Watching inept American actors and wishing they were badly dubbed into Japanese isn't any fun at all.

Max Payne, game or movie, has precious little to say.

Forgettable.

The only surprise here is the real star of the show, who turns out to be not Halle Berry, not even Bruce Willis, but a flat computer screen in all its hard-driven glory.

Gosh, what to say about House of 1000 Corpses? That it's about 999 too many, for starters. Then again, in a picture where the body count is the whole point and the only purpose, carping about the math rather misses the mark.

Will be construed by the faithful as an embarrassment of riches and by the rest of us as cruel and unusual punishment.

This isn't a movie so much as a marketing strategy -- a moving poster loosely disguised as a motion picture.

In an era when the words "President" and "penis" can occupy the same sentence and prompt nothing but yawns, this picture actually manages to surprise, to startle, yes, to administer a series of small but genuine shocks.

[Walken's] every minute on screen is filled with that level of jittery invention, and, watching him at play, not even the flintiest temper could resist a wide grin. Envy can surely be a trial, but Saint Christopher is there to ease our troubled journey and see us smilingly home.

Add them up and the sum has a certain mathematical inevitability: Really annoying characters, really annoying movie.

A dull, formulaic romance comedy with an ulterior motive and a sly message. Remarkably, the message is this: "Please Re-elect George Bush."

I doubt that Lawrence is conscious of this process. Nevertheless, stuck in a dull commercial feature, a very good actor happens upon a new solution to an age-old problem: She improves the script by transcending it, and steals the picture by abandoning it.

Damned if Parker hasn't done it again. An intermittently good filmmaker but a consistently bad polemicist, he may well sway opinion here -- but, oops, not in the hoped-for direction.

A lightweight flick about a heavy-duty subject, A Dark Truth plays like a TV movie back in the days when TV wasn't worth watching.

The concept is high but everything else is merely fair to middling, one more or less watchable B-movie in megabucks clothing.

But Keaton is a mistake. He's an actor with an innate sense of irony firmly grounded in the here and now. Even as Batman, skepticism was his forte; true belief falls way outside his range.

Hey, it’s all good clean fun.

Like a tone-deaf singer at a benefit concert, John Q. is a bad movie appearing on behalf of a good cause.

Adam is back to lining his pockets again.

Somewhere, back in the mists of time, co-writers Eric Bress and J. Mackye Gruber must have flapped their gums in the fond hope of crafting a script; today, that whisper of hot air has swollen into a feature flick that rains down upon us a veritable torrent of inane plot.

A layabout movie -- not risibly bad, just relentlessly sub-par.

If laughs are the currency of any comedy, then this one pays minimum wage and, worse, makes you work damn hard even for that pittance.

For the price of a ticket, and 100 minutes of your time, how many laughs are enough to qualify as just compensation? Will four or five do? Let's be generous and count five.

As for the locals, they speak like extras from "Fargo," although, on this go-round, that weird Swedish accent has somehow lost its power to amuse.

It’s just such a shining example of a dull studio comedy.

Characters already too wicked to be credible start doing stuff simply too stupid to be believed, with no help from a cast way too overmatched to be useful.

A crashing bore.

Pretty much what you'd expect -- just another haunted house that happens to float.

Writer/director Gus Van Sant, who's built his reputation on the romantic decadence of "Drugstore Cowboy" and "My Own Private Idaho," completely misses the poetry and the irony of the book. [20 May 1994]

Valuable life lessons always come at a steep price, and this one is no exception. Sorry, but you'll have to shell out for The Divide and then suffer through its nearly two hours of bloody inanities. Weigh the balance, make your choice.

The pretty good stuff comes early, when Nic and Ron, weary of wasting women and children, suffer an attack of conscience and desert the Crusades.

Far more than most action stars getting on in years, Bruce Willis has aged nicely into the role. Maybe it’s that shaved pate of his, a bullet-head that still looks primed for any chamber.

Neither boring enough to qualify as pornography nor vital enough to generate a controversy.

But the best, most irrefutable reason why Sex and the City 2 deserves one-half a shining star. It’s worse than Sex and the City 1, and that alone is a remarkable achievement.

You might believe that a movie comedy requires no visual rhythm, and that entire scenes -- especially those big set-pieces -- benefit greatly from a shooting style devoid of imagination and unremittingly flat. If so, A Guy Thing is surely your thing. Enjoy.

[Pitof's] managed to create an entire digitalized city that has all the allure of an underground parking garage. And his action, it's cluttered; his editing, it's confused. The result: blandness butchered, hamburger chopped, kitty littered.

A 0-star Comedy that is nonetheless guaranteed to rake in multimillions.

For all its current political incorrectness, the original film at least attacked hypocrisy; this one practises it.

View from the Top never gets off the bottom -- comedies don't come much flatter.

As for Keitel, he pops up in a brief cameo as a housing contractor, with a dump-truck full of sand, the one that De Niro is standing right behind. The pair engage in a heated argument, as they once did so memorably those many years ago, and then the truck dumps that load exactly where you know it must. An esteemed actor gets buried but, what-the-fock, the franchise laughs on.

It's always rather sad to watch gifted performers stranded in a tepid thriller. You can see them, as professional pretenders, trying to believe that they're creating a character, but the lie is transparent -- all they're really doing is advancing a retarded plot.

The whole mess turns nuttier by the second. A black comedy, you ask? I wish. There are plenty of laughs here, but nary a one is intentional.

Basic Instinct 2 is double trouble -- the femme is to die for, the film is to die from.

In the case of When in Rome, oh to do what the Romans used to do: Toss the bloody thing to the lions.

A few early laughs scattered around a plot as thin as it is repetitious. There's talent in this picture, both before and behind the camera, but virtually none of it gets on the screen.

Dragonfly has more plot than a figure-skating competition, and just about as much credibility.

When a movie ostensibly on a serious subject is so God-awful silly, is it impossible to be offended, or impossible not to be?

If physical appearance creates its own class system (in high school and beyond), then Qualls is perfect for this proselytizing role. He has that rarest of movie-star faces -- one that over comes the tyranny of beauty.

As cinematic flops go, nothing falls quite as hard as a failed black comedy.

Consequently, as star vehicles go, Ford Fairlane runs straight over the very guy it's meant to transport. Some will see that as the movie's greatest fault, others as its only virtue. Take your pick, and come out swinging. [13 Jul 1990, p.C1]

The movie pretty much blows.

The Love Guru is a comedy like the Leafs are a hockey team.

Here's the title: Couples Retreat. And here's the review: Couples, Retreat. Yep, just find the verb, treat it as a command, and vamoose, unless you harbour an abiding curiosity about how eternally long 100 minutes can feel.

God forgive me, but I worship the Bad Dialogue Fairy -- he gets me through these endless nights.

And De Bont's effects are wildly over the top, devoid of the stylish cuts and intriguing angles that enriched the original. In fact, there's so little panache in his destructive action that it begins to seem like a weird act of self-destruction.

Ho, ho, horrible.

Never one to shrink from the challenge of parodying the already parodic, along comes Marlon Wayans to do in A Haunted House what he once did in "Scary Movie." And do it much, much worse.

Frankly, about 20 minutes into this dud, I was rooting for the alien beasties -- their diagnosis seemed dead-on.

One Star (and only for quoting Knee-Chee).

A mundane sitcom with feature pretensions, the kind where the comic "situation" is simply a coat-rack for hanging a rag-tag assortment of inflated sight gags and telegraphed punch lines.

Remember that the director, the renowned Mike Mitchell, is the genius who helmed "Deuce Bigalow: Male Gigolo," and be sufficiently generous to accept that such a high level of excellence is hard to sustain.

No less laughable is the ending, where Ritchie neatly reflects today's prevailing attitude -- that audiences can't be trusted to handle a hint of ambiguity, but can live happily with flat-out stupidity.

There's nothing even mildly intriguing, or remotely galvanizing, about Showgirls.

Is this movie so god-awful bad that it's hilariously good? Can't be bothered deciding. Figure that's an answer in itself.

What's up with director John McTiernan? The man has got to get a career of his own -- sponging off the pale leavings of Norman Jewison just won't do.

Calls itself a movie. It has words and pictures like a movie, and will appear in theatres like a movie, and will damn sure charge admission like a movie. But, truth be told, that's pretty much where the resemblance stops.

The incomprehensible leads to the inexplicable which ends in the indecipherable.