Nathan Rabin

Any pretensions of satire, moral ambiguity, or social commentary get lost in a hurricane of empty, mindless spectacle.

Limply, tardily trying to cash in on the success of the Indiana Jones movies.

The boys similarly deserve very minor props for choosing a satirical target that lends itself to satire: the glum, self-important Twilight novels and movies. Sadly, that's where the filmmakers' mild accomplishments end and the groaningly predictable hackwork begins.

The film is too violent and dark for kids but too juvenile and bland for grown-ups.

Explores love in all its myriad forms, from the sickeningly sappy to the cornball to the groaningly precious and obnoxiously cute.

So why is The Paperboy so bizarrely dull? It's as if the filmmakers combined 18 different kinds of scalding-hot peppers, yet inexplicably emerged with oatmeal.

The Possession attempts to breathe new life into a creaky old subgenre by taking its exorcist and demon from Jewish mythology, but even this backfires: The casting of Jewish reggae star Matisyahu would be distracting even if he weren't introduced singing softly to himself.

Tony Scott’s bracingly awful remake/desecration of the classic ‘70s thriller.

Forever Mine explores many of Schrader's pet themes—obsession, revenge, jealousy, betrayal, guilt—but they've seldom felt as empty, shallow, or ridiculous.

Roberts blunders amiably and cluelessly through his amateurish eyesore of a documentary on society's obsession with beauty, perpetually searching for a thesis that will transform a shambling mess of half-baked thoughts and pointless digressions into a real documentary.

Wrath Of The Titans is shopworn and derivative even by the degraded standards of contemporary blockbuster filmmaking.

Saw has shown a ferocious unwillingness to evolve.

It's a struggle with quasi-profound ramifications that crystallizes Prince's long-standing obsession with sin and salvation, sex and Godliness, the hungers of the body and the demands of the spirit. Or, at least, it should be. Instead it plays like a cartoon parody of Prince's soft-headed spiritual concerns.

Girl In Progress is ultimately less interested in subverting the clichés of the genre than in recycling them. It wants audiences to know it's in on the joke though it's not always apparent that there even is a joke in the first place.

It's all quirk, posturing, attitude, and needless exertion signifying nothing beyond its own sad need to impress.

Never remotely frightening.

Zellweger has come an awful long way since Matthew McConaughey terrorized her in "Texas Chainsaw Masscare": The Next Generation, but not quite as far as she might like to imagine.

The almost perversely colorblind College Road Trip represents a strange milestone in black film.

The Brave ultimately plays like the world’s most depressing remake of Joe Versus The Volcano, with all the joy and whimsy replaced by gloom and grime. It’s a morbid, maudlin oddity that starts off slowly and never finds its footing.

The Big Hit goes beyond the call of duty in terms of hateful, crass exploitation.

Made with just enough craft to keep it from being the instantly dated camp howler its title promises, but it's quickly apparent that there's no thought or originality under its grim, familiar surface.

A bad-movie-lover's heaven, and a good-movie-lover's hell.

Astonishingly boring.

Essentially "Bring It On" minus the effervescence, star power, energy, and brisk pace -- in other words, everything that made it bearable.

47 Ronin is elephantine and lumbering, a wobbly, would-be epic that aspires to the scope and majesty of The Lord Of The Rings trilogy, but comes up woefully short.

A nasty black comedy whose relentlessly glossy exterior recalls both Araki and John Waters without the wit or smarts of either...As a black comedy, Jawbreaker has one major flaw: It's not funny.

A mess, a poorly paced, poorly structured, lukewarm comedy-drama that fails even to capitalize on the cheap nostalgia inherent in its plot.

It’s simply tacky consumer product that dishonors the famous name in its title—the same one that’s keeping this film from the direct-to-video burial it deserves.

Urban Legend has an undeniably clever premise, which plays on a sort of cultural mythology shared by the filmmakers and the ostensibly media-savvy audience, but it fails to do anything interesting with it.

TMNT confuses “dimly lit” for “gritty” and humorless for substantive. It’s afraid of being too fun or too light, and doesn’t seem to know whether it wants to be a Nolan film or a 21 Jump Street-style spoof.

Reynolds and Reid's white-bread romance begs to be left on the cutting-room floor, but then again, so does just about every other scene in Van Wilder, which distinguishes itself only in featuring a level of ejaculate rarely found outside of hardcore porn.

Let’s Be Cops takes its premise in the dullest, most predictable direction imaginable, as a wacky mismatched-buddy-cop movie pitched to the lowest common denominator.

The film’s reliance on formula and stereotypes wouldn’t be so frustrating if that formula worked and provided the glib pleasures the filmmakers are going for; instead, Ping Pong Summer feels stilted, undernourished, and oddly sour.

The Independent Film Channel is distributing Girls Will Be Girls; perhaps its executives failed to realize that this kind of mirthless, tacky independent film sends traumatized audiences racing back to the glossy production values on display at the local multiplex.

Sadly, it's yet another intercultural mishmash that hopes for its iconic star's charisma to overcome a dire script, cardboard characters, indifferently directed action scenes, and an atrocious villain buried under layers of unconvincing old-man makeup.

Myers returns as his menagerie of repulsive characters, but this time, his frantic mugging feels more like an insipid parlor trick than ever.

Any social good the film might do gets lost in a soupy morass of histrionics, clumsy storytelling, overripe dialogue, and rampant didacticism.

Repentance lurches unsteadily to a foregone conclusion that isn’t the riveting twist the filmmakers imagined: It’s the final, predictable disappointment in a film full of them.

An uncomfortable-looking Lee soldiers doggedly through a thankless role, while Green, though never particularly funny, at least brings off-kilter energy to a role that provides Stealing Harvard's only spark of spontaneity.

Laughably awful.

this old-school international hodgepodge production is weighed down by a lumbering humorlessness and a glacial pace that makes it seem far longer than its 115 minutes.

Mean-spirited and stagy where "Psycho Beach Party" was cinematic and charming, Die, Mommie, Die recycles gags from Busch's screenwriting debut--from transparently phony rear projection to a character's crippling constipation--and the law of diminishing returns kicks in pretty hard.

Garai's flowery, overwritten narration proves irritating in the movie's first half, then unfortunately sets the tone for a fatal second-half descent into soap operatics, dippy dialogue, and airless melodrama.

Deconstructing Harry is a mess: a shambling, narcissistic, sexist romp that is, worst of all, almost entirely devoid of laughs.

Wholly devoid of suspense or chills, The Skeleton Key simply bides its time until its big final plot twist, but the filmmakers don't seem to realize that a second-rate twist can't redeem a third-rate fright flick.

The worst Hanukkah movie ever made, Adam Sandler's Eight Crazy Nights does for the holiday what "Santa Claus: The Movie" did for Christmas.

The film doesn’t feel like a fresh riff on familiar tropes so much as a bad cover of Pulp Fiction.

Better Living Through Chemistry suggests a new cinematic rule: the more impressed a movie is with itself, the less likely it is to impress a discriminating audience liable to have seen all its silly little tricks before.

In the midst of this comic black hole, only Snoop Dogg and Method Man emerge unscathed, as even material this bad can't mask their languid, long-limbed charisma.

Schwartzman steals Slackers without much effort, but it's not worth the theft.

I do not invoke the terms “Gestapo” or “genocide” lightly; for an ostensible romp aimed at small children, Guardian Of The Highlands is an incredibly dark, disturbing film that derives all of its suspense from putting adorable animals in horrible peril.

While “Final Destination” was gimmicky enough, its sequel begins with the same flawed premise, then piles on layers of contrivances until it reaches a level of implausibility rarely seen outside of films pitting giant radioactive monsters against each other.

When the film ends after a mere eighty-one minutes it feels like Toback and company simply gave up and decided to let the audience go home twenty minutes early as a covert apology for the film they just endured, a glum little trifle that fails as both a James Toback movie and a Molly Ringwald vehicle.

Perversely low-budget and oddly devoid of imagination, Vice seems less like a proper film than a bargain-basement SyFy pilot, shot on the cheap and drafting off Willis and Jane’s star power. It’s about androids aching to be real, but it doesn’t have an ounce of genuine humanity in its tin heart.

Spears is filmed and costumed in such a harsh, unflattering manner that it looks like Christina Aguilera bribed the crew to make her rival look as hideous as possible. Spears' ubiquity has spawned an inevitable backlash, but the awful Crossroads ought to do more harm to her career than even the most powerful Britney-basher.

The film’s lazy reliance on distraction extends to keeping its female lead underwritten and unsympathetic.

Made In America is a puff piece, a shallow, insufferable exercise in hagiography that seems to operate under the delusion that a festival bill combining rock, pop, and rap acts represents a dazzling innovation, not the status quo for festivals like Lollapalooza, Coachella, Bonnaroo, and countless others.

Unfinished Business aspires to high-spirited antics, but it feels defeated and exhausted from the very start.

Anyone older than eight is likely to find it a ridiculously extravagant exercise in stupidity.

The humor is seldom character-based: It’s more a matter of actors saying whatever outrageous thing springs to mind at that moment.

Big Fat Liar's screenplay, co-written by Robbins and fellow Head Of The Class alumnus Dan Schneider, is a model of comic inefficiency. Like a Rube Goldberg contraption, it goes to excruciating, wildly implausible lengths for the flimsiest of payoffs.

A surreal piece of silliness.

It is much less understandable, and not at all forgivable, that in eschewing the culture-clash comedy of the first film for generic action, the filmmakers forgot they were making a comedy at all.

Wasted comedy ringers Eugene Levy and Cheri Oteri co-star.

Celebrity is a waste, a tedious and depressingly routine film by a filmmaker on a steep, possibly permanent artistic decline.

Meet The Fockers has assembled a historic, once-in-a-lifetime cast, then stranded them in the laziest, most mercenary kind of sequel imaginable. It's like the 1927 Yankees taking on the Special Olympics softball team.

A tone of lurid idiocy permeates Trapped, a Z-grade woman-in-peril thriller starring scenery-chewing Kevin Bacon.

In the past, James at least had likability on his side. He was a big, lumbering oaf, the ideal drinking buddy. But there’s an arrogance to the way he treats people here, particularly a gorgeous hotel employee he’s convinced is in love with him, that renders him strangely unsympathetic.

Parental Guidance is the abysmal grandpa/grandkids bonding comedy he's (Crystal) been destined to make since he first started creating new comedy with an unmistakable old-person smell.

A punishingly awful slasher film with monosyllabic banter dreadful enough to make viewers yearn for the sophisticated repartee of earlier Dark efforts like "White Bunbusters."

At an egregious 106 minutes, Joe Dirt 2 feels like a director’s cut where every single moment of footage was carefully preserved, no matter how pointless or unfunny or digressive it might be.

The Chaperone is being marketed as a comedy, though no one seems to have told anyone involved.

Thinner’s problems begin with a grotesquely unconvincing fat suit and makeup that make Burke look less like a big man battling obesity than a melting marshmallow man. The plug really should have been pulled on Thinner after the first makeup and prosthetics tests, since the bad design digs the film into a hole it never begins to shimmy its way out.

The sketches aren't united by a half-ignored framing device, so much as by an enduring fascination with bodily functions. Movie 43 is the most star-studded collection of jokes involving menstruation, flatulence, incest, bestiality, Snooki, and nutsacks ever assembled, but the stars don't elevate the material-they just descend to its level.

God-awful.

Nobel Son sadistically resurrects the Tarantino knockoff--an unloved, foul-mouthed little bastard of a subgenre that should now go away forever.

The film is such a barren comic wasteland of scatology and misogyny that Vanilla Ice steals the film with a good-natured, self-deprecating portrayal of himself as Sandler's sleazy party buddy.

Apparently no one told Ricci she was acting in a comedy, not a touching drama about a young woman overcoming a formative trauma to achieve her dreams.

To paraphrase a famous Mae West wisecrack, when Cage is good, he's very good, and when he's bad, he's better. Here, however, he's just plain lousy, and like the film he so passively carries, that's no fun at all.

With deadening predictability, the filmmakers have reduced a definitive satire about the flaws and foibles of human nature into family-friendly sub-Disney pabulum about an affable slacker who finally musters up the courage to ask a pretty girl at work for a date.

A laughable would-be fright-fest that's as strikingly inept as a Boll movie, but nowhere near as much guilty fun.

Unfortunately, nothing about Tony Goldwyn's vapid, navel-gazing, claustrophobic adaptation of a 2001 Italian film rings remotely true.

Having broken free of the Disney machine that molded her, Lohan now seems intent on destroying her career and credibility on her own terms.

There may be a trenchant satire to be mined from our culture's materialism-warped wedding madness, but Bride Wars instead opts for graceless, flailing, poorly choreographed slapstick performed by characters who suggest a dumbed-down tour production of "Sex And The City."

It'd take more than potentially lethal amounts of alcohol to make this derivative trash endurable.

The idiotic melodrama The Words is a maddening contradiction: a film about the publishing industry and a great literary fraud that doesn't have a literary bone in its body or a thought in its pretty, empty little head.

With its mixture of whimsy and special-effects-driven humor, My Favorite Martian aims to blend E.T. and Men In Black, but in its sad, mercenary shamelessness, it ends up recalling Mac And Me instead.

Not even a young Eddie Murphy is capable of generating hilarity out of thin air and Best Defense gives him nothing to work with. Even with Murphy inside the tank the film sorely lacks urgency and momentum.

Sleazy, exploitative, cheap, and nonsensical, The Players Club is an unwatchable waste of time.

We remain a nation divided, but hopefully we’ve at least progressed beyond the need for clumsy message movies about racial tolerance, as fortified with dick jokes.

It’s almost impressive how the moronic new ensemble comedy The Big Wedding manages to cram three hours’ worth of nonsensical subplots, extraneous characters, and implausible plot points into 90 minutes of streamlined idiocy.

Everything about Mac And Me is shameless.

There's precious little of Lennon's legendary crankiness on display in The U.S. Vs. John Lennon, a fawning hagiography that diligently shaves away the ex-Beatle's rough edges and knotty idiosyncrasies.

King Kong Lives is a terrible film, alternately boring and fascinatingly misguided. But it’s ragingly inessential more than anything else.

Another contrived, unconvincing romantic comedy that once again mixes stale sitcom humor with laughable attempts at pathos and emotional depth.

Running a mere 83 minutes, A Night At The Roxbury still feels like an eternity spent in bad high-concept-movie hell.

In one respect at least, the film's idiocy works for Lopez: Every diva needs at least one camp classic on her résumé, and with Enough, she's scored a howler on the level of "Mommie Dearest."

Super Mario Bros. devotes half its run time to lumbering exposition, yet still makes no f.cking sense. Seldom has a film done such heavy lifting to such meager effect.

Sex Ed takes a lot of glee in subjecting its timid hero to a rancid sewer of sexual excess early on, but the film’s apparently strong belief that it deserves to be taken seriously—despite its title, premise, and utter worthlessness—both as a comedy and as social advocacy might just be the most offensive thing about it.

Marginally better than its predecessor, but only because "Next Friday" lowered standards so far that only a homemade cockfighting video would have failed to surpass it.

Writer-director Jonathan Jakubowicz does his best Quentin Tarantino impersonation, loading the film with percussively profane dialogue, smug adolescent nihilism, rampant drug use, pop-culture references, homophobic invective, and empty stylistic excess.

Almost comically unambitious, Underclassman seldom tries to be funny, and never even attempts to be original.

A shamelessly derivative mob movie.

The makers of “Bringing Down The House” should thank the gods of cinema for Marci X, which has relieved the Steve Martin/Queen Latifah hit of its status as the year's most misguided culture-clash comedy.

A supernatural religious thriller so awful it should result in the retroactive forfeiture of the Oscar writer, director, and producer Brian Helgeland won for co-writing "L.A. Confidential."

Straight from the fiery, churning bowels of high-concept hell comes Kangaroo Jack, Bruckheimer's idea of kid-friendly fare, and some of the longest 90 minutes ever committed to film.

Salinger thinks it’s big, important news, but it’s barely a footnote.

Sets a new nadir in the reality genre's race to the bottom. The price of sacrificing dignity for the amusement of the general public gets lower every day.

It's probably not the year's worst film, but it would be difficult to imagine three more interminable, snooze-inducing hours of film than you'll find watching this narcoleptic dinosaur.

Spade proves that he's entirely capable of making unwatchable dreck all by himself.

Its creepy use of DMX's daughter is reprehensible, but the film is otherwise so unrelentingly sleazy that its use of the child-in-danger gambit actually qualifies as one of its subtler moves.

Twisted marks a bottoming-out for pretty much everyone involved, particularly Judd and director Philip Kaufman, who should know better. The film is the creative equivalent of waking up naked in a puddle of cheap wine and vomit.

In the insufferable, secondhand tradition of countless other regrettable genre films, Black Out is so impressed by itself, it doesn’t even need an audience.

A work of staggering stupidity.

Reflects poorly on everyone, particularly its makers, its stars, and the studio laboring under the delusion that this stuff was worthy of release.

The film is so slight that it feels less like a proper sequel to Grown Ups than a failed television spin-off that inexplicably cast Sandler and the gang in the lead roles instead of their low-budget television equivalents.

It's not even bad enough to be any fun.

The film’s constant nods to the artificiality of its narrative highlight its precious, cloying phoniness rather than subvert it.

The ongoing cinematic desecration of Dr. Seuss' legacy continues with The Cat In The Hat, a clattering abomination that makes it depressingly likely that an entire generation of reading-averse children will know The Cat In The Hat as that obnoxious character Mike Myers played in that horrible movie.

A headache-inducing mess without direction or purpose.

As well-intentioned as it is thoroughly inept, Black November would be a serious contender for year-end worst lists if it weren’t so painfully noble and sincere.

A work of Battlefield Earth-level miscalculation.

At least Into The Fire can't be accused of misleading audiences. From its overwrought opening narration to early shots of an empty Ferris wheel, it promises to be a dour, pretentious, humorless time-waster, and it doggedly makes good on that promise.

Bewitched piles miscalculation upon miscalculation, beginning by casting the iron-willed Kidman, one of film's gutsiest and most fearless actresses, as a regressive pre-feminist dumb-blonde doormat, a sort of mildly retarded amalgam of Marilyn Monroe, Renée Zellweger, and Meg Ryan.

Such a stupid, painfully obvious, gratingly unfunny dud that it's unlikely to please even the most gullible and easy-to-please members of the Kiss army.

It’s so egregiously awful, so utterly without merit, that it makes its predecessor seem much worse by association. The film’s brainless, chest-beating brand of hyper-pulp calls into question whether Sin City was any good at all, or whether the novelty of its visuals and storytelling merely masked a howling nothingness at its core.

Takes almost two self-infatuated, smarmy, condescending, cringe-inducingly sentimental hours to reach its pre-ordained conclusion.

Somehow both formulaic and bat-shit insane. It's sort of a given that films in this genre won't be rigorous cerebral exercises, but Simply Irresistible is almost hypnotic in its unyielding stupidity.

Not since Mark Wahlberg trembled in fear beside a menacing houseplant in "The Happening" has a film tried to provoke terror with such an unlikely object of menace.

It isn’t a movie so much as a feature-length perfume commercial for a Charlie Sheen signature cologne with gorgeous packaging and absolutely nothing inside.

A shockingly inane college comedy that accomplishes the nearly impossible feat of being far worse than it looks.

It's an ersatz comedy filled with unconvincing celebrity look-alikes and tone-deaf parodies. Only the desperation and cynicism feel authentic.

A Madea Christmas belongs to a rancid strain of Yuletide trifles that feature awful people being terrible to each other for 90 minutes under the sway of insulting plot contrivances before the awfulness is climactically washed away in an avalanche of holiday sentimentality.

Contrived, clueless, reprehensible.

Perhaps the harshest criticism that can be directed at Chapter 27 is that it's awful even for a late-period Lindsay Lohan movie. It might even be bad enough to inspire "Catcher" author J.D. Salinger to break his decades of public silence to speak out against this high-camp fiasco.

That 8MM fails miserably as a psychological thriller is forgivable. The fact that it is nearly as creepy, sleazy, and manipulative as the pornographic films it so cluelessly and hypocritically condemns is not.

A generic time-waster powered by a lazy, cynical combination of scatological kiddie humor and maudlin sentiment.

The problems with Street Fighter: The Legend Of Chun-Li began with the casting of dead-eyed, sleepy-voiced, charisma-impaired automaton Kristin Kreuk.

This results in a film that spells everything out visually, then further elaborates through groaningly obvious dialogue, then drives every point home for slow-witted audiences via shameless narration.

This suspense-free, originality-deprived mess will likely be a major contender for the title of 1999's worst film.

Bound to wind up as one of 1999's worst films.

All too effectively conveys the claustrophobic horror of being shackled in a small space with two whiny, hateful children.

A horrible, horrible film that wears out its welcome before its opening credits.

The most perversely unnecessary sequel in recent memory.

An unspeakable nadir in the career of its writer-director-star.

Cannon is a big believer in the power of repetition. He apparently nurses a strong belief that if a gag isn’t funny the first time around, it will somehow become hilarious the eighth or ninth time it’s repeated.

If Spurlock had simply followed Waters around for 80 minutes, the result would be more entertaining than Mansome. Hell, 80 minutes of John Waters sleeping would be more fun than Mansome.

Cheap and ugly in every sense--morally, cinematically, creatively--Nowhere Man accomplishes the seemingly impossible by dragging the seedy revenge genre to a horrific new nadir.

Luke Matheny’s perversely milquetoast romantic comedy seems to have escaped from the afternoon schedule of the Lifetime network and secured a VOD and theatrical release it patently does not deserve.

The Cobbler is such a weirdly somber comedy that it would almost be in poor taste to laugh during it, though there’s not much danger of that happening.

The hilariously convoluted thriller contains all the elements for a wacky parody of exorcism movies, except a sense of humor about itself: The Devil Inside never acknowledges its innate ridiculousness, so the laughs are unintentional.

No matter how much care and thought went into it it's still disgusting and pointless.

For all its crudeness and desperation, Soul Men can't scare up a single laugh.

It's not hard to imagine the militant Jane Fonda of 1972 angrily denouncing Monster-In-Law as insulting Hollywood claptrap trafficking in regressive, reactionary, blatantly sexist gender codes. And she'd be right.