As has happened before in less extreme circumstances, filmmakers with purportedly serious intentions punish their viewers for watching their envelope-pushing depiction of sex on the screen by presenting it in the most profoundly negative context imaginable.

The well-intended Group is nevertheless problematic. It's relentlessly grueling, as therapy can be, and not everyone will be able to see a reason to watch it.

A handsome, intelligent film of rigorous austerity; unfortunately, for all its seriousness of purpose and fine performances, it's also a boring film about boring people.

It's hard to imagine anyone enjoying it except for those seeking to see people up there on the screen unhappier than themselves.

Highly problematical. The trouble with "Trouble" is one of temperament. Denis' formality and seriousness make the horror genre a risky business for her, especially when sex is combined with outrageous gore.

Has its moments here and there, but not nearly enough of them to add up to a satisfying movie.

The result is crass but reasonably harmless, although to hear one of the guys hold forth on how much he's learned about family and loyalty in just one week living with the DOGs is enough to make a person gag.

Jackpot has much that is sweet and funny, but it is not overly original--and it is overly long and not as coherent as it might be.

It's not a bad idea, and it has the right cast and the right look. But, sad to say, it lacks the pace and energy to make it come alive and therefore remains more of a literary conceit than a movie.

A fantasy, a fairy tale, but its characters and the emotions they elicit become painfully real.

Controlled Chaos unfortunately also reveals that Zendel's talents do not equal her ambitions.

Certainly sexy, entertaining and provocative -- in several senses of the word -- but it's also tiresome as only a French film can be when everyone in it has only sex and amour on his or her mind and is deadly serious about both.

Despite strong portrayals by Guttenberg and his co-star, Lombardo Boyar, and sequences that attempt to open the play up, it remains too much a filmed play, and worse, one that has not been effectively paced. As a result, it doesn't come alive until it's drawing to a close that's unexpectedly touching, if more than a little sentimental, but too late to redeem the preceding tedium.

The result is hit or miss, with a laugh here and there, ultimately creating an aura of hopeless and drawn-out improbability.

What's wrong with Megiddo is not its good-versus-evil theme but the clunky, unpersuasive manner in which it has been expressed.

All-out burlesque rather than spoof from the outset, the film becomes less and less amusing. Wayans has a wild zaniness that can be hilarious, but how many bodily function jokes, ultra-crude sexual innuendoes and quite a lot of men and women simply punching each other out can one movie endure?

Maxwell has populated his film with paragons rather than people. Worse, they talk and talk and talk; this film is in danger of talking itself to death before the Union and the Confederacy are able to decimate each other.

The endless gore and violence make the experience torturous -- and not just for the victims in the movie.

Youthful audiences won't be attracted to a love story between two 54-year-olds in the first place, and mature audiences will be turned off by the language, not necessarily out of prudishness, but out of its sheer crassness.

Evokes the fear, anger and conflict that swept over the country at the time, but it doesn't offer sufficient fresh insights to justify doing so.

Rich in authentic locales but is unevenly directed by Andrew Molina and is hazy in its chronology. Hayata's story in all its myriad implications might well have been better told in documentary form.

Limp spoof.

There's scarcely a whiff of originality in the zombie horror picture House of the Dead, but Uwe Boll has directed it with enough energy and style that it adds up to passably mindless if grisly fun.

The film does have a certain flair and pace and is lively enough to be mildly diverting.

Slight in the extreme, more tasteless than amusing, but at least its young actors manage to make promising impressions, especially Wiehl and Brenner, whose characters have a tad more dimension than the others.

A fairly silly and ultra-gory schlocker/shocker.

An ambitious and intelligent film probing that chronic contemporary phenomenon, the seemingly senseless crime, but it is ultimately unsatisfying for all its efforts and various pluses.

A lot of uneven acting is also no small detriment to this frequently awkward film's credibility.

Could be a tough go for those not already Scooby-Doo fans. It has a totally artificial quality, starting with Prinze's blond wig.

The film is loaded with striking visuals, high energy and all-stops portrayals from its actors, but for all of Samuell's imaginative cinematic bravura, it is, finally, mainly exasperating. Phooey on Julien and Sophie's excruciating l'amour fou.

The misguided, delirious result offers the perverse guilty pleasure of watching a roster of distinguished actors earnestly swimming against a tidal wave of silliness.

In short, Vlad could have used a substantial transfusion of wit and energy, with a dash of dark humor.

Although decently acted and well-crafted, Thérèse is essentially an illustrated Sunday school lecture for true believers. It comes across as more an exercise in determined piety.

Hilary Duff can't rise above an overbearing script with underdeveloped roles.

More than anything, The Grudge suggests that it's time for Shimizu to move on.

Chintzy-looking gore-bore.

A tiresome addiction drama.

A thick and gooey slice of holiday hokum.

The thriller with a promising premise fails to deliver.

The only way the film could have had a prayer of working--and thereby tapping its stars' considerable strengths--is by taking a much harder edge and going for dark, even bleak humor.

The merely depressing ultimately gives way to the contrived in Seth Zvi Rosenfeld's King of the Jungle.

It's amazing how boring endless talk about more and better orgasms can become.

Mildly entertaining, offering generous swaths of Mahler performed by the Bratislava Philharmonic, but it's also inescapably ponderous.

Relentlessly smarmy and contrived, and its pitch for the cause of prisoner rehabilitation preachy and heavy-handed.

The filmmakers cannot sustain enough momentum to keep their film from seeming contrived and preachy.

Overlong, overwritten.

Like a lot of other Asian sci-fi anime: a stunningly imagined world of the future populated with one-dimensional characters caught up in a trite plot.

Dazzling visually but is flattened by corny dialogue better suited to the 1936 "Flash Gordon" serial, a needlessly hard to follow plot and heavy-handed exposition clotted with pseudo-scientific mumbo jumbo.

The result is a movie that's hard to laugh at when its hero would surely be either in jail or perhaps even a mental institution were he to behave the way he does on screen in real life.

These characters, which Perry worked into the narrative from other stage performances, may have been entertaining in those venues, but they undermine the film.

Smile is like a dose of cod liver oil: It may be good for you, but it's no fun.

Not quite the sum of its occasionally interesting parts. Most of its cast makes strong impressions, but the plot and motivation don't quite jell, resulting in a minor item that shows its star Troy Garity to good advantage.

Weighed down with gimmicks and special effects, a number of which are far from special, Sky High is best left to 10- to 14-year-olds because it's not likely to do much for older audiences and is too violent for the very young.

It's too over-the-top, too lurid and at times simply too silly to represent any kind of valid commentary on the repressive '50s or the way in which institutions tend to destroy rather than cure. "Far From Heaven," which nailed '50s angst to perfection, Asylum could not be farther from.

The young stars are attractive and capable, but Hotel de Love is as synthetic as an old "Love Boat" episode.

Marcos Siega's direction is well-paced, but writers David T. Wagner and Brent Goldberg haven't brought anything sufficiently fresh or original to a formula plot to allow Underclassman to rise above the level of a mildly diverting video rental.

This is a standard-issue gross Hollywood knockabout comedy in which slapstick antics have been piled up with a steam shovel and driven home with a sledgehammer. Reynolds and Smart are game and even dimensional, but all others are stuck playing tiresome, obnoxious characters.

Synthetic, strained and noisy, Yours, Mine & Ours is a clinker that doesn't bear comparison with the original. Quaid, Russo and others deserve better.

Lame and overly contrived comedy.

Parker Posey, the queen of the indies, is a stylish actress, but there's not much she can do with the flat, trite sex comedy The Oh in Ohio, written by Adam Wierzbianski and directed by Billy Kent without a trace of imagination or originality.

Writer-director Todd Stephens set out to make the raunchiest gay teen movie ever, which this picture most certainly is, but the result is far more frenetic than funny.

Eating Out 2 is sweet-natured, but like the first edition, lame and way too talky.

Inspired by the Parker Brothers board game of the same name, Clue is more frenetic than funny, more strained than suspenseful or scary. In fact, it's not the least bit scary or suspenseful but instead quickly grows tedious. The more you struggle to keep track of the constantly multiplying plot developments, the harder it gets to care who did it. [13 Dec 1985, p.6]

It lapses into that familiar category of movies that go in for lots of fancy obfuscation along the way only to make its story seem all the more simple, trite and contrived by the finish.

It's revealing that writer-director Dave Boyle has said that in a way he fulfilled his lifelong ambition to be a cartoonist with the live-action White on Rice because his people in this wan, trite and increasingly silly comedy are little more than stick figures.

The number of clearly talented individuals who committed themselves to the folly of The Living Wake were fearless too.

A glum British kidnap movie in which writer-director J Blakeson manages to generate tension and some suspense, never rises above the mechanical and contrived, finally lapsing into the improbable.

While her latest, It's a Wonderful Afterlife, is affectionate and energetic, its comic premise seems too silly, and at times, too tedious, to hope for much cross-cultural appeal, despite a fine, committed cast.

Despite a capable cast and attractive Baton Rouge, La., locales photographed by Bobby Bukowski, The Ledge suffers from a seriously flawed script that's just too implausible to be taken seriously.

Ready for a singing and dancing "Reservoir Dogs"?

Just the ticket for girls in their early teens.

Implausible at every turn, it offers a dab of quirkiness and edge from writer-director Finn Taylor, but otherwise has nothing for audiences to embrace.

You can't help but feel that Disney has delivered a turkey for Thanksgiving.

All strained artifice, inhabited by individuals who either lack dimension or are merely stereotypes. The result is a movie not nearly as amusing as its makers may think.

Quickly becomes silly and tedious.

Has plenty of warmth, affection and conventional wisdom, but too much of the time it plays out in routine fashion with moments of contrivance.

By the time the heavy-handed Solomon & Gaenor is over, it has become such a punishing exercise in the self-evident that one is left numb and eager for escape.

Misfires badly as both an entertainment and a message movie.

One Night at McCool's is one night too much.

Might work on the stage but is merely tedious on the screen.

Psycho Beach Party is, from the start, in dire need of the electroshock therapy that Florence ultimately undergoes.

Not even the strong, reflective, world-weary presence of Reno or Cassel's energy can make a dent in a movie in which suspense and tension dissipate quickly, with action sequences not spectacular enough to compensate. All that's left is gratuitous gore.

Can never rise above the melodrama of a past era, despite a splendid, impassioned portrayal by Willem Dafoe and an affecting one by Luo Yan.

It's too labored and ponderous to qualify as a so-bad-it's-good amusement. Original Sin is merely an old-fashioned bore.

Begins as a captivating romantic comedy and then, at the very moment it's most involving, takes a wholly gratuitous and disastrous swerve and just keeps on going from bad to worse.

A trite psychological thriller -- all buildup and no payoff, a mystery that essentially offers only two alternative solutions, which diminishes the element of surprise and strings the viewer along way past caring which possibility proves to be true.

An undernourished romantic comedy-drama that's especially short on that most essential ingredient: credibility.

A dreary title for an even drearier picture.

Looks sensational, moves like lightning. But its script (by Joel Soisson) makes no pretense about being logical or even comprehensible.

Dust is a bust, a big bad movie of the scope, ambition and bravura that could be made only by a talented filmmaker run amok.

The look of the film is great, the soundtrack glorious, but more often than not the dialogue is atrocious, featuring a lot of long-winded gobbledygook.

Far from great, and this off-putting French romantic comedy is sure to test severely the indulgence of fans of "Amélie."

It's too bad this Rollerball veered off-track so swiftly, derailed by bad writing and possibly also by some of that extensive post-production reworking.

Melts swiftly...don't expect a shred of credibility.

More travesty than tragedy.

Whatever his intentions, Clark, in his third outing as a director, has come up with a film that is seriously flawed.

Opens and closes on a jaunty note: It's the tedious, relentlessly talky 80 minutes in between that's the problem.

So uninvolving it scarcely matters what it looks like.

The best the makers of Down to You can hope for is that girls in their early teens--clearly the film's target audience--will be so carried away by its charismatic stars that they'll overlook the film's various flaws.

A film that means to be seductive but merely progresses from the contrived to the manipulative.

Ashton Kutcher and Brittany Murphy are attractive and skilled performers as the film's newlyweds, but the movie is so mechanical it's like watching Barbie and Ken dolls going through the motions.

They never generates any real fear until its last minutes, by which time it is too late to redeem the dull events that preceded them.

Crewson is a game, experienced actress but hasn't sufficient star charisma to lift Suddenly Naked out of the doldrums.

Anders Thomas Jensen's Flickering Lights may have been a huge hit in Denmark, but it doesn't travel well. A bleak male-bonding comedy that's a queasy blend of brutal humor and escalating sentimentality, it is overlong, heavy-handed, slow and unpersuasive.

Leaves us with a heightened appreciation of the bold and personal films made by a number of filmmakers of the former Yugoslavia.

An L.A. neo-noir raised to an insufferable degree of artiness.

Feeble and unfunny.

Begins on a mildly entertaining note, with each successive vignette the film grows increasingly tedious.

Unfunny rather than outrageous as intended.

A tedious comedy... It's not the worst premise for humor dashed with a little wisdom, but the script, written by the film's star Eddie Griffin and others, is less than inspired and tends to blur the line between immaturity and just plain stupidity.

Pretty dreadful.

Turns out to be a tedious and under-inspired comedy.

This documentary-like realism, alas, only underlines the preposterousness of its plot with its torrent of contrived, credibility-defying cliffhangers.

Turns out to be a thudding dud, crammed with clunky dialogue, bad acting and gruesome but unpersuasive gore. Mindhunters will pass muster with only the most undemanding horror fans.

It's tedious instead of provocative and so unconvincing as to be preposterous.

An elegant tale of romantic obsession weighed down by a needlessly convoluted plot that yields far more confusion than psychological suspense.

Good-natured but it's a dud.

At once corny and precious, its humor seems too heavily ethnic to travel well.

Gets nowhere. Its star Ice Cube remains characteristically amiable, but this thuddingly miscalculated comedy is way beneath him.

This heartfelt valentine to the stage leaves no cliché unturned. If it has anything to recommend, it is the loving portrayal of the camaraderie of those who participate in art for art's sake who, to quote Cyrano, "work without one thought of gain or fame."

Although Travolta is as smooth as ever, the picture is a bust, a grimly unfunny comedy with no connection to reality, and worst of all, running on and on for two dismal hours.

The bleak absurdity of its predicaments cries out for a tone of pitch-dark comedy to stave off the unintended laughter that it is virtually certain to elicit.

As awful as the original was inspired.

Eating Out might just make it as an amusing trifle, but on the big screen it's merely tedious and silly.

Moving from tragedy to tragedy, the film teeters along unsteadily, showing events we've seen countless times before and then imploding under the weight of its ridiculous ending.

However visually striking, this Australian film is ultimately as tedious as it is derivative.

Good-natured and exuberantly politically - socially is more like it - incorrect, but it is woefully under-inspired and amateurish.

A big fast bust.

A campy, hopelessly amateurish vanity production.

Cease Fire is no art film but, rather, mainstream fare that's likely to appeal primarily to Farsi-speaking audiences. It is talky, too long at 1 hour, 44 minutes and tends to be preachy and tedious.

Except for that music and a bit of the acting, Swing Kids is unsatisfactory from just about every point of view. [05 Mar 1993]

The genitally ambiguous as well as transsexuals and gay people deserve more than XXY's good intentions.

Not even a brief appearance by Quentin Tarantino and a ton of references to other movies enlivens the proceedings much.

The film is no more than a tedious, over-long Bollywood soap opera.

GhettoPhysics undercuts its approach with too much cant, too much rambling and too much that is self-evident.

Eventually, Immigration Tango throws away what little credibility it has in going for a finish of total improbability and silliness.

A lame, tedious comedy.

A broad and stale British crime comedy that wastes the considerable talent and presence of Minnie Driver.

A routine shoot-'em-up, with the triteness of Scott Busby and Martin Copeland's script exceeded only by the flatness of Steve Miner's direction.

Smartly shot in digital and transferred to 35 mm, suggests that Evans needs more seasoning to make genre conventions and characters work for him rather than against him.

All this sadness becomes so depressing to watch, testing the limits of the patience of even a viewer prepared to take Wang's underlying concerns seriously.

Asks us to spend 101 minutes with people most of us wouldtake pains to avoid in real life.

It's easy to accuse Morrissette of condescending to a bunch of yokels, but hardly anybody would hold that against him if the result had been hilarious instead of deadly dull.

Works against its goals.

A standard issue undergrad gross-out comedy notable only for the showy role it provides Jason Schwartzman, well-remembered as "Rushmore's" geeky high school student Max Fischer.

What ensues is so glum and disjointed that the film becomes an even bigger mess.

A dreary tale of supernatural horror.

For histrionic wretched excess this movie would be hard to surpass.

Always a welcome presence in any film, Howard, as a simple-minded hick, gives Blackwoods whatever humor and life it has.

It is an inept, inane Mafia comedy with a gay angle, all the more insufferable because director Kristen Coury and writer Joseph Triebwasser clearly think they're being wonderfully cute and clever.

The actors are game, but their roles lack color and depth, and it's a real struggle to survive Soul Survivors to the finish.

Teen sex comedies don't come more mindless than Joseph A. Pineda's Going Down, a movie so seriously underinspired it's hard to imagine it appealing to anyone but fantasy-prone middle schoolers who can barely wait to live it up like their older brothers and sisters.

Garmento has nothing going for it. First-time writer-director Michele Maher spent three years working in Manhattan's fashion industry...her attempts at satire are feeble and trite, and her stereotypical characters are without interest.

A lackluster international action adventure.

There's nothing super about Super Troopers except for those deep into the low end of the frat-house mentality that equates smart-alecky with hilarity.

Paymer and many others in a large cast are well-established players with strong credits, and they do the best they can to pump life into remorselessly glum material.

The only element that keeps the film from falling apart entirely is powerful physical presence of Pollio, an experienced, impassioned young actor.

Awkwardly staged and edited and fitted out with an overly intrusive score drawn primarily from classical music, the film consistently subverts the earnest efforts of its cast.

It's a glum, stale soap opera, tediously paced but mercifully running only 75 minutes, its sole virtue.

Has nothing going for it -- and much going against it.

Whitney takes having it both ways to new heights -- depths is perhaps more like it. He satirizes reality TV while showing total nudity and at times carrying sex to the verge of soft-core porn. As titillating and energetic as the film is, it is also rather sad because it reveals what aspiring actors will endure for what they apparently regard as an opportunity.

Michael S. Ojeda's film is so relentlessly shallow and excessive that it hardly matters whether Lana is eventually able to turn the tables on Darko. When it rains in Lana's Rain, it pours -- and what comes out is trash.

Some movies should never come to light, either, and Darkness, bearing a 2002 copyright, might well have been better left on the shelf.

Neither acutely suspenseful nor particularly thrilling but instead mainly numbing.

A grimly unfunny and stupefyingly inept comedy.

The picture looks as murky as its story line, the sound is tinny, much of the dialogue is flat or confoundingly technical or merely risible, and most everything on the screen looks patently fake.

Maple Palm cannot possibly be seriously recommended to anyone, but a reviewer, sitting through it until the long-awaited finish, cannot but be moved by how Stewart and everyone else involved has hurled themselves into the project with the utmost conviction, sometimes with unintended comical effect.

Lapses into an exercise in foolishness.

Supernova isn't so super.

A total waste of time.

Way too bleak to be funny, even as a contemporary satire of the battle of the sexes.

The Specials is an unfortunate name for a film that's anything but.

So laughably awful that it begs to have stones thrown at it; it's a wonder it got made at all.

Despite a premise that's provocative, to say the least, this one's a dud.

Trite and uninvolving.

The "crime" was that it was made in the first place and the "punishment" is having to watch it.

It's so bad that you have to wonder whether Tom Green was looking for a project to match last year's "Freddy Got Fingered" -- Green didn't direct this turkey, but it surely is a contender for the bottom of the barrel award for 2002.

Darkness Falls -- with a thud. But it does not go gently into the night, for director Jonathan Liebesman and his large crew cram as much style and energy as they can into a hokey and morbid supernatural thriller plot. It's a downer to see so much effort expended on such junk.

But even Carvey's protean talent can't dent this ponderously unfunny and uninspired comedy. It's hard to imagine anyone older than 10 being diverted by its broad buffoonery, and kids deserve better than this in the first place.

The result is hopelessly inane, humorless and under-inspired.

Appalling, shamelessly manipulative and contrived, and totally lacking in conviction.

The only way his (Benigni's) show-off performance could have a prayer of working would be if the film were released as a silent.

A painfully anemic variation on John Landis' 1981 winner, "An American Werewolf in London." While the original had both wit and poignancy--and an affectionate and knowing tip-of-the-hat to werewolf movies past--this slapdash, silly new edition is so cut-rate it has Luxembourg and Amsterdam standing in for the City of Light.

Under Alan Cohn's straight-on direction, the film, written by various hands, huffs and puffs mightily just to keep a strenuously labored plot going.

The attempt to find humor in mean-spiritedness is way beyond Paris and Fejerman's abilities, and their last-reel attempt to portray Sofia as an ultimately liberating force for her daughters is as contrived as My Mother Likes Women is repellent.

In comparison to Where the Heart Is, the Wal-Mart commercials seem like cinema verite.

Degrading, disgusting and depressing.

Julien Hernandez's Sex, Politics & Cocktails gives all three a bad name.

It is terrible in every aspect -- wretchedly written, directed with a ham fist (by Matthew Levin) and over-acted.

A trite, incoherent tale.

There's so much ranting and raving, all of it boring and trite.

It was probably worth every costly cent for Kim Basinger to get out of doing the dreadful Boxing Helena -- but you have to wonder whatever there was about it that persuaded her to do it in the first place. [3 Sept 1993]

The one thing that can be said of Waking Up in Reno is that it's rigorously consistent. Every note rings false.

It doesn't seem possible that a film with both the formidable Reno and Waits could be all bad, but The Tiger and the Snow is precisely so.