His heart may be in the right place, but 25-year-old writer-director M. Night Shyamalan can't even begin to pull all these episodes together into anything that seems remotely special, or even makes any sense. [03 Apr 1998]

What is this movie about? Is it a morality tale? Is it about the complexity of romantic love? Parenthood? Accepting the often-blurred lines of our sexual orientation? Is it about the role of race in white-collar crime? What?

The film's deliberately overblown cartoonishness and its gleefully pandering adolescent cruelty never blend into the enjoyable style of, say, a good spaghetti western (Rodriguez's acknowledged model), or even a bad Quentin Tarantino movie.

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.

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

The whole enterprise is a colossal waste of everyone's time.

Not only have they (Coen Brothers) stripped it of all its wit and charm, they've loaded it down with the kind of race-baiting and bathroom humor they've always avoided in the past.

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.

A potentially interesting idea deflated by the absurd proclamations of an arch screenplay and smothered under the ponderous gravity of M. Night Shyamalan's dreary direction.

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

The utter lack of tension or suspense is as dumbfounding as Hunt's blender approach to editing, which purees action scenes into incoherent mashes of image confetti.

The most insipidly innocuous film ever made about facing mortality and living it up before passing away, The Bucket List has as much poetry and poise as its clumsy, clunky title.

This is a much dumber movie than "The Lake House." In fact, the script is an ungainly mess and ultimately a shaggy-dog story.

Yet another raunchy, gross-out farce, this one about smart-alecky city boys who have wacky adventures while exposing themselves in -- I mean to -- the great outdoors.

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

Absurdly over the top and not especially funny.

Director Ryu Murakami obviously has a few nonexploitative impulses, but more than half of his movie is graphic sex scenes (it's rated NC-17), and it seems mostly just an excuse to sneak into a mainstream theater the kind of S&M, bondage and urination scenes that have been banned from even the hardest of hard-core porn videos since the late '80s. [15 Oct 1993]

Director Uwe Boll ("House of the Dead") has made a cottage industry out of this kind of junk. Maybe it's time for him to close up shop.

In the annals of insufferable family entertainment, the VeggieTales set a new standard.

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.

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.

Since we never see Thomas, we can't care for him. And he's hardly a sympathetic "hero" in his treatment of women and his insistence that other characters honor his personal boundaries while he ignores theirs.

Tautou seems tired, mean-spirited and utterly devoid of that Audrey Hepburn-like charm that made her the international movie find of 2001.

Contains much abuse and brutality, an annoying celebratory air of pimp-chic and enough explicit gay sex scenes to qualify as (very tepid) soft-core porn.

There is no stylistic thrill to this blunt object of a callous action film. It's content to bludgeon the audience into numb resignation.

It's been turned into a stupid kung fu movie.

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.

In this movie, he (Shelton) falls so hard he becomes, for the first time in his career, genuinely offensive.