question: Sloppily-made, amateurish, and scarce on laughs, The Wash can't compare to Richard Pryor's 1976 Car Wash.

numbered reviews: 1. a plotless, mostly humorless time-killer that exists primarily as a 90-minute commercial for a star-studded soundtrack. ... the movie has all the earmarks of the "let's just make it up as we go along" school of filmmaking.
2. A 100% feeble comedy that exposes the dire acting abilities of two otherwise well respected hip-hop artists.
3. I was wishing I was sitting through Bones a second time.
4. Waterlogged from start to finish
5. You've really got to wonder sometimes how talented people end up in hopeless misfires like this film.
6. [A] crude and boring movie.
7. Snoop, Dre and their buddies take it all in stride -- if they were any more laid-back, they'd be napping in their trailers.
8. Two roommates start to antagonize each other after one becomes the other's superior at an LA car wash, and the conflict is played out with grittiness and flippancy.
9. The lame, underdeveloped jokes far outweigh the fresh ones, the women are all chirpy airheads, and the whole thing hangs on a feeble storyline.
10. Some energetic performances from the cast may make this accessible to a wider audience.


question: Harmlessly hokey yet never much more than mediocre, Hocus Pocus is a muddled family-friendly effort that fails to live up to the talents of its impressive cast.

numbered reviews: 1. Still an underrated Disney gem to this day.
2. It strictly remains more "trick" than "treat."
3. Hocus Pocus remains a delightful family comedy, spooky but never scary as it romps its merry way through the graveyard.
4. Perhaps I underestimate the power of its generational hold, yet considering the potential of a broad Disney witch romp, Hocus Pocus is an incredibly mediocre movie.
5. For an 11-year-old boy (in 1993) already in love with horror movies, Halloween and Thora Birch, Hocus Pocus was my dream movie sprung to life.
6. Goofy witches and things that bump all over the place, incliuding Midler...fair family fun.
7. Rollicking Halloween fun for tweens and up.
8. With Bette Midler and her onscreen sisters shamelessly hamming things up, it looks as if those involved in making this inoffensive flight of fantasy had more fun than anyone over 12 will have watching it.
9. [Midler, Najimy and Parker] perform a show-stopping version of 'I Put a Spell on You' at a Halloween party, but otherwise it's slim pickings.
10. Modern audiences will probably enjoy watching a bizarre Sarah Jessica Parker ham it up as one of a trio of Salem-era witches reincarnated in the 1990s (they ride vacuum cleaners!) and after the children of the town. Too bad the story is so disposable.


question: A glossy yet unflinching portrait of violent, hedonistic teenagers. Bruce Willis and Sharon Stone chew the scenery, while Justin Timberlake gives a noteworthy performance.

numbered reviews: 1. Imagine a Larry Clark movie minus the constant alarmism, given a decent script and competent actors. I know, it's tough.
2. Director Nick Cassavetes should be commended for the unflinching manner in which he tells the story -- it packs a punch, although it lingers too long to be truly unsettling.
3. Alpha Dog may be more crass exploitation than an earnest attempt at laying out the facts of a crime, but it's exciting and watchable for anyone willing to romp in the mud for two hours.
4. Alpha Dog, like most of its cast, is posing.
5. Wants to be a horror story of sorts, but winds up being tedious and over-indulgent.
6. Nick Cassavetes' new film, Alpha Dog, has a compelling, ripped-from-the-headlines vibe.
7. Apart from the grim forebodings of tragedy, writer-director Nick Cassavetes seems to have modeled this ambitious docudrama on Larry Clark's kiddie-porn shockers, but he doesn't know what to leave out, and the movie becomes excessively complicated.
8. In his best film to date, Nick Cassavetes directs with ferocious energy, taking scenes past their logical stopping points and pushing his actors to, but never over, the precipice of absurdity.
9. Misses its opportunity to be a smart, investigative crime drama ... a frivolous and shallow affair about partying teens.
10. Alpha Dog operates without outrage -- not because the behavior of the people in the movie isn't horrifying but because the movie knows it is much too late to save those bouncing, happy kids we glimpsed in the opening seconds.


question: Made-for-tv drama evokes anything but real emotion.

numbered reviews:
1. The surprises are interesting, but not enough to save the film from itself.
2. Warm-hearted but ultimately soft!
3. A torturous endurance test!
4. Never manages more than a glib, TV movie-of- the-week glance at their lives.
5. Everything is reduced to a transparent formula. And everyone plays their schematic part.
6. A neatly wrapped made-for-TV homily!
7. For what is supposed to be a poignant love story, The Other Sister fails to show much spark.
8. Giovanni Ribisi could be his generation's Dustin Hoffman... he could also be his generation's Richard Benjamin...
9. Grotesquely sentimental, shamelessly manipulative and fundamentally bad.
10. The film pushes the outer limits of just how long anyone with a normal I.Q. can watch what should be a TV sitcom.