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.