Joe Morgenstern

This satire, directed by David Gordon Green from a screenplay by Peter Straughan, suffers from deficits of wit, wisdom, focus, filmmaking expertise and appropriate tone. It’s a case study, if nothing else, of starting with a dubious idea and making it downright awful.

A deeply dreadful movie -- no, a shallowly dreadful movie -- that's too unpleasant and repetitive to be entertaining, even as camp.

After seeing The Shack — after enduring, that is, its 132 minutes of blissed-out New Age religiosity — I’ve become a believer. I believe there is no role Octavia Spencer can’t play with convincing feeling and an impeccably straight face.

This one, a debut feature, is awfully inept, whereas the short isn’t long enough for ineptitude to take hold, or for a story to develop.

If I could find some facet to praise, I'd be glad to do so, but the production's mediocrity is all-pervasive -- story, character, graphic design, even music -- and it all points to a failure of corporate imagination, or maybe just nerve.

The plot makes no sense — time travel as multiverse Dada. Worse still, it renders meaningless the struggles that gave the first two films of the franchise an epic dimension.

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

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.

The movie drills itself into our skulls, which are all too vulnerable to such an assault, though I must say my brain glazed over and my heart turned adamantine while the stupidities of this action thriller played themselves out.

Mr. Scott's idea of making movies is to bludgeon or deafen his audience with every scene. In another line of work he'd be certifiable. [16 Aug 1996, p.A8]

The writers haven’t given her the nuance needed to differentiate confident from crazy, and the directors, who are two and the same, haven’t given the production as a whole consistent verve; the pace drags when it isn’t frenetic.

A movie's script is its fate, which means this one is doomed.

Amelia Earhart is still missing.

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.

It's bad enough to make parable a four-letter word.

This new film, though, is mainly appalling, and not instructively so. It’s all over the place, to the point of inducing numbness or suffocation. In the end it comes out in favor of love, which is good, but getting there may leave you glassy-eyed, unless you’re deeply into bling porn.

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.

Mr. Rock's opening scene is very funny. After that it's a steep downhill slide.

What was fresh and surprising in Las Vegas turns rancid and predictable in Bangkok.

Rarely has a major motion picture -- and this one is major by virtue of its misplaced ambition as well as its budget -- been afflicted by such flagrant dissonance between subject and style.

Manages to make its live actors sound -- and even sometimes look -- computer generated. This wan, sluggish comedy wouldn't pass muster as a premium-cable original, but here it is on the big screen.

Choose to pass this one up.

The movie's smugness is insufferable.

The oddest thing about this very odd movie is that it doesn't seem to know what to make of itself.

Bee Movie isn't a B movie, it's a Z movie, as in dizmal.

Bad can't begin to describe Christmas With the Kranks. It's sub-humbug.

The only entertaining member of the cast is Terence Stamp.

A deadly earnest and deadly dull psychological thriller.

Elegance isn't Zack Snyder's bag; a certain sort of impact is. Watchmen establishes him as Hollywood's reigning master of psychic suffocation.

A generally mirthless comedy of manners.

Motion is in copious supply -- a frenzied shootout at Manhattan's Guggenheim Museum grows interminable -- but the workings of the abstract plot are unfathomable, the characters are unpleasant and a couple of assassinations leave us as cold as the corpses.

For better or worse, Woody Allen turns out a movie every year. Last year's "Midnight in Paris" was better than better; that is to say, sublime. To Rome With Love is worse than worse, as inert as its predecessor was inspired.

A comedy afflicted with terminal unfunniness, Here Today, which is playing in theaters, may well be gone tomorrow.

What I don't understand is why this extended piece of idiocy chose to sink its stinky teeth into our 16th president. If an axe-wielding hero was required, George Washington would have been the better choice, with the Redcoats as bloodsuckers.

J.Lo should sue her handlers for damages.

Consider this more a consumer warning than a movie review: The Life Before Her Eyes will draw you in, then intrigue you, then bore you, then bewilder you, then make you crazy with its incessant flashbacks and flash forwards, and finally leave you feeling like the victim of a fraud.

It may be lulling to know, almost from the outset, where the plot is going, but thrilling -- or even psychological -- it is not.

What was weirdly but deliciously scary has grown ponderously out of scale, even for witches at their malign worst.

I wanted to give this movie a fair shake, though I can't pretend to be an admirer of Ayn Rand's writing. But the movie, the first installment of a projected trilogy, doesn't give the book a fair shake.

Like most other members of an excellent cast that includes James McAvoy, Kevin Kline and Tom Wilkinson, she (Robin Wright) has come under the deadening directorial hand of Robert Redford.

As entertainment, however, the film is calculation impure and simple. It’s a box-ticking exercise in female jeopardy, survival and empowerment, oppressively efficient in its relentless way but unrelieved by emotional resonance.

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.

There isn't a milliliter of honest feeling from start to finish, and precious little comedy or romance.

Eye-blowing and mind-numbing.

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.

Smith is only a rogue computer program, but this morbidly dispiriting movie makes him sound like a prophet.

The Navajos must have sent much more crucial messages at much higher levels during the war, but you'd never know it from this movie. Windtalkers is practically all action and no talk.

Talk about tin ears. Black or White comes off as the product of clouded eyes, sour stomachs and addled brains.

The Producers is nightmarish, in its febrile way, a head-bangingly primitive version of an overrated Broadway show that grew out of a clumsy 1968 movie with an inflated reputation.

The Loss of Sexual Innocence is a work of intransigent anger and barely relieved depression. [28 May 1999]

An ugly exercise in big-budget carnage.

It's unlikely that a dinosaur wrote the script — the Writers Guild of America makes no provision for Cambrian membership — but this animated feature is dimwitted all the same. The title should be "Trudging With Dinosaurs" (in 2.5-D, for all the grandeur the glasses confer), because the only semblance of a plot is provided by a long migration to winter grounds.

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.

The kindest context in which to put Over Her Dead Body, which was written and directed by Jeff Lowell, is that of a training film, a public display of people trying to master their craft. The best way to see it is not at all.

Young audiences may welcome this movie, but girls, and boys, should want more.

The writing is semicoherent at best, and the buddies of this meandering road trip are not only mismatched but dislikable.

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

Must be seen to be believed, though I'm not suggesting you actually see it.

Mr. Sayle's portrait is painfully unfunny, and the movie as a whole is a plodding polemic.

This is movie-making by and for dummies, a sappy little bible story, blissed out on its own ineptitude.

Not to put too fine a point on it, Surviving Picasso is merely the worst movie ever made about a painter; worse movies have been made on other subjects, though none comes immediately to mind. [20 Sep 1996]

Ambitious to a fault, this cautionary fantasy about artificial intelligence has so much on its muddled mind, and so little sense of dramatic grounding, that it grows ever more preposterous before lurching to a climax that's utterly unfathomable.

This ripoff, directed by Jerry Zucker, has a few funny moments, but it's a sad sad sad sad example of what Hollywood is currently serving up -- and what audiences are swallowing -- as summer entertainment.

The script is woefully inept, with plot twists that wouldn't pass muster in a high-school drama class.

The remake stumbles from a ragged start into a child's garden of worses -- worse than the original in more ways than you could imagine.

In the real world, a debate has been raging over what does and doesn’t constitute torture. In the movie world, there’s no debate; watching The Interview is torture from almost start to finish.

Only God Forgives would seem to be a parody of something or other — "Blue Velvet"? "Last Year At Marienbad"? — except that the film takes itself seriously to the point of suffocation in telling its lurid tale of slaughter and revenge.

Remarkably joyless, even though Ms. Jolie is a formidable presence with the potential for becoming a witty one.

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.

In all candor, and with all the amity I can muster, Divergent is as dauntingly dumb as it is dauntingly long.

Guess Who is, impurely and simply, a comic premise borrowed, turned around and dumbed down to the level of sketch or sub-sketch humor.

Alan Arkin does the best trick, bringing a dollop of humanity to the role of Rance Holloway, the magician who was young Burt's inspiration. Apart from Rance, the whole production is slovenly nonsense, photographed on the cheap with blaring ghastliness. Yet it poses an intriguing mystery. Did the producers appeal to a denominator even lower than common by making their film as dumb as possible, or did it just turn out that way?

The Legend of Tarzan, for all its anticolonialist posturing and eminently attractive co-stars, has a dead soul.

Looks like the deformed spawn of a development process gone awry.

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

Any kind of acting requires courage. Great acting requires formidable courage. Then there’s the dogged courage, spawned by devotion to duty, of wonderful actors like these, doing what they’re asked to do even though they must know that it’s no damned good.

Greta is petit Guignol trying to pass for Grand, a horror flick made by people who forgot to have fun. One of them, the director, Neil Jordan, made a memorable film called “The Crying Game” almost three decades ago. This is the groaning game, an inept tale of danger, entrapment and dismemberment.

Too labored to be romantic and too derivative to be funny.

Real feelings lurk just below the surface--Samantha's terror of growing old, Carrie's fear of eventual tedium in a childless marriage. Yet the surface is where the movie stays, like an old submarine with dead batteries.

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

What a botch. All the King's Men, a remake of Robert Rossen's classic 1949 film about the rise and fall of a Southern demagogue, has no center, no coherence, no soul and no shame.

Ms. Vikander has leapt into the void of a franchise reboot, based on a video-game reboot, that generates no joy, makes negligible sense, and seals its own tomb with a climax of perfect absurdity.

Mr. Cage's knight ends up playing second banana to a digital devil. Welcome to the January dead zone.

Nothing but miscalculation from clumsy start to chaotic finish, an action thriller with a cynical, shriveled soul.

The film doesn’t lack for audacity, or ultimate purpose — it’s against hate and in favor of love. But the adaptation isn’t funny enough to sustain the style, which owes an overt debt to Mel Brooks and amounts to Springtime for Hitler Youth.

Like Thor's hammer, this ersatz epic bludgeons its victims into submission. What's more, it requires them to stare at the source of their punishment through 3-D glasses.

Every now and then a movie's awfulness rises to the level of mystery.

Huckabees is godawful, a mirthless, bilious bore in which the vividly focused fury of "Three Kings" has become free-floating anger at the follies of human existence.

My Homo sapiens brain was boggled by the movie's clumsiness, while my heart was chilled by the chance that otherwise mature members of my species might mistake this disjointed botch for summer entertainment.

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.

How much do I loathe this film? A lottico is putting it mildico.

Certainly trashy, but, stripped of Mr. Diesel's services and directed by John Singleton, it's a no-go Yugo in muscle-car sheet metal.

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.

A gross-out saga that sentient adults should avoid like the plague.

This shabby enterprise gets so many things so wrong that it freezes your face into a cringe.

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.

The big news in Blade II is that there's something worse than vampires, but is there something worse than Blade II?

The worst would-be-big-and-Capraesque-but-actually-bloated-and-bloviating-beyond-belief movie of the year.

Adds up to one numbingly unfunny comedy.

Robert De Niro collects another stupendous paycheck for starring in another piece of exploitable junk.

In the 1980 movie “Urban Cowboy,” John Travolta rode a mechanical bull. In The Longest Ride, Scott Eastwood rides real bulls, but everything else is mechanical.

The Happening makes you wonder whether Mr. Shyamalan's own switch may have been flipped. How else to explain his film's befuddling infelicities, insistent banalities, shambling pace and pervasive ineptitude?

Mr. Smith's latest film is about nothing less than life and death, sin and atonement, and it takes the soggy cake for multiple layers of sentimentality topped by indigestible grandiosity.

It's a bad idea done disastrously.

Hitchcock rings false from start to finish.

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

Given the importance of that subject, the real mystery of Mr. Lee's movie is why it's so diffuse, dispirited, emotionally distanced and dramatically inert.

What's never explained is why anyone would do such a dumb remake of Robert Wise's 1951 sci-fi classic.

What could anyone have said of the finished film except that it was finished? Terminator Genisys plays like the worst of all outcomes.

Whatever one may think of the overall style--I think it's ludicrous--Mr. Fuqua clearly wanted his film to be operatic, and so it is, in a tone-deaf way.

Mr. Hardy does have a few sensationally lurid moments, but the stuff of high drama isn’t there. Most of the time his character is a minimally animate object, scowling furtively and growling in a voice that evokes Marlon Brando, Lionel Stander and Stephen Hawking’s synthesizer.

What they've done here goes beyond gross -- or clumsy, or dumb -- to genuine ugliness, both cutaneous and sub.

Instead of “The Shape of Water” this is a stream of drivel.

Mr. Brooks manages to be deeply loathsome -- no small feat for a film that's shallowly amateurish.

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.

Too much tumult and chaos, not enough dramatic focus; too many animals with clever names spouting glib one-liners, not enough simple human — or for that matter nonhuman — feeling. What a waste!

It's shrill in tone, awash in unexamined narcissism - kids are just pretexts for laughs, rather than objects of love - and afflicted by explosive verbal diarrhea. There's simply no base line of normal human activity, let alone intimacy, until the anticouple finally re-examines their anticommitment credo. By then everyone has been so selfish and dislikable that our commitment to the film is lost.

Littered with low points -- lame comedy, dubious history, fumbling drama and a love story so inept as to make a pacifist long for war.

I must confess that I was outsmarted by the ending, but by that time my brain had been bludgeoned into a state just north of stupor.

Built from an alloy of absurdium and stupidium, with the latter, heavier element dominating the mix.

For anyone who remembers the "Die Hard" adventures at their vital and exciting best, this film feels like a near-death experience.

Why, beating the audience about the ears, eyes and brain with essentially the same sequence of events from eight characters' points of view, none of which adds much more than deafening hysteria and identically dreadful music. The filmmakers seem to have missed the point that each re-enactment in "Rashomon" provides new and conflicting information. It makes you wonder if they studied the wrong movie. Maybe they rented "Rush Hour," or a video on Rosh Hashanah.

It is shabby, as well as disjointed, superficial and just plain dull, a dislikable rendering of a tumultuous life.

Ragging on Town & Country is like shooting a school of fish that's already belly up in a fetid barrel, but the movie's ineptitude is almost incomparable.

The production can best be described by several f-words. It is frenetic, frazzled and febrile. It is also feeble -- almost touchingly so, if you think of what bottomless insecurity must have prompted so much bombast.

Insurgent opens new horizons of repetitiveness, dramatic shapelessness, self-seriousness and a generalized oppressiveness that flows from all of the above as well as from visual clutter, cheerless color, 3-D dimness and plain old bad acting.

Joyless and airless suspense thriller.

It's unfunny at best and borderline-amateur at worst, notwithstanding the desperate efforts of Renée Zellweger.

Sara is supposed to be an adorable screwball with a fatal disease. Ms. Theron certainly gets the adorable right. With a comic style that's close to unerring, she not only deserves better than this junk but the very best.

Manages the dubious trick of being both execrable and boring.

How bad can a movie be? Hellboy expands the possibilities. It’s brain-numbing and head-splitting.

It's "The Sixth Sense" as nonsense, "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind" without the sunshine. Or the mind.

The source of this movie's energy is near-perpetual desperation. You can see it in Tom Cruise's fixed grin, and in the mad proliferation of unspecial effects.

Lacks both taste and flavor.

This noirish, sourish thriller left me unmoving as well as unmoved.

This tedious retelling of the venerable fairy tale-"Twilight" with Oedipal kinks-takes place in a medieval village that is plagued by a werewolf, and that looks like a shtetl settled by California actors.

Suburbicon is not only unfunny, a bad sign for a black comedy, but deep-dyed dislikable.

Timeline has negative energy to burn. There's even less of it by the end than at the beginning.

Wayne Kramer's interlocking saga of immigration in 21st-century America definitely crosses over, from workaday mediocrity to distinctive dreadfulness.

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.

The production's penchant for contrivance is insufferable - not a single spontaneous moment from start to finish - and the boy is so precocious you want to strangle him. It's surely not the fault of Thomas Horn, the remarkable young man who plays him.

The film's only unqualified success is the end title sequence-because it's genuinely stylish, because it looks like it was shot in genuine 3-D and, most of all, because it's the end.

This woefully botched mystery-adventure-thriller-caper-romance-comedy, or whatever it was meant to be, is no fun at all.

Everyone in the film seems to be in solitary, thanks to Mr. Duchovny's stultifying style. If there was a single moment of spontaneity, it escaped me. Ditto for frivolity, though bogus poetry abounds.

An abomination.

Let's give this ghastly studio comedy a Truthiness in Advertising award, if nothing else.

Here’s the bad news: Brüno is no "Borat." Here’s the worse news: Brüno crosses the line, like a besotted sprinter, from hilariously to genuinely awful.

Redefines the notion of a feature film another notch downward.

A pitiful shambles of a remake, The Stepford Wives might have qualified as a rethinking of the 1975 original if there were any trace of coherent thought in the finished product.

This cloying piece of claptrap sets a high-water mark for pomposity, condescension, false profundity and true turgidity -- no small accomplishment for the man whose last two features were the deadly duo "Signs" and "The Village."

Grindingly tedious.

Snowden is mostly flat, overlong, unfocused and didactic.

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.

Downey is undone by a woefully amateurish production that, sadly and ironically, looks like a cheap TV show.

Where to begin in describing the awfulness of Annie? Why not with Sandy, Annie’s dog, whose name now connects with the superstorm in this hapless contemporary update of a musical that begged to be left in its 1930s period. Have you ever seen a dog suffer from incompetent direction? This one does, but no more or less so than the human members of the cast, none of whom have any emotional connection with one another, let alone with a standoffish pooch.

Daisy was written without irony, wit or any grounding in reality. She's a barefooted flower child in a flatfooted fiasco.

The dialogue is clumsy, the tone swings between somber and silly and the whole bizarre venture eventually succumbs to rigor mortis.

The nadir of the movie -- or cheesy zenith -- is Ollie's sodden soliloquy, delivered in the presence of his baby, in which he laments the loss of her mother and his wife. All that's missing are the strains of Ravel's "Pavane For a Dead Princess."

Even in the month of January, traditionally a time for movie lovers to expect the worst, this cheapo feature, directed by Shawn Levy, takes the stale cake for witlessness.

The whole movie prompts a sense of wonderment: at how boring, dumb and vacant it is; how it fails to give its co-stars enough to do; how the tone changes from one moment to the next; how presumably hard-headed businessmen could have sunk so much money into such a feeble script (the production values are impressive, albeit antiseptic); and, most importantly, how the script raises a crucial question of ethics, then comes up with the wrong answer.

How could a major studio -- in this case 20th Century Fox -- put its name on a production with a dim-bulb, tone-deaf script that piles howler on howler? Why couldn't someone save poor Ms. Carey from herself?

Who am I to call it soulless, graceless, witless, incoherent — even for the franchise — and, not incidentally, brain-numbingly long at 136 minutes?

So you think you've seen silly? And smarmy? And inept? Wait till you see Wanderlust, though that's just a figure of speech; I'm not suggesting that you actually lay eyes on this naked grab for box office bucks.

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.

The filmmaker has delivered yet another iteration of what has become a classic M. Night Shyamalan film, only much bigger than before, and, as a consequence, mind-bendingly turgid.

Unlike "Dead Man Walking" and many honorable dramas before it, "David Gale" has nothing coherent to say about capital punishment, or anything else. It's a dead film lurching.

The script, by Charles Leavitt, is dead in the water, and the drama is too, despite billowing sails and pods of whales. Instead of “Jaws” it’s a turgid “Tails.”

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

The 3-D is cheesy (2.2-D at best) the gags are gross (Gulliver urinates on an 18th-century palace to extinguish a fire) and the production abandons all hope of coherence when the hero fights a climactic battle with a giant robot out of "Transformers."

This movie is truly unhinged — not crazed, which might be interesting, but devoid of the usual hinges that connect one sequence with another.

A movie that goes beyond defying comprehension to being truly incomprehensible.

There's a good subject for satire here, the extended adolescence of American kids. But satire presupposes maturity, or at least some perspective. The movie's calculation is that its subjects and audience share the same point of view. The results are truly ghastly.

The settings seem shopworn and the whole exercise feels hollow. Long ago, when the first “Men in Black” hit the screen, the most conspicuous of its many delights were Will Smith’s street-smart but sweet-spirited cop who became Agent J, and Tommy Lee Jones’s wearily imperious Agent K. Now they’re gone, and all delight has gone with them. Only weariness remains.

This dramatically, thematically and artistically bankrupt comic fantasy cost something in the neighborhood of $100 million to make and isn't worth the celluloid it's printed on.

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

In a word, Suicide Squad is trash. In two words, it’s ugly trash.

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.

Metroland, which is adapted from a novel by Julian Barnes, is an oddly unpleasant variation on the theme of "The Way We Were." [09 Apr 1999]

Heaping derision on such a woeful debut may be tantamount to shooting fossils in a tar pit. Yet this lumbering industrial enterprise, which was written and directed by the Wachowski siblings, Andy and Lana, is bad enough to be granted landmark status.

Life is full of choices, and Halle Berry has made another bad one with Perfect Stranger, a perfectly off-putting thriller.

Every so often a movie transcends stupidity and soars into the empyrean of true idiocy. John Q. is such a movie.

Why did Mr. De Niro do it, and why would anyone pay money to see it?

Domino is a new definition of a snuff movie. It snuffs out every vestige of feeling.

Basically a soulless slasher flick, and one that demeans its gifted performers.

The stars were misaligned from the start for this frantic, turgid thriller. That’s no knock on Ms. Foy, who might have surprised us if she’d had a different director working from a different script under a different set of studio imperatives that didn’t involve extracting blood from a very cold stone.

Certain words should be reserved for special occasions. "Abysmal" is one of them, and Georgia Rule is as special as such occasions get.

Pay real money to see this feeble fiasco only if you're in the mood for "Groundhog Day" without the laughs.

I can't say anything nice about Flipped, a painfully clumsy adaptation of a tween novel by Wendelin Van Draanen.

A godawful gothic horror flick.

Rowan Joffe directed from his own adaptation of a novel by S.J. Watson. If you’re thinking of seeing this turgid turkey, forget it.

The worst movie -- all right, the worst allegedly major movie -- of our admittedly young century. More stupefying follies may come, but it's impossible to imagine how they'll beat this one for staggering idiocy, fatuousness or pretension.

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.

Wild Hogs, which includes a cameo by a live revenant from "Easy Rider," gives a bad name to carpe diem, but could have been worse; the trip might have started from Bangor.

Nothing's alive in this trash-heap travesty of warm-weather entertainment, despite the frenetic pace.

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

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.

Watch the trailer, if you must, but spare yourself the full experience: Identity Thief steals time.

The Americans are portrayed with varying degrees of loathsomeness, but there's not much variety in the film. It's all an awful aberration.

Any notions of demolishing black stereotypes -- and what else could have possessed Mr. Smith to do this? -- are dashed by the coarseness of it all, and by the narrative incoherence; a surprising plot twist turns a sloppy action-comedy into a totally different movie, and an even worse one.

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.

An appallingly tedious Hanukkah comedy that must have bubbled up from the Porta Potti of his subconscious.

This comedy is harmless, too, when measured against the vast array of harms that the world has to offer. It's also stupid, strident, witless, pitifully inept and bad for what ails you.

No one doesn’t love Bill Murray, but his melancholy torpor can wear thin in the best of circumstances, and these circumstances are pretty close to the worst. The cast includes Bruce Willis, Kate Hudson, Danny McBride and Scott Caan. No one escapes unscathed.

I have no idea how such shameless prattle found its way to the screen.

Hate is too strong an emotion to spend on such a clumsy, bloodless broadside against human foibles in general and American follies in particular.

A movie that means to be uplifting but turns out to be insufferable.

Buck is so precocious, such a relentlessly clever construction, that he leaves nothing to our imagination. He’s the soul-free star of a movie that’s dead in the icy water.

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

Jack Reacher, which Christopher McQuarrie directed from his adaptation of a Lee Child crime novel, is not just another dumb thriller. It's almost peerlessly self-important, weirdly incoherent and eerily smarmy. It's also mysteriously inept, considering that Tom Cruise plays the title role.

Designed as a disposable commodity, it's a film I'd dispose of with no further ado, except for what it says about minimum standards in a certain tacky niche of the movie business, as well as for what it suggests, in its lunkheaded way, about the perils that marriage may pose.

The results are mind-numbingly immense, joylessly violent and utterly lifeless.

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.

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.

As a PG-rated film opening on Christmas Day under the Disney banner, Bedtime Stories would seem to promise fairly wholesome family entertainment. What it delivers is the glitzy allure of a hotel setting, smarmy double entendres, Ferrari lust, Beverly Hills bling and pneumatic babes -- one of the characters is a surrogate Paris Hilton.

An abomination, impure and simple.

Not only does Ender's Game have many scenes in zero gravity, but this zero-sum fiasco has zero drama, zero suspense, zero humor, zero charm and zero appeal.

This film bespeaks a truly startling mistrust of the movie audience, and, what's more, a disrespect for the feature film medium. Yes, of course it was conceived as an unpretentious entertainment pitched mainly to girls and young women. Yet that doesn't explain the nightmarish quality of the finished product.

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.

Olympus Has Fallen is no fun at all. To the contrary, it soon grows tedious, odious and oppressive.

Lest my own reaction be misconstrued, let me explain that I didn't like a single one of these insufferable narcissists, the kid included.

The road taken by The Love Guru could hardly be lower, and leads nowhere.

The film isn’t funny at all. It’s so didactic and dislikable that it took me a while to realize humor wasn’t its main goal.

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

Blacklight isn’t much of a title. At the very least, though, it provides a useful hint that the movie isn’t much either. One could even argue that it’s not a movie at all, only a rusted-out recycling bin of ill-fitting themes, notions, poses, conventions, affectations, tropes, tropelets and inert snippets of dialogue from other movies.

One of the strongest arguments yet for making sequels illegal.

This toxic admixture of computer-generated frenzy and live-action torpor succeeds in being, almost simultaneously, genuinely painful -- the esthetic equivalent of needles in eyeballs -- and weirdly benumbing, like eye candy laced with lidocaine.

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

Whatever possessed the people who made this film to believe its ponderous style would appeal to contemporary audiences? One answer may lie in a variant of the mostly true proposition that no one sets out to make a bad film. No one chooses ponderousness as a goal; it comes unbidden, with deadly earnestness.

All the same, it's a feat to find the lowest common denominator at 40,000 feet; View From the Top would be perfect as the first in-flight offering of the new Hooters airline.

Moronic. idiotic. Insulting. Pathetic. But enough with the sweet talk.

Watching this film is like being trapped inside a snow globe — no air, no warmth, no life — while the death of drama unfolds.