Owen Gleiberman

The result is a dead pile of information in search of a movie.

To dismiss this movie for being ''offensive'' would be to offer it high praise.

The plot is déjà vu all over again, another variation on the proletarian-joker-goes-yuppie formula used in Trading Places, The Secret of My Success, and Opportunity Knocks. In Taking Care of Business, the formula gets boiled down to its bare bones. The movie is nothing but a series of executive signifiers — it should have been called The Trappings of My Success.

Personally, I'd say that it was about time Arquette was leashed.

Since there is a mystery, the movie might have been entertaining camp had director Taylor Hackford staged it with pace, style, or a whisper of surprise. Instead, the plot just clunks forward-for two hours and 10 minutes.

Parts of the film play like the world's slowest and most insensitive reality show (Who Wants to Be an Octogenarian?).

Would like to be a Halloween treat, but it's more like a nightmare of blandness.

This ''satire'' of triple-X raunch and ''Jerry Springer'' sleaze starts off at a pitch of preening dementia and just grows more hysterical from there.

Confined to just a few sets, the movie is like the pilot for a sitcom you never want to see. Yet Ephron seems to think she's making a feel-good holiday classic: She floods the soundtrack with old pop versions of Christmas standards, trying to render stale comedy appetizing by drenching it in syrup. [23 Dec 1994, p.50]

Simply put, it may be the lamest movie ever made about poor white... Southern characters.

It's hard to say what's more excruciating: Alex's novel, which is like ''The Great Gatsby'' rewritten by Lizzie McGuire, or his quarrelsome flirtation with Emma, who has no existence as a character apart from her drive to reshape Alex into a specimen of respectable tamed manhood.

Though not quite the fiasco of revved-up gunplay that Beverly Hills Cop II was, this new movie, directed by John ''Rock-'em Sock-'em'' Landis, is just a clunky action thriller, with occasional comic moments rationed out to the audience like stray crumbs.

It’s a messy and annoying one-joke movie that repeats the joke over and over again — and guess what, it was barely funny the first time.

Instead of rooting for Pullman and Fonda, we end up praying that the crocodile is hungry enough to put them out of their misery.

Bones and All is a concept in search of a story. The film doesn’t draw us in. It stumbles and lurches and seems to make itself up as it goes along. You may feel eaten alive with boredom.

Like a virus that keeps coming back but growing weaker each time, Children of the Corn is now a horror movie that lacks the strength to infect you with even a speck of fear.

Nine Lives is a lot like a cat: It occasionally bestirs itself, and it would like to be stroked with love, but mostly it just sits there. It’s a pet farce so flat it makes you long for the Lubitsch touch of the “Alvin” comedies.

What makes Heart of Stone such an enervating experience isn’t that it’s incompetent but that nothing in it matters. It’s all bombast and noise, all hollow logistics, all virtual “Minority Report” screens and clattering fury signifying nothing. In other words: Time to start planning the sequel.

Is less an end in itself than an excuse, a jumping off point for showy, contrived, borderline exploitation sequences that fail to tie together because they're not really there to do anything but sell themselves as money shot thrills.

It's really a dramatic sinkhole.

Combines hugs and ''pain'' and dialogue so fakey-cute it makes your ears hurt.

To hear the unmistakable sounds of yet another lavishly orchestrated Donaggio swoonfest laid over the flat, static expository scenes of the choppy benumbed “international” police thriller Domino is to watch De Palma trying to create cinematic fire out of burnt-out match sticks.

It was originally called ''Animal Husbandry,'' and while the producers were throwing away that title, they might have done well to chuck the movie along with it.

Nothing in Imaginary Heroes rings true, least of all a plot that lightly combines domestic abuse, adulterous pregnancy, teen bisexuality, job abandonment, and a possible case of Mysterious Movie Disease. These are not ordinary people. Or real ones.

Feeling Minnesota suggests Sam Shepard trying to be Quentin Tarantino. It makes even gun battles seem pretentious.

Antal has assembled what may be the single most colorless group of mangy lowlifes I have ever seen.

As the brutish Kable, Gerard Butler must find out who's pulling his strings, but it's the audience whose chain gets yanked by this headache-inducing techno-violent mishmash.

The United States of Leland is tedious yet infuriating, since its characters, all of whom seem to have emerged from a screenwriter's manual, are like exhibits in a thesis meant to indict the middle class for the crime of its collective dysfunction.

The whole noisy movie is really just a setup for the climactic duel between renegade cop Danny Glover and the monster. By that point, you’re pathetically grateful for a few stomach-churning special effects.

I love a good mind-bender, but it's getting more common these days to see thrillers that don't so much bend your mind as chop it, smash it, and place it in the Cuisinart. Trance, the new film directed by Danny Boyle is a high-brainiac art-world thriller that wants to do nothing more (or less) than give your head a majorly pleasurable spin.

In theory, A Thousand Words should draw on its star's abilities as a physical comedian, but Murphy, miming his order for a triple latte at Starbucks, comes off like Charlie Chaplin on crystal meth; he's strenuously unfunny to watch.

Isn't up to much of anything besides pretending that swearwords and snot-nosed insults, served up by Santa with an almost institutional monotony, aren't just naughty. They're -- big joke! -- incorrect.

A few more films like Tears of the Black Tiger, and kitsch will be on its way to having a bad name.

The film treats its audience like fidgety junior-high schoolers, piling on the sub-Koyaanisqatsi cityscapes and cheesy episodes with Marlee Matlin as a lonely photographer, plus bouncy cartoons of human cells who look as if they'd be happier chasing stains in bathroom-cleanser commercials.

Why would filmmakers with this much talent work this hard to thumb their noses at everything they put on screen?

Just when you're sure that Deuce Bigalow: Male Gigolo can't get any less funny, the movie douses the trailer's best gag, as that prosthetic leg turns out to be attached to Deuce's true love.

I gave up making heads or tails of Synecdoche, New York, but I did get one message: The compulsion to stand outside of one's life and observe it to THIS degree isn't the mechanism of art -- it's the structure of psychosis.

A glumly serious British mock rock doc: You could forgive the paucity of jokes if Brothers of the Head had anything to say, or if the '70s-vérité surface were remotely convincing.

The actors give little life to the proceedings, since no one’s bothered to figure what this movie has to offer beyond terrifically tactile stone figures going through the motions of what might be called Generic Animated Action Rescue Plot.

There’s no real terror or dread in it, just the same old meat-puppet gore and cattle-prod scares served up with a kind of ritualized self-satisfaction.

Dinesh D'Souza's documentary is no mere screed: 2016: Obama's America is a nonsensically unsubstantiated act of character assassination.

Even Snow Day's winter wonderland looks fake.

The plot, which features Lea Thompson as a gold digger scheming to marry Jed, is like something you’d catch on the USA Network at 4 a.m. But enough of beating a dead possum. After sitting through The Beverly Hillbillies, I now realize that the best tribute anyone can make to the pop detritus of our childhood is to let it rest in peace.

It's one of those stultifying aftermath-of-
a-car-crash movies.

In Cobb, Jones seems trapped inside his own febrile personality. He’s so utterly, hyperbolically Tommy Lee Jones that his performance doesn’t begin to register as an imaginative look at who Ty Cobb was.

Just... bad. As in BAD bad.

Watching Pecker, his rickety new comedy about a teenage Baltimore shutterbug, it becomes clear that Waters has grown color-blind to his own sleazo-shock aesthetic.

A brutally monotonous thriller.

You'd think that the film would ask you to be appalled at this scenario of forced servitude -- but no, it's treated as harmless and cute, like an Israeli ''Chico and the Man.''

There’s a wisp of a plot (who could the office klepto be?), but most of Clockwatchers is as empty of drive and imagination as its poor-little-victim heroines, who never seem more than sulky, overgrown high school girls.

It has that vintage Polish pace, their signature arch pomposity and rhythmless weirdness, only this time the brothers had to go and make a cosmic allegory of American dreams.

Inert dud of a hitmen-are-people-too comedy.

Stuart Townsend, Theron's reallife boyfriend, may have inner fires as an actor that have yet to be revealed, but in Head in the Clouds he's a somber puppy who looks as if Theron could eat him alive. I wish she had.

The wedding, which turns the very concept of ''Greek'' into the sort of hideous, pandering clichés that look rejected from bad Jewish and Italian sitcoms.

It’s a ham-handed, lurchingly obvious mess, without the glimmer of human interest that even a sensationalist horror film needs.

A school-shooting drama needn’t be any one specific thing, but to ask an audience to sit through one is, implicitly, to promise some wrenching insight in return. Eric LaRue is just a lot of indie showboating signifying nothing.

Warlock is an occult schlock-o-rama, with special effects so low-budget they might have come out of a joke shop.

Whenever an actress takes on a gritty working-class role, the audience does a gut check of authenticity. Either the actress gets it, like Melissa Leo did in "Frozen River," or she doesn't, like Michelle Monaghan as the spoilin'-for-a-fight truck-driver heroine of the inert indie dud Trucker

If you look hard, you can make out a story in Femme Fatale, but it has nothing to do with the senseless pileup of jewel thievery, shutterbug voyeurism, and leggy sex bombs so shallow and bad they seem to have come out of a 1978 copy of Hustler magazine.

So badly told that it ends up dissecting a corruption that exudes from nowhere but itself.

A fractious fiasco: whiplash camera movement set to raging blasts of death metal, a story so incoherent it made me wish I was watching, instead, the collected outtakes from Van Helsing.

It’s like watching the lamest Indiana Jones sequel ever imagined, minus Indiana Jones.

Some viewers will surely be moved. To me, though, The Midnight Sky just proves that a movie that reaches for the stars can still come up empty-handed.

“Mother Mary” turns into the most befuddlingly pretentious movie about a pop star since Brady Corbet’s “Vox Lux.” It heads down a blind alley of cosmic meaning that, in the end, means nothing.

While there’s no denying that Howard has made the ultimate movie that’s not in his wheelhouse, what’s most different about it isn’t the eccentric subject matter. It’s that Howard got so immersed in the subject, so possessed by it, so lost in it that he forgot to do what he can usually do in his sleep: tell a relatable story.

The movie lacks even the misplaced fervor of obsession. It's lifeless kitsch.

I wish I could say that the film is half as intriguing as it sounds, but A Woman, a Gun... lacks the Coen brothers' precision, their diabolical game-board cleverness. It's a remake in shaggy outline only.

Most of this just seems, you know, so three years ago, so "Bourne" again.

In Baker Boys, Kloves crafted a melancholy vision laced with ripe possibilities for pleasure and love. But the movie was (inexplicably, to me) a commercial disappointment, and Kloves, perhaps as a delayed response, has returned with a vision drained of joy, freedom, excitement.

If there were truth in advertising, The People Under the Stairs would be called The Not Very Scary Movie Set Inside a Grungy, Badly Lit House.

It would all be worth getting mad over were the film not so plodding or so obvious in its tactics.

In every way dreadful.

In the end, there’s something a little insulting about a contemporary movie that reduces women to either trashy bimbos or repressed virgins.

By the end, you feel like a drill sergeant-you want to wipe that stupid grin off Sandler's face.

Writer-director John Herzfeld blends violence and top-heavy absurdism, creating a self-conscious muddle of indie-style hackery. Strip away the goofball nihilism, though, and what’s left is as formulaic as any straight-to-tape opus with a title like "Dangerous Instinct."

Back to the Future Part III has that same sort of studio back-lot clunkiness. Only this time it's the audience that gets conked — by the sheer desperation of the whole enterprise.

Has Brian De Palma finally lost his mind? Ever since "Carrie" (1976), his one true masterpiece, this director has evolved into a cinematic serial killer of common sense.

Ambulance is simply too much of a not-so-good thing. It never stops huffing and puffing to entertain you, but it’s joyless: a tale of escape that’s far from a great escape, because for all its motion it’s going through the motions.

You might be wondering if “Clown in a Cornfield” is at least scary. No, it’s not, and it’s not trying too hard to be.

The film is proof that if you repackage the classics (in this case, Dickens) for the youth market in an era of MTV dislocation, what you get, in essence, is postmodern Cliffs Notes with an alt-rock soundtrack.

You may go into Flatliners hoping for a psychedelic mindblower, but the film is about as exciting as staring at a lava lamp for two hours.

Antonio Banderas is a charming and talented man, but in Take the Lead he lays on the old-world panache so thick - the accent, the flowery courtliness, the romance of romance - that he comes off like Dracula's metrosexual cousin.

Wain made a terrible mistake when he decided to turn Kenney’s story into a goof, a sketch, a riff of threadbare mockery, instead of treating it as a relatively straight movie with laughs. If he had done that, it might have been hilarious, though in an acidly downbeat and far-reaching way.

A magical-realist sitcom war farce that ends up being about nothing but its own slovenly smugness.

In the history of bad ideas, George Romero’s decision to produce a color remake of his disturbingly frenzied 1968 zombiefest Night of the Living Dead has to rank right up there with New Coke.

Orphan: First Kill is draggy and suspense-free. Fuhrman, as before, invests her role with a cold creepiness, but the minimal, haphazard script sticks her with playing Esther as a one-note mascot of terror, somewhere between Freddy Krueger and Leprechaun.

The Exorcist III has the feel of a nightmare catechism lesson, or a horror movie made by a depressed monk.

None of the faux icons comes close to being a character. Instead, they are contrasted with a group of nuns who skydive without parachutes. Could this possibly be a metaphor for Korine's filmmaking? It certainly goes splat.

You can expect a lot of shredding and gurgling. 30 Days of Night is relentless, but it's also relentlessly one-note.

Has a topsy-turvy sense of injustice.

The film’s most distinctive, if obnoxious, feature is the coy, look-at-what- an-adorable-doofus-I-am clowning of Adam Sandler, who here, as on Saturday Night Live, parades his ironic infantilism.

A ponderous dystopian bummer that might be described as "The Road Warrior" without car chases, or "The Road" without humanity.

For all of De Palma's studious multimedia trickery -- a valid, even inspired idea -- Redacted is so naive it's an embarrassment.

The only performer I enjoyed watching was Martin Short, who plays a bitch dandy music teacher with a smile so fake that the comedian seems to be acting with his gums.

Fragmentation can be an artful method; it can also be the last refuge for someone who scarcely knows how to make a film. In the no-budget fantasia Wild Tigers I Have Known, the fragments are like a borrowed collage of gay coming-of-age tropes.

In a season of digital bombast, it can be a relief to walk into a stodgy life-of-the-great-man costume drama. Goya's Ghosts, before it turns into a messy, horse-drawn load, achieves a civilized stuffiness that gives off its own mild pleasure.

You can see what the film was going for, but the jokes just sit there; you chuckle a few times, mostly out of lame hope, but you never bust a gut, never really get what you came for.

Starts out as a neo-Pygmalion comedy, but the film is slow, earnest, and rhythmless.