Mick LaSalle

The Persian Version tries to pivot and fashion itself as a celebration of women’s strength across the generations, but it’s transparently something else — a daughter’s attempt to come to terms with a problematic mother. And it’s an effort in which there can be no suspense because Keshavarz’s strenuous effort to whitewash mom tells us that the movie, and the relationship, can only resolve in one way.

The Black Phone has better-than-average acting, an interesting period setting and well-developed characters. But it runs out of story less than halfway through, forcing the filmmakers to repeat the same kinds of actions, over and over, in order to stretch it to feature length.

In the end, Da 5 Bloods feels like a clumsy hybrid of two fine impulses — to make a heist movie set in Vietnam, and to make a statement about race in 2020. Alas, each intention doesn’t serve the other, and so both go unrealized.

Seemingly intended as a celebration of the power of books, it's an occasionally incoherent, sleep-inducing picture that reduces narrative to mere mechanics.

Almost every moment has flashes and explosions and a pulsing, relentless soundtrack. It's like being trapped inside a video game.

Exactly one minute longer than its predecessor, but it's a dragged-out exercise, with no epic scale and no spirit worth talking about.

If you think of Pompeii as a ride, a conveyance for special effects, and not anything resembling an emotional experience, indifference can almost be a good thing.

There's no satisfaction and no pleasure to be gained by sitting through it. The characters are ludicrous and, worse than that, boring. And this is despite all the lead actors doing the best they can.

The young actors are adequate, but they’re not intrinsically interesting, so their interior movements hold no fascination. With that in mind, The Kid Who Would Be King should have been an hour long, but an extra 20 minutes, just to stretch it to feature length, would have been forgivable. But a full 120 minutes for this was just borderline crazy.

It's two hours of your life wasted, time once spent that can never be regained. Don't go. Don't do it. [30 Mar 1988]

Remaking Get Smart for the big screen might have sounded like a bad idea, but the movie shows it to have been something else: a REALLY bad idea.

The movie's promise -- to provide a balanced argument -- goes unrealized, and all we're left with is the spectacle of an idiot bullying a genius.

The real problem with This Is 40 is its lack of truth, that Apatow wanted to express something about married life, and it eluded him. After all, no less than Kierkegaard once said that the actual dynamics of marriage are beyond the scope of art, and he was the best movie critic of the 19th century.

Vantage Point has nothing going on. There's no artistic, philosophical or even jolly entertainment reason for adopting this strategy. It's just arbitrary, a gimmick.

There are chase scenes and car pileups. This wasn't fresh in 1980. It hasn't gotten any fresher.

In the early going "Wild Bill" looks interesting -- an audacious wallow in violence and Western legend. Then 20 minutes in, writer-director Walter Hill puts his cards on the table. It's a dead man's hand.

The opening to John Carter is a dud, a battle between airships made of woven bamboo, bursting into computer-generated flame over a sandy terrain. There's nothing to see, nothing to think about, nothing to care about, and nothing to feel, just emptiness. The emptiness is never filled over the course of 132 long, barren minutes.

Unfortunately, by the time the movie gets around to the parts that might have dazzled us, Emancipation already lost its audience.

Incidentally, this is an Ang Lee film, though, beyond the first-rate production values, you wouldn’t know it. Lee seems happy that he has embraced technology, but what’s the point if the technology is in the service of an empty exercise? He has made one movie like this and doesn’t need to make another.

There's nothing particularly wrong with A Kid in King Arthur's Court and nothing right with it, either. Parents will take their kids to see it and suffer, but the pain is mild.

It's a big disappointment.

Cast adrift in this aimless movie, Ahmed seems lost. His performance is one in an unfortunate tradition of weepy Hamlets, and his problems are compounded by the fact that his weepiness is unconvincing. Each time he teared up while delivering a soliloquy, I felt that he was trying to sell me a used car.

Convoluted.

By the time we get to the last 20 minutes, Empire of Light is so scattered, so without impact or focus, that every scene could be the last. Ending it anywhere would make equal sense, because making sense is no longer a possibility. The movie is a glossy wreck.

There's an appeal here, for sure, but if you're not 8 years old you may never figure it out.

Williamson's script, which he also directed, is spiteful and shallow.

This film never had any business being stretched into a feature, much less one running 106 minutes. At that length, Biosphere is soporific and repetitive and puts viewers in the position of always being two steps ahead of it.

Setting out to make a cult movie is almost as strange as setting out to make a camp movie. Or setting out to make a movie that's so bad it's good. If you know you're doing it, you're not really doing it.

A handful of acting moments aside, Being Flynn is a drama without much in the way of rewards.

Take the worst things about independent movies - the wallowing in an unpleasantness, the narrative unsteadiness, the next-to-no story. Then combine those with a hefty dose of light comedy. The result: the big, fat tonal mess that is Happy Tears, a charmless film about two sisters who come together to care for their demented father.

The tone of “The Exorcism” is deadly serious, but one wonders if the premise might have worked better as a scary comedy rather than as a scary drama.

In the end, what we have here is a Tarzan movie made by people who don’t understand the appeal of Tarzan. He’s about joy and abandon and the fantasy of living in harmony with creation. He’s not about the struggle in the Congo.

There’s really nothing else to say about Gold, beyond one general point: It is illustrative of what’s particularly fun about being a critic in January. For most of the year, bad movies have the same general ailments. But in January, they have exotic diseases. They have things wrong with them that you’ve never seen before.

It has a weak story that provides no tension, feeling or interest. Its opening action sequence is just a long, drawn-out dud, filmed by director John Moore in the worst modern style of quick cuts and smeary, jittery photography.

To put it bluntly, Wiig and McCarthy are funny, but Kate McKinnon and Leslie Jones aren’t. McKinnon, in particular, is shockingly out of place, and she helps drag down the movie.

Higher Learning says nothing new or challenging and is too naive to inspire controversy.

The best thing that can be said for “Kinds of Kindness” is that it’s never quite boring, despite being 164-minutes long and lacking much of a story.

The picture gives us two protagonists and sets up a situation in which only one of them can have a decent life. Then, having devised this sour souffle, the screenwriters find no adjustment to make it palatable. The resolution is flip, at best.

A childish, empty effort.

Woodley has been first-rate in everything she’s been in, particularly the “Divergent” series. But there’s something about her performance here that feels like the sincere and dutiful dispersal of medicine.

Badly made and poorly written, Blended is a rehash of Adam Sandler's 2011 comedy "Just Go With It," only without Jennifer Aniston and without laughs. It not only gets the big things wrong. It gets the small, easy things wrong.

Nora Ephron directed it and had a hand in the screenplay, but without Travolta this film would have no reason for being.

A lot of talented people with the best of intentions got together and made The Last Face, and yet it’s an almost unwatchable flop.

Really, The Expendables 3 has only one thing going for it, beyond the unremarkable novelty of seeing lots of celebrities in a lousy movie. It has Mel Gibson, who is at his grim, tormented and quirky best here, playing someone who has crossed a moral line and has no regrets.

If it happens to hit you right - that is, if you happen to catch its wavelength of tear-and-a-smile whimsicality - the movie will speak to you.

Isn’t It Romantic isn’t romantic, and it isn’t funny. It’s a bad idea stretched to feature length, a gimmick picture that never gets past its gimmick and never grows into something better. It runs 88 minutes and runs about 80 minutes too long.

In the same genre as the Farrellys' "There's Something About Mary" and "Dumb and Dumber," only lousy.

The Signal starts off as an alien version of "Blair Witch Project" and then drifts off into cold plotlessness. But for a while, a little while, it seems like it just might be interesting.

It's a complete mess, the spectacle of filmmakers blowing up their movie and everything in it, because they can't think of anything else to do.

The bottom line with Andrea Arnold's Wuthering Heights is that the writer-director has taken Emily Brontë's tale of undying passion and rendered it passionless.

Why, if Chase is such a funny guy, does he make such unfunny movies?

It provokes nothing but yawns, and the sex it explores is stuff everybody knows about and says, "So what?"

It takes about 20 minutes to catch on that Friday is without narrative drive - and about as long to figure out that the film offers nothing better in place of it.

The comedy, to the extent there is any, consists mainly of Carrey's verbal asides and strained reactions to people. The script gives him very little to work with.

Just about everything in The Chronicles of Riddick is impenetrable, from the convoluted story to the dark and baroque art direction. It's an inane film rendered sometimes laughable by an atmosphere of dead-serious reverence.

As vile, unredeeming and thoroughly unpleasant experiences go, I Spit on Your Grave at least has one thing interesting about it. It's a document of the most paranoid fantasies that urban, Northern people have about a rural Southern people.

Long before the end, audiences will stop worrying about the characters and start worrying about themselves — about when they’ll get to leave.

Eternals is like a movie about a horse race that concentrates all its attention on characters that neither own a horse nor like to gamble.

Liotta's acting can't redeem senseless violence.

Father-daughter relationship lacks impact.

It shambles and ambles, seemingly without focus or pattern, from one thing to the next. Yet at the same time, it's predictable, not from moment to moment, but in its outlines.

To their credit, by the time the movie ends, Blunt and Johnson have made the sale. I believed them and liked seeing them together. They don’t make Jungle Cruise worth seeing or even worth tolerating. But for scattered minutes across this wasteland, they make it less painful.

Boundaries is a slog, a succession of weak and uninteresting incidents, leading to a conclusion that seems foreordained.

Depictions of an aide talking about her hospital vigil and her words of comfort to a distraught Laura Bush are creepy and exploitative -- and borderline disgusting.

There's something painful about watching Scarlett Johansson, who looks as if she never had an indecisive moment in her life, struggle to seem ineffectual.

Owen is a magnetic, sensitive presence at the center of a movie that doesn't deserve him and that barely deserves to be seen.

John Lennon once said, "There's a great woman behind every idiot." This time, I'm counting seven of them.

Has no truth, wisdom or honesty, and it's barely entertaining.

The big disappointment of The Babymakers is that it doesn't come close to being worthy of its two stars, Paul Schneider and Olivia Munn.

As good as The Motel Life is for the actors, that's how bad it is for the viewer.

When Christian Bale allowed himself to play Bruce Wayne in "Batman Begins," he was slumming - and to good effect. But with Terminator Salvation, this ostensibly serious actor takes up residence in the action ghetto, and it's not a good fit.

There are phony movies made every week, but this is in a different category - a phony movie that seems a distortion of something real, a phony movie offered in place of the real movie von Trier could have made, but it would have cost him something. Some blood, some truth, some soul. What we're left with instead is an empty gesture.

Original enough to come up with new ways to go wrong. For one, the film is a blatant showcase to promote O'Neal as a rap artist.

A stink bomb of a movie.

Great to look at but not much fun to watch… An emotionally uncommitted picture that's smirky and mawkish, by turns, and at heart, empty. [14 Dec 1990, Daily Datebook, p.E1]

There are all kinds of dull movies. There’s check-your-watch (or phone) dull. There’s run-into-the-bathroom-to-splash-water-on-your-face dull. And then there’s Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore, which is standing-up dull.

What's completely baffling is that everyone in the film thinks Nomi is one heck of a dancer, even though her one move -- throwing her arms out stiffly -- is straight out of "Dr. Strangelove."

Yet, it's watchable -- not remotely enjoyable, but watchable.

RV is a horrible movie about horrible people, and just because they call it a comedy doesn't mean we have to play along.

Filmmakers can’t depend on funny actors to go out there cold and bring back laughs. They have to be given funny things to do.

"Spider-Man 2" was a textbook example of how to make a sequel: Deepen it, make it funnier, give it more heart and come up with a strong villain and a good story. Spider Man 3, by contrast, shows how not to make a sequel.

No, this is not good. This is just not good.

It's a dreadful exercise, tin-eared and sincere, bereft of any truth or inspiration.

It's hard to tell if Cage's performance is a grand stab at all-out, no-holds-barred comic acting or one of the worst dramatic performances in a film this year. [2 June 1989, Daily Datebook, p.E8]

Dick Cheney deserves better than this — or worse. So does Lynn Cheney, played by Amy Adams, who strains in vain to give dimension to a script that paints Mrs. Cheney as little more than an amoral social climber.

With its flat story, numbed-out protagonist, and faux artistic lighting and set design - everything is dark or moody or darkishly moody or moodily dark - Max Payne seems a good half hour longer than its running time.

By the end A.I. exhibits all its creators' bad traits and none of the good. So we end up with the structureless, meandering, slow-motion endlessness of Kubrick combined with the fuzzy, cuddly mindlessness of Spielberg.

The movie's bereftness of invention can be measured by how no story element builds on another. Instead, Happy Feet Two is plotted so that a bunch of disparate things happen, until it's time to end the movie.

It is a very good performance in a very bad movie.

A third-rate effort, with a weak script, cheap-looking effects and no genuine frights.

Film anybody's trip to Italy, and it would be more interesting than this, or at least equally boring.

Song to Song is Terrence Malick’s first truly awful film. In it, he does all the things that Malick does, except for all the great things that Malick does.

More than confusing. It's opaque.

Approximately the last hour of Dante's Peak is made up of action scenes, and how well one likes computer-generated destruction will determine how well one likes the movie.

This latest from director Wayne Wang, about the friendship of two young women, travels from 2011 to 1997 to 1829 to 1838, in search of a reason for the audience to keep watching and start caring. That reason is never found.

In an attempt to be complex and fair-minded, a simple story becomes a jumble of confused motivations.

To call this effort misguided would be kind. The job this "prequel" does on the original Dumb and Dumber is the movie equivalent of surgery that removes all the vital organs and then gives the patient a prosthetic third arm. What's needed isn't there, and what's here we don't need.

Of course, the real problem here isn’t that Ritchie isn’t Noel Coward, but that he’s not clever or funny in his own right. The Gentleman isn’t offensive, and it’s not even good enough to qualify as coarse. If it weren’t mildly annoying, it would be as close to nothing as an experience can be.

The movie goes to Vienna, to Egypt and to Italy and was probably more fun to make than watch.

It's just horsing around that comes to nothing. No, it's worse. It's horsing around designed to disguise nothing as something.

If, while watching The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, you start wondering why Ben Stiller is acting strange, the answer comes during the closing credits: "Directed by Ben Stiller."

The Dutch thriller Borgman gets credit for being original, but not for being original in a compelling way.

She is a great talent, a legend, someone who has made enduring classics, and just the fact that she’s still working at 86 is a gift. But somehow none of that makes The Life Ahead, coming to Netflix on Friday, Nov. 13, an experience worth having.

North is director Rob Reiner's first flat-out failure, a sincerely wrought, energetically made picture that all the same crashes on takeoff. It's strange and oddly distasteful, at its best managing to be bad in some original and unexpected ways.

The big problem of Good Boys is not that it’s harsh or nasty or outrageous or tasteless or shocking or appalling. The problem is that it’s none of those things, when it should have been all of those things. It’s safe and sentimental, with just a few mild laughs.

The problem with Popcorn is that it's just as ridiculous as the horror movies it satirizes. [02 Feb 1991, p.C3]

As for Fraser, his clumsy humanity is endearing, but by now, assuming he has invested wisely, he should have enough money saved so as to not have to waste his talent anymore.

There's no point complaining that Honey is a tired reworking of an old formula, because it's intended for a young audience that doesn't know the formula.

Witless banter might have won Ginger Rogers for Fred Astaire, but Thompson is too smart for that.

The bad outweighs the good and the cringes outnumber the laughs in Brüno, a disappointment from Sacha Baron Cohen, whose "Borat" was one of the funniest movies of the decade.

No longer fresh -- though that's to be expected in a sequel -- it contains none of the virtues that made the first one anarchic and original.

Cmera work can't do anything about the barrenness of the screenplay, nor the sense of fundamental insincerity at the core of the film. [03 Sep 1993]

De Palma plays both sides against the middle, and eventually the thing collapses. Instead of simply pursuing what seems to be his vision of the story, about a flawed but decent man getting martyred to a corrupt system, he tries not to offend and ends up making empty and confusing gestures. When at the end of this remarkably cynical movie, Morgan Freeman, as a principled trial judge, stands up and makes a speech about decency -- ''Decency is what your grandmother taught you'' -- it's hard not to laugh out loud. [21 Dec 1990, p.E1]

Hellion is so sincere and so dull that some might mistake it for a true work of art.

The movie is a mess.

Lacking the velocity and excitement of an action movie and the reality of good drama, The Mother is the worst of both worlds.

As writer and director, Cronenberg devises for himself a compelling situation, but a situation is not the same as a story. Within 20 minutes, Cronenberg has written himself into a hole, one populated entirely by passive characters who do nothing but get cut up or watch other people get cut up.

In King Arthur, everything goes wrong. The film combines the plodding sincerity of a Ph.D. dissertation with the brains of a high-concept Jerry Bruckheimer- produced blockbuster (which it is), and no one benefits.

Surprisingly, the results are embarrassing. As puppetry, Team America is stilted. As satire, it's gutless and lazy. And as comedy, it barely delivers laughs.

Morgan Freeman's voice is heard as the narrator, which is in itself the stuff of parody. Then we listen and get lost within two sentences, because the narration is so poorly written that Freeman himself probably didn't know what he was talking about.

It's a bomb - not the usual bomb, but a time bomb, despite a 20-minute stretch at the beginning that goes along nicely. [17 May 1991]

The movie's excruciating length is without dramatic or thematic justification.

Not only not funny, it's unfunny. It kills humor. Sit in a room by yourself, look at a blank screen for 90 minutes, and you'll have more of a chance of laughing at your own thoughts than you will at this movie.

Just awful. But uniquely awful -- awful in a way that might just attract a cult audience. [3 Sept 1993]

Metro, the new Eddie Murphy cop picture made in San Francisco that opens today, goes beyond cliched: It's shameless. The relationships, plot turns -- even the action sequences -- are trite and uninspired. Murphy is fresh, as usual, but "Metro" is not.

Even when it tries to be funny, there’s never any point of connection. The emotions in White Noise are neither real nor meant to be real. The audience is always watching from a distance — until, finally, it starts wondering why it’s watching at all.

Has many grotesque sex scenes, interspersed with sights of Chong rambling in a dissociated way as she sits in her squalid apartment.

Damsel is a misguided exercise, a 113-minute mistake and a waste of time, but it does have a good opening.

All the movie's narrative gymnastics can't disguise the fact that it's inauthentic at its core and that its story just isn't worth telling.

A mess.

Harmon proves that he can act stupid, and that's not enough to make the movie funny… You're supposed to like Freddy (Harmon), and you're supposed to like his brainless students… But you hate everybody. [24 July 1987]

It is a mess of a film, botched but also misconceived, with a central performance by Natalie Portman that evokes nothing about Jackie Kennedy, beyond the stylish clothes and the secret smoking.

Someone should steal this concept and make a decent movie out of it.

In essence, everything good in Self/less was derived from “Seconds,” and everything bad the writers and the director came up with on their own.

A frustrating movie, a work of immaturity from a director who should be past the empty gestures and self-protective distance of his early work.

A movie like this depends on clever bits and incidents, but there's little invention here to disguise the film's formulaic nature.

The movie suffers from two fatal ailments -- a dearth of vitality and a story that's shapeless and uninflected.

The bottom line is that the filmmakers are working with nothing here — no characters to speak of, no interpersonal relationships, no story with any suspense or capacity to engage, and no script with any humor or wit. What can they do?

The Road Within is never good. The presentation of Tourette’s syndrome may be authentic, but everything else about the movie — the emotions, the characters, the situations — rings false.

The movie's most inexcusable failing is that, despite all the flashbacks, we never get a sense of what this relationship was like when it worked.

Neither original nor presented in a convincing way.

This picture is disgusting. [15 Aug 1986]

Rarely do two lines go by without Fellowes changing something, always for the worse.

It will bring joy in a way certainly not intended, as one of the most gloriously and unwittingly silly films ever devised by a major American filmmaker.

Nothing but a showcase for the inherent comedic gifts of Cameron Diaz. The problem is she doesn't have any.

What we have in this film is a whole lot of nothing, and the little that's there is irritating.

Another inert, soul-dead action drama that turns actors into zombies...It's garbage.

Lucas Black, who looks as much like a high school kid as George Bernard Shaw, speaks in a thick Southern accent that hasn't been heard on any leading man since the second act of "Our American Cousin."

The moments of action are interspersed with lengthy plot developments that are hard to follow.

Ultimately, the people who made “Lightyear” bet too much on the appeal of Buzz, when they really needed to be deepening him and transforming him. Buzz is no Woody, and to sustain an entire movie, he pretty much had to be.

Saint John of Las Vegas was a bad script that somehow got made into a bad movie with good people in it.

Behind Enemy Lines has a wretched script and a director (first-timer John Moore) who either has no taste or doesn't know what he's doing.

Fly to the Moon is absolutely awful. The only interesting thing about it is how long it takes for a viewer to figure out how bad it really is.

Results are all that matter, and the result here is that The Desolation of Smaug fails in almost every way, as a story, as an adventure, as a piece of art direction and as a visual spectacle.

With the exception of Jessica Lange, who tears into her fairly brief role as a wealthy and wicked former movie star, everyone in Marlowe is directed as if to seem groggy with depression. It’s as if they’re all bored with the story before they tell it, and then they tell it while trying not to fall asleep.

With Hard Candy, the innocent are tortured along with the guilty -- the innocent, in this case, being the audience.

While the plot is worthless and the battle scenes cheap-looking and unengrossing, Wing Commander has clearly defined characters and relationships. In other words, the film's young actors have nothing interesting to say, but they say it well.

Sonatine eliminates the one virtue American action films can legitimately claim -- vitality -- and replaces it with fake- existential claptrap wrapped in an inept narrative.

Going into Sisters, the thought is, “It’s Tina Fey and Amy Poehler. How bad can it be?” Going out, the thought is, “Now we know.” It can be downright awful.

At 100 minutes, it feels about 80 minutes too long, and that’s not a good sign. Lazer Team might have made a fun and pleasant short.

If the film has any value at all it's as an example to illustrate the point that even a mediocre horror movie requires a certain amount of inspiration. At least a sense of fun, a little life and enthusiasm. Dr. Giggles is put together strictly by the numbers. It aims low -- at the floor -- and misses. [24 Oct 1992, p.C3]

If you’re talking about “Venom: The Last Dance,” you know you’re talking about something unimportant. If you’re writing about it, you know you’re doing something embarrassing. But what about the people who made this movie? What level of awareness do they have?

While the original was serious, Old Guard 2 is merely forlorn. Its story holds little interest and, to make matters worse, it doesn’t even end. Instead, it stops mid-story, promising a sequel that feels less like a promise than a threat.

Its story meanders and doesn't build, and the pace is deadly.

They take on special powers that the filmmakers are incapable of making interesting, partly because the characters are ciphers, and partly because the story is listless and uninventive.

The film doesn't make a case for Lavoe as an important artist.

The comedy never really takes off because it's phony.

A limp, slow-moving and desperately unfunny comedy.

It takes a winning recipe and adds some distinctly Hollywood flavors...The result is a botched job.

It's unpleasant where it should be pleasant, convoluted where it should be streamlined, anxiety provoking where it should be easy, and long, long, long - at least 20 minutes longer than it has a right to be.

With The Way, writer-director Emilio Estevez has made a respectable failure. What's respectable - and undeniable - is that this is a sincere effort to make a film of sensitivity and spiritual richness.

Weekend at Bernie's II has the tell- tale signs of a bad film directed by its screenwriter. There's lots of goofy shtick, and the actors seem to have been directed to act silly. Instead of playing for truth, they mug and overdo it, particularly McCarthy, and the result is deadly. [10 July 1993, p.C3]

Story problems tank the new Tomb Raider — small, essential things like lack of motivation, lack of reasons for people to do the things they do, and lack of any reason for the audience to keep watching.

This is a half-hearted, derivative action film with not a single honest artistic impulse behind it.

This sequel goes beyond disappointment into a sublime realm of embarrassment that's beyond and yet better than merely bad, because it fascinates: What on Earth were they thinking?

A ghastly sequel to a charming animated film.

Trust never lives up to its snappy opening. Everything is tongue-in-cheek here - yet it's never remotely clear what the point is or what's getting satirized. [16 Aug 1991]

There was an interesting idea at the heart of Judy & Punch, but the execution is disappointing. This feminist visit to the world of the old “Punch and Judy” puppet shows is tonally off, shifting and swerving when it should be precise and then turning earnest and explicit when it needs to be subtle.

Shanley tries to make something courageous and symbolic out of the notion of jumping into a volcano, but his philosophizing is sentimental, heavy-handed and forced. The idea of doing something reckless and adventurous even becomes a bit depressing when it dawns on you that Shanley may have been taking his own advice with this movie, for less than glorious results. [9 Mar 1990, p.E3]

So The United States vs. Billie Holiday is a misfire, and what a shame, because Andra Day had it in her to be great in this. The movie just didn’t let her bring it out.

It's off in many directions - false in its details, false in its relationships, false in its emotions - but probably the first and worst thing that needs to be said about it is that it's also overlong and dull.

The narrative is clumsy, and the monster scenes are ridiculous, but not ridiculous enough to be funny, just ridiculous enough to be boring.

If you loved the earlier films, these are moments you will hold on to, but they're very few, and they're not enough.

It's astonishing what little impact even the most imaginatively choreographed and well-filmed aerial escapades can have when they're presented as neither an expression of a character's personality, nor in the context of a compelling mission.

I hated this film. I hated every minute of it, and at times it even made me angry.

It's a plodding, episodic film, reverent and sanctimonious, and its pro-Southern viewpoint -- a time-honored Hollywood tendency -- makes "Gone With the Wind" look like a Northern polemic.

Unfortunately, Stuart Baird's direction is so sluggish and Jim and John Thomas' script so padded that Executive Decision has no build. Instead of focusing on the mechanics of suspense, the film concentrates to a boyish extent on mechanics, period.

The movie’s overall aura of cheapness, the cast of unknowns and the half-baked theology all call to mind the low-budget horror of the 1980s.

The only thing good to say for The Forest is that Dormer is interesting, that she creates a different vibe and essence for each sister, and that it would be nice to see her in a better movie.

So there’s nothing here to see, except maybe the white dress that Vergara wears in her first scene.

Director Stephen Chbosky needed to bring this stage musical into greater balance with the film medium. He needed to make Dear Evan Hansen less grandiose. He needed to pick up the pace and chop 10 minutes from the running time. It’s still possible that wouldn’t have saved it, but it might have made it less awful.

If The Creator were any more slanted, any more in the tank for the coming AI onslaught, you would think it was produced, written and directed by AI.

The best thing in the movie is Peter MacNicol as Dana's boss at the museum, a slippery character with an incomprehensible accent. [16 Jun 1989, p. E1]

It’s the kind of torment you can wish on your worst enemy without feeling too guilty, not something to inflict permanent damage, just two hours of soul-sickening confusion and sensory torment.

The film is a failure in just about every way, save for its acting, which is adequate.

There’s no apparent human feeling on display here, just scene after scene of protracted martial arts combat that goes on and on, while providing no rooting interest.

No matter how guilty our knucklehead-protagonist's victims supposedly are, it's difficult to maintain a rooting interest.

Fatal Instinct isn't funny, which in a comedy is a slight problem. The movie isn't funny for several reasons, but the most important reason is that the jokes aren't any good. [29 Oct 1993, p.C3]

A dull, boring, poorly acted, limply written and thoroughly unappealing fantasy, featuring bland characters locked in a struggle of no interest.

Achingly long and pointless, "Runs" is a movie about family that's dishonest in its presentation of every relationship.

It bombs, but not for lack of trying. It bombs for too much trying. [17 Feb 1990, p.C3]

Watching Inside is like being stuck inside a house, unable to escape. No, it’s worse than that. It’s like being stuck inside a house, unable to escape, and Willem Dafoe is there with you.

A graceless, embarrassing effort.

Gerry is ragingly bad art that contributes to a definition of independent film as something no one would want to sit through.

What garbage. Seriously. What absolute, bereft, witless, unoriginal, unrewarding, soulless garbage that’s 40 years past scaring anybody. The only power this formula retains is the power to make you feel a little sad — at the ugliness, at the cynicism, and at the pathetic waste of your own mind as you watch it.

Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez had their fun with From Dusk Till Dawn, and now they need to stay away from each other. For their own good. Forever.

No more than a minute into this, and it becomes obvious that the next 98 are going to be trouble.

It is possible to watch 90 minutes of this comedy without once cracking a smile. [12 Jan 1994]

It's just not enough to say that The Three Stooges is the death of comedy. Rather, it's the death, burial, putrefaction and decomposition of comedy. It is where comedy, once alive, ends up as dust blowing in the wind, like something out of a really bad Kansas song.

A poorly acted, colossal bore of a film that strikes wrong notes from beginning to end.

Proves that it's possible to make a movie so tasteless and so crude that audiences don't laugh. This is worthwhile information. It means there's a limit.

It's so low it scrapes through the barrel and deep into the earth's core. It's the lowest piece of garbage to hit screens in months.

The only people to feel sorry for in Transformers: Rise of the Beasts are Anthony Ramos (“In the Heights”) and Dominique Fishback (“Swarm”) who play actual humans trying to save the planet, when in real life they’re just humans trying to save a movie. They’re fine, but they can’t make a dent in the awfulness.

The result is embarrassing: quick cuts and shaky, hand- held camera work, bad acting and lots of attitude.

Remarkably empty, remarkably noisy, remarkably pleasureless. It's unwatchable.

How bad does it get? How far past the basement can one elevator go?

That the movie becomes silly isn't necessarily a problem, but it also becomes tiresome, degenerating into a series of martial arts interludes -- everyone unaccountably leaves his guns at home.

In trouble from its first minutes.

Gods of Egypt is an epic — an epic disaster.

Directed by Danny Boyle, it lacks even a single moment of charm or interest.

There's nothing here but wreckage. Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows is so ineptly made that the story is advanced solely through announcements.

Only a complete idiot could think Epic Movie is remotely funny.

It's a dishonest satire that manages to be (disingenuously) contemptuous of white people and (unintentionally) condescending toward black people, without ever being funny.

In UHF we get 90 minutes of Al Yankovic, and that's 85 minutes too much. The problem isn't that he's weird, but that he isn't weird at all. The premises for his gags are commonplace and predictable, and his follow-throughs lack imagination. He seems incapable of spinning more than one tired joke from each set-up. [21 Jul 1989, p.E1]

The equivalent of a full-course meal with no calories. It is a mirage of a movie, 100 minutes of nothing.

Aside from being vile and repellent, it's mainly dull - old-fashioned in its shock tactics and culminating in a ho-hum climax.

Duller than first version.

The most thoroughly joyless and inept film of the year, and one of the worst of the decade. We're talking about a disaster, and not of the fun "Showgirls" variety, either.

It's a completely botched effort -- botched in its direction, its writing and editing.

A cynically made, painfully long comedy without a single laugh. It's a film to really make you wonder about Damon Wayans ' abilities as a comic actor.

Even camp status eludes this tepid and misguided picture.

The script is weak and unrelenting. The stunts are unspectacular. The special effects are nothing you haven't seen before. But worst of all, there's the spectacle of Schwarzenegger glorying in the wonder of Schwarzenegger. [18 Jun 1993, p.C1]

Sommers film just lies there, weighted down by a complete lack of wit, artfulness and internal logic. So it's a disaster -- a big, loud, boring wreck.

Cocaine Bear is a movie that will appeal mostly to people who think it’s hilarious to get their dog stoned. If you’re someone who loves to sit on an old couch with a bong between your legs, crying with laughter as your dog bangs into furniture, “Cocaine Bear” might be your “Citizen Kane.”

Attack the Block is the other alien-invasion movie opening today, the lousy one, the one from Britain. In Britain, it's probably just a regular bad movie, but here - with accents that are barely comprehensible and in-jokes about council flats, not to mention a swerving handheld camera and some of the cheapest effects since "Night of the Lepus" - it's surprising this thing ever got released.

As plain awful as Untraceable is, possibly the worst thing about it is that it pretends to mean something.

She's hopeless, he's hopeless, and this movie is just ghastly.

In stiff competition for the lamest thing ever put on celluloid.

The best bits come in the first few minutes -- or maybe the jokes just seem fresher then.

One of the downsides of living in a free society is that every so often someone like Myles Berkowitz gets hold of a camera.

This sixth installment, by far the worst in the series, is bland and deadening.

It represents 2 1/2 of the longest hours on record, a jumbled botch that is so confused in its purpose and so charmless in its effect that it must be seen to be believed, but better yet, no. Don't see it, don't believe it, not unless a case of restless leg syndrome sounds like a fun time at the movies.

The most shocking thing about Harry and Max isn't the subject matter. The most shocking thing is just how tepid it is.

Movies don't get much worse.

Birds of Prey: And the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn is more than horrible. It should not exist. Money should never have been raised for it. The screenplay should never have been filmed. Margot Robbie shouldn’t have produced it. She certainly shouldn’t have starred in it. It’s just a terrible thing to inflict on audiences, who, after all, didn’t hurt anyone and just hoped to have a nice time.

An amazing film amazingly tasteless, tin-eared and awkward, but amazing all the same. Anyone with a predilection for bad movies might want to see it, if only in an inspecting-the-wreckage spirit, since because movies this misguided come but once or twice a year.

It's even less funny than it sounds. By the end, this soporific comedy makes 105 minutes feel more like a two-year hitch.

Despite its actors, its lush photography and its obvious seriousness of purpose, is as close to a form of torture as any film ever devised. I can't think of any individuals I dislike so much as to force them to see this picture.

After 96 minutes with these people, you’ll care even less than you do now.

There's bad, there's awful and there's horrible, and then somewhere beyond that, in its own Kingdom of Lousy -- where all the milk curdles and the jokes aren't funny -- is License to Wed, the latest ghastly exercise starring Robin Williams.

The movie is 105 minutes long but seems about 45 minutes longer, with uneventful stretches and at least three sections where the action stops for musical interludes featuring goopy pop music.

Doesn't work at all. Even the structure is off.

The absurdity of seeing these two young actors impersonating garbage men, combined with a script that's so clumsy it's remarkable, makes the first 10 minutes or so of Men at Work perversely entertaining. But the fun of laughing at the movie fades quickly. [25 Aug 1990, p.C3]

The race is on for worst film of the year honors. Among the top contenders: Men Cry Bullets.

Suspiria is not just a movie unworthy of your time. It’s an experience one should reflexively recoil from, up there with things like fire, pain, humiliation and embarrassment. Easily, it’s one of the worst movies of 2018.

Muddled and endless.

To say Venom: Let There Be Carnage is not worth seeing is not enough. It’s not worth admitting into your life, even as an option. You’ve read a review of it. That’s enough. Now, never think of it again for the rest of your life.

Daniel Day-Lewis has emerged from retirement to do something he has never done before — make a truly horrible movie.

If garbage could think, it would look down on 9 Dead Gay Guys as garbage.

Take a wretched premise. Imagine the worst picture that could be made from it. Then imagine something even worse. That's Alien vs. Predator.

Truly awful.

When the books are written, The War With Grandpa — the first family film to hit theaters since the pandemic — will have a special place in De Niro’s vast and varied cinematic legacy as the absolute worst movie he ever made.

Desperately unfunny action comedy.

An ugly, misguided exercise.

It is a colossal bomb, an epic miscalculation, an excuse for actor self-indulgence and for what sounds very much like bad improvisation.

A comedy without laughs. The people on screen laugh more than the audience. I'd be willing to bet that the average person laughs more during any given 105 minutes of the workday than they would during all of Ski Patrol. Even if they go to Ski Patrol having had a few drinks. [05 Mar 1990, p.F1]

This may be hard to believe, but there's not a single moment of drama or tension in any of the action sequences. And the film is made up almost entirely of action.

Inert, incompetent and emotionally fraudulent.