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]