Scriptwise, you'll be left thinking "if it only had a brain." Like last year's "Hardware," this British effort is simply too talky. Those who seek deeper meaning will enjoy the astrological and satanic explanations, even if they make no sense.

Rarely has an act of such cinematic cruelty as Tideland been perpetrated on filmgoers.

I will admit that this TV skit stretched out to a filament-thin 83 minutes is idiotic, but I mean that in a good way.

A poor man's "Lords of Dogtown," substituting hard-core motorcycle racing for extreme skateboarding and featuring a young cast of television-bred actors.

The story’s message may not be the most original one in the world — put down your device and make eye contact — but it’s fun to watch it unfold in a world that, while far from realistic, feels real enough.

Sometimes in horror movies, bad acting is effective, its very woodenness contributing to the sense of robotic horror. That ain't happening here. These guys are just bad actors.

Everything about it screams mid-20th century. Rather than refresh the cast with new actors, the producers would have done better to just digitally reanimate Patricia Neal and Gary Cooper, the stars of the 1949 adaptation of Rand's "The Fountainhead."

A classic like this deserves to be unearthed! After all, this picture is likely to command a pedestal of its own at the local video store. Just check for shelves marked either "Sharon Stone" or "Staff's Worst Picks of 1999."

The only thing this movie should lead you to is the nearest exit.

What follows is about as suspenseful as looking at your watch to see which minute will pop up next.

The film dutifully cleaves to the contours of a well-established and viscerally satisfying formula.

The title, of course, leads one to expect the long-awaited movie version of David Halberstam's The Best and the Brightest, but the actuality is closer to tattered but dopily diverting remnants from The Karate Kid, Road House and Rocky IV. [14 Nov 1989, p.E3]

D'Souza makes it all sound almost plausible, but only if you're predisposed to believe that Obama hates America. It's bashing, all right, but with a velvet-gloved fist.

The comic equivalent of microwaved leftover food -- and pretty stale at that.

It’s a lazy piece of work, even by the low standards of Hollywood horror movies.

Bland as a fortune cookie and as trite as the message inside.

It's a soap opera posing as moral outrage.

Fox's performance is a shadow of his "Future" self, and the rest of the cast -- everyone from teeny-boppers to wise guys to baffled adults -- are equally benumbed. You really can't blame them, what with a screenplay by Joseph Loeb III and Matthew Weisman that relies on "losing control of his bodily functions" for its biggest laugh. [24 Aug 1985, p.C6]

A moldy teenage tear-jerker.

Whatever the title of the next installment, this movie is certainly One best forgotten.

Just what we need least: a warm family comedy about child molestation.That's Georgia Rule, which combines battleship actresses of the "Steel Magnolias" variety, fall-down-go-boom comedy that was obsolete in the '30s, Lindsay Lohan's cleavage and intergenerational fondling just for kicks.

After all the bloated lines are delivered, and dozens of women are debased, and Bishop has attitudinized the story line into incomprehensibility, audience members will be asking themselves how they got on this Hell Ride and what they did to deserve it.

Uneven but occasionally funny.

There's no escaping the hackneyed plot or Mayfield's conventional hand. So don't go.

I watched Mona. I felt like drowning.

If this guy tripped over a print of "Citizen Kane," he not only wouldn't know what it was, he'd hit somebody over the head with it. [24 May 1986, p.C1]

The music is catchy and sounds sufficiently Elvis-like, and The Identical occupies a neglected niche as a family-friendly movie that isn’t geared just toward kids. But living up to a legend is an uphill battle, and the movie doesn’t ever reach those heights.

To that long list of third- and fourth-rate comedies we can now add Sorority Boys.

Grecian Formula and body corsets notwithstanding, Bronson looks like one of those sculpted potato heads and moves with appropriate grace. This is not the face of death; it's the face of old.

Flowers in the Attic is slow, stiff, stupid and senseless, a film utterly lacking in motivation, development and nuance, and further marred by embarrassingly flat acting and directing.

Perhaps their quest had a mythic significance in Richard Sale's original novel that has somehow eluded his screenplay in which it's impossible to believe that the movie heros are doing anything more than beating on a dead prop. [03 Jun 1977, p.B1]

Ninja III quickly falls off track.

Animated in form but completely listless in content.

Nielsen earns a few giggles with his big entrance and later on his even bigger belly, but he can't overcome the lousy material.

[A] strained, clunkily orchestrated and dismally retrograde film.

The lowest common denominator of smutty amusement [03 Aug 1983, p.B2]

While in theory this seems like an altogether valid notion, in practice it falls apart because Fred is such an obnoxious boil of a character. Instead of wanting to release him you want to deposit him in a Davey Tree Grinder. Painful death, that's what this trickster deserves.

Really two movies in one, and there's not enough breathing room for both of them.

It is horrible. Time curls up and dies while this Hilary Duff vehicle wheels its weary, conventional way along.

The problem is not the credulity-stretching script. Or even that much of the movie just isn't all that funny. The problem is that it thinks it's freakin' hilarious.

A fairly straightforward, if preachy, tale about environmentalism.

Here's the best thing about Stealing Harvard: A dog bites Green in the crotch for a really long time. Priceless.

A dud that squanders a decent cast and succeeds neither as the comedy nor the action film it purports to be.

Reprises all the tedium of slasher flicks.

A gruesome tale of obsessive love and mutilation, it's less a work of art, however, than a luridly stylish expression of female self-loathing...A prettied-up snuff movie.

A protracted and only sporadically imaginative menu of ways to be murdered.

Hatched by screenwriters watching "The Sixth Sense" on methamphetamines

After watching this movie, which stars Robert De Niro, Harvey Keitel, Kathy Bates and Gabriel Byrne, I was moved only to find my own bridge to leap from.

Cro-Magnon-dumb...Less funny than your own funeral.

Monday at 11:01 a.m. would probably work well as a half-hour television episode or a short story. As a feature film, unfortunately, it feels a bit like clock watching.

This suspense drama, which stars Sally Field, Kiefer Sutherland and Joe Mantegna, tries desperately to press your vigilante buttons. But its manipulative agenda is so transparent, you don't know whether to take exception or laugh it off.

Its main purpose -- and no, you are not experiencing ocular breakdown -- is spiritual.

This film is just a coarser, dumber, smuttier remake of the 1983 Eszterhas-penned "Flashdance," throbbing music, working-class Cinderella and all.

Most of the comedy, such as it is, consists of the uppity Chase acting "street" and the ghetto-fabulous Tiffany putting on moneyed airs. But, if you've seen the trailers, you already know that.

In terms of actual social conscience, the movie gets a demagogic, rabble-rousing F. It also gets a failed grade for honest writing.

Ed...is thrown together with such little concern for originality or its audience, it's appalling.

The director, J. Lee Thompson, was once a proficient craftsman. Not all that long ago he and Quinn were associated on the prestigious hit The Guns of Navarone. You can't help wondering what they, along with Mason and Neal, talked about between the takes of this howler. [29 Mar 1979, p.D15]

Not that much deep thinking went on here.

Although the film is little more than a slapstick showcase for the nosey-neighbor character Varney has played in TV commercials, it's not the slapped-together piece of work you might expect. The movie is fairly inoffensive, and younger kids may get a real boost out of its us-against-the-world spirit.

Unfortunately, all too many paying customers will remember being suckered into the Derek remake of "Tarzan," which shortchanges every feature susceptible moviegoers must assume they'll find: tongue-in-cheek romance, exotic high adventure and generous scrutiny of Bo in the buff. Denying people the forms of amusement, notably erotic amusement, that the publicity suggests, Derek exposes a truly dangerous ineptitude.

A particularly loathsome piece of cultural detritus, a trashy, crass piece of work that panders to the anxieties and desires of adolescents without a scintilla of sympathy or coherence.

With horrific wildfires scorching California, the timing of this firefighter comedy also seems off. It might inspire empathy, if only it were actually funny.

More sluggish than a funeral barge, cheaper than a sale at K mart, it's a nerd, it's a shame, it's Superman IV.

Leaden, laugh-free, lacking anything resembling a heart, mind or soul.

Watching Maximum Overdrive is like sitting alongside a 3-year-old as he skids his Tonka trucks across the living room floor and says "Whee!" except on a somewhat grander scale...It's hard to even imagine a movie so impeccably devoid of everything a movie ought to include. [29 July 1986, p.C2]

Just Police Academy all over again, without laughs.

Scriptwriter Kitty Chalmers really should have called it Replicant, since Cyborg borrows bits and pieces from so many genre films and since it has really no soul of its own.

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.

If there's one piece of wisdom to be culled from this botched project, it's this: No one gets Carter.

The projectors in the theater practically shut down with boredom.

Under the direction of "Die Harder's" Renny Harlin, the movie has a crackling pace and a glossy look. It's all the more pernicious for that, this slick glorification of hate and loathing that portrays women as sexually promiscuous and men as infantile, violent and feeble-minded. Here's one Ford that doesn't have a better idea.

Predictable, lazy and as overprocessed as Kate Hudson's hair, this thoroughly joyless movie also possesses a deep nasty streak, making it loathsome when it might have been merely annoying.

Why sit through a lesser imitation, when you could just rent "Heathers" and those other movies for a far more enjoyable time? Drop-dead bitchery? Been there, done that.

The air inside the pyramid isn’t the only thing that’s stale in this ludicrous yet mildly likable horror film.

If this sounds like "Tootsie" with a ball, well, it is. Screenwriter Bradley Allenstein should be hauled up in writer's court for his shameless cribbing of that far superior comedy. Someone call a foul.

Solarbabies is a hilariously bad movie that doesn't make much sense and isn't much good when it does. Director Alan Johnson has stolen most of his visual ideas from Ridley Scott ("Blade Runner") and George Miller ("The Road Warrior"), and he hasn't the slightest idea how to direct actors. That said, the movie has its campy pleasures.

See critic run. Oh, for the days of Smell-a-Vision.

Alas, the movie's producers could use a genie of their own. Surely, if granted three wishes, they could have produced a better film.

If the John Candy-Dan Aykroyd comedy The Great Outdoor had a few more laughs we might be tempted simply to write it off as mediocre and let it go at that. But this woodland farce is just coarse enough, and unfunny enough, to achieve true awfulness.

The kinetics aren't that good, the twaddle is off the charts and the characters seem written by monkeys on amphetamines with crayons.

The camera style is grotesquely overwrought, a relentless exercise in technique for technique's sake. It's all here, folks: fancy wipes, expressionistic angles, quick-cut close-ups, stylized backlighting, camera moving in endless illogic. It's as if a 15-minute history of film technique had been compiled by a psychotic. [19 Mar 1986, p.B9]

Not just a bad thriller but also a thing of pain.

Definitely stuck in the fourth grade.

It’s hard to know which of the film’s many flaws to cite first, so here’s one thing it does fairly well: scare the bejesus out of you. That’s assuming you have read nothing about the subject of vaccines and autism, and are of a generally lax and incurious mind when it comes to the rigors of scientific inquiry.

With his teddy bear appeal, it's not surprising that there was more magnetism between Selleck and the Baby in "Three Men" than there is between Selleck and grown-up babe Paulina Porizkova (though the two femmes fatales are similarly gifted). And it doesn't help that this high-paid clotheshorse is a chilly beauty whose presence is as spare as her figure. It's hard for Selleck to look deeply into those far-focused mannequin eyes.

The results are a wheezy, tired attempt to milk more laughs out of the '60s, by doing exactly what "Austin Powers" did.

Happy Birthday to Me is a cheesy tease from the outset. The opening sequence entraps the first victim, then allows her to escape, then entraps her again and allows her to escape again. By the time the filmmakers get around to making a murder scene stick, you're already fed up with their methodology and wondering why the movie wasn't called something like "The Coed With Nine Lives." [15 May 1981, p.F4]

A cross between an after-school special and MTV video, melding threadbare plot with colorful visuals and delivering a message, which is, basically, Vanilla Ice is cool, you know?

Intriguingly, Jinn makes a plea for understanding and cooperation between Muslims, Jews and Christians. Disappointingly, writer-director Ajmal Zaheer Ahmad does all too good a job burying that message within a blustering supernatural thriller.

The Wizard is not only tacky and moribund, but it teaches gambling and bad sportsmanship.

It's a comedy to be laughed at rather than with, largely because the producers decided to dub Arnold's Teutonic voice with that of another actor, one who sounds like he's giving bus departure announcements at the Port Authority Terminal. [30 Jan 1992, p.C7]

The movie isn't a disaster, and if you responded to the first one, its memory may carry you over the roughness, the excessive, ugly violence and lack of conviction here. Hill and his stars are merely going through the motions, but the motions are immensely familiar. If you've been there before, then you've been there.

The problem, or problems, stem from the lazy, unfunny script; the weak computer-generated animals (never have God's creatures looked less lifelike while dancing to Chic's "Le Freak"); and the squandering of so much talent.

It's not Deuce's satisfied clientele, but the audience, that gets the shaft.

The movie manages to be simultaneously superficial and heartbreaking. That’s no easy feat — nor is it a laudable one.

The unapologetic laziness and ineptitude of Jack's impersonation, which is played for cheap laughs, is just as lazy as Sandler's performance as the real Jill. You don't buy it for a minute.

Coasts on comic fumes, relying on colloquialisms, foreign accents, racial stereotypes, lemon sharks, Speedos and inopportune erections to supply the funny. Any one of these things might work in a comedy that was less contrived.

Hopeless rip-off of Hitchcock's "The Birds."