Kyle Smith

Kill the Messenger tries to be the “JFK” of crack, but offers only shrill self-righteousness to answer the crazed energy of Oliver Stone’s masterpiece of deceit.

Cheap, ignorant, tone-deaf and condescending, but what's strangest about it is that it actually thinks it's pro-soldier even as it portrays vets home on leave as foolish (Rachel McAdams), desperate (Tim Robbins) and dishonorable (Michael Pena) while playing all three situations for laughs.

Combining narrative heavy-handedness with an airy disdain for the details of the situation, director Julian Schnabel gives us a one-sided view of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in Miral.

The ever-excitable Martin Scorsese, who is listed as a producer and who pops up, bizarrely, to talk about how he decided to stage the last shot of "The Departed," concludes things by saying, "Cubism was not a style. It was a revolution!" Yep. And not in any way a fad.

Great actors make the craft look easy. In the Paris Hilton comedy The Hottie and the Nottie, acting looks very, very difficult.

Far too childish to intrigue adults yet too slow and dull for kids.

It’s all as pointless as the asthma inhaler with which one character treats his advanced lung cancer.

Halfway through, the jokes stop - the laughs never began - and give way to a tiresome thriller.

There isn't enough revealing material in the tedious documentary Jimmy Carter Man From Plains to sustain an 800-word magazine profile, let alone a two-hour film.

Giving Mrs. Tiger Woods a run for her money as the most humiliated celebrity of the month, Russell Crowe accepts a third-banana role in the laughable weepie Tenderness.

One of those Deep Dark Secret movies, the dull indie Lake City combines a wholly uninteresting family mystery with a wholly unconvincing crime drama.

In the Land of Women is one of those films informed by intimate personal experience - the experience of seeing "Garden State."

Never amounts to anything more than a rambling, studenty exercise in undergraduate cinema vérité. Some expressive, arty photography and a mildly satiric attitude toward stage poseurs do little to make the picture bearable.

Mostly Unfinished Business is a tale of unfinished jokes.

If Young ever converses with the gentlemen from al Qaeda, I expect his comments to be along the lines of "Please don't cut my head off."

The movie chides us for being a sick voyeuristic society, hungry for the sight of violence. The purity of this moral stance is somewhat clouded by the movie's habit of staging sick violent acts.

Whelk, I hope the makers of Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs earned a nice celery, but I’m afraid they made a hash of things. A hash seasoned with oy sauce.

Small fry will learn an important lesson taking in the recycled storylines of Ratchet & Clank: Like nearly all recycling, it’s garbage.

The indie road movie Janie Jones is billed as "inspired by the true story" of its writer-director, David M. Rosenthal. Impossible. No one's life is this boring.

Rolls out stiff clichés to tell a familiar story of racial injustice in the South.

All the film provides is this bulletin: Lefties are angry about the things Lefties are angry about, chiefly corporate profits.

Watching the film, I did manage to retain my empathy for the narrator, though: I was as desperate as he was to escape the situation I was in.

The movie's prideful silliness makes it semi-watchable in the manner of Saturday afternoon cable flicks like "Delta Force."

The three friends do things that venture beyond entertainingly dumb and into exasperatingly unbelievable.

Sounds like a great idea for a gay porno, but the soapy Save Me actually takes itself seriously.

Occasionally there is a striking image or a moment of wounded sweetness, but mainly the film provides ample proof that it's possible to be bizarre and boring at the same time.

How cheap-looking is the modern-day romantic tragedy Private Romeo? Take a couple of friends to see it, and the amount you spend may exceed the amount the filmmakers did.

I’ve read ingredients labels that were scarier than The Purge: Anarchy, a plodding horror flick that mistakenly thinks it has big ideas.

Remember when Robert De Niro was an interesting actor? These days his talent, like his character in The Family, is in the witness protection program, never to be seen again.

Confessions of a Shopaholic -- a "Devil Wears Prada" for Chico's customers.

Step Up 3D is strictly 1D. Tired choreography and moldy hip-hop gestures accompany insipid characters.

This time the execs are lobbying us, yet the public grows increasingly furious as our tax dollars fund corporate welfare, bailouts and dumb ideas like the $41,000 golf cart that is the Chevy Volt.

Goes up for the dunk and misses the hoop, the backboard and the point. Instead, it manages to both strike out and get sacked. Whose idea was it to remake "Slap Shot" a la Jerry Lewis?

Cutesy? My pain was acutesy as the entire plot yawned before me.

Sorry, but if your sensibility is pure trashy camp, don't expect anyone not to laugh when you try to be earnest.

Drifts awkwardly between popcorn entertainment and angsty mood piece.

A girl with relationship woes can hardly set foot in Europe these days without finding herself hip-deep in yummy food and tasty men. The latest iteration of the story is Letters to Juliet or, as I like to think of it, "Eat Pray Hurl."

In the ’80s, I hated Ronald Reagan, Bob Dylan and the Smurfs. It’s comforting to know I got one thing right.

The movie is as lumpy and misshapen as a giant booger.

A decent idea for an episode of "Everybody Loves Raymond," The Do-Deca-Pentathlon falls short as a movie.

The only conceivable reason for Warner Bros. to (barely) release this mush is as a favor to Clint Eastwood, whose daughter Alison directed.

A Walmart "Wall Street," the hedge-fund drama Supercapitalist is junk merchandise stamped "made in China."

When Mel Brooks checks in to play Dracula’s dad, harrumphing and looking exactly like Grandpa Munster, you realize Sandler and Co. aren’t trying any harder than they did in “Jack and Jill” or “Pixels.”

The silliness of Moore's oeuvre is so self-evident that being able to spot it is not liberal or conservative, either; it's a basic intelligence test, like the ability to match square peg with square hole. His documentaries are political slapstick that could have been made by a third Farrelly brother or a fourth Stooge.

Besson provided the story and co-wrote the screenplay for a film directed by McG, who does his usual McGhastly job with action and is McGruesome when it comes to comedy.

This comedy is cringe-inducingly lame and the dramatic turns are visible as far in advance as utility poles on the prairie.

The entire script, which boils down to a hopelessly embarrassing lesson about "this beautiful place that can make people live again," seems to have been written within arm's reach of a bong.

Kingsman: The Secret Service borrows the tone, story, characters and humor of “Kick-Ass,” only this time in a 007 world instead of Batman’s. Nearly everything it does, it does poorly: This one is “Weak-Ass.”

An Eye for Beauty star Éric Bruneau proves to be a haircut in search of a man, which makes him ideal for this vapid adultery drama that delivers the character depth of your average spread in Architectural Digest.

I suppose it's nice that Romero has a hobby, but he couldn't be more of a bore if he were showing off his pine cone collection.

What If is a case of the cutes the way the Black Death was a case of infectious disease. The movie is saturated with cute, teeming with cute, rancid with cute. I’d endured all a man could fairly be expected to take when I glanced at my watch and realized there were still 95 minutes to go.

Even the audience at whom the movie is aimed — the crowd for whom dinner and a movie means meeting up at 3 p.m. — will be bored by the stale funk coming off every scene.

The danger of dreaming up a predictable adventure for a group of nobodies you hold in contempt is that the audience will see your indifference and raise you.

School for Scoundrels teaches one important lesson: Avoid any thing carrying the banner of The Weinstein Co., which is to the multiplex what bagged spinach is to the produce aisle.

All I wanted to do was escape from this aggressively ugly world and its equally unattractive characters. It's not that the movie is in bad taste or cheesy (though it is) but that all of its hyperviolence adds up to nothing: This thing is dedd.

This is one of those thrillers where the person on-screen is often the only person in the theater who can't guess what'll happen next. Lots of laughable moments provide camp value, though, and Bentley ("American Beauty") makes for a charismatic creep.

The laziness of this filmmaking (which assumes you know that Gray killed himself in 2004) is of a piece with the emphatically uninteresting tales told by a classic dinner-party bore who once referred to his ramblings as "creative narcissism." He was half-right.

The climax is as dull as reading the dictionary of a language you do not speak.

A wan effort at "Annie Hall"-style comedy, has about as much Manhattan sophistication as a gas station in Chippewa Falls, Wis.

At its best, the movie is an unbearably precious slice of stale imitation Wes Anderson. But at its worst, it's dull and strangled by its own would-be jaunty deadpan.

Watching Robin Williams as a pastor giving premarital counseling to lovebirds John Krasinski and Mandy Moore in License to Wed is like having a laugh chastity belt cinched up tight around your funny bone.

A 2 1/2-year-old collection of mediocre stand-up routines and dull backstage chatter, Vince Vaughn's Wild West Comedy Show demonstrates why comedy clubs require you to have a couple of drinks.

Draft Day is lumbering and predictable, and its hero general manager is so dumb it should have been called “Dummyball.”

Fifty Shades will make you dumber.

Maybe DVDs of "Buried" and ATM will be sold in the same package someday. You could call it a trapped-in-a-box set.

An indie exercise in macho posturing disguised as a tale of grief, reminds us that losing one’s parents is psychically debilitating. But that’s about as useful as knowing that rain is wet.

Hire “Dreamgirls” director Bill Condon to tell the story of Julian Assange and WikiLeaks? Sure, and next let’s hear from Lady Gaga on the Higgs boson particle.

Time for another of Steven Soderbergh's "experimental," i.e., half-assed, films.

Stone praises Latin America for turning toward "government of the people" (yet ignores Castro's lack of interest in democracy). But it's no wonder he's in such a sunny mood: We see him grow increasingly giddy while chewing coca leaves with Morales (a coca farmer who wants to make cocaine legal).

As phony as a re-enactment with finger pup pets.

The similar Kevin Bacon HBO movie "Taking Chance" got there first. Worse news: The earlier movie was sober, meticulous and quietly convincing, not a shouty, shoddy bore like this piece of flummery.

This is just a slow-moving skin flick broken up by lots of boring discussions about Cherry's future.

A pretentious Euro-snore that should occasion a fraud prosecution for any marketer who calls it a thriller -- and which stars an actor who seems to wish his name were Jorg Clooné.

Moreover, in attempting to update the play to a buzzing CNN world, Ralph Fiennes proves that as a director, he makes a fine actor.

Apart from a heart-tugging plot twist, some lesson learning and more random football talk ("no more buttonhooks in the kitchen"), that's about it. Oh, except for the scene in which Kyra Sedgwick - who plays Joe's agent - farts. Be sure to update your résumé, Kyra.

A young Jack Nicholson might have pulled this off, but Jason Bateman is not Jack Nicholson. Pity the actor who thinks he’s edgier than he actually is.

A drippy romance that makes Nicholas Sparks look like Leo Tolstoy.

Dire musical interludes are sprinkled throughout the sprawling mess Beloved, an uninvolving would-be romantic epic that spans 45 years in the life of a mother and her daughter, starting in the early 1960s.

Lazy, shallow and repetitive, Phil Donahue's Body of War is one of the most incompetent documentaries to emerge from the Iraq war.

Though Wilkinson gives an atypically restrained performance that lends the movie its best moments, and Watson manages to breathe a little life into her underwritten character, the movie is hopelessly simple-minded, with corny fantasy sequences, slathered-on folksiness and a plot twist that it would take a miracle of self-delusion not to see coming.

The American Muslim comedian Ahmed Ahmed does lots of jokes about how he isn't a terrorist. How odd: As I sat through his tepid act, I could have sworn he was bombing.

Sandler's bizarrely clunky kiddie flick, is a sort of upside-down "Princess Bride."

Sundance Mopey Alienation Flick No. 4,228 is For Ellen, an empty angst-athon that proves 90 minutes of close-ups of Paul Dano looking wounded can be even less interesting than it sounds.

If your film is as downbeat and deflated as this one, you had better be leading up to a more interesting insight than, "The older I get, the more I know that I don't know anyone."

The Will Smith weepie Collateral Beauty couldn’t be more calculated and manipulative if it slapped you on the back, shoved a giant lollipop into your mouth and immediately tried to sell you a time share in Tampa.

This movie's heart is in the right place, which is one way of saying it's terrible.

With Philomena, British producer-writer-star Steve Coogan and director Stephen Frears hit double blackjack, finding a true-life tale that would enable them to simultaneously attack Catholics and Republicans. There’s no other purpose to the movie, so if 90 minutes of organized hate brings you joy, go and buy your ticket now.

A backstage drama that has all the sizzle of a glass of water resting on the windowsill, Olivier Assayas’ Clouds of Sils Maria mistakes lack of dramatic imagination for smoldering subtlety.

A circle of lowlifes gradually kill one another off to no great effect in the dull and woebegone comic noir Kill Me Three Times.

In The Runner, the latest Nicolas Cage film to roll off his one-man assembly line of shoddy cinema, the star looks almost as tired of acting as I am of watching his acting.

How bad could the boneyard be compared to sitting through this execrable piece of non-entertainment? Better dead than RED 2.

It’s unspeakably depressing to see Anna Paquin playing the mom (of a teenager!), but the pointlessness and mediocrity of the Paquin-produced Free Ride is even more depressing.

The Paperboy can't decide whether to be an unfunny sex comedy, a half-hearted detective story or a woeful race drama - so it decides to be all three, then becomes yet another movie (a swampy "Heart of Darkness") in the final act.

Directed by journeyman actor Matthew Lillard, this tame and by-the-numbers effort never succeeds in making the outcast situation cinematic or interesting.

A documentary that uses against Atwater images of lynch mobs, decades-old racist comments of his onetime boss Strom Thurmond, and a clip of Bryant Gumbel calling him "the architect of the evil campaign."

A preposterous supernatural thriller that inexplicably managed to sign up Julianne Moore to star.

In the mood for some dead-child entertain ment tonight? Reservation Road has what you're looking for. It's "In the Bedroom" crossed with, um, "Fever Pitch."

At 86 minutes, the film spends exactly 86 more minutes with its subjects than can possibly be tolerated. Coincidence?

There needs to be a 12-step program for movie people to stop sharing their "deeply personal" yet insight-free stories of addiction.

The French affection (affectation?) for conversational film reaches absurd proportions in the talkathon Domain.

It's another in the bicoastal indie industry's endless series of self-congratulatory comedies about the alleged dopiness of middle American hicks who do things like read Parade magazine and decorate with flags.

A film so self-serious that it demands to be remade as a Seth MacFarlane farce, The Truth About Emanuel mixes the ludicrous and the pretentious in a story about mommy issues gone wild.

To describe this as a movie about a mediocre businessman biding his time before an appointment probably makes it sound more exciting than it is.

Flash Point comes loaded with cliches and immediately starts blasting them in every direction.

May be well-intentioned, but it's as obvious and inert as a spoonful of mashed potatoes.

Proves that what might be (but probably isn't) worth five minutes of your time while you're passing through the Times Square subway station really isn't worth a 1 1/2-hour movie.

A dismal rom-com for dudes that makes the average beer commercial look nuanced and plot-heavy.

Within five minutes you’ll guess why John Cusack, not overly encumbered with big film roles these days, didn’t return for the sequel: The script is monotonous, meandering and witless.

A two-hour trailer: explosion, shape-shift, chase, wisecrack, repeat. Its most amazing trick will be how it vanishes from your memory before the seat you vacate has stopped moving.

In the appalling documentary If a Tree Falls, a narrator referring to an arson attack by the Earth Liberation Front solemnly intones, "In one night, they had accomplished what years of picketing and writing had never been able to do." Well, yes -- terrorism does make short work of red tape, doesn't it?

You must lead a dull life if it would be enlivened by 76 minutes' worth of Old Joy.

The parallels between the kids' war and the real one are made far too obvious by Christophe Barratier, who made the equally treacly "The Chorus" and infests the movie with nonstop musical goo.

Even if you overlooked the production values from a 1986 porno and special effects like something your nephew cooked up on his Mac, the movie's "Yay, money!" zingers are just a big bag of sad.

It’s a tiresome, preachy, repetitive, disorganized and dismally unfunny attempt to appeal to Michael Moore fans. The overall temperature of their efforts is strictly room: Call this “Fahrenheit 68.”

Lovable misanthropes can be a lot of fun, but someone forgot to put in the lovable.

Fails to draw much humor from farcical situations.

Preposterous, slipshod, unfunny and emotionally null.

If we can agree on anything in this great divided land of ours, it's this: Mischa Barton can't act.

Cancels itself out by being too campy to take seriously and too tragic to laugh at.

This indie documentary is egregiously Hollywood in spirit. That a take-charge white football coach can buck up a place like Manassas HS with some gridiron grit is a lie we want to believe.

At 96 minutes it is exactly 93 1/2 minutes too long. If they're going to put this artifact in theaters, they'd better charge 1973 grindhouse prices: a dollar a ticket.

Darlings, there's nothing quite so tragique as a boring eccentric.

It's condescending, it's vague, it's unfair and, ultimately, it's pointless.

Old Dogs does to the screen what old dogs do to the carpet. It's unfortunate that only the latter can be taken out and shot.

The Love Guru is even funnier than "Wayne's World" or "Austin Powers." Not.

The makers of The Spy Next Door should give 50 percent of their profits to James Cameron for ripping off "True Lies." Let's see, what's 50 percent of nothing?

There are a couple of grams of interesting stories about Miami's drug traffic in Cocaine Cowboys, but the good stuff is cut with 50 kilos of cinematic baking soda.

Let us return to reality (all this happened less than three years ago; do documentarians think we don't read the papers?).

Dramatically inert, satirically inept and thematically insufferable, Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk is the most disappointing film of the year.

None of Dunham's humor comes across, except when someone says, "And when you speak, your words are snakes I swat at with swords," which is hilarious, but not intentionally.

Plodding drama.

Last week I thought watching women take their clothes off was sexy. This week I saw A Wink and a Smile.

The misleading documentary Trumbo paints a golden nimbus of holiness around the onetime highest-paid screenwriter in Hollywood, Dalton Trumbo, an on-the-record hater of democracy, defender of authoritarian rule and avowed Communist.

A sort of "Babel" of bonking, 360 gives us much in the way of international anguish, frustrated coupling and longing stares, but there's very little plausibility or genuine emotion in its egregiously contrived story of ardor gone amiss.

Recalling the lesson about bringing a knife to a gun fight, a British documentary filmmaker brings a spoon to a hatchet job in the film Sarah Palin: You Betcha!

Brutally banal chitchat about life and love ensues.

Like the lobby of a Donald Trump building, it looks ever so expensive and amazingly cheap at the same time.

The movie (Untitled) is a tinny satire destined to go "(Unwatched)" because it is "(Uninteresting)."

Congratulations are in order to Table 19: This comedy about the random losers stuck together at a wedding reception actually, uncannily, creates an experience as dull, awkward and excruciating as the thing it mocks.

The Mortal Instruments: City of Bones hopes to be the start of a new franchise for tweens and Twihards, but the twuth is this twash is anything but a twiumph.

The good news about I Don't Know How She Does It is that it's so bad that it's another ovary-punch to the formula chick flick. Bring on more films like "Bridesmaids."

A low-watt, low-wit comedy.

An English-language film from Italy, Tale of Tales toys with the ogres, princesses and crones of classic fairy tales to almost no dramatic effect, albeit with lots of sex and gore. Imagine the Brothers Grimm’s cousins Tyler and Jake writing for a late-night slot on Cinemax and you’ll get the idea.

Corny action scenes and borderline-hilarious direction by Isaac Florentine mark the film as an obvious straight-to-video item that somehow took a wrong turn into a movie theater.

The movie falls into all the usual rhetorical traps.

Just because two people are miserable doesn’t mean they’re interesting.

Most of the comedy comes from dull situations like a fat guy trying to put on a fat suit for no reason.

Guardians of the Galaxy brings to mind some of the most unforgettable sci-fi event movies of the last 30 years. Alas, those films are “Howard the Duck” and “Green Lantern.”

This is essentially a student film offering nothing but absurdly contrived coincidence.

Bears all the signs of having been composed by an inferior race of alien screenwriters from the Hackulon System.

At last, the missing link be tween "Phantom of the Opera" and "Saw." Welcome to the gonzo revenge saga Law Abiding Citizen.

Jane's Journey is an exceedingly graceful and dignified sleep aid.

The movie is essentially a theater piece in which Nolan (Walker) is mostly alone on screen, making use of what he finds a la John McClane, but without the smart pacing or inventiveness of “Die Hard.”

Demonstrating that an hour and a half of stunts doesn't make a movie, this feature is X-treme only in its multidimensional dullness.

This film is narratively inert (we spend a lot of time listening to the same questions being asked over and over) and, like virtually all docs in its genre, less than vigorous in its pursuit of truth.

Aggressively ugly and intergalactically boring, the dismal sci-fi kiddie cartoon Battle for Terra is too weak to be shown anywhere except maybe on the next flight to Saturn.

The Lorax is awful, like chronic disease.

This genre flat-lined a long time ago. Why won't it stay dead?

Really it's just a trashy bid to be the "Scarface" of Mesopotamia.

Name names, please. Or shut up.

It’s breathtaking. It’s dazzling. It’s world-altering, is what it is. For the first time ever, a movie has actually done it. Hardcore Henry has precisely replicated the experience of watching someone else play a video game.

There was a time when the climate-change alarmist movement was like a guy with a megaphone at your ear, but now it’s more like a squirrel at your shoelaces.

When Grown Ups star and co-writer Adam Sandler repeatedly slapped Rob Schneider in the face with a dehydrated banana, I was jealous of Schneider, who suffered less than I did getting slapped upside the head by this rotting fruit of a comedy.

The Purge: Election Year imagines that, right now, laws are being ignored, people gun each other down with impunity and the death toll is horrendous. It’s too bad the title “Chicago” was already taken.

Though nothing much happens, all of the actors get to do lots of teary close-ups.

After an hour or so, when the would-be comedy War Dogs finally gets around to a point to focus on, it’s stale ammunition that’s been sitting in a dusty Albanian warehouse for 40 years. I assume the movie got its jokes from the same place.

Heavy-handed message movies don’t come more harrumphing than “Miss Sloane,” a clunky dramatization of the gun-control argument liberals still don’t understand is being conducted solely among themselves.

Few kinds of art are more boring than the insistently transgressive, and few movies are more boring than Humpday.

There’s nothing wrong with making movies for 5-year-olds. But, as directed by Aaron Horvath and Michael Jelenic and written by Matthew Fogel, “Galaxy” seems very much like a movie made by 5-year-olds.

There is a difference between gleefully bonkers and tragically inept, and I’m afraid this omnishambles has earned a place in the anti-pantheon of the worst films ever made by a great director.

Much of this roams pretty far from Orwell’s vision, but that’s not the reason the film fails. It fails because it’s obvious, witless and dull. The animation is charmless and bland.

Swamping the audience with Michael Giacchino’s oceans-of-syrup score, IF expects viewers to cry at the end, but if so it’ll be due to regret at wasted time, or possibly from hyperglycemia.

Ella McCay is not quotable. It is not believable. It is not likable. It’s not even digestible. For an ordinary filmmaker, it would be merely a disaster. For James L. Brooks, it’s more like a tragedy.

Much forced joshing about the conventions of the genre undercuts the impact of the film’s action, which is also severely limited by the smash-em-up frenzy of the special-effects department. Not for the first time in a comic-book epic, the CGI cart comes before the storytelling horse and leads it off a cliff.

At no point does anything shocking, or even interesting, happen.

To describe “Amsterdam” as an unfunny comedy would be unfair, because it’s so much more than that. It’s also a non-thrilling thriller and a not particularly mysterious mystery. As an allegory for our times it is vapid and irrelevant.

Thin characterizations, bland acting and a surfeit of bubbly cuteness combine to make a throw-pillow of a movie: It’s soft and decorative without being particularly useful or interesting.

This more than 2 1/2 hour film would rank as one of Hollywood’s sleepiest fantasy blockbusters of the century even without the pointless musical interludes, of which there are at least half a dozen.

“Rise of the Beasts” is shamelessly vapid filmmaking that stacks up poorly against several other entrants in the series.

Every element other than Mr. Grant is brain-scarringly awful—the flat characters, the dull acting, the rusted-battleax dialogue, and above all the action scenes, which are frenzied, chaotic, meaningless and vapid, overflowing with CGI that is no more awe-inspiring than the average TV commercial about lizards selling auto insurance.

The entire movie comes across as awkward, even flailing to hold our interest.

Mr. Coen and Ms. Cooke’s plot is such a muddle that they more or less expect us to dismiss it. The interstitial moments and incidental comedy are meant to be the chief attraction here. Minus Joel Coen, however, the jokes are thin and tired.

All of the roaring and thundering in “Dominion” carries roughly the dramatic impact of a robust sneeze, because Mr. Trevorrow has forgotten that what we human beings care about, despite our addiction to spectacle, are human beings.

As usual, Hartnett exhibits the acting ability of linoleum; his performance would not be measurably changed if he lapsed into a coma halfway through. Only an amusing cameo by David Bowie enlivens things, but he's onscreen for just about two minutes at the end.

There isn't enough plot in this amateurish mope-athon to fill up a half-hour TV show.

The year's dullest movie has arrived: the deeply silly Badland, which is as dead as winter and twice as long.

To call Ride Along 2 rubbish is unfair to rubbish, which at some point had a purpose.

The bad movie in my head was far better than the one on-screen, which offers no twists at all. A twist? There isn't even a curl or a bend.

A comedy that locks up Will Arnett's talent and throws away the key.

As for the script, a wittier director would have spotted the absurd elements and delivered a horror-comedy instead of a straight-faced bore.

A slow ride to nowhere.

Not like a lump of coal in your stocking. Coal is useful; you can burn it. This movie is more like a lump of something Blitzen left behind after eating a lot of Mexican food.

Chlamydia, gonorrhea and Jason Sudeikis are three reasons to stay well clear of A Good Old Fashioned Orgy, but they're not the only ones.

You know you're in trouble when you're suffering a comedy shutout and the pinch-hitters you send in are Kidman and Dave Matthews.

Ice Cube's well-worn performance as a wise old geezer is the only bright spot in a movie that otherwise fumbles every opportunity to be funny, exciting or insightful.

A sci-fi actioner with the production values of your average porno, Alien Outpost spews clichés like a machine gun set on maximum triteness.

The chick comedy-drama Catch and Release may look bland, but it's not. It's worse. To rise to the level of blandness, it would need to have a few gallons of Tabasco dumped into it.

At the end, as Shadyac proclaims, "I stopped flying privately" (well, hurrah for you, Mahatma), renounces his Pasadena mansion and moves into a trailer park, the results of his epiphany grow funnier than any of his movies.

If anything is frightening here, it's the scenes of the small children being indoctrinated into an organic lifestyle and being made to sing, at least three times, a song about the evils supposedly lurking in the environment around them.

The ludicrous action thriller Beyond the Reach fails to achieve the Southwestern noir potency of “No Country for Old Men,” but there’s no denying it brings to mind another Southwestern classic about malicious pursuit: the Road Runner cartoons.

Watching I'm Reed Fish is like being forced to read the diary of a dull-witted teen who is breathlessly beginning a lifelong fascination with himself.

For a movie that so strenuously rips off “Ghostbusters” and “Men in Black,” R.I.P.D. manages to come up with fresh new ways of being absolutely terrible.

Just because your comedy is dumb doesn’t mean it’s funny.

This spoof of "The Da Vinci Code," "Pirates of the Caribbean," "Harry Potter," "The Chronicles of Narnia" and other recent blockbusters piles up sex gags, toilet gags and make-you-gag gags.

I can't remember ever seeing such a spectacular implosion of a squad of all-stars as Rise of the Guardians. Well, not since Yankee Stadium in October.

Martin Short as Jack Frost, means we're getting a turkey and a ham for the holidays. As for Tim Allen as Scott Calvin, an ordinary guy who took over Santa's job by chance, he's more like a tasteless lump of mashed potatoes.

Paul Haggis’ Third Person has nothing to say and spends 2 ¹/₂ hours not saying it. Its combination of pretentiousness, vanity and vapidity suggests Alain Resnais directing a triple episode of “Guiding Light.”

Little Fockers may not be the worst, most vulgar, most pathetic and least funny picture of the year. But it's a strong contender for second place behind the picture Brett Favre allegedly sent over his cellphone.

There's a reason you've never seen the words "Will Forte" topping the billing of a major motion picture. After the throbbing flameball of unfunny that is MacGruber, you never will again.

A dumbass "Kick-Ass," the superhero comedy Griff the Invisible sits on the screen like a steaming lump of Kryptonite.

If I wanted to spend $10.75 making myself sick, I'd buy a bottle of cheap tequila.

WARNING: Do not take your mom to Georgia Rule unless she's Roseanne Barr. You may expect a three-generational chick flick, but what you get is a child-rape comedy.

“I see dead people,” Adrien Brody all but exclaims in Backtrack, a movie that tries to make a choo-choo out of “The Sixth Sense” but immediately goes off the rails.

Calls to mind Grandpa taking out his dentures and trying to put on a comedy monster show for little kids at Halloween: When he tries to be scary, he's goofy, but when he tries to be goofy, he's scary.

This kids' cartoon from France is such a surreally demented attempt to connect with children that it's the equivalent of foie gras breakfast cereal or a bleu cheese milkshake.

The good news is that The Hangover Part III isn't a rerun like the second episode. The bad news is everything else. For all the promise of mayhem and WTF moments, the final episode hits you with all the force of a warm can of O'Doul's.

Luc Besson keeps ralphing up scripts about beautiful lady killers, but that doesn't mean you have to keep seeing them. Case in point: Colombiana...[a] dull cable-TV-quality item.

A buddy comedy that reeks like stale underpants.

For a horny-road-trip flick that's actually funny, check out last year's "Sex Drive," which just came out on video.

88 Minutes holds you in a state of acute suspense, keeping you wondering until the very last minute whether this is the worst Al Pacino movie ever made.

A grubby cut-price sci-fi thriller.

Struggling for the same vibe as male-bonding comedies like “Diner,” Growing Up & Other Lies instead feels like a really long beer commercial, except beer commercials usually contain at least one witty idea.

89 minutes go by like 89 hours. Not just 89 regular hours either: 89 hours of being stuck in an airport. During a blizzard. While Lewis Black sleeps drooling on your shoulder.

Cage and director Joel Schumacher, who has fallen so far from the A-list that he provokes a demand for new letters of the alphabet after Z, have each found their cinematic soulmates.

This spring, boredom has a new name: Lucky You. In the poker flick, an announcer calling a climactic poker match uses a Texas hold 'em term frequently, saying, "And the flop. And the flop. And the flop." This movie reviews itself.

The laughs begin with the excellent title Hamlet 2 - and they end there.

Isn't quite insipid, although if it were a little better, it could be.

This one resembles a James Bond film about as much as Belgrade resembles London.

This film is headed quickly for DVD. In the video store, though, it isn't funny enough to be shelved in the comedy section nor dirty enough to be filed with the smut. It might be useful in propping up a wobbly chair, though.

Someday, The Bounty Hunter and last month’s “Cop Out” will be featured in a cable movie double bill as the two worst 1988 films of 2010.

A comedy for no ages, has an amazing amount of CGI - Cuba Gooding Incompetence.

It's something old, it's something new, it's something borrowed and it's something that blows.

This movie -- G.I. Joke, The D-Team -- tries to do so little, and yet falls so short. A clue comes when the girl asks Clay, "How's your steak?" and he replies, "Meaty." Simple enough to achieve in theory, but this would-be treat for cinematic carnivores is a sawdust sandwich.

Besson co-wrote and produced this cheesy mash-up of elements from James Bond and "Battlestar Galactica."

Everybody flirts with everyone else as director John Irvin pours on a level of shopping-mall-gift-shop-kitsch that would shame Wayne Newton.

The writer-director of Dying of the Light is Paul Schrader, screenwriter of “Raging Bull.” The star is Nicolas Cage — Raging Tool.

If someone ran this guy through a scanner, the readout would say: “Mark down and stock in straight-to-video aisle."

Thin yet excruciating, the film is a quintessential vanity production. The script feels like a first draft that aspired merely to mediocrity and fell well short.

It stumbled onto an accomplishment truly awe-inspiring: It makes “Battleship” and “The Watch” look good.

Put it this way: Jimmy Carter was funnier than this movie.

Ho-ho-huh? Arthur Christmas is an animated kiddie comedy that delivers all the wonder you'd expect in a movie about a guy delivering one package. Maybe they should have called it "UPS Man: The Movie."

Depravity and addiction can be dramatic and fascinating, or they can be as they are in this week's indie filthathon Cook County.

Formerly a maker of bad, but at least angry, movies, Spike Lee now seems to be trying to be the world's oldest student filmmaker. Take out the rookie mistakes from Red Hook Summer, and there'd be nothing left.

Parents should take their children to Hoodwinked Too! Hood Vs. Evil, if only because kids are never too young to learn the important and liberating skill of walking out of a movie and demanding a refund.

Formerly a real American hero, G.I. Joe is no longer a hero (it's a group) or American. (It's a multinational team of military superstars, though the way it does business, you'd feel safer with the Croatian navy on your side.)

The mystery is why the filmmakers thought third-graders or anyone else would be willing to pay for this master class in tedium.

A sleazy and pointless film about sleazy and pointless people, Killer Joe reminds us that what Quentin Tarantino does isn't easy.

Getaway is so bad that what’s most surprising about it is that Nicolas Cage didn’t manage to star in it. But one man can only do so many low-rent projects a year.

The movie boasts five Oscar winners. That figure exceeds by five the number of times I laughed at this cheap collection of icky jokes.

Someday, when gay Americans enjoy full equality, we can all hope their sexuality will finally stop being used as fodder for dopey, hopelessly contrived dramas like I Do.

Even worse than the hacky chick revenge fantasy now showing on channel 186 of your box.

One of those movies that comes "straight from the heart" - the heart of the hack screenwriter's manual that pushes formulaic structure to cover up a lack of compelling characters, genuine emotion or actual humor.

Mortdecai is mortdifying, a mortdal sin of a movie that’s headed for the cinematic mortduary.

Not just a shabby "Wall Street" knockoff clogged with dull, jargon-spewing trading-desk scenes that fail to advance the plot in any way. It's also a nondescript "Sex and the City" retread.

A Liam Neeson thriller so lacking in ambition they should have called it "Paycheck."

Molly Ringwald-like, Wren must choose between two guys: the nerdy Roosevelt (Thomas Mann) and the Porsche-driving Aaron (Thomas McDonell), but both are so dull it's hard to care. So feeble is the movie that even the wacky, redheaded best friend (Jane Levy) isn't funny.

Contraband aims to be dumb fun but gets only the first half right.

Coincidence and contrivance are the name of the game throughout.

A would-be piece of pulp fiction about a parolee trying to go straight, The Samaritan proves that even Samuel L. Jackson can be boring.

I went in expecting to be disappointed, but even so, I was disappointed.

Good Luck Chuck, a fungal little sex comedy, doesn't need a review. It needs a tube of ointment and a shot of penicillin.