Joe Morgenstern

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.

None of it is enough, though, to save this glum drama from its schematic self.

It isn't a great film, or even a greatly original one. Still, it has many grace notes, and interesting oddities.

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.

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.

This gets to be exhausting, since there’s hardly a scene that isn’t manipulative or assaultive.

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.

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."

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.

The computer-generated monsters, like the film as a whole, are numbingly repetitive, and devoid of any power to move, scare or stir us.

Still, the action is ponderous too. Mr. Morel is no Kubrick, or Tarantino, just as Mr. Travolta's caricature of John Travolta is no Travolta.

Mr. Freeman, a superb actor, creates the illusion of drama even when there is none.

Beware of idiocy's charms.

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.

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

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

This latest retelling of the ancient Arthurian myth is a stinker for the ages.

If the movie gets by, as it surely will during the current entertainment drought, most of the credit should go to a couple of performers (Latifah/Keaton) who come from different traditions, yet share a gift for breathing life into moribund material.

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

Like "Transformers," which it rivals in relentlessness, Battleship comes with its own force field, a furious energy that renders criticism irrelevant.

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

Functions mainly as an action extravaganza, and a numbingly depersonalized one at that.

This cheerfully chaotic, gleefully vulgar action-comedy retread of the old television series has box-office success written all over it, and where's the harm? It's irresistibly funny until it isn't.

It's long on Viagra jokes and whorehouse scenes, and comes up short on plausibility.

Ride Along, set in Atlanta, gives shoddiness a bad name.

It's going to be a hit with libidinous boys, and their parents could do worse (see first review) than to watch the lavish, James Bondish gadgetry and cheerful anarchy of an action-adventure that's been made with all the finesse it needs, though not a jot more.

Does Meet the Fockers make you laugh? Sure it does, from time to time. Just lower your expectations to the altitude of the gag that's showcased in the trailer, the one in which Jinx the cat flushes a little dog named Moses down a toilet.

The film is less like a full-fledged story than a series of notifications you might get on your phone, most of them couched in language that could have been generated by a buggy AI program.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

Like the high desert that provides its main setting, William Monahan’s Mojave is dry, often windy and full of hot air.

The technology is seamless, the movements are eloquent and the problem may be my own misprogramming, but the robot still looked to me like a man in a robot suit.

Aspiring to pure action -- several very long passages are wordless -- the movie ends up teetering on the brink of self-parody.

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

The revelations of The Invisible Circus don't justify the quest.

Mr. Beall, a former LAPD cop, has written a script so devoid of feeling that the cartoons blur into thin line drawings, while what's been done with the marvelous Ms. Stone - i.e. next to nothing - is downright criminal.

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.

The special effects are variable, but even when they're good they don't have much impact because Evolution, with its self-trashing spirit, turns moviegoers into bemused bysitters.

Jennifer Aniston brings a needed liveliness to Derailed, though not enough to go around.

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

An experience best likened to being battered by hurricane-force winds generated by an organ with all stops pulled permanently out.

Adds up to one numbingly unfunny comedy.

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

The result is a movie groping for a comic tone while its FX machinery spews vast clouds of visual gibberish.

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

There's no zest to the general depravity, no coherence to the script or the spectacle -- clarity is missing in some of the camera work -- and, most important, no character to give a Greek fig about.

After missing the film on the small screen the first time around, I recently watched it on video, and can only conclude that my screen wasn't small enough.

Disney's National Treasure is supposed to be family-friendly, a PG-rated action adventure free of hard violence and bad language. That's admirable, to be sure, but with a friend like this a family doesn't need sleeping pills.

All three sides of the love triangle are appealing, and the movie as a whole might have been winning if it weren’t for the absurdist style that was clearly dear to the filmmaker’s heart. Sometimes Aloha reminded me of John Huston’s cheerfully unfathomable “Beat the Devil.” More often than not, though, it left me yearning for simplicity and sweet clarity.

Pretty bad, and pretty funny.

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.

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

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.

Green Lantern was meant to be a sci-fi adventure, but it proves to be a genuine mystery. How could its megamoola budget have yielded a production that looks almost as tacky as "Flash Gordon" (which had the good grace to deprecate itself at every turn)?

You keep rooting for the child to get a new pair of lungs, but all of the beatings, betrayals and bitter ironies leave a bad taste in your head.

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

What's wrong with this sad fiasco goes far beyond its visual deficits.

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.

If you go to see this sloppy sitcom, in which Mr. Martin plays a divorced, repressed lawyer named Peter Sanderson, do expect to be surprised, seduced and entertained by Queen Latifah.

Do not attempt to see this film, derived loosely from the videogame of the same name, unless you're prepared for wobbly writing, lead-footed direction and acting that must have been boosted by nitrous-oxide injectors, plus a starring performance that could have used a boost and didn't get one.

The good news is twofold. Ms. Foy, an accomplished performer, is appealing throughout. And Keira Knightley, as the Sugar Plum Fairy, gives the film several desperately needed jolts of edgy energy.

Less than the sum of its parts, which were problematic to begin with.

The movie will surely find an audience, since it speaks to young people's anxieties about marriage and parenting. But what are two particularly engaging performers doing in a dump of a comedy like this?

The result is a mess -- sometimes an entertaining mess, but mostly a movie that makes a perfunctory mockery of the mockery currently passing for political discourse.

The film almost suffocates on overripe dialogue (“We are messing with the primal forces of nature here”) and finally loses its way in the logical contradictions — or the nonlogical implications — of time travel.

His (Eddie Murphy's) performance in Daddy Day Care isn't bad. He's restrained, and even tender in some of the scenes he plays with the kids. But restraint is the last thing we want from a comic of his caliber. It's no fun at all.

A small story, a monodrama with a hero but no antagonists.

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

The film suffers from a different condition, an emotional elephantiasis that is inexorable and ultimately terminal. What was by all accounts a modestly scaled production in all of its live-theater iterations has become a ponderous movie that turns earnest into maudlin, lyrical into lugubrious.

Depending on how you feel about Zac Efron, he is either a sensitive hunk or an inexpressive hunk, but definitely a hunk. Unable as I am to locate any feelings about him, I see Mr. Efron as a hunk with a problem delivering sustained dialogue in units of more than one or two sentences.

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.

The psychodynamics may well be sound, but the problem is that Léa and François, whether in or out of bed, are much more appealing than Roland and Vanessa. The camera is in the wrong room.

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.

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

A star once beloved for his buoyant spirit has taken another bad turn in his career, and that’s painful to behold.

The star of this fantasy adventure for young audiences is a charmer from the moment she is hatched (from a huge blue egg that starts to rock like a Mexican jumping bean). Her name is Saphira, she speaks with the voice of Rachel Weisz, and it doesn't matter that she's too young to breathe fire -- at first -- or that she waddles a bit on the ground, because she lives and breathes the joy of flight, which is exactly what was missing from most of Harry Potter's solos on a broom.

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.

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.

Mr. Gooding is out there in almost every scene, and the destruction of his once-promising career proceeds apace.

I won’t make a case for No Escape being a good film; the first half is pretty good and the second half ranges from pretty bad to truly awful. Nor will I deny having enjoyed quite a bit of it as a zombie film, never mind that it’s supposed to be an international thriller with contemporary political significance.

The production renders totally irrelevant all hopes for a well-made movie. It's one of those ragged, pandemonious studio comedies that hammers at plot points in every contrived scene.

Mr. Hopkins gives the production what he was hired for. Whenever you wonder how much longer he can trade on Hannibal Lecter's special zest, the same answer comes up-a lot.

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

Ms. Hudson makes the most of her role, even though that's not saying so very much -- the writing is terribly thin -- while John Corbett gives an unaccountably clumsy performance as a romantic pastor. Joan Cusack gets the funniest lines as Helen's sister, a model of boring mommyhood, but she also stops the movie dead in its tracks every time she plays a scene.

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.

Long after lice from her children's school infested Kate's scalp, I was scratching my head about why a 91-minute movie seemed so long. The answer came from reframing the question. Why was a string of sitcom problems stretched to 91 minutes?

Mr. Chan proves yet again that he has the virtuosic grace -- and goofiness -- of any of the great clowns of the silent era, and a complete refusal to abide by the laws of gravity. Do let us be clear, however, that the movie's plot, minus a few roundhouse kicks, is straight out of the Scooby-Doo playbook.

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

This slapdash farce, arriving three decades after Sellers last inhabited the role, sustains a baseline of good will that often spikes into delight at Mr. Martin's beguiling nonsense.

Cold and clever to a fault, like the main character played by Liam Neeson, the movie is based on a fundamental miscalculation—that our desire to penetrate its mysteries will trump our need for people to care about.

Men, Women & Children touches many nerves, but then pinches and twists them with its ham-handed approach to social commentary. I worry about Mr. Reitman, a filmmaker of consequence who is still too young to be so cosmic. Time to lighten up and come back down to Earth.

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

Ms. Berry works hard in her role, generating some excitement in the course of her distress. But the story's convolutions can't cover a deficit of substance, or sense.

Amelia Earhart is still missing.

This time the filmmakers seem to have forgotten everything they knew, and have endeared themselves only to Ms. Moore, who walked away from this ghastly fiasco with more money than most people could earn in two lifetimes.

The movie is a minor crime, a meandering misdemeanor that’s neither soft-core nor hardcore but no core, with no consistent style and minimal content.

Manages the dubious trick of being both execrable and boring.

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

A rube's-eye view of Hollywood, but the rube is weary, and those around him seem to be suffering from terminal torpor.

Certainly grows in its own right, into a coarse-grained summer vaudeville that could have been much smarter and sharper without losing its target audience.

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

Some of the action sequences, and a few of the performances, are enjoyable enough to make up for the dialogue, which has been upgraded to cheerfully absurd, and the plot, which has been simplified to the point of actual coherence.

Johnny Depp's Tonto wears a dead crow on his head in The Lone Ranger. The star himself carries a dead movie on his shoulders.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

Sorry excuse for political satire.

Mr. Crystal underplays his role wisely and well, while Mr. De Niro parodies -- maybe the better word is pillages -- himself and his career with scary gusto.

A gothic thriller called Cold Creek Manor extrudes an 80-minute idea -- I may be overgenerous here -- into 118 minutes that feel like an eternity.

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.

Intriguing and affecting documentary.

The script's foolish contrivances crush its content.

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.

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.

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

A shopworn studio contraption, slapped together from second-hand parts.

Instead of soft core, Sex Tape offers no core. No narrative core, just a not-bad notion executed execrably; no core of conviction, just two stars trudging joylessly through swamps of mediocrity.

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."

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.

I wish I'd brought a pair of peas to the screening. Then I could have taken in the glorious scenery without the dumb dialogue, which is delivered in a jangle of accents that makes a mockery of ethnicity.

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.

This time he (Martin) goes through the motions.

Brought down by repeated bursts of high absurdity.

Jumper, based on the novel by Steven Gould, re-defines -- downward -- the notion of dreadful. It does so by dispensing with everything a movie needs for a shot at being merely awful. Dramatic development? None. Entertaining dialogue? Ditto. Internal logic? Puhleez. Intriguing characters? No characters, thus no intrigue. Interesting performances? Essentially none, though with an asterisk.

The movie transforms a dim idea - "Elmer Gantry" lite - into comedy that's dead in the water and as dull as it is broad.

This Transformers is a pile of glittering junk.

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

But clever casting, and inspirational dieting, can't make up for this poor little rich girl's shortcomings as a comedienne. Under Mr. Benjamin's vulgar tutelage, she portrays Connie's coarseness coarsely, with an accent that seems to have come from Ida Lupino by way of Madonna. [19 Apr 1996, p.A11]

Ms. Wynter's performance is only one of many failings in a heavily accented costume drama that Bruce Beresford has directed turgidly from Marilyn Levy's amateurish script.

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

A turgid recycling of Mr. Carpenter's remake of "The Thing."

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.

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

This horror-free horror flick sent me wandering through my own memory warehouse, where, at every turn, I bumped into images from similar -- and mostly superior -- entertainments.

Stinker doesn't begin to describe this movie's character -- both frenzied and dispiriting.

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

Why is the movie such a mess? Will Ferrell plays a washed-up actor who's supposed to be a hopeless mess, but even his character makes little sense. Is it all supposed to be postmodern? No, it's post-postmortem, the dead spirit of a dearly departed show.

A bizarre conflation of chick flick and "A Christmas Carol."

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

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?

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.

The only entertaining member of the cast is Terence Stamp.

Funny bits come along every now and then, and the co-stars work desperately hard for their salaries. But the spectacle is depressing for what it says of mainstream studio standards. Grinding on with dim humor and grim purpose, Get Hard gets ever harder to take.

The good news is that Mia Wasikowska is back in the title role, bright-spirited and skillful as ever, but she’s burdened by the manic direction of James Bobin, working from a dramatically inert script by Ms. Woolverton.

Mr. Osunsanmi's chutzpah exceeds his skill.

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.

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.

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.

Long on cutlery and décor (including, of course, the marvelously decorative Ms. Garner, of the TV series "Alias") and woefully short on narrative.

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

Five months after Sept. 11, the movie inevitably echoes those events, but in a loud and extremely cheesy way.

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

The movie's failures are all the more unfortunate because they detract from its central and conspicuous success, the performance of Riz Ahmed in the title role. Mr. Ahmed turns the quicksilver quality of the book's internal monologue into a tour de force of his own creation. He's a bright star in a dim constellation.

Eventually, though, Ghost Town buckles beneath the weight of contrivance -- so many ghosts to dispel, so many lessons to learn.

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.

No one comes out of Mooseport unscathed -- not Rip Torn, as the president's campaign manager, not Christine Baranski as his avaricious ex-wife. It's a democracy of mediocrity, or worse.

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."

The story plays out on two planets, Mars and Earth, while the production follows its own orbit in a state of zero gravity, zero nuance and subzero sense.

Takes a sharp turn for the better when Ronnie and a poor big rich boy played by Liam Hemsworth fall in love.

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.

By the climax, the adult has finally become a responsible though still charming citizen; the child has become age appropriate and, yes, even cuter. Tsunami swell of music. Roll the credits. Minus the charm, that pretty much sums up Uptown Girls.

Goes down fighting, but it goes down just the same.

Eye-blowing and mind-numbing.

The movie's smugness is insufferable.

The best thing about a movie as silly as this is that it makes such modest demands on your attention. As the story unfolded with all the energy of California in a Stage 3 alert, I staved off brain death by trying to imagine an alternate version.

YEEEEE HAAAAW! They've gone and done it. The feature version of The Dukes Of Hazzard turns a sow's ear into a bigger sow's ear.

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.

Punishes the audience with a flat starring performance; Mr. Jane finds few sparks of life in a hero who wasn't all that lively to begin with.

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.

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]

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

In many ways the film reflects its hero’s brilliance. It’s a scintillating construction, though one that sometimes feels like a product launch in its own right.

A sudsless soap opera with human misery as a backdrop for romantic banality.

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.

An ugly exercise in big-budget carnage.

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

Another dim adaptation of a bright comic novel.

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

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

It's a shrewd little comedy that uses good British actors to challenge its star, who rises to the occasion.

What the movie lacks in coherence it makes up for in zest, well-founded self-delight and a sharpshooter's eye for the absurdities of reality TV.

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

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

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

Rousing, provocative film.

I do wish Mr. Robbins's one-note co-stars had been worthy of his performance, and that some of the melodramatics hadn't been quite so slapdash.

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

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

The movie itself is grotesque, and may drive you nuts as it makes you laugh, mostly at the stupidity of the thing.

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.

Between the two performances there's not a false note. Between the father and son there's an unbreakable bond. Though civilization has ended, love and parental duty shape the course of this fable, which is otherwise as heartwarming as a Beckett play shorn of humor.

Has many more downs than ups, but this ragged action comedy, with Martin Lawrence and Steve Zahn as mismatched buddies, rings some outrageously funny changes on a deadly serious genre of amateur video that began with Rodney King.

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

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

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.

Mr. Goldsman, a first-time director though a veteran screenwriter, has been done in by the source material. Either he climbed aboard a horse that was too much for him, or the universe gave him a bum steer.

It neglects, for one thing, to make any sense.

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.

Fatigue has caught up with the Warrens, and the question about the franchise is not where it can go from here, but how much longer it can be sustained by humdrum deviltry.

Knows that it's junk and tries feebly to rejoice in its junkiness.

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

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

In a truly terrible action adventure called The Tuxedo, a high-tech monkey suit turns Jackie Chan into an all-powerful cyborg, and will turn you into a boredborg.

It's too much for a feature film, and too little, but it certainly isn't dull.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

Snow Dogs isn't subtle, to say the least, but it's a serviceable city-slicker-in-the-frozen-sticks comedy for kids and undemanding adults.

Watching a bad movie can be fun for reasons that have less to do with its essence than with its trappings. I enjoyed some of the characters’ cardboard and/or plastic names.

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

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.

N'ever was an apostrophe so misplaced, n'ever was the prospect of good cheer so perversely defeated.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

Qualifies as top-grade catnip for connoisseurs of trashy camp.

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.

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.

I haven't seen the original, but I can vouch for the clumsiness of the new version. As usual, though, Queen Latifah is an indomitable, if sometimes undirectable, comic force.

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.

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.

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!

Basic Instinct 2 is pretty awful. Rarely has a meaningless thriller had so many meaningful glances, or such arch acting by good actors who know better.

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

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

Can't lift the double curse of too little genuine action, as opposed to quixotic events, and too many fancy words.

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.

No cues are needed to understand the plot, which feels computer-generated and barely serves to sustain an hour and a half running time.

Beyond being entertained, I was delighted by the movie's outpouring of slapstick invention (one crazed sequence in a pet store has all the pawmarks of a classic), and the genial energy of its star, David Arquette.

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

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

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

It's basically a cheerful slob job, one of those slapped-together features so often embraced by teenagers with more disposable income than discernible taste.

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

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

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

A few clumps of very funny stuff (including a quick tonsorial reference to "Mary") can't hide all the spots that are bald instead of bold.

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

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.

Redefines the notion of a feature film another notch downward.

As the hilariously foul-mouthed, sweet-souled Dr. S, he (Wayans) slaps Marci X to life every time he's on screen.

An abomination, impure and simple.

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.

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.

You can survive this comedy, which was directed by Garry Marshall and written by too many people to shame by naming, but only if you’re immune to febrile calculation complicated by chronic ineptitude.

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

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?

This is a film with a positive message that's delivered eloquently, and who's to say that joyous purpose doesn't have its place?