When the film suddenly turns into "Rocky" -- as all boxing films of the past two decades invariably do -- it invalidates its theme.

This is still Reiner's worst movie since 1994's "North." Wilson is lackluster, the film's depiction of the collaborative process is (unlike "Adaptation") tortuously false, and it's so disrespectful to the realities of writing and publishing that it has no satiric bite.

Either you're in the mood for a sweet and simple Christmas movie or you're not. If you are, then Perfect Holiday should fit the bill nicely.

Not faithful enough to be an adaptation, too misguided to be considered an interpretation, and not funny enough to be a parody, this film would do well not to advertise its inspiration.

So witless, sit-com shallow and bad in every way that it's just not worthy of much discussion.

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.

Isn't merely bad, it's utterly flavorless and the filmmakers are either too lazy or too cynical to even pretend there's a story behind Lawrence's 21st century homeboy shtick in 14th-century garb.

It's getting hard not to think of De Niro as anything but a dead-pan comedian.

A dumb film with a great conceptual hook from a director who visualizes better than he dramatizes.

This harmless but mediocre enterprise was doomed to failure from the start. Hollywood magic can do a lot, but it can't raise the dead.

Resnick's script never engages, the stars can't find the keys to their broadly played characters, and Ephron's direction is harrowingly out of sync.

Cliched, mostly routine and never especially satisfying.

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.

Entertaining in a trashy sort of way.

It's phony and forced, but mostly it's just silly. If there was once a satirical edge to this thriller, it's been programmed right out.

Whether or not Garden Party is an accurate portrait of the shadow L.A. culture where the young, pretty and desperate can find quick rent money, this low-budget production never engages with its characters or stories enough to make you care either way.

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]

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

It's incorrigibly unfunny.

Manages to squeeze by on Angelina Jolie's surprising flair for self-deprecating comedy.

Though First Daughter delivers a nice twist about midway through and Keaton lights up the screen every time he's on it, Holmes fails to deliver the kind of nuanced performance "Pieces of April" suggests she's capable of.

The film's first-time director, the TV-commercial-trained Marcel Langenegger, is out to emulate Hitchcock with dashes of "Vertigo," "Strangers on a Train" and more. But his homage is uninspired and disconnected, and his film is a bore.

An innocuous waste-of-time.

It's only a notch above the routine, and it obeys all the conventions of its tired formula, but it also tones the anarchy with a serious edge and it works a surprisingly effective vein of race-relations satire.

The sad truth is that it's dreadful, despite a top cast and strong production values. [02 Dec 1994]

Anyone in the market for an overblown and totally mindless adventure-comedy will certainly get his money's worth.

The movie depends on one of those big surprise endings for its effectiveness, but the script gives itself away in the first act.

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.