Joe Morgenstern

Bleak, remarkably turgid, tediously violent, devoid of drama, deprived of magic, stripped of romance and, except for one of the oddest boy-meets-girl scenes in movie history, a befuddled and befuddling excuse for entertainment.

Everything that was modest, soundly grounded and therefore horrifying about the 1971 rodentarama that starred Bruce Davison is now insistent, Grand-Guignol-intense and therefore shrug-offable when it isn't downright awful.

No need to belabor the awfulness of this film, a romantic comedy devoid of romance - instead of chemistry there's the flow of reverse magnetism - and lacking in comic timing, let alone comic content.

Hitchcock rings false from start to finish.

Killer Joe is, at bottom - and I mean bottom - ugly and vile, not to mention dumb and clumsy.

The best news about this clangorous clunker is that it may well have vanquished the Mummy franchise.

The last thing we need is entertainment that evokes the horror and then trivializes it with cheesy heroics. Never has a movie taken on a subject of greater immediacy, or handled it more ineptly.

This joyless thriller runs the gamut from unconscionable through unwatchable to unendurable.

Nobody doesn't like Tina Fey, and anyone aware of her starring role in Admission will be wishing her well. But wishing won't make this dramedy any less dreary than it is.

A good subject has been ill-served by Ms. Greenwald's cliched script and clumsy direction.

I've been a Vanessa Redgrave fan for such a long time that I would have been happy to watch her beautifully weathered face without much happening around her.

You need only watch the trailer to know that The Internship is a promo for Google; think Google for Dummies, as well as Summer Comedy for Dummies. It's as if the writers googled "how to write a script" and nothing came up, so they wrote this anyway.

Starts well with the stirring spectacle of young men and women, members of a National Guard unit stationed south of Baghdad, struggling to do their duty in an alien land of unfathomable danger. Once they return, however, wounded physically or shattered spiritually, the film turns didactic, contrived and occasionally ludicrous.

Why is she (Bullock) demeaning herself with such shoddy goods? She’s a talented woman with a faithful following. She has made formula films of varying quality before, and her fans may well swallow this one, but it’s a formula for disappointment laced with dismay.

A shamelessly fictionalized biopic.

The essence of this grindingly violent movie can be summed up by what Parker says of his handgun to a terrified clerk at a check-cashing service: "It's small, but it hurts."

There's no transcending a prosaic plot and several flat performances.

This Transformers is a pile of glittering junk.

The book’s subtitle was “A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon,” and the film gets that part wrong. It’s deadly dull and conspicuously short on obsessiveness.

Comes on like an overproduced coma, and leaves you comatose by the end. In between are 127 minutes of intermittent chaos that feel like a lifetime.

Truth be told, though, the film, which Mr. Iannucci directed from a screenplay he wrote with Simon Blackwell, is blissed out on its own cleverness and ultimately exhausting.

It's a terrible life, and a terrible movie.

Every now and then, though, a movie comes up with a scene of surpassing stupidity, and then builds from that defining moment to a climax of perfect ineptitude. Life or Something Like It is such an achievement.

Michael Bay's absurdist comedy is all pain, no gain and an utter monstrosity. It may be the most unpleasant movie I've ever seen, and I'm not forgetting "Freaks," which Pain & Gain resembles, come to think of it.

How could a movie with such likable actors be so deeply dislikable?

In addition to being borderline unendurable, Funny Games is inexplicable, and I don't mean in any philosophical sense.

The larger problem, transcending all realms, is that this action-adventure sequel from Marvel soon turns so dumb and 3-D-murky that it hurts.

Still, human doesn’t leap to mind, even though Ms. Lively works hard to inject blood in the veins of her feminist avenger. The Rhythm Section isn’t a human movie. It’s as cold as the waters of that loch, and nowhere near as lucid.

The calculation couldn’t be clearer. Put two superb performers together — they don’t get superber than Helen Mirren and Ian McKellen — and you’re on your way to making an exceptional movie. Not so fast, though. The Good Liar is calculation from arch start to hollow finish.

Still, Eat Pray Love preaches a sermon it doesn't practice-the need to open one's self to the world. In a pictorial sense this is exactly what Liz does; she vacuums up the transformative essence of three continents. Yet the world gets weirdly short shrift because this transcendently narcissistic movie is, in a narrative sense, almost entirely about Liz and the movie star who plays her.

Meryl Streep as Margaret Thatcher is the main reason to see The Iron Lady, which was directed by Phyllida Lloyd - not just the main reason but the raison d'être of an otherwise misconceived movie.

Ordinary moviegoers, on the other hand, may wonder what they're supposed to feel, apart from bored.

If Detroit had produced an equivalent lemon, we might have been seeing the world's first one-wheeled, square-tired car with no cooling system, steering wheel or brakes.

Another dim adaptation of a bright comic novel.

J. Edgar, with Leonardo DiCaprio in the title role, is at war with itself, and everyone loses...Mr. Eastwood's ponderous direction, a clumsy script by Dustin Lance Black and ghastly slatherings of old-age makeup all conspire to put the story at an emotional and historical distance. It's a partially animated waxworks.

I tried to buy into the characters, to enjoy the performances on their own terms, but no dice. I saw only performers who, with one conspicuous exception, were working hard to ignite a glum drama that declined to combust.

From early on my strong desire was for this horribly pretentious phantasmagoria to be over.

The whole thing devolves into such highfalutin silliness that it’s impossible to care what happens to whom. In Mr. Guadagnino’s previous film, “Call Me By Your Name,” the tone was romantic, and sustained to the very end. In Suspiria, style stomps fun into submission.

What’s missing is nuance (the idea of Mr. Nighy’s performance, like others in the film, is wittier than what’s actually on screen); connective tissue (the story is semicoherent at best, a jumble of characters rushing to and fro); and depth of feeling.

What Happens in Vegas... should have stayed in development -- forever. This ramshackle -- and occasionally repulsive -- farce doesn't even deliver on the minimal promise of its title; most of it takes place in Manhattan.

I defer to no one in my admiration for Ms. Pike and her fellow cast members, but it’s no fun watching them soldier on through this heavy-handed and mean-spirited charade. I Care a Lot is a good title for the film that might have been. In the film that is, you can’t find anyone to care about.

Quentin Tarantino's Kill Bill inflicts intolerable cruelty on its characters, and on its audience -- though I'd like to believe that there is no mainstream audience for what has already been described, quite correctly, as the most violent movie ever released by an American studio.

This nasty little bottom-feeder of a film is too condescending to be trusted, too manipulative to be believed, too turgid to be enjoyed, too shameless to be endured and, before and after everything else, too inept to make its misanthropic case.

In The Hunger Games it's both a feast of cheesy spectacle and a famine of genuine feeling, except for the powerful - and touchingly vulnerable - presence of Jennifer Lawrence.

Never mind the awfulness of the three madwomen being relentlessly mad, or the silliness of their journey’s logistics; not for a moment do you believe that this grievously afflicted trio actually inhabits what amounts to a small, rickety and unadorned paddy wagon. What’s definitively awful is the spectacle of unrestrained vanity.

I found it insufferably fatuous and damned near interminable. [26 Jun 1998]

The Hateful Eight wears out its welcome well before the halfway point, leaving the equivalent of a whole other movie to sit — and suffer — through.

Mr. Jarecki undercuts his own case -- not just undercuts but carpet-bombs it -- by using the same propaganda techniques he professes to abhor.

The only reason to see it is Riz Ahmed's performance as Omar, the supposed brains of the operation. Mr. Ahmed reminded me a bit of Robert Carlyle. He's dynamic, quick-tongued and intense. And much too classy for this tatty room.

It's a fascinating story, but Mr. Nichols and his actors never stop reminding us how fascinating it is. With the exception of Mr. Hoffman, a master of understatement, everyone acts up a storm, yet context is lacking.

Some movies keep you in a state of suspense. Zoolander 2, a dud glitter-bomb of a sequel, eventually leaves you in a state of suspended animation, with eyes glazed over and brain in sleep mode.

I won't pretend that I had a great time watching G.I. Joe: Retaliation.

The whole movie seems to be on fast-forward, with crushingly brainless dialogue, hollow imagery and no way of slowing down the febrile action or making sense of the chaotic plot.

Only Le Carre fans with tin ears and clouded eyes will fail to note the film's sour tone, crude performances and drab look.

The worst part of Ms. Zellweger's plight is that she, along with others in the cast, has fallen victim to a first-time feature director whose vocabulary doesn't seem to include the word "simplicity."

It’s overstuffed, and essentially empty.

Jim Jarmusch's Dada meander, shot by Christopher Doyle, is empty and excruciating -- that's really all you need to know.

Bring Zoloft and a tank of oxygen to Closer, an airless, ultimately joyless drama of sexual politics.

The effort shows in all three performances. Spontaneity is in short supply. The comedy seems willed, the solemnity mechanical, the dialogue rhythms awkward and self-conscious.

A grim disappointment for grown-ups, and far too violent for young kids. I found it to be clumsy, misanthropic and intractably lifeless.

When bad movies happen to good people, the first place to look for an explanation is the basic idea. That certainly applies to My Week With Marilyn, a dubious idea done in by Adrian Hodges's shallow script and Simon Curtis's clumsy direction.

Breakfast on Pluto, with an impressive cast that includes Liam Neeson and Brendan Gleeson, deploys its whimsy in many ways, all of them cloying.

Superb as Ms. Kruger is, there’s nothing she can do to keep the taut, heartfelt narrative from going off the rails.

What's worse, some mysterious movie curse has turned the three once-lively adventurers into wood.

A slow and lugubrious film about the impact of adoption on the lives of three women.

Where to Invade Next is documentary filmmaking gone wrong, a churlish polemic that uses the tools of propaganda to construct its world view. The film itself is an invasive presence, wreaking havoc in the realm of truth.

Costner has never been further from the lively, engaging actor he can be, or at least once was.

The director was Baltasar Kormákur, a gifted filmmaker from Iceland who shouldn’t be blamed for a case of industrial filmmaking gone wrong — the culprits in elaborate clunkers like this are usually the producers and the studios.

The video-game sequences are impressive, but you know that a 'toon is in big trouble when its most powerful theme is planned obsolescence.

J. Michael Straczynski's disjointed script manages to ring false at almost every significant turn (Collins' psychiatric-hospital stay has grown into a latter-day version of "The Snake Pit") and Clint Eastwood's ponderous direction -- a disheartening departure from his sure touch in "Letters From Iwo Jima" and "The Bridges of Madison County" -- magnifies the flaws.

Meant to evoke such distinctive examples of the genre as “Shock Corridor,” “The Snake Pit” and, on a much grander scale, “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.” And it’s also safe to say that whether or not you enjoy Unsane — I didn’t, for the most part — there’s a terrific scene in a padded cell.

The script is dead in the water, and most of the misanthropic repartee rings resoundingly false.

The pace is deadly slow, the style old-fashioned and the acting devoid of spontaneity. These are skilled actors, but the writing is so threadbare — an important character from the novel has been eliminated — and the direction (by Thomas Bezucha, working from his own adaptation) is so lacking in nuance that genuine dramatic energy gets lost by the wayside during the road trip to North Dakota.

Split reworks some of the themes Mr. Shyamalan developed in the 2000 “Unbreakable” — weakness and strength, unstoppable power, a sense of emergent destiny. The film contends that people are purified by suffering. Having suffered through the screening, I’m still waiting for my purer self to kick in.

The Matrix Resurrections is a recycling dump of murky effects, indifferent action and a crazily cluttered, relentlessly repetitive narrative.

A guaranteed downer that's devoid of any upside, and free of dangerously entertaining side effects.

A snapshot, to be sure, but scattershot as well.

Charm has curdled into smarm in the big-screen version of Entourage. The jaunty style of a hit TV series has been replaced by huge spasms of false energy and a sense of barely concealed flop sweat.

Disney’s new Dumbo is one ponderous pachyderm, a live-action remake of the 1941 animated classic with a grim tone and a dead soul. It’s astounding that Tim Burton and his colleagues could have created such a downer from a long-beloved source of delight.

Sometime around what I guessed to be the one-hour mark in The Five-Year Engagement, I checked my watch and honestly thought the battery had given out. Five years doesn't begin to tell the interminable tale.

A train wreck of mind-numbing proportions.

Secretariat stumbles along beneath the weight of leaden life lessons. They're dispensed at frequent intervals by Diane Lane, who does better than anyone had a right to expect, since she is saddled with dialogue of exceptional dreadfulness.

As juxtapositions go, regressed Goth rock star and Holocaust could hardly be more bizarre, and bizarre can be good when it's done deftly. In this case, however, it's done ponderously and sententiously.

A symphony for tin ears, a sniggering assessment of human nature delivered with the faux-lofty tone of a Lexus commercial.

The denizens of Judd Apatow’s Funny People have been pulled every which way to fit a misshapen concept, yet they remain painfully unfunny, and consistently off-putting.

The blithely dishonest script would have us believe that the real Napoleon can't prove his identity when the fake Napoleon refuses to come clean. Not only is that patent nonsense, it's cockeyed dramaturgy.

Perhaps some of the goofiness was intentional — you can’t always tell from this production’s wavering tone — but Spectre is full of not-good things, and some oppressively bad things that may come to feel like drill bits twirling in your skull.

Grotesque doesn't begin to describe Ms. McCarthy's new character. Scarily insane comes closer; repulsive occasionally applies. Mullins's insanity can be extremely funny from time to time, but her anger grows as punishing for the audience as it does for the victims of her unrestrained police work.

Comes briefly to life, after many longeurs -- many large longeurs in IMAX -- with the discombobulated entrance of B.E.N., a dysfunctional, hyperverbal robot voiced by Martin Short.

A bad movie with a good title.

It’s hard to believe that human minds conceived the story line of Godzilla vs. Kong—not because it’s so intricate, elegant or spiritually elevated, but because it’s so incoherent and idiotic.

Mr. Pratt’s charm is no match for the crude filmmaking or the stupid plot that keeps him running around in a constant state of artificial animation.

Ms. Weisz is always a strong presence, but her talents are wasted here on a naive heroine - the fictional Kathy is exceedingly slow to grasp the extent of the corruption - and a narrative style that turns the horror of the prostitutes' plight into harrowing melodrama.

There's no maybe about its standing as romantic comedy -- definitely bad.

Think of Joker as both dental drill and Novocain. This origin story of the famously depraved smiler deals in pain from start to finish — pain that the hero, Arthur Fleck, first suffers, then inflicts — and Joaquin Phoenix plays the title role with piercing intensity. Yet the film, directed by Todd Phillips, leaves you numb. And glum. Days after the screening I was still under its stultifying spell.

Every joke is leaned on, as if it were some Shavian gem; every pregnant pause eventually aborts.

The IMAX print I saw was so murky as to make you give thanks for the few scenes shot in simple sunlight, the 3-D wasn't worth the bother, and never before have I wanted to chloroform an entire orchestra.

The whole movie is a sinkhole — not because it’s smutty or raw, but because it’s lazy, and demeaning to the talented people at its center.