Charles Taylor

If Enduring Love doesn't make sense as a thriller, it's equally nonsensical as the parable it wants to be.

What Picture Perfect sells as romance is a junior high school health class morality lecture we all got years ago. And it was a crock then, too.

Lost the friskiness and wildness and charm the movie might have had.

Just a bad movie, with more bits of good acting and flashes of director's invention than you get in most bad movies.

Isn't particularly offensive, except in its total mediocrity.

Elephant is not as bad as the National Rifle Association's decision to hold a pro-gun rally near Columbine High School shortly after the killings. Unlike the NRA, Van Sant doesn't have blood on his hands. But he shares something of its callousness.

The Loss of Sexual Innocence is a failure to be sure, but if it's not exactly a brave one, it's one whose foolhardiness deserves at least half a salute.

There's an entertainingly ludicrous movie lurking somewhere inside of the ludicrous, mediocre one this actually is.

Lacks any layers beyond its own amiable inconsequentiality. It needs the spark of the distinctively American slapstick craziness that has distinguished Frye's previous work.

James Cameron disgraces those who died on the Titanic -- again.

The Devil's Own isn't the disaster its bad advance publicity might lead you to expect. But it's a disjointed, sluggish picture.

The problem is that the charm and good spirits of Amélie feel calculated rather than natural.

When has Woody Allen ever been interested in anything besides Woody Allen? He has no interest in bringing out new sides of his actors. Jim Henson's casts had more spontaneity.

What's missing -- apart, of course, from a plot -- is any character development.

What's offensive in Bringing Down the House is the way the jokes have been calculated not to offend.

The bitterness of her new comedy, Loser, comes as a shock. It's not a mean-spirited movie.

High Crimes does offer good, often sharp and funny work from its two stars. But you can't fake excitement, and it's a lousy feeling to know that the best commercial movie I can point you to right now is this shallow, self-erasing nonsense.

Gordon's film is an art-house curio, visually ugly and emotionally and narratively dissonant. Its cheapness and poverty of imagination consistently undermines its ambitions and reduces its complexity to by-the-numbers Freudianism.

Such an inept bundle of work -- crying out for the filmmaking equivalent of Ritalin, but still sluggish as syrup -- that it doesn't even provide an opportunity to ogle properly.

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.

Probably the worst-directed film Spielberg has ever made. A peculiarly rhythmless piece of work, it seems to go on forever, though nearly every one of the scenes is cut off before it has been dramatically developed.

This adolescent comic-noir trounces Shakespeare's "Macbeth," but Maura Tierney sizzles as a vengeful Lady Frycook.

It's too mild to be crass; it's clumsy. Lehmann has made what amounts to an anti-sex sex comedy, the first youth sex comedy made to be enjoyed by those creepy abstinence teens.

A stiff, clunky piece of work that never builds up urgency or tension. The script, by playwright Ronald Harwood, who wrote the script for Roman Polanski's "The Pianist," is close to atrocious.

Hoary epic of British Empire valor and cowardice, remade for seventh time, remains rot, old boy.

A grim, sour view of single life.

When the movie isn't hitting us over the head, it's spooning out the material to us like broth to an invalid, drop by flavorless drop. The excruciating pace mirrors the sluggishness of Morrison's sonorous prose.

For everyone who's been waiting for a love story between an anal retentive and a flake.

To say that the film is unpleasant would imply that there's an emotional reaction to be gotten from it. I'd have to believe that there was someone, somewhere, who would actually care.

Klapisch wants his characters shiny bright, and winds up making them excruciatingly dull in the process. Watching L'Auberge Espagnole is like seeing the young Maoist revolutionaries of Jean-Luc Godard's 1967 "La Chinoise" body-snatched by the international touring company of "Up With People."

The Hulk goes on for two hours and 20 minutes and there's not a stirring or exciting moment in it...At last, a comic-book movie that National Public Radio listeners can be proud to take their kids to see.

A little like looking at pictures without a text to unify them… Prestige filmmaking bereft of inspiration -- sometimes even of the nuts and bolts of craft.

Because the movie never fully engages us, it never quite manages to allay our queasiness about watching the boy's distress.

Kubrick's much-anticipated final film boils down to the most elaborate monogamy lecture ever.

The embodiment of every conservative paranoid's slathering fantasies about Paula Jones, Vince Foster and Whitewater.

Seems best suited to all the couch-potato swinging dicks who get off watching the police on "Cops" keep the public safe from people in possession of marijuana.

It's not just our emotions that are being played on here, it's not just our intelligence being insulted because of Ron Howard and Akiva Goldsman's presumption that we won't have any interest in a character whom it's not always possible to like. It's John Nash's life, being turned into an Oscar machine and an easy way to jerk tears.

Even dressed up in tabloid lighting and cut with jagged edits, this pulp nihilism never goes beyond daytime TV banality.

It's like receiving a box of Valentine's chocolates in which someone has deliberately hidden ground glass. Flee.

It's hard to remember a movie that has asked us to care, without giving us reason to, about a character who is so thoroughly and relentlessly a prick.

The movie is flat-footed, and the pacing gives you time to rest between laughs.

Ben Affleck provides a charismatic star turn, but John Frankenheimer's out-of-season heist thriller is dead on arrival.

A sustained piece of showboating mythmaking, and something of a snow job.

The whole movie is overbright, overloud, antic, telling us the characters and animals are endearing rather than allowing them to reveal themselves as such.

The entire movie looks as if it were processed in the toilet of a Tijuana jail cell. Shot by Dariusz Wolski in colors that are bleached out, over bright and flat, The Mexican is the ugliest-looking major studio release in recent memory.

Anti-Americanism is a small matter when a movie is anti-human. Dogville is as total a misanthropic vision as anything control freak Stanley Kubrick ever turned out.

It is a testament to our national determination that Nathan is not stymied by his almost complete lack of talent, his slipshod timing or his crude comic sensibility.

Unpleasant would be the word for Mercury Rising if "tired" weren't a more appropriate one.

Sells ignorance as a refined evening's entertainment.

The Negotiator slogs on for two hours and 20 minutes, and there's hardly a real laugh or a genuine thrill in it.

The movie not only approaches a level of shamelessness you have to see to disbelieve, it does it in a manner that's both inept and crass.

A thoroughly inept piece of moviemaking. You're more likely to find a ham sandwich at a Passover seder than to find a laugh in this picture.

A compendium of every cliché from every bad boxing melodrama ever made, Million Dollar Baby tries to transcend its cornball overfamiliarity with the qualities that have long characterized Eastwood's direction -- it's solemn, inflated and dull.

An excruciatingly amateurish production.

At under two hours, the movie crawls by; at four, people would become fossilized to their seats.

This cookie-cutter spy thriller depends on the chemistry between Anthony Hopkins and Chris Rock. Um, wait, there isn't any.

The movie is crass and vulgar almost beyond belief.

The most gutless and naive political drama of recent memory.

Jolie is far too good for this tripe but she does give the film its only believable moments, and for the first half, her concentration makes you watch her intently.

A bad movie -- really a terrible movie -- with a daring idea behind it. And it's had the sort of crummy luck that, no matter what you think of it, can get you steamed.

Didactic, clumsily directed and abysmally acted, never lets go of its intellectualized approach long enough to deliver any real kinetic thrills.

Punishingly dull.

Such a blatant imitation of Adrian Lyne's Reaganite thriller that the only thing you can be grateful for is that it's far too clumsy to get people arguing about it or taking it seriously.

There's nothing worse than a bad farce -- except for this Cuban missile crisis comedy that wastes talent like Sigourney Weaver, John Turturro and Alan Cumming.

I walked out of Scary Movie feeling as if I'd been whacked around with a two-by-four for an hour and a half.

I understand how hard it is for parents to find movies to take their kids to, but the thought of them or their children getting stuck at this stinker galls me. Summer vacation feels short enough as it is.

Sandler deserves to be damned to the pits of hell for this witless masturbatory comedy.

Who cares about old guys and young girls? This handsome romantic slop finds other problems.

It's a terrible movie, stuck in plot idiocies and big, noisy set pieces like a tire mired in mud.

There's a vacancy in The Million Dollar Hotel, and it's between Wim Wenders' ears.

It's an A-list movie for the most brain-dead elements of the action-movie crowd.