Andrew O'Hehir

It's easy to hate movies that are abundantly terrible or immoral or stupid, but I almost feel like a jerk telling you that Fernando Meirelles' globetrotting drama 360 is a mistake from beginning to end.

It isn't a masterpiece; there are occasional clunkers in Jelski's dialogue (adapted from a play by Wolfgang Bauer) and the acting, although superior to maybe 85 percent of Hollywood movies, is a little uneven.

A dreary, humorless affair, with no real feeling for the rhythms of either baseball or love.

Although Instinct is strictly a Hollywood formula picture, it's such an efficiently executed one, built around two such outstanding actors, that for the most part you won't mind.

A middling little movie that tries to trespass on Bergman-Renoir territory and simply isn't adroit enough to pull it off, and because in its weaker moments it's overheated and silly.

Mackenzie delivers that story as a blend of sex comedy, dark satire, and morality tale that recalls various aspects of "Shampoo" and "Less Than Zero" and "The Graduate," but has a couple of nifty surprises and a poisonous sting in its tail that's all its own.

An agreeably chewy, pulpy work of old-fashioned crime cinema, a fair bit overcooked and overlong, but worth catching for its acting, its atmosphere and its action set-pieces.

This is a highly enjoyable summer thrill ride with an action heroine who likes to be on top, literally and figuratively.

Too jumbled to become the major pop hit it wants to be. But it's not an entirely bad film despite its lack of coherence. Horror aficionados and other midnight-movie fans shouldn't miss it.

But in the end conventional sentiment, rather than any actual morality, is all that the script for The Family Man (by David Diamond and David Weissman) has to offer.

Whatever his faults as a filmmaker may be, Cameron would never make an adventure flick that felt this bland and generic.

Home of the Brave isn't exactly a subtle or a delicate picture -- it's an old-fashioned Hollywood movie, at least in tone, that's being released like an indie -- but it has some terrific acting and comes straight from the heart.

So teachers' unions don't care about kids. Oh, and luck is a foxy lady. This is what I took away from the inept and bizarre Won't Back Down, a set of right-wing anti-union talking points disguised (with very limited success) as a mainstream motion-picture-type product.

Alone among the cast, Farrell seems to understand that this movie -- which is lazy and stoned, for all its loud music -- needed somebody to go ape-shit, to pretend to give a crap or at least to have fun.

What makes The Internship especially unfortunate is that there are pieces of a better, funnier movie lying around here, pretty much unnoticed.

Lazer Team is a pastiche based on a beloved pattern; it understands its own limitations but seeks to maximize its potential. All the characters are presented with immense affection and offered the chance to grow and develop, by which I mean to be gifted with inexplicable superpowers, to be repeatedly struck in the groin area by projectiles and to be mocked by others for their moments of vulnerability.

The kind of little indie you'll either hate or find impossible to resist. I fall into the latter camp, but can appreciate opposing views.

The best thing I can say about it is that the costumes and the hambone acting keep it from being a deadly bore.

The funny thing about all this is that a half-hour into Underworld I couldn't wait for it to be over. When it really was over, I couldn't wait for the next installment. Go figure.

As a performance-art act of juvenile Id-fulfillment, it's magnificent.

There's definitely some empty-calories, summer-movie fun to be found in this ludicrous genre mashup, most of it courtesy of maniacal Russian director Timur Bekmambetov, who stages hilarious, imaginative, almost free-form action sequences like nobody in the business.

Horror fans should see this, at least in geeky admiration for what it pulls off, but in the long run it's no more than a crisp footnote to genre history.

A cryptic and unsettling film.

I'm not quite saying that the unabashed squareness and silliness of Larry Crowne are negatives. They're almost admirable in themselves, and certainly constitute a selling point.

Its shameless and nonsensical combination of ingredients finally won me over, after a fashion, when I realized that its gung-ho Navy-recruitment propaganda and retrograde gender politics shouldn't be taken any more seriously than the ZZ Top, AC/DC and Billy Squier songs on the soundtrack.

An endless battle scene in search of a movie. It's every bit as harrowing -- and also every bit as pointless and misguided -- as the botched military mission it depicts.

Ultimately I’m going to vote with my heart and say you should see it, largely for the brooding, physical performance of Tom Hardy, an actor still a shade too peculiar for Hollywood stardom, along with the ominous evocation of Stalin’s Russia on the cusp of change. But that recommendation comes with many asterisks, and in various respects Child 44 is a lost opportunity or, as they teach us to say in film-critic academy, an “interesting failure.”

The film has an odd and striking energy, and the chemistry between Scodelario and Biel has an electrical charge to it. There are a couple of genuinely creepy moments, and Gregorini keeps us on an emotional knife edge.

Forster and Benioff are able craftsmen who apparently thought it might be interesting to seal themselves into a narrative box with no way out. Sorry about that, guys -- I hope it was a growth experience.

It's rare enough to see a Hollywood movie made with this much attention and personality, let alone one that balances comedy and darkness as well as this one does.

I'm always grateful to practice a little affirmative action on behalf of grade-C sleaze movies with a budget you could probably locate in your sofa cushions or your dryer, and Tim McCann's digital-video opus Nowhere Man is a fine example of the species.

An intermittently engaging thriller.

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.

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.

The doggie in Darling Companion is a big, warm bundle of puppy love; his owners are lost forever in a big chill.

As a capable imitation of better movies by Martin Scorsese, Brian DePalma and Roman Polanski – it's reasonably successful entertainment.

Proceeds at such an amiable pace and features enough creepy-crawly effects that many viewers won't quite notice or care how rickety and second-rate it is.

Decadence is supposed to be fun, surely, or at least more fun than the desperate, sludgy, frantic mess of Suicide Squad.

In this classy, taut white-knuckler – largely shot inside a real-life decommissioned Soviet sub – Robinson asks us to consider more than the hypothetical possibility that the world nearly ended in 1968. He reminds us that we have no idea how many other near-misses may have happened in the behind-the-scenes history of the modern age and also, more troubling still, that long after the Cold War has faded into memory we continue to have difficulty telling the crazy people from the sane ones.

Shrink offers a roster of wonderfully eccentric characterizations, shoehorned into a dramatic structure that's just a little too formulaic.

No wonder Arlene (Hunt) keeps a bottle of vodka in the chandelier. You would too with this demonic, passive-aggressive, New Age munchkin (Osment) trying to run your life.

It has the kind of jumbled, pseudo-spectacular, overdecorated digital design that the eye and mind can’t really take in. Individual shots can be gorgeous, but there are just too damn many of them, and the overall experience is the visual equivalent of eating an entire wedding cake.

A haunting and terrifying film. It's also a film of wonderful spaces and silences.

A jumble of spare parts and leftover dialogue, as if it had been assembled out of unused bits of every movie where an unknown whatzit threatens our way of life and the government goes into full institutional pants-crapping panic mode.

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.

For all the CGI action sequences and butt-rocking Dolby sound effects, in fact, Green Lantern is most satisfying when it sticks close to stodgy comic-book archetype.

Doesn't work at any level, but the total lack of chemistry between its central couple is fatal.

It's occasionally funny and a lot painful.

Entirely watchable and often pretty fun, in a mishmashed, patchy kind of way.

It's long. Long movies almost always mean the audience member has time to think, and in this context that's not a good thing.

It’s clearly a directorial accomplishment to assemble this level of acting talent in one movie and come away with something so – well, “bad” is not sufficient to capture the idiot glory of this motion picture.

Let’s be clear right up front that The Maid’s Room doesn’t quite work, intriguing premise and all, and that the fault lies with Walker’s labored script and wooden characterization.

Dragons torch the earth as manly men with weird hair battle them in this colossally misconceived dud.

Thoroughly enjoyable, but not because it's any good.

The result is something like a weepy Lifetime melodrama told in the languorous, self-indulgent style of European art cinema, as if Michelangelo Antonioni or Bernardo Bertolucci had wound up in debt to multiple ex-wives and were forced to churn out straight-to-cable movies, circa 1986.

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

The ultra-tangled plotline of Terminator Genisys makes the rhythm of the action beats especially weird; we see the entire world nuked into rubble by the machine overlords really early in the movie, which makes it hard to get excited about a few buildings falling down later on.

If it's a nonsensical patchwork quilt, it's mostly a watchable one.

This is a parlor trick, but it's a hell of a good one.

With Men, Women & Children and the equally laborious “Labor Day,” Reitman has gotten trapped amid the crumbling edifice of Hollywood. It’s turning him old before his time.

Essentially dumb and sadistic, but it's not like that's something new for pop culture. What we've got here is a solid, grade-B genre sequel, not as scary as the original but a bit funnier, and with a nasty little sting in its tail.

Can someone explain what Nicolas Cage and Nicole Kidman are doing in a chaotic and sadistic home-invasion thriller, shot in digital colors so radioactive they appear to have leaked out of the Fukushima nuclear plant?

Even with its abundant flaws and its willingness to embarrass itself this strange and extraordinary film never lost me and never let me go; it wrapped me in a dreamlike rapture and then in a sense of profound and nearly universal personal tragedy.

This is a pale simulacrum of those high-style travel-porn thrillers of the '60s and '70s, which only serves to remind us that those aren't as easy to pull off as they look, and also that maybe they weren't so great in the first place.

If anything, it’s overstuffed with imagination and ideas, and when it comes to Hollywood movies I very much prefer that to the default setting. See it with an open mind, and you may well be surprised.

Inside of five minutes I felt an urgent, blinding hatred for almost all its grotesquely overprivileged characters.

A trashy thriller of the kind that used to make up the second half of double bills in crumbling downtown theaters, circa 1977.

Reasonably effective.

You can't call W.E. a total disaster; it's too pretty, too nonsensical and finally too insignificant for that.

Misfires on multiple levels but isn't all that terrible.

As a visual symphony, The Canyons is often masterful, and while it may be pornographic in places, it’s never campy. At the center of its cold, beautiful and half-dead world is the almost incandescent Lindsay Lohan, burning like a flawed diamond.

It's kind of fun to watch Pacino and Liotta and Tatum and James Ransone, as Jonathan's foulmouthed partner, as they roar at each other and suck the marrow from the hambone. You can see why actors want to work with Montiel, but actors are notoriously bad judges of whether good scenes will ever add up to a worthwhile movie, which is exactly the problem here.

An awkward and distinctly unsexy farcical misfire.

This film's dithering, handsome, morally ambivalent Hamlet, is a profoundly unsatisfactory character.

Some viewers may find this movie sexist or misogynist simply based on its premise, but it's a mistake to take Greenaway's symbolic narratives too literally.

Between the 12th floor and the 14th floor, boredom awaits!

It was boring and silly but not atrociously bad. No, that's much too glowing; allow me to back up and rephrase. It is atrociously bad, basically.

There's nothing unconventional or daring about On_Line, but considering how cheap it undoubtedly was to make, the acting, writing and direction all stand up pretty well; this is more intelligent and better structured than at least half the Hollywood movies I see.

A wildly uneven and sloppily directed movie, full of clashing tones and undigested bits of superior films.

No serious film fan could stomach the cheap gags and farting contests in this goofball tribute. I laughed myself stupid anyway.

It's pretentious highbrow trash, but as far as that goes it works pretty well.

It's kind of endearing and kind of asinine.

It might be nice if Ghosts of Mars had more to offer than snappy repartee and shameless gore, or if it could borrow a little narrative tension from its Alien Chain Saw forebears.

Identity Thief reaches impressive heights of laziness and idiocy.

For all the filmmakers' talk about reinvigorating the franchise for a new generation, and all their attention to technical details, this is a sloppily conceived remake with no passion for the genre or this story behind it, a movie that assumes its audience is brain-dead and likes it that way.

Startlingly inept from start to finish -- it's atrociously written, poorly shot and edited and fatally unfocused.

A dispiriting and thoroughly ineffective romantic comedy, with some juicy morsels provided around the edges by a great supporting cast but no heat whatever in the central coupling between Lopez and Aussie TV hunk Alex O'Loughlin.

Cohen had neither the chops nor the clout to prevent Get Hard from ending up, no doubt through the normal process of producer rewrites, focus groups, worried agents and weevil infestations, as a confused and contradictory mess. More to the point, it’s almost never funny, and full of elementary screenwriting blunders.

This Friday the 13th is glossy, good-looking garbage, acted out by a cast of big-chested androids (male and female alike) and with the original series' rough edges smooved over. It's reasonably entertaining.

For the most part it's a blast.

As irritating as Lake Placid sometimes is, it also has an easygoing sense of fun, along with one of the more memorable movie monsters of recent years. The mismatched ingredients blend into a blissfully, stupidly surreal summer cocktail.

Does become more engaging as it lurches along, perhaps because you give up hoping that anything will really happen and settle into the Nicolas Roeg-meets-David Lynch-at-the-cast-party-for-"Taxi Driver" atmosphere of mid-'70s nothingness.

A Garry Marshall movie has to be funny in order to be anything at all, and this one is so deeply involved with its pseudo-meaningful roundelay of beautiful but inexplicably lovelorn people as to be teeth-grindingly, mind-warpingly boring.

It may be a haphazard mess, but it's actually pretty funny.

It's a challenge to take a comic-book adaptation that stars Josh Brolin, John Malkovich and Megan Fox and drain nearly all the fun out of it. Jonah Hex is one of those movies that combines a certain amount of being ridiculous on purpose with a great deal of pseudo-profound silliness.

It's a sloppy, fun, late-'80s style Hong Kong action flick full of pogo-dancing zombies and voracious vampires who look vaguely like Siamese cats with spoiled cottage cheese cooked onto their faces.

Quickly plunges into boggy terrain from which it can never extricate itself.

This movie feels a little half-baked to me in the sense that it carries an exceedingly complicated intellectual agenda below the surface of a conventional thriller, and doesn’t execute either level as well as it might.

The good news is that Duchovny has an undeniable feel for this medium, and a fine rapport with actors.

Sucker Punch doesn't all work by a long shot, but it confirms my sense that Snyder belongs near the top of a very short list of directors who are trying to reinvent a personal, auteurist vision of cinema at the most commercial, mass-market, attention-disordered end of the spectrum.

I'm not sure whether to recommend The Baytown Outlaws as a guns 'n' glory time-waster or warn you off it as a piece of mendacious trash. So I'll do both.

Familiar and profoundly unoriginal.

An Adam Sandler comedy, which means it bears only a superficial relationship to the customary conventions of moviemaking, and also that there's no use getting all worked up about that.

It's not merely that Dear Wendy was shot on Danish and German locations that don't look quite right; it's that almost every decision made by the production designers is wrong, or at least discordant.

Martin Lawrence, no Eddie Murphy, takes a reheated cross-dressing shtick and turns it into something to elate your inner fourth-grader.

A chaste, lively and mildly goofy romance to dispel the winter blahs.

This initial “Mortal Instruments” picture has the vibe of a straight-to-video release from the mid-‘90s, except with a $60 million budget and considerable special-effects expertise.

That whole aspect of October Baby creeped me out a lot more than the blood-curdling failed-abortion story did, honestly. I've seen a lot of movies where crazy and impossible things happen, and you just have to roll with them. Real life is much more frightening.

There's virtually no context provided here, about Lennon or the Beatles or New York or Chapman himself. To put it another way, the film's entire context IS Chapman.

It’s a moving and magnificently crafted story about a person named Steve Jobs who was brought low by pride and arrogance and then redeemed by love. It might be a story that mirrors our dreams and desires, which is what the real Steve Jobs did too, and in that sense maybe it’s indirectly about him. It’s definitely not about a guy who built and sold computers.

Deliciously dumb, reasonably well-made.

There's almost no such thing as an entertaining holiday trifle anymore -- the kind of casual, cheerful little picture that you might see on a whim and end up enjoying, even beyond the breadth of your modest expectations. The Perfect Holiday is an attempt, at least, to resurrect the idea of the trifle

This extremely stupid movie, with its recycled Batman/Spider-Man-style plot involving a dead father, an evil scientist-tycoon (played by the reliably terrific William Fichtner) and a massive criminal underworld of masked thugs, also features the best action sequence of the summer, bar none. I’m not kidding!

Gingival surgery would be more fun than watching this brain-draining, spirit-sucking attempt at a stoner spoof, which combines the cutting edge of frat-boy wit, the excitement of a mid-'80s made-for-TV action flick and the authenticity of a Renaissance Faire held in an abandoned field behind a Courtyard by Marriott.

A nerve-jangling work of visual poetry and ironic juxtaposition, and a powerful human story of a group of brave young Americans.

Ludicrous trash, but it has style.

It’s a thoroughly incoherent, generally inane and surprisingly entertaining tale of witches and monsters and what legendary film critic Joe Bob Briggs calls “beast fu,” all set in a sub-Tolkien, sub-“Game of Thrones” pseudo-medieval universe.

CBGB has more of the original prankish punk spirit than it even recognizes.

Grade-B blockbuster.

The guys abuse each other in what's meant to be fraternal affection but feels more like the discomfort of being stuck together in a terrible movie.

A well-intentioned, profoundly silly and borderline insulting movie.

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.

The worst movie of the new millennium.

Babbit is skilled at creating atmosphere and mood, all of it creepy or sodden, and actresses Elisha Cuthbert and Camilla Belle put their hearts into their roles, which are, unfortunately, encased in a sleazoid TV movie of the week tarted up in art-school clothes.

It's strange and stupid and half-compelling and sometimes beautiful.

Pretty much three well-staged action sequences strung together with the dumbest imaginable connective tissue.

Seriously, this is one of the strangest and most painful films in recent memory.

Off the top of my head, I'm guessing that Season of the Witch claims a place in the top five all-time bizarre and pointless homages to art cinema.

For a movie that’s supposedly about delivering weightless, uncomplicated fun, Pixels is an overwhelmingly sad experience.

This well-crafted example just piles imaginary atrocities on top of real ones, and then halfheartedly claim that it means something. Well, it doesn't.

Indeed, this movie's offensive on many levels, but Arabs and Muslims don't get to feel special. It relies on stupid stereotypes because it's a stupid movie that's offensive to virtually everyone.

The movie is terrible, but made with verve and sincerity, all of it pointed in the wrong direction.

It's a gleeful, nitrous-oxide high.

They kill me, these guys. No, seriously. If they make any more of these movies, they might as well kill me.

Classic Rudolph: a tone of sweet-edged, slightly kooky melancholy, a terrific cast mostly left to its own devices and a few intriguing moments. Not, I'm sorry to say, a movie.

The misanthropic nadir of the director's crash-and-burn career.

A charming but silly love letter to a vanished era of urban bohemia?

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.)

It gets much more watchable in the last half-hour.

You get the feeling that everyone was in a good mood and the margaritas were pouring, but neither Gallo nor anybody else ever found a bottom line for this movie or its characters.

A fourth-rate Hollywood thriller that bungles a lot of thievery from better movies, is entirely bereft of suspense or excitement and features a leading man who absolutely, positively cannot act.

Even if the actual movie is an awkward, uncinematic mishmash. Waters has at least tried to write a sex comedy that isn't aimed at titty-fixated 17-year-olds, and at its best Sex and Death 101 has a fast, clever rhythm that almost sings.

This one's a pile of crap that won't start.

Utterly predictable, thoroughly sentimental and -- worse -- not all that funny. It makes your average episode of "Third Rock From the Sun" look like the edgy mutant offspring of John Waters and Ingmar Bergman.

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.

Saw 3-D is in 3-D. Really, really bad 3-D.

Let's be real clear about this: You've got to be suffering from some major trash-culture brain damage to enjoy a movie like Ready to Rumble.

Basically brings home the bacon for horror fans -- it offers decent special effects and a nice array of those moments where you shriek and jump and nearly pee your pants but it turns out to be Mom or the cat after all.

I was laughing myself sick over Saving Silverman, a sublimely idiotic farce in the "There's Something About Mary" tradition.

Director and co-writer Jonathan Glatzer handles his talented cast well, and the movie is dark, droll and sentimental in roughly the correct proportions. Worth a look.

A winsome, charming and irresistibly romantic picture, and also a profoundly self-involved one that has nothing whatever to do with Iraq or war or much of anything else besides the butterfly-like spirit of Roberto Benigni. But I guess that combination makes it a great holiday selection choice for certain disheveled, liberal family groups. Mine, for instance.

A self-indulgent and icky film, but reasonably well made and undeniably addictive.

Almost as degrading as any unmarked video you can buy in the back alleys of Manila, and, in its pseudo-significance and arty pretension, it's a lot less honest. I'm heartily sorry I had to poison an entire evening with it.

Somehow Kutcher and Heigl and Tom Selleck and Catherine O'Hara (as her parents) are all fun to watch a fair amount of the time, without the movie they're in being any good at all.

This is a movie full of now-you-see-it, now-you-don't plot points.

Pretty much everything in this high-space war yarn has been swiped from other, better movies.

It's a little bit Tolkien, a little bit Lucas, a little bit "Matrix," a little bit "Dune" and rather too much Philip Pullman, all stuck together with some powerfully expensive effects and lots of cute kids doing tai chi.

What makes it so disappointing is that the movie is just another sub-Farrelly-brothers collection of miscellaneous gags.

I don't even care that there's no plot in this Antonio Banderas-Lucy Liu faceoff. It's still terrible!

OK, so Valentine is, like, this new serial-killer movie that totally blows. But kind of in a good way. Like, it's funny.

This awkward fable of ghetto redemption mixes painfully earnest message-delivery with occasional scenes of brutal violence.

What's really depressing is that some viewers may be deluded into thinking there's something of substance in "Centipede II," when it's more like a DC Comics version of Pier Paolo Pasolini's notorious "Salò, or The 120 Days of Sodom," with the sweeping condemnation of Western culture stripped out and the mean-spiritedness cranked to 11. If you want to check this out for a stomach-turning giggle, don't let me stop you. But please, let's not pretend it means more than that.

A lugubrious sub-"Exorcist" demonic possession film that's absolutely no fun at all.

There's nothing scarier than a group of hormone-crazed 20-somethings, but this sequel isn't much more than a footnote of a footnote.

This fantasy crap, fake-o effects and all, betrays princes of dice, masters of graph and wielders of bong.

Summer's most shameless piece of trash since "Wild Things."

A dumb and sloppy movie.

Shot after shot photographed at wobbly, off-center angles for no particular reason, weigh every action sequence down with super-slo-mo in lame imitation of "The Matrix" or end every single scene with a vertical wipe.