Though intermittently engaging and decently acted, the movie suffers from a repetitive format, with too many shifts in time that prove disruptive.

The atmosphere is properly bizarre and in moments even scary, but there's no involving story or characters to sustain the feature-length narrative.

Gilliam's work is long on sensibility, short on sense.

Stuart Baird's new thriller is inferior to the Andrew Davis movie in every respect: script, acting, rhythm and even tech credits.

Meant to be an offbeat, darkly comic tale of a triangle of losers desperately clinging to their versions of the American dream, pic comes across as a charmless high-concept indie.

But Foster is unable to give the episodic, fragmented film a coherent feel; her prosaic, sometimes irritating picture proceeds scene by scene, with the requisite climaxes and anticlimaxes along the bumpy road.

A noisy, soulless, self-conscious pastiche that mixes elements of sci-fi, action-adventure and romance, then pours on a layer of comedy replete with Hollywood in-jokes.

The material is slender, the characters not sufficiently engaging or eccentric for a feature-length movie.

Unfortunately, Wolman's flat direction accentuates the predictable course of his soft narrative.

Isn't even unintentionally funny enough to qualify as guilty pleasure a la "Valley of the Dolls."

So fractured and so awkwardly staged that end result is an uninvolving film that’s dramatically inert and artistically shapeless.

Ferrara has made a film that's always visually arresting, but one that lacks emotional and dramatic sense -- a recurrent weakness in his work.

A slender story that's not particularly suspenseful or involving, resulting in a movie that's a feast to the eye but not much for the intellect.

Not a bad picture, just utterly banal.

A shallow, only mildly entertaining satire

Part comedy, part family drama, part romance, part special-effects mystery-adventure, and not entirely satisfying on any of these levels, this hodgepodge suffers from the conflicting sensibilities of its three credited scripters: Robin Swicord, who has done good work before, Akiva Goldsman, who has not, and Adam Brooks.

The strongest dimensions of this self-conscious but centerless film are four sexy actresses parading in colorful costumes and Amy Vincent's radiant lensing, which makes the picture seem hipper than it is.

John Travolta's charismatic screen presence is the only element that propels Michael over its rough narrative spots and scattered direction.

Gummo is personal, honest and raw, but it's also erratic, self-indulgent and full of ideas that are not fully explored. [8 Sept. 1997, p.80]

Almost every element in Art of War is slightly off.

There's no particular reason to see this disappointingly trivial picture on the bigscreen.

This small-scale, chamber piece, which boasts good acting from Moore, Skarsgard and Fichtner, has a strong built-in appeal for women but may experience harder times in going beyond the specialized arthouse circuits due to the narrowly-scoped, undernourished script.

Visually gratifying but dramatically weak, the film falls short of its aspiration to be a sweeping romantic epic.