Andrew O'Hehir

Reasonably good fun. If you're a 12-year-old boy riding an intense Cherry Pepsi buzz and totally devoted to destroying some brain cells, that is.

Finally, at the risk of seeming provincial, why is it OK that some Canadian has made a movie set in Ireland with no Irish people among the principal cast?

30 Minutes or Less features about half of a decent idea, which works out OK since it ends up as half a movie.

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.

Mamet's trademark artificial, mutual-incomprehension dialogue and con-game plotting are ineptly matched to the action genre (and feel stale in any case), while the jiu-jitsu scenes are so incoherently shot and edited you can't tell if the fight choreography is any good or not.

Robert De Niro and Frances McDormand almost rescue this lifeless, clichéd cop drama! Close isn't good enough!

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

An awkward and distinctly unsexy farcical misfire.

What I see in The Avengers, unfortunately, is a diminished film despite its huge scale, and kind of a bore.

For the most part "Inception" is a handsome, clever and grindingly self-serious boy-movie, shorn of imagination, libido, spirituality or emotional depth. Nolan establishes a fascinating world, loaded with trapdoors, symbols and hidden secrets, and then squanders the opportunity on an overpriced "Twilight Zone" episode.

Given the debased standards of action cinema these days this might be enough to make The Town a hit. But almost everything else about the movie is badly off balance, starting with Affleck's decision to cast himself as the implacably sexy and good-hearted Doug.

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.

The Hunger Games has some cool moments here and there, and is never entirely dreadful. Lawrence is both radiant and triumphant. They haven't screwed it up badly enough to kill it, although they've tried.

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.

Begins as pseudo-realism before descending into weird and mangled wank-job fantasy.

I can admire the professional flexibility that leads Van Sant from slow-motion, half-experimental works like "Paranoid Park" or "Last Days" to an inspirational, Oscar-season package like Milk, but I wish he could split the difference between his two modes more effectively.

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.

The hit-to-miss gag ratio is atrocious, and we spend most of the movie hanging out with these borderline-agreeable characters, waiting for something to happen.

This one has its technical virtues, but it’s frankly kind of a muddle, and may have been doomed from the outset. I would divide the potential audience for Oldboy into two groups: Those who will be disappointed and those who will be bewildered.

The scenes with Johnson and Wallace, although intrinsically interesting, drag down the drama somewhat, and...every minute we're away from the firecracker atmosphere of rural Alabama detracts from the overall impact.

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

O'Connor chucks away everything that was interesting or dark or subtle in Warrior and replaces it with a pseudo-individualist, sub-Freudian, Tea Party-friendly fantasy.

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.

What results is a patchy, uncertain motion picture, full of incidents and images but fundamentally unfocused and superficial.

A relentlessly gruesome, visually impressive and ultimately not very interesting movie with some pretensions to seriousness.

For a while, at least, this one feels like Iñárritu’s masterpiece, until that familiar too-muchness begins to take over.

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

I'd rate Bubble at no better than a C-plus for artistic achievement and a D-minus for audience appeal. In one sense, it accomplishes its goals efficiently by making you feel, in less than 80 minutes, as if you've gotten permanently trapped in the dead-end, trailer-park lives of its working-class characters. I've never been so grateful to get out of a theater, turn my cellphone back on and plug myself into a $4 Starbucks latte.

Dark Matter has neither the technical command of an art-house film nor the manufactured intensity of a grade-B thriller, yet it's also too cheap and dirty to feel like a Hollywood-scale drama.

Any film that begins with one of those fake-news montages, where snippets of genuine CNN footage are stitched together to concoct a feeling of semi-urgency around its hackneyed apocalypse, already sucks even before it gets started.

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.

A limp and dreary experience, at least after you get past its intriguing premise. It's poorly written and woodenly acted, completely formulaic and hopelessly imprisoned by both its genre and finally its form.

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.

Lee Daniels’ The Butler is big, brave, crude and contradictory, very bad in places and very good in others, and every American should see it.

Despite its clichéd elements, Dallas Buyers Club is a fierce celebration of the unpredictable power that belongs to the outcast, the despised, the pariah. That’s not a story of the ‘80s, it’s a story of always.

You can choose to understand The Force Awakens as an embrace of the mythological tradition, in which the same stories recur over and over with minor variations. Or you can see it as the ultimate retreat into formula.... There are moments when it feels like both of those things, profound and cynical, deeply satisfying and oddly empty.

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.

So ends this enormously important, and enormously extended, chapter of pop culture, with a combination of bang and whimper.

I don't think any of it really hangs together as anything resembling drama, or that Michael is ever a remotely likable character, before or after his day of reckoning. But Adam Sandler didn't get where he is today by making movies for me and Roger Ebert to like.

Unless you like boob jokes and preachy sentimentalism, this comedy isn't funny at all.

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

Pontypool is something like a claustrophobic, locked-in-the-barn zombie movie, only almost without zombies.

It's occasionally funny and a lot painful.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

A pallid, mediocre tale that treacles its way through well-worn channels.

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.

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

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

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.

Stupid, empty and -- worst of all -- fantastically boring.

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

Ludicrous trash, but it has style.

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.

You could definitely call it awful, and I'm about to do so, repeatedly and effusively. In fact, One Day is an appallingly bad movie made by talented people who could and should have done much better, but somehow all drove off the cliff together.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

Renders Jonathan Safran Foer's best-selling 2005 novel into unconvincing Hollywood mush.

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.

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

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.

Luc Besson and Liam Neeson and the rest of the furriners who made the inept and offensive Taken 2 don't seem to have gotten the memo from Jason Bourne: Americans don't think our spooks are good guys anymore.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

What we've really got here is a tame screwball adventure dressed up with some desert scenery and some awful computer graphics.

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.

A would-be tween-oriented hit so scrubbed and sanitized and not worthy of paying attention to that it can barely be said to exist at all.

Familiar and profoundly unoriginal.

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.

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.

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.

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

It's exactly the sort of movie that Hollywood specializes in, the kind which seems on paper as if it ought to be entertaining, but winds up a massive and chaotic drag.

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.”

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.

It's all just an embarrassment, the kind of pointless slog you'll encounter on Netflix in two years and wonder, How the hell did that get made?

It sometimes produces moments of unexpected power. It also produces a bizarre and fatally uneven movie, veering from black comedy to utter stupidity to maudlin religiosity, which seems to have been made in total defiance of both narrative conventions and emotional logic.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

The fact that its sound and photography are gracefully crafted, or that fragments of a tolerable film are visible here and there, only makes its dumb-ass, romance-novel version of tragedy worse. This is one of the most badly botched mainstream movies I've seen in years.

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.

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

That's the culture we live in, where the once-proscribed Pleasure Principle has become iron law and where the recycled, bloated, fish-belly emptiness of something like TRON: Legacy carries boredom to extravagant new heights.

This premise could, just maybe, make for a decent thriller, but everything about Murder by Numbers is so flavorless and rote, so devoid of real suspense and human interest, that you never suspect for a moment that the answers are likely to be engaging.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

I've never seen anything crazier than Palindromes. You can read that as praise if you're that sort of person, but I don't mean it that way.

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?

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

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.

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.

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.

Disposable crap.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

A stodgy, moribund plodder loaded with stock characters that wouldn’t have felt edgy in 1983 and has about the same contemporary urgency as your average late-night rerun of “CSI: NY.”

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.

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.

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

A dumb and sloppy movie.

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

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

It's a dumb, ugly and, most of all, painfully unfunny movie.

I have to assume that Russell Crowe and Warner Bros. did not deliberately set out to insult and anger the Armenian diaspora and its friends around the world, or to participate in covering up a monumental 20th-century crime that shaped the world we live in and remains swathed in too much historical shadow. They disgraced themselves by making this movie the way they did, and then redoubled the disgrace by releasing it this week.

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

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.

The worst movie of the new millennium.

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.

Identity Thief reaches impressive heights of laziness and idiocy.