Mick LaSalle

The only thing to take from the wreckage of “Lisa Frankenstein” is the performance of Soberano, in her Hollywood debut. She finds comedy in a weak script and radiates goodness without being boring. Let’s hope she has better movies in her future.

It's a strange thing, this type of whimsy. Kari offers us ideas in place of characters, and yet he expects us to see through these ideas to the real-life conditions they represent - and then to respond to them in kind.

As far as formulaic, empty and disappointing comedies go, The Watch is far from the worst. About every seven or eight minutes, perhaps a dozen times over the course of the picture, the movie generates a medium-size laugh. Not a big laugh.

More than the usual bad or even numbingly horrible movie. It's an amalgam of many of the modern cinema's worst tendencies and modern filmmaking's most unfortunate misconceptions.

A single 125-minute monstrosity of a cop movie.

Could hardly be called a success -- it's rather a likable disaster.

Haunted Mansion shouldn’t have been rebooted, but if made, it should have clocked in at a modest 90 minutes.

In the long history of bad movies about bad illnesses, A Little Bit of Heaven just might be the worst.

Michael can't be killed, and so a ''Halloween'' picture can never really end. It can only stop. And since it can stop anywhere, it may as well stop sooner than later. This one stops later, and by the time it does it's hard to care. [17 Oct 1989, p.E4]

There's run-of-the-mill bad, and then there's a movie like Hardware. [14 Sep 1990, p.E3]

This makes Hostiles something of a slog, but a movie-literate slog containing some impressive scenes.

You can almost say it simulates an experience of brain injury in the audience: Nothing adheres, nothing connects. It's just nonstop cuteness, poses and emptiness - with nothing logically following from one moment to the next. It would be exaggerating to call it torture, and yet why split hairs?

Foy is anything but mysterious or feral. Rooney Mara and Noomi Rapace, who previously played this role, seemed appropriately weird, but weird depends on hiding something, and Foy hides nothing.

Happy End is the latest from Michael Haneke, an uncompromising filmmaker whose work is sometimes brilliant and sometimes hard to watch, and sometimes both, but not this time. Happy End is just hard to watch.

Going after one innocent man was bad enough. Going after another constitutes a pattern. This marshal isn't a hero. He's a menace.

Everything connected with the lovers, who are the point of the movie, is either ordinary or unwittingly funny, and the laughs come early.

Wonderstruck should not be confused for a brilliant but challenging film. Rather, it’s narratively deprived and with entire sections that are completely charmless.

The film occupies that peculiar space that many of us would prefer to believe doesn’t exist, a movie that’s worthy but often inert, by turns enriching and enervating: a good boring movie.

You can’t make a raunchy comedy and a sentimental paean to motherhood at the same time. You have to choose either one or the other. Raunchiness or sincerity. Try to do both, and you end up with a flailing, unfunny wreck, like the mix of contradictory and self-defeating impulses that we find here.

Perfunctory, thrill- free sequel.

The character motivations are weak, and the story is poorly structured. But its camera work, possibly intended to distract audiences from the movie’s flaws, only compounds its problems. It distances the audience and makes Jason Bourne a chore to sit through.

It's a tepid, quiet and uneventful film, directed almost in slow motion, with no narrative propulsion and with a succession of very similar scenes. The actors speak softly and pause a lot. And in the background is the steady hum of the soundtrack.

Serious intent may be lurking somewhere in there, but it's buried under layers of stupidity - not just stupid jokes, which is what you want from Sandler, but also stupid, shallow thinking.

One of those comedies in which almost everything good about it is extraneous. There are funny lines and quirky bits, but in terms of story and character, the movie is empty and pointless.

Spirited was never going to be any good, but it would have been slightly better — and a change of pace — if Reynolds and Ferrell had switched roles.

The problem comes down to this: If you take the spirituality out of Ben-Hur, you take the Ben-Hur out of Ben-Hur.

It’s far from the worst movie ever produced, but it’s a one-of-a-kind disaster, and therefore interesting.

Belushi is profoundly unfunny. Opportunities are provided for him to do shtick -- running amok in the jacuzzi, drooling over a pretty girl -- and it's like watching a form of communication from an alien civilization. What is he doing up there? [17 Aug 1990, p.E11]

The strain and desperation are apparent from the first scene.

A wretched comedy about middle-aged romance.

Floats is corny and false, with a script by Steven Rogers that's almost 100 percent artificial sweetener.

A great role becomes an unenviable chore, in which a superb comic actress finds herself trying to sell a series of unfunny comic situations by mugging and pushing with all her might. It's an unflattering spectacle for all concerned.

An agony of bad plotting and whimsical, lifeless scenes.

These people are so stupid that they make us think, well, wait a second: Maybe those livers and kidneys could be put to better use.

The film is intended to be light and whimsical, but with a core of sincere emotion. But it's as if the thing were made by Martian anthropologists who assume that human audiences are as twisted as the people onscreen.

Jennifer 8 is an empty-headed thriller, uninspired, by the numbers, the kind of movie that gets made not because anybody wants to make it but because of a perceived market out there for this kind of picture. People do like thrillers, but they don't like long, boring, vapid thrillers, and Jennifer 8, which opens today, is definitely in the latter category. [6 Nov 1992, p.C1]

But Congo leads to nothing but a fierce battle with the gray gorillas, a kind of guns vs. fangs scene; and a convenient and incongruous volcano eruption that looks as artificial as a video game.

Falls apart immediately, then limps on for 45 minutes more.

It’s just bad. It’s boring, folks.

The movies have been heading toward this for a while, and now with Mile 22 we get a film that is almost wall-to-wall violence. There is very little talk, and what little talk there is is entirely confrontational. People are either cursing at each other, threatening each other or killing each other.

For all it does right, there's something seriously wrong.

You know there is something seriously wrong with Anna Karenina when you start rooting for the train.

A mix of the powerful and the ridiculous, and eventually the ridiculous wins. The movie deals with a big subject that has received scant treatment in movies - the genocide in Bosnia in the 1990s - giving voice and testimony to what happened there. But the ill-conceived fictional elements take the picture right off the rails.

If the first "Hangover" movie were this awful, there never would have been a Part Two. This is a joyless, unfunny mix of comedy and drama, a complete waste of time, with exactly one good joke in the entire movie. It comes in the first minute. After that, you can leave.

“Ant-Man: Quantumania” is a glum, tiresome exercise that follows the pattern of every run-of-the-mill superhero movie ever made.

“Batman v Superman” is an insanely long and convoluted action movie, made worse by an air of importance. It’s dispiriting and visually bland.

A bright young actress, a movie-star actor and a potentially interesting concept gets smothered in 128 minutes of colorful, empty nonsense.

Even worse, Little Joe is a horror movie that, rather astonishingly, lacks a climax. The ending falls off a cliff. The result is not to make viewers ponder the unresolved and wonder what might happen next, but to question how they’ve spent the past 105 minutes.

This is anti-funny, where every attempt at a joke is like a little rock thrown at your face.

The film is kindly and well-intended, but it’s also sentimental and lifeless. Swan Song is a rare movie without a single good scene.

Holes in the script, overwrought camera work, dialogue that's embarrassing, and a plot device that's obvious 10 minutes into the movie - all these are major problems.

Maybe there's a metaphor here, but figuring it out wouldn't make Trouble Every Day any better.

Has no narrative throughline, no emotional spine. It's a mess.

Two awful things about Push are at least interesting: The first is the way in which the story is confused. The second is that the story makes no sense.

Ritchie aspires to be a great British director, but his working his way through British icons — Sherlock Holmes wasn’t even safe — does no one any good. He just reduces them to his own vernacular, his own level, and he ends up revealing nothing about them and everything about his own narrow vision.

Neither funny nor exciting. It’s at best incongruous, the kind of incongruity that seems delightful on the page but not in practice.

Either “Nightbitch” shouldn’t have been made or its premise should have been transformed and built upon.

It's as close to nothing as anything could be while still being something.

A romantic comedy and an adventure story, but in this case that just means it bombs in two distinct ways.

There's just the matter of facing it: that The Perfect Man is just something slapped together -- by people who don't care, for an audience they figure will care even less.

This is not one of the good Altmans. This isn't even one of the mediocre Altmans.

The worst action movies, and this is one of them, are all about stretching out the action.

With Brightburn there’s not even the pretense of idealism. It’s a superhero movie with the soul of an ’80s slasher film.

Mildly caustic, sentimental and slow.

The overall premise, involving mental illness and suicide, isn't all that funny, at least not in practice, and the picture begins to seem labored and long.

The Bourne series ended with the last installment, and now comes a 135-minute death rattle called The Bourne Legacy. It's a peculiar movie, both over-plotted and under-plotted, encumbered by layers of detail and yet with no details invested in or developed.

Drama is as much about perspective as it is about events, and the angle provided by How I Live Now turns out to be self-defeating.

The ultimate failure of Jurassic World: Dominion is not only that it relies too much on action, but that the action is lousy.

Has a vacant, inept, why-oh-why feeling from its opening minutes and only gets worse.

What this film desperately needed was another element in the script, something besides love and sex. Maybe something about art, something that put the lovers on the same team and back into those appealing bohemian clubs. As it stands, love jones is a smart setting in search of a story.

There's not a single moment here in which Nixon is admirable, decisive or appealing. Nixon doesn't work as a drama, but with a little push it might have been a great comedy.

There might be a lot of guts scattered around in Leatherface: Texas Chainsaw Massacre III, but it's a completely gutless movie, without the wit to be a comedy or the nerve to stand on its own as a straight horror picture. It just floats around at its own dull pace, trying this out and that out, as it slowly sinks. [13 Jan 1990, p.C30]

The action comes so fast and furious in Furious 7 that, for all the explosions and overturned cars and missiles fired on downtown Los Angeles, it becomes a dull muddle. Here and there, we get the imaginative and outrageous stunts this series is famous for, but mostly the movie plods along, muscling through without much life or spirit.

Faced with a story that doesn't make much sense, the filmmakers switch gears and try for a sociological statement - something about the marginalized and the neglected. This makes for a funny last five minutes, but sad, too, because Walker was better than this, even if his movies sometimes weren't.

Every so often he inflicts something like Irrational Man on the world, which is so awful you have to wonder if Allen wrote it himself or farmed it out to some look-alike cousin out to destroy him.

The To Do List is a romantic comedy with no romance and little comedy, but with an ugliness of spirit that's surprising and unrelenting.

How many doubts can Lee possibly cram into one motion picture? Red Hook Summer has almost too many to count: moments that go clunk, followed by others that go clang; actors who talk as if reading their lines off cue cards or rehearsing them for the first time; and set pieces that lie there.

The picture, which marks the debut of Mexican film maker Guillermo del Toro, is a dull hybrid - a ponderous art film crossed with a vampire story. [06 May 1994]

It's a romantic comedy with insights into sex and relationships that are old and obvious.

Jack is a warm, heartfelt disaster that shows that life is fleeting but movies can be very long indeed.

Hesher is about as awful as independent films get, a mix of ugliness and unearned sentiment, with a flat story, repellent and pathetic characters and dialogue that consists of lots of stammering and cursing.

110 minutes of Euro silliness mitigated only by the presence of Huppert and the striking ability of the actors to keep a straight face throughout this mess.

The picture, for all its slickness and style, is empty, empty-headed and emotionally false… [It] has no more depth than "Pretty Woman" and occupies the same moral landscape. [5 Apr 1991, Daily Datebook, p.E11]

Ugly, gore-strewn and, ultimately, ridiculous.

A repellent, stupid film.

The Flash gets credit for effort, because this superhero movie isn’t trying to be stupid and convoluted. It gets there by accident.

It's a gorefest, a borefest and a snorefest.

A lamebrained guts-and-glory fiction. [20 July 1990, p.E1]

Has that title going for it, which might annoy or provoke you. It makes me suspicious. It's the kind of flashy, meaningless title that's usually given to drab, pointless films.

The formula is tired, and it’s particularly sad to see Shazam! surrender so completely and pathetically to it, when it might have been DC Comics most human superhero franchise.

There's a lot of bad hair and incoherent, drug-addled remarks, but inside a minute we get the joke, and it isn't much.

Unfortunately, Sucka falls apart after the first half-hour. The action sequences are confusing and senseless. The setups for the action scenes are long and pointless. You know where the movie is heading, and there are no surprises along the way. It's one joke, over and over. [17 Feb 1989, p.E7]

Another dreadful, not-funny Owen Wilson movie, in which Wilson is the best thing.

The Losers is boring. It's predictable. It's so, so active, and yet so, so dead.

The only surprise is that there are no surprises.

As a first-time director, Falcone has trouble maintaining a specific tone - the movie wobbles back and forth between sentimentality and silliness, sometimes even within the same scene.

A bleak, tedious enterprise, shot in earth tones and Gothic gray and blue.

In between the scenes of folks being impaled, cut in half with swords and blasted with shotguns are moments of light comedy, but these moments don't succeed in lightening up the picture but rather make it seem as if it were made by Martians with only the vaguest notion of human sensibilities. [16 Mar 1990, p.E6]

Inside 10 minutes, at most 15, Be Kind Rewind reveals itself as an awful mess, and it only gets worse.

Not surprisingly, only Samuel L. Jackson seems fully to understand that he's in a bad movie, and he makes a virtue of it, using it as an excuse to hang loose, overact and ride the scenes for wherever they might go.

Going into Armageddon Time, I had no interest in James Gray’s childhood. But that was to be expected. What I didn’t expect was to have even less interest going out.

To take such a subject and render it without focus, interest, or joy—to make a long, dull movie from it — qualified as some perverse sort of achievement.

Aside from being annoying, depressing and repulsive, Chaos Walking has a lot going for it. It’s directed by Doug Liman (“Go”) and takes place in a fully imagined other world. Plus, it stars Tom Holland and Daisy Ridley, who are smart and watchable, and the movie does get better as it goes along.

A disgrace to the talents of Robert De Niro and Eddie Murphy, but it's not enough just to say that. It's also a disgrace to the talents of Rene Russo and whoever drove the coffee truck to the set every day.

A resoundingly unlovable movie that almost resists being watched.

A thriller without thrills. It's also a thriller that cheats. The story is stretched to feature length only by having the film's incidents arranged in such a way as to reveal as little as possible.

An adventure in mediocrity that brings together some of the worst current techniques and trends.

Hoodlum is an overlong gangster movie, a bloated and often laughable attempt at an epic.

It's as if there's a barrier between the viewer and the story that never comes down.

The verdict is sad but unavoidable. Poor Things is a 141-minute mistake.

Everything about it is manufactured -- the emotions are false, the sentiments are phony, and the story is a construction of mirthless silliness. It's a product, not a creative expression.

The truth is, “You People” is too confused to be offensive — too inconsequential to merit that level of engagement. But it’s certainly disappointing, virtually from its opening minutes.

There’s beauty here — Virzi is too humane to make a movie without beautiful moments. But a scattered eight or 10 minutes of splendor just isn’t worth an almost two-hour investment of time.

That was probably writer-director Roman Coppola's main responsibility in "Charles Swan," to give the audience a character worth watching. Get that right, and everything else falls into place. Get that wrong, and the audience finds out just how long 84 minutes can be. The answer: really long.

In the end, about the only thing that could have saved “Windfall” was a really good ending. But what we get is something gimmicky that makes no psychological sense and that the actors cannot make work.

A complete bust, but the ways in which it fails are interesting.

Women Talking has a remarkable cast — Rooney Mara, Jessie Buckley, Claire Foy, among others — and it’s grounded in dramatic real-life events. But it’s mannered in its conception and wooden in its execution, and has little to do with living, breathing people.

When it’s not repulsive, The Witches drags, but for one brief yet gripping sequence, in which the boy and his friends sneak into the head witch’s hotel suite.

The effect of the 2 1/2-hour film is deadening.

This is a story that should have been, at the absolute most, 20 minutes long.

The movie asks us to wonder what’s real and what’s false, and what it all means. But it goes on for 134 minutes without ever giving viewers a reason to keep watching. Few Netflix customers will make it all the way to the end, and even fewer will be glad they did.

What we have is the case of a movie with a straight man (Jason Lee) who really is funny, but with a comic (Tom Green) who sadly isn't.

[Pedro Almodovar] gives it a nice try, but his approach turns out to be completely wrong for the material he's working with here. [25 May 1990]

Kurzel and three screenwriters have figured out a way to make Macbeth boring. Now that they proved it can be done, no one need ever do it again.

Australia shows all the signs of having been a labor of love for director Baz Luhrmann. One problem: It's his love, and the audience's labor.

Though the film contains renditions of many of the big hits, they’re so badly performed you’d have every right to wonder what the fuss was all about.

Jaden is not ready for his solo spotlight, and the film is the same action over and over. Another bad movie from Shyamalan.

Wexler gets tired of his own movie near the end of it. The viewer will get tired in 15 minutes.

Identity Thief is not only not funny. It's negative funny. It's short on laughs, but it will disturb and annoy.

Actually, there is one other thing that’s unforgivable. After building up to the great climactic confrontation for two-thirds of the movie, it’s a letdown.

It wimped out by blanding down the story and the characters to the point where she isn't really a shrew and he isn't really a maniac.

A structure might have inhibited Aster’s impulse for meaningless excess. Instead, we get a movie that’s all talent and no discipline, which, in practice, is even worse than a movie that’s all discipline and no talent. At least the latter tries to please the audience; the former just pleases the filmmaker.

A big disappointment.

The worst failing of Corsage is that it makes Sisi boring and unsympathetic when it’s trying to do the opposite. You kind of catch on that there’s something wrong with a Sisi biopic when you start sympathizing with Franz Joseph, who not only was a lousy husband but helped start World War I.

Midway, Mondays in the Sun becomes as dull as a day with nothing to do.

Gradually, FX2 ties itself into a knot it can't undo even with the most desperate of measures. Everything is left hanging, and by the end the plotting is so clumsy it's embarrassing. [10 May 1991, p.E3]

The heart of the picture has to do with the heroes realizing the error of their ways and finding redemption, but it takes a lot for an audience to forgive two murderers. Belly comes up short.

It’s a downer. It’s morally tangled. The characters are as depressed as the scenario, and Michael Giacchino’s music can’t make it better.

A long-winded indulgence in tear-and-a-smile whimsy, elevated above the merely irritating and saccharine by compelling art direction.

Every single thing wrong with John Dies at the End might have been avoided had John died at the beginning, along with all the other characters, transforming an awful full-length movie into a harmless five-minute short.

Its whodunit plot is easily figured out, and its story is a mess. Most surprisingly, its star, Bruce Willis, manages to pull off an entirely uncharismatic performance...Striking Distance passes through boring on its way from indifferent to laughable, with the last 20 minutes the most ridiculous. [17 Sept 1993, p.C1]

A sour misfire.

Why was the sight of scrawny Woody Allen kissing pretty Diane Keaton never revolting, while scrawny David Spade kissing beautiful Sophie Marceau in Lost & Found is the creepiest cinematic sight of the year?

There’s a nude scene that comes out of nowhere that’s almost embarrassing. Why is it there? Like the movie itself, it’s almost daring, except it’s not.

The satire is unfocused, while the story goes nowhere. Too bad. The material is ripe for satire.

A House of Dynamite is an attempt to make a white-knuckle thriller, but there’s very little suspense to it. We have a pretty good idea of how it’s all going to end even before the first segment is over. And after that, we really know it, as we’re forced to watch the same events play out two more times.

It’s not boring bad, but flashy bad. It’s not “I’m sick of this, already.” It’s “I can’t believe what I’m looking at.”

There’s idiotic, and there’s magnificent, but The Greatest Showman is that special thing that happens sometimes. It’s magnificently idiotic. It’s an awful mess, but it’s flashy. The temptation is to cover your face and watch it through your fingers, because it’s so earnest and embarrassing and misguided — and yet it’s well-made.

It gets worse and worse as it goes along and finally ends just as it's becoming unbearable.

Flat and uninspired.

Unfortunately, the best jokes in Loaded Weapon were in the coming attractions. What's left amounts to just a lot of flailing around in search of a handful of half-hearted laughs. [5 Feb 1993, p.D5]

Super- violent, super-serious and super-stupid.

In its second half, Outlander falls apart completely, becoming nothing but a violent, mindless monster movie along the lines of "Alien vs. Predator."

Career Opportunities is a real strange one, a tasteless and completely off-key comedy that has the elements of the much-more serious and more interesting picture it could have been -- if only the film makers had a clue as to what sort of movie they were making. [30 March 1991, p.C3]

On its own terms, the film is overlong, repetitive and lacks impact. Even if this were the first gorilla-in-love movie ever made, audiences would come away vaguely dissatisfied, suspecting there was an intriguing idea buried somewhere in here, but it didn't quite come off.

Ghosted is repellent without ever quite being obnoxious and worthless without ever being boring.

The effort behind Bird Box was to make something better than a standard horror movie, but the result is dull and half-hearted. It’s not serious enough or important enough to transcend the horror genre, but neither is it visceral enough to hold up as a regulation horror movie.

The most enjoyable way to watch Surveillance - "enjoyable," in the relative sense - is to take its awfulness for granted and pay attention to everything Bill Pullman does.

Avatar: The Way of Water is a one-hour story rattling around in a 192-minute bag.

Few pictures that start this well go so bad so fast. [7 March 1992, p.C3]

So you get comments from the likes of Paul Rudd, Adam Carolla and Judd Apatow, all trying to be funny, but not one says anything remotely amusing or worth hearing.

Arrives in theaters today with a sheet over its head and a tag on its toe. So to speak. What we have here is a complete systemic failure, a comedy that's not funny, with action that's not thrilling.

Imagine the worst "Deadwood" episode ever, and you'll get an idea of the general tone of Beowulf & Grendel, which is full of anachronistic cursing, tortured syntax, dark humor and lots of hairy, homely, filthy-looking people.

Serious Moonlight is a tonal disaster, distasteful and sentimental by turns. It was probably a mistake to have Hines try to walk that same delicate line that took Shelly her entire career to master.

Supercharged and lifeless, frenetic and stone-cold dead, a barrage of action scenes that look fake, yet make you wonder if fake is the new real.

The artistic signature is unmistakable — 30 seconds in, you’d know you were watching a Wes Anderson movie. But Anderson’s human connection seems to have short-circuited, so that his irony now bypasses the world and becomes an ironic contemplation of his own work. This is a dead-end, and it’s just not interesting.

Hitman: Agent 47 takes an austere European aesthetic and combines it with Hollywood mindlessness, and the result is like a guilty pleasure, minus the pleasure.

These scenes of raving nonsense might have seemed radical in, say, the 1970s. Now they’re just tiresome.

A documentary that doesn’t have the stomach to tell the story of what happened on Jan. 6 explicitly, and to express the real threat to American democracy that that day represents, is of no use to anybody.

A dreadful exercise, with a script full of contradictions and empty gestures and a leading lady who's such a novice it hurts to watch her.

Gran Turismo is just the same cars, going around and around and around.

It’s rather amazing that Sophie Cookson, who has most of the screen time as young Joan, isn’t detestable in the role. It tells you that she’d be perfectly charming in another movie. Actually, Dench is more off-putting here, if only because destructive naivete is more forgivable in the young.

The Ex isn't painful, horrible or despicable, but it is an amazing mess.

Consists of long stretches of boredom, banal dialogue and contorted metaphors, interrupted by flashes of ugliness. See it if you want to be put off of sex for a month - longer if you're older, and perhaps for years if you're very young.

Neither funny nor outrageous nor horrifying nor conventionally affecting.

A disappointment, a precious and grotesque exercise reminiscent of Jean-Pierre Jeunet's "Delicatessen," only less amusing.

Showcasing three individuals whose spiritual and physical journeys are both repellent and mundane, the film is just a long and pointless slog.

The movie’s failure to engage is illustrated by directors Cristina Gallego and Ciro Guerra’s approach to the climactic scene. They shoot it almost entirely in long shot, as if inviting the audience not to care — or worse, as if admitting there was nothing to care about, after all.

A cute movie, a little too cute and a little too aware of its own cuteness.

It's great to see cherished, longtime stars in big roles to which they can bring so much spontaneity and finesse; you wish only that this movie were sturdier and had aimed higher. Judging from the bloopers that unreel during Grumpier Old Men's end credits, the cast had lots of fun making this movie--more fun, it would seem, than it is to watch.

It’s not like bad Tarantino. That would be too kind. It’s like an imitation of a bad imitation of Tarantino — violent, unfelt and witless, and straining to be funny.

Ultimately, “Mija” fails almost totally, and two main things tank it: (1) the lack of complete access to the subjects, who should have been grateful for the exposure, and (2) too much collaboration between the director and her subjects. There are documentaries and there are promotional films. A documentarian needs to keep those categories rigorously separate.

Ana de Armas is inspired and flawless as Marilyn Monroe, and yet “Blonde” is a total bomb. Intuitively, that would seem impossible, for someone to be that good in a failed picture. Here’s something else that would seem impossible: “Blonde” has seriousness of purpose and a strong director, Andrew Dominik, who clearly made the movie he wanted to make. It’s still bad.

Stone tries to make us like Alexander because he's good, when he should have made us want to watch Alexander because he's amazing.

The first and most honest thing to say about Miracle at St. Anna is that it's an awful mess.

If Soderbergh's ambition was to make us feel just how dull it would be to a woods-dwelling communist guerrilla, he succeeded.

Nothing that works here adds up to anything worth a long slog in a movie theater, watching Pattinson punching guys and knocking guns out of their hands. From start to finish, The Batman is mostly just a collection of bad ideas.

Serenity is not just awful. It’s amazingly awful, which means that very few people will want to see it, but some probably will. People who can enjoy laughing at something made in dead earnest, who can appreciate, in a perverse way, a phenomenal, jaw-dropping mess, may find an experience close to pleasure in this strange, misbegotten, three-headed freak of a movie.

Innocuous and dull.

This is an embarrassing film. It's a sex comedy that sets itself up as a satire of middle-class mores, except there's no truth behind any of its observations. LaBute tries to be shocking and manages only to be shockingly puerile -- tasteless in a high-school-boyish sort of way.

Mostly unbearable.

Still, when you’re making a Christian epic and the best thing about it is the guy playing the inquisitor, you have a serious problem.

It’s a tired, inert sci-fi thriller featuring a succession of escalating action sequences that all, somehow, fail to ignite. The cliches mount.

Franco Zeffirelli's Hamlet, a senselessly adapted, ill-conceived, poorly acted mess of a film that's guaranteed to frustrate anyone who loves the play and to put everybody else to sleep. [18 Jan 1991]

Attempts to convey emotional dislocation and passion at the same time. All we get is distance.

Saint Laurent’s designs and working life take a backseat to scenes of him stuffing his face with pills, accidentally poisoning his dog and sleepwalking through sex with a variety of lovers. Two and a half hours of this. Bonello might as well have shown him sleeping eight hours or using the toilet for all that says about the man and his work.

The Chamber has nowhere to go and it goes there slowly, flirting in all directions.

The picture is a comedy. It's a drama. It's a romance. And it's a vampire movie -- it's definitely a vampire movie....But what it is most of all is a mess. A flat-out, flailing-in-all-directions mess. [26 Sept 1992, p.C3]

The emotional core of the movie, the relationship between Nicky and Jess, lacks impact, mostly because you can’t believe a word that they say, but also because Smith is not a strong leading man.

Promised to be the season's thoughtful action picture, turns out to have few thoughts and no thrills.

I saw this movie in the middle of the day, having had a great night’s sleep, and I had to slap myself awake a few times.

Jaw-droppingly awful.

The film is obvious, weak and scattered and seems more like a practical joke than a work of genuine passion. It is without exaggeration one of the most blindingly boring films I've seen in years.

The Lazarus Effect is not the usual mindless thriller, but it’s as flat as an open soda from last week, with dull characters and virtually every scene taking place in a single location. It looks as if it cost about 12 bucks to make — and somebody got robbed.

"300" was an innovative and imaginative action film, but the follow-up, 300: Rise of an Empire, is nothing but a disappointment.

A discordant comedy that gives bad taste a bad name.

Butter is a misfire. At 90 minutes it feels inflated, and though clearly intended as funny, it's difficult to locate, except in the most general terms, the focus of the movie's satire, and there's not a laugh to be had.

Scorsese stuffs the film with heavy-handed art direction and piles on a ludicrously ominous soundtrack. The soundtrack is a constant reminder of the movie's importance and only highlights its unimportance.

We all know how actors overact when they play Italians, and we all know how actors overact when they play brain-damaged characters, so just imagine Knight's performance as a brain-damaged Italian American.

The landscape shots are impressive, and it's fascinating just to look at the native people -- but after 10 minutes, you've had the experience. Connery is crusty, twinkling and attractive, but in reciting this ham-handed dialogue, the best he can do is be a good actor trapped in a bad film. [07 Feb 1992, p.D1]

It’s a preening piece of work, aiming to flatter and please, while masquerading as something hard-hitting and daring. And because of all that, it’s a bore.

An utter debacle.

It’s a formula movie, which wouldn’t necessarily be a problem, except that it’s a sort of bad version of itself.

Just because it's a conscious commentary on other vile, useless, pointless cinematic exercises doesn't make it any less vile, useless and pointless.

Just awful… There is probably not one interrupted 60-second stretch in which a line of dialogue doesn't clunk, an action doesn't ring false or an irritating plot turn doesn't present itself. [25 May 1991]

In the end, the great fault of Terminator: Dark Fate is that the filmmakers didn’t trust what they had. They didn’t trust how much audiences enjoy Linda Hamilton and Arnold Schwarzenegger. They didn’t trust their audience’s interest enough to let the movie breathe. They thought Hamilton and Schwarzenegger could be seasonings for a dish of the usual slop.

The Village seems poised to become as cheesy in its effects as a low-budget horror film. Shyamalan's gracefulness keeps his movie just out of that abyss.

There’s one unalloyed good thing to be said for Damsel: It marks the end of Millie Bobby Brown’s apprenticeship. Her child actress years are over. She’s grown up and ready to star in movies that audiences can take as seriously as she does.

Director Edward Zwick tried to make a great movie, but somewhere in the process he forgot to make a good one.

The movie is overplotted, a soulless maze of special effects and relentless action.

This isn't absurdity. This is nonsense - and it's as boring as nonsense.

Suffers from a problem in its rhythm. It's not that its pace is too slow, but that it's too regular, and this lack of syncopation makes it feel slow.

It is never remotely serious, and yet for the most part it isn’t funny, either.

One pities poor Molly Parker, a fine actress who was somehow persuaded to disrobe for this degrading and dispiriting Wayne Wang film.

Think of The Bubble as part of a pattern we could have anticipated. Pandemic movies almost can’t be any good at this point. The pandemic won’t be funny, interesting or anything anybody wants to think about until we’re safely beyond it by a few years. So, filmmakers, set your watches for pandemic nostalgia to commence circa 2027, and between now and then, just put it out of your minds.

So desperate and silly that here and there, it's a lot of fun.

The movie isn't hellish, because there's always hope of leaving it. It's more like purgatory, two whole hours of it.

Moon is boring. Agonizingly, deadeningly, coma-inducingly, they-could-bury-you-alive-accidentally boring.

What a waste of a great comedian. What demented casting.

Only Lovers Left Alive is simply dead, an exercise in style, bland humor and vague gesture that yet seems to have been made in the naive expectation of a conventional response - that is, of an audience's actually caring.

If For Greater Glory were a person, it would be wearing two different socks. It is a scattered mess, as earnest as a folk song, but like a folk song that goes on for two hours and 23 minutes. Not only does it never justify its epic length, it gets even the small things wrong.

Bezucha made something perverse, a feel-bad holiday film about a repellent family, with a milquetoast dad and a smug, devious harpy of a mom.

This is bad, borderline garbage, but disturbing, too, in that it’s just the kind of fake-clever awfulness that might be cinema’s future.

An empty exercise.

This remake of the 1981 horror classic starts well, but it soon degenerates into tiresome shock gore that overstays its welcome, despite the film's modest run time. Jane Levy as a heroin addict going through withdrawal is the one bright spot.

The audience has already checked out, long before the formulaic finish.

So, The King’s Man is a mess, purposeless, pointless, witless. However, it’s not obnoxious. At times, it can even be close to enjoyable watching it squirm and try to make sense of itself. It has a genial idiocy and one genuinely effective sequence, involving mountain climbing. So, to its credit, it’s never actively annoying. It’s just, from start to finish, a disappointment.

But throwing fairy dust in our eyes can’t make us think we’ve entered Fairy Land. It just takes a lowdown tale and inflates it until it bursts.

Everything that’s good about Cruella can’t obscure the fact that it was a very bad idea. The movie makes gestures toward style. It has first-rate costume design. The soundtrack contains a series of well-loved but mostly irrelevant pop songs from the 1960s and ’70s. But we still end up with a movie that should never have been made.

Ideally It Could Happen to You should be fun all the way, with the audience confident things will turn out right. Instead it's mostly annoying, with an ending that feels tagged on.

Nia Vardalos has such a warm, alert energy that’s impossible to hate My Big Fat Greek Wedding 2, even as it’s impossible to like it, even a little.

In the important things, in all the ways that really count, Caché is a handsome fraud.

The worst kind of avant-garde film, one that hides its lack of commitment to the story, the characters and the genre under cover of being experimental. It mocks form and plays with form but offers nothing in its place, just boredom, emptiness and the oldest metaphor in captivity, about grass coming up through concrete.

The only thing scary about the new version is realizing that someone keeps giving director Jan De Bont money to make movies.

Anyone can make a bad movie, but it takes a good filmmaker to make one as bad as I'm Not There.

About as weak a movie as can be made without actively trying.

Sollima knows how to film violence, so individual moments stand out. What Sollima can’t do is make a good movie from a bad script.

It plays like a string of cliches linked together to form a movie with not a single moment of surprise or originality.

Efron makes what he can of an impossible role. He’s watchable, that helps.

As an exploration and celebration of a sub-culture, the movie fails. The people don’t seem especially bright or interesting. Whatever fascination Moselle felt for this world doesn’t come across in the movie.

It boggles the mind that after six years of silence, all Tarantino has to offer is this garbage.

What has gone wrong in director Matthew Vaughn’s process that he can offer up an awful mess like “Argylle” and just hope that nobody will notice? He must notice.

Clocking in at two hours and 20 minutes, it seems intended to have been a crime epic in the vein of Michael Mann’s “Heat,” about two men of talent and spirit who happen to be on opposite sides of the law. And it’s sort of like that, if you can imagine a Michael Mann picture that has been set on fire and dropped from an airplane.

It’s awful. But it could be where movies are going — into a wasteland.

This time the martial arts philosophy lesson rings hollow. [10 Feb 1990, p.C5]

Black Widow is what happens when movies abandon human values for the emotional deadness and emptiness of the superhero movie.

Numbing and inert.

A dull film with unsympathetic characters brought together by a gimmicky premise that's handled with no imagination and a pristine fraudulence of emotion. Aside from that, it's great.

Fast Color is not a success, in that it’s not enjoyable as entertainment. It doesn’t hold an audience.

Highly visual but cold. It's undeniably inventive, but also relentlessly fey and self-consciously zany and, in terms of story, it moves with audacious slowness.

An overblown action monstrosity with no surprises, no exhilaration and no thrills.