Allen is wretched. It is no kind of pleasure to say so, especially with the memory of the good things he has done; but here he simply plunks front and center the fact that he cannot act and never could.

DeLillo felt he needed a plot, and he invented one that is shockingly bad for a novelist of his accomplishment. It isn't the use of a plot that degrades the picture: it is the degrading plot itself--which isn't even a good cartoon of a too-busy plot.

Contrivances accrue so thickly that the source seems to be not 1978 Toback, but 1930s Warner Brothers. The film sweats to be up-to-date with ultra-hectic editing, pace, elision, and sangfroid, but they can't verify the pasteboard base.

Fonda believed in acting. She doesn't seem to believe in it anymore. Her performance in this film is a collection of reactions, vocal whoops, and pouncings that we have seen often before in lesser actors.

After the three hours--though it seemed longer--I was still bewildered. Stone is a unique and fiery talent. Why did he make this film?

Birth is one of those films occasionally encountered that make me question my nativity or that of the film-makers. Were they and I born on the same planet? If so, how could we now have such vastly different criteria of a film story's believability?

The dialogue that is wrapped around the sexual activities only helps to make the film disgustingly ridiculous.

It all turns out a bedraggled mess. Lee presumably had two ideas, one an exposé of pharmaceutical greed, the other a sex comedy: then he decided that neither one would make a film in itself and came up with the lame idea of combining them. What makes the resulting blunder even worse is that, intrinsically, almost every scene is directed well.

Disembodied, patchy, pointless work, which isn't even successfully pretentious.

A braggart piece of empty exhibitionism.

The really relevant defect of this thriller is that it isn't scary.

The whole is just a wan rejection of traditional story, as well as a weak slap at those who still bother to attack the story tradition.

The film's intent was presumably satirical in the vein of "Catch-22" or "M*A*S*H," but the satire is so weak, the action so devoid of comic perspective, that we are left with a naked gaggle of ugly episodes.

In future Lee can best serve his versatility by never doing anything like this again.

His (LaBute's) work needs attention even at its nadir, which I hope this new film is.

His (writer/director Konchalovsky's) plunge into the world of mental distortion is so garish, so exploitative, that the picture needs only a few clicks of the dial to move from the horrible to the ludicrous

A series of disconnected scenes alternating between two story lines, neither of which is cogent or concluded. The picture is tinged with the irrational.

Imagine finding the will to get up every morning to do another day's work on this stale story tarted up with relevance.

Over and over in the course of the film, we can see Spacey, a good actor, reaching down into himself to find a source of verity for this plot-constructed character. It is not a pretty sight.

Gerry is all manner without any trace of depth.

So this is not, as vaunted, a documentary about a film destroyed by temperaments and tizzies. It is the account of a medical catastrophe that could have spoiled the opening of a supermarket.

Virtually everything that happens in Adaptation is almost juvenile showing off - daring to make a film that is in search of a script.

As is frequently the case when there is public fuss about a film or play, the work itself is not very good.

Not every stupid film sets out to be that way. But a furious zeal to entertain, especially to find twists, can push filmmakers past credibility, past twist, even past social decency. A dreadful example is Pushing Tin.

A lot of talent has gone down the drain, an apt term since bathrooms loom in the picture. [22 Jun 1998, p. 26]

It's the flat, self-exposing dud that fate often keeps in store for the initially overpraised. [26 Jan 1998, p.24]

We get the feeling that, about nine-tenths of the way along, after he had all the characters knotted up, Bass suddenly thought, "Good heavens! I've got to find some way to finish off this thing." The way that he found is lame and makes a hash of what precedes it. [28 July 1997]

The banality of the plot and the writing make the presence in the cast of the celebrated William Hurt, Andie MacDowell and Bob Hoskins all the more disheartening. [03 Mar 1997 Pg.30]