James Berardinelli

Part music video, part bizarro psychological thriller, and part David Lynch-inspired descent into existential purgatory (I kept looking for Michael J. Anderson), the film’s weirdness is sometimes extreme enough to exert an almost hypnotic attraction. But, as good as he may be on stage and in a music studio, The Weeknd (a.k.a. Abel Tesfaye) is not a good actor.

The 2011 version of Conan the Barbarian looks cheap and feels rushed. The few good elements are dwarfed by a generic, nonsensical plot and shoddy storytelling.

A slow, meandering misfire of a movie.

Watching a misfire like Thunderbirds illustrates how impressive the "Spy Kids" movies are.

Want to see a movie where almost everything takes place on a bus? Try "Speed." Jeepers Creepers 2 isn't even worth a peek.

A bad movie. No amount of perfume sprayed on talk show audiences by Madonna and her husband can eliminate the stench of failure emanating from this motion picture.

Meet Joe Black has the dubious distinction of being the longest film to date of 1998. It is also one of the most tedious and bombastic.

The level of humor is sit-com-ish at best and the film's dramatic elements are bland and uninvolving.

Redundant and unnecessary.

The comedy is embarrassingly unfunny, the attempts at drama are badly acted and sometimes cringe-worthy, and the copious amounts of blood during the fight sequences fall short of being amusing while sabotaging any hope of taking them seriously.

Fans of the original will end up doing shot-by-shot comparisons. On every level, The Omen isn't just bad filmmaking, it's bad storytelling.

A fully disengaged brain is probably the key to enjoying Final Score. Employing even basic logic engenders a recognition of how truly stupid this screenplay is, especially when it comes to the resolution.

Wild Hogs is more tired, worn out, and sagging than its protagonists - an arthritic comedy whose humor is below mediocre and whose drama is cringe-worthy.

It's hard to say what is more responsible for the film's utter failure: Hopkins direction, the editing, or the screenplay. The result is such a muddle that one assumes each aspect deserves part of the blame.

The problem with Hostel Part II is the same flaw that afflicted Hostel: no tension.

Pretentious and manipulative, the movie bludgeons viewers with its new age philosophizing and its desire to be considered meaningful.

Louder, flashier, and more hollow than anything else out there.

Narratively incoherent and full of cheese and camp, this movie makes it clear that the mummy should have remained dead and buried.

The recycling goes as deep as the dialogue, which is a mangled and blended refrain of clichés.

There are a lot of other bad things I could talk about -- the overblown score, the silly portrayal of the police, the bad dialogue, the poor lighting in almost every scene -- but I think it's pretty clear how few virtues Striking Distance has. In fact, one of the movie's few positive aspects is that it's too loud to fall asleep during, which is surely what most people would do if their attention was based on story and character.

This unexceptional and uninteresting story of a self-pitying borderline-personality teenager verges on being unwatchable as a result of McDonald's decision to bombard the audience with extraneous images in lieu of telling the story.

At best, this is a late-night time-waster to be watched on Prime Video when all better options have been exhausted.

A misfire in far too many meaningful aspects, The Book Thief is so bad that it's tough to decide whether it's better used as a sleep aid or watched while under the influence as an object of derision.

The Happening is a movie to walk out of, sleep through, or - best of all - not to bother with.

Stay away from Birth not because of what goes on (or doesn't) in a bathtub, but because this is not a very good movie.

The Thirteenth Floor shows what can happen when film makers fail to recognize that they need more than a concept to establish a full-length motion picture.

Dirty Deeds boasts a passably entertaining idea that is butchered in the telling.

It's either a failed experiment or a movie that was rushed through production so Allen could fulfill his one project-per-year commitment.

Director Sidney J. Furie, whose previous career high-point was either The Ipcress File or Lady Sings the Blues, fumbles the tone as badly as Richard Lester did in Superman III, veering drunkenly from action/adventure to comedy. Gone is the sense of naïve grandeur that made the original Superman such an endearing production.

The movie is frequently incomprehensible and, on those occasions when it makes sense, the viewer may wish it didn’t.

This is a bad film - at times it’s nigh unwatchable - but that doesn’t matter in the grand scheme of things.

Sanders, however, has taken a deep dive into the world of pretentious horror, where every killing has to be as stylized as it is gory. His characters have no humanity, his romance has no sizzle, and the whole thing turns into a slog where style overwhelms substance to such a degree that there’s too little left of the latter to matter.

The Informers is nihilism for nihilism's sake; a bleak and borderline-unwatchable collage of misanthropes, self-absorbed a**holes, and pathetic weaklings as they struggle to move forward during the early 1980s in Los Angeles.

Director Rick Friedberg (who made the "bad golf" videos with Leslie Nielsen) has crafted a dreadfully unfunny comedy that takes Naked Gun-like sketches and rehashes them without a whit of style or energy.

Take away the film's attitude, and you're left with "Son of Van Helsing."

Wild Wild West isn't just a bad adaptation of a TV series; it's a bad film.

In R.I.P.D., we have a legitimate train wreck of a motion picture: a film that doesn't work on any level. It's not funny. It's not exciting. It's not engaging. It's a waste of time and money.

This is a tedious and insulting motion picture. The only ones likely to be surprised by the payoff are those who understandably dozed off fifteen minutes into the proceedings.

Movies like this usually have something interesting to say about the human condition, but not Nine Lives. It makes an insufferably obvious observation: we live boring lives, shit happens, and we die.

Undemanding movie-goers on the lookout for a movie featuring pretty people in a vapid rom-com that might find this movie to their liking. For everyone else, this is decidedly not “all that.”

The movie is a pointless retread with nothing to recommend it beyond McShane’s commanding presence.

It represents a missed opportunity on every level. As a black comedy, it fails. As a satire of the bloated wedding industry, it fails. As a drama about friendship triumphing over all, it fails.

"The Hangover" was high octane fun. "The Hangover Part II," despite its repetitive nature, was enjoyable. The Hangover Part III is some kind of hideous experiment in mass consumer torture.

Where's John McClane when you need him? If nothing else, the main character from the two Die Hard films would have livened up proceedings in this pathetically inept psychological thriller.

Orphan is being marketed as a horror movie, but that's misdirection. It's more of a standard thriller in the "evil amongst us" mode, about a group of people who inadvertently admit a psychopath into their midst.

I didn’t laugh once and the movie’s stylized and satirical tone defused any connection I might have felt for the characters. Perhaps if the proceedings hadn’t dragged on well past the two-hour mark, it wouldn’t have seemed like such a chore to sit through.

Very little of what made the written version so enjoyable has been successfully translated to the screen, and what we're left with instead is an overly-long (two hours and thirty-four minutes, to be exact), pedantic thriller.

The result is an unappealing mess, made less bearable by uniformly lackluster performances and the cheesy special effects.

Even at the attractive price of “free,” it’s not worth it because watching it requires 97 minutes and that’s not time well spent.

This is as dreadful a holiday offering as you're likely to find this year. A lump of coal would be more welcome.

Regardless of whatever ephemeral entertainment this production may offer to some, it is not by any reasonable definition a good movie. It is badly written, inexpertly directed, poorly acted, erratically paced, and features music of dubious worth.

Plagued by moralizing so strident and a style so artificial that the story never has a chance to speak to an audience.

If all you're looking for is breasts, blood, and gore, this film hits pay dirt. None of the killings are terribly inventive, but they are plentiful, and why bother being devious when axes, machetes, knives, and pointed sticks will do the job just as well?

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles doesn't so much provide brainless enjoyment as it pummels the viewer into submission. "Shell-shocked" is a reasonable description of the experience.

To succeed, Deception requires viewers to be both inattentive and stupid. There's not a twist in this flimsy and moth-eaten plot that isn't both contrived and transparent and not a character who hasn't been hopelessly manipulated by the needs of the narrative.

This movie isn't bad in the way some incompetently made movies are bad; this is bad because there's much skill evident in a pointless endeavor.

Unremarkable. A more honest description would be to label it as mirthless, pointless, and banal.

Fire in the Sky is grim. I'm not sure why director Robert Lieberman chose to fashion his movie like this, but the result is distinctly unpleasant -- dark, gloomy settings with harshly disagreeable characters and no sign of anything remotely resembling comic relief.

Unimaginative horror movies are a dime a dozen, but overlong, boring, unimaginative horror movies? Those are rare. However, in Split, that’s what writer/director M. Night Shyamalan has provided the early 2017 movie-going populace.

The only thing that distinguishes Species 2 is how awful it is.

Everything about this movie feels both tired and tiring. Yes, it does a great job setting up a sense of deep unease but that quickly evaporates when it becomes apparent the movie isn’t going anywhere worthwhile or interesting, and the ending is downright silly.

With a script that waffles between being hilariously absurd and insultingly stupid, and action scenes that won't cause anyone's pulse to skip a beat, Paycheck is less appealing than a lump of coal in a Christmas stocking.

A Perfect Murder has inexplicably managed to eliminate almost everything that was worthwhile about "Dial M for Murder," leaving behind the nearly-unwatchable wreckage of a would-be '90s thriller.

From narrative to character development to staging, every frame of Mistress America drips with artifice. It's a playground for unpleasant, self-absorbed characters - an excursion into the lifestyles of people most of us would prefer to bypass. If there's an antonym for self-awareness, it applies to nearly everyone populating this misfire.

The movie starts cheating the audience early, and never lets up.

A shallow, transparent satire/social commentary, Palindromes lives and dies on a gimmick.

If I knew definitively what the plural was for the term deus ex machina, I’d apply it here. Rarely can I remember a movie filled with so many miraculous rescues and associated contrivances.

A maudlin hack-job.

For better or worse (emphasis on the latter), it was unlike anything else on the multiplex landscape. In 2017, it’s becoming difficult for Bay to distinguish his brand of brain-dead spectacle from the brain-dead spectacle of many other sequels, prequels, and remakes.

Wow. Just wow. Every year, movie theaters bring us their share of surprises – both good and bad. Suburbicon goes immediately to the front of the line of contenders for the most disappointing film of 2017.

The only worthwhile portion of Twin Dragons is the climactic action sequence, but, to get to that, it's necessary to endure more than an hour of unfunny physical comedy and excruciating verbal interaction.

My Best Friend's Girl isn't just a misfire; it's a misfire compounded by a chain of miscalculations, and it's hard to figure out who this could appeal to (except, perhaps, Dane Cook's fan club).

Unfortunately, as with too many films being made with the international market in mind, Jack Reacher: Never Go Back is a jumble of overhyped action scenes, trite dialogue, painfully bad “character development”, and awful writing.

The script isn't just "dumbed down," it's lobotomized.

The film is critic-proof and it will find an audience, but it's hard to imagine even the film's target demographic (teenage boys) being overly enthusiastic about the product. It's disposable entertainment of the worst kind.

Once again, we have a movie where the jokes are aimed at the least common denominator - meaning that to genuinely enjoy the experience of sitting through Slackers, you will need help from a controlled substance.

However, once you realize there's no "pleasure" to be had from something this wantonly dumb and idiotically constructed, all that's left is "guilt" - guilt that you actually spent money to see this.

Meg 2 (it lost the “The” somewhere along the way) is pretty awful stuff even in comparison to its predecessor.

Instead of offering engaging storytelling, it give us flashes, bangs, bad dialogue, and a mountain of fakery (a reminder that things that work in comic books don’t always translate to the silver screen). It’s sound and fury signifying nothing except to expose another chink in the once-impervious armor of the MCU.

It's a cloying, humorless motion picture whose only assets are the work of Jim Henson's Creature Shop and a couple of good one-liners by a pair of rodents.

This film makes the common mistake of showing in great detail things that would be more terrifying if left to the imagination. As a result, the only thing disturbing about The Haunting is how discouraging the end product is.

The way in which I Feel Pretty presents its message is one of the film’s biggest problems. If there’s something less subtle than a sledgehammer, it applies here.

The movie mandates complete gullibility and vacuous attention in order to work on any level.

The Punisher isn't Frank Castle; it's Jonathan Hensleigh. And the punishee is anyone sitting in the audience.

For a strangely-titled, female-oriented drama about mothers and daughters bonding, try "The Joy Luck Club" and leave Ya-Ya as a phrase uttered by one-year olds who have yet to learn how to talk.

Schumacher doesn't leave an imprint on the film -- it could be the work of any second-rate director.

Lockout is painful. Not painful in the way Uwe Boll or "Sex and the City" movies are painful. But painful enough that I kept waiting for Nicolas Cage to show up. Or Katherine Heigl. Or, god forbid, both.

Nothing short of a disaster -– easily one of the worst movies of the year.

Misses the mark.

This is a mechanical gore-fest that offers preposterous stunts in place of escalating tension and waxwork mannequins in place of marginally interesting characters.

One doesn't expect intelligent scripting or deep characterization from Roland Emmerich, but the film's lack of energy, poor special effects, and monotonous pacing lead to an inescapable conclusion: 10,000 B.C. isn't only brain-dead, it's COMPLETELY dead. It's inert and without a heartbeat.

A tedious, incoherent bore.

The movie has little to recommend it and more than a few things to encourage those who pursue quality cinema to stay away.

Even for those who have an orgasmic reaction to kaiju confrontations, far too little of the film is devoted to them and the overreliance on CGI leeches away the immediacy and awe associated with the spectacle. This isn’t as bad as the 1998 Godzilla misfire but it’s perilously close.

All-in-all, what we have here is classic Seagal. And that means, for anyone who isn't an admitted fan, an uninspired outing.

Boring and repetitive.

Regardless of whether you're a fan of the 1950s series or not, it's doubtful you'll get more than a few halfhearted chuckles out of this lifeless retread.

The screenplay is so incredibly dumb that it’s never possible to suspend one’s disbelief sufficiently for the movie’s high points to offer more than a fleeting moment’s satisfaction.

I wonder if Gamer might make a good game; it certainly doesn't make a good movie.

This isn't just typical, unchallenging Hollywood drek -- it's typical, unchallenging Hollywood drek made by people who don't care, for people who don't care.

Speed 2 can be numbered among the worst second chapters ever made.

Is this a movie or a feature-length advertisement for Qwest? We're not just talking one product placement; this brand name is nearly omnipresent.

Everything in G.I. Joe: Retaliation is perfunctory - technically proficient but soulless. It's not exciting. It's boring.

John Tucker Must Die is toothless. The jokes are obvious and unfunny, the storyline goes nowhere that's interesting or unexpected, and the only chemistry happens in a science lab.

Devil will do little to dispel the growing belief that Shyamalan is a one-trick pony whose horse has keeled over. The laughter during the trailer was sadly prescient; the film is a joke.

The screenplay fails to provide any reason to care about the characters or their circumstances, so we sit in a theater seat, trying not to be hypnotized by all the flashes of light in the muddled brown-and-white environment or lulled to sleep by the inane babbling that passes for dialogue.

Chase, like his Vacation movies, are things of the past. This is a series that should have died with the '80s. Instead, inexplicably, it has limped on into the '90s.

Breakdown is the latest in a seemingly endless traffic jam of thrillers that opens strong but finishes abominably.

Wonder Wheel seems more like a cobbled-together afterthought than the romantic melodrama it seeks to be.

A soulless jumble of ineptly assembled cliches and pabulum that plays like a 95-minute commercial for NBA properties.

Code 46 is like "Solaris" without the psychological depth and strong acting. The movie is flat, boring, pointless, and nonsensical.

One has the sense that if the level of violence had been ratcheted up a little, Paparazzi might have been more of a guilty pleasure and less of a chore to watch.

Eye for an Eye is one of three pictures currently in theaters about parents coping with the deaths of children. Both of the others, The Crossing Guard and Dead Man Walking, are vastly superior, and the latter, a thoughtful examination of some of the same issues that drive this film, makes Eye for an Eye look like puerile rubbish. Despite paying lip service to high ideals, Schlesinger's movie has no moral compass, and is only interested in delivering cheap thrills. And, while there's a place for that in movies, appropriating this particular storyline for such a base intention feels uncomfortably like a defilement.

It is now weighed down by a second half that's equal parts incoherent, tedious, and repetitive.

Unfortunately, stiff acting, an increasingly hard-to-swallow storyline, and an atrociously bad ending torpedo Eli Horowitz’s Gone in the Night, making it unworthy of even a streamed view. When the movie started, I wanted to like it. 90 minutes later, I just wanted it to end.

If there's the kernel of a good story buried somewhere deep in Cursed, it never pops. As werewolf movies go, this one is on par with "An American Werewolf in Paris," but at least that dud had plenty of gore and Julie Delpy's bare breasts to recommend it.

As a satire on the media's infatuation with violence and murderers, Natural Born Killers hits the bullseye. The problem is, this is a one-note movie. It repeatedly hammers home the same point until the audience is bludgeoned into senselessness.

Painfully unfunny and unnecessarily long, this movie is the antithesis of its predecessor, the delightfully raunchy "Horrible Bosses."

Too long and too full of itself to offer more than a few fleeting moments of entertainment. It doesn't take long for tediousness to triumph.

Most of their jokes miss the mark and the movie gets lost in action/thriller territory that’s anything but thrilling.

Alien 3 is, simply put, a mess. The writers have no idea how to tell a coherent, entertaining story. With the exception of a surprise or two, there isn't much worthwhile here.

Dull, uninspired, and redundant.

A frustrating crime thriller that incorporates too many plot threads into the overall narrative at the expense of character identification, suspense, and emotional heft.

If I wanted to be kind, I’d call Luca Guadagnino’s Suspiria remake “visually striking” and “stylish.” If I wanted to be brutally honest, I’d call it “tedious”, “pretentious”, and even “painful” (although not in a good way).

Everything about Staying Alive is cliched: characters, story, dialogue… There’s not a single original or interesting thing to be found. Even the music is tired and, although Travolta evinces the same physicality he showed in Saturday Night Fever, the sense of joy is gone.

Aspen Extreme is a predictable, pointless melodrama -- a kind of Top Gun in the snow. Ski enthusiasts might be tempted to see the film based on subject matter alone, but, unless they're undiscriminating about the quality of their movies, I would caution against it. Even as vicarious entertainment, Aspen Extreme is feeble.

It's a depressing experience to view something like Saw IV. It's not just the soullessness that's dispiriting, but the lack of invention. When a movie does little more than repeat what its predecessors accomplished with grotesque effectiveness, it's past time to tip this corpse into its grave and bury it.

Director Scott Waugh’s intention may have been to elevate my pulse, but the only thing at which he succeeded was getting me to check my watch repeatedly.

It's all about eye candy and the quick tease. It's not over fast enough.

Indian Summer is a mish-mash of mediocre formulas. Although there are several good comedy sequences, this uneven humor is unable to camouflage the essential weakness of the storyline. The script, which relies heavily on conflict, doesn't present us with any believable characters. Reunion stories have been done so often that for one to make an impression, it needs a new angle (Peter's Friends, Kenneth Branagh's recent film, fell into the same trap). Indian Summer doesn't even attempt to strike out towards new ground. It finds a comfortable, cliche-filled groove and sits there.

Like many genuinely awful movies, Queen of the Damned has the ingredients of a cult film.

A muddle of a film - an overlong bore that either mistakenly thinks it's something more than a humdrum romance or has incorporated a variety of pretentions as window-dressing.

The greatest flaw in My Father the Hero isn't the feeble laugh-to-running length ratio, the limp characterization, or the mediocre acting. Instead, it's the feeling of unease that pervades the first forty-five minutes as Nicole and Andre clash while the film tries unsuccessfully to make light of their dysfunctional relationship. There are serious issues bubbling away here that the movie doesn't know how to address properly. Lighthearted motion pictures should never cause discomfort, but this one does.

This is sloppy filmmaking, and it's likely to wipe away whatever luster still remains to Shyamalan's reputation.

Fountain of Youth is a perfect example of something that can play in the background but proves singularly unable to hold anyone’s attention for the entirety of its running length.

A "Jennifer Aniston movie" has become synonymous with "derivative, lackluster mediocrity," and it's a shame. We know she has both talent and charisma but nothing on her recent resume has allowed her to display those qualities. So we're stuck with films that are at best forgettable and at worst painful.

In terms of storytelling, excitement, and overall entertainment value, Blacklight is a black hole.

It's a little sad that The Messengers is ultimately a good candidate for burial in a toxic waste dump because there are some good elements contained herein.

Clumsily incorporates elements of "Ghost," "The Sixth Sense," and "Field of Dreams."

Uninspired and painfully familiar.

LaBute has transformed the eerie, disturbing psychological thriller into an unintentional comedy. At times, The Wicker Man is hilariously bad.

The only arena in which Gulliver's Travels plays an adequate game is in visual effects.

Trespass is a home invasion movie, but not a clever, taut one; it's sloppy and obvious, with curves so un-serpentine they might as well be straightaways.

The really disgusting thing about this movie isn't the crude jokes themselves, but how grossly unfunny they all are.

Plastic characters, chaotic camerawork, lots of things blowing up, and an incredibly dumb screenplay. In short, it represents a great time at the movies for anyone who has recently undergone a frontal lobotomy.

The result is a film that runs far too long and rarely generates enough tension or genuine horror to justify its runtime—or, indeed, its very existence.

A woefully underwritten motion picture that starts out as a dumb comedy before taking an ill-advised detour into mawkish sentimentality. The last 30 minutes of Bruce Almighty is so godawful that it almost sent me screaming from the theater.

Perhaps the biggest (and most noticeable) fall-off from the first film is the lack of chemistry between Reynolds and Jackson. The two never connect. Rarely have I seen the volcanic Jackson look so disinterested; this is the closest he’s ever come to phoning it in.

Battleship has the IQ of a rutabaga and doesn't require much more intelligence than that to watch. Despite spending copious amounts of time with back story and so-called character development, it's really all about the explosions.

It's the kind of thing that Shakespeare might have written if he had undergone a frontal lobotomy.

Has some promise as a throw-away, lighthearted romance. Unfortunately, once those elements are gone, what's left only has a running time of about 13 minutes.

It's not just about a disaster, it is a disaster.

This movie works best as a sleep tonic. Somewhere isn't just frustratingly slow-moving; it's inert.

I’m not predisposed to like movies focused on hollow characters floating in their own bubble of self-absorption, whether they’re men (Entourage) or women (Sex and the City), and as soon as I realized that’s what Home Again was offering, I knew I was in for a long 97 minutes. Unfortunately, I was right.

Tideland is, by turns, a complete bore and a creepy experience. And I don't mean "creepy" in a positive sense.

Delpy's injection of class into an otherwise classless production raises the specter of what this film could have been with a better script and a better cast surrounding her.

If the film is to work on any level, even a comedic one, it's necessary for the viewers to sympathize with Joanna and Walter. However, the script and scattershot performances keep them at arm's length. Nicole Kidman is in full scenery-chewing mode, and Matthew Broderick hasn't been this invisible since Ferris Bueller had to go back to school.

Monster-in-Law is appalling misfire of a comedy - a motion picture that takes a situation ripe for the blackest vein of satire and reduces it to a puerile and edgeless pile of goo

Johnny Mnemonic is brash, flashy, and loud, but it lacks a few key ingredients -- namely heart, soul, and intelligence.

This is the sort of movie that gives "chick flicks" a bad name. It's a cross between inept melodrama and a bad sit-com.

Captures the essence of its TV inspiration, which is to say that it's not nearly as clever as it thinks it is. It also feels very, very long.

Instead of generating a testosterone rush, the fight scenes release tryptophan. Not only are they boring, but they are choreographed in an amateurish fashion.

Labeling The Call as "relentlessly dumb" would be an overestimation of its intelligence. This is as brain-dead as a movie can be and it assumes the audience will have the I.Q. of a rutabaga.

I can’t say that Annabelle Comes Home, the third feature focused on the creepy girl doll, is the worst (because it has plenty of competition) but it’s easily among the dumbest.

It's tired and dated with too few laughs to justify the stultifying attempts at drama and the impossible-to-swallow plot contortions.

Sixteen years after her death, Princess Diana is still capable of generating interest, which is probably the only reason why this dull, pointless movie was greenlighted.

Feels perfunctory and obligatory and, despite the return of several familiar characters, is more like an afterthought than an organic third piece of a trilogy puzzle.

Everything about it feels stale: the actors, the story, the comedy, everything. And, to make matters worse, that everything goes on for an interminable two hours.

Calling Delivery Man a "comedy" is a bit of a stretch, because it's rarely funny. Dumb, yes, but not in a way that's worthy of more than a half-hearted chuckle.

To work, The Host would have required a visionary interpretation rather than the mundane telling that Niccol opts for.

For all its attempts to weave a spell on the audience, Hearts and Souls displays an incredible lack of subtlety. Nevertheless, if you are prone to sigh rapturously at the thought of a happy ending, this may be the movie for you. It doesn't just have one of these, but five, each more cloying than the one before -- a rare treat for those who don't mind sugar shock.

From the start, it's obvious that this is a vehicle for his comedy, and it mostly works -- for about ten to fifteen minutes. After that, Carrey's act gradually grows less humorous and more tiresome, and the laughter in the audience seems forced.

Chaos Theory stumbles from one contrived circumstance to the next, and there's not a moment in this entire mess that conveys any sort of genuine human emotion or reaction.

It's remarkably appropriate that Envy is about turds, because that's what the movie is.

Two if by Sea has a drab, dreary tone that's due as much to the unenthusiastic performances as to the bland direction. If anyone was having fun making this film, it doesn't come across. Star Wars' gold droid C3P0 had more humanity than all of Two if by Sea's characters combined. Because I never cared about Frank or Roz, the "feel good" ending left me cold. And, to think, I wasted over an hour and a half in a theater with this movie when I could have been outside shoveling snow.

With its grim tone and sickening content, this gruesome gore-fest might have limited appeal for "Death Wish" lovers who wished Charles Bronson hadn’t been such a wimp.

It will bore you.

The Ice Road may be the worst direct-to-Netflix movie to feature a major star. It may also offer the worst entry into Liam Neeson’s catalog of strong, resilient action heroes.

The sad truth about After Earth is that not only is it difficult to find things it does well, but there are numerous examples of outright incompetence dotting the landscape.

Surprise of surprises, Revolver turns out to be worse than "Swept Away" - and not just by a little bit.

The Last Airbender is an insult to anyone with a triple-digit I.Q. and a willingness to use it inside the confines of a movie theater. This is bad filmmaking and bad storytelling. It also sounds what should be the death knell to M. Night Shyamalan's career.

Hush has three very simple problems: it's incredibly dumb, it's incredibly boring, and it's incredibly predictable (at least up to the stupefying ending).

Expend4bles feels like a movie that never should have been made for a franchise that, having lain dormant for nine years, didn’t deserve a resurrection.

Good entertainment stretched to three times its natural length is rarely three times better, but bad entertainment dragged out that long will typically be three times worse. In the case of Demon Knight -- which probably doesn't have ten minutes of worthwhile material -- such a statement could be regarded as infinitely kind.

Belly-flopping into the superhero movie pool, Thunder Force illustrates what happens when filmmakers take a moderately interesting premise and surround it with witless writing, cringe-inducing acting, stagnant action, humor-deprived comedy, and feckless drama.

The "special effects" employed to have the animals' mouths form words might have been state-of-the-art 20 years ago, but they're outdated today, and the gorilla looks like a guy in the monkey suit that was abandoned after the 1976 version of "King Kong." I guess CGI was too sophisticated for the technical crew.

Unfinished Business is bad - not epically bad but bad enough. Little contained in this misfire of a film works and the few successful things are dragged out to the point where they die a lingering death.

It's astounding how a movie this long could accomplish so little.

Occupation accomplishes the previously unthinkable: an alien invasion film that makes "Independence Day" look smart.

--- Ho, ho, ho - the joke's on anyone who pays to see this.

If you've gone to Kung Pow for the plot, you have made a mistake. Come to think of it, if you have gone for the comedy, you've also made a mistake. In fact, if you've gone at all, you've made a mistake.

The biggest shock of this new movie re-imagination is that it makes the original seem fresh and smart by comparison. Perhaps that makes this whole endeavor nothing more than TV producer Aaron Spelling’s posthumous fantasy.

This film is unable to involve, entertain, or titillate. Basically, it stinks.

The Pink Panther is supposed to use humor to uplift. Instead, I departed this movie feeling depressed.

Halloween 5 is the movie that pushed the Halloween franchise into the generic slasher film category.

A bunch of IQ-challenged characters traipsing through a laughably bad scenario brought to life using silly dialogue, banal direction, and questionable special effects.

This a neutered Garfield, one part tomcat and three parts pussy, recognizable only by his orange coat and love of lasagna. This feline's got a serious case of mange.

This is cheap-looking, ugly filmmaking. It goes without saying that the story is nonsensical. The characters have the depth of crepe paper. But perhaps what’s most surprising is that the endless CGI hasn’t gotten a noticeable upgrade since 2017’s Transformers: The Last Knight. Modern video games look better.

There are bad movies and annoying movies, and this one contains elements of both.

The resulting hodgepodge of unfunny, sophomoric humor and PG-13 T&A, frosted by a sheen of appallingly nauseous "drama," makes for such a noxious brew that it's amazing viewers stay in their seats for the entire production.

When it comes to comedy, Deck the Halls is remarkably tedious.

The most depressing thing about this movie is not that it's such a complete waste of time, but that there are people in Hollywood who think this kind of thing is what American movie-goers are interested in seeing.

“Hollow cash grab” is one way to describe The Grinch. Equally appropriate would be “soulless abomination.”

Sometimes, even a little gratuitous nudity can't save a movie. This is one of those occasions. Cosmopolis easily trumps "To Rome with Love" as the biggest disappointment of 2012 from an established director.

Devoid of life, intelligence, humor, and anything else that could entertain even the most undemanding viewer, this film is a perfect example of something that should have been shipped to landfills, not multiplexes.

Epic Movie is a waste of time. It's like a bad issue of "Cracked Magazine" come to life. It's not so much painful as it is sleep inducing.

In general, thrillers are among the easiest movies to do poorly and the hardest to do well. Body of Evidence takes the easy road, and ends up as a shambles. This is the kind of poor effort that's difficult to forgive.

If Superman was an eagle streaking across the sky, Supergirl is the result of that eagle’s bowel movement.

Robinson's movie flip-flops back and forth between being inept and goofy.

It boggles the mind to consider that the fertile writing team of Alec Berg, David Mandel, and Jeff Schaffer, all of whom spent time scripting episodes of "Seinfeld," could turn out something as abysmally unfunny as Eurotrip.

Taken as a whole, it’s excruciating in ways that few would consider enjoyable.

Unless you're among those who admit to an inexplicable admiration for Shore, Son-in-Law will rate as one of the most unpleasant, grating experiences of the summer.

August Rush isn't just a bad movie - it's an aggressively bad movie.

By the end of the film, I was hoping everyone on two legs would die, preferably suffering as much on screen as I was in the audience.

One of the dumbest thrillers to arrive it theaters in a long time.

The worst action movie of the summer. I liked Bad Boys II a little less, but making the comparison is like distinguishing between a cow turd and a horse turd. And that pretty much sums it up nicely.

Watching this movie, I wished I knew how to use dental floss, a paper clip, and a crumpled movie ticket to break the projector.

It is a ghastly experience, and I left the theater feeling as if I had waded neck-deep through a stream of raw sewage.

The funniest movie of the year - a true laugh riot. Viewers will be holding their sides to contain the laughter. Forget Borat - if you're looking for something hilarious, this is the movie to see. What's that? It's not supposed to be a comedy. Oops.

This film is an absolute mess.

If there's anything to like about The Bounty Hunter, it's Christine Baranski doing a Joan Rivers impersonation.

This is quite possibly the most moronic motion picture I have seen thus far in 2013 and that's saying a lot.

This is a sit com. An ‘80s-style sit-com. A bad ‘80s-style sit-com.

You may find sperm jokes hilarious, but it's doubtful you'll find them hilarious in The Babymakers, which has serious composition problems.

We’re here for the nasty kills, the clever eviscerations, and the M3GAN vs. AMELIA rumble. And we get very little of any of those things.

The only thing about Victor Frankenstein worthy of praise is the set design. Visually, the movie is impressive but pretty pictures are better left to postcards.

There's nothing worse than a film which mistakenly believes it's the comic event of the year. For no legitimate reason whatsoever, When Nature Calls is full of itself to the point of being offensive.

Sliver will surely be among 1993's worst.

It has all the elements one would expect from a "so bad it's good" feature: cheesy dialogue, a script that could have been written by two chimpanzees, acting that would make a high school drama teacher cringe, and lots of tight female bodies poured into tiny bikinis. Despite all of that, however, I found Into the Blue to be a real trial.

Apparently, someone turned up the heat because The Snowman is a sloppy mess.

95 minutes of unrelieved tedium.

Watching Imagine That, I was beset by a feeling of intense depression. Is this what Eddie Murphy has become?

The waterlogged end product is an example of lazy writing and direction with the vague hope that perhaps the involvement of Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson will attract viewers.

There's just one problem: it's not scary and it's not funny...Idle Hands transcends that mundane level of badness into the realm of gross ineptitude.

Aside from Snipes' well-tuned performance and a few clever scenes detailing superstar marketing, this picture is a veritable wasteland. Even watching the horror show that the real Giants have become during the 1996 season is more fun than this. The advertising slogan may be "fear strikes soon", but, when it comes to The Fan, fear, like the movie, strikes out.

This is another one of those pointless action superhero movies that unfolds like a video game in which the viewer is unable to participate.

Unless you derive pleasure from watching Lohan being tortured, there's no reason to subject yourself to this movie. Besides, if that's your goal, all you have to do is turn on tabloid TV. There's Lindsay's living hell of a life, being broadcast 24/7.

Could it be argued that the movie is “so bad that it’s good”? I suppose, especially if you’re a connoisseur of cinematic guano. For me, Death Race is merely bad. I wouldn’t worry about finding a way to append the word “good” to anything associated with this film.

It's crass, cruel, and borderline offensive, but the laughs that could redeem all of that are missing. Material as bad as the tripe that comprises Norbit can be endured only if there's a payoff. In this case, the point seems to be that some actors will do anything for a buck.

It has been a long time since I came as close to walking out of a movie as I did with Confessions of a Shopaholic. Not only did I find this production to be irritating, unfunny, and lacking in entertainment value, but I found its underlying slavishness to a culture of consumption to be morally repugnant.

Even Charles Barkley's big-screen acting debut can't camouflage a wandering script built on formulas and cliches. As for John Travolta and Kirstie Alley, suffice it to say that their pets steal every scene, and, when the dogs aren't present, the furniture takes the honor. Look Who's Talking Now has about as much appeal as the pile that Rocks leaves on the back seat of James' cab.

This movie is bad from top to bottom, front to back, and start to finish.

If there's one thing this motion picture proves, it's that "The Naked Gun 33 1/3" wasn't the final insult from a founding ZAZ (Zucker/Abrams/Zucker) member; this is.

It's not scary, it's not chilling, and it's not interesting.

The gore is so badly done that it's borderline comical and poor lighting passes for "atmosphere."

Trap is a house of cards built on a bed of sand in the middle of a hurricane. It flies apart and collapses almost immediately and the various plot threads are so thoroughly ripped to shreds that there’s nothing left at the end but the wreckage of a movie and the recognition that 105 precious minutes have been stolen.

Life with Mikey is a subpar piece of film making for which the producers' intentions are all-too- apparent. In slapping together a formula-riddled picture, they hope to cash in on the early-summer family-oriented audience (those that are questing for something to see before the re-release of Snow White and the Seven Dwarves). Considering the creative limitations of this project, such blatant marketing is patently offensive. Those with a yen to see something for the whole family can find hundreds of better offerings on video, and fans of Michael J. Fox would do better to peruse old episodes of Family Ties. At least back then, he appeared to care about what he was doing.

White Noise has nothing. You'll have a better time staying home, tuning your TV to a station that doesn't carry a local signal, and staring.

In truth, this feels more like a half-baked comedy sketch stretched far beyond its breaking point—until even the last traces of humor have leaked out like the gooey innards of a Stretch Armstrong toy that’s been tortured by a sadistic kid.

Maybe approaching The Unborn as horror is the wrong approach. Perhaps this should be seen as a comedy. It is quite possibly the most egregiously laughable high-profile supernatural tale since Roman Polanski and Johnny Depp impaled themselves on "The Ninth Gate."

With its canned, predictable action sequences and mirthless attempts at humor, it displays an ineptitude that is frankly shocking considering the talent involved.

A catastrophe. This motion picture is an embarrassment to all involved.

Tracey Ullman is a bright spot in an otherwise sordid, murky production.

The Layover is an appalling movie.

Regardless of the reason, Borderlands arrives as a legitimate contender not only for worst film of 2024 but one of the worst videogame movies ever released.

Love Me isn’t bad in the sense that it is poorly assembled or incompetently shot. On a craft and technical level, it’s above average. But the narrative is incoherent and the philosophical meanderings lack depth and intelligence.

Chock-full of unfunny humor, bland characters with nonsensical motivations, and tedious subplots, the entire endeavor might have been shelved if not for the participation of De Niro, Uma Thurman, Cheech Marin, Jane Seymour, and Christopher Walken. A cast like that doesn’t get swept under the rug or sent direct-to-video.

A dreadful, hackneyed piece of cinema.

It's badly directed, poorly edited, and features some of the most unconvincing acting this side of a soup commercial.

Any time Disney tries their hand at live action, though, the results are usually pretty poor. Just not this bad.

The element of high camp that makes for enjoyable "good trash" isn't present.

A comedy without a single funny joke, Mafia Mamma will likely go down as one of the year’s worst theatrical releases.

It's a wretched attempt at entertainment, ephemerally redeemed only by the appearance of several attractive girls.