It's all very pat and, ultimately, annoying.

Lots of buildings and cars explode, but there isn't a spark between any of the characters.

There's not a scrap of imagination in the script.

Serving Sara, which often feels more like serving time, is one of those tortured Hollywood romantic comedies that starts with a passable premise and turns into an inventory of flat gags and weak lines set against a travelogue backdrop.

Just the umpteenth replay of the girl-meets-boy/boy-loses-girl/boy-gets-girl story.

Mostly, the plot is busy and incomprehensible and the action sequences directed with all the art of a detonation.

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

General Boredom meets Major Tedium on the Civil War fields of Virginia.

You leave Stolen Summer with the feeling that you have watched acrobats stumble on a tightrope with no net below. Not a great show, but at least nobody got badly hurt.

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

Smith and Lawrence enjoyed some amusing chemistry in the '95 original, but their molecules sure aren't jibing here. It's a full hour into this behemoth before there's anything resembling a belly laugh.

For about 20 minutes, Phantoms, based on Dean Koontz's bestseller, keeps you guessing. After that, it barely keeps you awake.

The script is definitely mediocrity mixed with complication.

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 most disturbing aspect of Cold Creek Manor -- a predictable, disjointed "Cape Fear" knockoff -- is that a script this disjointed and unoriginal could actually get the Hollywood green light.

In the right hands, Good Boy! might have been a ripe bit of mischief. But except for an endless drum roll of fart jokes, what we get is stuffy liberal humanism that would bore the Oshkoshes off Al Gore's littlest nieces and nephews.

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

A semi-intriguing abomination, the movie The Cat in the Hat takes a piece of classic childhood Americana and turns it into something garish, dumb, ugly and senseless.

The problem here isn't how the figures look; rather, it's what they do and say -- the story is lame and the dialogue no better.

Oh, it's perfect all right. In fact, The Perfect Score is a flawless example of the classic January movie release -- the kind of studio picture that even the studio loathes, and so consigns to the dumping ground of the year's frosty first month.

There ain't much to You Got Served, but at least this teensploitation flick is bookended by two frenzied sequences that fully exploit the visual potential of street dancing.

I confess to a deep uncertainty about whether this can be rightly called a movie. A bunch of scenes, maybe... I confess to a cynical belief that Lola isn't actually a role but just a succession of costume changes.

Despite being set in 1958 Cuba, Havana Nights sticks to the formula. This would be perfectly acceptable if the dancing was "dirtier" and if there was a spark between the young couple.

A plot so thin you could filter coffee through it.

In what is surely a tribute to the dazzling mediocrity of director Luis Llosa, the real jungle looks as bland as the fake jungle.

A lazy, hasty effort that offers little beyond a few jack-in-the-box startles and a high body count, including Hewitt's bouncing about in a shirt half-unbuttoned over a bikini top.

A twisted, but not particularly clever, black comedy.

In its nearly two-hour running time, in its always lugubrious pace, in its almost complete absence of laughs, The Prince & Me is a comedy that plays like a tragedy. No stricken bodies, though, unless you count the ones in the audience slumped back in their seats -- perchance they slept.

Okay, it's just a movie, but his "reward" just doesn't cut it, even on a basic storytelling level. A crooked casino and a nephew's experiment with drugs are not enough justification for the hero's violent acts of vengeance.

The United States of Leland has a resonance of "Elephant" without the visual poetry or structural sophistication, or "American Beauty" without the leavening comedy, but it's neither an insightful nor well-made film.

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.

An overemphatic revenge fantasy devoid of even a trace of excitement or wit.

The plot's not so hot -- it feels like it was jotted down by someone on an after-dinner napkin.

The net result is a few shaky laughs and one unwavering sensation -- that The Terminal is interminable.

Filled with visual potential, yet Levinson can't tap it. He's just a whole lot more comfortable trying to tame the human software than the technical hardware.

With the performers given zilch to perform, the result is a picture that's all chassis and no engine, or, in the parlance of the genre, a bunch of pointy hats in search of a transporting broomstick.

There, in its midst, stands a freeze-dried Arthur -- stripped of his legend, shivering in the cold and wondering, like the rest of us, where in hell the magic went.

The finale just seems hypocritical, even nonsensical in a comedy that derives its few laughs from a farting dog and an accidental gynecological exam. This book is better left closed.

A vigorously cross-marketed product, with comics, collectable cards, games and a television series.

The devil is back in Exorcist: The Beginning, and he is more disgusting than ever. Not more scary, just really yucky, in a kind of maggots-on-a-pizza-slice way.

A crashing bore.

Very little of it works.

Now, forcibly deported to Chicago and peopled with American stars, the same story is huffed and puffed and squeezed into an entirely different cultural context. Guess what? Sayonara sushi, hello turkey.

[Law] talks straight to the camera like the young Michael Caine, but this time our hunk has got zilch to say. That's because a bastard's candour is off-limits in today's politically correct market — it just wouldn't be polite.

It's the perfect sort of movie to have playing on a television in the corner of a rec room during a low-key beer and pizza party.

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

Dull Blade just doesn't cut it.

The countdown begins with the first negative integer — an amped-up score that overpowers the proceedings like a bad band at a high-school dance.

It's possible to insult even a teenager's intelligence.

All would be forgiven if Peter were worth believing in. Instead, the boy who wouldn't grow up comes off like a shrill, obnoxious little drip. Shrek should give him a right pounding.

Talky, crude and sexist, Mallrats is significantly less funny, a flatulent sequel to the director's small start.

Is Kazaam racist? In effect, yes. But it'sracism linked to bad marketing: You can't really mix a black-pride rap film with a revamped version of "Free Willie" and expect them to magically jibe.

A film willing to cheat whatever way necessary to scare you... The good news is that once you leave the theatre, you'll never think of Boogeyman again.

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

Every time you think you grasp the concept, another layer of outlandish supernatural gobbledygook is laid on top, leaving the viewer feeling as spun-out as Linda Blair's head.

Director Adam Shankman pushes together scenes with little rhythm or flow. Writers Thomas Lennon and Robert Ben Garant ignore credibility, throw in pointless sight gags, treat humiliation as comedy and use tiresome ethnic stereotypes. In short, Diesel doesn't get the help he needs.

Meant to explore anger, all this picture does is manufacture it.

The results are so listless, dated and characterless.

A bunch of scenes in need of a tighter narrative and, more importantly, a raison d'être.

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

Herbie without the herb has never been my cup of tea.

While this may all sound seductively warped to those who enjoy movies featuring sexually deviant confinement and torture, blasphemous rants and rampaging rednecks, The Devil's Rejects does not live up to its sick, twisted and campy intentions. "Straw Dogs" meets "Smokey And The Bandit" for the new millennium it ain't.

In lieu of a movie, we get a series of car chases rudely interrupted by the occasional smattering of dialogue.

In the worst scenes in Deuce Bigalow: European Bigalow, it's as if Schneider and Co. are straining to invent new taboos just so they can break them, a strategy that provokes more confused silence than laughter.

The director's approach is far too ham-fisted and erratic to bring Four Brothers up to the level of enjoyable trash -- it's too crummy to earn that distinction.

Instead, you get a nominal character study that boasts a single mighty performance and one nifty scene; alas, both performance and scene exist in a narrative vacuum - the plot is non-existent and the pace makes the ice age seem hasty.

Falls somewhere on that aesthetic scale between mediocre and flat-out bad.

Scott means for his entertainment package to be hip, hysterical fun. But his stylistic embellishments and indiscriminate appetite for sensation crowds his title character right out of the film.

Most of The Fog will seem drearily perfunctory even to those viewers who don't know Carpenter's version, which itself emulated the elegant gloom of Val Lewton's horror pics of the 1940s.

Unwilling to offend, the scribes have committed the greatest offence of all - they've neglected to tell a story, airbrushing out anything remotely dramatic.

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.

One of those purposefully glum studies in alienation that Hollywood occasionally produces as blue-state specials for disenchanted liberals.

The result is a curious mix - a picture that simultaneously seems meanderingly loose, affording the cast plenty of performing space, and suffocatingly tight, choking off the audience from any interpretive engagement.

Forgettable.

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

An Adam Sandler movie without Adam Sandler, it turns out, is not necessarily an improvement.

By then, the lofty ambitions can't disguise the sad reality - it's long, it's cluttered, and it's trite.

With some movies, though, it's just the opposite. Like this one. It's a whole lot easier to forget than to forgive.

Guaranteed neither to offend nor delight.

What's amazing is how far McConaughey carries this nonsense despite his total lack of chemistry with Parker and almost Zen-like indifference to his circumstances.

This story, like many of Towne's own, does not come with a happy ending. Or beginning, for that matter, because it's almost immediately clear that Ask the Dust bites the dust -- his dream movie is stillborn.

Here's a movie that tries to be a video game but is less entertaining than a vending machine.

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

An underdog's breakfast of a movie, with some quite funny characters and set pieces mixed with some excruciating "moral lessons," but at least it moves along at a brisk pace.

If it weren't for Mo'Nique's fresh, appealing screen presence, Phat Girlz would fall flat.

Sure, the food looks good and the prayers are worth hearing, but there just isn't enough wine in the world to tempt the prophet Elijah into dropping by this household when this is the company he'll get.

Though Silent Hill's shoddy dialogue and incoherent story constantly irritate, several sights and scenes possess a certain surreal grandeur...Sadly, that's not enough to compensate for Silent Hill's utter lack of tension, intrigue, character development or satisfactory explanations for what the hell's happening on the screen.

Like a two-bit philosopher working the wrong side of the stone, Howard has managed to turn gold into lead.

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.

Just my luck that I saw the trailer for the film several times and already knew all of this, which made the long-form version of the movie redundant.

The intriguing thing about The Peaceful Warrior is that nothing else in the movie feels haphazard.

Little Man will probably satisfy fans of the Wayans.

The disturbing thing in this preposterous piece of family fluff from writer-director Steve Oedekerk (Ace Ventura: When Nature Calls, the Oscar-nominated Jimmy Neutron: Boy Genius) is the sight of bulls with udders.

A family-friendly adventure.

Beerfest is safety-by-numbers comedy. A troupe, as opposed to a single comic star like Adam Sandler, shares the comic load and, well, at least the film is funnier than "Click."

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.

With barely a laugh to be found, Confetti takes the "mock" right out of the mockumentary, and you can guess what's left. Yep, a Umentary, a brand new genre best defined by what it's not -- not real like a doc, not funny like a mock, not this thing or that thing or much of anything.

School for Scoundrels suffers from an old-fashioned identity crisis. The poor thing is awfully confused, and so are we. Is it a black comedy that isn't dark enough? Or a dumb comedy that isn't stupid enough, or a gross-out comedy that isn't yucky enough? Or is it really just a romance comedy that isn't sweet enough? Don't have a clue, but this much is certain: It's definitely a failed comedy that isn't funny enough.

[Lange] does give the movie the only excitement it possesses -- the frisson of a hideous thrill -- but it's still an excruciating embarrassment.

A British flick based on the first novel in a popular teenage spy-thriller series by Anthony Horowitz, looks promising but, unfortunately, doesn't measure up.

Sarah Michelle Gellar is not faring well as a horror-movie scream queen. Gone are the attitude, wit and verve she used to routinely display in the title role of TV's "Buffy the Vampire Slayer."

Definition of redundant: A formulaic Hollywood pic that calls itself Déjà Vu.

Why bother suffering through 90 minutes of bad company for a few moments of holiday cheer? Especially when you can still stay home alone and watch "A Charlie Brown Christmas" somewhere on TV.

Though a few scenes drum up some intensity -- that green ham Gustave makes one last great appearance -- it's mostly grim, dull and ugly, three qualities that nobody wants in a piece of multiplex filler about a surly reptile.

Despite their hackneyed characters, Smith and Lewis create a tiny spark and add a little humour. Without them, Catch and Release would be totally dead in the water.

Norbit is pretty much a bad-taste sinkhole.

As you watch -- no, endure -- this flattened-out spectacle, there's really nothing worth pondering save for a single thought: What a difference a director makes.

Narratively, the film strikes all the sentimental chords that audiences typically find so reassuring, but the music grates here, sounding mechanical and flat, lacking the single ingredient indispensable to any uplifting fable - a charming belief in its own sweet nature. [19 Apr 1996, p. C1]

The movie's uninteresting characters, boneheaded dialogue and flagrantly nonsensical narrative detract considerably from the virtues of the visual design.

American Me is a graphic and honest effort that, unfortunately, becomes a catalogue of other films on similar subjects. Its depiction of prison life is much too slow, too long, too repetitive and too familiar. [13 Mar 1992, p. C3]

A perfunctory gore fest and quite possibly the year's worst date movie.

The cast is equally strong (especially McDonnell), but the vast subject and the shifting settings force Kasdan all over the map. [10 Jan 1992]

White Nights is too ponderous to have the pizzazz of trash and too dumb to have the insight of art - it's a lumbering behemoth of a film in which the extraordinary talent of its one authentic star, Mikhail Baryshnikov, is exploited in a Cold War cartoon that suggests a musical adaptation of Ayn Rand's anti- Soviet novel, We The Living. [22 Nov 1985]

Cranked up at double speed, the plot of Flashdance could almost be a satirical fantasy about dance students. Although Flashdance doesn't admit it's a fantasy, neither does it succeed in looking realistic. [16 Apr 1983, p.E5]

When The Big Chill is busy being funny, it's a great comedy, but when it goes for depth, it hits bottom an inch down. [30 Sep 1983, p.E1]

Kubrick certainly doesn't fail small. One could fast forget The Shining as an overreaching, multi-levelled botch were it not for Jack Nicholson. Nicholson, one of the few actors capable of getting the audience to love him no matter what he does, is an ideal vehicle for Kubrick. [14 Jun 1980, p.E1]

Do we at least perk up during the ol' gunfight at the O.K. Corral, or the vacant lot at Fremont Street, or wherever the hell it did take place? Sorry. Kasdan never was an action director, and he clearly hasn't gone to school for this flick. Bang, bang, I'm dead, you're not, next scene - I've seen livelier shoot-outs at a soccer match. [24 Jun 1994, p.D1]

The manipulative Star Wars-style score is the only novelty on tap in Silverado, which has a plot too drearily complicated and arid to summarize and an attitude almost unbearable in its dryly smirky assurance that it knows what you want from a Western, which is to say, action that never quits, emotion that's never felt, characters that are never real and situations that are never sensible. [10 Jul 1985, p.S7]

It wants to make an important political statement, which might have been dandy if it had anything remotely cogent to say.

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]

Most of the time the film is simply stupid; not offensive, just silly. [03 May 1983]

Stallone's sequel has almost nothing to do with the original film except that it's about dancing; otherwise, it's Rocky IV with legwarmers. [16 Jul 1983]

It is a disappointment - just intermittently engaging, and lacking the cohesion of his best efforts, it seems less a fully realized feature than a film-school foible. [30 Aug 1996]

There is, admittedly, something splendidly subversive about putting the movie's arch-villains into a children's theme park - the ultimate symbol of both apple-pie family values and the whole U.S. entertainment industry. There are no real worms in this apple, however; like most flicks conceived as marketing vehicles, it's hollow at the core. [27 May 1994, p.D3]

The whole d--- thing can be summed up in three little words: yo ho hum.

What My Blue Heaven has going for it: one funny premise and two earthly delights, in the comic persons of Steve Martin and Rick Moranis. What My Blue Heaven does not have going for it: anything remotely resembling a cohesive script. [22 Aug 1990, p.C4]

Air America, starring Mel Gibson's big blue eyes and Robert Downey, Jr.'s big brown biceps, is bland and toothless. [15 Aug 1990]

It transforms that bottom line into a saccharine border, framing the picture with enough faux inspiration to keep Hallmark in cards for a month of Mother's Days. [03 Jun 1994]

It's Footloose Loose In The Third Reich and, even with your expectations kept knee-high to a kindergarten, you might have at least hoped for some finger-poppin' music and a few great dance scenes. Sorry. Here, too, things come up short. [05 Mar 1993]

Candy and Moranis are real talents, but they're completely wasted, like everyone else here, sacrificed to the grade-school inanities of that self-indulgent script. [26 Jun 1987, p.D6]

I'll personally toast the buns of anybody I hear saying anything good about the movie Broadcast News. Broadcast News is for boobs. It doesn't apply to us. Anyone who thinks otherwise is invited not to think, because thinking is for statues. [16 Dec 1987, p.C5]

Rambo's return is thick with usual thrills. [26 May 1988, p.C1]

The movie seems much, much longer than its 90-minute running time. [15 June 1998]

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

In the end, this musical is not a disgrace - Huston has too much experience to let the thing die. But he cannot summon the magic required to let it live. Watching Annie is like being buried alive in balloons. [21 May 1982]

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

Distinctly humdrum, The Last Legion, a boy's adventure story that seems to have been dragged out of the vaults of some early-sixties TV series.

Like kudzu vine, killer bees and herpes, we may never be rid of it.

Who wants to watch any film where Sarandon, the sexiest 60-year-old woman alive, is first prize in a corn-eating contest?

The Game Plan, created as a vehicle for Johnson, is a family comedy heavy on syrup and low on laughs.

David Beckham may star in Goal II: Living the Dream but calling him an actor is like calling his wife a singer.

Throughout all this, Cage's lazy, dull performance – who knew there were so many ways to express smugness? – is enlivened only by poorly timed bursts of exuberance.

Give this call a miss.

The problems with First Sunday extend well beyond the hokey premise and predictable performances to the fundamentals of script, direction and tone.

If you thought "300" was silly, think of 10,000 BC as 33.333 times sillier.

At times, the film is more fun than it deserves to be, and it's probably a lot more fun if you're a 13-year-old with an addiction to "Bully: Scholarship Edition."

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

A lamentably slack and dishonest genre exercise.

Made of Honor should come with a bar code and a Wal-Mart display - this isn't a movie, it's a commodity. The generic brand is the romantic comedy, and the manufacturer's material of choice is recycled plastic, smoothly glued together to assure the consumer that the purchase is risk-free and thoroughly predictable.

Some films, like some people, wear their artsy pretensions on their sleeve, and there really isn't much going on beneath – it's just a posturing armband wrapped around a plain arm. Welcome, then, to the emptiness of Mister Lonely, a movie that goes to extraordinary lengths to say ordinary things.

Though frantic from the get-go, A Previous Engagement rarely finds its feet. Devoid of the fine balance of grace and chaos necessary to any screen farce, the proceedings are slapdash, repetitious and badly overextended.

What Happens in Vegas should damn well have stayed in Vegas.

While the movie and the accompanying series are being pitched to a younger audience than most new Star Wars ventures, parents may be perturbed by the film's relentless violence.

Yes, from "Blonde" to "Bunny," it's abundantly evident that the two scribes have mastered, truly mastered, the serious art of self-plagiarism.

The storyline is a sinkhole that swallows up any sense and suspense.

An ugly, strictly-for-meatheads comedy that can only be recommended to couples who wear matching Tie Domi Toronto Maple Leafs jerseys out on a date.

All of this is interesting, but not all that entertaining.

One smart thing Green's character Ezekiel does is split from Sex Drive as soon as his two scenes are over.

The Boondock Saints II does, from time to time, display a vulgar charm. Or maybe it just wears you out.

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.

The high point might be the opening scene, before the stars arrive on screen.

Some of the most memorable performances from great actors are also their worst: Add to that list Anthony Hopkins's turn as a sinister old Jesuit.

Don't mean to boast, but I can suspend my disbelief as willingly as any credulous moviegoer. Yet not even an industrial crane would have helped here.

With its stilted dialogue, fragments of voice-over and over-busy camera, Red Riding Hood feels off-kilter from the start.

Apparently, somebody thought it was time for a remake. Clearly, somebody was dead wrong.

By comparison to this effort, "Pineapple Express" seems like a model of thoughtful maturity.

Last Night is a New York morality play: A film in love with (lower) Manhattan that is suspicious of real romance. What it lacks is Allen's sense of horseplay; his appetite for lunatic adventure. When you take a bite of the Big Apple, you're not supposed to nibble.

Bad Teacher should be a hoot. But it isn't. Love the theory here, hate the practice.

Over on the aliens side, it's hard to make out faces, but there's no doubt about their place of origin: These slimy, growling, bug-eyed and distinctly non-scary things are straight from central casting.

In today's cultural climate, any remake of Conan the Barbarian can only be considered (a) redundant or (b) a cruel case of rubbing salt in our cinematic wounds. Either way, it ain't a pretty sight – in fact, it's downright barbaric.

The film has one sly, ominous touch Peckinpah would have liked. David is writing a script on the defence of Stalingrad, a battle that swallowed two million lives. Otherwise, the new version is a vigilante action film bereft of subtlety or restraint.

All the borderline pantomime acting and wigged buffoonery is deliberate and silly, but The Three Musketeers remains charmless, a romp brought down by its lead-footed script.

Add up these three intentions – the down-and-dirty tone, the tender and uplifting message, the starring vehicle – and the math ain't funny. Bottom line: This movie is a whole lot less than the sum of its parts.

Virtue aside, however, Red Tails is a lousy film. Not wincingly bad, mind you, just mediocre.

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.

W.E. is a heavily made-up face masquerading as a movie and demanding to be admired – demands that might just leave you with an acute pain in the other end.

Admittedly, it's been a long time since Kelly McGillis was being hyped as "the next Grace Kelly." But of all the films in all the world for whom the former Top Gun lust object could have done a walk-on, this lacklustre haunted-house feature is the one she chooses?

Call me Grumpy, but this seems less an adaptation than a random assault.

Ye gods, there's a lot of hacking and many seismic eruptions in The Wrath of the Titans, the latest 3-D action film that treats the Greek gods as action figures.

Another Nicholas Sparks novel, another cinematic brush with insulin shock.

The film sputters and stalls and winds up behaving like the worst sort of oldster – passing gas and pretending to be deep.

Try not to be in the same room as Jesus Henry Christ. At the very least run when the first fire alarm sounds.

The biggest high comes from the images evoked by the title alone, or the title in tandem with the movie poster, doesn't it?

Dance gets political in Step Up Revolution, the fourth installation of the popular movie franchise, which delivers plenty of spectacular fancy footwork in what is otherwise a flat-footed fantasy.

Anyone who has seen "Dream Girls," "What's Love Got To Do With It?" or even "The Doors" will find themselves in familiar (if inferior) territory here.

A few striking images keep our attention – like evil warrior Rain (Michelle Rodriguez) seated menacingly with an assault rifle on a playground swing in the 'burbs. But the film's title promises payback, without offering ample compensation.

Clint has a script. Actually, Clint has too much script, one of those schematic by-the-number jobs that telegraphs its every pitch.

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.

The filmmakers have altered the premise from the unlikely to the ridiculous.

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.

It’s hard to argue with the title here – Safe Haven, indeed. This is all about safety in the Hollywood workplace. Why make a movie when making a Hallmark-card-with-dialogue is so much less risky?

The characters are reluctant to believe in the face of overwhelming evidence, mostly because writer-director Scott Stewart doesn’t want to play his hand too early. By the time the movie is over, it’s easy to see why he kept his cards close to his chest. He’s not really holding anything.

There are two movies in Superman III, one a witless and obvious and often cruel comic strip, the other a blithe and subtle and often amusing exercise in middle-brow camp. Not only do the two halves never come together, they are in active opposition. [17 June 1983]

Feels like a five-year-old with a megaphone, excitedly yelling about his latest bulldozer-soldier-dinosaur smash-kill-squash-everything game.

All the special effects in the universe don't make up for a lame plot, though. There's something foul about a Star Trek movie so apparently slapdash: the creators know that legions of fans will show up, no matter what. [18 Nov. 1994]

It's unclear as to how we are supposed to feel about these monologuists, the majority of whom are twentysomething; nothing is how I felt about them, but perhaps I was tired. [27 Sept. 1991]

What we have here is a romp, a funny romp at times, with a clear satiric intent and the expected quota of outrageous style - likable enough, yes, but a rather flimsy thing, a zany fest with its mind on cruise control. [17 June 1994]

A limp Eddie Murphy vehicle that even he seems embarrassed to be part of.

The film lacks the moronic consistency that graces the Sandlerian oeuvre at its most pristine.

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.

There are people who find treasures in celebrities' garbage cans so it's a reasonable gamble they might want to buy tickets to watch their throwaway home-movie projects as well.

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?

Here is a truly unfunny comedy from Universal Studios, which seems determined to prove that Hollywood can be opportunistic and clueless at the same time.

So far as I can remember, no such film has ever asked its audience to experience the level of excruciating discomfort an actual fish must feel when it is gored by a sharp hook, yanked into the air, and left to flail in desperation before succumbing to an agonizing death... Until now.

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

Because the society in Menace II Society is boxed in sociologically, the picture (for all its strengths) is boxed in esthetically. Already, this genre is beginning to seem as much a victim as the victims it portrays.

Think of it as trope grope. Things are so relatively democratic nowadays that filmmakers have to rummage through the past for a truly shmaltzy story. And they don't come any shmaltzier than this.

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