A.O. Scott

Given the stature and the presence that the entrepreneurial rappers-turned-film-moguls Ice Cube and Queen Latifah possess, the fizzle of their scenes is doubly disappointing.

Remember "American Pie"? If you do, this movie is redundant and sad. If you don't, it's irrelevant.

Not a terrible movie, just an insubstantial one. All of DiCaprio's charisma and the director's savvy are used to divert us from the fact that there's not much going on.

In spite of its scruffy look and slack pacing, it often rings as false as any of the big, shiny and soft studio rom-coms (starring Kate Hudson or Katherine Heigl, say) of the last decade.

Max’s righteous anger finds various allies and targets, though it is not always clear who is which. They are played by Mila Kunis, Beau Bridges and Ludacris with just enough panache and expressiveness to uphold the (increasingly irrelevant) distinction between a movie and a video game.

Reitman uses Altmanesque sound design and serpentine camera movements to convey the chaos and kineticism of a process in constant, frantic motion. But after a while, once we’ve met the principal players, the speechmaking starts and a potential comedy of political manners turns into a pious, tendentious morality play.

In spite of Mr. Baron Cohen and Mr. Charles’s high-level skills and keen low-comic instincts, Brüno is a lazy piece of work that panders more than it provokes.

The outtakes are not all that great but still better than anything else in the movie.

If the movie looked any cheaper, you might think you were paying more to get into the theater than was spent on making the film.

A smorgasbord that seems to have been picked out of a Dumpster. It clumsily combines a fish-out-of-water story with bits lifted from sources including the "Terminator" movies, "Star Wars," "Starman," "Close Encounters," a couple of Pink Floyd albums and H. G. Wells.

The one halfway-interesting part of this movie is Nivola’s performance, which operates at both a deeper register of seriousness and a higher pitch of comedy than anything else.

The movie itself, while not entirely terrible — a lot of craft has been purchased, and even a little art — is pointless in a particularly aggressive way.

Seems stranded in that nowhereland between irony and sarcasm.

Someone put together a listicle! That’s the kind of criticism this brand was made for.

More abrasively quirky than a lesser Bjork B-side, though the hideous monster who co-stars hails from Iceland, too.

Sometimes it flaunts its clichés...and other times it cloaks them in rough visual textures and jumpy, bumpy camera movements, so that a rickety genre thrill ride feels like something daring and new. It isn’t. It’s stale, empty and cold.

Paralyzes history and human drama with relentless hagiography.

Dreary.

Something to behold; it's just not much to watch, despite admirable ambition and a few tense, well-thought-out sequences.

If you approach Last Vegas expecting an emotionally engaging, in any way surprising, moviegoing experience, you will be disappointed. But if you want the equivalent of an old-fashioned television variety show — a Very Special Evening with Robert De Niro, Morgan Freeman, Michael Douglas and Kevin Kline — you might not have such a bad time.

There's not much here; some of the shots feel so static that you wonder if they're being rehearsed before your eyes.

Given that movies can now show us everything, the manifestations that Ms. Rowling described could be less magical only if they were delivered at a news conference.

The kind of movie that gives literature a bad name. Not because it undermines the dignity of a great writer and his work, but because it is so self-consciously eager to flaunt its own gravity and good taste.

A movie for people who somehow managed to miss the point of the first picture.

The intentionally self-conscious style of R2PC is a little hard to take sometimes because the movie is trying too hard to be funny.

It's hard to be drawn into a movie if you're never entirely sure what it's supposed to be about, other than about 100 minutes.

I can’t deny that the glum, resentful, not-giving-a-damn masculine vibe of Cold Pursuit has its appeal, as does Moland’s blunt knack for efficient screen violence.

When they are on the screen together here, there is enough physical charm and emotional warmth to distract from the threadbare setting and the paper-thin plot. But those defects ultimately get in the way of the stars and leave you wondering: Is this a romance about neurological impairment or a neurologically impaired romance?

Mr. Oyelowo is without a doubt the best thing in Gringo, supplying the only grace notes in a cacophony of secondhand attitude and facetious overacting.

It’s not a hard and fast rule, but in general when the main character, sometime in the third act, says, “I did some bad things ... ” and stares off into the middle distance, the implied end of the sentence is “including this movie.”

Has the sweat stains of wasted energy; it's dreary, yet frantic.

None of it is as scary or as funny as it should be, and what starts out as a sly thumb in the eye of corporate power ends up as a muddled and amateurish homage to David Lynch.

As it lurches from Act II to Act III, Battle: Loss Angeles reveals itself to be a lousy movie.

What is harder to comprehend is how Mr. Clooney turned out such a sloppy, haphazard and tonally incoherent piece of work. Leatherheads lurches hectically between Coen brothers-style pastiche and John Saylesian didacticism, while Mr. Clooney works his brow and his jaw and waits in vain for his charm to kick in and save the day.

The filmmakers feign boldness in tackling national politics, but revert to coyness and caricature when it comes to local matters, gesturing toward a multiculturalism that isn’t even skin deep and sweeping gentrification under the rug.

So disorganized that it seems to be pulling its conclusions out of its pockets, along with scraps of paper, matches, lint and half-forgotten junk.

Sitting through the lavish and dumb action spectacular Lara Croft: Tomb Raider is about as much fun as watching someone else play a video game.

A baroque blend of gibberish, mysticism and melodrama, the film seems engineered to be as unmemorable as possible, with the exception of the prosthetic teeth worn by the lead actor, Rami Malek, who plays Freddie Mercury, Queen’s lead singer.

Written and directed by Gerard Bush and Christopher Renz, and propelled by the charisma of Janelle Monáe, it lines up moments of possible insight and impact and messes up just about all of them.

By the end the most vivid figure on the screen is the lovable doggie who goes wherever dangling fingers are waiting to give the happy pooch a scratch.

The result is something that intermittently looks and sounds like a good movie without ever actually being one.

One of the things that makes Adore, which was written by Christopher Hampton, hard to take seriously is how seriously it takes itself, how utterly purged of humor or credible human complication the drama at its center turns out to be.

It’s a phoned-in, gutless piece of hack work that reminds you of other, better films in the same vein.

If realism is what you're after, you'll do better at "The Three Stooges." The Lucky One is where you will find death, redemption and kisses in the rain.

An attempt to inaugurate a new movie franchise, something that might appeal to women and mystery fans. This is a perfectly sound ambition, but the movie, directed by Julie Anne Robinson from a script by Stacy Sherman, Karen Ray and Liz Brixius, is so weary and uninspired that it feels more like an exhausted end than an energetic beginning.

This picture is mostly a lump of run-of-the-mill profanity sprinkled with a few remarks so geared toward engendering audience sympathy that you might think he was running for office -- or trying to win over a probation officer.

Hot Rod might be called the poor man’s “Eagle vs. Shark” if “Eagle vs. Shark” were not already the poor man’s “Napoleon Dynamite.” It certainly lacks the conceptual purity and aesthetic integrity of the “Jackass” movies. In any case poor certainly describes the quality of the filmmaking.

Try as it might to be refined and provocative, Perfume: The Story of a Murderer never rises above the pedestrian creepiness of its conceit.

Raunchier and somewhat more imaginative than “Hot Rod.”

I don't think Mr. James intended to make a creepy, exploitative movie about teenage runaways - or, for that matter, a moralistic, cautionary tale of girls gone bad. But those are the default categories that Little Birds stumbles toward, perhaps because the filmmaker has not found a cogent way to channel his curiosity or his empathy.

By Monday, Torque will look like a period piece with its expiration date, January 2004, prominently displayed. The inevitable movie-inspired video game will appear more realistic.

The movie is like spending an idle afternoon browsing, and not buying.

Hallie's dad said it was Rocky Horror for toddlers whatever that is. Me and Hallie are 7 and we thought it was for babies.

Rae and Nanjiani do their best, but neither the dialogue nor the direction serves their talents adequately.

A movie that is as stuffed with bogus feeling and overwrought incident as a fast-food burrito.

Nothing in the picture works. It is both overwrought and tedious, its complicated narrative bogging down in lyrical voiceover, long flashbacks and endless expository conversations between people speaking radically incompatible accents.

Overplotted, hollow thriller.

Tries to show it has its heart in the right place, but it's such a crude undertaking that it doesn't actually seem to have a heart at all.

Feels like an early rehearsal for a play where all the movement is being coordinated but the underlying emotional notes have yet to be set.

The film is more of a pageant than a convincing drama. It’s so determined to deliver its moral that it loses its grip on the reality of its characters.

The picture, which fails to achieve its ambitions or to fulfill our expectations, is ultimately worse than a violent piece of hack work, in which the director isn't interested in displaying his integrity -- or taste. You'd be better off downloading the trailer: a much more convincing piece of storytelling.

Ms. Mort’s writing lacks psychological texture, and her direction generates little intensity, or even continuity.

What we see on screen is a lumbering, flat-footed fancy-dress melodrama.

Pallid compared with the flaming id of television's "Will and Grace," the happy swizzle stick Jack, who's all appetites. When series television is more entertaining than a series of short independent films, that's something to worry about.

It is about as diverting as having a porcelain sink broken over your head.

Like a zombie picture directed by one of the undead.

It's one of the rare films for which a blooper reel would be redundant.

It looks and sounds like a movie without quite being one. It’s more like a Pinterest page or a piece of fan art, the record of an enthusiasm that is, to the outside observer, indistinguishable from confusion.

Tacky and disposable.

It's an oddity that will be avoided by millions of people, this new Pinocchio. Osama bin Laden could attend a showing in Times Square and be confident of remaining hidden.

Grisly but not especially suspenseful, tongue-in-cheek without any real wit, The Voices aims to hit the intersection of horror and comedy but tumbles into an uncanny valley of tedious creepiness.

Perhaps the directors are under the delusion that the dodging and leaping can make up for an ending that leaves the cast members of "Killer" adrift and nearly scratching their heads in puzzlement.

The movie is a bust, and, as usual in these situations, it is easier to say how than why, and best to say as little as possible, cut one's losses and move on.

What The Beach Bum celebrates as transgression is pure tedium. What it takes for divine lunacy is frat house doggerel. The booze flows freely. The women are topless and ornamental. The cars and boats are fast and expensive. There’s nothing much worth writing about.

This version, in the dreariest Hollywood-remake tradition, turns a grim, morally ambiguous story into a fable of empowerment. That might be kind of fun if it didn’t feel so tired and timid.

Brand: A Second Coming wants to tell the story of a man overcoming temptation and trading a shallow approach to life for something more sustaining and profound. It’s undone by its own shallowness, and by the limited appeal of its subject.

A shallow yet empty action extravaganza.

Like its title, it's a clumsy contraption.

Various secrets come dribbling out... They add up to a sprawl of narrative that is as unconvincing as the suspiciously sprawl-free, nostalgia-tinged town where it all takes place.

The most indolent waste of screen time since Andy Warhol's marathon shot of the Empire State Building.

This dumb, only intermittently (though sometimes even intentionally) funny sequel presumes that since almost everything else from the 1980's has come back, why not the cynosures of the "Nightmare on Elm Street" and "Friday the 13th" movies?

For his sins poor Stewart is kidnapped, tortured and shot up with horse tranquilizer after his leg is broken. It’s disturbing, and somewhat baffling too, until you grasp that this hapless sucker is a surrogate for the audience.

Lame, long, ugly joke of a movie.

The movie doesn't turn out to be as benignly right-wing as it initially suggests, though the plot turns can be spotted a mile away.

A clumsy and confused adaptation of Michael Chabon's 1988 novel.

This floppy British romance, directed by Thea Sharrock and adapted by Jojo Moyes from her best-selling novel, sits at the point where tedium, ridiculousness and heartfelt sentiment converge, separated by an all-but-imperceptible distance.

Drab and incoherent teen comedy.

The Bakkers were many things to many people: appalling, inspiring, laughable, sad. This movie succeeds in making them dull.

Couldn't be more artless.

Its bone-deep willingness to do anything to entertain is exhausting.

Even the handful of moments that are amusing feel recycled from old sketches of Mr. Murphy's.

There are a few funny moments in Jack and Jill, most of them celebrity cameos that also serve to affirm what a cool, connected celebrity Mr. Sandler is. The most sustained of these is the appearance of Al Pacino as himself, falling for Jill and giving the film a jolt of genuine zaniness. I'm sorry to say that this may be Mr. Pacino's most convincing performance in years.

The scandal of Mr. Clark’s more recent movies, including “Wassup Rockers” and “Ken Park” and this new one, resides more in its tedium and lack of insight than its strenuously provocative content.

This Fantastic Four, directed by Josh Trank from a script he wrote with Simon Kinberg and Jeremy Slater, feels less like a tale of superhero beginnings than like a very long precredit opening sequence.

Everything that made the first “Die Hard” memorable — the nuances of character, the political subtext, the cowboy wit — has been dumbed down or scrubbed away entirely.

This mistaken-identity picture is so film-culture referential that the final product is a ghost.

The scandal of Antichrist is not that it is grisly or upsetting but that it is so ponderous, so conceptually thin and so dull.

Wants to be everything and adds up to nothing. "War" is a film that tries to excel on several levels and falls flat on all of them.

Like a soft drink that's been sitting open too long: it's too much syrup and not enough fizz.

It has the melancholy mildew of both "Marty" and the 1940's weepie "The Enchanted Cottage."

Fitfully amusing.

Magic in the Moonlight is less a movie than the dutiful recitation of themes and plot points conducted by a squad of costumed actors. The tidy narrative may advance with clockwork precision, but the clock’s most prominent feature is the snooze button.

The cast would have been better served by a middle school production overseen by a creatively frustrated, inappropriately ambitious drama teacher than by this hacky, borderline-incompetent production, which was directed by Will Gluck from a screenplay by Aline Brosh McKenna.

Forlorn melodrama, which is low on drama and high on mellow.

Has shockingly little to say.

Such few assets aren't enough to alleviate the film's shallowness.

Like his scripts for “21 Grams” and “Babel,” this one makes heavy use of happenstance and temporal displacement, and like them, too, it depends on ideas about human behavior that can only be called preposterous.

Appears to be a somewhat sinister episode of "Nightline."

Could serve as a textbook example of what to avoid in nonfiction filmmaking.

The lip movements of the animated figures are slightly slow, so you feel as if you're watching a badly dubbed Japanese creature feature from the 1960's. The dialogue is almost as stilted, and after a while you drift into that half-dream state that inert movies can create.

There are dull stabs at verbal wit that leave you baffled, bored or slightly grossed out.

The idea of confronting an unknown second self is full of rich, uncanny potential — there’s a literary tradition going back at least to Edgar Allan Poe — but Gemini Man squanders it, along with what might have been two interesting performances.

This movie is a suspense thriller whose only suspense comes from an audience wondering if the picture will hit its promised 97-minute running time.

A loud, seemingly interminable, and altogether incoherent entry in the preposterous and proliferating “action-comedy” genre.

A piece of moldy wax fruit if ever there was one.

This crude comedy delivers on the "No Shame, No Mercy" threats from the original. Unfortunately, it all adds up to "No Good."

The list of charges against this watery café au lait of a crime caper is extensive — wearisome ethnic stereotypes, cop-movie clichés, awkward pacing, a labored plot — but the chief transgression is that it wastes the time and talent of one of the supreme screen actors of our time.

The documentary doesn't get near the prowess of its subject; it passes through your life like a minor daydream.

A washout.

Preposterousness is not necessarily a vice, and plausibility is a weak virtue. Just ask Alfred Hitchcock. So to say that the conceits of The Forger (directed by Philip Martin) are ridiculous isn’t really saying much. It’s also dull, incoherent and drab to look at.

Another movie -- Matt Stone and Trey Parker's "Team America," whose wooden puppets were more compelling actors than most of the cast of 300 -- calculated the cost [of freedom] at $1.05. I would happily pay a nickel less, in quarters or arcade tokens, for a vigorous 10-minute session with the video game that 300 aspires to become.

Filled with voyeuristic shots as the camera peers through picket fences and windows and around corners; the film looks as if it were shot with a surveillance camera from a 7-Eleven

Straining to capture artistic frenzy, it descends into vulgar chaos, less a homage to Federico Fellini’s “8 ½” (its putative inspiration) than a travesty.

The main audience for this dim little sex comedy has no particular interest in seeing Ms. Alba act. They want to see her in her underwear and also to confront one of the central cultural questions of our time: will she take her top off?

The dominant emotion in Pan is the desperation of the filmmakers, who frantically try to pander to a young audience they don’t seem to respect, understand or trust.

There is warmth and intelligence here, and undeniable sincerity, but also a determination, in the face of much painful and fascinating history, to play it safe.

If you're looking for laughs, give "Valley of the Dolls" another read instead.

No real mockery is intended by this harmless, mindless grab bag of slightly used gags, which lampoons some of the conventions of recent comic-book epics and adds the expected staples of juvenile humor: urine, vomit and intestinal gas.

A flimsy bit of mildly romantic, putatively comic Anglophile bait.

Misery Loves Comedy, Kevin Pollak’s survey of the opinions of a bunch of professionally funny people, is an evident labor of love and also a work of grating amateurism.

Salinger, directed by Mr. Salerno, is less a work of cinema than the byproduct of its own publicity campaign.

There is almost nothing here that you haven’t seen a dozen times before, and even the surprises feel flat and familiar. More dispiriting still is that this drab complacency is wrapped around messages of daring, honesty and spontaneity.

At least it isn't a remake -- though given how slovenly and forced this movie is, maybe that wouldn't have been such a bad idea.

With the exception of some of the battles, which have the angry desperation of Mr. Yuen's inspired martial-arts choreography, Close is a nominal effort.

The most disturbing thing about this may be how dull and routine it seems. Computer-generated imagery can produce remarkably detailed vistas of disaster — bridges and buildings collapsing; giant ships flung onto urban streets; beloved landmarks pulverized — but the technology also has a way of stripping such spectacles of impact and interest.

Summer is like an episode of the religious children's series "Davey and Goliath," without the entertainment value of animation and a talking dog.

By interweaving several stories, the movie suffers from a peculiar multiplier effect: it deepens its shallowness.

To be worth arguing about, a movie must first of all be interesting: it must have, if not a coherent point of view, at least a worked-out, thought-provoking set of themes, some kind of imaginative contact with the world as we know it. Joker, an empty, foggy exercise in second-hand style and second-rate philosophizing, has none of that.

This, in the end, is a very bad movie, executed with enough visual polish and surface cleverness to fool the Cannes jurors, something Ostlund has done twice. Shame on them! But maybe we shouldn’t be surprised.

Unreliability is a fascinating and tricky conceit for novelists and filmmakers. It should not be confused with bad writing. There is a lot of that here, and also, to confuse matters further, a lot of good acting.

It feels like a halfhearted bluff and has the stale smell of yesterday’s after-shave.

While a movie that fails to catch fire is disappointing, there is something even more dispiriting about a movie that doesn’t even bother to try, that tosses its stars a soggy book of matches and expects them to generate a spark.

The unfortunate thing is that children will probably waste their summers indoors watching "Recess" over and over again.

The Hundred-Foot Journey is likely neither to pique your appetite nor to sate it, leaving you in a dyspeptic limbo, stuffed with false sentiment and forced whimsy and starved for real delight.

This movie sets out to honor and refresh a youthful enthusiasm from the past and winds up smothering the fun in self-conscious grandiosity.

Wears its preposterousness with a certain pride. It’s about the cat-and-mouse game between two very smart guys, and it’s perfectly happy to be as dumb as it wants.

This Rebecca can’t really suffer in comparison to its predecessor. To suffer it would need nerves, a pulse, a conscience, or at least some idea of its reason for being.

However you take its politics, the film upholds a dreary tradition of simplifying and sentimentalizing matters of serious social concern, and dumbing down issues that call for clarity and creative thinking. Our children deserve better.

This may be the first movie that runs under two hours and yet has no attention span. Characters are abandoned and picked up; narrative threads dissolve before your very eyes.

Fifty Shades of Grey might not be a good movie — O.K., it’s a terrible movie — but it might nonetheless be a movie that feels good to see, whether you squirm or giggle or roll your eyes or just sit still and take your punishment.

Everything in this film is forgettable, right down to bongos pounding on the soundtrack to indicate a quickening of the pulse.

You are not, in a movie like this, supposed to think too much; you are supposed to be transported beyond skepticism on a wave of pure, tacky feeling. Instead, in this case, you drown in sentimental, ghoulish nonsense.

The problem -- the catastrophe -- of The Last Airbender is not in the conception but the execution. The long-winded explanations and clumsy performances are made worse by graceless effects and a last-minute 3-D conversion that wrecks whatever visual grace or beauty might have been there.

You can't get more high-concept, or less plotted, than this, and Daddy Day Care is proof.

About 20 minutes in, it is clear that the couple will emerge as nothing more than crabby yuppies whose articulation of their pouts sounds like the same argument over and over again.

A film so family-safe it feels sheathed in plastic Bubble Wrap. Unfortunately, it's not even as much fun as popping the bubbles. It doesn't matter that the film is less than 90 minutes. It still feels like a prison stretch.

Stardom makes its metaphor of 15 minutes seem like a lifetime.

The current version, however, like its predecessor, fails as entertainment. Mr. McTiernan's remake may be lighter on its feet -- the sober-minded original was as graceful as a tap-dancing rhino -- but it is just as boring and as obvious.

A stupefying mix of action, politics and melodrama.

There's so little chemistry between Mr. Wilson and Ms. Hudson that you begin to look back on what now seems like the halcyon time of "How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days."

The picture is so predictable that the bad acting becomes a distraction.

Mr. Baldwin's attack -- there's no better way to put it -- is unforgettable. He's the first shrunken narrator with a serial killer's swagger.

It's hard to take Passion seriously because it brings to mind the kind of shallow psychology that wouldn't be out of place in a history short about Sigmund Freud on "ABC Schoolhouse Rock."

Geostorm uses digital technology to lay waste to a bunch of cities and hacky screenwriting to assault the dignity of several fine actors.

So lacking in shame that it finally seems laughable.

Backstage isn't as good as the rap documentaries "Rhyme and Reason" and "The Show," but it still casts a keen, observant eye...on this world.

The film falls far short of its goals, but it is a classic of sorts. It belongs in that Blockbuster on Mount Olympus, where pristine new copies of "I Changed My Sex," "Dracula's Dog," "Blackenstein" and "Battlefield Earth" play constantly.

A weak-witted comedy.

This bloated spectacle has all the get-up-and-go of one of the legendary late-era Elvis Presley concerts. The picture feels longer than Presley's career and as irrelevant as he was by the end.

Our judgments, in any case, may be superfluous, since the director, Mathieu Kassovitz, has already publicly described it as "pure violence and stupidity."

All hope is lost for those trapped in theaters with this picture.

The stripped-down narrative is almost an apology for the ludicrous story -- but it's just not enough of one.

Does it have to be so witless, so stupid, so openly contemptuous of the very audience it’s supposed to be pandering to?

Almost creates a sense of dread as you sit watching its raft of aimless, self-absorbed neurotics clang into one another.

Sleepless, directed by Baran bo Odar, sets a low bar for itself, and then trips over it.

Manages to squeeze in several different endings — like a bad pop song that doesn't know when to fade out. But as Mr. Schwarzenegger's stature as an action figure diminishes, his effort to retain a piece of the market is touching.

A thin line separates the magical from the preposterous, and by insisting so strenuously on its own magic, Winter’s Tale pitches helplessly into earnest ridiculousness.

It's fleet- footed, merciless entertainment. But the mixture of laughs, bathos and brutality is a big turnoff.

Without a real-world correlative for the actions it depicts, Bertrand Bonello’s new film would merely be tedious and pretentious rather than repellent.

Still never having to say you're sorry.

Something TERRIBLE is afoot. Sadly, that something turns out to be the movie itself.

Nearly every time Mr. Jordan, working from a script by Mr. Ellis and Nicholas Jarecki, tries for similar effects, he goes badly awry, so that you snicker when the movie is trying to be poignant and groan when it aims to make a joke.

All it has in common with the original is a few dumb fun scares. In the new version, what we're left with after the scares is just plain dumb.

The film equivalent of the dark, boring period on a haunted house ride before the gondola crashes into another room filled with dirty mirrors.

The film calls attention to its own artificial status. It actually knows it’s a movie! What a clever, tricky game! What fun! What a fraud.

Whatever thoughtful instincts Mr. Castellitto might possess are undermined by his addiction to cinematic prettiness.

A supernatural soap opera.

Like many of the nonpolitical terrorist-as-villain spectaculars that have been held back after Sept. 11, has the whiff of something gone stale. Though it may have sat on the shelf for a while, this project had gone bad long before it was released.

It's the central story that's lacking.

You might be tempted to say, "Huh?" Or, if you're in the theater, to leave. But wait -- there's less.

The “Mummy” reboot from 1999, directed by Stephen Sommers and starring Brendan Fraser, was kind of fun. Monster movies frequently are. This one, directed by Alex Kurtzman and starring Tom Cruise, is an unholy mess.

The action is the best thing in the picture.

After several scenes of this tacky nonsense, you'll be wistful for the testosterone-charged wizardry of Jerry Bruckheimer productions, especially because Half Past Dead is like "The Rock" on a Wal-Mart budget. And the marked-down price tags are incredibly visible.

May lead to a new axiom: success has many fathers, but failure has "Project Greenlight."

If the film were a fight, they'd have stopped it.

Blends the least of Woody Allen with a plot complication out of "Love, American Style," stuck together with sitcom glue.

You could accuse it of glamorizing the shallow hedonism it depicts, but that charge would only stick if the movie had any genuine flair, romance or imagination.

A soulless compilation of thrills.

There are a few laughs, but I'm not sure that a comedy is supposed to make you recoil, which is what "Smoochy" does.

It may be too much to ask for anything more, but, on the other hand, if you’re going to go to the trouble of pretending to blow up the White House, you might also want to pretend that something was at stake.

"Queen" is a movie that stoops to jokes like calling Lestat's CD "a monster hit"; the movie is just a plain old monster.

Rarely has a movie worked so hard to be so inconsequential.

It is all a contrivance; the cast and filmmakers were under the delusion that putting unhappy women in a room would lead to drama.

If you can discern any critical distance or interesting perspective here, or even a good reason to spend 90 minutes in such company, I'm afraid the joke is on you.

Its pleasures are so meager, its delight in its own inventions so forced and false, that it becomes almost the perfect opposite of entertainment.

Relentlessly softheaded and softhearted.

A shell game passing as entertainment.

In spite of the charm and discipline of the stars, the jokes misfire and the scenes creak and stumble.

Mr. Deeds is mostly terrible, a shambles of a comedy that looks as if it was shot by a tabloid news crew.

The worst that can be said of the first two-thirds of Tideland is that it is tiresome. Toward the end it becomes creepy, and not in a good way.

High-school cafeteria soup has more flavor than this bland, tepid throwback.

There is no story to speak of. Just a series of anecdotes that gain very little when acted out on screen.

It lumbers from one scene to the next with the stop-and-start mistiming generally seen in the outtakes shown at the end of the "Cannonball Run" movies, which this picture resembles in spirit.

The ugly smell of unexamined privilege hangs over this film like the smoke from cheap incense.

Its badness is not extreme, but exemplary: It’s everything wrong with Hollywood today stuffed into a little less than two hours.

His (Fleischer) first feature, "Zombieland," was a half-witty genre parody. This one might be described as genre zombie-ism: the hysterical, brainless animation of dead clichés reduced to purposeless, compulsive killing. Too self-serious to succeed as pastiche, it has no reason for being beyond the parasitic urge to feed on the memories of other, better movies.

A witless, straining mess.

There is nothing here to enjoy, beyond the tiny satisfaction in noting that the movie lives up to its name.

Few people other than future airline passengers should be subjected to such misery.

A dreary crash of malapropisms and slapstick maimings wrapped very loosely around a murder mystery.

The only people who could be surprised at this movie will be those who wandered into the wrong multiplex theater by mistake.

You'll see better film on ponds.

A Viagra suppository for compulsive action fetishists and a movie that may not only be dumb in itself, but also the cause of dumbness in others.

What makes Leap Year so singularly dispiriting is precisely that it is bad without distinction -- so witless, charmless and unimaginative that it can be described as a movie only in a strictly technical sense.

A desperate, broad comedy.

So minimally plotted that not only does it lack subtext or context, but it also may be the world's first movie without even a text.

If Boat Trip were screened on a cruise ship, most of the passengers would be dog-paddling back to shore.

It feels like both a joke and a turkey.

Festooned with yards of gross-out jokes, sniggering allusions and, astonishingly, a sentimental climax that's more repellent than any of the crude effluvia the film is drenched with.

Serves a reheated notion on a creaky TV tray.

The film isn't even as good as the second-rate game it is based on, which is nothing but a shootout.

The movie is a noisy, useless piece of junk, reverse-engineered into something resembling popular art in accordance with the reigning imperatives of marketing and brand extension.

The only thing that kept me watching License to Wed until the end (apart from being paid to do so) was the faith, perhaps misplaced, that I will not see a worse movie this year.

Has the dreary one-track banality of a feature-length version of an episode of "Red Shoe Diaries," Showtime's series for people who like soft core but are too lazy to leave the house.

This may be the worst movie Pauly Shore has ever been in. Think about that.

The cast of The Core deserve Oscar nominations just for being able to speak most of the lines without succumbing to the chortles.

As good as cut-rate animation that seems to consist of screen savers can be.

Looks like a big-budget version of a Miller's Genuine Draft commercial.

So shameless in its pandering, sentimental vision of Frenchness as to constitute something of a national embarrassment.

Wants to be sweet and dark at the same time, but it is as distant as a planet's satellite.

After about 20 minutes of "Thing," a concussion begins to look enormously appealing.

An R-rated version of this mess would be only more gratingly dishonest as it tried to hide its weak sentimentality behind a fig leaf of vulgarity.

It's the element of condescension, as the filmmakers look down on their working-class subjects from their lofty perch, that finally makes Sex With Strangers so distasteful.

Strands one of the most gifted casts assembled in some time. Sadly, though many of the actors throw off a spark or two when they first appear, they can't generate enough heat in this cold vacuum of a comedy to start a reaction.

Ops is too brain-dead to play the incognito war criminal segment for comedy, although when Will is seen thumbing through the pages of a newspaper called USA Daily, the picture has inadvertently tumbled down a Mad magazine wormhole.

A worthless piece of garbage.

The law of diminishing returns is enforced so stringently that the movie succeeds not only in negating its own comedy, but its very being.

The most transcendently, eye-poppingly, call-your-friend-ranting-in-the-middle-of-the-night-just-to-go-over-it-one-more-time crazily awful motion pictures ever made.

It may be a bit early to make such judgments, but Battlefield Earth may well turn out to be the worst movie of this century.

Most of Blended has the look and pacing of a three-camera sitcom filmed by a bunch of eighth graders and conceived by their less bright classmates. Shots don’t match. Jokes misfire. Gags that are visible from a mile away fail to deliver.