Jonathan Rosenbaum

At least (John) Waters cares about most of his freaks; for Lynch they're basically exploitation fodder for a puritanical "dark vision of the universe" that seems to come straight out of junior high, complete with giggles.

A festival favorite in 1992, this flamboyant Australian crowd pleaser and first feature by Baz Luhrmann ("Moulin Rouge") struck me then as one of the more horrific and unpleasant movies I'd seen in quite some time.

This is gold-plated navel gazing in the worst 60s style.

Full of odd notions and interludes, the movie never really comes together, but fitfully suggests a cross between Boys Town and Greaser's Palace.

It seems almost impossible that someone could vulgarize and coarsen Tom Wolfe's best-selling novel, but leave it to director Brian De Palma, working here with a script by Michael Cristofer, to plumb uncharted depths.

After making their two best features to date, "Fargo" and "The Big Lebowski," the Coen brothers have surely come up with their worst.

Seems more theatrical than cinematic, needing the kind of direct address that only a stage can provide.

An exceptionally feeble entry whose ideas, visual and otherwise, consist of hand-me-downs from 2001, Star Wars, Blade Runner, and Superman III, and whose special effects, despite the hefty budget, look strictly bargain basement.

A loud and often stupid action thriller in which director Thomas Carter (Swing Kids) has every screaming psycho killer and every hysterical hostage behaving identically. Lots of car crashes, one superb explosion, and the fleeting charms of Carmen Ejogo (Absolute Beginners) hardly compensate for the overall unpleasantness, in which sadism is taken for granted and no character is allowed to develop. The idiotic script is by Randy Feldman.

Stone's all-purpose conspiracy theory, built like a house of cards, rivals "Mississippi Burning" in its sheer crudeness and contempt for the audience.

The glorification of the FBI, the obfuscation about Jim Crow laws, and the absurd melodramatics may all have been well-intentioned, but the understanding about the past and the present of racism that emerges is depressingly thin.

I can think of only one bit of Tin Cup that's beautiful, imaginative, and different, and it lasts for only a few seconds: a speech delivered by Russo, before her character is transformed into the standard-issue cheerleader, is broken into fragments by jump cuts.

This is thoughtful nihilist provocation at best.

About eight minutes of this comedy is devoted to some terrific breakdancing; the rest consists of wall-to-wall product placement and politically incorrect bad-taste comedy.

Tacky in the extreme, this self-congratulatory 1988 film is an exercise in hypocrisy, indulging every form of Christmas exploitation that it pretends to attack, and many of the laughs are forced.

Maybe writers Josann McGibbon and Sara Parriott were thinking of Tracy and Hepburn--assuming they were thinking of anything--but not even Roberts's smile can put this one over.

It's not terribly interesting on the subject.

A stiff. I don't know the comic book series, but it could hardly be as lifeless as this leaden adaptation, in which the weapons have more personality than the characters and the nonstop action often feels like no action at all.

Indescribably awful—a serving up of Beatles tunes by Peter Frampton and the Bee Gees with the ugliest visuals imaginable, directed with more glitz than good sense by Michael Schultz.

Sitting through this barrage of all-purpose insults aimed at obvious targets was an unenlightening chore.

This 2005 feature offered me my first taste of Guy Ritchie's macho-centric artiness, and I hope it's my last.

All this is supposed to be as cute as bugs and chock-full of worldly wisdom, but even with lead actors as likable and as resourceful as these, the material made me alternately want to gag and nod off.

The writing and directing of Jonathan Darby, a British TV veteran and Hollywood executive, make the proceedings neither believable nor compelling, so what might have been another "Rosemary's Baby" isn't even a halfway decent genre exercise.

If I were a Christian, I'd be appalled to have this primitive and pornographic bloodbath presume to speak for me.

Not even D.W. Griffith, Steven Spielberg, and Stanley Kubrick working together could succeed in making this pandering piece of nonsense work dramatically on any level except the most egregiously phony.

It's especially doomed by a strained script that recalls certain bottom-of-the-barrel Bob Hope vehicles of the 50s in its attempts to be brittle and self-mocking in its humor.

I didn't laugh once.

It bored me clean out of my wits.

I don't know if Rob Reiner is the one to blame for this atrocity, but he directed and coproduced.

The recut American version is truly awful, but a good 75 percent of the awfulness is attributable to Miramax, the film's distributor.

Not wishing to spoil the fun -- pretty hard to come by anyway in this 1998 blockbuster's 150 minutes -- I won't tell you the outcome, but I'll wager you can guess.

A lot of uninteresting and unpleasant people torture, abuse, and fire guns at a lot of other uninteresting and unpleasant people, in a repulsive, interminable would-be crime thriller.

Holly Hunter and Sigourney Weaver, a cop and a shrink, are the main trackers, but so little is done in Ann Biderman and David Madsen's script to give them or their colleagues or even their prey interesting human dimensions that the overall ambience is chiefly pornographic.

If you want to waste a couple of hours, you can surely do much better looking elsewhere.

An offensive premise and a pathetic, almost pleading desire to outrage our sensibilities with it.

Painfully unfunny comedy.

This runs a close second to September as his worst feature to date--marginally more bearable only because it's a comedy and a couple of gags are reasonably funny.

Another piece of phony uplift from producer Jerry Bruckheimer.

Four writers worked on the script, and they all should hang their heads in shame.

What emerges is oddly ineffectual and uninvolving.

If you really hate your kids, pack them off to this slapdash farce, whose only funny moment is the PC disclaimer at the end about the Disney company's humanist concern for blind people (which even literate toddlers will have trouble understanding anyway).

The hokey dialogue and witless physical gags keep everything painful and hectoring.

Misguided version of one of the Bard's best comedies.

"Speed" made millions on mindless, empty thrills; this laborious sequel is just as mindless and empty but lacks the thrills.

An extravagant waste of resources.

Tautly directed by David Slade, this drama probably offers more sadism than anyone could possibly want...The characters are absurd, but if you're up for this sort of thing, then surely you can con yourself into accepting them. Personally, I'd rather have this movie obliterated from my memory.

Vacuous filmmaking of a very familiar kind.

What seems more problematic is the virtual exaltation of Dirty Harry vigilantism, the storm trooper mentality and behavior on Nolte's part that the film breezily takes for granted; if there's any irony about it, it's carefully designed to wash over the storm trooper types in the audience and not give offense to them--only to the rest of us.

Misshapen and obfuscating biopic.

Enter this diseased Lewis Carroll universe at your own risk.

This is a new form of obscenity that might be called suicide porn. It's not just the voyeuristic surveillance that's obscene, but the use of suicide footage as counterpoint to other stories as they're told. Steel shows no special insight into the subject, though even that couldn't justify such hideousness.

If you haven't lived until you've seen Laurence Fishburne and Sam Neill duke it out in a vat full of red paint, here's your chance; personally, my idea of hell would be having to see this stinker again.

Considering the 32 writers (including Tom S. Parker, Jim Jennewein, and Steven E. de Souza) who worked on this live-action adaptation of the 60s Hanna-Barbera cartoon series about a Stone Age family, one might have expected a few funny lines here and there, but this is mirthless (and worthless) from top to bottom.

If you haven't lived until you've heard Geena Davis say "Suck my dick," New Line probably deserves your money.

In what I saw, Madonna in the title role tries bravely not to buckle under the weight of Stone and Parker's sense of Stalinist monumentality and fails honorably, while the Lloyd Webber music goes on being nonmusical.

The ethnic humor that gave May's movie its charge is replaced by crass mean-spiritedness. If I were in movie hell, I'd rather see "Good Luck Chuck" again than return to this atrocity.

Van Sant's doomed and misguided experiment.

A piece of mythmaking stupidity.

This atrocious comedy doesn't have an idea in its head but still screams at the top of its lungs.

It was like a Farrelly brothers gross-out without the laughs.

[A] really awful, hysterical thriller...If you thought Schlesinger’s Pacific Heights was egregious, you ain’t seen nothin’ yet.

Formulaic sass machine... I was writhing in my seat.

Insulting to audience and cast alike.

The cynicism of the writer and director smacks of such self-hatred (fully acknowledged in the film's closing shot) that their disgust spills over onto all their characters (and their audience too), and inasmuch as everybody here is one kind of whore or another at virtually every moment, the fine moral distinctions this movie insists on making sometimes seem about as arcane and as loony as medieval theology about angels dancing on the heads of pins.