Starts slowly, takes a turn for the better for a couple of reels and then, not having much to say or anywhere to go, flatlines into something akin to "American Idol."

Johnny Suede seems in every way a pale imitation that is so vacuous and self-consciously hip that it just fades into nothingness. [13 Nov 1992]

The official R rating is for "strong language, sexual content, drug use and some crude humor," but the MPAA is just being polite. It's all crude.

The few genuine moments of connection -- are as refreshing as they are out of place. They only highlight how false and affected the rest of the film is.

Pretty silly stuff, designed to appeal more to older kids and adults than the toddler brigade.

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

Kilner and crew cough up a mish-mash of contrasting tones and tempos and wind up a rather odd, misshapen curiosity that wavers into too many styles to avoid a slow death by overkill.

The film's technological selling point -- having a computer-animated Scooby in a mostly live-action world -- is strangely unimpressive. In fact, it's virtually unnoticeable: a testament perhaps to the audience's increasing knowledge that in today's CG-driven Hollywood, all movies are cartoons.

More than painful to behold, it's simply insincere in a film determined to undermine gay stereotypes.

A sad, sad, sad, sad rip-off.

Every frame of the way, it's eminently clear that Primer is the work of an engineer, not a film- maker.

Von Trier is far more hypocritical than his straw-figure characters, and he's simply too cynical and insincere to be provocative.

The masochistic brutality it's selling still seems glaringly out of step with the current mood of the country.

Legends of the Fall is one of those movies that is so sloppy and so poorly written and so clumsily directed that every dramatic scene seems to either insult your intelligence or come off as being unintentionally hilarious. [13 Jan 1995]

First-time director Ted Demme (no relation to Jonathan), also of MTV ("Yo! MTV Raps"), displays little flair for comedy or storytelling beyond a sketch length. He also seems to have the sensibility of a dirty-minded eighth-grader. [11 Mar 1994]

It's an unenlightening film that proves youthful anarchy is just as dull as a midlife crisis, and sadly, as predictable, too.