Charles Taylor

The pacing is off, the emotional tone is wobbly, and none of the actors seem to be acting in the same style or the same movie.

The picture starts off slick and amusing, gets convoluted, draggy and strange round about the midway point, and ends up just plain ludicrous.

It's mostly terrible. The movie has no sparkle, no charm, nothing to sweep us off our feet.

A dreary, ludicrous thriller.

The film is a plodding, earnest adaptation that strips the source of its richness and ambiguity.

One of those movies that you continue to pull for even after it becomes clear that it isn't very good.

This alleged thriller, which might be described as "'Gaslight' Goes to College," is one of the most incoherent features in recent memory.

It's a flat, clumsy piece of filmmaking. When Phillippe and Ward are in bed, the shots are so badly matched that I believed they were having sex, just not with each other.

Stay away from this cautionary tale about the gay porn industry -- it blows.

LaBute is some kind of find: an auteur for people who don't like movies.

Middlebrow kitsch, but kitsch straining for respectability and therefore without the energy that can make kitsch entertaining.

So clumsy and crass that it makes you doubt the pleasure of the first movie.

There's something offensive about how Mamet continues to win praise as a serious filmmaker with such a joyless picture, a picture that -- intentionally -- gives the audience so little.

Stallone returns in a gangster remake that wears itself (and the audience) out trying to be cutting-edge stylish.

A brain-dead version of a dark and complex work.

Isn't particularly assaultive, but it can still make you feel that you never want to see another car chase, explosion or gunfight again.

The movie is so thoroughly lousy. It's loud, brash and obvious, full of car chases and explosions and gunplay.

Totally unwatchable if it weren't for Ashley Judd.

May be the shoddiest and most incoherent piece of big-budget action moviemaking since "Armageddon."

Put Bruce Willis and this bewildering World War II movie in front of the firing line.

Another Jerry Bruckheimer-Michael Bay demonstration of spectacle -- noise, stunts, the aforementioned incoherent editing -- taking precedence over story and character... by far the most brutal American picture released this summer.

Like so many self-conscious directors, Julie Taymor wrecks Shakespeare's already disastrous play with her own horrific vision.

There's some sort of gross egotism involved in linking great music to visuals that are so unabashedly kitschy.

It's not badly made, but it's a drag. Leconte's virtues can't overcome the plodding glumness that prevails.

Isn't a serious attempt to deal with our vulnerability to terrorism, or to address how established channels of power can bring us to the brink. It's the same damn Tom Clancy picture that's been churned out since "The Hunt for Red October," as humorless and gray and dour as its predecessors.

An art-house horror movie, and like most art-house versions of genre films, all the vitality and juice of genre conventions have been sucked right out. The irony of the movie is that it puts you into the same torpor that's supposed to be afflicting the characters.

The movie is an unpleasant slog, the gruesomeness working in concert with humorlessness to lend the whole picture a queasy deadliness.

It's about as phony and manipulative as a movie could be. That Polley seems true every second is maybe the strongest testament yet to her acting. It's exasperating that this movie doesn't have the courage to go places where its actress plainly has the guts to follow.