The movie as a whole is nonsensical. And long. And slow. And head-poundingly loud as it culminates in slavering horror.

The movie itself is neither a catastrophe nor major.

The director Penny Marshall has a gently persuasive touch that keeps the movie's most brazen manipulations from being too offensive. [02 Jun 1994]

Ricky Stanicky is, per the Farrelly aesthetic, eager to offend, gleefully vulgar and takes every joke too far.

Every scene in this oppressive film has a theme or didactic purpose, but little life.

The film’s ponderous pace, its deficit of emotional energy, its ugly colors, its repetitive chases down more corridors than anyone has seen since “Last Year at Marienbad,” and its actors’ shared penchant for mumbling and scowling make those 108 minutes seem interminable.

In addition to being borderline unendurable, Funny Games is inexplicable, and I don't mean in any philosophical sense.

Lush romanticism, bloody action and a certain winking distance from the material keep Mr. Besson’s picture vivid if not quite compelling.

This is silliness of such a special grade, performed with such zest, that it makes you forgive and even forget the movie's foolishness and borderline incoherence.

To give the film its full due, the people who made it — the writer, John Swetnam, and the director, Steven Quale — got wind of a genuine trend and ran with it. Everyone on screen is busy filming everyone else. It's a shakier-camera version of "The Blair Witch Project" in the era of YouTube.

A wispy, fundamentally sentimental tale about a nice girl who has to support herself by working as a phone-sex siren, Spike Lee's movie takes the better part of an hour to get started. Once it does it still can't dramatize the script's one good idea. [2 Apr 1996, p.A12]

What was fresh and surprising in Las Vegas turns rancid and predictable in Bangkok.

In the not-so-grand scheme of such things, Along Came Polly is certainly harmless, and occasionally very funny. It's just not clever enough to keep you engaged.

Since Mary rarely gets to see any of the good stuff, neither do we; Dr. Jekyll hides most of his switcheroos behind closed doors. [23 Feb 1996]

Somewhat sluggish but reasonably scary.

Spasms of highfalutin philosophy, and howlingly pretentious dream sequences, serve only as the thinnest of veneers for incessant action in one of the most assaultive movies ever made.

This is one of those overworked and generally airless comedies with a sitcom premise that can't sustain life.

It's bad enough to make parable a four-letter word.

In case you were holding your breath, Renée Zellweger's Bridget Jones is still sweetly earnest, chronically overweight and swinging once again from lovestruck to lovelorn.

Fitfully amusing.

Its crackly sarcasm and smart talk turn out to be simply coating for a soft, icky, center.

In addition to all else, and it's a lot, The Losers wastes the riches of Hollywood technology in hot pursuit of nothing.

Amusing enough, especially with its uniquely credible premise of a media fraud, to recommend.

The movie . . . doesn’t have the smarts to embrace its own stupidity.

San Andreas changes all too quickly from satisfyingly foolish to dismayingly dumb to genuinely stupid.

The film suffers from a style that settles for pleasant or touching at the cost of spontaneous or impassioned. Too bad, because Ms. Garner is a genuinely pleasing presence.

If this adds up to a full-fledged feature film, I'm a monkey's uncle.

Can't lift the double curse of too little genuine action, as opposed to quixotic events, and too many fancy words.