Michael Phillips

Snyder is not without skills, or ideas, but when a critic finds himself at odds with almost every aspect of a director’s visual approach to material like this, material like this becomes pretty joyless.

I mean, whatever with the “X-Men” movies. It’s hard to even rent an opinion on the discrete strengths and weaknesses of a franchise that has devolved to the point of Dark Phoenix, a lavishly brutal chore nearly as violent as the Wolverine movie “Logan,” and a movie featuring more death by impalement and whirling metal than all the “Saw” movies put together.

This material is offensive. The film may end with a straight-faced reassurance that "no actual Torah scrolls were destroyed or damaged in the making of this motion picture," but it's perfectly willing to exploit the Holocaust for cheap, weak thrills.

For me, the mechanics or even the (excellent) designs are not enough. Jeunet's archness keeps conventional empathy or engagement at bay, and by design maintains a tone of artificiality.

Blunt’s derring-do has its stray moments, and her comic wiles are most welcome. But this is blockbustering from a talented director whose talent has been pounded flat by the dictates of a script in the quality range of Disney’s “Lone Ranger.”

Knight and Day may well suffice for audiences desperate for the bankable paradox known as the predictable surprise, and willing to overlook a galumphing mediocrity in order to concentrate on matters of dentistry.

This is a fantasy grab bag in which nearly anything can happen.

Only Biel and Greer lift it above the level of bleh.

I wish the movie made emotional sense, because it’s all about getting in touch with whatever’s holding you back, but it doesn’t.

It may well be a hit, but me, I'm waiting for "Iron Man 2."

Easy Virtue may be a bauble, as Larita's described at one point, but Coward's examination of hypocrisy demands real skill. The style should suggest "whipped cream with knives," as Stephen Sondheim once described "A Little Night Music." Elliott's film is more like curdled milk with a spork.

"The Misadventurer" is more like it.

The acting's not the problem, and it's a nice thing to find Moore playing a human-scaled human being, with a recognizable human touch. The material has a hint of it too. But only a hint.

How much of what we see in Third Person is the novelist's invention is part of the guessing game that goes on and on. And. On.

The line between cool and cold is a thin one, however. Cool isn't the word for "Thirteen"; it's just smug.

The storytelling proceeds in such a halting manner, with De Niro's speeches going on and on and on, that before long you'd kill for an easy scare.

Because The Campaign tries to say something about truth vs. hogwash in election season, it's doubly sad the efforts of screenwriters Chris Henchy and Shawn Harwell come to so little.

It's rather sweet to think of Filth and Wisdom as Madonna's reconnection to her own boho Manhattan striver self a generation ago, and I did enjoy the last five minutes or so, when the movie essentially stopped and Hutz's band, Gogol Bordello, took over.

It wanders and putters and follows its main characters around.

Aiming for a piece with the raw impact of "Precious," on which he served as executive producer, he (Perry) ends up with 134 minutes of misjudged intensity.

If actors this good cannot overcome their material, then we can only say: Tom Hanks, Sandra Bullock … Max von Sydow, Zoe Caldwell, Viola Davis, Jeffrey Wright, John Goodman… thanks for your honest efforts in the service of a fundamentally dishonest weepie.

I kind of hate the movie’s mixture of bro comedy, sadistic practical jokes (don’t call it slapstick) and last-ditch pull for the heartstrings.

In a year of mass culture that gave us HBO’s excellent “Chernobyl,” Joker can claim the grimmest depiction of a meltdown.

Most of the ingredients for a strong, tough film are there, and they have been sadly botched by a few key collaborators.

It's passable.

The movie's heart, of course, is with poor addled Mike and his kids, but 17 Again works only fitfully to make the Efron/Perry character worth a story.

Stranded in this charmless fantasy, Stiller is reduced to his old halting, squirming tricks.

What could have been a juicy, pulpy noir, based loosely on the real-life 1976 Mustang Ranch love triangle involving Joe and Sally Conforte and Sally's boxer paramour, instead has the dramatic consistency of rice milk.

Formulaic romantic junk.

What’s missing is not simply surprise, or the pleasurable shock of a new kind of ghost comedy. It’s the near-complete absence of verbal wit, all the more frustrating since Keaton is ready to play, and he’s hardly alone.

Welcome to Marwen is a misjudgment only a first-rate filmmaker could make.

The Love Guru”does not bring out Myer's best, and aside from a deft early Bollywood parody, there’s nothing visually to help the fun along.

The pathos really are shameless, arriving with killing regularity and false humility.

Isn't just the weakest of the "Die Hard" pictures; it's a lousy action movie on its own terms.

Rampage is a drag.

It's tough to get on board with these monsters. They don't get the banter they--or we--deserve, and the screenwriters lean on wearying stereotypes.

Dominik drains the complication and, saddest of all, the screen wiles, from a plainly complicated legend.

This is “True Lies” without the striptease or the Arab-maiming.

The slapstick is awful; the pathos isn't much better, though it's far more plentiful.

The film is a fancy-pants muddle in terms of technique. And if Bloom doesn't do something about his smirky tendency to troll for audience approval, his career may be severely limited.

This movie also offers less: less wit, less charm, and only a few scraps of the old movie’s crucial songs (though “Baby Mine” receives its moment, in a campfire rendition).

The music is drippy and constant, the wobble from comedy to drama feels off, and the dialects have been reamed in the Irish press. Charm resists calculation; even if actors get some going, even if a writer creates an approximation in or between the lines, deliberately manufactured charm curdles so easily. The one success story of Wild Mountain Thyme belongs to Blunt, who has yet to give a poor or lazily considered performance.

Black Snake Moan strikes me as hogwash. It fundamentally does not work; its consciously far-fetched, out-there notions of the things damaged people do in the name of love are reductive and go only so far. It's as if the premise were tethered to a radiator or something.

Calling a sequel Are We Done Yet? is like calling it "Enough Already."

Writer-director Thom Fitzgerald's ambitious but hopelessly inchoate AIDS drama is actually three separate, sequentially-told stories.

The atmosphere in Serenity, by design, imparts a slightly uneasy and hermetic feeling. In Baker Dill, who sounds like a line of gourmet pickles, Knight has the makings of a compellingly messed-up antihero. That’s a start. If movies were all start, then this one might’ve worked.

Watching this movie is like spending two hours and 27 minutes staring at a gigantic aquarium full of digital sea creatures and actors on wires, pretending to swim.

The film has one objective: to smack its audience in the face with fleeting, competing wows, over and over.

Compared to so many varied and skillful female-driven hits such as "Bridesmaids," or this summer's "Trainwreck" and "Spy," Sisters isn't worth talking about.

Hit & Run is pretty rancid as comedy. Worse, the chases are strictly amateur hour, all shortcut editing and no gut satisfaction.

A mild and static attempt at sincere camp.

A lot of the rougher stuff, depicting Ig's late-inning vengeance, is sadistically misjudged. It's hard to jerk tears a beat or two after gleeful rounds of brutality, even if it happens to, or because of, dear wee Daniel Radcliffe.

Jumper, the film, goes everywhere and nowhere.

Everything happens quickly in Fatal Affair, since it’s all plot and no character. These movies are what they are: disposable; full of shiny, unstained, high-end kitchen countertops.

IF reminds us how certain key ingredients — charm, wit, clarity, emotional tact and resonance — cannot be willed into narrative existence, or fixed in post.

The pretty, empty, emotionally frictionless and touch-free new Rebecca adaptation may suit the pandemic dictates for social distancing, but the drama fails to spark.

As generic as its title, College Road Trip feels like a first draft, the one the studio brings to the rewrite team that, in this case, never got hired.

Carell's pal and "Daily Show" colleague Jon Stewart has a cameo as himself, one of a chorus of godless media star non-believers who do not see God's larger plan for Evan. Yes, well. At least "The Daily Show" is funny.

The pacing throughout is languid. Your eye becomes fixated on the hideous 70s wallpaper behind them. If only the story's interstellar narrative developments had the intensity of that wallpaper. Rod Serling might've gotten a great hour out of it (the story, that is, not the wallpaper). It simply is not two hours' worth, no matter how many quantum leaps into the unknown Kelly takes.

It's Bay World. And after an hour of Pain & Gain, it felt more like "Pain & Pain."

Here and there, in the father/son scenes, you see a glimmer of an honest interaction. All in all, I'd rather watch a "Ned's Declassified School Survival Guide" rerun.

Because Stonewall turns everyone into a sentimental or suffocating "type" instead of a dimensional character, the results are sheer noise.

The events of the movie may be a little bit true, or a lot, but hardly any of it plays that way.

The first "H&K" caught people off-guard with its canny idiocy and zigzagging, picaresque treasure hunt premise. By now, there's no catching anyone off-guard with these two, except by way of the most off-color and off-putting means possible.

I find Lars and the Real Girl adorable in the worst way, bailed out only by most every member of its excellent cast.

It's miscast, barely functional in terms of technique, stupid and unnecessary. Other than that….

A tedious picture about a remorseless serial killer, played by Matt Dillon.

Just the same auld same auld.

A buddy cop film in which one of the cops continually quotes dialogue espoused by fictional cops, in everything from "Heat" to "RoboCop," and not once is it funny.

A half-silly, half-earnest indie with the soul of a John Hughes-era sex comedy.

The most joyless revisionism since Disney's "The Lone Ranger.

For a while, director Roth plays this stuff relatively straight, and Willis periodically reminds us he can act (the grieving Kersey cries a fair bit here).

Yogi Bear gives cheap hackwork a bad name. Which is a shame, because hackwork made this industry.

Watching Heather Graham, Tom Cavanagh and a stridently adorable Alan Cumming do their wide-eyed, moony thing in the romantic comedy Gray Matters raises the question: Is it possible for a filmgoer to be twinkled to death?

Pure, witless discombobulation.

Only Sarah Paulson, as the Spirit's doctor and sometime lover, seems to be in there playing the scenes as if she were a human being in a comic book superhero scenario, as opposed to a comic book character stuck in a cruddy movie.

Offers only one point of interest beyond the breasts of its second female lead: Aniston's barely disguised disdain for her material.

Kathy Baker, as Burden's elegantly sodden mother, shows the only sign of interpretive life in this stiff-jointed enterprise. She has about five minutes on screen; she's lucky that way.

Life Itself is an emotional mugging, not a movie.

It sets a tone, all right. A lot of gamers (sorry, "filmgoers") may well enjoy writer-director Michael Davis' ultraviolent lark. It's not meant to be taken seriously. But films like this are worth taking seriously because they're genuinely cruddy and hollow and, yes, vile.

This movie is crushingly ordinary in every way, which with Rand I wouldn't have thought possible.

It's the neediest movie of 2011, and one of the phoniest.

The full-on assault on the audience’s tear ducts in much of “Guardians 3″ may be sincere, but the rhythms and pacing of the film never find the beat. We end up waiting for the reductive punchline, or for another round of wanton slaughter.

Call it "Clash of the Whitans," and call it a folly that doesn't have the energy or delirium to qualify as entertaining crap. It's just crap.

In scenes such as hundreds of Natives being slaughtered by U.S. troops behind Gatling guns, we have Tonto and the Lone Ranger acting like a couple of comic-relief ninnies, screwing around aimlessly for laughs on a handcar. It's as if the movie were having a nervous breakdown. At one point the masked man gets his head dragged through horse manure. Watching The Lone Ranger, you know the feeling.

This latest version is le pits.

Not-funniest comedy of the year so far.

A whopper this isn't. It's not even a Whopper Junior. It's the paper the Whopper Junior came in.

The aftereffects of watching Lockout include an inability to focus or to complete a simple declarative sentence without an ill-timed cutaway in the middle.

The preposterous 88 Minutes is a serial killer movie starring Al Pacino's festival of hair.

Without the brute vigilante junk, this 82-minute picture would be approximately 2 minutes long.

Monaghan’s comic timing saves this go-nowhere affair from 100 percent lousiness.

Dominated by Adam Sandler's D-minus Bela Lugosi impression, the 3-D animated feature Hotel Transylvania illustrates the difference between engaging a young movie audience and agitating it, with snark and noise and everything but the funny.

Macy's character finds romance with the Madrid, N. M., diner owner played by Marisa Tomei. They're the only two people on screen who relate in any way. But there's no movie here. There is only a tired "City Slickers"-inspired idea for a movie.

From Miles Teller to Kate Mara to Reg E. Cathey, everyone on screen in Fantastic Four speaks in a flat, earnest monotone with a determinedly low-keyed air bordering on openly not giving a rip.

A funny thing happened to Larry Doyle's 2007 debut novel on the way to the multiplex. It turned into its own ring of coming-of-age comedy hell.

It’s tolerable, I suppose, if you don’t have to listen to it. Unfortunately it’s a musical so you have to listen to it.

It's just a mediocre action movie, poorly edited and larded with a terrible musical score, based on a video game. Nothing new there.

What's remarkable about the remake is its nastiness.

It’s a pity Grizzly II: Revenge isn’t giddy-bad, the way Tommy Wiseau’s “The Room” delights so many. But it’s here, it’s seriously disoriented and disorienting.

If it weren't for Kate Lyn Sheil, who has a couple of scenes as a blase Brooklyn waitress inexplicably ending up in the protagonist's bed, 'The Comedy' might well have qualified as the worst film of 2012.

The vocal characterizations aren't the problem here; the script and the animation are the problems, and in feature animation, you can't arrange more significant problems than those.

As if by deliberate and vaguely sadistic design, Hoodwinked Too! Hood Vs. Evil leeches the fun clean out of the first "Hoodwinked" (2005).

This one's a certifiable soul-sucker, dining out on its characters' venalities while wagging a finger at the horror, the horror.

Shottas exists purely in the realm of rasta-music-video fakery.

Arkin in particular can barely hide his lack of enthusiasm for the material. Some of the looks he shoots his co-stars appear to contain a secret code of some kind, deciphered as: 'Well, at least I'm in 'Argo.'"

At what point might animators be arrested for doing work so ugly it causes aesthetic blindness in millions of younglings?

As Vaughn's therapist mother, Sissy Spacek comes off best. But she's a rare bird of whom it truly can be said: She's always good. No matter how grim the material.

In code, Wonder Wheel dances along the edge of the writer-director’s off-screen life, namely the allegations by Dylan Farrow, Allen’s adopted daughter, of sexual molestation, and Allen’s controversial marriage to Soon-Yi Previn, the adopted daughter of Allen’s then-partner Mia Farrow.

The mayhem in The Mummy feels desperate, mistimed, grueling in the wrong way (the film's violence is infinitely less appropriate for preteens than that of "Wonder Woman").

Certainly Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's creations have suffered permanent damage thanks to Ritchie's films.

It's a mystery why two bona fide comic stars, working very, very hard to keep this thing from tanking, couldn't pressure their collaborators for another rewrite or three.

Gordon, she of the Selma Diamond voice and mournful glare, is by far the most interesting aspect in a picture that might be termed unreleasably dull, if it weren't in fact in release at the moment en route to DVD.

Good Luck Chuck is this year’s low-ender to beat.

Sucks a whole lot of talented people into a wormhole of lousy. The film either needed to be a lot wittier to make up for the way it looks, or a lot better-looking to compensate for the funny it isn't.

Haven't we seen the oh-my-gosh-my-spouse-is-secretly-an-assassin-but-you-know-a-nice-one routine once too often?

The Devil Inside joins a long, woozy-camera parade of found-footage scare pictures, among them "The Blair Witch Project," the "Paranormal Activity" films and certain wedding videos that won't go away.

None of it is funny. It’s all pain and no funny.

Laughing at the freaks and then feeling bad about it is the sole reason for the existence of this pale little film.

Big problem straight off: tone. The violence isn't slapsticky; it's just violent.

Max Payne offers max pain along with min invention, and the only thing that keeps it out of the bottom of the Dumpster--it’s more of a top-of-the-Dumpster movie--is the presence of Mark Wahlberg.

The exhausting slapstick violence is the film's chief variation, and it's no fun at all.

Red One is the holiday fantasy built on retribution, punishment and crushed hopes we deserve right now.

I saw Resurgence an hour and a half ago, and I feel like an alien wiped my memory clean already.

It’s lousy, and a frantic bore, squandering its on-screen talent and making bland visual hash of its preening, recreational slaughter.

Playing the title role as well as the Dream role, real-life Elvis tribute artist Blake Rayne is more convincing when he's singing than when he isn't. But he has little to explore beyond bashful smiles.

Rosenbush strives for a difficult blend of spoof and sincerity with Zen Noir. In the spirit of rebirth, let's assume that the next time he makes it, it'll turn out fine.

Reynolds retains his skittery comic timing, and Jackman (while tonally a little lost here) certainly put in his time with a personal trainer. But there isn’t a single shot in Levy’s film that flows excitingly into the next one.

Writer-director Stewart Wade expanded his festival-circuit short film into a blobby, watery feature-length enterprise, unredeemed by its cast (though Sally Kirkland shows up as Todd's mom).

Revenge is a dish best served cold, as some Albanian dramatist once said, but Taken 2 isn't good-cold, as in steely and purposeful; it's cold as in "lost the scent."

The film may as well be titled "Stephenie Meyer's Waiting Around."

In A Thousand Words the camera stays about two inches from Murphy's hyperactive face, and you start to see the strain and desperation in the actor's eyes.

Plenty of comedies aren't funny, but this one is more than that. It's wholeheartedly narcissistic in its portrait of male petulance and self-pity.

A misjudgment from metallic head to titanium toe.

Snyder must have known in preproduction that his greasy collection of near-rape fantasies and violent revenge scenarios disguised as a female-empowerment fairy tale wasn't going to satisfy anyone but himself.

If any of this was surprising or cleverly timed, you'd laugh and then cringe. In Vacation you cringe first and ask questions later.

It's not just the sound of crickets you hear watching this movie. It's the sound of dead crickets.

This is the worst, least, dumbest picture made by people of talent this year.

Even with 87.5 years to go, the 21st century may never see a stupider comedy than That's My Boy.

Cage is going for manly, if conflicted, family-guy confidence in this role, but somehow it comes off as nuttier than the events surrounding him.

A Good Old-Fashioned Orgy isn't just not funny, it's totally just not funny.

There are comedies that make you double over in laughter, and there are comedies that are eerily unfunny to the point where you start thinking about a class-action suit.

You live in a free country, you put up with crud like Hostel Part II. It truly is crud, though.

Rarely has the question of a documentary's artifice mattered less. I genuinely hated this picture, almost as much as I've admired Phoenix's work in everything from "Gladiator" to "Walk the Line" and even the hackneyed but affecting "Two Lovers."

The most horrifying film of 2007, Bratz is based on the popular line of collagen-lipped, doe-eyed slut-ette dolls and their male companions, "the boys with a passion for fashion ... and the Bratz!" (In other words, they're bi-curious.)

The Happytime Murders is a one-joke movie, minus one joke. The year may cough up a worse film, but probably not a more joyless, witless one, raunchy or otherwise.

Is it the worst film of 2019, or simply the most recent misfire of 2019? Reader, I swear on a stack of pancakes: “Cats” cannot be beat for sheer folly and misjudgment and audience-reaction-to-“Springtime for Hitler”-in-“The Producers” stupefaction.

The result just might be the most hypocritical feature in the history of film as well as the history of hypocrisy, and along with serving beer, I hope they show I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell in hell.

Nothing in this movie is properly focused; everyone keeps talking about a character whom we never meet and does not matter; the tone keeps slipping around from indolent satire to thudding sincerity, and the Challenger shuttle disaster backdrop is queasy-making at best, offensive at worst.