Kenneth Turan

Experiencing Beast of Burden's inept dialogue and uninspiring direction on screen is a continual trial.

If ever a film was made with more money than sense, this is it.

This is a surprisingly dull and tedious affair where nothing is even remotely plausible, the romance and the sex least of all.

Chappie is a movie about the evolution of artificial intelligence that's as dumb as a post. It also marks the continuing devolution of the work of director and co-writer Neill Blomkamp.

McCarthy has not done himself or his reputation any favors with this original.

The Canyons is a bad accident everyone saw coming, and now it is here.

The Lone Ranger exists without a convincing sense of jeopardy or, more critically, any place for audiences to emotionally connect.

Though the photographs are memorable, the photographer is not.

With some momentary exceptions, Jack the Giant Slayer simply isn't any fun.

A Good Day to Die Hard plays like an extended victory lap for star Bruce Willis and the entire "Die Hard" franchise. Not surprising, but not overwhelmingly entertaining either.

This poor film is so shamelessly manipulative and hopelessly bogus it will make you bite your tongue in regret and despair.

A leaden mash-up of western and science-fiction elements that ends up noisy, grotesque and unappealing.

Larry Crowne is an inside-out movie, acceptable around the edges but hollow and shockingly unconvincing at its core. When that core is two of the biggest movie stars around - Tom Hanks and Julia Roberts - it's an especially dispiriting situation.

May not be the most tedious superhero movie ever - the competition is admittedly tough - but it is certainly in the running.

Not just any kind of trash, it's high-art trash, a kind of "When Tutu Goes Psycho" that so prizes hysteria over sanity that it's worth your life to tell when its characters are hallucinating and when they're not.

Yet for all its ballyhooed candor about sexual matters, it's a surprisingly baffling and opaque film, too artistic to be standard pornography and too zealously focused on being graphic to the exclusion of all else to succeed as drama.

A film that is more listless than funny and could surely use some of the energy that animated both Art Buchwald and Paramount Pictures in the lawsuit surrounding authorship of [Eddie Murphy]'s 1988 "Coming to America." [01 Jul 1992]

Any movie whose computer-generated effects are more believable than its actors is asking for trouble. A frustrating combination of the magical and the mundane, Dragonheart has less difficulty creating a creditable dragon than a recognizable human being. [31 May 1996, p.F1]

It's not often that you see talented, well-meaning people joined together like cultists in the snare of a group delusion, but that's what makes this film fascinating, the proverbial accident you can't take your eyes off.

Goofy and gee-whiz when it isn't being post-apocalyptic glum, it is such an earnest hodgepodge that only by imagining "Mad Max" directed by Frank Capra can you get even an inkling of what it's like.

As pretentious as it is hard-core specific, this fiercely anti-erotic film makes even the chilly "Eyes Wide Shut" play like "The Big Easy."

the first techno-misfire from Walt Disney Pictures, an over-elaborate film that leaves you feeling harangued, harassed and assaulted.

It's doubtful that records are kept about this sort of thing, but consider the possibility that Clash of the Titans is the first film to actually be made worse by being in 3-D.

A painfully contrived and artificial exercise in futility.

Soon becomes a sadistic experience in its own right. Experiencing this pretentious wallow -- overwritten, under-thought and overdone -- is a very sophisticated form of torture.

Feels more planned than passionate, scary at points but unconvincing overall.

Affleck and Paltrow, who've been excellent elsewhere, display less chemistry than they've shown in magazine photo shoots. Even Woody and Bo Peep had more going on between them in "Toy Story" than these two manage here.

It's a portrayal so unconvincing it makes it close to impossible for the rest of the film to function as intended.