Andrew O'Hehir

How do you screw up a family movie that has a cute bull mastiff, a cute 6-year-old and David Arquette playing a mailman? Apparently by unleashing half a dozen writers to gnaw it to pieces and entrusting the result to a TV director (John Whitesell of "Cosby" and "Roseanne") with little sense of how to tell a story longer than six minutes.

A movie that's laughable without, alas, even being enjoyably awful.

An academic exercise driven by adolescent ideas that never shape themselves into a narrative: in short, a movie that can never dislodge the art fatally wedged up its butt.

The story sounds great, on paper: It''s got interracial romance and betrayal, political and ethnic violence, and a faint feminist undercurrent. But the resulting movie is so pretty and so utterly lifeless you can almost smell the embalming fluid coming off the screen.

Portman and Judd aren't responsible for the mendacious and finally repulsive sentimentality of Where the Heart Is, but by the end their wholesome glow seemed contaminated by it, and that's a shame.

Wild is a Hollywood holiday movie "based on a true story," meaning that its view of reality is conditioned by the three-act structure and the pop-Christian teleology of sin and repentance.

Speaking as someone who despises almost every aspect of the Thatcherite social-economic consensus that has defined the capitalist world for thirty years (and almost every aspect of Thatcher's actual policies), she deserves more than this.

J. Edgar turns out to be one of the worst ideas anybody's ever had, a mendacious, muddled, sub-mediocre mess that turns some of the most explosive episodes of the 20th century into bad domestic melodrama and refuses to take any clear position on one of American history's most controversial figures.

This could have been a story of immense heroism, tragic sacrifice and agonizing historical irony, and it hints in that direction, in its stiff-upper-lip fashion, before retreating into a vain search for a happy ending and an effort to turn itself into “The King’s Speech.”

It’s not just that Chappie is a mishmash of familiar ingredients whose story quickly slides off the rails into a swamp of action-movie clichés, or another misbegotten project from the Land of Intriguing Premises. It doesn’t have an intriguing premise in the first place. It’s cluttered, goofy and incoherent from beginning to end, and much too long.

Director James Marsh (already an Oscar winner for the documentary "Man on Wire") and screenwriter Anthony McCarten (adapting Jane Hawking's memoir) opt for the safe, pretty, and reassuring English period-piece choices the whole way through, as if deliberately underselling the fact that this is a story about two remarkable people facing extraordinary circumstances.

Don’t get me wrong, I like trash just fine, and the twisty-loo, triple-abduction plot of Prisoners certainly kept me watching to the end. (You’ll figure out some of screenwriter Aaron Guzikowski’s plot twists, but not all of them.) It’s the imitation-David Fincher pretentiousness that gets on my nerves.

Scorsese is pushing, I guess, for something that combines a '40s horror-thriller with a contemporary psychological tragedy. What he ends up with is more like a Hardy Boys mystery directed by David Lynch.

I hated this movie; I wish I could unsee it and will it out of existence. But that’s not the same as thinking it’s worthless or corrupt or entirely inept. It’s more like a massively self-indulgent prank, inflicted on the world by some reasonably intelligent young men, which makes it the most bro-tastic project of all time. Mo’ bro than this, no es posible, amigos.

One could and perhaps should use scare quotes around "intellectual" when it comes to someone who would crank out a piece of campaign-season partisan hackwork this crude and sloppy. (By this standard, James Carville looks like Immanuel Kant.)

If The Cell were six minutes long it would blow your mind. At two hours, it's a disordered muddle of hellacious highs and pedestrian lows.

Perhaps the most startling aspect of Suffragette, which for better or worse is a standard-issue historical drama, well constructed but not especially capacious or original, is its depiction of how far female activists were willing to go in order to prove that they could stand alongside men.

Fitzgerald’s influence could have crept in there by osmosis, and whatever other charges you want to level against Spring Breakers – such as incoherence, plotlessness, salaciousness and mind-numbing monotony – it has no lack of high concept.

There's so little sexual chemistry between the actors in this film that it seems like a kind of accomplishment. I've seen shows on C-SPAN that were hotter than this.

Did this overstuffed quality of Entourage, its KFC Double Down too-much-is-not-enough-ness, ultimately work on me? Absolutely not.

Rarely has a film with such a great cast and so many moments of terrific writing and such high dramatic goals been so messy and disorganized and fundamentally bad.

Edward Norton's dopey directorial debut gives interfaith romance a bad name.

There’s enough craft and intelligence at work here that you can’t dismiss Raze as meaningless sadism, but not nearly enough to make it worth the unpleasantness of actually watching it.

Stoker, which plays something like a remake of “The Addams Family” mixed with “The Paperboy” — but without the laughs of either – belongs in a special category of movie badness, or perhaps two different but overlapping categories. It’s a visually striking but fundamentally terrible film made by a good or (some would say) great director.

This might be the edgiest film of the year -- if the year were 1982.

Director Cook and screenwriter Anthony Frewin were both intimates of the real Kubrick, which I guess counts for something. But for what, exactly? Does it uniquely qualify them to make a mean-spirited, trashy and intermittently funny film about a guy who wasn't Kubrick?

His scattershot and ad hominem attacks against many different forms of religious hypocrisy don't add up to a coherent critique, and he's not qualified to provide one.

I felt like dropping to my knees in the theater and praying for this smug, irritating fake-reality-TV show to go away, leaving these three terrific actors (and characters) in something resembling a real movie.