David Edelstein

The downside to the performance is the downside to the movie: It’s one note played louder and louder.

It’s so aggressively puerile and phallocentric (big swinging dicks, big guns) it could be taken as a parody of a puerile, phallocentric action comedy — a hotfoot to feminists and girly-men. That’s a distinction without a difference, though, since either way it stinks to heaven.

This thing is an unholy mess.

The Happytime Murders turns out to be a stupefyingly sh—y puppet movie.

I know I’ve been rather harsh on an indie film that deserves points for its ambitions, so let me end on a brighter note. If Papierniak took that scene with Stanfield and started over with it, he might have a hell of a good rom-com. He needs to learn to separate the gold from the f*cking shit.

What’s Terminal about? It’s about 90 minutes. That’s a cheap shot, but since the film doesn’t establish a baseline of reality, it’s hard to pick out a premise. It’s a series of playlets stitched together with the seams hanging out.

Dimly lit and slackly made.

I figured the film would have an off-the-charts creepy quotient (the novel is chilling) and gobs of atmosphere. I could never have predicted it would turn out to be such a shambles.

I wish I could tell you they made a mistake and it’s not so bad, but, as Andy Kaufman’s Foreign Man would put it, “Ees so bad, ees terrible.”

Kingsman: The Golden Circle is the bloated, campy, thoroughly stupid sequel to the 2014 action thriller "Kingsman: The Secret Service."

The Mummy is not your usual lousy movie. It has been made with skill and hits its marks. But those marks are so low and so brazenly mercenary that it doesn’t feel like much of an achievement. It’s not involving.

It’s stuffed to the gills with effects executed by the highest-paid artists and technicians in the business. But it’s still a sorry spectacle.

My loathing of Split goes beyond its derivative ideas and second-hand parts.

The visuals in the final battle have some charm: They reminded me of early Tsui Hark Hong Kong extravaganzas like Zu: Warriors of the Magic Mountain and A Chinese Ghost Story (which he produced). But there was passion in those HK pictures, along with acrobatic wire-work. Promiscuous CGI makes even the miraculous seem ho-hum.

This hodgepodge has been thrown together in so slovenly a way that it’s no surprise the studio didn’t show it to the press.

Clarke is so insistent on becoming the new adorkable life force that she’s excruciating to watch. The movie makes you admire all the more her restrained power in Game of Thrones, in which her eyebrows are largely stationary.

How bad is Zoolander 2? It’s "Batman and Robin" bad. It’s so bad that it makes you feel sorry for the scores (literally) of celebrities who show up in cameos, even the ones (Anna Wintour, Tommy Hilfiger, Susan Sarandon, Ariana Grande, Kimye ...) who actively resist your sympathy, whom you maybe want to see taken down a peg.

You wonder what he has up his sleeve in The Hateful Eight, but gorgeous as that sleeve might be, what’s up it is crap. The movie is a lot of gore over a lot of nothing. I hope that won’t be Tarantino’s epitaph.

I can’t decide if Kurzel’s Macbeth is worse than the geriatric Maurice Evans–Judith Anderson version I was forced to endure in high school, but it’s certainly less lively than the two terrible gangster updates, Joe Macbeth and Men of Respect.

Entertainment wears its contempt too arrogantly, fulsome in its emptiness.

The air of mourning might have worked as a counterpoint to the silliness if Mitch Glazer’s script had smart gags, but as one-liner after one-liner misses its mark, you begin to feel sorry for Murray, who’s really too old to be playing a guy who has a little daughter (not granddaughter) and likes to get kinky with Kate Hudson as a raucous, Dolly Parton–style hooker-businesswoman.

It doesn’t jell, though, and the movie’s philosophical message is especially grating.

I’m also guessing Kendrick did not want to come back. I’ve never seen her so flat-out bad — distracted, depressed, conviction-less. Anna, I still adore you, but you should have tried to make it work.

There’s only one good scene in True Story, though it’s the most flagrantly absurd.

In the end, we must lay the badness of Mortdecai at the feet of its star. I envy Depp’s capacity for self-amusement, but it’s a pity he’s so rich and enbubbled that no one dares say to say to him, “Er, Johnny ... this is, er, really very bad.”

The new Annie musical starring Jamie Foxx and Quvenzhané Wallis is pretty bad, but let’s be honest: Despite some decent show tunes, the show was pretty bad to begin with, so it’s not worth getting all righteous about the dumb changes.

Before I go into the grinding awfulness of Dumb and Dumber To, let’s get one damn thing straight: The original Dumb and Dumber is a clasick.

It’s a good family movie the way Hooters is a good family restaurant.

One reason Oculus feels so talky and monotonous in spite of its tricky syntax is that the space itself isn’t charged with malignancy. And the monster doesn’t compensate — it’s dumb, blockish, inert. The mirror doesn’t have two faces. It barely has one.

It’s actually worse than the 1981 Franco Zeffirelli–Brooke Shields version — which is worse than being waterboarded but at least bears some resemblance to the book and its brilliantly addled ‘70s vibe.

Eckhart plays Frankenstein’s monster in a monotonous, teeth-gritting mode, as if someone had one gun on him and another on his family.

My daughter wants you to know that the movie is great and that you shouldn’t listen to a hater like me. I envy her belief.

A fair number of people have responded with tears and laughs to Saving Mr. Banks, but I found it interminable.

The carnage (with its computer-­generated splatter) is meant to be campy fun, but it’s so offhand that there’s less suspense than in an Austin Powers movie.

Villeneuve is trying like hell to elevate what turns out to be a dumb genre picture.

The Canyons isn’t just bad, it’s rank — and it takes a peculiar sort of integrity to denude the frame of life to the point where it smells to heaven.

In my own world, Only God Forgives plays somewhat differently. I thought it was just about the worst f---ing thing I’ve ever seen. In fact, I was depressed it wasn’t laughed off the screen.

Appalling in ways that you could never have anticipated. The movie mixes mismatched-buddy high jinks with scenes of carnage.

Were Shyamalan and Smith deliberately invoking the terror — now omnipresent in urban African-American communities — of lethal asthma attacks in children? I’m not sure how I feel about something so real and so wrenching in the context of a Grade D (unfit for human habitation) sci-fi picture like After Earth.

Olympus Has Fallen is a disgusting piece of work, but it certainly hits its marks — it makes you sick with suspense.

A Good Day to Die Hard is the opposite of a labor of love. It has no good lines, no crackerjack fights, and only one mildly orgasmic revenge killing. It will satisfy no one — high-, low-, or middlebrow. Die Hard is finally in its death throes.

It's rare to see a piece of sh** that actually looks and sounds like a piece of sh**. It's kind of exciting!

What a whorish film this is: Even the serial killer lectures the detective.

Sinister did something I thought would be impossible: It made this lifelong horror freak abhor horror movies.

The movie, written and directed by Brian Klugman and Lee Sternthal, is desultory when it's not inept, but the set-up is so good that you can't help sticking it out to the (unforgivable) end.

Rock of Ages withholds nothing and makes miracles seem cheap.

Dr. Seuss's The Lorax [sic] isn't Seussian in spirit. It's shrill and campy and stuffed with superfluous characters.

It has been a long time since I've heard people - many people - distinctly yell, "Boo!" Usually they just growl or moan or hiss. They don't bother actually to articulate the word "Boo!" I second their statement. The ending reeks.

The movie spreads bad vibes like a virus.

The Rum Diary has no mighty gonzo wind. Even with a push from its Thompson-worshipping star, Johnny Depp, it leaves our freak flag limp.

A well-polished cowpat that will confuse and bore those who know nothing about Shakespeare and incense those who know almost anything.

The movie is a reductio ad absurdum, a sick joke taken to extremes, beginning with a goof on the notion that horror movies inspire copycats and ending with a test to determine whether some people will watch anything.

Apollo 18, isn't egregiously inept. It just never lives. It's 80 minutes of dead air.

I've never seen a film in which what was actually onscreen seemed so irrelevant.

Amusing and annoying in the wrong ratio, maybe 30/70.

In Arthur, the spectacularly grating remake of Steve Gordon's 1981 P. G. Wodehouse simulation (this time, Peter Baynham miswrote, Jason Winer misdirected), Russell Brand gives a career-killing performance.

No Strings Attached is so palpably calculated that you know if the camera had pulled back a foot from the bed in which Portman and Kutcher were pretending to have sex, you'd have seen their agents standing by beaming: proud parents, proud pimps.

Even if the film were well done, it would still be a travesty.

He (Perry) has taken Shange's landmark poem cycle for seven African-American actresses, cut it up, and sewn its bloody entrails into a tawdry, masochistic soap opera that exponentially ups the "Precious" ante.

Bizarrely depressing.

9 Songs could have been "Last Rock Show in London." Unfortunately, it's stupefyingly dull, even with good music and at the short but resonant length of 69 minutes.

Turns into a moronic, psycho-on-the-loose picture pretty quickly.

Jumper is so in sync with the language of modern action movies that it’s possible to look past its soullessness and go with the quantum flow.

This is an extraordinary -- and unfathomable -- piece of whitewashing: a true snow job.

A depressing comeback for Jane Fonda, but it's still nice to see her in movies again, and in something that isn't dripping with self-actualizing virtue like her last projects.

This is a two-hour-and-six-minute snuff movie -- The Jesus Chainsaw Massacre -- that thinks it's an act of faith.

The movie is barely sufferable.

If it isn't the worst sequel ever made, it's only because it has too much competition: Impersonal and frenetic, it's a landmark Hollywood disgrace.

Emminently skippable.

What was already a raucous put-on, a goof on Aldrich's brutal action movies, is now a hyperbolic, gross-out cartoon, with a cast of enormous ex-football stars (plus the 7-foot-2-inch Indian wrestler Dalip Singh) only adding to the air of facetiousness.

The final illuminations (people have demons, a mind is a terrible thing to lose) are a poor return on nearly two hours of ear-buckling, eye-stabbing incoherence.

I had a hard time maintaining interest in (let along liking) any of these self-involved Hollywood twerps, and scene after scene is a grating mixture of self-aggrandizement and masochism.

The movie stinks to heaven.

And you wait--and wait--for the magic of movies.

Made for the most excruciating two-and-a-half hours I've ever spent in a theater.

Most of the dialogue and effects are clunky, repetitive, second-rate. A minute or so of David Lynch’s latest Twin Peaks series has more irrational menace. For all its feverish activity, Mother! feels static.

George Clooney is all by himself among living leading men in making smarm pass triumphantly for charm. But the movie lacks momentum, clarity, a decent payoff, and a location with the personality of Vegas.

It isn’t a train wreck--a train wreck would be memorable. What’s wrong is wrong by design.

The documentary has its roots in a monologue in which the "guest of Cindy Sherman" (what H-O's place-card read at a gala) stood up for his personhood and made himself the center of the story—only there's NO STORY, not even insight into what made this unlikely couple click. Remove the boldface names and there's no movie; that center does not hold.

My real problem with Matchstick Men is that it didn't con me well enough: I saw every trick up its sleeve in the first 20 minutes. If everything had been what it seemed--now, that would have been a stunning twist.

Lost Highway, David Lynch's first movie in five years, is a virtuoso symphony of bad vibes.

Exterminating Angels is meant as an autocritique--and yet the director can't get past his notion of himself as a fearlessly transgressive artist-hero, a martyr to the limitations of male gaze.

A riot of sleazy camera moves, bad acting, and maladroit profane dialogue.

The 12 scenes of Irreversible--each shot in a single, semi-improvised take--constitute something of a tour de force. But so would being dragged through the streets by a wire noose.

Con Air is boring to the marrow.

Libel on one of the true visionaries of American business in the 20th century, a man unfairly demonized for doing what others strove to do but doing it faster and better.

Turns into a pea-brained hodgepodge of "The Omen" (1976), "The Sixth Sense" (1999), and about 30 Grade-Z Bela Lugosi mad-scientist movies.

Russell is a manically inventive writer-director--maybe the most fearless talent of his generation. It's not a contradiction to say that I admire him more than ever while pronouncing Huckabees an unmitigated disaster.

It underscores the gruesome legacy of Saturday Night Live in American movies...They haven't liberated screen comedy, they've left it neutered--or, should I say, Spade.

Inexpressiveness is what separates the film from its models (chiefly Antonioni) and what makes it so exasperating.

He (Annaud) doesn't have a clue how to dramatize the romance. Fiennes, whose eyes are extremely close together, stares with a mixture of rage and longing at Weisz, whose eyes are extremely far apart, and the film turns into "The Dating Game" designed by Picasso.

The premise is admittedly a killer--fun to think about, fun to see realized, not so fun to see screwed up in the last half-hour.

There's only one surgery scene, but it's the heart (and kidneys) of Turistas. The rest -- especially the incoherent action -- falls well below the mark set by the last Americans Abroad torture-porn picture, "Hostel."

The most appalling comedy of the millennium after "Joe Dirt," which is so supernaturally terrible that it levitated me out of the theater after 40 minutes.

Domino seemed to me the end of the world for movies--a glimpse of a future so excruciating that I'd prefer to take my chances with Hitchcock's eye-gouging avians.

As messy and flat-footed as its predecessor is nimble and shapely. It's an ugly, bloated, repetitive movie that builds to a punch line that should have come an hour earlier (at least).

The script plays goofy games, stopping the action for Tarantino-style small talk; piling on alternate, "Rashomon"-style flashbacks; and divulging its characters' secrets in no particular order.

The whole movie is like that: showy stunts, explosions, over-the-top acting, fiesta colors, lurid angles, and a sense of nothing--nada--at stake.