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.