Not only dense, dark and deeply introspective, it's also as remote as it's chilly.

Rust, Alec Baldwin and Joel Souza’s slow-moving, sepia-toned homage to the American western, is the kind of respectable if unremarkable genre exercise that would have come and gone without much notice were it not for the circumstances of its making.

Judgment Night is regrettably familiar fare.

You can expect to fall about, snort and hoot, at times hard enough to hurt inner body parts that only doctors can identify.

This is a movie that knows its audience and realizes it doesn't need much of a story to hit that audience, literally, where it lives.

Ought to have been called "The Sap Also Rises."

A pooped, poorly executed buddy-cop comedy with more cliches than expletives.

An endless, virtually laugh-free pastiche of Aaron Sorkin by way of Aaron Spelling, Chasing Liberty features Mandy Moore trying so strenuously to be the next America's Sweetheart that she almost pops a vein.

A brain and a heart, two things that, along with a good story, believable characters and anything resembling style or flair, Pumpkin is fatally missing.

A largely laugh-free exercise in cliche.

This lethargic romantic drama forces chemistry where there is none and, worse, sells out its aspirationally cool, intelligent female protagonist with an endgame that she — and the luminous Dern — hardly deserves.

Ultimately the movie feels like an empty exercise. Sure, it’s a cautionary tale about the pitfalls of fame. But when the one figure most worthy of our sympathy is nothing more than a beautiful blonde robot, what’s the point?

Another gate-crasher at the let's-do-a-mediocre-update-of-Shakespeare party.

Mad City is for those who haven't seen enough movies about hostage situations. It's also for those who haven't seen enough ponderous movies about media exploitation, or Dustin Hoffman's ongoing reliance on muttery method acting.

What's wrong with The 'Burbs? It's not funny. Why is it not funny? It's just not. Not remotely, momentarily, intermittently or otherwise funny.

While perfectly presentable and agreeable, especially if you are in an undemanding frame of mind, Krull remains a thin, dogged exercise in extravagant adventure. [03 Aug 1983, p.B1]

The whole thing is played for laughs that almost never come. To be sure, the film has its moments, but they’re few and far between.

Both director and co-writer of Rascals redux, Spheeris coaxes artless performances from the picture's engaging ensemble of half-pint players.

Does Lurie have an ax to grind? And how. Yet if, to some ears, its high-pitched whine nearly drowns out the underlying story at times, why did so many in that preview audience seem deaf to it? Maybe that's Lurie's real point: A culture that feeds on violence -- in real life and on film -- has also inured us to it.

The performances are fantastic across the board, with Costner acting in his trademark low-key naturalistic style and Spencer as the picture of no-nonsense maternal love. But their efforts can’t make up for overly simplified characters, not to mention melodramatic exchanges that sound exactly like written dialogue.

The movie is humble as child's play, graced with the effortless comedy of Hanks and Ryan. They're as fresh and warm as summer peaches, but never sappy, thanks to the off-kilter honesty of Shanley's writing.

Though shot in four weeks on a low budget, Stephen King's Children of the Corn, while not on a par with "Carrie," sure beats "Christine," "Cujo" and "Dead Zone." It's terse, tense and the sound is effective as auditory terror.

There's an adult mentality throughout the film, and not a nice one. It gets all the smirking fun it can, then tacks on some quick sermonizing at the end. One minute sex is like a camp food-fight -- against the rules but everybody has a good time-- and the next it's the grown-up activity that leads directly to that other favorite grown-up activity -- depression. The accompanying adult had better be prepared to explain not sex, but "Do as we say, don't do as we show."

The character is again a lackluster after-thought, exploited by a new Universal assembly line that specializes in the serials manufactured for weekly television consumption.

A Night in Old Mexico succeeds when it comes to suspense, and the ever-evolving plot will keep viewers guessing. But the movie doesn’t have the same kind of emotional depth that Duvall and Wittliff managed to pull off decades ago. Worse, the dialogue often sounds stilted.

Mark Childress, who wrote the screenplay based upon his book of the same name, would have been better off leaving this Southern Gothic between two covers.

Unfortunately, apart from Downey's convincing contribution, the movie feels too contrived, stagy and inorganic to draw any pleasure.

About as funny as malaria.