Although it has moments of charm and poignancy -- this is one of Glenn Close's best hours -- the scheme and scope of the movie are just too darned obvious.

The finished film remains a mess of tangled, turgid continuity and florid, mock-operatic style -- at best a collection of production numbers and set pieces waiting in rain for a story capable of accumulating suspense and meaning.

Tired conventions, hoary themes and obvious conclusions.

Some of it is funny in a Zucker brothers slapstick way. And as the Man's geeky lieutenant, Chris Kattan has some amusingly kooky business. But there's not enough to sustain the comedy. Ultimately, the movie's short running time becomes its finest quality.

The humor works beautifully until Marshall decides to beat the comedy over the head and drum us, once again, with this relentless message: "Mentally challenged people in love say the darndest things!"

The movie's gentle and friendly, but nowhere close to exciting. It would be hard to believe that anyone involved with this production --considers Snow Dogs anything more than phoned-in business as usual.

Another film about . . . a cretinous, grating loser.

A magical child movie in which the child is magical, yes, but the movie is not.

When the danger subsides and the sparkless romance returns to the foreground, the vehicle comes sputtering back to earth with a thud, weighed down by the inertia of its leaden leading lady.

Desperado also has some entertaining twists, some sexy goings-on, but on the whole, watching the film is about as much fun as sitting on a cactus.

Is it scintillating, nutty, madly inspired or ecstatically preposterous? Ginsberg himself is all these things, but this movie is not. (Review of Original Release)

It's the kind of undigested vision that might have come from the kids themselves. [15 Feb 1985, p.B1]

It couldn't be any less revolutionary in style. It is straighter than a guitar string.

Just like "Bad Boys," only louder, longer and the stars get paid more.

The story's tired, as are the main characters.

Feels like "Alien" as directed by Jim Henson. And the suspense is restricted to mundane slasher-movie tactics, including the frequent use of a mobile camera (call it the ’condacam) that’s supposed to represent the snake’s point of view.

Twister not only blows, it sucks, too.

It could hardly be called rip-roaring. I should report that it drives about a quarter of the audience out of the theater before it is half over. That's because it's slower than molasses in Siberia.

Too lightweight and streamlined to be memorable.

Feels more like an overblown TV special than a grand theatrical release.

There's nothing to stir us, no scene to savor for life -- such as the father-son battle between Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader in "The Empire Strikes Back." Back then, we were watching a classic, still the best film in the series. This time, we're watching just another "Star Wars" flick.

Suffers from all the excesses of the genre: gunfights that go on and on and on, a plot that is almost incomprehensible.

Heckerling lacks the intuition to let things flow. The actors seem rushed and the scenes incomplete. For instance, Stacy and her brother Brad (Reinhold) almost build a poignant scene outside the abortion clinic. Just when they're about to show us their stuff, poof, it's off for a car crash or a football game. [13 Aug 1982]

Despite an appealing, even ingenious premise, "Scorpion" is another quippy but uninspired comedy.

Will this film do Kerry any good, or the Swifties any harm? My bet is: Not a bit, one way or the other.

[McGowan's] serene psychopathology is the movie's most consistent pleasure, and to see her is to both love and fear her.

As filmmaking, it's a bravura performance, but as a film, it falls flat.

Speaking of jail, "Shawshank"-the-movie seems to last about half a life sentence. The story, chiefly about the 20-year friendship between Freeman and Robbins, becomes incarcerated in its own labyrinthine sentimentality.

The plot contrivances are telegraphed too loudly; the emotional manipulation too obvious.

Kind of like watching a John Waters film on fast forward with all the good parts cut out. It's empty of charm and meaning, but it certainly kills time, for those who wish it dead.

It's a warm bath experience, soap-sudsed with sentimentality, improbability and other storytelling misdemeanors.

Why ... does it feel so lifeless?

Mac manages to find some moments of comedy within a movie that often feels like it's going into extra innings

It is one of those soap bubbles of a film, fleeting, ephemeral, seemingly there when it is not. As you leave the theater, it diminishes with each step, collapsing into shards of imagery and sensations of movement. It's the film that never was.

Despite its hopeful title and a warm inland location, this dawdling family dramedy proves as sodden as a bed-wetter's mattress.

11 minutes longer than the original, and 11 minutes worse. [2000 re-release]

A well-intentioned, reverential but unenlightening portrait. It pays tribute to the artist. Yet it doesn't scrutinize him.

Let's face it, some people find butt and bathroom comedy funny. And some don't.

Its splendor cannot be denied, but then again neither can the emptiness of this Henry James adaptation.

The Empire strikes out.

Despite a glut of luridness, the story line feels essentially flat, as Keitel stumbles through New York in an immoral, unchanging haze. It is only the strength of Keitel's performance that gives his personality human dimension.

Something far more consequential looms in the wings. And that renders The Hunting of the President the feel of a sideshow

The performances are so monotonic that you understand depicting authentic humanity is not the writer-director's goal: Each character has been reduced to a single unpleasant primal trait from which deviation is not permitted.

It's just respectable trash, and a dress rehearsal for better things ahead.

Forgettable the instant it strafes your retinas.

Baldly manipulative, emotionally counterfeit melodrama.

The movie lacks luster, and that quintessentially adolescent passion that fueled "Fast Times at Ridgemont High." There's no punch to the pacing, and the players, though pleasant, are uninspired by Howard Deutch, who is directing his first feature film after doing videos, including one from Ringwald's second movie, "Sixteen Candles." The happy ending, changed to suit the tastes of preview audiences, steals the movie's potential pathos, and turns teen trauma into so much gooey, rose-colored mush. [28 Feb 1986, p.11]

For a while, the film is screamingly funny, but the further it goes, the more muddled the narrative becomes.

Comes across more like an above-average TV movie you might see on the Lifetime channel.

A blithely unfunny, low-budget comedy from director Barry Levinson.

Some routines are funny, it must be said. But more often than not, you'll be groaning with painful recognition rather than actually laughing.

If any element takes us through the movie, it's him (Depp).

The worst mistake is the screenplay, which not only cuts everything into superficial pieces but fails to make authentic moments of anything. In the end, White Oleander isn't an adaptation of a novel. It's a flashy, star-splashed reduction.

Tea With Mussolini is really about the first women in the Italian director's life. It's drawn from a single chapter of his book but suffers from a lack of focus. None of these great ladies is willing to give up center stage; nor, for that matter, are the grande dames who bring them so vividly to life.

In some ways, Contact is just like the universe: big, star-bright and seemingly endless. Not to mention that it begins with a big bang, gradually falls into a lull and finally succumbs to entropy.

Sparse and implausible screenplay.

Keeps you hanging on until the very last moment, not because it's scary, but because you can't believe that's all there is to it.

How can you celebrate a movie in which Zellweger doesn't soar but simply avoids disaster?

Enough to make any thinking person want to shoot a hole in the screen.

Suffers from what might be called colonitis. It comprises too many equal parts, and they tangle each other up. Everything is important, which comes to mean that nothing is important.

Silly? Contrived? Vapid? You bet. Put more simply, "The Prince & Me" is . . . cute.

Lee's understated performance is a small treat.

In the end, Stage Beauty is in over its mediocre head.

Has its sinfully funny moments. Funny, that is, if you appreciate a certain cynical clamminess -- or Buck Henry seediness -- to your comedy.

Although the newly paunchy Stallone is credible as a weak, conflicted small-time sheriff, this suburban "Serpico" is a noble, passionless charade.

They succeed in presenting a compelling series of dots, to use the current parlance, but they don't succeed in connecting them.

Certainly handsome, well made and for most of its running time gripping, the film ultimately turns into a $60-odd-million piffle.

The first of Spielberg's films to make us feel heavy in our seats, the first to leave us sitting, passive and uninvolved, on the outside. Watching it, you feel that nearly anyone could have directed it.

Amid the violence, the one-liners ring out. Nobody speaks for real. It's as if they all know they're in a movie.

At what point in the movie is it too late to ask for your money back?

The occasional big moments are stunning, and kids from the ages of, say, 6 years to 6 years and 3 days will love it. Anyone younger will be scared; anyone older, bored.

A mite sluggish.

Though 45 minutes longer than the original release, still feels thinner, less complex, more mythic and far less compelling.

The producers of this mediocre movie ...had a story line rife with potentially good material and instead chose to let bathroom humor, lewd scenarios and gratuitous nudity color their European landscape.

A dumb guy comedy about dumb guys by dumb guys and for dumb guys.

If Eastwood had any emotional depth as an actor, the character's anguish might come through.

You are allowed to come up with a monster we haven't seen before.

One wishes the same wit and energy had gone into the story. That's Shrek 2 in a nutshell -- very pretty to look at, very hard to care for.

Despite all the life-threatening situations, warrior deaths and heroic feats, it's hard to get behind characters who feel like lazy archetypes.

Occasionally charming but ultimately forgettable bit of fox-trot fluff.

For all the filmmakers' efforts, this project is something of an artistic albatross. It's a conundrum that doesn't get answered until a sort of help-the-audience Cliffs Notes final scene, in which we learn Everything. But by then, more than a few of us may be wondering, was it all really worth the trouble?

Isn't appropriate for any innocent child -- assuming such lovely creatures still exist. But boys and girls who enjoy surprise attacks in their entertainment (of the aforementioned toilet variety) are going to have a blast. Sad but true.

All foreplay and no climax.

I can only bestow this adaptation of Joanne Harris's bestselling novel with such faint praise as "pleasant" and "mildly disarming."

Despite a subject of immense potential -- the movie's surprisingly uninvolving.

The movie is going to be fine for PG-ready audiences, assuming they don't have a problem with extremely predictable story turns.

I remained strangely dry-eyed up to the final shot.

A tolerably silly lark, decorated with lots of tasteful (and exclusively female) nudity. Yet as Christophe's role expands -- and the soundtrack's classical flourishes become more strident -- the film's plausibility plummets.