All of this plays out as flat, didactic, and lazy.

The best one can say for Christopher Hampton's dispirited adaptation of Joseph Conrad's The Secret Agent is that this weirdly sentimental movie might direct new attention to Conrad's corrosive novela satire. [12 Nov 1996]

A largely mind-numbing experience.

Gaudier than a Hindu-temple roof, louder than the Las Vegas night, Speed Racer is a cathedral of glitz.

The new Richard Kelly movie is basically a sock of coal for Christmas.

Pale by comparison to an action thriller like "Children of Men" or gross out eco-catastrophe like "Land of the Dead," squandering its ready-made zombie scenario.

Bronson is essentially a faux-operatic, music hall turn--a larky, lumpen version of "Lola Montès."

Hereafter is not just a stretch for Eastwood, it's a contortion. The irrationality of the premise is exceeded only by the strategic irrationalities of the plot.

"Every work of art is an uncommitted crime," Theodor Adorno once wrote. This one is more of a botched misdemeanor.

Less awful than inert, Claire Dolan comes across as a willfully bad movie.

Hamming shamelessly as Berowne, Branagh is overseasoned for his part ... he's as desperate as a veteran social director at a Catskills hotel about to fold.

Peaks with its opening scene.

Blackboards is both shrill and soporific, and because everything is repeated five or six times, it can seem tiresomely simpleminded.

The movie's mode is brutal and excremental.

This modern-day vampire story is purposefully shocking in its eroticized gore, if unintentionally dull in its lack of poetic frissons.

The script is worse than slack, and despite its lurid premise, Bully doesn't have "Kids" tabloid immediacy.

The Phantom Menace is simply a billboard for itself. Anyone who sees it will be experiencing it for the second time. The hype was not about the movie, the hype was the movie.

Sodden mess, a mutation-invasion movie that passes "Attack of the Killer Tomatoes!" going south.

A mishmash of life-insurance commercials and Ronald Reagan campaign spots, this sexless orgy of self-congratulation is designed to make you feel good about Hollywood, America, and Jim Carrey -- not to mention the nation's motion picture exhibitors, who are praised at one point as the antithesis of Soviet Communism.

The Allen persona has always blurred the distinction between his art and his life. Still, one would scarcely expect Allen's attempt to satirize daily life in the National Entertainment State to be this tired, sour, and depressed.

Very Bad Things is a guy film, and, as such, it's a dog. The gross-out humor lacks edge, the guilt never kicks in, and the outrages are predictable. It's one flat brewski.

Grim going.

See it if you must, but don't forget to pack the Air Wick. These breezy doings are mustier than a Glitter Gulch casino at 4 a.m.

A tale of absolute self-absorption and unconscious revelation.

In Jackson's hands, The Lovely Bones is doubly appalling. Part Disney's "Alice in Wonderland," part Fritz Lang's "M," the movie is horrific yet cloying, alternately distended and abrupt, sometimes poignant and often ridiculous.

An insufferable exercise in cutie-pie modernism, painfully unfunny and precious to a fault.

Professional obligations required that I endure it, but there's no reason why you should.

The film seems dimly aware of its own ridiculousness, but it lacks the constitution for self-mockery.

As overlong and undermotivated as it is absentmindedly incoherent.

At once simple-mindedly didactic and utterly chaotic, Steal This Movie! is interspersed with fake headlines and botched history.

Bracingly unfunny.

For all the tumultuous entrances and flouncing exits, the eight principals manage maybe three laughs among them.

Even sillier than it is cynical, Drop Dead Gorgeous is a tiresome tale.

From the end to the beginning--or is it from the inadvertently ridiculous to the would-be sublime?--Noé's stunt is an exploitation movie with a gimmick, not to mention a vacuous philosophy.

Filled with all manner of tawdry tricks.

This smoothly odious piece of work, written by Frank Cottrell Boyce and directed by Michael Winterbottom, posits the self-consciously repellent Plummer as a sort of Valerie Solanas-inflected version of the Florida serial killer Aileen Wournos. [7 May 1996]

The Pillow Book's pretentions are boundless, for all its desperate fashion and layered imagery, it's a staggering bore-as vacantly petulant as Kate Moss's stare. [10 Jun 1997]

The grim finality of the ensuing pietà suggests the last act of Hamlet or, rather, Hamlet 2--so embarrassing that, for the first time, I wanted to avert my eyes from the screen, although that might have also been because Repo! appears to have been shot with a cell phone.

An unrelentingly crass and confrontational barf bomb that makes Lars von Trier's "The Idiots" look like the philosophical experiment that it is.