Like the nuclear sub it's named after, the picture is big, shiny, and expensive. It's also cold, hard, and cumbersome, and lacking the barest hint of emotional or psychological depth. [9 Mar 1990, Arts, p.10]

Carpenter pulls out all the action-adventure stops, but he and coscripter Larry Sulkis forgot to write dialogue the audience could listen to without howling in disbelief.

It's encouraging to see Hollywood tackle themes of faith and religion, but here, too, Shyamalan is timid, reducing them to fuzzy New Age clichés. Add wooden acting, stilted dialogue, and a faux-arty style, and you have a thudding disappointment.

The infuriating thing about XXX isn't that it delivers thrills and spills to moviegoers who don't know any better, but that its Hollywood hype reinforces the notion that brain-dead entertainment is what movies are all about.

A private eye enters a horrific world of degrading sex and bottom-feeding pornographers.

The dialogue is dumb ('zilla has the best lines, "arrrrrggh" and "maaroarrr"), New York is waterlogged, and Godzilla isn't on screen enough.

The consequences aren't remotely as comic as they're meant to be.

Falls flat on screen, weighed down by far-fetched plot twists.

South Korean melodrama uses a unique location, dominated by fishermen's floating huts, as the background for an overheated story that grows steadily more grotesque and unpleasant as it proceeds.

The story is mildly entertaining in its hackneyed way, but there's no excusing the picture's exploitative treatment of almost all the female characters.

The funny scenes are as far apart as oases in the Sahara. [22 May 1987]

The junior Giannini, who has inherited Giancarlo's handsome looks, portrays his mercurial character with energy and flair. Madonna doesn't. Indeed, it's hard to remember the last time a certified celebrity gave a performance so monotonous, unimaginative, and all-around tiresome to watch.

Let's look at the bright side. If this movie bombs as it deserves to, we won't have to sit through "Analyze Those" a few years from now!

I doubt if the results would have satisfied Kahlo, whose originality in matters of life, art, and ideas was vastly more far-reaching.

The bad thing about A Guy Thing isn't the talent of its stars but the warmed-over triteness of the material they're forced to work with.

The problem with Possession isn't that it's filmed in a lackluster way, but that it shouldn't have been filmed at all. Byatt's novel is an adventure in language, telling its story through a kaleidoscopic array of Victorian-style poetry and prose, alongside gripping accounts of the characters' activities and escapades.

What really hurts is the movie's shallow screenwriting, self-indulgent acting, and woozy camerawork.

Hop away from this one fast!

The plot is predictable, the characters are cliches, and all the actors look and sound like refugees from a movie Martin Scorsese would have made vastly better three decades ago.

Was this spiritless stuff really directed by Paul and Chris Weitz of "American Pie" fame? How the rebels have mellowed!

Fiction and fantasy to evade reflection on the world we actually live in.

Een fans of Jay and Silent Bob may find the story too slender and the jokes too repetitive to be much fun.

The gimmick behind the screenplay is clever, but the filmmakers don't rise to the challenge they've set themselves, merely spinning two unimaginative stories for the price of one.

Brody has offbeat charisma, but it's no match for the corny dialogue he's given here, not to mention the "Wild at Heart" snakeskin jacket he wears.

The film means well, but each scene gets clobbered by sappy screenwriting.

The movie is designed to show off Liotta's acting skills, but pointless mayhem and sheer nastiness crowd out any virtues it might have had.

An interesting cast is wasted in this misanthropic thriller.

A total lack of chemistry between the stars -- neither of whom is particularly good at romantic comedy in the first place -- and you have a promising package that grows steadily less lovable as it goes along. Down with this movie!

Norton's high-energy acting is the only element that saves the picture from being a total loss.

The acting is uneven and most of the romancing seems so mismatched.

How did a dignified pro like Duvall get stuck in this fender-bender?

Travolta and Jackson have some effective scenes, but Nielsen is lacking in charisma, and James Vanderbilt's screenplay ought to be court-martialed.

The slasher-movie genre may never die, but can't its perpetrators think up variations more clever than this by-the-numbers rehash?

Violent and vapid, but the visual jolts may please horror buffs.

This boatload of clichés is strenuously unfunny.

This is fatuous twaddle with a nasty, misogynistic edge.

By the time it ended, I'd stopped caring. I suspect most moviegoers will do the same. Here's hoping Shelton scurries back to the athletic world in a hurry.

The plot pants so hard -- that it makes less sense than the average pet-food commercial.

The movie's one good performance is given by the house, full of ominous inscriptions, inscrutable chambers, and fiendish machines. The human characters are played with various degrees of manic overacting.

The film is a disappointment, and at more than two hours' running time, a very long disappointment.

It soon gets down to its real business: fights, face-offs, and showdowns mired in the shallowest sort of Hollywood machismo.

Crash-lands as disastrously as the heroes and never quite recovers its wits.

Perry and Hurley don't have much chemistry, and the story is so dumb you might want to sue it for stupidity.

Moves at a lumbering pace, peppered with ungainly gags and dramatic moments with little emotional power. The ironic commentary on show-biz superficiality is sabotaged by Niccol's failure to make his own story seem real.

A lovestruck Californian kidnaps a neighbor's dog as a way of getting her attention.

The film tries to revive the sort of good-hearted optimism associated with Frank Capra classics of the 1940s era, but pictures like "It's a Wonderful Life" and "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington" were never so simplistic, syrupy, or tedious to sit through.

This movie has promising ingredients. But you'll leave wanting much, much more.

So sloppily made that it's barely coherent.

A director of Frankenheimer's stature deserves less sensationalistic material, and so does his audience.

Goldmember comes after years of escalating vulgarity have thrown the need for caution -- and cleverness -- out of fashion.

At 225 minutes long, it feels like a trilogy in itself. That wouldn't be a problem if it had energy and imagination, but those qualities are missing, as is any sense of historical or philosophical context.

The movie has a well-meaning message about love and loyalty being the bedrock of real family values, but its good intentions sag as the story trades its air of mischievous comedy for trite sentimentality, arbitrary plot twists, and enough maudlin melodramatics to sustain a tabloid TV series.

The film has enough wild driving to satisfy any "French Connection" fan or "Bullitt" buff, but there's precious little for anyone else to enjoy. 2 foolish + 2 flashy = 4 get it!

Opium- addicted Allan Quatermain becomes none other than Sean Connery. At least he gives a real movie-star performance, which is more than the other gentlemen manage. Extraordinary? Balderdash!

Muddled screenwriting and uninspired directing.

A perfectly funny idea -- call it "Ms. Ditz Goes to Washington" -- that's never allowed to take on real comic life. I laughed exactly once.

The repetitious script -- cobbled together by no fewer than five writers -- shows interest in nothing beyond action-centered plot gimmicks and tame romantic shenanigans.

The movie's real spectacle is the sight of so many talented people slogging through such idiotic material.

Unoriginal.

If the Warner Bros. wizards have it right, what a girl wants is to see as much of Amanda Bynes as she possibly can...It's not so great for the rest of us, since the film has nothing else to offer.

I found much of it as emotionally rigged as a crooked horse race.

Whatever novelty this series ever possessed has gone down the proverbial tube. The actors are on autopilot, and Adam Herz's screenplay panders to its immature target audience so cravenly and relentlessly that it verges on incompetence.

Davis contributes his usual dignity -- not easy when you're playing a character who thinks he's John F. Kennedy dyed black -- but it's not enough to save this silly thriller-comedy.

In short, this isn't a poignant drama about courage and imagination -- it's a contrived fantasy about courage and imagination.

Talking dogs were cute, once. It's a tad disconcerting, however, when a canine starts lip syncing to the voice of Carl Reiner so it can complain about flatulence.

This fact-based drama is very well-meaning but also cloying, sentimental, and simplistic. Gooding's fake-toothed grin deserves an Oscar for best makeup, though.

A romantic comedy-drama has to make sense, though, and Love Actually doesn't, actually.

It's a sort of soullessly cheerful cynicism that is about as far from Seuss as one can imagine.

Weak acting, even by Hoffman. Aniston is so far above this material she should never, ever have signed on.

As soon as I finish writing this review, I'm going to try traveling a few hours in the past. That way, I can improve my life by skipping this movie!

It's hard to enjoy this when you're barraged by bathroom humor, animal stunts, and gags about a character whose memory loss is so bad he's called Ten-Second Tom.

Like the recent "Mona Lisa Smile," this tale could have been an effective feminist fable if it weren't so calculated.

Romano tries hard, but it takes real big-screen talent to draw laughs and emotions from material as flimsy and formulaic as the script.

This belated "reimagining" is as beguiling as a dried-out palm tree.

Surely it couldn't be meant as dramatic realism! But it is. And amazingly, the movie gets worse as it goes along.

So stupid you'll wish you'd brought a duffel bag of your own.

The nasty, sometimes violent story was written by Christian Forte, a newcomer who is clearly under Quentin Tarantino's unpleasant spell, and directed by Kevin Spacey, an unusually gifted actor who doesn't yet show any special talent for filmmaking.

The animals are cute and Murphy gives a lively performance, but as with his remake of "The Nutty Professor," the original is still the best.

In short, it's dull, derivative, and as lifelike as a heap of historical figurines. Few will remember this Alamo for long.

Strenuously unfunny sequel.

How could such a high-octane cast produce such low-octane horror?

Poor writing and directing are the culprits - and whatever possessed the gifted Moore to make her role a nonstop Diane Keaton imitation? There oughta be a law!

In sum, Van Helsing is yet another video game disguised as a wide-screen epic. Here's hoping the box office drives a firm wooden stake through its hokey Hollywood heart.

Great premise, but the ensuing trials and tribulations - not to mention hapless attempts at comedy - are as off-key as a karaoke scene in which Hudson sounds worse than any audition Simon Cowell has ever had to sit through.

The concept of dueling negotiators has strong dramatic potential, but Gray seems more interested in gimmicks and gunshots than in the psychological face-off between sharp-witted foes.

The special effects are extra special. The screenplay is idiotic, though, and Diesel speaks his dialogue like a Sylvester Stallone clone who never finished third grade.

The film contains so many endings that it's hard to tell what impressions the filmmakers want us to leave the theater with. Buy a copy of the book instead. It remains an excellent read.

The blend of live action and animation is competently done, but the subtly mean-spirited screenplay has more sour meows than hearty laughs.

Stiller strives to be a wild and wacky villain, Vaughn endeavors to be a likable and average hero, and both fall flat on their faces, like everything else in this unspeakably stupid comedy.

As he showed in the recent "Catch Me if You Can," also a Hanks vehicle, Spielberg has little talent for emotional realism, not to mention psychological suspense. He should scurry back to "Jurassic Park" as soon as the next flight leaves.

Labors mightily to be a frolicsome entertainment, but the results are - well, labored. The dialogue isn't snappy, the story isn't surprising, there's little chemistry between the stars.

It seems to have had the opposite effect on the director's taste, as she strives for new levels of raunchiness.

The movie gives us a Round Table and a flashing Excalibur but no magic, no mystery, no mythic resonance. Mostly there's a lot of slashing swordplay that should appeal to the picture's target audience of young males.

Imagine a movie where every character is more self-centered than Ted Baxter in "The Mary Tyler Moore Show" of old, add a caboodle of idiotic jokes, and you have some idea of this ugly, unfunny farce.

Viewers of that age may overlook the contrived situations and the awful acting, which consists mainly of frozen grins. Nobody else will.

What ensues is a Halloween-style blood bath accompanied by graphic sex scenes.

Uninspired thriller-comedy.

Even the delightful Duff disappoints.

Even MacLachlan's surprisingly witty performance can't compensate for the trite screenplay and Mistry's lack of charisma.

Cartoonish effects and overacting make this more corn than catnip.

The action is snappy and quick, but why does this youth-targeted adventure pit white male heroes against a trio of villains comprising a black man, an Asian man, and an ugly woman?

Dull despite its suspense-driven story.

The movie is gorgeously filmed and contains some fascinating lore about life in northern climes. But the plot is tritely predictable and far-fetched. Julia Ormond, Gabriel Byrne, and Vanessa Redgrave are among the performers who deliver less than their best.

Nicolas Cage, Ving Rhames, and Steve Buscemi are among the few performers who emerge with a shred of dignity at the end.

Almost entirely devoted to combat violence and sentimental interludes.

Crass and soulless.

Bataille was a serious philosopher as well as a sensation-seeking writer, but you'd never guess his provocative ideas from this updated version.

Breillat is a smart, serious observer of sexuality's often disruptive role in human life, but this existential drama is sadly pretentious.

Tennant's featherweight comedy is clearly pitched at the date-movie crowd, and couples may enjoy it if they can get past the picture's simplistic ethnic stereotypes and its willingness to wish away every real-life family problem the characters will surely face after the feel-good finale.

Some scenes paint a convincing portrait of Stern as a witty opponent of stuffiness, prudery, and hypocrisy. Others mix gross-out humor with nasty doses of racism, sexism, and homophobia that reveal a dark side to Stern's professional personality.

Sordid and sleazy, although the lead performances are hard to fault.

Falls flat, with more "sound design" than delicious music, more slick film editing than graceful ballroom gliding.

MESSAGE Nuclear blackmail is a horrible crime but can be defeated by vigilant and courageous authorities.

The story takes place in 2013, but you'd hardly know it from the age-old clichés Kevin Costner purloins to tell this overblown action yarn, which relies so heavily on ideas borrowed from John Ford westerns that the Hollywood giant should have been credited as codirector; too bad Costner can't invest them with Ford's kind of life and originality, though.

Alas, the movie is less clever than its characters.

Santa Claus's bag couldn't hold as many clichés as the screenplay dishes out.

It's astounding that the ingenious creator of "JFK" and "Wall Street" could make an epic on war and empire that's so utterly simplistic and unreflective.

Its main message is that everyone should believe and behave in exactly the same way. Groupthink wins again!

I hate to sound per-Snickety, but this lemon of a movie is a sadly unfortunate event.

De Niro and Hoffman almost give comic life to this brainless, vulgar farce.

This noisy, disorganized story is riddled with clichés, stereotypes, and self-indulgence from beginning to end.

The picture's real interest lies in detailing the villain's sadistic crimes, though, and this is rarely fun or edifying to watch.

Downright awful.

The plot is hamstrung by trite formulas, and there's too much violence and family tension for very young viewers. Shaquille O'Neal is likable as the title character, though.

Suffers from a lack of chemistry.

Barry Levinson's filmmaking style is often imaginative. The story contains horrific scenes of sexual torture as well as sadistic killings and other disturbing material, though.

Ron Shelton's romantic comedy has no more visual excitement than a televised golf tournament, but the climax is truly surprising, and there's solid acting by Don Johnson and Cheech Marin.

Cumming's antic acting is the only asset of this boisterous comedy.

Like a nincompoop version of "The Usual Suspects."

Adam Sandler's creative songs and silly expressions on "Saturday Night Live" may have turned him into a celebrity, but this movie based solely on his antics doesn't work.

Plenty of mad moviegoers will put this in their diaries as one of the worst pictures in ages.

The overlong comedy has few laughs and flirts far too much with racist, homophobic humor. A waste of a fine cast.

Sadly it's been botched. Guess Who serves up such flat dialogue and stilted situations that it's hard to sit through.

House of D, arrives in theaters this week, after debuting at the Tribeca Film Festival last year. I'm sorry to report it's the opposite of impressive.

What's the point of the picture, except to allow Kutcher fans occasional peeks at acting talent he usually keeps hidden?

Amiably bland actors can be fun to watch, as Tom Hanks has proved. Freeman is no Hanks, though, and The Hitchhiker's Guide won't boost anyone's career into hyperspace. Or give your mind a workout.

The comedy is shamelessly stupid and flagrantly vulgar by turns.

Luc Besson's screenplay is dumb, but has just enough weird touches to give occasional glimmers of interest.

The result is a quickly paced, slickly filmed entertainment that's also as crude and rude as the PG-13 rating will allow. It's mighty mean-spirited too, aiming "satirical jibes" at everyone from black illiterates to white rednecks, from breakers of the law to enforcers of the law, from society's elites to society's dregs.

The animation is deft but the screenplay is stilted, the voice-performances are unimaginative, and the whole project is surprisingly clumsy in its efforts to please young and old alike. A major disappointment.

The movie is a mish-mash of action-adventure clichés, book-ended with lame attempts at psychological interest. Written, directed, and acted with ham-fisted heaviness.

Serial killing and other insanity in the French countryside, with ineptly dubbed English dialogue.

Repetitious teen-targeted fluff.

Can a mild-mannered toxicologist and an eccentric Alcatraz veteran stop him before it's too late? Learning the answer means sitting through more than two hours of violence, vulgarity, and all-around excess, served up with high-tech trimmings by director Michael Bay.

David Cronenberg's movie is a chilly meditation on this theme, carrying some cinematic interest but surprisingly dull given the story's outrageous subject.

The dialogue is utterly inane, but the high-tech effects deliver the sort of thrills that disaster-film connoisseurs expect.

The acting ranges from adequate (Jared Leto, R. Lee Ermey) to awful (Lindsay Crouse and everyone else).

Mostly trite and tacky despite Robin Williams's strenuous acting.

Larry and Andy Wachowski directed this lurid, sexually explicit thriller.

The picture is effectively made, but viewers will want to erase the horrific violence that erupts in scene after scene, leading to an unusually mean-spirited finale.

Movie stars have tamed sassy kids in movies from "The Blackboard Jungle" to "Stand and Deliver," but it's hard to remember an example more patronizing or sentimentalized than this one.

One thing is certain: It's a bomb trying to be a hit, and at that it'll never succeed.

Youngsters may enjoy it. But the humor is generally of the genre heard in the boys' locker room at the high school gym.

When promising independent filmmakers decide to jump on the bandwagon and pump up the gore, the results are sure to be touted as visceral and unflinching. Don't be fooled. Kramer has even commented that the movie should be viewed as a modern-day Grimm's fairy tale. It's grim all right.

The suspense sequences are straight from the standard Hollywood blueprint, and the movie as a whole is so sloppily assembled that it's almost incoherent at times.

Weitz doesn't have the chops for satire, let alone black comedy.

This woozily uplifting saga is big on homilies and deficient in just about everything else.

Bacon lavishes his camera on her (Sedgwick) in various states of dress and undress, but the script, by Hannah Shakespeare - talk about having to live up to a name! - is a cheat. It rarely expands on the boy's crises in having to deal with such a mother.

I suspect audiences will see Shyamalan's portentous doodle for what it is - the height of arrogance and a bad night out at the movies.

Lange and Paltrow give it their all, but they can't save this one from plot holes, continuity mistakes, and heartlessness.

Borderline unwatchable, although, as is true of all Gilliam movies, it certainly is different.

I hope Keaton doesn't begin to make a specialty of these roles. They play into what is least attractive in her repertoire – the loosey-goosey, knockabout side of her that all too swiftly devolves into hysterics.

Some movies are so flagrantly awful that they achieve classic status. To this rarefied company we must now add The Astronaut Farmer.

Graham was good in films such as "Boogie Nights" and "Bowfinger" where her apparent innocence was a smoke screen for her lustful connivance. To be effective in the movies, she needs something to counteract her wholesomeness.

Maybe Jackson should avoid any more movies with "snake" in the title.

Philippe Rousselot's carefully shaded cinematography looks great, but the screenplay is pretentious and there's little to applaud in the top-heavy acting by John Malkovich and Julia Roberts.

The basic plot of Thomas Hardy's great novel "Jude the Obscure" comes through accurately enough, but its sublime irony and sardonic wit apparently got lost in the misty English countryside.

Shots of blood and naked bodies clash bizarrely with Coppola's more quaint and engaging notions; the result may be intended as a dialectical encounter, but seems more like a head-on collision.

Amanda Plummer is even more weirded-out than usual as a serial killer wandering through England with her sadly befuddled girlfriend. [10 May 1996, p.13]

Hal Hartley's innovative comedy-drama is more ambitious than successful, but it deserves credit for trying something genuinely unusual.

As a movie, it's mediocre.

Beverly Hills Cop III is perhaps the dumbest of the cop trio. There are no surprises, there's no real police work to unravel, and there are no mysteries. It's all very predictable with lots of gunplay, noise, and blood. [3 Jun 1994]

The rest of Franco Zeffirelli's latest Shakespearean outing is so eager to be cinematic, with its peripatetic camera and souped-up screenplay, that it forgets to make sense.

The story is too self-conscious about its offbeat qualities, becoming so cool that it practically freezes on the screen.

It's picaresque, all right, but full of ethnic stereotypes, and filmed much too blandly to compete with the superb ''Black Stallion'' of a few years ago.

Pokes and prods the viewer to watch the brutal, indiscriminate methods of Rio's SWAT-like cops and then demands only one conclusion: That cops in Rio's drug-infested slums must do what they do and if that means rampant point-blank executions, so be it.

Sometimes, dear reader, there's no place like home, and that's just where you should be when this gorefest opens at a theater near you.

After a powerful opening, when we see the first victim suddenly go blind while driving in traffic, the film devolves into a dystopian freak show and wastes many wonderful performers, including Mark Ruffalo and Julianne Moore.

With the mounting number of first-rate, even masterly foreign-language films locked out of movie theaters due to wary distributors, it's worth pondering why such laughable dreck as German actor-writer-director Vadim Glowna's House of the Sleeping Beauties actually made it through.

By comparison, Bride Wars makes "Sex and the City" seem like Jane Austen.

Don't be taken in by Taken.

The only point of interest in New in Town is sociological. In the current economic climate, this comedy about workers whose livelihood is rescued by a benevolent boss represents the ultimate wish-fulfillment fantasy. Don't spend your hard-earned discretionary cash on it.

The disjointedness of The Headless Woman might be the result of narrative complexity or of directorial ineptitude or (my favorite) of narrative complexity mangled by directorial ineptitude. If the residual fog ever clears, maybe I'll be able to tell you for sure.

Why are Steve Carell and Tina Fey wasting their time, and ours, by appearing in the miserable comedy Date Night?

The Last Airbender is like a Care Bears movie that got waylaid in the fourth dimension. It's insufferably silly.

It will be interesting to see whether audiences embrace Mr. Diesel's barely controlled vigilante as warmly as they embraced Clint Eastwood's swaggering "Dirty Harry" and Charles Bronson's nasty "Death Wish" characters a few decades ago.

A suggestion to screenwriters: Stop telling stalkers that their passion isn't misplaced and that the girl will come around in the end. It is, and she won't. Just give it up.

"The idea evolved and expanded," he (Snyder) says, "and took on a life of its own." Unfortunately, all of that life must have dribbled away as the project developed, because the resulting nonsense has none.

Full disclosure: I have to say I did laugh during Your Highness. Twice, I think.

Numbingly inane comedy.

It's a mash-up of blah buddy comedy and gross-out CGI monster splatter, with nary a laugh to be had.

An impossibly, incomprehensibly overlong and cacophonous bore.

It just may be the most boring movie ever made – period.

Monumentally unromantic.

They miss by a mile – or should I say, a light-year.

Caine acts dignified throughout, but there's no way to dignify dreck.

Arnold Schwarzenegger fights an outer-space monster in a third-world jungle. The monster never has a chance. Neither does the jungle. Neither does the audience. [19 June 1987, Arts & Leisure, p.23]

A dark comedy about a bachelor party gone awry, it is excessively violent, ghoulish, and gory. Very Bad Things is lack-of-taste taken to the extreme.

Frankly, it's excruciating to watch.

Paying homage to drug comedies of the '70s, Half Baked is high on getting high and low on laughs.

This romantic comedy is so awfully misjudged and ineptly executed in every department that, while it isn't quite a contender for the "so bad it's good" category, this critic was nonetheless dabbing tears of laughter from his eyes.

Pauly Shore is less a comedian than a class clown, and his dim-witted mugging makes Jim Carrey's antics seem creative triumphs by comparison. Vapid, vulgar, and more to the point, not funny.

The Griswalds drive to Las Vegas "because half the fun is getting there," but the fun never begins in this disappointing sequel to the Vacation slapstick comedies.

Numbingly violent action.

There's nothing fresh or off-beat in Final Destination 3, no talent that is struggling to get out. The only thing struggling to get out was me from the theater.

The subculture of weekend warrior bikers is such rich comic material that the ineptitude of Wild Hogs is doubly offensive.

Veteran comics like Steve Martin and Madeleine Kahn wrestle valiantly with the incoherent story and ham-fisted dialogue, but it's a losing battle all the way. [30 Dec 1994]

A sham.