Charles Taylor

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.