Mick LaSalle

I got tired of Coneheads early on, but I never really got tired of looking at those heads.

Indeed, it's hard to figure out why this film was even made, beyond the fact that it could be made, that there was a loose idea and talented people willing to join in the fun. It's neither serious nor funny enough, and it adds nothing to Jarmusch's reputation. If anything, it might hurt it retroactively.

Aside from a few moments involving Dudikoff, American Ninja 4 is a formula action picture without appeal, and its contradictions and illogical turns of plot don't help matters. [09 Mar 1991, p.C3]

If this is the best we can do in terms of movies - if something like this can speak to the soul of audiences - maybe we should just turn over the cameras and the equipment to the alien dinosaurs and see what they come up with.

It's one of those self-consciously cute pictures, about as hard to take as a person who stands in front of a mirror and preens all day. [23 Mar 1990, Daily Datebook, p.E1]

A useless film in every possible way.

A Tale of Love and Darkness is a dead film, an eminently worthy corpse.

It's just off, odd and joyless.

The result is a frustrating, boring mess.

Stevens, Fisher, Mann and Dench are all fine. All have good moments. The problem is the script, the script, the script.

RocknRolla attempts to depict a world of ever-expanding chaos. But the chaos is only in the way the story is told. The actual vision Ritchie offers is pedestrian and tame.

The temptation arises to say something nice about Grown Ups 2 just because it doesn't cause injury. But no, it's a bad movie, too, just old-school bad, the kind that's merely lousy and not an occasion for migraines or night sweats.

The goal here was to be absurdist, relentless and light. Well, Barb & Star is light — so light it floats off and vaporizes.

Safe House is an idea for a movie. It's a few blustery gestures in the direction of a story, with five good actors doing their best, trying to hold up the barest frame of an idea, while investing the surrounding emptiness with all the truth they can muster.

Whatever else W.E. may be (lousy, a waste of time, tin-eared, sleep-inducing, occasionally laughable, etc.), it's sincere and ambitious.

These are good moments, and there are a few others, that prevent Tomb Raider from being one of the worst films of the year. But they're not enough to make it worth seeing.

An awkward comedy made surprisingly bearable, most of the way, by one actress' ability to turn on the charm and sparkle.

As Baby Boomers continue to dominate the culture through sheer numbers, you can expect more movies about demented parents. But a good rule of thumb for those who’d attempt such a story in the future should be this: If you want us to care about crazy old Dad, show us that he was once something more than an abusive sperm donor. Show us that he was once a decent father.

A movie with the power to freeze the mind and make anyone watching just want to stagger away mumbling nothing but “This is awful,” over and over, until the pain goes away.

August: Osage County was a three-hour play that felt like two hours. It has been made into a two-hour movie that feels like a month.

There are all kinds of bad movies in the world, but it's really only stardom that can create the exact variety of cinematic abortion we find in The Tourist.

Hartnett is naturally engaging, and one can see why, with the movie plummeting to earth, the filmmakers might decide to pull the humor ripcord. But here it smells of desperation.

A noble attempt that doesn't hang together.

It has the curse of earnestness. It is so sincere ... it is so sincere it could put you into a coma.

In “Atlas,” Jennifer Lopez does everything she can to act her way toward a good movie. Unfortunately, she can’t do it well enough to make a difference.

An awkward hybrid of Asian and American film techniques. It's also an uninvolving story that casts Chan in the role of a fish out of water and gives him little opportunity to show his exuberant personality.

This is strictly formula stuff, made worse by an utterly careless depiction of the characters.

It's monumentally coarse and vulgar, aimed at the mentality of a 14-year-old locked inside his father's liquor cabinet, and nothing about it is funny, least of all Adam Sandler.

Here's the tricky thing about The Strangers. Sure, it uses cinema to ends that are objectionable and vile ... but it does it well, with more than usual skill.

Measure of a Man is intended as a touching coming-of-age film about one crucial summer in a young man’s life. But it’s a movie of gestures and feints, in which we’re constantly being told of events and relationships rather than seeing or feeling them.

The film itself is wretched. A grueling, numbing black hole.

Aspires to the breezy esprit of a Richard Lester comedy from the '60s, but it's a deadly, leaden affair.

Spins an unconvincing, miscast noir tale.

It's the cinematic equivalent of an all-dessert meal: After the initial jolt, the lack of any real nourishment is apparent, and it becomes a struggle to stay awake.

There's nothing here but a concept and a marketing and merchandising strategy, at the center of which somebody - oh, no - had to come up with an actual movie.

Maybe Glazer’s movie will be of use to people naïve enough to believe that nobody without horns and a pitchfork can be the devil. Everybody else will learn nothing from this film.

At times, it actually hurts to watch.

The movie equivalent of an idiot who, to avoid scorn, starts acting like an even bigger idiot, so as to get in on the joke, too...It takes everything and nothing seriously, depending on what the filmmakers think they can get away with at any given moment, and the result, while not painful to watch, is ridiculous.

Represents his (Smith) first act of cinematic cynicism, his first crime against his own talent. With this action comedy, he has given us 110 worthless minutes, a bad formula movie like every other bad formula movie.

Blanchett's performance is Soderbergh's biggest mistake. He either encourages or permits her to play Lena as a Greta Garbo caricature, which is mildly amusing if you're interested in Garbo, but if you're interested in Lena and The Good German, you're out of luck.

An overwrought drama.

This film is like cynicism transformed into celluloid, a movie made without love and with no vision, except of dollar signs.

The film is neither fish nor fowl nor some arresting new entity, but a lumpish coagulation of conflicting impulses and unrealized gestures.

It turns out to be just as bad as any routine French romantic comedy - illogical, inconsistent and sloppily written, a charmless, tasteless, witless waste of time.

A complete washout, a joyless, pointless and fundamentally idiotic enterprise.

The film is glossy, but awful. Frenetic, but awful. Expensive, but awful. ... And awful.

One could criticize A Night at the Roxbury for being a comedy that provides not a single laugh. That would be too easy.

The experience of seeing Causeway isn’t what you’d imagine while trying to decide whether to watch a 92-minute movie about a veteran’s slow recovery. It feels more like moving in with her — invisible — for weeks, and watching as she makes a sandwich or stares into space. That isn’t drama. That’s practically audience abuse.

If Zabeil didn’t want to deliver a formula picture, he needed to come up with something better than the formula.

Standing Ovation is an innovative film in the sense that every minute or so it comes up with a different way of being annoying. Moreover, it often goes for a layered effect, in which it's annoying in two or three ways simultaneously.

The Woman in the Window is, unfortunately, one of Wright’s amazingly bad movies, and this is a shame, with Amy Adams at the center of it.

Thankfully, the movie clocks in at a mere 105 minutes. The Marvels doesn’t have much to say, but at least it says it quickly.

To watch Boulevard is to keep circling back, over and over, to the question: Was it merely an actor’s misguided inspiration, to take a repressed character and turn him into a grievously depressed one? Or was Williams simply unable to do it any other way?

At its best, it captures the last-days-of-Pompei feeling that was in the air at the time — a mix of frenetic celebration, paranoia and despair. But alas, the documentary soon derails into bogus history, specious arguments and a self-blinding variety of political bias.

This seemingly good idea results in disaster. Allen has no insight into the current generation of young people, and his film is just a jumbled rehash of themes and motifs that he's explored elsewhere.

Bastian is a difficult kid to sit and watch for 90 minutes -- self- important and with a shrill voice. The story is all over the place, setting the audience up for things that never pan out and defying its own logic. [09 Feb 1991, p.C3]

SWAT is better than "Gigli," but so is most outpatient surgery.

A sour romantic comedy that arrives in theaters just in time to spoil Valentine's Day. Its plot is a catalog of unpleasantness. Its characters are repellent.

Twenty minutes in, the movie is already operating at a deficit, and it never recovers.

Amateur gives the impression of a sloppy first draft. It begins with a splash, meanders until it reaches feature length, then ends abruptly.

It takes one of the most gifted screen actresses of her generation and casts her out to sea with nothing to hold onto but a hideous script that’s all attitude without depth or understanding.

A whimsical modern fairy tale.

Has a gutsy premise, but no guts.

Unfortunately these characters are stuck in a picture that is little more than a gory mess, heavy on the smoke machines and thunderous sound track, but with no suspense and not much interest. Split Second is just a series of killings that come, one after the other, until the movie hits feature length, and then it's the bad guy's turn. Since these killings all consist of a heart being yanked out of a human body, Split Second isn't pretty. I've long since lost my weak stomach, but this movie is definitely not for the squeamish. [2 May 1992, p.C3]

Blackhat is pretty much nonsense, which Mann directs with such misplaced energy and with such little natural instinct for the material that, for most of the running time, the movie’s problems seem entirely his fault.

Mary is a fictionalized and heavily dramatized account of the life of the Virgin Mary, but the movie’s great and only pleasure is in watching Anthony Hopkins play King Herod as a homicidal maniac.

This is just plain bad - and it's a surprise.

“Dead Men” is a jumble of half-baked impulses.

For all the characters butting heads, all the street fights and all the explosions (there are plenty of those), Street Fighter may very well put you to sleep. [24 Dec 1994, p.E1]

You can watch 100 movies and never see such joyless joy as in Blinded by the Light.

Needless to say, the actors are better than the material.

I can’t imagine who would want to make a movie like this, much less who would want to watch this. It says nothing real about life or death, and it’s not as though it’s telling us something we don’t already know.

Badly made, badly acted and badly written. [07 May 1994, p.E3]

A film with no theatrical core and no integrity in the writing, acting or storytelling.

An attempt at a beautiful film about renewal -- about past love, love lost, longing and rediscovery -- but it has no emotional truth.

Every so often an obviously talented person makes a bad movie, and that’s what we have in Nope. The talent is there, the movie is dead on the screen.

Ill conceived and unworthy (and dull and ridiculous).

It tries to get by on charm. It doesn't.

For about an hour of its running time, The Magic of Belle Isle seems like a tiresome, sentimental and slow-moving story about a grumpy old man redeemed by the sweet spirit of a rural town and by the nice family that lives next door. But no, it's even worse than that.

The appeal of A Rainy Day in New York, to the extent it has any, is nostalgia.

Ugly. ..and unpleasant -- and clueless on a grand scale.

The foundational mistake came when someone said, “Hey, let’s make another ‘Alien’ movie.” Newsflash: The alien concept is dead. Leave it alone, and leave poor Ian Holm out of it.

The production values are first rate. But you will wait in vain to hear a good reason for this movie's existence.

The Ghost and the Darkness could have been an effective film about the virtues of courage for its own sake. But the picture is too lightweight, too posturing and too self-important to go in an introspective direction.

The result is that rare movie specimen, a completely intentional, expertly guided work of art that fails almost completely.

There’s just one big problem here: It Comes at Night is about as enjoyable for the audience as it is for the people in the movie. On both sides of the screen, misery reigns.

IF may have the sheen and aura of an expensive, important production, with a good cast and lots of famous names in voice roles (Steve Carell, George Clooney, Richard Jenkins), but the movie is a disordered wreck that confuses impulse for inspiration and dissipates any impossibility of impact by constantly switching focus.

This isn't pleasant to watch. Neither is it amusing, intellectually engaging, whimsically fascinating, coldly satirical or painfully poignant, though at any given moment in this erratic film director Tom Tykwer might be trying for one of these conflicting tones.

Burns presents two mildly amusing fellows wrestling with romance and expects the audience to see them as embodying universal dilemmas. At the very least, he wants us to take these guys as seriously as they take themselves.

Sometimes it's unpleasant, sometimes it's insincere, and for long stretches it's boring.

Thus, we find ourselves watching an ice-cold movie about competition that contains not a shred of rooting interest.

By the end, Downsizing is one of those great ideas that should have just stayed an idea.

Most of Thor: Love and Thunder is a mess, pleased with itself and tonally everywhere. As bad as one of the better “Pirates of the Caribbean” movies, but that’s still pretty horrible.

It's hard to sit all the way through Aeon Flux while fully awake.

Essentially, this is a two-person picture that falls flat.

The movie’s one and only idea renders itself boring, with still half the movie left for the audience to endure.

A ponderous and dreadful film.

Dreary movie.