Michael O'Sullivan

It’s a mushy and unsuspenseful melodrama.

The film has the whiff of easy paycheck. It looks glossy but is empty. It sheds light without gaining insight.

How ironic then, in a movie about wordsmithing, that The Only Living Boy in New York is tripped up not by tawdry behavior, but by terrible writing.

The whole thing looks like an ad for cologne.

Imagine a 10-episode podcast about the making of a single episode of the 1950s marital sitcom “I Love Lucy” — a podcast dense with behind-the-scenes details about the show’s real-life husband-and-wife stars, Desi Arnaz and Lucille Ball, who played wildly caricatured versions of themselves on the hit show for six seasons. Imagine a trove of inside-baseball trivia about the early days of television, as well as details about the stars’ real lives, including Ball’s 1952 pregnancy, which Arnaz — a TV pioneer who popularized the three-camera setup — wanted to weave into the show’s plot. Then imagine dumping all that material, like a box full of marbles, into a two-hour movie.

The “Insidious” franchise, after three attempts to exorcise its real demons, still can’t seem to shake what really haunts it: the ghost of B-movies past.

The secrets that are revealed, to the extent that a viewer is able to make out what they are, remain murky, even to the end of the movie.

Although Miller is excellent as the doomed teen, Wahlberg seems out of his league here, except in the actor’s rendering of Joe’s acute discomfort with public speaking and confrontation — which is odd in a movie that wears its heart, and its lessons, on its sleeve.

Wonder Wheel may be scenic, but it goes nowhere — and slowly.

The Christian-themed Where Hope Grows wears its heart on its sleeve, hawking its message of salvation through faith to anyone who’s in the market for cheesy uplift and saccharine sentiment. It’s a soft sell, to be sure, but it’s salesmanship all the same.

It ain’t worth the price of admission, but it is, in one of the drowsiest, dullest summer movies ever, a bit of an eye-opener.

Cute without being especially clever, Warm Bodies is almost as pallid and as brain-dead as its zombie antihero.

The movie leaves us, like J.D.’s family, with only a mounting pile of baloney excuses for bad behavior.

There ought to be no lack of firepower in telling this shameful tale. Too often, however, Bitter Harvest is guilty of overkill.

The speculative ending is actually the most intriguing thing about “The Alto Knights,” more interesting even than De Niro times two. And yet the film’s climax nevertheless fails to raise much of a heartbeat in this boglike slog through a momentous moment in murderous mob history.

Despite all the mayhem, The Hitman’s Bodyguard is a surprisingly bland dish.

The ending of Foe is not the problem. It’s the beginning and the middle that feel phony: at once as calculated and as uncanny as ChatGPT.

Although filled with fey, flamboyant characters, the stereotype of the gay hairdresser seems to have been meticulously expunged.

Less a movie than a meticulously, tediously accurate Civil War reenactment committed to celluloid.

A lowbrow, only fitfully amusing comedy.

An unfunny comedy by Tony Vitale that is enacted not by fleshed-out characters but by hackneyed, two-dimensional stereotypes. There’re so many sexual and ethnic caricatures, it’s hard to know which is most offensive.

No movie this stupid should need a plot synopsis this complicated.

The film is so anemic you should probably order iron supplements with your popcorn, its plot so predictable it makes falling dominoes seem like a white-knuckle thrill ride.

Rated PG, which must stand for "particularly gullible," it's "Raiders of the Lost Ark" for people who slept through American history class.

It's just so darn annoying to watch this attractive, seemingly smart woman throw her life away for some (admittedly rather hot) sex in the greenhouse.

With the exception of a few dazzling special effects and a digitally enhanced camera move or two... it's also a towering bore.

Made me feel like a Christmas goose being fattened for slaughter. Its force-fed diet of whimsy cloyed long before the eagerly anticipated romantic payoff arrived to put me out of my misery.

So rich in processed sugar, canned sentiment and schmaltz, I thought I was going to throw up.

Torpid, syrupy melodrama from the Chinese director of 1993's "Farewell My Concubine."

Will satisfy only those who can't tell the difference between the good, the bad and the ugly.

The film's maudlin focus on the young woman's infirmity and her naive dreams play like the worst kind of Hollywood heart-string plucking.

While the younger Van Peebles certainly looks the part, Baadasssss! never feels like anything more than kids playing dress-up.

What's troubling about "My Mother" is not the way the sisters respond to the news, but the way that Paris and Fejerman have opted to make lighthearted comic fodder out of the daughters' responses.

Audiences who have avoided the multiplex these last few years because of the garbage peddled there are the only ones for whom this overly familiar "Walk" will be memorable.

Ghost suffers most from a distinct lack of anything, well, cinematic.

It's a silly, giggly piece of pink-colored fluff, as hyperactive as its heroine and as redolent of bubble gum and Love's Baby Soft cologne as Lola apparently is. Yet the superficial sweetness masks something rotten.

As the film's boo! moments get spookier and more frequent, Godsend gets more and more inane.

The movie drains Cole and Linda Porter of blood and fills them with embalming fluid.

Loud, dumb and obnoxious.

The film doesn't even cut it as cheap escapism.

The underwhelming, only fitfully amusing movie left me hungry for more.

The movie and its star just aren't that funny.

It's a question of tone, which jumps back and forth between airy-fairy romantic comedy and leaden family drama with the alacrity of a manic-depressive.

It's hard to know which is more annoying: The fact that writer-director Reverge Anselmo makes Dori's schizophrenic look like little more than a cute, sexually available lush or that he makes Mark's Marine act like a jarhead with nothing inside except fireflies.

It's laughably stupid, only fitfully scary and relatively harmless summer fun – if you're 12 years old, in which case you probably aren't supposed to be going to movies like this anyway.

Collapses under the weight of its own pretension, a victim of misogyny trying to pass itself off as female sexual empowerment.

For anyone old enough to cross the street without holding hands ... the movie's a reconditioned lemon trying hard to hide its flaws.

On the whole, it feels like a cross between a PBS special hosted by a series of low-rent Deepak Chopras and an infomercial for self-help audio tapes.

The girls in 'Traveling Pants' are only mannequins wearing someone else's clothes. They don't get inside your head, let alone your heart.

Despite its impeccable acting and subtle backdrop of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, The Event lets its message overwhelm its emotion.

One singularly unbecoming character, who should, by rights, forever remain a "singleton."

A series of cutesy but flat-footed jokes leading up to a foregone romantic conclusion.

The 20th-anniversary sequel to the groundbreaking horror film-and the sixth in an increasingly awful series about the bulletproof murderer Michael Myers-is a styleless and predictable affair.

A soundtrack buried inside a sitcom.

Tailored for the readership of Teen People magazine and about as thought-provoking as the average 500-word celebrity profile.

It starts with a bang and ends with a whimper.

Functional but tiresome.

It's creepy, all right. It's just that HOW it goes about creeping you out is sometimes just plain cheesy.

The film stars Bruce Campbell of the "Evil Dead" series as Elvis in a touching, funny and at times grotesque performance that is actually the best thing about the movie.

Not enough to keep this celluloid ship from sinking under the weight of its own stupidity.

Less a tale of mysterious, tragic love than a three-way Harlequin romance.

It has as much of an ax to grind as the humorless and misguided bureaucrats it mocks.

Gives new meaning to the word "obvious."

Simply painful to watch as the doomed vehicle it's trapped in comes whistling toward a fiery crash landing.

The title (which translates, essentially, as "burned out") is an apt description of the film itself: a hot and smoldering shell.

Set against "Mooseport's" backdrop of ramped-up whimsy -- and not the kind that charms, either, but the kind that gets old faster than uncovered cheese -- Romano just kind of disappears.

A film so boring, unsexy, styleless, sluggish and physically ugly that its badness seems almost intentional.

If you're mocking holier-than-thou-ness, you can't very well strike a hipper-than-thou tone.

Beyond mawkish, Radio would be harmless twaddle were it not for the offensive depiction of its hero, the real-life James Robert Kennedy.

It's less a children's movie made for contemporary children than a children's movie made for people who still remember, and pine for, how children's movies were made 50 years ago.

The film, like the cheap double-scotches quaffed down by the central character, leaves a distinctly sour aftertaste that's hard to wash away the morning after.

The parodistic romantic comedy makes the fatal mistake of so much middlebrow satire: It becomes that which it mocks.

Unfortunately, the more traditionally drawn 2-D human characters are as flat, in every sense of the word, as can be.

Unfortunately, the experience of actually watching the movie is less compelling than the circumstances of its making.

What's strangest, though, about Die Mommie Die! is how material that was obviously so giddily irreverent in origin became so inert, so joyless and dull.

Moves at a glacial pace.

If this garbage sounds like your kind of thing, and the folks who jump up and talk back to the screen are your kind of people, then, sweetheart, you and this movie deserve each other.

The movie based on Young's 2002 memoir is a good bit blunter. One early laugh comes at the expense of a pig urinating on a woman's feet at the BAFTA awards, the British equivalent of the Oscars. And it doesn't get much better, or much smarter, than that.

This latest, utterly gratuitous chapter in the saga of the wisecracking reptile hunter will add nothing to the ever-dimming reputation of the Subaru pitchman.

Really two movies in one, and there's not enough breathing room for both of them.

It's not Deuce's satisfied clientele, but the audience, that gets the shaft.

Someone forgot to remind Duvall to write an ending.

Easy on the eyes and hard on the head, Suriyothai is absolutely unaffecting where it matters most, in the heart.

Comes across less as a fully realized work of storytelling than as a commercial for a corporation whose goal of entertainment has been replaced by that of making money.

It's hard to say exactly what the point is to this sour tale.

Goes nowhere fast.

The psychologizing in Party Monster never goes deeper than what you might get out of Dr. Phil on a bad day.

What is perhaps most disappointing about this ham-handed film, though, particularly since it was directed by the screenwriter of the righteously raging "Thelma and Louise," is its crypto-misogyny.

As a whole, the film is a perplexing, dark and brooding exercise, which only makes its inappropriately cheery ending feel all the more slight.

It would be one thing if Christmas With the Kranks were a satire on the assaultive, bullying nature of contemporary Christmas celebration in this country, but it's not. It's an ugly glorification of it.

Feels like something I know is supposed to be good for me, but that I just couldn't stomach.

One hackneyed, inauthentic, predictable scene after another.

Miyazaki, like an evil sorcerer, has plucked the heart out of Jones's story and left it there to die.

It's a silly, if simultaneously deadpan and stomach-churning, psychological portrait of one crazy lady.

I started out this journey actually liking children. By the end of the movie, I wasn't so sure.

Lacks "spark."

A syrupy Italian power ballad along the lines of the ones on the movie's soundtrack. Its tune is mawkish, bombastic but, in the end, not especially resonant.

It becomes, after a while, little more than a mind-numbing bloodbath.

It's so over the top, the top isn't even visible in the rear-view mirror.

Seriously, though, watching New in Town left me feeling as pained as Zellweger, playing Lucy Hill, looks.

Nosedive it does, abandoning all pretense of style and eccentricity for at-times laughable predictability and a parade of unconvincing red herrings straight out of Murder Mystery 101.

Brit actors can't even be bothered to speak with French accents.

The notions of the good man's complicity through inertia and of innocence tarnished by association are ones that have been more powerfully explored before.

An offering so endearingly lame it seems to have missed the past 10 years' worth of special-effects breakthroughs.

There are a couple of good things about the film, chief among which is Land's naturalistic performance. But the overall sense of it, heightened by a folk-guitar score so spare it feels like part of the soundtrack is missing, is not one of poignant minimalism but emptiness.

A protracted and only sporadically imaginative menu of ways to be murdered.

Actually underserves its star, who is better than schlocky material like this would lead you to believe.

This time-travel scenario is by now shopworn, and the normally riotous Lawrence, a manic and gifted clown, is hamstrung in his efforts to eke humor from the anemic script.

What it suffers from most is the sense of offhand storytelling that lies halfway between creative laziness and cost-cutting sloppiness.

The dialogue is often drowned out by engine noise.

Sure, I laughed. Yes, I cried. But mostly I just wanted to throw up.

Did I laugh? Yeah, I did, half a dozen times. Not a great percentage for a film with something close to 300 quote-unquote jokes.

It doesn't satisfy in the way a good thriller ought to.

One overly busy (not to mention shopworn) story, which regurgitates everything from H.G. Wells's "The Island of Dr. Moreau" to the herky-jerky monsters of Ray Harryhausen to James Bond to "The Mummy."

Offers little in the way of originality, real excitement or even genuinely transgressive behavior.

The filmmaker drowns his trademark edgy stew of smutty humor, stiff acting and dime-store insight into human nature with a gravy of glutinous bathos, making for a singularly unpalatable dish.

As Primer progresses, it just gets murkier and the experience of it more drudgelike.

Not terrible so much as terminally silly.

Needless to say, in the age of inferior remakes, this would-be homage -- a sort of Wim Wenders Lite -- is a mawkish debasement of its source material.

With Casa de Mi Padre, it's often hard to tell the difference between when it's making fun of bad movies and when it's being one.

The film defies one of the fundamental rules of capitalism: Exploitation of the proletariat may be well and good, but don’t execute them all. At the same time, “The Purge: Anarchy” obeys a cardinal law of Hollywood: Shoot first and ask questions later.

It’s more silly than scary.

Playing a hero who's meant to be something akin to the young Dalai Lama, Ringer brings less than zero gravitas to the role. He makes the kid who plays Gibby on "iCarly" look like Sir Laurence Olivier.

The message of The Ultimate Life could be summed up on a greeting card. Or rather, 12 greeting cards.

Suffers from an increasingly common movie defect: appealing, sharply drawn supporting characters, and a cast of main characters that is as unlikely as it is unlikable.

I’ll say one other nice thing: The film isn’t terribly long. You’ll keep waiting for the suspense to kick in. Spoiler alert: It never really does, except feebly, after about an hour and 15 minutes. And then, unceremoniously, it’s over.

Salva certainly gets points for creative repurposing. Much of what transpires in Dark House has been seen before, just not all in the same movie.

Warning: If you have seen neither “Unbreakable” nor “Split,” you may be utterly and irredeemably lost. Shyamalan cares not a whit about — and is probably incapable of making — a stand-alone film that will appeal to a general audience. This one is for the die-hards.

There is such a thing as toxic fandom, to borrow the term used by one of this movie’s young protagonists, and “Scream,” which is filled with endless conversation about the difference between a sequel and a “requel” and more rules than a penitentiary, suffers from it, fatally.

To make matters worse, this third “Hangover” is dull.

By visual standards alone, the characters, rendered in eye-popping 3-D, resemble nothing so much as Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade floats. They’re just as lifeless and inexpressive, too.

The self-conscious affectation of the film would be funny, were it not so smug.

The high-school sports drama Crooked Arrows has two -- but only two -- original selling points: Its protagonists are Native Americans and the sport in question is lacrosse. That's something you don't see every day. Other than that, however, the film's moves are taken straight out of "The Bad News Bears" playbook.

Did you hear about the Morgans? Trust me, you don't want to.

Despite classy lead performances by Mark Duplass and Olivia Wilde, the movie, from horror factory Blumhouse (known for cranking out sequels in the “Paranormal Activity” franchise, among others), relies too heavily on reanimated monster movie cliches and scientific gibberish to keep it alive.

This tedious slog through the highland muck should win no Oscars, only groans and raspberries. Even the much-buzzed-about glimpse of a nude Pine, as his character emerges from a lake, doesn’t make this worth watching.

The unapologetic laziness and ineptitude of Jack's impersonation, which is played for cheap laughs, is just as lazy as Sandler's performance as the real Jill. You don't buy it for a minute.

Clerks III is a movie for die-hard fans and die-hards only.

A workmanlike, if treacly and overblown, piece of propaganda. Its effectiveness depends entirely on the degree to which you already believe its talking points.

You can’t blame Will Smith for wanting to give his son a leg up in the business. Maybe one day Jaden will have his father’s career — and his ability to carry a movie. For now, it’s a little premature to ask him to bear the weight of this soggy, waterlogged “Earth” on his skinny shoulders.

Like its brain-damaged protagonist, Criminal just shouts and shoots its way into, not out of, an oblivion of illogic, plot holes and emotionally unengaging scenery-chewing.

Unnecessary and unfunny re-imagining of the classic satire by Jonathan Swift.

Overlong, overcrowded, overstimulating and with an over-the-top performance by Charlize Theron as the evil queen Ravenna, the movie is a virtual orchard of toxic excess, starting with the unnecessarily sprawling cast of characters.

"Bridesmaids" may have been crude, but it also said something about female friendships that felt true. Bachelorette feels like it's about four women who, not even all that deep down, can't stand one another.

That's the problem with the whole movie, which lies halfway between poker-face documentary and broad farce.

This Arthur is an exercise in time-travel tedium, a trip to the Land That Funny Forgot.

At nearly two hours, the movie feels bloated. It could easily lose 30 minutes, give or take, and live. It would still not, however, live up to its title.

The more invested you are in the old-fashioned Robin Hood of legend — the less likely you are to enjoy what amounts to a chilly and flavorless frappé of historical speculation, revisionist folklore and every lazy action-movie cliche ever written.

It gets the bullet points of Sam Childers's life, but misses the target.

What's Your Number? ups the vulgarity, ladling it on top of a rom-com base so insipid and predictable that the only thing to keep you awake is counting the number of times that the script drops the word "vagina."

The first “Transporter” delivered an unexpected kick, courtesy of Statham, who made for a brooding, magnetic — and reliably kinetic — action hero. Skrein is an inferior stand-in, scowling like his predecessor, but lacking Statham’s cool, coiled power.

The movie itself is already like one long commercial.

Yes, it’s all in good fun. And there’s a certain verve to the way Lynch handles the violence, even if he’s less of a stylist than Tarantino. But the film’s brutality... is so excessive, even if tongue-in-cheek, that it leaves a bad taste in the mouth.

The special effects look cheap, the acting is wooden, and the shouted dialogue consists largely of throwaway action-movie cliches (“Let’s do this”) and B-movie sci-fi jargon (“His bioenergy is off the charts!”).

The threat that this mess of a movie might be followed by a sequel is enough to make anyone cry uncle.

The dialogue is less than sparkling, and what passes for witty repartee is mainly a barrage of sarcastically delivered f-bombs and such insults as “gold-digging whore.” The style of acting would, at a sporting event, merely be called shouting.

A glorified infomercial in defense of the holiday that contains about 15 minutes of actual content padded out with almost an hour of filler.

Save yourself 10 bucks, and an hour and 45 minutes of your precious time.

Mainly for those who are already infatuated with Cena's stoic, Mount Rushmore-esque countenance and who do not find the idea of the big lug leaping off the edge of a cliff onto an airborne helicopter's landing gear remotely absurd.

To call Poltergeist laughable is not the same thing as saying it’s bad (although it is that, too.) It’s just that it seems less interested in scaring you than in making you chuckle. At least on that score it succeeds.

Despite its deficiencies, Annabelle is not without a modicum of verve. It has its unnerving moments, but they’re outweighed by the sheer stupidity and predictability of the story.

But seriously, folks, if you're going to make a scary movie, shouldn't you be able to do it without resorting to both "Blair Witch"-style found footage and movie stars? (Will Patton and Elias Koteas also show up as, respectively, an angry sheriff and a psychologist friend of Abbey's.)

Wild Grass might be the strangest film I've seen all year. Maybe all millennium. Is it any good? Quite frankly, I have no idea.

Sexist, racist, overlong, dull, visually ugly and, worst of all, unfunny, “Kasbah” squanders its cast.

The problem is not the credulity-stretching script. Or even that much of the movie just isn't all that funny. The problem is that it thinks it's freakin' hilarious.

A classic example of a film that doesn't trust the strength of its source material - or the intelligence of its audience.

I Feel Pretty suffers from a fatal flaw: its premise.

The whole thing is played for laughs that almost never come. To be sure, the film has its moments, but they’re few and far between.

It is the story itself that never achieves liftoff.

It's hard to imagine that any self-respecting man would want to sit through two hours - let alone two minutes - of such caustic man-bashing.

There are only two really good jokes -- or two really gross ones, depending on your sensibility -- in She's Out of My League. Both of them are stolen.

If Refn is trying to skewer our cultural fixation with youth and good looks, his blade isn’t up to the task. The Neon Demon attacks, but indiscriminately. It’s sharp-looking but dull, hacking and plunging every which way, yet drawing no real blood.

The littlest children in your house may find something to titter at from time to time, but based on the reaction of a young screening audience, it won't be often.

Escapes is an eccentric portrait of a not especially eccentric — or even terribly interesting — subject: Hampton Fancher.

A comedy that looks like a documentary but plays like a horror film -- to parents of teenagers.

Neither Grint nor the hoax subplot are compelling enough to hold our attention. Perlman, on the other hand, is a commanding, if peripheral, presence, diverting the focus of the film from silly historical speculation to the tale of a damaged psyche.

Jokes about race, women’s anatomy and little people are sprinkled, like rancid pepper, over a script that depends on the inherent humor of cuss words. Not that coarse language can’t be funny, but here it appears to be evidence of a toxic mix of laziness and sociopathy, not defiance of seasonal propriety.

The drug-fueled romp turns ugly, sexist and misogynistic, as so many rap-star vehicles do.

Even the Richard Rich-directed animation -- except for some nice but gratuitous computer-generated walking statues and dramatic ocean waves -- is not appreciably better than Saturday morning cartoons.

I'm not sure if it was that or the cloying script, but after a couple of hours of spinning around listening to this drivel I felt like I was going to barf.

I can't imagine why anyone would pay money to see this sorry excuse for a film, which plays more like a home movie than something from cinema professionals.

It's all too, too cute and too, too forced for words -- not to mention too, too dark.

Anyone with a modicum of good sense -- or a weak stomach -- will take it as a warning to stay the heck away from this literally and figuratively deadly "War Zone."

A feel-good movie only in the sense that it wants to reassure today's white people about our own enlightenment and how far we've come in the evolution of our attitudes about race.

Allegations of governmental double-talk and cover-ups are, unfortunately, boooring.

Too highbrow for the multiplex and too literal for the hipsters, it's unsatisfying both as gothic camp and serious cinema.

Full of the kind of obnoxious chitchat that only self-aware neurotics engage in. Christopher and Grace probably deserve each other, but that doesn't mean that any of us do.

A loud, choppily edited and surprisingly unengaging portrait of speed demons.

There's so much wrong with this movie.

The real problem is not the maudlin script or Madden's travelogue touch. It's Cage as Corelli, a miscasting that turns the normally volatile, edgy performer into little more than a spokesman for the Olive Garden.

A field goal, not a touchdown.

Feels more like "Porky's" with marinara sauce than "Summer of '42."

The story here is just not particularly amusing.

Wild Wild Waste is more like it. Waste of time, waste of money and colossal waste of talent.

Very much like sex. On second thought, make that bad sex. Actually, sexual assault is more like it. It will leave you feeling used, bruised, violated, mistrustful and unclean.

It plays like a soft-core-porn potboiler left over from the 1970s about a hot vampire chick.

For a comedy, there are precious few real laughs. Three to be exact.

It's the sort of movie that can make normally well-read and intelligent viewers feel stupid.

Awash in the kind of pretension that only the French can get away with.

There was absolutely no reason to make a new version of the 1970 comedy.

I never forgot for a minute that I was watching a cartoon, all the way down to the silly, pseudo-spiritual ending, an ending whose very incomprehensibility is actually one of the more endearing hallmarks of anime.

Neither funny nor suspenseful nor particularly well drawn.

Propelled not by characters but caricatures.

So bad that I predict there will be drinking games set around viewing it someday.

The makers of Godzilla obviously devoted so much manpower and time and energy and money to the admittedly fabulous special effects that they apparently had no budget left over for actors.

Here, common sense flies out the window, along with the hail of bullets.

Oddly off-balance, estrogen-powered dramedy.

Its important if inflammatory message will bore all but Chomsky's fellow travelers to death.

The laughs are few, far between and pretty darn faint in this comedy.

The jokes are lame, the set-up is stupid and Bullock, occasionally a winsome comedienne and here a co-producer, is annoying as heck.

Cinematic sleeping pill.

Most of the comedy, such as it is, consists of the uppity Chase acting "street" and the ghetto-fabulous Tiffany putting on moneyed airs. But, if you've seen the trailers, you already know that.

A limp and exceedingly uninvolving melodrama.

Do not be concerned if laughter trickles out of the scary parts or boredom creeps into the funny parts; this is to be expected.

Clumsily under-written and feverishly overacted, it's as embarrassing to watch as it is perplexing.

It's hard to know who exactly Parental Guidance was made for.

A straightforward, B-movie horror flick — “The Snake Pit” without the prestige — complete with intentional overdosing, electroshock torture and patients threatening each other with a sharpened spoons, when they’re not either screaming or catatonic. It also is very, very bad.

I would call the movie a trainwreck, except it’s really four or five separate trainwrecks.

Blackhat is also one of the most visually unattractive movies I’ve ever seen.

There is a faintly greenish fuzz of bread mold at the edges of every frame of this stale exercise in psychological horror (subgroup: homeowner hell).

Director Mark Pellington (“I Melt With You”) at least recognizes that the setup is little more than a freakish showcase for Mac­Laine do her blunt-spoken-battle-ax thing.

A more accurate title would be “Inept, Inadequate and Insipid Comedy.”

It’s hard to know which of the film’s many flaws to cite first, so here’s one thing it does fairly well: scare the bejesus out of you. That’s assuming you have read nothing about the subject of vaccines and autism, and are of a generally lax and incurious mind when it comes to the rigors of scientific inquiry.

As it is, The Divide is simply noxious for noxiousness's sake. French director Xavier Gens and writers Karl Mueller and Eron Sheean almost seem to take a kind of perverse pride in seeing how far they can go.

A largely laugh-free exercise in cliche.

How on earth is it possible for one film to be so tiresome? Spring Breakers isn’t deadly dull despite all the nudity and violence, but because of it.

Insipid, unfunny and cliche-ridden.

There really is no other movie on Earth quite like it. And that's including "The Human Centipede: First Sequence," the 2009 horror film on which this dismal, nauseating and yet bizarrely artful sequel is based.

The film is amateurish on almost every level.

The only reason you'll feel any wrath is because you shelled out 12 bucks for this steaming bucket of half-baked plot, cliched dialogue and disappointing 3-D special effects.

That's My Boy is radical only in its extreme laziness.

The twist is, yes, audacious, even daring. It’s full of risk and defiance of expectation. So half a star for that. Steven Knight, you’ve got some nerve. But none of those things mean that the movie works.

The director, who is the son of filmmaker David Cronenberg, seems to have inherited some of his father’s worst excesses, which are here unleashed in a manner that is sophomoric, fetishistically violent and hyper-sexualized.

"Welcome to the Rileys"? Thanks, but no thanks.

Despite its plentiful and playful sexuality, this dose of Spanish fly is anything but exciting.

For a suspense drama, Impact is a slack, oddly enervated and mawkish soup of largely lethargic performances.

The film degenerates into sophomoric name calling and a brand of insult humor that would embarrass Don Rickles.

An appallingly dull film set in the world of professional racing, director Renny Harlin and screenwriter Sylvester Stallone have found a way to drain all the adrenaline out of the sport.

The movie is really just an elaborate excuse to show repeated close-ups of an elephantine dog scrotum.

There's a thin line between some drag comedy and misogyny, and Girls Will Be Girls, a crass comedy in which all the women are played, with over-the-top abandon, by men, roars past that line.

Hopeless rip-off of Hitchcock's "The Birds."

A hideously unfunny spy spoof with pretensions to social satire in its treatment of a lesbian relationship.

Tries to put your tear ducts in a headlock with a litany of catastrophes.

Involves such a disturbing blend of unhealthy mother-son affection and physical pain that it gives new meaning to the term child -- not to mention audience -- abuse.

True to the film's name, there is one thing I couldn't hardly wait for, and that's the closing credits.

Confusing as heck.

An unoriginal warming over of a skimpy Japanese production that has been re-edited, rescored and rewritten for American tots and padded out to feature length with a plotless short called "Pikachu's Vacation."

A numbingly unfunny romantic comedy. I hated every minute of it

Maybe I should let a role of the dice determine whether I use a cudgel or a broadsword to put this puppy out of its misery.

Unfortunately, the dramatic potential of such a moral quandary is left largely unmined in director Joseph Ruben's monotonous parlor game of will-he-won't-he. [14 Aug 1998, Pg. N.39]

For da love of God, spare me.

From opening to closing credits, there isn't a single genuine moment -- as phony as a dime bag of oregano.

The gratuitous vulgarity is just one more reason that Scooby-Doo should never have left the pound.

A stupid and violent delicacy, congealed nachos and Mountain Dew for the Beavis-and-Butt-head set.