A ghastly sequel to a charming animated film.

You can almost say it simulates an experience of brain injury in the audience: Nothing adheres, nothing connects. It's just nonstop cuteness, poses and emptiness - with nothing logically following from one moment to the next. It would be exaggerating to call it torture, and yet why split hairs?

A frustrating movie, a work of immaturity from a director who should be past the empty gestures and self-protective distance of his early work.

Trust never lives up to its snappy opening. Everything is tongue-in-cheek here - yet it's never remotely clear what the point is or what's getting satirized. [16 Aug 1991]

There's a lot of bad hair and incoherent, drug-addled remarks, but inside a minute we get the joke, and it isn't much.

If it happens to hit you right - that is, if you happen to catch its wavelength of tear-and-a-smile whimsicality - the movie will speak to you.

Thus, we find ourselves watching an ice-cold movie about competition that contains not a shred of rooting interest.

There's not a single moment here in which Nixon is admirable, decisive or appealing. Nixon doesn't work as a drama, but with a little push it might have been a great comedy.

A ponderous and dreadful film.

Flat and uninspired.

An overwrought drama.

By the end A.I. exhibits all its creators' bad traits and none of the good. So we end up with the structureless, meandering, slow-motion endlessness of Kubrick combined with the fuzzy, cuddly mindlessness of Spielberg.

The film ends up landing in a confused middle category. It's neither a coherent, discrete work nor a zany tribute to the late actor.

Coppola has no trouble convincing viewers that Marie Antoinette is an interesting historical subject, but there's a big distance between that and creating a fascinating personality or fashioning a compelling narrative.

The worst kind of avant-garde film, one that hides its lack of commitment to the story, the characters and the genre under cover of being experimental. It mocks form and plays with form but offers nothing in its place, just boredom, emptiness and the oldest metaphor in captivity, about grass coming up through concrete.

Goes nowhere.

A film with no theatrical core and no integrity in the writing, acting or storytelling.

Suffers from some of the deficiencies common to first features. It is sincere and earnest but the product of an assumption that the milieu itself is compelling enough to command an audience's attention.

With The Way, writer-director Emilio Estevez has made a respectable failure. What's respectable - and undeniable - is that this is a sincere effort to make a film of sensitivity and spiritual richness.

Directed by Danny Boyle, it lacks even a single moment of charm or interest.

Numbing and inert.

Midway, Mondays in the Sun becomes as dull as a day with nothing to do.

If Soderbergh's ambition was to make us feel just how dull it would be to a woods-dwelling communist guerrilla, he succeeded.

Surprisingly, the results are embarrassing. As puppetry, Team America is stilted. As satire, it's gutless and lazy. And as comedy, it barely delivers laughs.

Here Balasko, best known as a comedian, is particularly satisfying. But the reward is too small on the investment, and the film's resolution is downright irritating - not just a waste of time, but a waste of time with attitude.

Director Edward Zwick tried to make a great movie, but somewhere in the process he forgot to make a good one.

It provokes nothing but yawns, and the sex it explores is stuff everybody knows about and says, "So what?"

You know there is something seriously wrong with Anna Karenina when you start rooting for the train.