Claudia Puig

You know something is wrong when a preschooler's unwitting ad-libs are funnier than anything seasoned comedy writers can come up with. Kids say the darnedest things. Too bad the grown-ups don't.

The comedian's braggadocio here is more wearying than that of the most self-absorbed rapper. And worse, it comes at the expense of humor.

There is a blessed dearth of dialogue, but much of it is unintentionally hilarious.

The 1992 phenomenon was creepy, tense and sexually charged in a bold yet tawdry way. This sequel lacks even a shred of those elements.

Furry Vengeance is a slapstick stinker, easily the worst movie of the year.

Move along, there's nothing to see and no one to root for in this murky franchise reboot.

Superficial and lurid, Perfect Stranger is the cinematic equivalent of spam and should, like those trashy messages, be avoided.

Not only is it plodding and completely predictable, the carnage is rendered slowly and quasi-reverentially, making the whole brutal experience come off like torture porn.

This film is so superficial and shifts so jarringly in tone that nothing feels authentic -- not Bacon's hard-working husband and father, nor his maniacal vengeance seeker.

Memorable for being one of the most obnoxious animated movies of recent years.

This may be the most laugh-free comedy of the year.

A moviegoer's nightmare. The story is incoherent, inane and interminable.

It tries to pass itself off as a film about feistiness, forgiveness and the bonds of motherhood. Instead, it deals lightly and inappropriately with promiscuity, alcoholism, drug abuse, grief and child molestation. Georgia Rule doesn't make you feel good; it makes you queasy.

Even by teen gross-out movie standards Van Wilder makes "Sorority Boys" look like "Some Like It Hot."

A deadly dull and overly familiar movie about summoning ghosts that draws upon nearly every horror movie cliché.

This may be the most preposterous movie of the year. It is certainly the most ridiculous movie starring an Oscar-winning actor.

This is the worst kind of movie, one that insults its audience by purporting to condemn violence while simultaneously reveling in it.

Saw V is a terrible combination: grisly and tedious. Let's just call it bloody dull.

The film tries to be stylish and slick, but is mostly just nasty and blood-drenched. Piven, so funny in other film roles and on TV's "Entourage," overdoes it here, and extended scenes of his debauchery grow excessive and thuddingly dull.

That's what The Bounty Hunter has rustled up -- along with a listless rom-com, a feeble thriller and a supporting cast of clueless characters.

It's really not much fun - in fact it's painful - to watch an actor on the verge of a nervous breakdown. It almost doesn't matter if the psyche in question is imploding artificially - as in staged - or organically.

The unfunny jokes center on outhouses, vomit and flatulence. Gooding mugs, screeches, even hops up and down to no avail. Nothing can wring an ounce of comedy out of this sorry spectacle.

This ill-conceived sequel to 2011's entertaining Horrible Bosses is base, moronic, insulting and vulgar. It's also cringingly unfunny.

What audiences should expect is a tone-deaf, superficial, charmless ensemble rom-com, focused on five attractive, but uninteresting, couples.

An embarrassing debacle...the rare movie that never seems to take off, but also never seems to end. It tries hard to titillate, but ends up making audiences want to avert their eyes.

As forewarned, so avoid.

Bride Wars is about as funny as a cringingly awkward wedding toast.

Insidious: Chapter 2 appears to be the sum of the unusable parts from James Wan's recent haunted house feature "The Conjuring."

As if this drivel weren't bad enough, the ending blatantly threatens a sequel

Not only is it an unfunny movie shrilly told, it probably is the most ill-timed and appallingly insulting movie in recent memory.

Antichrist is probably the most disturbing, bleak and self-indulgent film ever made.

Shocking is the fact that three highly regarded actors -- Kim Basinger, Mickey Rourke and Billy Bob Thornton -- chose to star in this dreadful film.

In this Amityville, the performances are bad, the special effects ho-hum, and it's not even particularly scary.

A tribute to a giant leap for mankind feels like a clumsy shuffle backward for animation.

White Noise is the celluloid equivalent of a bad cell phone connection.

Neither side is worth rooting for in this ridiculous blood feud, which features some of the year's most laughable dialogue.

Even as temporary visitors, the audience can feel IQ points slipping away.

Should the desire to see a clever zombie movie strike, try the recent remake of "Dawn of the Dead" or last year's "28 Days."

School for Scoundrels will only leave you scratching your head in bewilderment and might possibly shave off IQ points.

For a comedian (Allen) who often seems to be calling it in, he's more lackluster than usual. Curtis is a bigger disappointment, especially after "Freaky Friday," in which she was funny, smart and cheeky.

Despite its appealing stars, The Ugly Truth is a charmless romantic comedy.

In most cases, doggedly pursuing a dream is laudable. But if it does nothing else, The Astronaut Farmer demonstrates that not every dream is worth pursuing. At least not the belabored one of a narcissistic crackpot masquerading as an admirable dreamer.

A movie about a teen party gone horribly wrong, would be every parent's worst nightmare if it weren't so inane.

That a group of creative people chose to direct their energies on this repulsive spectacle simply provokes disgust.

The movie is raunchier than expected, and above all clichéd, formulaic and thoroughly sexist. Worst, it's just not very funny.

It tries hard to be sexy, mysterious and dangerous, but ends up laughably inscrutable.

Only a truly dreadful story could make 81 minutes seem like an eternity. And Space Chimps is just that leaden experience.

The Canyons is billed as an erotic thriller, but the sexcapades of these empty-headed twentysomethings are far more likely to elicit yawns than titillation.

This is probably the year's worst romantic comedy -- and that's saying something in a year that includes "Ghosts of Girlfriends Past" and "Whatever Works."

The premise is misbegotten, the chemistry non-existent and the dialogue leaden. Did we mention how tediously the plot unfolds?

Unfunny, sappy and massively predictable.

To say that New in Town is the worst movie of this fledgling year is to damn it with faint praise. It may be one of the worst movies of any year. Not content to be merely inane and predictable, it is downright insulting, humorlessly deriding those who choose to live in rural America, labor in factories or have a strong Christian faith.

Hot Pursuit is this week's "Paul Blart." Which is to say, it's ill-conceived, not funny, overbearing and not in any way worth watching.

Sitting through the turgid and tedious S&M melodrama that is Fifty Shades of Grey may feel like its own form of torture.

It's so derivative, unfunny and thuddingly bad that it's one of the more cringe-inducing movies of a genre chock-full of clunkers.

In "There's Something About Mary," the gross gags were hilarious. Here, they're just vile.

This genre stew throws in so many ingredients - including sundry body parts that are cut off and go flying, and heads that explode - that the result is a tasteless mash-up that's hard to stomach.

A good script is the most essential ingredient for a good movie. Hiring a comedian isn't enough.

The biggest mystery about Repo! The Genetic Opera is why the grisly Goth-horror musical is opening the week after Halloween. The second-biggest mystery is why this unfunny, unscary, preposterous bloodbath about organ transplants is opening at all.

It may be the only movie ever to feature a bad performance by Johnny Depp, one of the best actors working in films.

This unfunny, über-misogynistic adaptation of Tucker Max's audacious best-seller of the same name is unlikely to please anyone.

If there was any doubt that most things in society have been dumbed down in the last couple of decades, Dumb and Dumber To could be exhibit A.

The Expendables 3 is as boneheaded and disposable as it sounds.

The tagline for College Road Trip is "You Can't Get There Fast Enough." But for those who sit through this humorless and massively predictable movie, a more apt phrase would be: "You Can't Get Out of There Fast Enough."

Mothers deserve a much better break than the hectic, shrill and dismally unpleasant Moms' Night Out.

This is about as egregious as filmmaking gets.

Nothing feels remotely fresh, let alone savage or zany in The Wild Life. It’s a dull, uninspired and frantically tedious animated re-telling of the Robinson Crusoe story, complete with a menagerie of ditzy, caterwauling beasts.