For 1,818 reviews, this critic has graded:
  • 63% higher than the average critic
  • 2% same as the average critic
  • 35% lower than the average critic
On average, this critic grades 10.9 points higher than other critics. (0-100 point scale)

Kenneth Turan's Scores

  • Movies
Average review score: 70
Highest review score: 100 The Act of Killing
Lowest review score: 0 The Green Hornet
Score distribution:
1,818 movie reviews
    • 72 Metascore
    • 50 Kenneth Turan
    Brief enough, clocking in at 83 minutes, but its story is too predictable to make an impact even in such a short space. Unlike "Toy Story," the dialogue here, written by Todd Alcott and Chris & Paul Weitz, is pro forma all the way.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 50 Kenneth Turan
    Does have its pleasures, but the feeling is inescapable that the person most pleased is Bertolucci himself. In essence he is the dreamer of the title, as eager to retreat into this hermetic world of his own creation as his characters are into theirs. Fair enough, but why does he have to drag us along with him?
    • 53 Metascore
    • 50 Kenneth Turan
    Sporadically playful, it ends up wearing as thin as any film geared to a preteen sense of humor is bound to do.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 50 Kenneth Turan
    Does benefit from Gibson's charisma...Whether it is quite good enough is another question.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 50 Kenneth Turan
    A movie we might like to buy into if left to our own devices, but that idea is anathema to Turteltaub, intent on pushing us so hard that we end up pushing back.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 50 Kenneth Turan
    Certainly acceptable. But no one seeing it is going to feel as spooked as executive producer Roy Lee. To make an audience feel that intensely, you need a different kind of director and a different kind of film.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 50 Kenneth Turan
    All the imagination and effort (including 18 months of pre-production) that went into making the dinosaurs state-of-the-art exciting apparently left no time to make the people similarly believable or involving. In fact, when the big guys leave the screen, you'll be tempted to leave the theater with them. [11 June 1993, Calendar, p.F-1]
    • 36 Metascore
    • 50 Kenneth Turan
    Though it wasn't planned this way, it's an amusing exercise to view A Man Apart as an allegory for the war in Iraq.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 50 Kenneth Turan
    For all its surface verisimilitude and for all its focus on a problem that couldn't be more current, this film can't manage to feel more than sporadically real.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 50 Kenneth Turan
    This energetic and diverting sports soap opera throws a few head fakes in the direction of an iconoclastic examination of the dark side of professional football.
    • 34 Metascore
    • 50 Kenneth Turan
    So unashamedly confusing, so intent on piling twist upon twist upon twist, it makes your head hurt just trying to figure out what's happened.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 50 Kenneth Turan
    As advertised, A Knight's Tale does try to rock you. The problem is, it doesn't rock you nearly enough.
    • 37 Metascore
    • 50 Kenneth Turan
    If you're in the mood for a hip-hop film with more happy faces than "The Partridge Family," Honey will divert you.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 50 Kenneth Turan
    Has little to occupy us once its battle scenes recede. One of those goofy movies where devil-may-care Russian soldiers unwind by playing the balalaika far into the night, it takes itself far more seriously than anyone else will be able to manage.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 50 Kenneth Turan
    Overcomplicates its plot and spends a lot of time floundering around in the shallow end.
    • 35 Metascore
    • 50 Kenneth Turan
    Simultaneously jokey and scary, sentimental and ruthless, tediously everyday and grotesquely out of the ordinary.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 50 Kenneth Turan
    Only partially convincing.
    • 35 Metascore
    • 50 Kenneth Turan
    Kind of like a basketball team of all-stars -- no names, please -- that has difficulty jelling into one smooth and efficient unit.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 50 Kenneth Turan
    Shallow where it would be meaningful, demanding leaps of faith it has not earned, this film's marriage of arresting technique to empty thinking is not unique, only frustrating.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 50 Kenneth Turan
    It does not have as much invigorating freshness as audiences have come to expect in computer animation.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 50 Kenneth Turan
    Director Wes Anderson, who also co-wrote the "Royal" script with actor Owen Wilson, unquestionably has one of America's most distinctive filmmaking sensibilities, but that is part of the problem. As my mother used to say, too good is no good.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 50 Kenneth Turan
    You can't have Rushmore without Max, and though Anderson obviously planned it this way, the kid is finally too off-putting to tolerate.
    • 47 Metascore
    • 50 Kenneth Turan
    Despite its high craft level and Washington's participation in it, this movie's showy violence is finally as deadening as the over-emphatic violence in these kinds of films generally is.
    • 43 Metascore
    • 50 Kenneth Turan
    As (DiCaprio's) character heads for The Beach's predictable heart of darkness denouement, only die-hard fans will have the heart to tag along.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 50 Kenneth Turan
    Unfortunately for Man on the Moon, Kaufman is definitely a person more interesting to hear about than to experience, an acquired taste few will be tempted to acquire.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 50 Kenneth Turan
    Dances on the edge of flat-lining just like the DOAs that are Frank's stock-in-trade.
    • 47 Metascore
    • 50 Kenneth Turan
    In effect, aspects of Gibson's creative makeup -- his career-long interest in martyrdom and the yearning for dramatic conflict that make him an excellent actor, coupled with his belief in the Gospels' literal truth -- have sideswiped this film. What is left is a film so narrowly focused as to be inaccessible for all but the devout.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 50 Kenneth Turan
    Though Vanilla Sky is smoothly and professionally done, even audiences who haven't seen the original will sense there is something off in the translation.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 50 Kenneth Turan
    Has a good deal of the appeal, and the drawbacks, of a high school play. It can be pokey and overly earnest and its dramatics are not always polished, but, on the other hand, would you want them to be?
    • 50 Metascore
    • 50 Kenneth Turan
    What it really is is an unapologetic cartoon, a harum-scarum endeavor that's so comically frantic it wears you out as much as it entertains.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 50 Kenneth Turan
    A shrewd, pulpy crowd-pleaser.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 50 Kenneth Turan
    Winterbottom, who's never been a director with a gift for warmth, can't make this romance come alive. Morton and Robbins are gifted actors, but they seem straitjacketed here, and the film finds it difficult to avoid tedium as their lugubrious relationship unfolds.
    • 47 Metascore
    • 50 Kenneth Turan
    A series of miscalculations caused this project to lose its way, until what we're left with is a film that should involve us more than it does.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 50 Kenneth Turan
    Isn't good and isn't bad, it just isn't. A lethargic would-be entertainment as well as a dispiriting vanity project, it is such a misfire that it makes it hard to remember what was special about its predecessor.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 50 Kenneth Turan
    Given everything, it's no surprise that the verdict on the film has to be a split decision. Troy is a movie you believe in physically...Believing in Troy emotionally, however, presents a greater challenge.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 50 Kenneth Turan
    Not without its funny moments, much of Birdcage seems pro forma and predictable. What felt original in 1978 is no longer half so inspired.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 50 Kenneth Turan
    Squanders an appealing performance from Costner.
    • 46 Metascore
    • 50 Kenneth Turan
    Except for a memorably haunted performance by Jeremy Irons as the conflicted Humbert Humbert, what the new version lacks most of all is inspiration.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 50 Kenneth Turan
    Slick and forceful, largely unconcerned with character, eager for any opportunity to pump up the volume both literally and metaphorically, The Rock is the kind of efficient entertainment that is hard to take pleasure in.
    • 43 Metascore
    • 50 Kenneth Turan
    Dante's Peak is customary for the genre, with convincing special effects sharing screen time with standard-issue characters and situations.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 50 Kenneth Turan
    With two of the world's biggest stars in tow, the creators of The Devil's Own can be forgiven for figuring that nothing else really mattered. If you've got Harrison Ford and Brad Pitt, do you really need a coherent script? Unfortunately for everyone concerned, the answer is yes.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 50 Kenneth Turan
    A warmhearted horror show that puts cliched movie people into a realistic situation, the signals it sends out are nothing but mixed.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 50 Kenneth Turan
    Though it is always pleasant and agreeable, this film has the bland and undemanding texture that characterizes movies made for network TV.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 50 Kenneth Turan
    A persuasive thriller for most of its length, it stumbles in its attempt to become an upscale version of "Death Wish" and other vigilante dramas and ends up derailing with a soft thud.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 50 Kenneth Turan
    What results is a film with some bright spots but whose effect is finally as muddled and wearying as the event itself sometimes is.
    • 47 Metascore
    • 50 Kenneth Turan
    While films are admired for making fantasy real, some manage a reverse, unwanted kind of alchemy, turning involving reality into meaningless piffle.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 50 Kenneth Turan
    Although he works his hardest at the part and doesn't embarrass himself, even with the help of Stan Winston's vampire makeup Tom Cruise is plainly miscast as Lestat. [11Nov1994 Pg. F1]
    • 53 Metascore
    • 50 Kenneth Turan
    Anyone looking for the kind of comic brio that Dustin Hoffman and company brought to "Tootsie" will not find it here. [24 Nov 1993 Pg. F1]
    • 50 Metascore
    • 50 Kenneth Turan
    So it is a surprise to say that the biggest mystery this legal thriller presents is how a film based on a novel by John Grisham, starring the bankable duo of [Julia Roberts Darby Shaw] and [Denzel Washington Gray Grantham] and written and directed by veteran Alan J. Pakula can end up more of a fizzle than an explosion. [17 Dec 1993 Pg. F1]
    • 38 Metascore
    • 50 Kenneth Turan
    Like "The Addams Family" before it, this is one of those clever, lively and ultimately wearying pieces of showy Hollywood machinery where a glut of creativity has gone into the visuals with only scraps left over for the plot and the dialogue. [27 May 1994 Pg.F1]
    • 45 Metascore
    • 50 Kenneth Turan
    Yet, there is also little doubt that when it comes to extreme physical humor, Carrey is remarkably gifted, a throwback to the vintage antics of Jerry Lewis or even the slapstick gang of silent comedy.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 50 Kenneth Turan
    While it's difficult to dislike what this film tries to do, the way it does it is more problematic.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 50 Kenneth Turan
    LaGravenese... has understood that the worst of Bridges is not in its dialogue but in the silent musings that occupy its characters' minds. By keeping those thoughts unspoken, by allowing the camera to show instead of having words tell, much has been accomplished.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 50 Kenneth Turan
    By having Sigourney Weaver and Holly Hunter play the maniacs' feisty antagonists, the filmmakers seem to believe that they've made a significant feminist statement, the movie's two hours-plus of almost continual sadistic abuse of women notwithstanding. Even in an industry known for self-delusion, that is quite a feat.
    • 44 Metascore
    • 50 Kenneth Turan
    There is nothing to be embarrassed about here, neither is there much to relish, for Mary Reilly has more of the sheen of art than its essence.
    • 44 Metascore
    • 50 Kenneth Turan
    Last Action Hero does have occasional moments of humor, but overall it is lacking in fun or magic. [18 Jun 1993, p.1]
    • 49 Metascore
    • 50 Kenneth Turan
    It's strong as can be in terms of production values and panoramic photography (as befits its $70-million budget) and weak as watery tea when it comes to little things like dialogue and character development. [22 May 1992]
    • 64 Metascore
    • 50 Kenneth Turan
    Despite its arresting visual style, its wave after wave of creative and hypnotic images, The Pillow Book, as its name hints, slowly but inexorably leads to sleep.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 50 Kenneth Turan
    Still, there are some things to savor. Blanchett is an actress who's always involving, and Crowe is very much in his element as an intrepid, laconic archer who lets his arrows do the talking.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 50 Kenneth Turan
    Unfortunately, absent a more objective context, Trudell's gnomic utterances do little to support those sentiments. By preaching so relentlessly to the choir, this film misses an opportunity to show what got them to sing in the first place.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 50 Kenneth Turan
    As sequels go, this one is acceptable, nothing more, nothing less.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 50 Kenneth Turan
    If the bad guys didn't reappear with welcome regularity, "Money Never Sleeps" would be even more of a snooze than it already is.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 50 Kenneth Turan
    It shouldn't be surprising, but some of these directors are more interesting than their work. French director Breillat, never a personal favorite, is an absolutely hypnotic speaker who holds the screen the way her films rarely have.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 50 Kenneth Turan
    The film throws so much ersatz cleverness and overdone emotion at the audience that we end up more worn out than entertained.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 50 Kenneth Turan
    RED
    Red can't stop itself from trying too hard to be hip. It's not that it doesn't have effective moments, it's that it doesn't have as many as it thinks it does. The film's inescapable air of glib self-satisfaction is not only largely unearned, it's downright irritating.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 50 Kenneth Turan
    To be fair to Deathly Hallows, the filmmakers have tried hard to fill the proceedings with battles and chases and debilitating curses. Genuine filmmaking excitement, however, is harder to provide.
    • 37 Metascore
    • 50 Kenneth Turan
    There is a moment in The Tourist when Johnny Depp turns to Angelina Jolie and asks "Why is all this happening?" It's a question moviegoers will be asking themselves as well.
    • 46 Metascore
    • 50 Kenneth Turan
    If, as someone says in one of Brooks' trademark excellent lines, we all feel we're "one small adjustment away from making our lives work," this film is one small adjustment away as well.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 50 Kenneth Turan
    Thor has its strengths, but it is finally something of a mishmash with designs on being more interesting than it manages to be.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 50 Kenneth Turan
    Blessed with considerable virtues, including a clever concept, crackling filmmaking and a charismatic star, it ultimately squanders all of them, undone by an unfortunate lack of subtlety and restraint.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 50 Kenneth Turan
    While Malick's great ability holds us for a time, it is finally not enough to compensate for a lack of dramatic involvement - those eschatological quandaries tend to overwhelm the story. The Tree of Life, its enormous advantages notwithstanding, ends up a film that demands to be admired but cannot be easily embraced.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 50 Kenneth Turan
    This film's cold, almost robotic conception of Salander as a twitchy, anorexic waif feels more like a stunt than a complete character, and so the best part of the reason we care enough to endure all that mayhem has gone away.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 50 Kenneth Turan
    Even though all the supporting elements of a superior film are here, the actual plot that everything is at the service of is disappointing. The texture of reality and the sheen of fine craft disguise this for a while, but not forever.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 50 Kenneth Turan
    Dazzling panoramas, no matter how impressive, are no substitute for the involving story Happy Feet Two has had to do without.
    • 41 Metascore
    • 50 Kenneth Turan
    This may sound thrilling, but it's not. Battleship plays ordinary and pedestrian because it's always been a job for hire, never anyone's passion.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 50 Kenneth Turan
    This film has much more to do with what goes on inside director Tim Burton's head than with any TV show, no matter how beloved. In fact, Dark Shadows is as good an example as any of what might be called the Way of Tim, a style of making films that, like the drinking of blood, is very much an acquired taste and, unless you're a vampire, not worth the effort.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 50 Kenneth Turan
    Unfortunately, "Blood and Honey" has script problems: Its core story is less compelling than its overall atmosphere.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 50 Kenneth Turan
    The result is a film that is solid and acceptable instead of soaring and exceptional, one unnecessarily hampered in its quest to reach the magical heights of the trilogy.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 50 Kenneth Turan
    While its ambition and scope pull one way, its pinched and unconvincing sense of drama pull the other.
    • 40 Metascore
    • 50 Kenneth Turan
    This intriguing hybrid is dramatically involving only when the shooting - with real bullets, naturally - gets underway.
    • 44 Metascore
    • 50 Kenneth Turan
    Part manic comedy, part would-be heart-warmer of the "follow your bliss" variety, its odd combination of tones and situations leads to as many awkward, uncertain moments as funny ones.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 50 Kenneth Turan
    Director Johanna Demetrakas has decided to simply present the man in all his demanding complexities and let him and his encounters with associates speak for themselves. Her only rubric is the one visible in her title: "Crazy Wisdom."
    • 66 Metascore
    • 50 Kenneth Turan
    Unlike "In Bruges," the outlandish parts of Seven Psychopaths, though often bleakly entertaining in their own right, remain a collection of weird riffs that not even engaging acting by Colin Farrell, Sam Rockwell, Woody Harrelson, Christopher Walken and Tom Waits can bring together.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 50 Kenneth Turan
    It's a product of the highest quality, but at the end of the day that's what it is: a machine-made, assembly-line product whose strengths tend to feel like items checked off a master list rather than being the result of any kind of individual creative touch.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 50 Kenneth Turan
    Even though as a whole Hello I Must Be Going lets us down in the second half, the pleasure of watching Lynskey and Abbott never diminishes.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 50 Kenneth Turan
    Samsara is as frustrating as it is beautiful, which is saying a lot because this is a film laced with exquisite images.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 50 Kenneth Turan
    It's got a strong cast and an intriguing premise that has the added bonus of real-world relevance. But, good intentions and good work aside, the film flounders before it reaches its conclusion.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 50 Kenneth Turan
    There is no shaking the feeling that Branagh and his cast are a kind of an espionage film B team, capable of mild diversion but nothing more.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 50 Kenneth Turan
    The Eye of the Storm is an ambitious stab at what might be called the Great Australian Film. The results are off-and-on impressive, but the project's ambitions turn out to be greater than its ability to achieve them.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 50 Kenneth Turan
    Tears of Gaza is both horrifying and frustrating. This documentary's goals are noble ones, but its execution is something else again.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 50 Kenneth Turan
    Despite the linked advantages of generous helpings of the man's high octane music and a star performance by Chadwick Boseman that's little short of heroic, Get on Up is more frustrating than fulfilling, a disjointed film that suffers from having a more ambitious plan than it's got the ability to execute.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 50 Kenneth Turan
    In practice this mélange of imagery is aimed more at the inside of Reggio's head than anywhere else. Unless you are able to get on his quasi-experimental wavelength, a dicey proposition at best, Visitors will miss your solar plexus entirely and instead put you right to sleep. With one exception.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 50 Kenneth Turan
    Even though this is supposed to be a kindlier Van Damme vehicle, his movies couldn't exist without his trademark ability to deliver the kind of accurate, powerful kicks any World Cup team would envy. All his soulful glances notwithstanding, Timecop still depends too much on violence to make it appealing to the uninitiated or the unwary.
    • 47 Metascore
    • 40 Kenneth Turan
    This is generic filmmaking at its most banal, a simple-minded simplification of a not overwhelmingly complex book.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 40 Kenneth Turan
    When faced as a director with the rudderless screenplay he (Jonze) co-wrote with Eggers, he's been powerless to energize it in any involving way. Sometimes you are better off with 10 sentences than tens of millions of dollars, and this is one of those times.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 40 Kenneth Turan
    While this film fits squarely into Soderbergh's recurrent goal of ignoring audience interest when possible, that's the only area in which it can be considered a success.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 40 Kenneth Turan
    A sour romantic comedy, only sporadically amusing.
    • 36 Metascore
    • 40 Kenneth Turan
    So over-plotted that it's borderline incomprehensible.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 40 Kenneth Turan
    The romance makes an awkward, contrived fit with the nominally serious political stuff, and even those momentous events come off as generic and unconvincing.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 40 Kenneth Turan
    Transformers' multiple earthling story lines are tedious and oddly lifeless, doing little besides marking time until those big toys fill the screen.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 40 Kenneth Turan
    Trapped in a no man's land between seriousness and pulp trash, it plays like a combination of "Death Wish" and "The Hours." If that sounds like an awkward fit, it is.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 40 Kenneth Turan
    Beowulf appears so cartoony, in fact, that the academy just put it on the short list of films to be considered for the Oscar in feature animation.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 40 Kenneth Turan
    Overall, Charlie Wilson's War is glib rather than witty, one of those films that comes off as being more pleased with itself than it has a right to be. It also suffers from being not all of a piece, with mismatched elements struggling to cohere.
    • 40 Metascore
    • 40 Kenneth Turan
    The truth is that two other films with Greengrass' name on them, "The Bourne Supremacy" and "The Bourne Ultimatum," have spoiled us for this kind of thriller filmmaking, and stacked against that, Vantage Point doesn't have a chance.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 40 Kenneth Turan
    It's a strange feeling to see the summer's most promising premise self-destruct into something bizarre and unsatisfying, but that is the Hancock experience.
    • 31 Metascore
    • 40 Kenneth Turan
    Though the new film has some good things, it does not have enough of them to make the third time the charm.
    • 27 Metascore
    • 40 Kenneth Turan
    Becomes unfocused as it stumbles over all the points it wants to make.
    • 39 Metascore
    • 40 Kenneth Turan
    Sometimes glossy, sometimes hard-edged, the film alternates between glitz and unpleasantness and ends as a kind of glum soap opera, too glam to be bleak and too bleak to be so glam.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 40 Kenneth Turan
    By consistently and relentlessly overplaying everything, by settling for standard easy emotions when singular and heartfelt was called for, by pushing forward when they should have pulled back, director Joe Wright and screenwriter Susannah Grant have made the story mean less, not more. Instead of enhancing The Soloist's appeal, they have come close to eliminating it.
    • 47 Metascore
    • 40 Kenneth Turan
    Elephants aside, the plot of this Ong Bak is rudimentary at best.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 40 Kenneth Turan
    It has its successful moments but it's surprisingly inert overall, more like a Burton derivative than something he actually did himself.
    • 42 Metascore
    • 40 Kenneth Turan
    Director Michael Bay's filmmaking style is so frantic and frenetic that it's often impossible to figure out exactly what is happening.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 40 Kenneth Turan
    After keeping its balance over much treacherous terrain, greedily overreaches and stumbles badly at the close.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 40 Kenneth Turan
    The main thing the new Shaft gets right is casting for the title role. It's too bad the rest of the film doesn't hold your attention the way he does.
    • 37 Metascore
    • 40 Kenneth Turan
    Its twisty film noir world of down-on-their-luck men and unfathomable women is vintage B-picture material, but, in the grand B tradition, the games it plays are more ambitious than successful.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 40 Kenneth Turan
    Less fascinating and finally unsatisfying is the awfully familiar racism angle, a subplot that, though unusual in a POW movie, turns regrettably earnest and preachy almost immediately.
    • 33 Metascore
    • 40 Kenneth Turan
    The film's political philosophy, as much as it has one, is of the "a plague on both your houses" variety, painting the rebels and the CIA as equally fixated on killing innocent civilians for their own nefarious ideological ends. We've seen it all before, and we'll likely see it all again.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 40 Kenneth Turan
    When a set of pre-shooting guidelines a director came up with for his actors turns out to be cleverer, better written and of considerable more interest than the finished film, that's a bad sign. A very bad sign.
    • 41 Metascore
    • 40 Kenneth Turan
    Another traditional Japanese production, weakly plotted, woodenly acted and indifferently dubbed.
    • 46 Metascore
    • 40 Kenneth Turan
    "You've got a sense of humor, I like that," Lester Long proclaims at one point. Well, we all like that, but would it be asking too much to have a little coherence to go along with it?
    • 54 Metascore
    • 40 Kenneth Turan
    Like Malkovich's out of control Russian accent, Rounders ends up reaching a place too hard to understand and even harder to believe in.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 40 Kenneth Turan
    Both too unfocused and overly familiar. It has enough comic energy to generate some chuckles, but even when we laugh we're always wondering why the jokes aren't funnier. [5 Mar 1999]
    • 33 Metascore
    • 40 Kenneth Turan
    The four actors are very good, and it's a shame they aren't working from a more focused and original concept. Written by Fusco and Michael Garrity, there's nothing awful about Stealing Time except that it mixes familiar ingredients with pretty bland results.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 40 Kenneth Turan
    LaBute can't avoid a fatal mistake in the modern era: He's changed the male academic from a lower-class Brit to an American, a choice that upsets the novel's exquisite balance and shreds the fabric of the film, corrupting all of LaBute's good work and robbing it of the impact it would otherwise have.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 40 Kenneth Turan
    Its successful moments (and they are only moments) remind us that this is a squandered opportunity.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 40 Kenneth Turan
    That bland, opaque quality is a disadvantage here; whatever else [Depp] is capable of, making audiences feel his pain is not at the top of the list.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 40 Kenneth Turan
    The melodrama of the Maugham original is too simplistic to involve, and the places the film's plot goes are so obvious that even the presence of quality actors can't create sufficient interest.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 40 Kenneth Turan
    A disappointment. A good-faith attempt has been made to duplicate the original elements, but the mix is wrong, bearings have been lost, the balance is off. It was attitude that made "Men in Black" special, a particular kind of cool insouciance that has proved as impossible to duplicate as it was irresistible to experience.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 40 Kenneth Turan
    Not as much fun as it should be. Few of its numerous actors make a lasting impression and Burton's heart and soul is not in the humor but (remember the "Batman Returns" backlash) in deadpan postmodern horrors, of which this film has a few.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 40 Kenneth Turan
    Outside of a hyper-energetic, irresistibly evil portrayal by Tim Roth as General Thade, the baddest ape in town, the sad truth about Planet of the Apes is that, disappointingly, it's just not very much fun to watch.
    • 43 Metascore
    • 40 Kenneth Turan
    It's not objectionable (which is saying something these days) but neither does it have any compelling reason to be seen.
    • 34 Metascore
    • 40 Kenneth Turan
    A reminder of the difference between exhilaration and exhaustion, between tension and hysteria, between eroticism and exhibitionism. The line may be fine, but it is real enough to separate the great thrillers from the also-rans. And Basic Instinct is not a great thriller. [20 Mar 1992, Calendar, p.F-1]
    • 55 Metascore
    • 40 Kenneth Turan
    Suffers from being neither here nor there. In its rush to modernize its story and attract a young audience with stars like Ethan Hawke and Gwyneth Paltrow, the film ends up problematic both in relation to the original and on its own terms.
    • 36 Metascore
    • 40 Kenneth Turan
    Does go on too long, leading to inevitable dead spots.
    • 47 Metascore
    • 40 Kenneth Turan
    A vaguely amusing formulaic comedy with a premise that turns out to be more discomforting than endearing.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 40 Kenneth Turan
    It is deeply unpleasant to see women abducted, tortured and eviscerated by a methodical and meticulous butcher.
    • 43 Metascore
    • 40 Kenneth Turan
    It's a copy all the way, a disheartening attempt to capitalize on the success of the original.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 40 Kenneth Turan
    Solondz's filmmaking style tries to make a virtue out of flatness and distance, and is always more comfortable indicating where feelings would go than actually providing them.
    • 28 Metascore
    • 40 Kenneth Turan
    Main lure is what feels like a very authentic visual sense of the nontourist side of Kingston, where the ambience of zinc-walled shacks wallpapered with old newspapers is captured by cinematographer Richard Lannaman.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 40 Kenneth Turan
    (Mamet) backslides to a system that has his speeches read in a stylized way. The result is language that sounds unhappily artificial and characters who behave like they are less than real.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 40 Kenneth Turan
    A concept, no matter how promising, is not a movie, and this picture has the bad luck to illustrate the difference.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 40 Kenneth Turan
    From its standard-issue action to its halfhearted dialogue and acting, that's one situation even two Schwarzeneggers aren't enough to solve.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 40 Kenneth Turan
    What's especially disheartening is the large gap between what's on the screen and the significant, meaningful work its creators sincerely believe they've made.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 40 Kenneth Turan
    Moves with the suffocating deliberateness of a river of molasses.
    • 44 Metascore
    • 40 Kenneth Turan
    Lacking noticeable energy or drive, its almost visceral distaste for dramatic momentum is puzzling, especially in a film about the black arts.
    • 35 Metascore
    • 40 Kenneth Turan
    As forgettable as the humor is the film's predictable portrayal of adults as clueless, overbearing cretins.
    • 29 Metascore
    • 40 Kenneth Turan
    Harlin's skill compensates for a lot of narrative preposterousness, even it is overmatched this time around.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 40 Kenneth Turan
    A decorative Italian soap opera with an asterisk for earnest aspirations. Its beautiful people say painful things to each other in gorgeous clothes, and though the film expects us to take their problems seriously, it's awfully hard to do so.
    • 43 Metascore
    • 40 Kenneth Turan
    If The Mexican proves anything, it's that eccentric features need a particularly delicate touch to be successful. With a film like this, how close you come doesn't matter: Off by a little is as debilitating as off by a lot.
    • 39 Metascore
    • 40 Kenneth Turan
    The result is exposition overkill and a dragged-out finale that turns what should have been a Tear Duct Special into a deflating experience, making what worked in the book unacceptable on the screen.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 40 Kenneth Turan
    Promising as it seems in theory, everything in this new version, like Lena Lamont's image in "Singin' In the Rain," falls apart as soon as the talking starts.
    • 36 Metascore
    • 40 Kenneth Turan
    If they had to make things up, couldn't they have made up something smarter?
    • 39 Metascore
    • 40 Kenneth Turan
    Runaway Bride's Josann McGibbon & Sara Parriott script is so muddled and contrived, raising issues only to ignore them or throw them away, you wonder why so many people embraced it.
    • 35 Metascore
    • 40 Kenneth Turan
    Mostly I Spy, with more dead spots than a Jerry Lewis telethon, is content to mark time. That gives us, and perhaps the cast as well, the opportunity to reflect on how satisfying this film could have been if anyone had thought it worth their while to provide real material for the talent to work with.
    • 47 Metascore
    • 40 Kenneth Turan
    What is disturbing and frankly distasteful about The Girl Next Door is how slick and shameless it is in its eagerness to blur boundaries, to squeeze as much transgressive material as it can into a nominally bland and innocent form, to serve up a benign, sanitized and exquisitely titillating portrait of the world of pornography in the cozy sheep's clothing of a teenage movie.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 40 Kenneth Turan
    Though Waterworld has some haunting underwater visual moments, the film's impact is weakened by flat dialogue, an overemphasis on jokeyness and a plot that, despite all those screenwriters, does not satisfactorily hold together at any number of points.
    • 41 Metascore
    • 40 Kenneth Turan
    There's no doubt Sandler is talented, but if he persists in believing that, like Elvis, his presence alone covers a multitude of omissions and inconsistencies, he will squander his gift and make a series of forgettable films in the process.
    • 35 Metascore
    • 40 Kenneth Turan
    The script is muddled and unsatisfying, as ponderous on its feet as its protagonists are in their heavy diving suits.
    • 44 Metascore
    • 40 Kenneth Turan
    On paper it has every advantage, from gifted stars Ben Stiller and Jennifer Aniston to an established comedy writer-director with a promising idea about a romance between a carefree woman and a worried man. But instead of maximizing those pluses, Along Came Polly so completely fritters them away that even its brief 90 minutes feels unhappily long.
    • 46 Metascore
    • 40 Kenneth Turan
    Has the makings of that rarest of ventures, an adaptation that is true to the spirit of the original as well as its own time and place. But as Payback wends its way toward its conclusion, its promise dissipates and its pleasures wane.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 40 Kenneth Turan
    Revenge may be sweet, but this is one "Monte Cristo" that leaves a sour taste.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 40 Kenneth Turan
    Features an aggressive, in-your-face romanticism that's noticeably lacking in genuine warmth. While its story of lonely misfits searching for love has appealing moments, more often it turns into an overbearing fable overburdened with fake joie de vivre.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 40 Kenneth Turan
    The genre's recent past has set the bar quite high, and Treasure Planet doesn't quite make it over.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 40 Kenneth Turan
    Something we want to like more than we can. It's a mild family film with an excellent cast that never develops traction.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 40 Kenneth Turan
    A technical amazement that points computer-generated animation toward the brightest of futures, it's also cartoonish in the worst way, the prisoner of pedestrian plot points and childish, too-cute dialogue.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 40 Kenneth Turan
    Though amusing from moment to moment, is erratic, unfocused and uncertain where it's going.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 40 Kenneth Turan
    Listless, disjointed and disconnected, this meandering two-hour, 32-minute exercise in futility will fascinate no one who doesn't have a blood relation among the cast or crew.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 40 Kenneth Turan
    Scorsese and his team have created a heavy-footed golem of a motion picture, hard to ignore as it throws its weight around but fatally lacking in anything resembling soul.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 40 Kenneth Turan
    The problem rather is the wholesale embracing of what has become de rigueur in animation, the practice of treating major characters as if they were stand-up comics working a room in Las Vegas.
    • 40 Metascore
    • 40 Kenneth Turan
    Ought to be disreputable fun. Instead it ends up, all its explosions and exposed flesh notwithstanding, rather inert.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 40 Kenneth Turan
    The Chamber is like a balloon that all the air has leaked out of. Maybe it wasn't magnificent before, but in its current state it is sad indeed.
    • 35 Metascore
    • 40 Kenneth Turan
    But the result is no more than a forced fable, a self-consciously smarty-pants concoction that is too clever by half and too pleased with itself in the bargain.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 40 Kenneth Turan
    Fluffy and mild to the point of somnolence, it can't even get the full benefit of its strongest asset, Glenn Close's performance as the grasping virago Cruella DeVil.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 40 Kenneth Turan
    Eraser does have a few big-ticket stunts that hold the attention, but director Charles Russell, fresh from "The Mask," isn't able to infuse them with the intensity and believability that James Cameron brought to comparable sequences in "True Lies."
    • 45 Metascore
    • 40 Kenneth Turan
    Without real dialogue and believable connections between actors, Evita is limited in its effectiveness, and all the crying for Argentina in the world can't change that.
    • 41 Metascore
    • 40 Kenneth Turan
    Well-meaning and convinced it has something of value to say, its "Reach Out and Touch Someone" sensibility ensures that all its satisfactions will prove hollow, and so they do.
    • 46 Metascore
    • 40 Kenneth Turan
    The Crossing Guard, Penn's second film behind the camera, is a troubling, troublesome movie whose makeshift structure cannot contain the powerful flood of passions that he and his cast have poured into it.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 40 Kenneth Turan
    Make no mistake, the high-flying stunts in director Renny Harlin's film are definitely state of the art, and while they're going on, the film works up a serious level of excitement. But as soon as the action stops and the inevitable talking begins, Cliffhanger falls to earth with a considerable thud. [28 May 1993 Pg. F1]
    • 53 Metascore
    • 40 Kenneth Turan
    The Wayne's World concept, which, egged on by a rabid studio audience, works so beautifully in skit format, ends up feeling dragged out and energy-less at feature length. [14 Feb 1992 Pg. F1]
    • 55 Metascore
    • 40 Kenneth Turan
    Working with cinematographer Karl Walter Lindenlaub, director Caton-Jones has givenRob Roy a beautiful wide-screen look, filled with gorgeous vistas. But this film is like a color Xerox copy of the real thing: hard to tell from an original until you look closely at the details.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 40 Kenneth Turan
    A wax-museum movie that is both bland and reverential despite its focus on the great man's love life, Jefferson is hampered by its disconnected protagonist.
    • 44 Metascore
    • 40 Kenneth Turan
    Too slight to be taken seriously and too off-putting (especially when the phone callers get hostile and the work demeaning) to be funny, Girl 6 feels like the first draft of a potentially interesting project. It just hasn't been made good on here.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 40 Kenneth Turan
    The idea that sexual harassment is about power, not sex, and that a woman in power can potentially misbehave just like a man may be news to certain segments of the population, but they are not news enough to light a much-needed fire under this production. [9 Dec 1994, p.1]
    • 47 Metascore
    • 40 Kenneth Turan
    An underwhelming experience. I pity the fool, as TV star Mr. T might say, who mistakes this for genuine entertainment.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 40 Kenneth Turan
    Against all reason and expectation, the result is a distinctly unfunny film.
    • 20 Metascore
    • 40 Kenneth Turan
    Airbender, whether intentionally or not, is pegged almost exclusively to a small-fry state of mind.
    • 46 Metascore
    • 40 Kenneth Turan
    This movie version adds a whole lot of other stuff, most of it not very good and not in keeping with the spirit of the Seuss original.
    • 42 Metascore
    • 40 Kenneth Turan
    Given the subject matter, an exercise in delicacy and restraint was unlikely, but it's too bad that the film's concept is way more entertaining than what has ended up on-screen.
    • 43 Metascore
    • 40 Kenneth Turan
    Like a drug that starts with a rush and ends with a headache, Total Recall is too much of a good thing.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 40 Kenneth Turan
    Not only is the story dreamed up by producer Ahmet Zappa even odder than the title indicates, its execution gets increasingly irritating as the film goes on.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 40 Kenneth Turan
    Life, however, cannot be lived entirely on stage, and once the characters have to take off their thongs and return to their real lives, the film goes nowhere that is either interesting, involving or surprising.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 40 Kenneth Turan
    Unfortunately, attempts to be original are not enough, they have to succeed, and this film's solutions tend to present themselves as alternately gimmicky and banal.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 40 Kenneth Turan
    Though individual set pieces are well done, the film inevitably leaves an empty taste behind it once it's done.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 40 Kenneth Turan
    It can't decide what kind of a film it wants to be and so ends up failing across a fairly wide spectrum.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 40 Kenneth Turan
    It starts out like a house afire, but by the time it's over we're the ones feeling burned. A slick heist tale with more twists than sense, this is one movie that ends up outsmarting itself.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 40 Kenneth Turan
    Despite the story's melodramatic contrivances the creation of characters we actually care about is beyond this film's capabilities.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 40 Kenneth Turan
    Le Week-End is a sour and misanthropic film masquerading as an honest and sensitive romance. A painful and unremittingly bleak look at a difficult marriage, it wants us to sit through a range of domestic horrors without offering much of anything as a reward.
    • 43 Metascore
    • 30 Kenneth Turan
    Yet for all its ballyhooed candor about sexual matters, it's a surprisingly baffling and opaque film, too artistic to be standard pornography and too zealously focused on being graphic to the exclusion of all else to succeed as drama.
    • 44 Metascore
    • 30 Kenneth Turan
    A trying experience. As we watch Rochester fall apart in spectacular fashion, it's clear that a major lure for the venturesome Depp was the chance to play a grotesque, to become a pestilent physical wreck with an artificial silver nose. There's more in that role for the actor, however, than there is for us.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 30 Kenneth Turan
    Though he claims to be a seeker, someone who "has to find out" why believers believe, Maher sets out not after answers but cheap laughs that preach, so to speak, to the converted.
    • 37 Metascore
    • 30 Kenneth Turan
    Pedestrian and awkward, this film is a disappointment not only in comparison with Lee's earlier epic, the underrated " Malcolm X," but also in comparison with another film with similar aims, Rachid Bouchareb's "Days of Glory."
    • 39 Metascore
    • 30 Kenneth Turan
    It's doubtful that records are kept about this sort of thing, but consider the possibility that Clash of the Titans is the first film to actually be made worse by being in 3-D.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 30 Kenneth Turan
    While adapting accomplished fiction such as this is a lure Hollywood can never resist, some characters breathe better on the page, and that is the case here.
    • 40 Metascore
    • 30 Kenneth Turan
    By the time Duets faces the music, hardly anyone is going to care.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 30 Kenneth Turan
    Affleck and Paltrow, who've been excellent elsewhere, display less chemistry than they've shown in magazine photo shoots. Even Woody and Bo Peep had more going on between them in "Toy Story" than these two manage here.
    • 42 Metascore
    • 30 Kenneth Turan
    Not the kind of unwatchable mess you might assume a film withheld from reviewers' scrutiny would be. It is, however, something equally unfortunate: a mess you'd rather not be watching.
    • 32 Metascore
    • 30 Kenneth Turan
    A painfully contrived and artificial exercise in futility.
    • 47 Metascore
    • 30 Kenneth Turan
    It's a portrayal so unconvincing it makes it close to impossible for the rest of the film to function as intended.
    • 43 Metascore
    • 30 Kenneth Turan
    Buried under the miscalculations, the shamelessness, the off-putting and inappropriate broadness are sporadically visible souvenirs of a good project gone bad, hints of the unusual, bittersweet story that got away.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 30 Kenneth Turan
    Writer-director Steers has chosen to overload "Igby" with phony archness and forced black humor, making it not the place to look for satisfying acting.
    • 47 Metascore
    • 30 Kenneth Turan
    Irritating, childish and more frantic than funny, Cats & Dogs does manage some few pleasant moments, but they are not worth waiting for.
    • 41 Metascore
    • 30 Kenneth Turan
    Scattered, phlegmatic and an all-around weak effort, Celebrity turns out instead to be one of Allen's periodic misfires.
    • 36 Metascore
    • 30 Kenneth Turan
    Given the polyglot nature of the cast, with actors from at least five countries taking their best shots at the English language, it's unclear why Cage felt he needed an accent or, stranger still, why it took him a reported seven months to come up with this one.
    • 33 Metascore
    • 30 Kenneth Turan
    The best thing that can be said about this lethargic coming-of-age tale, noticeably undernourished at 78 minutes, is that it's better than the even more pathetic "Stolen Summer."
    • 55 Metascore
    • 30 Kenneth Turan
    A weakly comic splatter movie oversupplied with jokey, cartoonish violence.
    • 37 Metascore
    • 30 Kenneth Turan
    Such a classic combination of feckless dramaturgy and rampant excess that giving way to giggles is the only sane response.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 30 Kenneth Turan
    Lacks even a vestige of subtlety and is rarely so much as amusing. Viewers with fond memories of the brothers' wildly funny "There's Something About Mary" will be astonished at how few laughs the current venture has.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 30 Kenneth Turan
    It might even have made a good film, but it hasn't. In the hands of stars in denial about their stardom and a director who can't be bothered to take things seriously, it has come out implausible and unsatisfying, a comic thriller that is not especially funny or thrilling.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 30 Kenneth Turan
    Max
    Just because people are objecting to Max for all the wrong reasons doesn't make it a good film, and it's not. It's a bizarre curiosity memorable mainly for the way it fritters away its potentially interesting subject matter via a banal script, unimpressive acting and indifferent direction.
    • 27 Metascore
    • 30 Kenneth Turan
    A bad movie for connoisseurs of the genre.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 30 Kenneth Turan
    It's not often that you see talented, well-meaning people joined together like cultists in the snare of a group delusion, but that's what makes this film fascinating, the proverbial accident you can't take your eyes off.
    • 29 Metascore
    • 30 Kenneth Turan
    Goofy and gee-whiz when it isn't being post-apocalyptic glum, it is such an earnest hodgepodge that only by imagining "Mad Max" directed by Frank Capra can you get even an inkling of what it's like.
    • 46 Metascore
    • 30 Kenneth Turan
    A complete waste of time and potential.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 30 Kenneth Turan
    As the Farrellys have proved, tastelessness can be made palatable, but they've misfired with Me, Myself & Irene.
    • 35 Metascore
    • 30 Kenneth Turan
    It has a tendency to run ragged and spends an unhealthy amount of time idling pointlessly at intersections.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 30 Kenneth Turan
    Getting progressively less involving as it goes along, the strongest feeling Series 7 creates is the passionate desire to change the channel and move on.
    • 43 Metascore
    • 30 Kenneth Turan
    Despite that frisson of naughtiness and the occasional smile, Jersey Girl is overall too bland to hold our interest.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 30 Kenneth Turan
    This noisy retread, a secondhand facsimile of a movie, is, except for the headache its boisterous sound level leaves you with, as forgettable as a bad day in the Disneyland parking lot.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 30 Kenneth Turan
    What audiences end up with word-wise is a hackneyed, completely derivative copy of old Hollywood romances, a movie that reeks of phoniness and lacks even minimal originality.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 30 Kenneth Turan
    What's most troubling about this witless mishmash of whiny, infantile philosophizing and bone-crunching violence is the increasing realization that it actually thinks it's saying something of significance.
    • 32 Metascore
    • 30 Kenneth Turan
    The hard truth is that the line between being deadly earnest and unintentionally silly is thinner than these people think, and Beyond Borders turns out to be an unreal film about a real situation, unavoidably cartoonish, as was the earlier "Tears of the Sun," in its attempt to join crucial issues to ridiculous melodrama.
    • 33 Metascore
    • 30 Kenneth Turan
    The laugh lines are mostly crude and the prevalent slapstick is weak and uneventful.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 30 Kenneth Turan
    The film's tone works overtime at mythologizing tawdry incidents into some ultimate epic about the lost innocence of youth. Gilded trash is more like it.
    • 36 Metascore
    • 30 Kenneth Turan
    Sporadically effective, it appears not to have particularly excited the people who made it, and that lackadaisical quality is a drawback.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 30 Kenneth Turan
    Laurence Fishburne is one actor who has charisma to burn, but even his incendiary performance can't ignite Hoodlum, a would-be gangster epic that generates less heat than a nickel cigar. [27Aug1997 Pg 8]
    • 45 Metascore
    • 30 Kenneth Turan
    Mad City is an example of how enervated polemical filmmaking can become when its plot loses contact with plausibility.
    • 23 Metascore
    • 30 Kenneth Turan
    Though it displays enough perils to put a dent in future cruise ship sales, the film has a makeshift, slapdash quality that is the opposite of its predecessor.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 30 Kenneth Turan
    A paint-by-numbers version of an artist's life, Basquiat is amusing for all the wrong reasons, especially at those horrible moments when you realize you're supposed to be taking it seriously.
    • 35 Metascore
    • 30 Kenneth Turan
    Redford's Gage is so busy being exquisitely sensitive and polite he neglects to project any energy, and without it the crucial morning-after part of the movie gradually collapses under the weight of its own self-importance. [07 Apr 1993 Pg. F1]
    • 54 Metascore
    • 30 Kenneth Turan
    Though the Strick-Robinson script is solid from line to line, the film's plot is finally too implausible for anyone to rescue.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 30 Kenneth Turan
    Coppola decided that he really wasn't making a horror film after all, but rather a love story, a comic burlesque, a costume drama, a piece of erotica, whatever. But no matter what else you do with it, a Dracula that cannot manage to be more scary than silly is as pitilessly doomed as that elegant old Transylvanian himself. [13 Nov 1992]
    • 31 Metascore
    • 30 Kenneth Turan
    Jack is more depressing than the weight of its demerits because of the quality of the work both these men have done before.
    • 28 Metascore
    • 30 Kenneth Turan
    Loaded as it is with undeveloped notions about feminism and individuality, nothing about it is really memorable except the appealing musicality of the fine k.d. lang/Ben Mink score, which deserves better. [20 May 1994]
    • 56 Metascore
    • 30 Kenneth Turan
    Falling Down encourages a gloating sense that we the long-suffering victims are finally getting our splendid revenge. The ultimate hollowness of that kind of triumph reflects the shallowness of a film all too eager to serve it up. [26 Feb 1993, p.1]
    • 61 Metascore
    • 30 Kenneth Turan
    It would be lying not to say that some of the moviemakers here aren't working at the top of their craft, or that the movie won't reach audiences. On its own terms, Kindergarten Cop is nearly fool-proof: the last word in glib, shallow, soulless, spuriously warm-hearted commercialism. [21 Dec 1990, p.1]
    • 49 Metascore
    • 30 Kenneth Turan
    Not only are none of these characters particularly fun to be with, but the inevitable violence that enters their lives is strong and unpleasant. [03 Sep 1993]
    • 67 Metascore
    • 30 Kenneth Turan
    George Clooney's first effort behind the camera was doubtless more stimulating to direct than it will be for audiences to watch.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 30 Kenneth Turan
    Fake or not, I'm Still Here is no fun to watch, and in fact Phoenix's situation comes off as so dire that it becomes a reason to doubt the film's authenticity. Filming someone having a mental breakdown is embarrassing and exploitative at best.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 30 Kenneth Turan
    Not just any kind of trash, it's high-art trash, a kind of "When Tutu Goes Psycho" that so prizes hysteria over sanity that it's worth your life to tell when its characters are hallucinating and when they're not.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 30 Kenneth Turan
    A leaden mash-up of western and science-fiction elements that ends up noisy, grotesque and unappealing.
    • 41 Metascore
    • 30 Kenneth Turan
    Larry Crowne is an inside-out movie, acceptable around the edges but hollow and shockingly unconvincing at its core. When that core is two of the biggest movie stars around - Tom Hanks and Julia Roberts - it's an especially dispiriting situation.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 30 Kenneth Turan
    With some momentary exceptions, Jack the Giant Slayer simply isn't any fun.
    • 37 Metascore
    • 30 Kenneth Turan
    The Lone Ranger exists without a convincing sense of jeopardy or, more critically, any place for audiences to emotionally connect.
    • 28 Metascore
    • 30 Kenneth Turan
    A Good Day to Die Hard plays like an extended victory lap for star Bruce Willis and the entire "Die Hard" franchise. Not surprising, but not overwhelmingly entertaining either.
    • 35 Metascore
    • 30 Kenneth Turan
    Though the photographs are memorable, the photographer is not.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 30 Kenneth Turan
    Aside from preserving these folks for a presumably grateful posterity and convincingly depicting Austin as an open-air lunatic asylum, Slacker does not offer much to anyone who likes to stay awake.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 30 Kenneth Turan
    Not clever or polished enough to be successful as farce, unwilling to supply any reason to care about any of its characters, unable to make the points about the role of fashion in society it thinks it is, "Ready to Wear" is madness without the usual Altman method.
    • 36 Metascore
    • 30 Kenneth Turan
    The Canyons is a bad accident everyone saw coming, and now it is here.
    • 33 Metascore
    • 20 Kenneth Turan
    With no plot, character or dialogue worth experiencing, let alone remembering, the film merely occupies space on the screen and hopes for the best.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 20 Kenneth Turan
    By any rational standard, this film is kind of a mess. Even if you agree with its politics, you will probably weep at the ineptitude of it all.
    • 30 Metascore
    • 20 Kenneth Turan
    This is a film that almost is not there.
    • 32 Metascore
    • 20 Kenneth Turan
    Rock is undisputably gifted and charismatic, but when Down to Earth takes his edge away, the film's energy goes with it. And without energy, no comedy can survive.
    • 25 Metascore
    • 20 Kenneth Turan
    A misguided romantic serio-comedy aimed at women and gay men that ends up caricaturing both.
    • 35 Metascore
    • 20 Kenneth Turan
    It ought to be delightful, but it isn't.
    • 33 Metascore
    • 20 Kenneth Turan
    This is a Laura Ashley on Safari meditation on bored rich people searching for fulfillment and a new life among the photogenic wildlife of Kenya. Just wake me when it's over.
    • 40 Metascore
    • 20 Kenneth Turan
    The latest in what feels like an endless string of movies ... in which the actor's parts have ruinously overdosed on sentimentality and schmaltz at the expense of humor and even sanity.
    • 41 Metascore
    • 20 Kenneth Turan
    If Pen&#233;lope Cruz were any less attractive, maybe someone would have noticed how dull this mild, would-be romantic fairy tale has turned out.
    • 33 Metascore
    • 20 Kenneth Turan
    54
    Decadence has rarely looked so pathetic, lethargic and dispiriting as it does in this listless film.
    • 27 Metascore
    • 20 Kenneth Turan
    The Majestic isn't. Rather it's "The Film That Wasn't There," a derivative, self-satisfied fable that couldn't be more treacly and simple-minded if it tried. And it tries, oh, how it tries.
    • 46 Metascore
    • 20 Kenneth Turan
    It's as sad and painful to report as it is to experience, but Hollywood Ending makes the conclusion inescapable: Woody Allen has become his own worst enemy.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 20 Kenneth Turan
    Stillborn, pointless piece of work.
    • 28 Metascore
    • 20 Kenneth Turan
    By coddling viewers and micromanaging our responses, The Other Sister shows almost as little respect for the audience as Elizabeth does for her feisty, underappreciated daughter.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 20 Kenneth Turan
    Soon becomes a sadistic experience in its own right. Experiencing this pretentious wallow -- overwritten, under-thought and overdone -- is a very sophisticated form of torture.
    • 32 Metascore
    • 20 Kenneth Turan
    A kind of dirty fairy tale in which people with nasty attitudes inhabit a trash-talking, macho world of fast cars and complaisant women.
    • 33 Metascore
    • 20 Kenneth Turan
    Almost completely lacking in genuine thrills. Even the attractive presence of star Angelina Jolie can't keep this leaden, plodding, completely underwhelming film from playing like "Lara Croft: Yawn Inducer."
    • 31 Metascore
    • 20 Kenneth Turan
    Hollow, simple-minded and about as profound an experience as stepping in a pile of road kill.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 20 Kenneth Turan
    As pretentious as it is hard-core specific, this fiercely anti-erotic film makes even the chilly "Eyes Wide Shut" play like "The Big Easy."
    • 46 Metascore
    • 20 Kenneth Turan
    Too glib too often to make much of an impression any way you look at it.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 20 Kenneth Turan
    So exasperating in its contradictions, so frustrating in its fakery, so deeply irritating in its pretensions, it's frankly hard to know where to begin to dissect it.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 20 Kenneth Turan
    Feels more planned than passionate, scary at points but unconvincing overall.
    • 41 Metascore
    • 20 Kenneth Turan
    Sporadically funny, often strange and almost never poignant.
    • 41 Metascore
    • 20 Kenneth Turan
    Taking issue with efforts like The Salton Sea, cold and unemotional films that couldn't be more pleased at the opportunity to enthusiastically drag audiences through unhappy material, is as futile as getting mad at the wind.
    • 28 Metascore
    • 20 Kenneth Turan
    Lacking most kinds of inspiration and geared to undemanding minds, this project is so overloaded with hardware and stunts, it's a relief to have it over.
    • 46 Metascore
    • 20 Kenneth Turan
    The Basketball Diaries is a lose-lose proposition. Although it masquerades as a cautionary tale about the horrors of heroin, this epic of teen-age * Angst is more accurately seen as a reverential wallow in the gutter of self-absorption.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 20 Kenneth Turan
    The Quick and the Dead is showy visually, full of pans and zooming close-ups. Rarely dull, it is not noticeably compelling either, and as the derivative offshoot of a derivative genre, it inevitably runs out of energy well before any of its hotshots runs out of bullets.
    • 42 Metascore
    • 20 Kenneth Turan
    This poor film is so shamelessly manipulative and hopelessly bogus it will make you bite your tongue in regret and despair.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 20 Kenneth Turan
    McCarthy has not done himself or his reputation any favors with this original.
    • 38 Metascore
    • 10 Kenneth Turan
    Forced, heavy-handed and overdone, it's a pretend serious film that offers crass manipulation in the place where honesty is supposed to be.
    • 38 Metascore
    • 10 Kenneth Turan
    The thrill is definitely gone, leaving a disappointing and unpleasant mess in its place.
    • 21 Metascore
    • 10 Kenneth Turan
    One of those movies that makes you want to throw up your hands in despair, disgust, or maybe both.
    • 33 Metascore
    • 10 Kenneth Turan
    This aggressively stupid film is merely business as usual, a compendium of all the current obsessions and fixations that make so many of these films such unhappy experiences.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 10 Kenneth Turan
    Such a tedious Hollywood farce, so unpleasantly glib and relentlessly shallow, that Pacino's excessive performance is not even the worst thing about it.
    • 34 Metascore
    • 10 Kenneth Turan
    Seems merely tired and stale, the opposite of fresh, marked by ideas for jokes rather than things that are actually funny. Then, without warning, it goes from inept to complete disaster, sinking from indifferent to fiasco in the blink of an eye.
    • 44 Metascore
    • 10 Kenneth Turan
    Tiresome, inept farce that's not even a fraction as clever or entertaining as it likes to imagine it is -- a complete waste of time.
    • 41 Metascore
    • 10 Kenneth Turan
    A numbing and dispiriting experience aimed at the least discriminating parts of the teen-age audience.
    • 24 Metascore
    • 10 Kenneth Turan
    Despite a wealth of special effects...this movie is surprisingly inert, more dull than anything else, with little to recommend it on any level.
    • 30 Metascore
    • 10 Kenneth Turan
    Turns out to be a muddled limp biscuit of a movie, a vampire soap opera that doesn't make much sense even on its own terms.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 10 Kenneth Turan
    It is hard to say what is more dispiriting about True Romance the movie itself or the fact that someone somewhere is sure to applaud its hollow, dime-store nihilism and smug pseudo-hip posturing as a bright new day in American cinema. [10 Sept 1993]
    • 24 Metascore
    • 10 Kenneth Turan
    What's most interesting about this new film is how lacking it is in any of the things, from humor to emotion to halfway decent acting, we might go to a movie for. There's not even enough here to get mad at.
    • 30 Metascore
    • 10 Kenneth Turan
    A haphazard film about half as sophisticated as the average beer commercial.
http://www.metacritic.com/critic/kenneth-turan?filter=movies&page=51
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