Dana Stevens

Both grueling and dull. Imagine (if possible) a Pasolini film without passion or politics, or an Almodóvar movie without beauty or humor, and you have some idea of the glum, numb experience of watching O Fantasma.

In its eagerness to drag us through the lower depths of human experience, Precious leaves no space for the audience to breathe or to draw our own conclusions. For a film about empowerment and self-actualization, it wields an awfully large cudgel.

After two hours and 20 minutes of flamboyantly repulsive variations on this well-worn theme, even the strongest-stomached and most feminist of viewers could be excused for muttering, We get it already.

The relentless upbeatness of Life or Something Like It wrecks the possibility of either real laughter or genuine pathos.

In the end, Loser disappoints.

What better to do with such a quiet, majestic landscape than to liven it up with the noise and vulgarity of lowest-common-denominator American pop culture?

The Iron Lady is, to put it kindly, a shambles.

Chandler's script has, by my count, exactly one sort-of-funny line and not a single scene whose comic possibilities are successfully exploited.

Like Ari Aster’s Eddington earlier this year, Bugonia invites us inside the internet-poisoned imagination of a lonely male protagonist who has “done his own research”—and, as with Eddington, the result is an allegory about contemporary life that’s as nauseatingly gory as it is thuddingly obvious.

I don't know how much The Score cost, but it's pretty close to worthless.

The real question raised by The United States of Leland is not why, but how. How, that is, did so many talented actors find their way to this dreary and derivative study in suburban dysfunction?

Clearly, this is an affair to forget.

Where are we? What is this empty, science-fiction-like space in which luxury goods and women who resemble them are ceaselessly rotated in front of our eyes? Oh, it's Hollywood.

Succumbs to its blockbuster ambitions and turns into a noisy, bloated mess.

Like licorice, Marie Antoinette is a confection you either love or hate, and both affects seem tied to your feeling about the director herself and her apparent identification with Louis XVI's bride. For my part, I can definitely say that I love licorice and hate Marie Antoinette. But I'm still wrestling with the enigma of Sofia Coppola.

Imagine "Last Tango in Paris" remade as a wan, low-budget romantic comedy.

As the movie dragged on, I thought I heard a mysterious voice, and felt myself powerfully drawn toward the light -- the light of the exit sign. I have returned from the beyond to warn you: this movie is 90 minutes long, and life is too short.

Any irregularity in tone becomes a part of the movie’s intentionally rough, imperfect surface — a formal strategy I might find interesting if I could make head or tail of what the movie that’s using it is trying to say.

Blomkamp proceeds to spend the last two-thirds of his film crashing spaceships into lawns, or staging high-tech fistfights between Elysium’s stolid hero and his even duller arch-nemesis. It’s a waste of a perfectly good dystopia.

The delicate magic of, for instance, Hayao Miyazaki's "Spirited Away," which Disney released earlier this fall, is absent from this brainless, mechanical picture.

Joker is a bad movie, yes: It’s predictable, clichéd, deeply derivative of other, better movies, and overwritten to the point of self-parody. (If a feature-length sendup of Joker was made, it’s hard to imagine in what details it would differ from Joker itself.) The experience of sitting through it is highly unpleasant, but that unpleasantness has less to do with graphic violence — there are only one or two scenes that go hard, gore-wise — than with claustrophobia and boredom.

At its worst, This Is 40 feels like being condemned to watch two hours of someone else's home movies - overly long, self-indulgent, and bone-crushingly banal.

For a series so steeped in supernatural mumbo-jumbo, Pirates of the Caribbean displays remarkably little sense of wonder.

A movie like this can survive an absurd premise but not incompetent execution. And Mr. LaBute, never much of an artist with the camera, proves almost comically inept as a horror-movie technician...It's neither haunting nor amusing; just boring.

I didn’t like the movie at all — found it boring, unintentionally comical, at times even (a word I seldom use) pretentious — but I admire the rest of your work so much that I nonetheless feel the need to defend To the Wonder.

This forced march through a chamber of personal and sociological horrors is difficult to endure but easy to forget.

All the rest of Thor's 113 minutes felt so synthetic and overfamiliar that those brief flashes of spontaneity stood out like Morse code messages from another, better movie.

Snow White and the Huntsman, the first feature from British commercial director Rupert Sanders, has its work cut out for it if it wants to be a truly dull piece of junk - but it manages.

The only thing missing is a coherent story -- or even, for that matter, an interesting idea for one.

Not only is it excruciatingly boring -- but its central premises are so banal and dubious as to border on offensiveness.

Yes is not just a movie, in other words, it's a poem. A bad poem. There is no denying Ms. Potter's skill at versifying - or for that matter, at composing clear, striking visual images - but her intricate, measured lines amount to doggerel, not art.

The end titles and the ones that introduce Veronica Guerin...are the most informative parts of the film, and also the most powerful. What comes between them is a flat-footed, overwrought crusader-against-evil melodrama, in which Ms. Blanchett's formidable gifts as an actress are reduced to a haircut and an accent.

A patchwork of contrived naughtiness and forced pathos...The loose ends are neatly tied up, as they are when you seal a bag of garbage -- or if you prefer, rubbish.

The movie is bulky and inarticulate, leaving behind a trail of wreckage and incoherence.

The human landscape of Palindromes is a vista of grotesqueness, dishonesty and creepiness. These are qualities Mr. Solondz has explored before, but this time he fails to make them interesting, partly because he lets himself and the audience off the hook.

The project as a whole conveys a drab sense of bureaucratic necessity, a "let's get this over with" wheeziness.

Unfortunately, all of these supremely expressive vehicles come equipped with drivers, principally a pair of crash-test dummies played by Paul Walker and Tyrese, whose low-gear dialogue makes the whine of engines sound like the highest poetry.

It's deeply committed to its own weird conceit, diminishing returns and all.

What's disappointing about Anonymous is that it isn't dumb enough.

The film's last half-hour -- or do I mean its final two weeks? -- is meant to keep the audience sniffling and sobbing uncontrollably, but the only thing likely to elicit tears is the sight of Mr. Reeves dressed in a white dinner jacket crooning "Time After Time."

As five or six bad movies squished together, it almost seems like a bargain.

Tron: Legacy is the kind of sensory-onslaught blockbuster that tends to put me to sleep, the way babies will nap to block out overwhelming stimuli. I confess I may have snoozed through one or two climactic battles only to be startled awake by an incoming neon Frisbee.

Just as the vast, square Imax screen magnifies panda-haunches and steep, jungle-clad gorges, its relentless scale also enlarges a half-baked, mediocre little adventure story into something almost grotesquely bad.

Instead of suspense, there is confusion; instead of intrigue, a lot of inexplicable confrontation among characters whose significance is not so much enigmatic as obscure.

His (Lee) Oldboy is relentlessly unpleasant and difficult to watch, without offering audiences much moral or aesthetic payoff for its hour and 40 minutes of graphic violence and abject degradation. Oldboy is both original and uncompromising, I’ll give it that—it just doesn’t happen to be any good.

Unfortunately, the movie's real setting is a sentimental fantasy world, and its story is a spectacularly incoherent exercise in geopolitical wish fulfillment.

There is no credible feeling here, no comedy, no eroticism.

A hectic, uninspired pastiche of catchphrases and clichés, with very little wit, inspiration or originality to bring its frantically moving images to genuine life.

Has nothing on its mind besides the squirming discomfort of its audience, the achievement of which it holds up as a brave political accomplishment.

Bad and tasteless. You laugh neither with it nor at it but rather sit counting the minutes while the movie laughs, for no good reason, at itself.

The worst thing about I'm Still Here is the fact that it exists.

The movie version overflows with affection and good intention, but unwittingly turns a bauble of cheerful fakery into something that mostly feels phony.

Offers a view of pornography that is nonjudgmental, even celebratory, but at the same time its premise -- that Danielle must be rescued from the shame and degradation of her old job -- suggests a more traditional, disapproving point of view. Instead of addressing this contradiction, the movie is happy to wallow in it, which would be fine if it had any real pleasure to offer.

This is a time-tested movie con, but rarely has it been deployed so contemptibly.

By any reasonable measure this is a terrible movie, too long and too self-serious and way too dramatically inert, a regrettable waste of its lead actors’ boundless commitment to even their most thinly written roles.

It's instructive to compare Bully with Jean-Pierre Ameris's "Bad Company," which tackles similar themes and manages to be explicit without stooping to cheap salaciousness. It's a genuinely disturbing film. Bully, in contrast, is merely disgusting.

The aesthetic of Full Frontal is as rough and grainy as the off-the-rack digital video in which much of it was shot.

This is bad cinema and bad history. Ms. Bravo is unstinting in her praise for the omelet and her admiration of the chef, but she refuses to admit that she's walking on eggshells.

In a culture apparently defined by lap dancing, ersatz architectural sublimity and the virtual contact of cyberspace, how do we know what is real? The Center of the World, for example, is as phony as can be.

What should be a soufflé of gender-bending mischief is more like a bowl of oatmeal.

The very confusion that has made him (Rock) so unpredictable and funny onstage makes this on-screen exploration of contemporary racial mythologies curiously tentative and unfocused.

It appears to be relying on name recognition to garner an initial burst of curious viewers before word gets out about what a dud it is.

Sadly Persuasion, not only the worst Austen adaptation but one of the worst movies in recent memory, delivers on all the agony and none of the hope.

This script - a collaboration between Hanks and Nia Vardalos, the writer and star of "My Big Fat Greek Wedding" - would need multiple punch-up sessions to attain mediocrity. Roberts and Hanks aren't just prevented from playing their A games; they're never even taken off the bench.

Lord Lloyd Webber's thorough acquaintance with the canon of 18th- and 19th-century classical music is not in doubt, but his attempt to force a marriage between that tradition and modern musical theater represents a victory of pseudo-populist grandiosity over taste - an act of cultural butchery akin to turning an aviary of graceful swans and brilliant peacocks into an order of Chicken McNuggets.

That mystery is certainly hardy enough to withstand the voyeuristic onslaught of this self-aggrandizing, lurid documentary, which leaves the viewer feeling that we’ve been given a tour of Salinger’s septic tank in hip waders without ever getting to knock on his door and say hello.

Even by the standard of a fourth-in-a-series summer blockbuster, Wolverine, the first X-Men movie directed by Gavin Hood ( Rendition), is remarkably lame.

Even by the standards of the current run of mediocre comic-book movies, this one stands out for its egregious shoddiness.

To call The Change-Up misogynistic would be to shortchange the equal-opportunity disgust this anal-regressive film demonstrates toward men, babies, old people, and corporeal existence in general.

Sadly, these small bursts of beauty seemed so at odds with the movie's general crushing mediocrity that they were like quickly squelched protests against it.

Like a ham-fisted high-concept public service announcement, directed with stagy deliberateness and written with tin-eared vernacular speechiness.

Seems both overplotted and underimagined, though there is at least some creativity and a dose of realism, evident in the hairstyles themselves.

"Ouch!" is also what you might exclaim as you pinch yourself to stay awake through the film's slow, labored contrivances.

True to the rom-com tradition, the film ends in apologies, tears, and redemptive hugs, but the sour taste it leaves behind feels less like victory than like morning sickness.

Confuses an empty and derivative stylistic bravura with formal cleverness, and a sterile, mechanistic sensationalism with emotional intensity.

Proves to be both too much and not enough: yet another slick, empty package of ersatz entertainment.

Baywatch is surprisingly without sexism or condescension: It’s equal-opportunity stupid.

It's not so much the nonsensical nature of the plot that rankles; it's the movie's wrongheaded approach to the material.

I suppose Rumor Has It could be worse, though at the moment I'm at a loss to say just how.

Proves that a movie about goodness is not the same thing as a good movie.

It would be easier to forgive Identity Thief its overfamiliar comic setups and shameless gag-recycling if the movie’s second half didn’t make such an abrupt about-face from soliciting our revulsion to begging for our pity.

May have had the unintended effect of obscuring the original it meant to honor.

That What's Your Number? is a bad movie is the least of the reasons to walk out of it feeling awful. Competing for the top spot are these two: the criminal misuse of Faris; and the casual endorsement of courtship practices as arcane and sadistic as Chinese foot-binding.

The Glass House is hardly insane, just absurd, and the only damage it does is to itself.

Brain-dead.

Works hard at being charming, but comedy is best when it looks effortless.

This movie, a chaotic caper film at heart, wrecks its comic tone with some moments of gruesome violence.

The burden of the story, which is maudlin and entirely unbelievable, weighs down even the more credible performances.

The ending is meant to be clouded with ambiguity, but really it is unequivocally happy because it means the movie is over.

A comedy so noxious it seems the product of deliberate malignity. Surely the sour, vapid, miserable world of this movie can't reflect any real human being's notion of what love or humor or good storytelling is-not even a Hollywood screenwriter's.

The story is laughably incoherent, which would be less bothersome if the movie were not also so unremittingly pretentious.

It's like watching two superbly conditioned rowers try to race a boat made of folded newspaper. Hard as they work, they just can't make it go any faster.

Its lack of subtlety is clearly a point of pride, and Mr. Hensleigh's flat-footed, hard-punching style has a blunt ferocity that makes "Kill Bill" look like "In the Bedroom."

Mr. Jones, who recently starred in "Zig-Zag," a similarly striving, overwrought picture, is a disciplined and likable performer, and he bravely perseveres in the face of narrative absurdity and rampant overacting.

An unholy, incoherent mess.

Completed before the release of "American Beauty," this contrived, puffed up little picture nonetheless seems like a ripoff, perhaps because it mines the same tired assumptions and unexamined stereotypes about suburban family life.

Plays every convention twice, once as parody and once by the book, but the movie, trying to be two things at once, fails at both.

You might actively root for their collective demise, if you could rouse yourself to care one way or the other. Go gallivanting in Chernobyl and you get what you pay for, nimrods.