Downey is undone by a woefully amateurish production that, sadly and ironically, looks like a cheap TV show.

The performances, under Mike Newell's direction, range from conventional (Ms. Roberts) to dreadful, and the script is as shallow as an old Cosmo cover story.

Extraordinary Measures requires extraordinary tolerance for bathos, bombast and plain old unpleasantness.

The last thing we need is entertainment that evokes the horror and then trivializes it with cheesy heroics. Never has a movie taken on a subject of greater immediacy, or handled it more ineptly.

The movie on the whole is joyless. Whatever Works doesn’t.

Before Firewall crumbles into foolishness, Harrison Ford and Paul Bettany make an oft-recycled plot look like a stylish model that just rolled out of a showroom.

Mr. Brooks manages to be deeply loathsome -- no small feat for a film that's shallowly amateurish.

J.Lo should sue her handlers for damages.

Mr. Samuell's stylistic revelries are meant as comments on the conventions and excesses of movie romance, but his approach is glib and self-congratulatory. No feelings dwell beneath the layers upon layers of faux-naïve artifice. I dare you to sit through this movie and not wish you were somewhere else.

The movie stands as a genuine offense against the venerable and indispensable institution of satire.

The IMAX print I saw was so murky as to make you give thanks for the few scenes shot in simple sunlight, the 3-D wasn't worth the bother, and never before have I wanted to chloroform an entire orchestra.

An abomination.

Its tone is unquenchably pretentious, and its scale is overblown.

A saga of static set pieces and strenuously clever notions, this is a fiasco of a film if ever there was one.

This is little more than a big-budget sitcom, with a guest appearance by Mike Ditka, who plays an unfunny version of himself as Phil's assistant coach.

Calling Joe Carnahan's movie heartless implies that this auteur of affectless anarchy might have meant to invest it with detectable human feelings, and failed. Better to call it heart-free.

Country Strong comes to spontaneous life from time to time, despite maudlin devices and manipulative set pieces.

Looks like the deformed spawn of a development process gone awry.

It's not a good sign when a movie is called The Break-Up and you can't wait for the couple to split so they'll get some relief from one another, and give the audience some relief from them.

Nobody fares well in this movie about sibling rivalry, doomed love and fringed suede. [05 Jan 1995]

Alan Arkin does the best trick, bringing a dollop of humanity to the role of Rance Holloway, the magician who was young Burt's inspiration. Apart from Rance, the whole production is slovenly nonsense, photographed on the cheap with blaring ghastliness. Yet it poses an intriguing mystery. Did the producers appeal to a denominator even lower than common by making their film as dumb as possible, or did it just turn out that way?

Oz the Great and Powerful, like so many products of movie studios that have lost their way, is a Tin Man of epic proportions — bright and shiny, with no heart.

Littered with low points -- lame comedy, dubious history, fumbling drama and a love story so inept as to make a pacifist long for war.

Choose to pass this one up.

If claustrophobia's your style, The Jacket is a perfect fit.

It's a bad idea done disastrously.

Stepping is everything in Stomp the Yard, and, dare I say it, a stepping stone to DJ's redemption. The movie itself is redeemed -- slightly -- by its almost touching devotion to the hoary Hollywood traditions of college movies with battling frats, as well as its earnest endorsement of education.

The movie as a whole is nonsensical. And long. And slow. And head-poundingly loud as it culminates in slavering horror.