Doesn't progress or deepen, it just gets weirder, and to no good end.

This movie is a predictable, gruesome piece of business.

For the most part, the film's a bewildering disappointment.

Occasionally amusing, technically lovely but ultimately dated.

Relentlessly beautiful and wholly annoying.

Even by Disney's formulaic standards -- is about as cut and dried as the phone book.

As it stands, this movie seems to have conflicting desires: to endear itself to the audience and then repel it.

A vulgar attempt to revamp the undead genre by introducing computer-generated splatter and a casketful of themes from genetic tinkering to conspiracy theories.

Needless to say, in the age of inferior remakes, this would-be homage -- a sort of Wim Wenders Lite -- is a mawkish debasement of its source material.

Martin Scorsese's obsession with a dubious mystique of masculinity turns Raging Bull into a ponderous work of metaphysical cinematic bull.

Roll past this casino.

Never manages to achieve the balance between authenticity and eccentricity.

As Primer progresses, it just gets murkier and the experience of it more drudgelike.

Hanks is great; the movie isn't.

About as persuasively ethnic as an episode of "Friends."

It's creepy, all right. It's just that HOW it goes about creeping you out is sometimes just plain cheesy.

On the whole, it feels like a cross between a PBS special hosted by a series of low-rent Deepak Chopras and an infomercial for self-help audio tapes.

Unrelentingly grim, unremittingly gross and unforgivably unattractive, 28 Days Later is an orgy of troubling images and bestial sound effects.

A disappointingly dull thud of a fantasy.

It would be one thing if Christmas With the Kranks were a satire on the assaultive, bullying nature of contemporary Christmas celebration in this country, but it's not. It's an ugly glorification of it.

Audiences who have avoided the multiplex these last few years because of the garbage peddled there are the only ones for whom this overly familiar "Walk" will be memorable.

Traffics in nearly every trite cliche of the "colorful" South one can think of, from its pseudo-Gothic aesthetic to its overripe dialogue.

It grinds on and on without mercy. You're in the cross hairs. There is no escape. Where is that Secret Service when you need it?

If your kids are too young to sit unsupervised, get together with other parents and pay an older sibling or sitter to go.

Like every other second of more than 10,000 seconds in Alexander, it doesn't engage in the least.

While the younger Van Peebles certainly looks the part, Baadasssss! never feels like anything more than kids playing dress-up.

This vainglorious biopic about Bobby Darin is really about what the '60s pop singer and actor means to Kevin Spacey.

One singularly unbecoming character, who should, by rights, forever remain a "singleton."

The muddy, convoluted story revolves around the star's cool-guy poses and one-liners.

The movie drains Cole and Linda Porter of blood and fills them with embalming fluid.

Utterly shatters the illusion with a trite plot, banal dialogue, clunky sentimentality and, worst of all, a sort of narrative arbitrariness.

The movie is still a routine Hollywood high school morality play.

The first and possibly the last Will Ferrell star vehicle. It's a clumsy, tedious ride that wears out its welcome as it wears out the seat of your pants and the circulation in your lower limbs.

Very young children, it should be said, probably won't have any problem with the movie. It's bright and perky on the surface. But for anyone mature enough to pay closer attention, it's going to fall short of expectations.

Big, dull and empty -- nobody associated with this production appears to have thought hard about storytelling.

Comes across less as a fully realized work of storytelling than as a commercial for a corporation whose goal of entertainment has been replaced by that of making money.

The firefighting equivalent of an Army recruitment commercial.

The effect isn't just frenetic, unfunny and dull. It's kind of creepy.

Rated PG, which must stand for "particularly gullible," it's "Raiders of the Lost Ark" for people who slept through American history class.

If laughter is the best medicine, Patch Adams is but a sugary, fitfully amusing placebo.

Perhaps they should have called this "Bore-a, Bore-a, Bore-a."

Gets more operatically farcical (most of it unintentionally so) by the minute.

The notions of the good man's complicity through inertia and of innocence tarnished by association are ones that have been more powerfully explored before.

None of it appears to be well thought out, or thought through, and it's consequently never remotely believable.

Absolutely awesome in its relentless mediocrity.

There's something secondhand about everything here. Hoge (this is his debut) seems to be mimicking the tone and fabric of other, better indie movies.

A movie marred by a flaccid script, listless pacing, a plethora of cutesy-poo gags and Ray Romano.

Ghost suffers most from a distinct lack of anything, well, cinematic.

Michael Winterbottom's Code 46 commits a Code 1 violation: It's boring.

It's not well scripted enough or well acted enough to do much of anything, save make anyone watching really hate Brittany Murphy for being so annoying.

These dramatic shortfalls make us merely worried that two human beings are in danger, but not two compelling souls. There's your missing ingredient, the human X-factor.

Plot and narrative? Minimal. Confrontations? Endless. Surprises? None.

Unfortunately, MacLachlan's strong jaw line and his valiant attempt to act so very Cary aren't enough to save this film from stumbling over the many cliches in its part-screwball, part-melodrama plotline.

It tries unsuccessfully to make a wry gumshoe noir out of an overarching, cross-sectional political diagram.

Bland, workmanlike and instantly forgettable.

Everything is tearful confessions, angry interrogations and breakups. But there's nothing underneath.

So rancid is Brooks's fury that it's clouded his judgment, so that each of his main characters is a stereotype of the most broad-brush, malodorous nature.

Needs more than happy thoughts to get off the ground.

There's not enough story in it to fill a shoebox.

The story, which features an apparently lobotomized Guy Pearce as an opportunistic explorer and hunter who learns the errors of his ways, is deeply dull.

The movie is loud, dark, bumpy and not even a little fun. You emerge into daylight bruised and battered, suffering a case of movie abuse.

The cast is too good for the script and the script is too good for the director and the director is too good for the horny dog jokes.

The film degenerates into an overly simplistic satire -- with moon-worshiping, Guatemala-visiting, lesbian aborters on one side, and fetally obsessive, meat-eating, gun-toting Jesus worshipers on the other.

Recalls those corny Warner Bros. movies about Dead End Kids.

Obstreperous, male-bashing pain in the patoot.

Humorless, charmless and flat.

The film has no discipline, but that's okay because it has no suspense, either.

Annoying.

An overwrought gangster fable.

A more kid-friendly version of "Dumb and Dumber." And there's even a moral: "Yahoo for education," though the movie doesn't really put any muscle behind it.

If, at odd moments, The Rock is better than tolerable, it is usually because of its stars.

The movie is very loud. It is pointlessly loud, arbitrarily loud, assaultively loud.

Let's blame it on poor Robin Williams, who tries so desperately to be likable, whimsical, lovable, smart and funny all at once that he just wears you out. Blame it also on the behind-the-scenes engineers at Disney who think that effects are more important than story and character.

The nonsensical screenplay can barely stand-up to the hellzapoppin, Beelzebubbin effects mustered by first-time director Mark Dippe.

There's no question the movie's entertaining. But the blatantly schematic depictions of black and white, liberal and hawk, and other tiresome dichotomies turn A Time to Kill into the moral equivalent of a cockfight.

The script boasts more writers than the computerized menagerie's got megabytes, but they haven't come up with much variety or humor in what is essentially a string of catastrophes.

There's a sense of mystery in this purply palette and one of majesty in the landscapes, but the drama of the drawings is never really echoed by the skimpy and predictable story.

For all their sass, brass and bewitchery, the starring troika can't breathe life into these characters, much less transform them from women scorned into hellbent furies.

Still, well-intentioned sappiness is something we can deal with; the lack of any genuine dramatic conflict is a more damaging shortcoming.

Penn, who also wrote the script, burdens the story with so many self-indulgent side developments that he loses emotional drive and Freddy's desperate obsession gets lost in the shuffle.

As if aware that Congo is the least interesting adventure ever filmed, screenwriter John Patrick Shanley (who once wrote a funny movie called "Moonstruck") tries to inoculate the activities with humor.

Passionately anticipated and much ballyhooed, the film, alas, is little more than a foppish, fang de siecle costume drama. Its pulse barely registers.

It's an eroticism of nastiness -- triple-X fare for dirty old men in raincoats. If you resist this sleazy gorefest, you'll be right to feel proud of yourself.

A brightly wrapped, ketchup-drenched mush-burger, it slides down the Zeitgeist esophagus like a slippery McPelican. You pay, you swallow, you drive home. You're left with nothing except, possibly, heartburn.

Roos and director Herbert Ross pave the long and grinding road to self-fulfillment with miles and miles of counterfeit poignancy.

Writer Alan Sharp gets so caught up in the legend and the lush language that he doesn't seem to know he's written "Death Wish" in kilts.

This solo project by first-time producer/director Edward James Olmos makes itself out to be hard-hitting, social commentary. But it's too longwinded and cliched to deserve that description. [13 Mar 1992, p. N47]

Director Michael Winterbottom languidly unspools the story; nothing seems to lead to anything.

Another ultra-stylized movie-about-movies by the Cannes-winning Coen Brothers, Hudsucker is clever but cold, a heartless mechanical gizmo. The actors rattle around tinnily like shiny marbles inside its cavernous sets and hollow script.

So what exactly is the point? Does Jefferson's treatment of Sally Hemings establish his racism or his instinctive color-blindness? Unfortunately, the picture is so unfocused and tumbles so rapidly from one event to another that it's difficult to tell.

Stanley Kubrick's production of The Shining, a ponderous, lackluster distillation of Stephen King's best-selling novel, looms as the Big Letdown of the new film season. I can't recall a more elaborately ineffective scare movie. You might say that The Shining, opening today at area theaters, has no peers: Few directors achieve the treacherous luxury of spending five years (and $12 million-$15 million) on such a peerlessly wrongheaded finished product.

Here, Lyne indulges more in misdirection than in direction; he's a magician turning a sleazy trick. But even his technical skill breaks down. The picture is garbled and cliched.

Sans emotional depth or narrative drive, Lee's latest flick is little more than a profane litany punctuated by Oscar-caliber orgasms.

This preposterous stalker flick, in fact, has less to do with America's favorite pastime or Gil's psychosis than with Hollywood's own obsession with blood sport. And for all British director Tony Scott knows about baseball, the thing might as well have been set in a cabbage patch.

Hinton was still a Tulsa teen when she wrote the best seller (4 million copies in seven languages) in the mid-1960s. Her brain wasn't mucked up with adult equivocation, so she didn't get into those confusing gray zones. Great for her, but not for Coppola, who turns this long-awaited story into baffling mush.

Despite Stallone's bantamweight attempts to insert, like, character into the fifth Rocky, it's the same old fight with the same old round of regulars. It seems silly wasting money on actors when the same could be achieved with Muppets. Rocky has little to do except shuffle around and mutter "cute" Rocky t'ings.

My Blue Heaven puts you in a stupor comparable to the one that comes on after Thanksgiving turkey. Written by Nora Ephron, it makes you long for the awful "Heartburn."

A punky, futuristic effort by Jean-Pierre Jeunet and Marc Caro, it is a tasteless variation on "Sweeney Todd" set geographically near the border of Terry Gilliam's "Brazil."