Dana Stevens

Buried in the slow, talky, inanities that the two stars exchange are some potentially interesting ideas about female sexual self-assertion and male surrender, but neither the actors nor the filmmakers have any notion about how to explore them.

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

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.

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

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.

Shot in smeary video, it sports the static, by-the-book camera work of a daytime soap-opera.

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.

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."

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

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

A vulgar, uninspired lump of poisoned eye candy.

Vacillates between cutesy Disney-style anthropomorphism and "Born Free" exoticism.

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.

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

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

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

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.

The director has fallen into the common first-timer's trap of biting off more than he can chew, stitching together an unwieldy, disorganized story out of subplots and flashbacks, without paying enough attention to the basic requirements of character and narrative.

In the end, Loser disappoints.

Jettisoning any ambition toward thrillerhood, Domestic Disturbance becomes a plodding, obvious angry-dad melodrama, ambling toward the final, fatal showdown between parent and usurper.

A listless and desultory affair.

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

Brain-dead.

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.

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

And it's true that this movie's absolute tone-deafness, its complete disconnection from our current economic and geopolitical reality, by moments achieves a perverse Warholian profundity.

The story is so crowded with incident and implication as to be both nonsensical and impossible to act, so the actors, when they are not bursting into fits of temper, smile mysteriously.

By the end of The Watcher you'll need your own prescription.

By the end, even the irrepressible Mr. Foxx seems tired and defeated, and we can only hope he perks up in time for his next movie.

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.

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

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?

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

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.

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.

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.

Extremely good-looking people tend to be shallow, self-involved and not very bright. Let's call this statement what it is: a form of prejudice, a stereotype. It is, sadly, a stereotype that Down to You does everything in its power to promote.

So poorly written, badly acted and ineptly directed that it denies you even the modest pleasure of making fun of it.

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

Take this as a warning: it's not much fun.

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

Snow Dogs is, even by the standards of a tradition that includes "Son of Flubber" and "The Shaggy D.A.," remarkably inept.

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.

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.

The whole business has a breathless, determined, student-film quality that makes it especially hard to watch. Mr. Cunningham and his cast are clearly trying to do something they feel is important, and there is no pleasure in watching them do it so ineptly.

A witless, gruesome barrage of jokey violence and lame trans-Atlantic humor, kept moving by the pointless, derivative kineticism of Mr. Yu's hyperactive cuts and splices.

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.

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

Endure the long, slow, unraveling of this movie, which can't even muster the intelligence to be pretentious or the bravado to be amusingly bad.

Lacks the wit to do anything new and instead recycles tired jokes and attitudes.

A film that even a rabid lowbrow like Homer Simpson (or, when the mood strikes, this critic) would find beneath his dignity.

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.

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

At the end the picture seems to acknowledge its own ludicrousness, but by then it, like Beans, is beyond rescue.

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.