Michael Polish (Big Sur, Amnesiac) directs with his foot nailed to the accelerator, but all the manic energy in the world can't stave off the boredom of Cory Miller's script, which is a deadly combination of convoluted and thin.

Several people get wrongly accused of being responsible for somebody's death — there's as much undeserved guilt floating around in this picture as in a Fundamentalist kid's puberty years — and all three of our aforementioned protagonists find they have family issues that need working out. All are broadly drawn and unconvincing, like everything else in this pandering supernatural romance.

A lo-fi treatment of a high-concept crime rom-com deficient in sexual chemistry, laughs and suspense, this is a grating stunt in which actors who ought to know better, led by Anne Hathaway and Chiwetel Ejiofor, play synthetically movie-ish characters meant to tickle us with the all-too-real trials of the COVID era. If you still think frozen screens and kids disrupting Zoom business calls are a hoot, it's all yours.

Gallo displays none of the screenwriting elan he's exhibited in such previous efforts as Midnight Run and the Bad Boys films, although here it's hard to separate the ponderous dialogue from the way it's delivered.

Audiences will likely feel that they're being intestinated while sitting through Fortress, a soporific and perfectly fatuous exercise that should lure modest audiences for a weekend or two before receiving a life sentence on video. [7 Sept 1993]

The movie, which bills itself as a crime-thriller-mystery, doesn’t come close to fulfilling even the lowest of expectations; it neither takes its characters seriously nor commits to its superficial attempt at topicality.

For all its high style and aestheticized visuals, this is a work of self-conscious posturing with nothing to say.

There’s nary an amusing or unpredictable moment in the film.

Punishingly dull.

Car 54, Where Are You? makes the other recent big-screen adaptations of old TV series seem like episodes of "Masterpiece Theater" in comparison. [27 Jan 1994]

The actors are all game for anything, but this is thankless work, in which the mix of live action and animatronics has no magic. The same goes for the talented voice cast, which also includes Colman Domingo and Hank Azaria in small roles.

This is the sort of movie in which even the opening credits, which continue until nearly the half-hour mark, are unbearably pretentious.

Achieves a certain cinematic distinction by outdoing "Dumb and Dumber" in sheer grossness and detail with its depiction of the unfortunate effects of explosive diarrhea.

A towering heap of nihilistic nonsense that plays like a cornball "Children of God."

Here's the deal: The worst sex cartoon in Playboy's long history can't compete with the sheer vacuousness of this inane comedy.

One of those rare instances of a movie being so bad ... it's still really bad.

This crass drag of a dud at best manages to elicit just a couple of half-hearted chuckles over the course of its 80-minute allotment.

A muddled and routine murder mystery tricked up with a science fiction gimmick that wouldn't pass muster for a "Twilight Zone" episode. The writing is poor, but the direction is even poorer. This is a film to delete from one's memory bank.

It's completely undone by its terrible screenplay, inept direction, oppressive musical score and muddy visual palette.

A turgid mess of a film that has a lot of ideas on its mind, none of which prove very interesting or in fact coherent.

A painfully unfunny, would-be comedy.

Cheap-looking, broad and ultimately unnecessary comedy.

In his second feature as a director, Gallo acts as writer, director, producer, star, cinematographer, production designer and editor. Thus, the failure is all his.

A lame comic premise, a tiresome-bordering-on-obnoxious protagonist and a script devoid of humor is a lot to overcome for any movie, and Surviving Christmas is not the one to do it.

Has the crass look and feel of a 90-minute infomercial.

The film is nearly unendurable.

The film doesn't know what it wants to be -- reality programming pushed to the max or a satire of reality TV? -- but it winds up as an exercise in the rankest sort of cynicism.

An experimental, transgressive work that pretty much fails on every level, A Hole in My Heart, depicting the efforts of a trio of amateur porn filmmakers, eventually will be considered a minor footnote to a talented director's career. In the meantime, it's the audience members that will have to suffer.