Owen Gleiberman

The film is light enough without being funny enough, most of it staged, by director Peter Segal (“Tommy Boy,” “The Naked Gun 33 1/3”), in a kind of generic action overdrive.

It’s really Prince who’s the ingenue here. He engages in much mock-effeminate vamping, scampers around the French Riviera in outfits that would have humbled Liberace, and grants himself the most melodramatic death scene since Camille.

The results in Employee of the Month are toothless.

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.

The Unholy is a good tight scary commercial theological horror film. Its spooks and demons unfurl within a pop version of Christianity, which makes it sound no more exotic than last week’s “Exorcist” knockoff or last year’s helping of the “Conjuring” franchise. But The Unholy has a religious plot that actually works for it.

Schrader tries to find the human side of it all, and he scores with Lohan, who taps a vulnerability beneath her dissolution to remind you why she's still a movie star.

How appealing is Muniz, taking a break from ''Malcolm in the Middle,'' a day job he should by no means let go of?

The film suggests Titanic in a giant wading pool.

Despite its logy, red-herring structure, the film has enough enigma and weirdness that it gradually stirs to life.

A trashy, frenetic remake of Fred Zinnemann's 1973 The Day of the Jackal, The Jackal is mired in blood, cheap shocks, and a random network of improbability.

A bad movie so over-the-top that at moments it's almost good - or, at least, more arresting than it has any right to be.

The more that secret comes out, the more incoherent (and ludicrous) the film gets.

Graffiti Bridge is a sad fiasco — and except for Shake! the music (at least to my ears) is Prince at his most joyless, a collection of glorified rhythm tracks. For the first time, the revolutionary funkster seems to be preaching to a world that has left him behind.

Just about unwatchable — a numbingly repetitive farce in which the cursed Short trips, walks into walls, trips, spills an entire saltshaker onto his breakfast, trips, sets people on fire, trips…

In the occasionally funny but mostly facile '80s-style culture-clash comedy Parental Guidance, Billy Crystal, who now resembles a very cute puffer fish, plays Artie Decker.

At least Ribisi's fake-cojones histrionics are fun. The rest of this "Donnie Brasco" knockoff, with James Marsden as a Gulf War veteran who goes undercover, is a turgid, ketchup-spattered dud.

It's not much fun to see these two reduced to "Mad TV" parodies of themselves.

Keeps teasing you with intimations of the libidinous animal within.

In Assassin’s Creed, Michael Fassbender is like the ultimate special effect. Just by showing up, he confers respectability on two hours of semi-coherent overly art-directed video-game sludge.

The bad acting — make that nonacting — of rappers DMX and Nas merges, all too well, with the shallow dehumanized vision of director Hype Williams.

The morality of revenge is barely at issue in a movie that pushes the plausibility of revenge right over a cliff.

Be wary of any movie in which the hero is monosyllabic and a stutterer at the same time.

Allen is no more convincing than the writer-director, Chris Ver Wiel, who strings together faux-QT, faux-Elmore Leonard clichés like so many necklace beads and pretends that's the same thing as making a movie.

As stagy and awkward as some of the Warhol/Morrissey films of the early '70s.

It’s engagingly junky entertainment with a healthy sense of its own ludicrousness.

As an animated entertainment, The Nut Job 2 lacks several key factors: memorable characters, a fun story, jokes that will appeal to adults as well as little kids. But one thing it does not lack is visual momentum.

As a sinister ESP showman, Robert De Niro is corny and fun.

Kollek is a fringe auteur who makes independent films the old fashioned way: no budget, static camera, a script that telegraphs its tiny, paste gem ironies.

This is a genre thriller. That said, it’s an urgent and honest one, and Caviezel gives his most committed performance since “The Passion of the Christ.”

The movie, with the exception of that lone squirmy surgery scene, is "Hostel" without sadism, thrills, or funky severed-limb F/X. It quickly turns into a very dull escape thriller.

It may be the first movie that mirrors, in its very syntax, the ''snap crackle and pop'' narcotic superficiality of the E! channel. I mean that as a compliment.

No belief on earth can rescue Swank from a film that's a chain of disaster chintz masquerading as a sermon.

Kutcher, who gives his most energized performance to date, and Diaz, darting between the caustic and shrill, look as if they're warming up to groovy hate sex, not love, which may be why the film goes flat the moment it turns friendly.

Provides genial chuckles, but it's never excitingly rude.

Bruce Willis is at his most morose in this flat, dankly lit, grindingly inept thriller about a serial killer whose victims all turn out to have been acquaintances of Willis’ rumpled, alcoholic cop hero. As his by-the-book partner, Sarah Jessica Parker is the only one in the movie who doesn’t look sleep-deprived.

Chatwin comes off as prickly and annoyed -- they should have called this "Perturbia."

Hartley is trapped between sincerity and mock sincerity, and that all but dooms a filmmaker to slipping through the cracks.

Offhand, I can’t think of an actor who could use a brain implant more. The trouble isn’t that Reeves talks like a surfer dude; it’s that he tries so hard not to talk like a surfer dude.

He now imparts so many life lessons via his Rube Goldberg thresher devices that he's starting to turn into the Rod Serling of severed body parts. Now that's torture.

The movie isn’t scary, it isn’t gripping, it isn’t fun, and it isn’t fueled by any sort of clever compulsion. It’s just a strangely arduous exercise that feels increasingly frantic and arbitrary as it goes along.

Viewers primed for a postapocalyptic blowout will be disappointed to learn that Universal Soldier is set in the boring old present day, and that until the climactic clash the film is slow-moving and short on firepower.

A splattery futuristic zombie thriller, designed as a jolt-a-minute freakout for young audiences who were numbed into submission long ago.

The funny moments in Genie, and there are a handful of them, emerge mostly from McCarthy just tossing off lines with her dislocating insouciance.

A derisively vicious show-off satire, a plastic exercise in authority bashing.

The movie itself, with the exception of a few scenes, doesn't really have the wit it's aiming for, and among Steve Martin vehicles it's middle-drawer, at best. Yet that mood of silly exuberance reigns through most of the picture.

Stealth, a dregs-of-summer knockoff, is too ponderous and inept to serve a comparable function now, yet the film's lack of thrust may be related to an absence of conviction about its own war-is-a-videogame clichés.

George Lucas is turning into the enemy of fun.

Venom is a textbook case of a comic-book film that’s unexciting in its ho-hum competence, and even its visual-effects bravura.

This suburban gothic is a logy, convoluted mess.

Liman, for all his craft, doesn't have enough FUN with the premise.

During the fight scenes, it sounds as if a hundred watermelons were being clobbered at once. Other than that, it’s business as usual, with the all-American Speakman proving the most generic vigilante this genre has spawned yet.

The Hustle, fun as some of it is, is a tall fizzy drink in which the fizz never completely rises to the top of the glass.

The sequence serves no real purpose beyond dazzle for dazzle's sake, but when you're watching it, that's purpose enough.

The movie gives us only a small taste of it, but it’s enough to whet your appetite: for a Bowie biopic that captures this cracked actor in all his funhouse-mirror rock ‘n’ roll glory.

A sodden ''feminist'' vulgarization.

It's really a dramatic sinkhole.

Ma Mère, while less prudish than Catherine Breillat's dour deconstructions of sex, is also less competent. It winds up making incest look absurdly swank.

Event Horizon could have used a decent script, but the director, Paul Anderson, is a stylist to watch.

The best thing about the movie is that it keeps drawing conclusions in opposite directions.

We see, in Melissa McCarthy’s increasingly fierce performance, a hint of what the movie might have been: the tale of a new kind of feminine mystique — a methodical fury that weds the imperatives of a mother to the style of a gangster. But that movie needed a better script.

Van Helsing, a fusion of eye candy and brain sputter, is a long, kinetic, yet dreary mess.

The premise is out of '70s porn, and so is the overbroad satire and almost total lack of conviction.

Morbius is a movie in which it’s clear that no one ever sent the script back for a rewrite with the instructions, “Please add a script.” As in: Add spice, add dialogue, add something so that the movie plays like more than a barely colored-in diagram.

The trouble with Scott’s movies is that they’re not just star vehicles. They’re about the aesthetics of celebrity, about the narcissism that’s going on offscreen. If Revenge ends up knocking Costner down a peg, it’ll be just what he needs — and deserves.

It’s a prosaic piece of muckraking, shot in a functional flat visual style, but it grazes a nerve.

Raging ego aside, the penny-ante hucksterism of his I'm-going-on-dates-to-get-famous-making-a-movie-about-dates approach is too cloying and opportunistic to bear.

It's not every day that one of our rogues' gallery of iconic psycho killers gets to be played by a creepy and fascinating actor -- in this case, Jackie Earle Haley taking on the role of Freddy Krueger.

Watts’ commitment holds the movie together. She acts as if that phone were her flesh-and-blood partner. But it’s not. It’s a device impersonating something human. And so is Lakewood.

The movie, which strains to be hip in a faux-1985 beat-the-system way, takes such a light view of cheating that it has the ironic effect of rendering the heist that follows utterly innocuous.

If you were looking for an actress to play a tempestuous, schizophrenic movie-slash-rock star, you might go for Courtney Love or Angelina Jolie, or maybe even Jennifer Connelly. But Rachael Leigh Cook?

A harmless crime caper. It stars Peter Facinelli (Nurse Jackie, the Twilight series), who also wrote the script, shaping the movie to his facile, unlayered charm.

The action in Kraven the Hunter is fine as far as it goes, but it rarely incites or bedazzles you.

The movie could have been a lot scarier.

Simply put, Scream 7 isn’t very scary, and it isn’t very inventively gory (which some of the sequels have been).

Henson is the right actress to play a contract killer grown weary, but as a thriller Proud Mary doesn’t quite do her justice. It’s a connect-the-dots underworld trifle, watchable and minimal...though Henson holds it together and, at moments, comes close to convincing you that you’re watching a better movie.

The movie is altogether too infatuated with its ramshackle spirit. Most of the gags take after the characters -- they just sit there.

So much flatter than it was on the comic-book page.

The film offers evidence that Vicious spent the entire night out cold on barbiturates. It plants resonant doubts.

He squeezes a bit of suspenseful juice out of the old plot, and Douglas makes smarm a chewy pleasure, but this is a noir in search of a hero we can root for because we actually buy what he’s doing.

Rebel Moon — Part Two: The Scargiver is a storytelling mediocrity, but as spectacle it has tumult and rhythm.

Yet another low-grade spectacular about an evil force that leaps from body to body.

A dismayingly impersonal piece of anime, genial yet chaotic.

On Married With Children, the baby-faced Applegate has a slutty spark. Here, the role is too straight, and she’s blah — an apple pie that’s neither sweet nor tart enough.

Hannibal Rising reduces this great creature of the pop imagination to a Eurotrash Boy Scout throwing a homicidal snit fit.

The trouble with low-rent science-fiction movies is that beneath all the futuristic gimcrackery — the video phones and laser guns and hyperspace leaps, the obligatory time-travel setups — you realize, at some point, that you’re watching a routine urban chase thriller: Lethal Weapon 2000. For most of its running time, Freejack bounces and sputters along atop the usual action- movie chassis.

Watching the movie, it's hard to imagine why anyone would dream of going back there.

As a romantic comedy, The Back-up Plan is friendly but also a bit drab.

The film ends with an overly spelled-out plea for the value of “imagination,” but about the only thing the filmmakers are drawing with their purple crayon is algorithms.

An amiable time-killer of an espionage comedy.

The movie is cheesy, tacky, and gimmicky. But as directed by Mark Waters (Mean Girls), it's also prankish and inventive enough to be kind of fun.

On the Line would like to be ''Serendipity'' for the Oxy-and-Skechers set, but it feels more like the worst movie Michael J. Fox never made.

The film is so brazen about its pandering, crumple-hearted silliness that it had me rooting for Vardalos to land her big fat Greek stud-muffin.

It’s a highly competent and watchable paranoid metaphysical video game that doesn’t overstay its welcome, includes some luridly entertaining visual effects, and — it has to be said — summons an emotional impact of close to zero. Which in a film like this one isn’t necessarily a disadvantage.

Sleepless is a propulsive thin exercise, “energetic” but tedious, the kind of January movie that Jamie Foxx should have permanently graduated from. Foxx is too good an actor — taut and committed — to phone in his performance, yet that hardly matters, since the whole movie is phoned in. It’s far from incompetent, but it’s a who-cares? thriller.

The combat is neither funny nor intense. The War with Grandpa is like “Home Alone” replayed as a tit-for-tat battle of logistical booby traps that never rises above the innocuous slapstick benign.

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.

Tame and witless enough to make me long for the ancient, dusty fright kitsch of ''The Munsters.''

Clyde is meant to be nuts, but too often it's Law Abiding Citizen that checks rationality at the door.

The movie is a romantic action comedy that starts off light and breezy but turns, before you know it, into a dead-weight spectacle of wretched excess.

In general le cinéma de Falcone is not a pretty (or hilarious) thing. Thunder Force is, at best, more a light chuckler than a laugher.

This is just silliness run mildly wild.

Parenthood seems only half aware of Eliza's REAL problem: that she thinks she's superior to the choices she's made.

The villains are shape-shifters, but the key thing about “Red One” is that the whole movie is a shape-shifter: arduous action jape, low-kitsch Christmas fairy tale, buddy movie, family-reconciliation movie — every quadrant and demo must be served.

The movie turns out to be a notch or two better than you expect.

The trouble with this stunted sequel is that the doughy, blobby-hatted Smurfs are mostly window dressing for an abrasive slapstick bash built around a tiresome kidnap plot, pancake-flat gags about Facebook and ''Smurf-holm Syndrome,'' and Neil Patrick Harris mugging his way through the role of a daddy with daddy issues who once again helps out our heroes.

For all its garishness, though, the film is punchy and fast, and it has an engagingly preposterous cheeseball climax, with Schwarzenegger, in full Turbo Man regalia, zooming through the skies like a consumer-king Rocketeer.

Bottom-of-the-garbage-barrel comedy.

Too often, The Fourth Kind makes the paranormal look disappointingly normal.

Imaginary, despite a few creepy moments, is starved for scenes that make the fear it’s showing you relatable.

Paula Patton is such a terrific actress that even in the ultra-tacky romantic comedy Baggage Claim, she gives a luminous, thought-out performance, not just walking through but digging into the role of an eager, nervous doormat with a people-pleasing grin.

Frequently silly, yet eminently more watchable than such leaden Schwarzenegger efforts as ''Eraser.''

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

It would be generous to call the film a continuation of the “Chainsaw” saga. It’s more like a blood-soaked but unscary footnote.

As bumbling and mindless, as naively misconceived, as that clapping-through-tears moniker.

Spawn doesn't make a lot of sense, but the imagery whooshes by in glitzy psychedelic torrents.

Even Snow Day's winter wonderland looks fake.

It may be a slight entertainment in the grand scheme of things, but it’s been made with a busy, nattering joy that is positively infectious

It's just a camcorder soap opera of packaged hormonal fervor -- ''The Real World'' with extra tequila body shots.

On the level of a no-budget student film in which the shots barely match up into sequences. It's about as much fun as watching blood dry.

The film's darkly bedazzled view of the '70s is spurred by great dish from André Leon Talley, Liza Minnelli, and Nile Rodgers, who set the stage for Halston's triumphs - and his jaw-dropping fall.

This high-concept update of It’s a Wonderful Life, Mr. Destiny, is pure formula treacle, but James Belushi, playing a schlub who learns what life would have been like had he become a big executive, is at his most immediate and appealing.

The Mummy is a literal-minded, bumptious monster mash of a movie. It keeps throwing things at you, and the more you learn about the ersatz intricacy of its “universe,” the less compelling it becomes.

The result is an ''action film'' mired in stasis. The ending piles on the potboiler mayhem, but it's telling that Schwarzenegger's climactic catchphrase is down to one measly word. This time, he's the luggage.

This is just cut-rate, generic daughter of Indy Jones hokum.

Hilary Duff makes me long for the comparatively Dostoyevskian depths of Sandra Dee.

It doesn't take long to figure out that Shadowboxer 's Helen Mirren, as a cancer-ridden hitwoman, and Cuba Gooding Jr., as her doting stepson, are the most unconvincing team of hired assassins in movie history.

The trouble with the movie, apart from its rather monotonous dourness of tone, is that everyone in the family, especially the reformed-delinquent high school son (Penn Badgley), comes off as tougher, smarter, and quicker on the draw than the stepfather who's supposed to be outfoxing them.

When a film’s basic strategy is to cut between the past and the present, it should create ripples of anticipatory tension. But Despite the Falling Snow is one of those movies in which the cross-cutting keeps destroying all mood and momentum — it feels more like channel-surfing.

If it’s less punchy and original than “(500) Days of Summer,” it’s still a wry tale that deserves to be seen. Gerald keeps telling Thomas that life should be a mess, but in The Only Living Boy in New York it’s a pleasingly witty and well-observed one.

It's an utterly fake nostalgia piece -- stupid and pandering, a bad-boy teen flick that plays less like a loving look at the late '70s than a terrible movie from the late '70s.

It's a dispirited, galumphing mess.

Flubber was more edifying than My Favorite Martian — and more fun.

The movie has no script, and even the better gags - like one in which a couple of the pilots scribble away at coloring books in the backseat of a plane - could have been staged more vividly.

God-awful?Gooding screams out lines like ''I'm about to get in yo' ass like last year's underwear!''

The Wrong Missy is a harmless dumb-meets-smart-mouth comedy that doesn’t necessarily feed your appetite for more Netflix throwaways. But it does make you want to see Lauren Lapkus’s next act.

North is structured like a black-comic Wizard of Oz, but by the time North awakens from his dream, even home doesn’t seem like a place worth visiting.

Extraordinarily faithful to the spirit of that creaky, derivative, fly-infested, don't-go-in-the-attic boofest.

Seems to have been given the comedy equivalent of blood thinner. It has the blazing satirical boldness to skewer the first Tobey Maguire Spider-Man -- and, amazingly, not much else.

Aspires to blasphemy but achieves only banality.

Best to experience Shaker Heights for what it is: not a movie, exactly, but the true season capper of ''Project Greenlight,'' a series that finds its very drama on the road to mediocrity.

The entire movie has the meaninglessly burnished, sunglasses-at-midnight glow of an early-'90s car commercial -- a visual scheme guaranteed to leave the audience squinting between yawns.

In ”Son-In-Law,” Pauly Shore is like MTV’s missing Marx Brother; call him Sleazo. For once, he makes being utterly shameless seem halfway likable.

In Trash Humpers, the latest slovenly, haphazard, is-it-a-travesty-if-it's-bad-on-purpose avant doodle from director Harmony Korine, three figures in rubbery old-age makeup do indeed mimic intercourse with Dumpsters.

Instead of exploiting the mystery and dread, or even the comedy, of Billy’s condition, Thinner turns into an excruciatingly low-grade pursuit thriller, with Billy hunting down the old Gypsy sage (Michael Constantine) who put the curse on him.

Unlike its obvious influence, the 1999 Japanese shocker "Audition," The Human Centipede has no real-world echoes. It's an only-in-the-movies sick goof.

The line between a good soap opera and a bad soap opera can sometimes be razor-thin. Regretting You walks the line for a while but lands on the wrong side of it.

The movie takes off from a concept as basic as a videogame, and it sticks to that concept, without surprise.

Graham is charming, but Miss Conception is a cloddish biological-clock bedroom farce.

Lawrence is so ON that he appears to be gunning for clockwork bursts of audience approval.

A trashy teen derivative of The Road Warrior, Blade Runner, RoboCop, and every other retro-future fantasy that director Mark L. Lester could cram into the compactor.

Peter Berg's scandalous sick-joke thriller is packed with rude and clever twists, and it delves, with surprising force, into the hypocritical postures of corporate-era male bonding. The cast is terrific, especially Christian Slater.

Most of The Man is as awful as last year's debacle, "Taxi," yet Levy, stuck in a no-brainer variation on Billy Crystal's predicament in "Analyze This," shows just enough noodgy passive-aggression to suggest what the movie might have been were it not shackled to buddy-action clichés.

It's trash, all right, but perfectly skewed trash -- a comedy that knows just how smart to be about just how dumb it is.

The most desperate thing about Desperate Hours is Michael Cimino’s attempt to direct it coherently. In Cimino’s paws, the story of a merciless crook (Mickey Rourke) terrorizing a suburban family descends into lurid gibberish.

There's a glimmer of what the film might have been, though, in the performance of Mike Myers, who plays Studio co-owner Steve Rubell, with his sweaty thinning hair and look-at-me-I-got-class Lacoste shirts, as a vengeful gargoyle presiding over a kingdom of beauty he can rule but never join.

Being Human doesn't seem to be about anything: Its five astonishingly limp parables might have been spun by a depressed Aesop who forgot to take his Prozac.

This one, taken on its own terms, isn’t bad in a TV-movie-fodder-as-parable way.

Leap Year could have used more pizzazz.

The Punisher is a moronically inept and tedious piece of death-wish trash.

The strangest thing about The Shack, and the reason it’s finally a so-so movie, is that all the rage and terror and dark-side vengeance that Mack has to learn to transcend is something we’re told about, but we never actually see him mired in it.

There's no denying that Scott is a wizard of the narcotic-flash school. In The Fan, he uses his chromium-edged technique to evoke a dread-saturated consumerist America in which the most beloved institutions have grown mercenary and hard.

A big, fat, juicy spitball lobbed, with mostly dead-on aim, at the teen-smarm clichés that have accumulated like so much earwax over the last three years.

A movie in which laughter and self-exploitation merge into jolly soft-porn ''empowerment.''

Chapter 27 is far from flawless, but Leto disappears inside this angry, mouth-breathing psycho geek with a conviction that had me hanging on his every delusion.

A boxing film with no conflictual punch.

Passion turns into vintage De Palma — which is to say, the film seems almost engineered to get you giggling at the extravagance of its absurdity. Any enthusiasm in the viewer is bound to be a shadow of the film's passion for itself.

Jolie, in this movie at least, has exactly two expressions: blank wistfulness and blank dismay. She reduces the tides of history to one more raided tomb.

The movie carries you along, and it’s got some high-tension moments, but there are one too many coincidental running-into-each-other-in-town close encounters.

Land of the Lost has stray amusing tidbits, but overall it leaves you feeling splattered.

A good movie? Hardly. But more than enough to pass a dog day afternoon.

The whole thing plays like “Logan” done in the worst humdrum rhythmless made-for-streaming generic style, the lighting flat, the soundtrack heavy with John Carpenter’s old-school one-man-at-the-synthesizer horror music, because if you took that sound of processed dread away you wouldn’t have much else.

Robin Hood is no classic, but if it sometimes seems like it’s trying to be “Baz Luhrmann’s Robin Hood,” more power to it. The movie is a diverting live-wire lark — one that, for my money, gets closer to the spirit of what Robin Hood is about than the logy 1991 Kevin Costner version or the dismal 2010 Russell Crowe version.

The movie, while heartfelt and vividly shot, takes too many rote genre turns.

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.

There are some clever and exciting sequences, but this $120 million epic of reconstituted Atomic Age trash lumbers more than it thrills.

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.

A somber, draggy, deadweight, lugubrious, absurdly self serious version of ''American Beauty.''

To call Lukas Moodysson's A Hole in My Heart the feel-bad movie of the year would be an understatement -- it's the feel-sick movie of the millennium.

A ludicrously scattershot drama in which overwrought feminine rage, diary-of-a-mad-woman craziness, and inept filmmaking are all but inseparable.

Lawrence, as always, exerts the appeal of a con man too lightweight to buy into his own con. He'd be funnier, though, if he didn't insist on being the only funny thing in the room.

De Niro seems to be reacting to nothing so much as the lame movie he's stuck in.

A bit of a tease itself. The movie keeps threatening to become amateur porn, like a risqué ''Candid Camera'' gone ''Dirty Debutantes,'' but it never quite gets there.

So is it, you know, fun? At times it is; at others it’s exhausting. Let’s call the whole thing fun-xhausting.

A grisly one-note chase thriller.

The teensploitation premise is like something a porn filmmaker from the '70s might have come up with. But Fired Up! has one added quirk: The script, credited to Freedom Jones, is a riot of tongue-twisting ironic sleaze -- it sounds like the first (and last) collaboration between Diablo Cody and Artie Lange.

It's just a grindingly inert death-wish thriller.

The cruddy, shot-in-a-warehouse settings are especially depressing, since the computer-generated special effects seem to be taking place in another movie entirely (a far livelier one). [9 Jan 1998, p. 47]

A bland, pious yet touching faith-based tearjerker.

No Safe Spaces is a smart, vital, urgent, and provocative exploration of that question.

A grubby, disturbing serial-killer mystery, a kind of blood-simple "Rashomon."

“Rebel Moon,” while eminently watchable, is a movie built so entirely out of spare parts that it may, in the end, be for Snyder cultists only.

A genially cruddy B movie can sometimes go places - sort of - that bigger movies won't.

A few of the images are startling, but as Radha Mitchell (a good actress) wanders through a ghost town, searching for her lost daughter as though she was touring an abandoned movie set, Silent Hill is mostly paralyzing in its vagueness.

“Smurfs” might be the best of the Smurfs films. It’s an amiable diversion for kids.

Screenwriter Kevin Williamson (the Scream trilogy), having bottomed out in the horror genre, now dips below bottom (there isn't a line that has his knowing sweet-and-sour zing).

Isn't coherent, exactly, but what dripping-ghoul horror movie is these days? The new rule is, It's not hip to make sense when you're raising hell.

The hilarious diminuendo of that title is such that the movie might as well have been called ''Wes Craven Presents: Not a Hell of a Lot.''

Never underestimate the importance of guy-on-guy sentimentality in the Adam Sandler universe. It's his way of making his fans feel as if he's high-fiving them, or maybe giving them a group hug. But Sandler, bottom line, is too good at playing louts like Donny to spend this much energy getting us to like them.

Graham makes the coming-out dithering bearable, but not before she has jumped through hoops of contrivance.

The film's fragmentary structure, though, is suspect. It says that the soldiers find no real meaning in their combat actions, yet Gunner Palace presents the operations we're seeing in so little context, reducing them to a random hash of ''sensational'' moments, that Tucker at times appears to be exploiting the war to create a didactic canvas of manic military unease.

Mostly hot air.

Amiably silly.

All the new Death Wish is truly committed to is getting a rise out of the audience. It’s a first-person-shooter fantasy. The film’s only real view of justice is that it’s a blast.

You can forge a decent drama out of elements this scrappy, but not necessarily a film like Jacob’s Ladder.

The Zatoichi films are amusing comic-strip spectaculars — the blood spurts like something out of a Hawaiian Punch commercial. The action in Blind Fury, on the other hand, is resolutely earthbound and heavy-duty. The fact that Hauer kicks, slashes, and punches without the benefit of sight just makes you acutely aware of how ludicrous this stuff always is.

It’s lunging to be a badass hard-R epic, but it’s basically a pile of origin-story gobbledygook, frenetic and undercooked, full of limb-hacking, eye-gouging monster battles as well as an atmosphere of apocalyptic grunge that signifies next to nothing.

Leaves you with the dismaying sensation that Levinson, who should probably be off making his own version of ''The Player,'' has instead crafted a comedy of self-loathing, burying himself in a movie that deserves to be Vapoorized.

Fails to recapture the elemental magic of Star Wars, and that, ironically, is because it represents the coarse culmination of the original film's adrenaline aesthetic.

A third-rate knockoff of Top Gun and Blue Thunder.

There's enough foreboding in America right now to make sitting through a movie such as The Road seem like one more heavy burden that, frankly, no one needs.

It’s a low-budget generic shrug of a movie, one that recycles clichés both ancient (testy drug dealers) and slightly less ancient (the hero films his life with a camcorder).

A sign of how desperate the series' producers have become is that the big twist here is that Leatherface, the slobby butcher-boy demon in his mask of human skin, is now...the good guy. (That's a ''jump the chainsaw'' concept if ever there was one.)

Without that heightened racial antipathy-turned-camaraderie, there's not a whole lot to Cop Out besides watching Kevin Smith pretend, with a crudeness that is simply boring, that he's an action director making a comic thriller about cops versus a Mexican drug gang (yawn).

This is the rare horror film so bad that you almost wish it had turned into a good old connect-the-gory-dots slasher movie. The only mystery at work is how Lawrence's agent ever let her sign on to this.

The film’s muted yet still rather flamboyant terribleness derives from the fact that it seems to be juggling three or four borderline schlock genres at once.

If you're not at the bull's-eye center of the target audience, a movie like this one can suck the life out of you.

After an hour of inert exposition, a race through Shanghai gooses the movie alive. Then it plunges back into torpor.

A self-righteous mishmash that can't decide whether to be a tribute to the fanatical leftist passion that thrives in college towns, an indictment of that very same fanaticism, or a ghoulishly didactic snuff-video thriller.

Adam Sandler stars in a one-joke Caddyshack for the blitzed and jaded.

it's a synthetic, rather drab movie, one that seems linked less to experience, or even to fantasy, than to other movies - "Big," of course, and also "E.T.," "Mask," and "Phenomenon."

It's no exaggeration to say that the actors have less personality than the pipes, nail guns, grinding gears, decaying beams, and slowly spreading oil spills that are fused, with a kind of empty-dread technical precision, into Rube Goldberg torture devices.

As the vamps, Eva Mendes and Scarlett Johansson might be posing for a fashion spread with just one note to play -- gorgeous high-bitch mockery.

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

The thinnest, draggiest, and most tediously preachy of the Saw films.

Phil is a trifle, and there’s no harm in that, but it’s an unconvincing trifle. The words “coy” and “whimsical” scarcely do justice to its coy whimsicality.

This comedy about a couple who can't get pregnant is stuck between Judd Apatow's humane raunchiness and the American Pie series' smirky broadness.

The new film lacks that kinetic haunted-house element. It’s the most somber and meditative and least aggressive of the “Conjuring” films. It’s out to deepen the series’ portrait of the Warrens, and damned if Patrick Wilson, with his gentle tenacity and Pat Boone grin, and Vera Farmiga, who plays Lorraine the psychic in high Victorian collars and embodies her gift with a feverish purity, don’t succeed in making Ed and Lorraine the coziest fighters of evil the movies have ever seen.

A yawn-by-numbers romper-room dud.

The movie is based on a 1999 series of comic books by Alan Moore and Kevin O'Neill, but the original tone of deadpan historical audacity has been replaced by a kind of wax-museum literalness.

Bloodless and false.

"USS Indianapolis” is a World War II “epic” that’s overscaled yet underimagined. It’s a tale of survival that never provides the audience with a basic entry point into how and why we should care.

The dialogue is chintzy and rhythmless.

This is true 21st-century trash: a movie in which the action itself is expendable.

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.

The new movie is a dusty piñata stuffed with omens and not much more.

Basmati Blues is one of those movies that isn’t terrible but still leaves you wondering why it exists.

It’s another of Perry’s raucous and slovenly comedies of responsibility, which means that its heart is in a very old — and right — place. If only a message that was this solid equalled solid laughs.

The movie could have used a brain transplant. It doesn't explore injustice -- it just exploits it.

For a while, the movie looks like "Couples Retreat" or a Tyler Perry house party, only instead of cookie-cutter conflicts, everyone just grows happier and more relaxed.

The House, like too many Hollywood comedies of outrage, turns the extreme into the innocuous.

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.

Supplies stretches of actual skating footage by pros doubling for the stars. It's in these moments, freed from the earthbound pull of its market-tested components, that the movie briefly relaxes into the sheer thrilling audacity of flying into the air propelled by a board on wheels.

Kutcher is the wrong actor to anchor a psychological freak-out.

Slender Man is the kind of movie in which images come before logic, because there really isn’t much logic. There’s just a movie out to goose you.

It has no twistiness or intrigue, and none of the juicy anthro-underworld detail that Koppelman and Levien brought to their screenplay for the tricky, enjoyable ''Rounders.''

Schaeffer's howler of a romantic comedy, which presents itself as a valentine to Clayburgh even as it keeps dreaming up fresh ways to humiliate her.

In the hands of director and co-writer Shana Feste (Country Strong), Endless Love has become a solidly engaging neo-'50s romantic melodrama.

An innocuous teen pulp soap opera that flirts with “danger” but, in fact, keeps surprising you with how mild and safe and predictable it turns out to be.

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

The definition of aiming low is when the John Hughes film you're ripping off is ''Weird Science."

Zookeeper (I can't believe I'm even writing this) is a dumbed-down "Paul Blart."

She Hate Me manages to be at once racist, homophobic, utterly fake, and unbearably tedious. This time, it's Spike Lee who's doing the bamboozling.

But the Lethal Weapon films, with their hyperbolic explosiveness, lurid repartee, and quasi-loco Mel Gibson hero, are already winking at the audience. (Last year’s spoofy, ragtag Lethal Weapon 3 practically turned its own slovenliness into a running gag.) The only way to make light of them is to exaggerate the cartoon funkiness that’s already at the center of their appeal. It’s no wonder this Weapon ends up shooting blanks.

It arrives at a moment when the crackling voltage of the culture wars — blue state vs. red state, Trump haters vs. Trump lovers — is coursing through every fiber of the nation. This means that a film like Daddy’s Home 2, in its stupido-on-purpose way, can seem almost relevant in its trivial hit-or-miss yocks.

A preposterous erotic thriller from the Basic Instinct fingernails-ripped-my-flesh school, Body of Evidence is shamelessly — and, on occasion, amusingly — unadulterated trash.

What's going on is: hunks on horsies.

The result is a sub-"Saw" knockoff that manages to be brutal yet monotonous, not to mention monstrously unpleasant.

Mostly preposterous, and it has no dramatic center, but the racing scenes hold you in their death-trip grip.

As Brier's comrade-in-lip-gloss, Ashlee Simpson, dressed to look like a teenybop girl version of Crispin Glover in "River's Edge," is the real deal -- in fake cred.

It’s a softheaded piece of morbid romantic treacle — two parallel cloying love stories for the price of one.

Proof that a thriller can be sleekly shot, expertly cast, paced with crisp professionalism...and still be a letdown if its twists and turns hold no more surprise than yesterday's weather report.

This dank and rhythmless ''psychological'' potboiler was directed by Jamie Babbit, who made 2000's "But I'm a Cheerleader," and though she has shifted tones from shrill camp to moody angst in The Quiet, she still thinks in stereotypes so thin that they put you to sleep the moment they open their mouths.

An act of nose-thumbing that never quite figures out how, or even where, to position its thumb.

Kate Hudson is as blah and dazed as her costar is cloyingly enthused. If it's possible to have too even a tan, Hudson in Fool's Gold would be the poster child for it.

Even in her dullest vehicle, Lindsay Lohan exudes an unfakable shine.

I take no vicious pleasure in saying that Poolman, a movie that Pine co-wrote, directed, and stars in, is not only the worst film I saw during the fall festival season but would likely be one of the worst films in any year it came out.

In this American remake of the spooky, more-atmospheric-than-coherent 2005 J-horror thriller, the ghosts blink and crackle into existence with an electromagnetic sputter, but really, they're not so different from the gauzy, see-through spirits of yesteryear.

Homophobic, sex-phobic, maybe even human-phobic.

The dumbing down of low-IQ sentimentality.

Cowgirls, a flaky-surreal adaptation of Tom Robbins' 1976 feminist hipster road novel, finds the director of "Drugstore Cowboy" and "My Own Private Idaho" lost in the ozone of his own private whimsies.

A deft, funny, shrewdly unsettling tribute to such slasher-exploitation thrillers as "Terror Train," "New Year's Evil," and Craven's own "A Nightmare on Elm Street."

Randall Miller (Bottle Shock), appears to be trying to cross a bad Elmore Leonard thriller with a bad indie-festival family-angst comedy. He gives us the worst of both worlds.

Ends up about as exotic as a straight-to-cable potboiler.

Collapses into the most generic sort of teen movie-ville, just at the moment it's convinced you that its lightly appealing stars are capable of better.

Gory but dramatically inert vampire schlocker.

Shepard just sprinkles overstated banter onto a generic plot and bits of pedal-to-the-metal action, as if he was serving the action-comedy gods by sticking the usual ingredients in a blender and pushing “puree.”

Winchester is the supernatural-schlock version of a liberal think-tank paper.

The movie, in its basic concept, is corny and contrived, but as written and directed by Justin Zackham, it's executed in a pleasantly wry and understated fashion.

A remake of the 1986 suspense ''classic,'' is as processed and hoot-worthy as the original.

Trash, but always just a little creepier than you expect.

The best thing about it is Claire Foy's performance as the seething, caged is-she-a-witch?. Foy, like a Brit Kristen Stewart, has an entrancing sparkle of disdain.

The Ugly Truth isn't fizzy and fun -- it's vacuously snappy.

In this year's lump of coal, Matthew Broderick is the control freak who lives for toasty yuletide cheer, and Danny DeVito is the vulgar pest who wants his holiday lights seen from space. The dueling-neighbor crankfest is blah.

Madea is still a witty character, but the gutter wisdom of her tossed-off verbal hand grenades can’t shock us anymore; even the outtakes that play through the closing credits feel like reruns.

Bland to dismal.

What sin did Heather Locklear commit to deserve her role in The Perfect Man?

Cloddish, unfunny dud.

One of the most indecently bad movies of the year.

Dangerous is a bits-and-pieces action thriller with a fluky premise and a lead actor good enough to embody it. Made in the slipshod, overlit style of a straight-to-streaming potboiler, it’s not a rip-off so much as a film built out of spare parts from other movies, to the point that it never fully becomes itself.

Vampire in Brooklyn is a horror comedy that mixes lame blood-pellet effects with lame gags, and it clunks along on a series of interchangeably deserted streets that manage to look dank and overlit at the same time.

It's been a while since we saw a bad John Hughes comedy, and Are We There Yet? more than fits the bill (even though Hughes had absolutely nothing to do with it).

Jason Lee seems to have been bitten by a vampire who sucked out all his prickly charisma. You see the promise of stardom dribbling through his fingers.

I wouldn't call Catwoman incompetent, yet it has no visual grandeur, and very little surprise; you can tick off the story beats as if they'd been graphed.

Thérese unfolds with the sunlight-and-daffodils piety of a Sunday school slide show.

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.

There may be a lot more going on “Blood and Honey 2,” but let’s not kid ourselves. It’s mostly a shambles.

For the first time, the messy hyperactive form and nihilistic crunched-metal content seem to reinforce each other.

Asia Argento is not what I would call a good actress, but she's a prime specimen of train-wreck sexuality: a debauched Eurotrash starlet who oozes punk cred more than she does talent. It's not too hard to see why she wanted to write, direct, and star in The Heart Is Deceitful Above All Things.