The acting is sincere and the camera work is pretty, but this art-movie variation on "The Sixth Sense" doesn't have enough energy to fulfill the high promise of Berliner's previous picture, the enchanting "Ma vie en rose."

The message of the film is that life isn't neat and predictable like a well-arranged business trip; yet everything in the picture is so calculated that there's no life to it. [23 Dec 1988, A& L, p.19]

In all, it's “Diner,'' female style. Directed by Donald Petrie from a blatantly manipulative screenplay that took four people to cook up. [24 Oct 1988]

The Abyss' isn't abysmal, but it's a replay of hits we've already seen - a recycled "close encounters of the wet kind'' with far too few ideas of its own. [18 Aug 1989, Arts, p.10]

Verhoeven's lurid thriller has moments of welcome self-parody, but most of the action manages to be sensationalistic, homophobic, and tedious at the same time. [20 Mar 1992, Arts, p.12]

John Hughes pours his usual slickness and sentimentality all over everything. [27 Feb 1987]

As before, the movie is more impressive for its finely detailed vision of Los Angeles as a futuristic slum than for its story, acting, or message. It's all downhill after the first few eye-dazzling minutes. [2 Oct 1992]

The main performances are generally weak, although the smaller ones are sometimes brilliant, and the yarn never builds much momentum as it leapfrogs from one subplot to another. [28 Dec 1990, Arts, p.14]

Judged by the standards of ordinary filmmaking, it's as strange, suggestive, and surreal as other Lynch pictures have been. Judged by the standards of Lynch's own career, however, it's amazingly stale and second-hand… [and] contains not a single moment of genuinely felt emotion. [1 Sept 1992]

A second-rate adaptation of the second-rate Choderlos de Laclos novel: two hours of pretty people sitting in pretty rooms and talking about sex. [23 Dec 1988, A& L, p.19]

The director, Taylor Hackford, doesn't have the cinematic savvy to sustain so many tensions in a meaningful way; and the screenplay strays far over the line between incisive political comment and heavy-handed Red-baiting.

Blending animation and live action, this ferocious fantasy is hopelessly vulgar in ways never dreamed of by "Who Framed Roger Rabbit."

While the production is attractive in a calendar-photo sort of way, there's not a speck of genuine feeling in its glossy images.

The stagebound setting gets boring; the action doesn't build a steady momentum; and the characters do far too much hanging around until the camera's ready to point at them again.

The combination of caveman dialogue, overcooked action, and anything-for-an-effect performances is maddeningly crude even by cop-movie standards. [22 May 1987, p.23]

Tries to be daring and iconoclastic but winds up seeming as spoiled and childish as its main characters.

Suffers from a lack of chemistry.

Cumming's antic acting is the only asset of this boisterous comedy.

Plenty of mad moviegoers will put this in their diaries as one of the worst pictures in ages.

The overlong comedy has few laughs and flirts far too much with racist, homophobic humor. A waste of a fine cast.

Sadly it's been botched. Guess Who serves up such flat dialogue and stilted situations that it's hard to sit through.

House of D, arrives in theaters this week, after debuting at the Tribeca Film Festival last year. I'm sorry to report it's the opposite of impressive.

What's the point of the picture, except to allow Kutcher fans occasional peeks at acting talent he usually keeps hidden?

Amiably bland actors can be fun to watch, as Tom Hanks has proved. Freeman is no Hanks, though, and The Hitchhiker's Guide won't boost anyone's career into hyperspace. Or give your mind a workout.

The comedy is shamelessly stupid and flagrantly vulgar by turns.

Luc Besson's screenplay is dumb, but has just enough weird touches to give occasional glimmers of interest.

The result is a quickly paced, slickly filmed entertainment that's also as crude and rude as the PG-13 rating will allow. It's mighty mean-spirited too, aiming "satirical jibes" at everyone from black illiterates to white rednecks, from breakers of the law to enforcers of the law, from society's elites to society's dregs.

The animation is deft but the screenplay is stilted, the voice-performances are unimaginative, and the whole project is surprisingly clumsy in its efforts to please young and old alike. A major disappointment.

The movie is a mish-mash of action-adventure clichés, book-ended with lame attempts at psychological interest. Written, directed, and acted with ham-fisted heaviness.

Serial killing and other insanity in the French countryside, with ineptly dubbed English dialogue.

Repetitious teen-targeted fluff.

Let's look at the bright side. If this movie bombs as it deserves to, we won't have to sit through "Analyze Those" a few years from now!

This low-budget drama tries very hard to convey messages of tolerance and compassion, but it's too weakly acted and directed to have much impact.

This sexually explicit South Korean drama aims more to jolt than to illuminate, but it illustrates an aspect of Asian cinema that globally minded moviegoers should know about as films from that region take on more international prominence.

The picture's real interest lies in detailing the villain's sadistic crimes, though, and this is rarely fun or edifying to watch.

The story is irresponsible and the filmmaking is awful.

Violent and vapid, but the visual jolts may please horror buffs.

The movie has a well-meaning message about love and loyalty being the bedrock of real family values, but its good intentions sag as the story trades its air of mischievous comedy for trite sentimentality, arbitrary plot twists, and enough maudlin melodramatics to sustain a tabloid TV series.

The picture goes for sentimentality rather than substance every chance it gets, and the cast falls right into its syrupy trap.

This noisy, disorganized story is riddled with clichés, stereotypes, and self-indulgence from beginning to end.

Lachow goes for cuteness and whimsy every chance he gets, missing a lot more often than he hits.

The plot is a shameless plea for vigilante violence, and the dignity of the black hero is outweighed by the ethnically marked evil of his Hispanic antagonist. Beneath its crisp veneer, much of the movie is a high-energy hymn to hate.

Audiences may want their own speedy divorce from this irritating collection of stale jokes, pointless vulgarities, and warmed-over clichés.

The consequences aren't remotely as comic as they're meant to be.

Preposterous plot, bad acting, and dialogue that provokes more laughs than shivers.

Muddled screenwriting and uninspired directing.

The acting is solid and the heroine's quirky dialogue is amusing for a while. But repetitious writing and a weakly constructed story turn the promising premise into a disappointing mishmash of crime, politics, and show business.

Spoiled by its simplistic portrait of people from the Mideast as incorrigibly violent and untrustworthy.

Not even veteran talents like Dukakis and Scheider can surmount the artificial dialogue, arbitrary plot twists, and wan humor of this disappointing comedy-drama.

Strains to be shockingly original but winds up as cheap and cheesy as its characters.

The comedy isn't quite as crude as it sounds, but there's not much of value here beyond a little lively acting.

The results are unbelievably tedious, but Mansfield buffs may find it intermittently worthwhile.

As dopey as its heroes, and the cast's admirable energy isn't enough to keep the story punching through the final round.

The story is a string of sub-Scorsese clichés, and if engaging actors like Malkovich and Hopper seem to be sleepwalking through their roles, imagine how unwatchable Diesel manages to be.

The plot is predictable, the characters are cliches, and all the actors look and sound like refugees from a movie Martin Scorsese would have made vastly better three decades ago.

Eventually you realize the whole movie has been about young showoffs who think it's uproarious to gross out neighborhood grownups.

The satire is intermittently amusing, but Arcand adds little to the arsenal of standard mockumentary tricks, and the interesting cast doesn't get many interesting things to do.

The movie means well, but neither its emotions nor its performances ring very true.

Everyone works hard, but the results are sadly short of style and personality or irony and intelligence.

Crash-lands as disastrously as the heroes and never quite recovers its wits.

A director of Frankenheimer's stature deserves less sensationalistic material, and so does his audience.

The story is inspirational in a superficial way, but the filmmakers focus so exclusively on their attractive heroine that the picture loses any real connection with Africa.

Downright awful.

Action freaks may enjoy the chasing and chomping, but there's no hint of human interest or moviemaking imagination.

There's nothing special about this movie -- it's just business as usual for today's debased action-movie genre.

What really hurts is the movie's shallow screenwriting, self-indulgent acting, and woozy camerawork.

Like the nuclear sub it's named after, the picture is big, shiny, and expensive. It's also cold, hard, and cumbersome, and lacking the barest hint of emotional or psychological depth. [9 Mar 1990, Arts, p.10]

The violent story is long on nastiness, short on credibility.

The film means well, but each scene gets clobbered by sappy screenwriting.

The star's over-the-top energy isn't enough to make this hopelessly vulgar, numbingly repetitious farce worth watching.

So stupid you'll wish you'd brought a duffel bag of your own.

The nasty, sometimes violent story was written by Christian Forte, a newcomer who is clearly under Quentin Tarantino's unpleasant spell, and directed by Kevin Spacey, an unusually gifted actor who doesn't yet show any special talent for filmmaking.

This boatload of clichés is strenuously unfunny.

In short, this isn't a poignant drama about courage and imagination -- it's a contrived fantasy about courage and imagination.

The problem with Possession isn't that it's filmed in a lackluster way, but that it shouldn't have been filmed at all. Byatt's novel is an adventure in language, telling its story through a kaleidoscopic array of Victorian-style poetry and prose, alongside gripping accounts of the characters' activities and escapades.

A few mildly amusing gags don't outweigh the trite situations and mean-spirited attitude of this comedy.

Was this spiritless stuff really directed by Paul and Chris Weitz of "American Pie" fame? How the rebels have mellowed!

It soon gets down to its real business: fights, face-offs, and showdowns mired in the shallowest sort of Hollywood machismo.

The film is a disappointment, and at more than two hours' running time, a very long disappointment.

Talking dogs were cute, once. It's a tad disconcerting, however, when a canine starts lip syncing to the voice of Carl Reiner so it can complain about flatulence.

The slasher-movie genre may never die, but can't its perpetrators think up variations more clever than this by-the-numbers rehash?

The movie's real spectacle is the sight of so many talented people slogging through such idiotic material.

The gimmick behind the screenplay is clever, but the filmmakers don't rise to the challenge they've set themselves, merely spinning two unimaginative stories for the price of one.

I doubt if the results would have satisfied Kahlo, whose originality in matters of life, art, and ideas was vastly more far-reaching.

By the time it ended, I'd stopped caring. I suspect most moviegoers will do the same. Here's hoping Shelton scurries back to the athletic world in a hurry.

Perry and Hurley don't have much chemistry, and the story is so dumb you might want to sue it for stupidity.

The dialogue is dumb ('zilla has the best lines, "arrrrrggh" and "maaroarrr"), New York is waterlogged, and Godzilla isn't on screen enough.

The film tries to revive the sort of good-hearted optimism associated with Frank Capra classics of the 1940s era, but pictures like "It's a Wonderful Life" and "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington" were never so simplistic, syrupy, or tedious to sit through.

A perfectly funny idea -- call it "Ms. Ditz Goes to Washington" -- that's never allowed to take on real comic life. I laughed exactly once.

Too bad (Arnold) can't save the movie from it's superstitious clap-trap, sadistic violence, and sheer silliness.

In short, this movie is exactly the kind of starry-eyed escapist fantasy that Dr. Powell suspects Prot of having. It's harmless enough, since we can be cured just by leaving the theater.

It seems to have had the opposite effect on the director's taste, as she strives for new levels of raunchiness.

The film is as tricky and superficial as its low-life characters, using visual flimflam to mask its lack of substance.

Creepy.

This is a great subject for a movie, but Hollywood has squandered the opportunity, using it as a prop for warmed-over melodrama and the kind of choreographed mayhem that director John Woo has built his career on.

The repetitious script -- cobbled together by no fewer than five writers -- shows interest in nothing beyond action-centered plot gimmicks and tame romantic shenanigans.

If the Warner Bros. wizards have it right, what a girl wants is to see as much of Amanda Bynes as she possibly can...It's not so great for the rest of us, since the film has nothing else to offer.

The story is mildly entertaining in its hackneyed way, but there's no excusing the picture's exploitative treatment of almost all the female characters.