The result is as off-putting as biting into a confection in which the sugar has been replaced by salt.

It's difficult to say who is more misguided here: the men (director, screenwriter and producer) who made the movie, or the women who signed on to play the parts.

The film moves from cliché to cliché and hemorrhages blood and logic at an alarming rate.

There's no doubt the cast is driven and talented; some day, it might be interesting to watch a film about what such kids are really like.

The movie's dated, stereotypical comedy often contradicts its wholesome intentions, coming across as laboriously cutesy and occasionally perverse.

Through it all, actress Posey strikes attitudes and preens across the glib surface of the film, and though her campy excesses are tolerable for a brief time, the performance becomes an exercise in overkill. [13 Oct 1995]

At 70 minutes, this groin and groan comedy seems almost dismissively short, but don't believe the myths you've been told: longer is not always better.

The problem is that director Wayne Wang seems deaf to the tonal differences between coming-of-age, magic realism and children's comedy.

This is a no-cable, no-wake-up-call, cash-only dump of a film, where you breathe through a hankie and bring your own Lysol.

There's are nagging problems with the script, which feels like it has lost a few pages during its rewrites. Instead of an orderly, inexorable pressure of events, we get a surfeit of red herrings, followed by the rather uninteresting killer simply stepping out of hiding.

The script is definitely mediocrity mixed with complication.

They are singing the jingle in the bath, in bed, in the car, ready to send you, like George, smack into a tree.

Call it Nancy Drew and the Case of the Confused Adaptation.

The results are so listless, dated and characterless.

A determined romantic comedy with a theme, and damned if it won't see it through.

The film is a mawkish mess, only occasionally alleviated by the performances or Shange's poetry.

Some movies just bring out your inner Matlock: a desire to grab young punks by the lapels, smack them against a wall, knock their cigarettes to the ground and wipe the sneers off their faces. Such is the case with the callow and cynical The Rules of Attraction.

Every character is like the hyperactive rat-squirrel Scrat, and the audience is bounced around like his elusive acorn.

Though Lillard's excitable tone keeps promising wild comic adventures, the sequences are uniformly flat and humour-free.

So what's Hanson exploring this time? His boring side, apparently.

This is the sort of movie that ends up awash in sincere revelations, and not a moment of it feels remotely believable.

The only pressing burden in this deep interior world is the question: What in or on Earth is a cast this good doing in a movie this ridiculous?

Unlike Sacha Baron Cohen's rude semi-documentary satires (Borat, Bruno), I'm Still Here never finds a satiric justification for all this grotesque behaviour.

Pretty limp, and works far better in theory than practice.

This one's just painful.

None of this is funny enough to justify stealing 90 minutes of your viewing time.

The lower orders seem to have been left out of The Lost City -- there just aren't any poor characters -- which for a movie about a workers' revolution seems downright slipshod.

After six years in development, this comedy starring and produced by Adam Sandler feels as slapped together one of the comedian's live-action buddy movies.