Mick LaSalle

Come Away is an idea that never takes flight.

A pleasant enough "Crimes of the Heart" rip-off about three young women bumbling, stumbling and fumbling through life, looking for answers, smiling through tears, blah, blah, blah. [21 Oct 1988]

This is the best disappointing movie you will see all year.

The movie makes a point, but it doesn’t build on it. And so the movie becomes as dull and depressing for us as it must be for the central character.

Uninvolving. Even the sex is boring. Are these scenes supposed to be wildly erotic? If they are, they don't work. [20 Mar 1992, Daily Notebook, p.D1]

It’s a flat, forlorn movie with occasional sparks of life.

John Lennon once said that because he was an artist, if you gave him a tuba, he could get something out of it. The Face of Love presents us with Annette Bening and Ed Harris playing the tuba. They get something out of it - they get everything there is to get and more - but it's not enough.

An almost successful comedy.

Homefront has craft and humor behind it, but not much in the way of inspiration. Think of a dessert with lots of calories and no nutrition.

It is a boilerplate action comedy.

July also narrates the film, in voiceover, as the cat, and every time she does, it's a white-knuckle thing. You have to hold on until she stops.

Black Nativity is a just-OK feature film that, as an hour-long television special, could have had the makings of a classic.

If you like this sort of movie - and actually, cards on the table, I like this kind of movie - you will not be sorry you saw it. But you will not come away from the experience feeling that you've seen Victoria, young or otherwise.

Instead of slavishly appending cliched horror tropes onto his otherwise worthy script, Franco should have at least taken the horror genre seriously enough to investigate how he might stretch it and make it better. That was within his reach, if only he’d reached for it. Maybe next time he will.

An adaptation not firing on all cylinders.

Wild Reeds is a sober, heartfelt piece of work, sensitively directed and lovingly photographed -- though slightly dull, if we're going to be perfectly honest.

A big fizzle.

It’s as if the film itself is suffering from a pandemic hangover and can’t believe there’s a reason to feel better, even when describing one of the greatest scientific and manufacturing achievements in human history.

The movie is reasonably entertaining, though it helps to be 6 years old.

All this is interesting, or interesting enough, depending on how you feel about Elaine Stritch. If you're a particular fan, this documentary is a must-see. But for everyone else, a little of Elaine's personality goes a long way.

Pet Sematary Two' follows the usual horror movie pattern: The first half is a pleasure, because you know what has to happen and you can't wait. And the second half is a bore, because you know what still has to happen and you can't wait for it to end. [01 Sept 1992, p.E3]

Kingpin has nastiness going for it. There are prosthesis jokes, bad-teeth jokes, ugly-women jokes, sight gags involving vomiting, etc.

The movie drags.

The movie makes something of a case for him, in that he is quite a good piano player, with absolute command of the blues, country and rock idioms, but there isn’t enough here to make someone a fan who isn’t already interested.

A merry, wistful, tear-and-a-smile romp about the Holocaust, of all things.

Anderson almost brings off a picture worthy of his grandiose ambition.

It’s slow getting off the ground, and never completely achieves flight, at least not in the sense of transport. It remains a series of sequences, some terrific and some less so, but at least the movie keeps finding new ways for people to fall off a building while on fire. So there’s that.

A movie that has two good ideas. It needed three.

Strives for an airy, merry amorality, but it never quite achieves liftoff, though at times it comes close.

Most of the bits and performances have a hard time making the transition from stage to screen.

Somewhere in the translation from stage to screen, The History Boys has become an intelligent misfire. What's left is a literate but listless film.

If we're going to be honest, we need to look inside and ask ourselves: Do we really want to see a listless movie about a woman whose dream is to move into a double-wide trailer?

Therapy for a Vampire has nothing to say. It just has stuff happening, none of it repulsive and all of it performed by competent actors, but that’s just not enough.

The movie itself is just a routine showcase, modest in its aspiration and effective within its limits, entertaining in the moment but, in the end, faintly silly. On the plus side, it's only 86 minutes long.

In the end, Venom exists in what may end up being regarded as a no-man’s land — too much like a superhero movie to appeal to people who despise the genre, and yet too deliberately silly to be taken seriously by superhero fans. There’s nothing memorable in Venom, nothing to talk about the next day. But if it happens to hit you right, its lightness is refreshing.

An entertaining film for kids and young teens. It's also a product of the era in which we're living, and weird times make for weird movies.

A perfect example of an Intelligent Bad Movie.

Even as it stands, Fish Tank is a valuable movie, though it aspires to a social insight it doesn't attain and a psychological penetration it won't maintain.

It's all pleasant but fairly unimportant, and then -- POW -- comes the great scene, almost out of nowhere.

The movie is never much more than fluff. But, like director Donald Petrie's previous film, "Grumpy Old Men," it has an honest core that enables it to keep its balance. [29 Apr 1994]

A stupid movie -- but a deliriously stupid movie, which gives it a certain grandeur.

It’s amusing to see what Ozon is up to, but the central character and her problems remain simply matters of curiosity mixed with indifference.

Lacks, a story that makes it feel personal.

Qualifies as a mild success. It's an easy picture to like, even if it's not exactly satisfying.

That's a lot of talent and star power at play here, made all the more conspicuous in that they don't really get much to work with. Not only is the movie just so-so, but the parts themselves aren't much.

It presents a compelling situation, genuinely touching moments and pockets of strong acting ... and dialogue that has people in the audience turning to each other and laughing because it’s so absurd.

Before it degenerates into a complete mess, it's an entertaining mess, and something about its willingness to please maintains the audience's goodwill throughout.

Has the strengths and weaknesses of a one-man show.

As a movie, Escape From Tomorrow is at best pretty good, but the way it was made makes it something unique, possibly memorable.

It's mostly entertaining, and has some strong moments, but it lacks the special magic that a musical needs, that sense of its inhabiting a parallel universe where any wonderful thing can happen at any moment, including music suddenly arising from nowhere. [10 Apr 1992]

Had a chance to be not just OK, not just fluff, but something special, and it's a shame that the people making it either didn't realize it or didn't have the guts to take this movie where it wanted to go.

Self-consciously bleak.

The Gray Man gets better as it goes along, and it contains a couple of action sequences that are as imaginative and well-crafted as any that you’ll see all year. So don’t dismiss it. Netflix it.

An occasionally powerful, yet occasionally frustrating documentary.

As a cop movie it's entertaining enough, but as a social commentary it comes up short, becoming self-conscious and preachy. [27 Apr 1990, p.E1]

Delpy and Scott are able to put it over. She's French and deep and mysterious. He's a fresh-faced American, an open book. Liking them makes it possible to (kinda) like this otherwise routine horror movie.

Though the movie is riddled with memorable scenes of violence, its pace is slow -- too slow. It has an epic sprawl, but it's not an epic. It's more like a bloated fairy tale. [7 Aug 1992]

The result is a film of passion and ambition, but one whose success is intermittent at best.

Even those who despised the original novel should not have trouble stomaching Bridges, while the novel's fans will find the film -- despite some additions -- generally true to what they perceive to be the book's spirit.

Now, thanks to A Most Wanted Man, we discover that it's really boring - practically sleep-inducing - to be an international spy.

As painstaking as a documentary but without the satisfaction of a documentary or the impact of a drama.

In the end, the best thing about The Dragon is that it will make people want to go out and rent ''Enter the Dragon.'' [7 May 1993, p.C1]

If this action extravaganza represents the future of movies, it's going to be a sad, dead and awful future.

The film is too intelligent and well-crafted to dismiss and too good to hate. Some people will love it, and at worst, most people will like it a little.

About one idea short of being an excellent teenage romance. As it stands it's a pleasing but routine effort.

The film remains, clearly by design, a cold piece, mechanistic and only intermittently involving.

As entertainment, On Chesil Beach isn’t remotely satisfying, but it does deserve credit for being weird.

Part of the appeal is that it's so bad it's good: The story is ridiculous. At other times, it's just plain good: There are ski and snowboarding scenes, plenty of them, that are beautifully filmed and exhilarating to behold.

Ultimately, The Duke tells an enjoyable real-life story.

Everybody in Admission is funny - Tina Fey, Paul Rudd, Lily Tomlin, Wallace Shawn - but they're not funny in Admission.

His (George Clooney) rugged good looks spell movie star, but his body language spells Don Knotts, without the wit.

I Origins is at its best when it's a personal story about relationships, and it has a strong first hour.

It does not follow the usual pattern of a Hollywood film. It goes to places that are desperate and irrevocable.

I had a migraine when I started watching Larry Crowne, and by the end, it went away. None of this quite adds up to a recommendation, but it's close. Very close.

A stink bomb of a movie.

Occasionally brilliant, profiting from Fellini's distinct and unmistakable way of looking and seeing. But it goes in circles and wears out its welcome, except for the most hard-core enthusiasts.

Fans of Les Misérables wouldn't have minded if the movie were different, but better, or just as effective. The screen version demanded some reconception, some vision to make sense of its existence. Instead, we're left with a film that is conscientious in all its particulars and yet strangely and mysteriously dead.

Black Sheep is a little comedy that succeeds in its modest aim to provide 87 minutes of harmless diversion. If you have nothing to do -- and I mean absolutely nothing -- Black Sheep, which opens today, is a must-see.

In any case, Fatal Affair is one of those lucky efforts in which everything good about it is good and everything bad about it is fun. The cheesiness is part of the experience.

Though charming at times, just misses, due to a contrived story.

Lush and heartfelt, but compelling only in fits and starts.

It's never boring, but it lacks a cumulative impact.

Dunst is not the only person doing quality work in All Good Things, but she is the only one worth watching.

An attempt at an epic. Sayles assembles a big cast and creates a mosaic of interweaving characters and story lines. But the stories are bland, the connections are incidental and the dramatic payoff is nonexistent.

I like it for the thing it is, a reasonably solid B movie, and I like it as one in the continuum of bizarre Ford vehicles that combine high-stakes action with household horror.

For at least an hour of its hour and a half running time, Fist Fight is a complete failure, a sour comedy without laughs. But then something happens in the movie’s last quarter. It doesn’t exactly redeem itself, but it comes into focus and starts making sense on its own weird terms.

It would be easy to dismiss Foe as a lugubrious downer, except that the reality of its world feels palpable and that marriage seems real. I believed Ronan and Pescal as two people bound up in love, shared history and torment.

For all its weaknesses, Terminator Genisys is a "Terminator" movie that feels like a "Terminator" movie, more than did "Terminator 3," not to mention the ghastly "Terminator Salvation."

Though the film seems less like a theatrical release and more like something that might play on an obscure PBS station at 2 p.m. on a Sunday afternoon, it's reasonably interesting as a personality study.

The bottom line on Joan Baez I Am a Noise is that if you absolutely love Baez and her work, you will find nothing here to challenge your preconceptions and will probably learn some things you didn’t know. But if you’re merely Baez-curious, this documentary will not satisfy and might even make you less curious.

A 98-minute elucidation of a point that's accepted within three minutes.

They can’t make “The Union” better than a genre movie, but they can make it better than a decent genre movie. Also, considering the fact that Berry is one of the most misused and underused major stars of the last two decades, any role that shows her screen personality to good advantage is probably worth a look.

The best thing about Strangers With Candy is its relentlessness. It doesn't back off on its absurd humor, doesn't try to make sense and doesn't soft-pedal the characters.

Alien 3 is pretentious and gimmicky by turns, resorting at times to silly B-movie tricks that undercut its seriousness and moments that can be anticipated from a mile off. [22 May 1992, P.D1]

Mighty Macs further distinguishes itself by, for once, giving a fair shake to nuns, who are treated with respect both in the performance of Ellen Burstyn, as the mother superior, and of Marley Shelton, who plays the assistant coach. It's about time.

Plays like a war movie made in a time of war: too careful, too programmatic.

Search for some independent inspiration, and you'll be looking for a long time.

As a drama - an epic drama, no less, clocking in at 137 minutes - its fascination is diffused, and the movie becomes something of a long slog.

Needless to say, Soul Men has a lot to overcome in its effort to be funny.

While We’re Young is one step forward and two steps back for writer-director Noah Baumbach, whose movies are never less than intelligent but, at their worst, tend to settle for gestures instead of movements.

Henry's Crime has three charismatic actors - Reeves, Vera Farmiga and James Caan - in search of a decent script, and what they find, instead, are a handful of good scenes and lots of room to build their respective characters.

It’s average. If you like this sort of movie, knock yourself out.

With Star Trek Beyond, the rebooted “Star Trek” franchise that features the original crew of the Enterprise, settles into routine sequel territory. This isn’t terrible news, and it may have been inevitable, but it’s something of a letdown all at the same.

The truth is, Studio 666 really is just one joke, and so McDonnell had only one play that he could make here — to take that joke, to hit it hard and keep hitting it, and then get out fast, while the audience is still laughing. He doesn’t quite do that. At 106 minutes, Studio 666 overstays its welcome.

Miss Julie has almost everything — good actors, impeccable sets and direction rich in emotional detail — but it lacks madness and passion, and without those elements, it becomes a mere intellectual exercise.

The temptation to be emphatic about Synecdoche, New York is overwhelming but should be resisted, because the movie really is a mixed bag. A particularly odd mix.

The picture doesn't come close to approaching the near-classic quality of the earlier film.

The real story of the King Richard dig is fascinating, but the movie, directed by Stephen Frears (“Cheri,” “The Queen”), is just OK.

In the end, the most valuable aspect of “Cyrano” is that it shows that Peter Dinklage can do anything.

For all the movie's coarse grandeur -- for all the blood in its battle scenes and the grim historical accuracy of its depiction of antediluvian medical procedures -- the story of Master and Commander feels like something intended not for adults but for children.

To its credit, no matter how self-important and dreary Infinite gets at times, it’s never dull, and there’s always a little sparkle to it and a reason to keep watching.

The first half is a lavish exaggeration of the original movie, with inventive turns and gimmicks and what at least passes for a real heart. And then -- all at once -- it begins to unravel. I don't know what happened. [22 June 1990, p.E1]

Daring and gutless at the same time. It's daring in that it's a romantic movie that's willing to be coarse. It's gutless in that it refuses to paint any of its characters in a negative light, even temporarily.

Saddest, most hang-dog, most depressing movie possible.

Going into The Violent Heart, you must understand that the ending is insanely ridiculous. This is not to say that it’s not entertaining — in a way, it’s even more entertaining for being insanely ridiculous. But by the end, you will in no way be able to regard The Violent Heart as anything resembling a serious movie.

Despite its general intelligence and worthy performances, Kill Your Darlings makes it difficult to see how the Beats ever caught on.

What the movie lacks -- a big lack, not a fatal lack -- is a compelling character at its center. Everyone in Garden State is fun, skewed, strange and singular.

A Korean film that takes an American genre and gets fancy with it.

It’s not a bad film, just, strangely, not a good one.

It’s definitely not for everybody, but even a non-fan stumbling into the theater accidentally will find whole sections here to enjoy.

The most glaring problem here, and the one hardest to explain, is Soderbergh’s failure to elicit any warmth or charm from Zoë Kravitz, who has been consistently appealing in her every other screen performance, from blockbusters like the “Divergent” series to little independents like “The Road Within.”

Befuddling.

The only way Bill Murray could seem less like Franklin D. Roosevelt in Hyde Park on Hudson is if the movie showed him winning a marathon.

The story, a dystopian tale with heroes and villains and lots of triumphs and reversals, is so busy and so inherently interesting that the movie is entertaining until the finish - or the sort of finish. As only the first part of the story, Atlas Shrugged doesn't end, it stops.

Take everything extraneous out of Undercover Blues and you're left with about 15 minutes of physical gags and banter, more than enough to make an amusing coming-attractions trailer but about 70 minutes short of a decent movie. [11 Sept 1993, p.F5]

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.

The film is like watching a very bad play as presented by a very bad director.

The Snowman is ugly and nasty, but that’s not the worst of it. The worst is that it’s boring and makes no sense.

It's possible there has never been anything like it. It contains memorable dialogue, vivid characters and several superb scenes, and yet it still manages to be wrong, a complete miscalculation.

The movie’s stylistic idea gets in the way of its story, and the story is too slim to sustain a full-length feature. And as the political ideas become as self-conscious as the style, Where Is Kyra? starts to feel a little like poverty porn.

It's the worst kind of convoluted thriller -- it can never unravel satisfactorily because there's nothing simple at its center, just more confusion.

It’s just cheap, it’s bad, and a completely out-of-left-field Pink Floyd reference — one of their employees is named Syd, the other Barrett — doesn’t help. It just feels like part of the general sloppiness.

There's only so much Soderbergh can do. Gray's Anatomy is made up mainly of Gray, and there's a whole lot of Gray going on. The story is unremarkable. Gray's observations, pedestrian.

A funny comedy for about 90 seconds. Then Bette Midler goes off a cliff.

80 for Brady is a good-natured effort, and that good nature keeps it from becoming hateable. But still, it’s fairly awful.

Fennell (“Promising Young Woman,” “Saltburn”) is a skilled filmmaker who can put over her ideas. The problem is that all her ideas here are bad — self-defeating, enervating and, in several places, unintentionally hilarious.

Martha Marcy May Marlene is a strange case, a drama that's disturbing and yet inert. Writer-director Sean Durkin builds an atmosphere of dread, which means that he persuades us to believe in the characters and in the central situation. But he doesn't build interest.

The film ends up landing in a confused middle category. It's neither a coherent, discrete work nor a zany tribute to the late actor.

Here's a tiresome feature that could be made into a wonderful 20-minute film -- or, with a few adjustments, into two or three 10-minute shorts.

The story, based on a novel by Victor Headley, is pointless and occasionally ridiculous. And the movie is hardly helped by a protagonist that we’re expected to care about, even as he does an unending series of colossally stupid, violent and self-destructive things.

In Godsend, we have the spectacle of three good actors tied to the mast of a sinking premise.

[Hartley] changes the script enough so that the integrity of his experiment goes out the window. But he doesn't change enough so that the narrative can have any suspense.

The bottom line here is that Cyrus is ghastly in The Last Song, bad not just in one or two ways, but in all kinds of ways.

Director David Kellogg tries to inject energy into the picture with speeded-up sequences and smash-bang cutting, and the art direction is bright and eye-catching. But it's just gourmet dressing on dead lettuce. The movie is unable to balance Ice's aspirations to genuine adult-level coolness in a story clearly designed to appeal to the sensibilities of pre-teenage girls, and the result is bland and often absurd. [22 Oct 1991, p.F1]

Runner Runner is less than mediocre, but it's not repellent, which means that to watch it is to root for it - and to be disappointed.

It's dreadful, but it's a special kind of dreadful -- the kind designed to appeal to intelligent people on principle.

To be sure, The Death of Dick Long is a weird one, in that it starts out intense and gradually loses steam, until nothing really matters and the audience might as well leave. This movie could be used in film schools to teach how not to structure a story.

Bram Stoker's Dracula is a lovingly made, gorgeously realized, meticulously crafted failure. It has big names, a big budget, big sets, a big, thundering score and even big hair. But it doesn't do it. It doesn't excite or fascinate but just lies there on the screen. [13 Nov 1992, p. C1]

The presence of Washington lends the picture a much-needed dose of authenticity. But in the end Virtuosity is disconnected and uninvolving, despite -- or maybe because of -- a climax that comes in three distinct waves. One section seems to be a half-hour sound-and-light show.

Mean-spirited and not remotely clever, though it strives for archness at every turn.

Unfortunately, the characters are so programmatic, the premise so ridiculous and the situations so far-fetched even if you accept that premise that no energy can be built, and the little that's there can't be sustained. Red Dawn is a vigorous but pointless exercise.

Made mostly by white people, it's a film largely about how awful white people are -- just the kind of thing many white viewers will love and consider important. But however you might feel about this kind of movie, Map of the Human Heart is fake merchandise, an unfelt, boring travelogue that covers itself in its anti-racist, anti-war message and then dares audiences to notice its barrenness at the core. [14 May 1993, p.C6]

If you see Alice Through the Looking Glass, prepare to lean forward in your seat just to stay awake.

Tag isn’t interesting at all, but its failure is. It’s the kind of movie that makes the viewer ask questions, such as, why isn’t this working? Why is this bombing? Why is this dying the death? Why am I shifting in my seat just to stay conscious? The movie seems like it should be funny, but it’s not, so why?

What could have been a brilliant short becomes deadly, stretched to feature length. The last hour of Nadja takes on the pace of a stranger's vacation video. In a sure sign of desperation, the careful tone of the opening is abandoned in scattershot attempts at cheap laughs. The film's world is undermined, and Nadja gets as precious, smirky and as boring as a Hal Hartley picture.

In her feature debut, Manzoor does something truly bizarre here, and not in a good way. She gets a whole audience rooting for love to triumph but then tries to make a lovable heroine out of the irrational, malevolent character who wants to undermine everything the audience is looking forward to.

Friedkin is steeped in gore, like some cinematic Macbeth, and it's obscuring his artistic vision.

About as awful as a film can be without being the ultimate awful, which is boring.

Ouija has something wrong with it from the first five minutes.

An action blockbuster that's one of the biggest misfires in its genre since "Godzilla."

Suffers from some of the deficiencies common to first features. It is sincere and earnest but the product of an assumption that the milieu itself is compelling enough to command an audience's attention.

The Adventures of Ford Fairlane, is a stiff, guaranteed to disappoint just about everybody, except those rooting against him. [11 Jul 1990, p.E1]

It’s all about as exciting as watching two drawings fight each other on a computer monitor.

A Family Affair never even makes the case as to why these people should be together.

The movie reveals itself as not merely dull, but pointless.

Goes nowhere.

Has to go down as a failed comedy. It's just not enough of a comedy.

This is how bad Table 19 gets: At a certain point in the movie, there is absolutely no reason that any of the characters would remain at the wedding or anywhere near it. So the movie devises a false reason to keep them in the general vicinity.

Credit the director for one thing. He could have stretched it to three hours, but he gets in and out of this mess in less than two.

With most movies that fail, the fault can be ascribed to carelessness or lack or inspiration or cynicism. But Chelsea Walls, directed by actor Ethan Hawke, is clearly a labor of love.

Coppola has no trouble convincing viewers that Marie Antoinette is an interesting historical subject, but there's a big distance between that and creating a fascinating personality or fashioning a compelling narrative.

Heartfelt but interminable movie.

Here Balasko, best known as a comedian, is particularly satisfying. But the reward is too small on the investment, and the film's resolution is downright irritating - not just a waste of time, but a waste of time with attitude.

Worst of all, in promoting its hero's eccentric journey as a voyage of healing, the movie replaces emotional precision and intellectual honesty with syrupy sincerity and insistence. It turns boring and cute and begs us to love it.

Only in the movie business could someone sell such shoddy merchandise and expect people to buy it. If The Hunger Games: Mockingjay — Part 1 were an appliance, it would be a broken toaster that people would toss in the garbage. Except that analogy is too kind, in that “Mockingjay” would be half a toaster.

Everything about the idea of Mr. Popper's Penguins sounds lovely, and everything about the actual movie is ugly.

Logan Lucky is not a contemptible piece of work. It’s a genuine effort by talented people that never quite comes off.

The Lighthouse is more than four times longer than a “Twilight Zone” episode, and 100 times worse.

Saltburn is a remarkable combination of smart and stupid. Its problem is that it’s superficially smart and deeply stupid. It’s clever and amusing in 20 different ways, but when it really matters, it descends into ridiculousness.

The banter, often Smith’s strong suit, is witless and tiresome, mostly obsessive conversations about minor characters in “Star Wars” and other aspects of pop culture. It’s probably not Smith’s intention, but we end up feeling sorry for the characters, that they inhabit such a tiny mental landscape.