Lacks the spirit of the previous two, and makes all those jokes about hos and even more unmentionable subjects seem like mere splashing around in the muck.

Everyone in the film is mean-spirited, manipulative and repulsive, and I'm only talking about the women! The men are much worse, particularly Dan Aykroyd.

It's not Christmas that's being stolen here. It's the spirit of Dr. Seuss.

A pocket of infection on the skin of the American body cultural.

They took the most famous tale in the world and broke it.

This David Spade comedy breaks an ankle, ruptures several knee ligaments and hits the dirt harder than a felled linebacker. Best thing you can do for this movie? Leave it writhing in the throes of forced humor.

David Gale deserves the chair for its brutal assault on subtlety.

In the end the movie goes nowhere a hundred movies haven't already been and tells us nothing we don't already know. It does so with so much violent energy, however, it's like four brutal years at film school crammed into an hour and a half.

What a jolly comedy theme: incest.

A feel-good movie only in the sense that it wants to reassure today's white people about our own enlightenment and how far we've come in the evolution of our attitudes about race.

There's nothing inspiring about Yu-Gi-Oh! The Movie, unless you count the way it compels kids to continue to support the "Yu-Gi-Oh" franchise.

If you think it's worth it to sit there for 97 minutes for three or possibly four laughs, then you are beyond help.

So bad that I predict there will be drinking games set around viewing it someday.

A limp and exceedingly uninvolving melodrama.

It goes so far -- way too far -- as having a known actor play Grant.

At least it cares enough to steal from the very best. Unfortunately, that's about all it cares about.

About halfway through you'll get an incredible hunger to see a movie.

A cynical, sexist and shallow work from cinema's premier misanthrope, Robert Altman, who here shows neither compassion for -- nor insight into -- the human condition.

At no point should anyone mistake this for an actual movie. This is an extended beach video that will leave no one swept away.

If ever there was a case for quitting while you're behind, this "Blade" is it -- ready to be buried in a vat of garlic.

Without a doubt, mainstream moviegoers will be revolted by the nastiness of it all.

Ford's earthy Everyman and Pitt's vengeful youth are probably more interesting than they have any right to be inside these tired macho roles. Of course, Rory and Tom could be bursting with blarney and the movie still wouldn't gather any momentum.

In his screen version, Schumacher does a flamboyant job of staging the book without showing the slightest interest in what it's about. Granted, Grisham's original is no masterpiece; it's beach reading, but it deserves credit for addressing its subject with some conviction and integrity.

The scenario (written by Carl Binder, Susannah Grant and Philip Lazebnik) is disappointingly wan and obsequious.

In Hollywood, imitation is the most profitable form of flattery. That is the only plausible explanation for 101 Dalmatians, Walt Disney's disappointing live-action remake of its own 1961 classic.

After the disastrous "Mixed Nuts," her last holiday season folly, Ephron appears to have hunkered down for a career of pandering mediocrity.

In Adrian Lyne's latest monstrosity, love takes on money -- and loses. Not necessarily in the story, of course. This is a Hollywood movie. I'm talking between the lines.

In short, Carrey's got nothing to bounce all that energy off of, not even a solid story line.

Writer-director Nicole Holofcener's earnest first feature is a low-budget comedy drawn from the pages of her own dear diary. Most women have sense enough to burn theirs.

Director McGrath retains the novel's highlights, but he slices everything to ribbons.

Arthur Hiller, who last directed the sour "The Babe" -- not the one about that sweet pig -- finds even less to work with in TV veteran Don Rhymer's stupid screenplay.

The problem with this movie is the problem with most Renny Harlin movies: There's an excessive amount of excess -- a mind-numbing plurality of firearm battles, vehicular explosions and brutally frank sexual talk.

With its callow cast and playful tone, there is nothing dangerous about Forman's variation on the novelist's schemes.

Jefferson in Paris is nevertheless a disaster, intellectually infuriating and thoughtlessly racist.

Wyatt Earp, a bio-pic that lasts more than three hours and moves with the urgency of a grazing buffalo, lacks everything from a coherent dramatic structure to a clearly articulated point of view.

Girl 6 is such a mundane, flat comedy.

Martin's comic charisma, which kept the first movie alive, is buried under a banal avalanche of trite comic situations. The flesh is willing but the script is weak.

Murphy has said that he wanted the picture to work both as a comedy and a horror movie, but he has succeeded at neither. Director Craven manages to wedge in some of his signature bits, but can't keep the comic elements in balance with the horror, and as a result there's no tension or dramatic pull.

Far and Away, the new feel-good epic from director Ron Howard, isn't a movie, it's a cartoon.

Lethal Weapon 3 is pretty much the same as "Lethal Weapon 2," which was pretty much the same as "Lethal Weapon."

Puffed up with Mamet's brawny bromides and DeVito's self-indulgent direction, this bio-pic would be an altogether empty load were it not for Nicholson, all snake eyes and snarls as the Teamsters boss.

Cruise is walking in the footsteps of Troy Donahue and John Travolta here. He does what comes easy. He bumps and grinds and grins till his lips ache. It's a performance with all the integrity of wax fruit. And Cocktail is mud in your eye.

Spaceballs is actually a kind of comic black hole. All in all, the movie is about as funny as having coffee spilled in your lap. Except that there's no burn -- just that slightly embarrassing, uncomfortable, all-wet feeling.

Irony is the movie's escape hatch. It allows the filmmakers to stage maudlin bits and, at the same time, signal the audience that they're too cool to actually believe in them. Their cool is all-purpose, and it carries with it a note of genuine nastiness. They manipulate us into a sentimental response, then kick us in the teeth for buying it.

As you might expect, the calculations here are on a much less sophisticated level. And by less sophisticated, I mean like counting on fingers.

It's not that Wayans lacks wit, it's that he's stomped it to death. A sweet-natured performance -- and the fact that he and Tom Cruise probably have the same orthodontist -- doesn't quite make up for the muddle. Don't be a sucka.

It doesn't seem like overstating things to say that Eros becomes steadily worse as it goes along.

Forsyth's script feels uncomfortably improvised, so almost all of the performances are hesitant and unconvincing. [06 May 1994]

Perhaps Steven Soderbergh's metamorphosis from clever Cajun auteur ("sex, lies, and videotape") to heavy-duty Eastern European angst-master has been altogether too successful. Like authentic Soviet Bloc cinema, Kafka makes its audience suffer along with its heroes.

Every composite shot in Superman III appears to be a careless affront to the willing suspension of disbelief. The flying sequences are a letdown, the cataclysms are a cheat, and even the settings are often exposed as a chintzy hoot. [17 June 1983, p.C1]

Superman IV, except for a glitzy new villain named Nuclear Man, is one of the cheesiest movies ever made. It's so grainy and grossly envisioned, it seems filmed on pulp. Superman's crystalline Arctic palace looks as if it's made of no-deposit-no-return soda bottles, and his suit of primary colors has ring around the collar.

"Star Trek V" is a shambles, a space plodessy, a snoozola of astronomic proportions. The story is uneventful, the effects warmed over from "Star Wars."

Nothing if not monumentally obsessed, Mann seems to be volunteering himself as the American film industry's answer to the cinema of ultraportentous imagery and crackpot visionary affectation. One imagines him entering the unofficial competition trailing swirls of smoke or ground fog and radiating backlit shafts of light, like half the characters in his movie. [17 Dec 1983, p.B3]

When the names of the players flash on the screen in Friday the 13th, it is not so much a list of the cast as a body count. Practically everyone who spends more than five minutes on camera dies horribly -- in close-up. Considering the quality of the acting, most of them deserve no better. [13 May 1980, p.B3]

Shabbily photographed and raggedly assembled. Caddyshack is hanging evidence that Ramis wasn't prepared for the assignment or clever enough to fake it...Ramis proves unable to sustain a single frayed thread of plot continuity, and none of the prominent cast members -- Chevy Chase, Murray, Rodney Dangerfield and Ted Knight -- enjoys opportunities decisive enough or direction competent enough to generate a little comic momentum and help prevent the gratuitous material from falling in a stinky, dismembered heap.

Unfortunately, the VR special effects are few and far between in a film short on plot and long on derivation.

Even before it begins laying waste to the reputations of cast members, Firestarter is promptly exposed as a derivative embarrassment of a conception. What could be better calculated to illustrate King's recent decline than a "new" thriller whose devices have been poorly cribbed and patched together from "Carrie" and "The Fury"? As a matter of fact, "Charlie's Fiery Fury" would be a catchier bad title than Firestarter.

Graveyard Shift is the latest failed attempt to visualize what King imagines so well. The acting and directing are substandard. Even the hackneyed plot is barely turned over.

A bewildering, boring assembly of rock-video-surreal nightmare sequences with more repetitive episodes than Groundhog Day.

Jaws 3-D, in which the Amity horror swims south to Florida, looks a lot like a Poligrip commercial, what with its extreme close-ups of the Great White's artificial chompers. [29 July 1983, p.17]

Oink. Oink. Porky's II: The Next Day is just swill. But the millions who pigged out on "Porky's" will go hog-wild for No. 2: It's packed with the same old sub-teen smut and subliterate sanctimony. Sex is all talk and dropped britches and one so-so hootchy-kootchy queen's flabby fling. At the same time, it's sexist and sexless, acted by hams and written by bores. [1 July 1983, p.21]

The director, Joseph Sargent, doesn't bring out any of the possibilities in the material -- not even the scary ones. And Michael Caine is wasted, though not completely. He manages to provide at least a little suspense, even if it's the extracurricular sort, by raising the question: Will an Oscar winner be allowed to become fish food?

The daffy fires that often lit their four previous films are in danger of extinction. Or,to put it in terms they and their fans surely will understand, it's down to seeds and stems. [13 May 1983, p.B4]

After the film's first few minutes I watched, neither entertained nor illuminated, with something close to total indifference... (Greenaway's) extravagances and attacks on taste seem less like the bravery of the courageous artist than the empty desperation of a charlatan.

The film only succeeds in establishing a remarkable new low in remakes.

Dull and unimaginative, Chetwynd treats his characters with such reverence that they might as well be saints in striped prison pajamas, martyred for the sake of some robotic patriotism. At least, his villains stand out from the host of underdeveloped heroes. Boob journalists, a doofus peacenik actress and a Cuban goon -- Michael Russo, who seems to think he's playing a pimp on "Miami Vice" -- add the unintentional comic relief.

Better yet, just throw the whole thing in front of a subway and hope it gets dragged a couple of miles.

It's dismally bad, but not remotely connected to reality, so it can't be that dangerous. In short, it won't cause blindness or hairy palms. And if the soundtrack gets a proper amount of recognition, it shouldn't damage anybody's hearing, either.

Dismal.

David Lynch's disastrous film adaptation of Fank Herbert's science-fiction classic turns epic to myopic. [14 Dec 1984, p.31]

Except for pedophiles, it's hard to imagine who'll be drawn to this irresponsible Little Bo Peep show.

Steve Barron, who directed "Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles," "Electric Dreams" and a mess of music videos, understandably can't seem to whip up any enthusiasm for the project. Nor is he able to inspire this large, listless cast of zombies.

Since I had been fortunate enough to miss or avoid the earlier installments, "The Love Bug" and "Herbie Rides Again," the latest entry in the Disney studio's cycle of farces about the exploits of a sentient, racy Volkswagen, Herbie Goes to Monte Carlo, came as a more stupefying shock than it probably should have. As excruciating kiddie vehicles go, a Herbie is certainly more diverting than a Benji, but comparison at this level smack of sheer desperation. [27 July 1977, p.B7]

In Police Academy 6: City Under Siege, the humor (kind word, that one) vacillates between the soporific and the moronic.

Basically "Beaches" without Hershey and the salt water. This insipid suck-face-athon provokes the gag reflex.

Pitiful.

An utterly pointless remake of Sam Peckinpah's hair-raising road movie. Updated and dumbed down, this anemic variation on the bloodier 1972 original is primarily an opportunity for those vast legions of Baldwin-Basinger voyeurs. You know who you are.

A lamebrained American remake of the classic, bitter French farce "Les Comperes," Fathers' Day offers sporadic laughs of the lowest kind -- the old outhouse-bites-man thing -- but some conspicuous idiocy as well.

Here is a Neil Simon movie with all of his banality, but none of his humor -- a sort of "The Nod Couple." [30 March 1985, p.G3]

Technically the movie is flawless. One scene in Central Park, when Pacino confronts the murder suspect on a deserted rain-slicked path, is haunting and beautfully photographed. But that's hardly a reason to sit through the rest of this wretched film. [22 Feb 1980, p.19]

Parker's fatal misjudgment is failing to recognize that a solemnly expressionistic movie presentation of themes from "The Wall" tends to magnify its inherent lack of dramatic substance.

Even this garbage-can world deserves a better grade of junk. [7 Aug 1980, p.B4]