Owen Gleiberman

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 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.

Darkness was clearly tossed together like salad in the editing room, since it's little more than the sum of its unshocking shock cuts.

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.

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

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

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.

One of the most indecently bad movies of the year.

It's like a film-school thesis gone disastrously wrong.

It all makes you want to see a Bollywood movie, all right -- a good one.

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).

Silver City may be the mustiest political-conspiracy tale ever filmed; it's like "Chinatown" rewritten by Ralph Nader.

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

Except for the relentless, jittery way that the film has been photographed, there's nothing of interest going on in it. It's all fractious guerrilla-newsreel "style" masquerading a void.

Another racial cartoon buddy movie that eagerly flogs its best laugh -- indeed, its only laugh -- in the trailer.

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]

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.

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

Don't let the Carl Hiaasen pedigree fool you: Hoot is an Afterschool Special too crummy to give a hoot about.

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.

It's doubtful that even a real actress could have triumphed over the rusty tinsel of Glitter, a hapless, retro-'80s ''Star Is Born.''

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.

Simon Pegg has what it takes, but he's saddled himself with a script (co-written by Pegg and Michael Ian Black) that Adam Sandler wouldn't have pulled out of his bottom drawer.

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

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.

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.

Greenland: Migration is a dystopian dud. It’s like the boring middle section of a picaresque disaster film, minus the showy kickoff and catchy climax.

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

It’s hard to say what the title of Trespass Against Us actually means, but then it’s hard to know what anything in this movie thinks it’s about. Even Ed Wood would have said, “Needs work.”

Father Figures...is a limply spritzing fountain of unconvincing (and unfunny) tricks out of the how-to-write-a-comedy-hit manual.

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.

It’s a mad jumble, an eager product-tie-in mess.

This is a fuzzy-headed, badly made cheeseball schlock fable for everyone!

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.

Even at 40 minutes, America’s Musical Journey could have taken us on an organic and inspiring musical adventure. But what’s odd about the movie is that instead of reveling in the jewels of our cultural past, it seems to be twisting itself in knots to avoid the past.

Five Nights at Freddy’s 2 is a supernatural video-game slasher movie of astonishing clunky crudeness. No, the movie isn’t dumb fun. It’s flat-out bad, maybe even worse than the first film.

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

There’s hardly a moment in Cherry that’s believable, but the film’s true crime is that there’s hardly a moment in it that’s enjoyable either. The only emotion the movie conveys is being full of itself.

The movie, which will be lucky to eke out a weekend’s worth of business, isn’t scary, it isn’t awesome, and it doesn’t nudge you to think of technology in a new way. But it does make you wish that you could rewind those two hours, or maybe just erase them.

Stops time, all right -- it stretches 94 minutes into something that begins to feel like infinity.

The Prophecy is an occult freakshow so inert it seems to have been pasted together out of stock footage.

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.''

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

What’s numbing about this sub-Eastwood potboiler isn’t just the grisliness of the violence but the absence of any possibility that Seagal will stumble, or show doubt or pain, or have to challenge himself in order to defeat his enemies.

Shainberg reduces this most disturbing of all photographers to a portraitist of Halloween.

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.

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.

Angel-A shows how director Luc Besson can be French in a way that even the French might despise...Quel ick. And très tedious.

Serves up the sort of shrill ''satire'' of middle-class Jewish vulgarity in which the mere mention of words like ''brisket'' and ''klezmer'' is automatically presumed to be hilarious.

Selma Blair, the one vibrant actress in a cast of colorless screamers (including Tom Welling from Smallville and Maggie Grace from Lost), takes Adrienne Barbeau's old role.

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…

With its waxy color scheme and nonexistent pace, the movie is like an homage to Hitchcock’s worst period.

The movie, a shoddy mess, is a bargain-basement rip-off of ''Ronin."

Vapid, cutesy, knockabout Western.

At this point, revenge thrillers have become so standardized that these films are really all the same film — a Mixmaster blend of Death Wish, Dirty Harry, Enter the Dragon, and Rambo. A star with a personality would only gum up the works.

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."

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

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.

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]

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

The Zodiac has been made with the dunderheaded flatness of bad '70s TV.

Fragmented and monotonous, without a semblance of the gymnastic cleverness that at least made the first Mortal Kombat film into watchable trash, Mortal Kombat Annihilation is as debased as movies come.

Bottom-of-the-garbage-barrel comedy.

In the ludicrous soft-core fantasia Wild Orchid, Mickey Rourke is so tan he looks as though he’d spent a week with his head in a microwave.

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.

The gimmick in The Abandoned is that people battle their zombie doubles, whom they can't kill, since they'd be killing themselves. But the movie sinks so deep into deathly atmosphere that there's no life to it.

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.

It will come as no surprise that the movie isn't scary. But here's the real damn: It isn't funny, either.

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.

With jokes this lame you won't have to worry as much about your children getting any bad ideas.

The movie wants you to giggle and say, ”Yup, we sure are saps, aren’t we?”

"Hillary’s America” is a slow-motion seizure of ideological rancor, served up in the filmmaker’s trademark style of wide-eyed schoolbook infamy. The only novelty here is that there’s been a subtle shift of emphasis in the D’Souza vision. It’s now really all about him.

Melania is a documentary that never comes to life. It’s a “portrait” of the First Lady of the United States, but it’s so orchestrated and airbrushed and stage-managed that it barely rises to the level of a shameless infomercial. Is it cheesy? At moments, but mostly it’s inert. It feels like it’s been stitched together out of the most innocuous outtakes from a reality show.

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

It's like ''Grease: The Next Generation'' acted out by the food-court staff at SeaWorld.

Carrey suggests an escaped mental patient impersonating a game-show host-and, what's worse, his hyperbolically obnoxious shtick is the whole damned show.

The filmmakers even manage to turn seamy Bangkok into the least exotic setting imaginable.

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.

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.

As the killer, who plucks out his victims' eyeballs, Kane, the seven-foot bald WWE wrestler who's like a modern Tor Johnson, is so inept he's more cuddly than terrifying.

The trouble with Whipped isn't that its characters are dirty mouthed horndog jerks -- it's that they're phony dirty mouthed horndog jerks.

Stupefyingly tedious and annoying.

A soporific dud, which should have been tossed out of Sundance.

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

In Death of a Nation, Dinesh D’Souza is no longer preaching to the choir; he’s preaching to the mentally unsound. That’s how detached from reality his “philosophy,” his armchair rage, and his passionate and consuming desire to be a radical-right shill have become.

A joke of a title in search of a movie with a single good joke.

Ryan radiates neither desire nor terror. She's freeze-dried in a world of lifelessly abstract feminine fear, and so is the movie.

A movie so unhinged it practically dares you not to hate it.

The movie actually makes you long for the rockin’ entertainment value of a good catechism session.

This remake is merely vile (and dull).

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.

It appears to have been modeled on the worst revenge-of-the-nerds clichés the filmmakers could dredge up.

Even Snow Day's winter wonderland looks fake.

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.

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.

It's a shrill, stupid, brickbat-blatant piece of hackwork that practically sweats to be ''commercial.''

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

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

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

Benigni's Pinocchio is meant to be adorable, but he comes off as less an enchanted puppet than as a harmlessly deranged middle-aged man prancing about in the kind of froufrou cream-colored pantsuit that Dinah Shore retired to her back closet in 1977.

Chucky the plastic slasher proves that his novelty value has long worn off.

The only thing shocking about it, however, is the degree to which self-congratulatory gutter exhibitionism has become the degraded ash end of indie ''edge.''

The picture is so lethargic that I began to think of watching it as a form of atonement.

It might be courting hyperbole to call Corky Romano the single worst movie ever to feature an ''SNL'' cast member (Dan Aykroyd hit some pretty arid valleys), but I'm willing to go out on a critical limb and rank it among the all-time bottom dozen.

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

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

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.

Mr. Magorium, who is 243 years old (so are his jokes), is a cross between Willy Wonka and Geppetto, but Hoffman plays him with little more than a goofy dumb lisp, achieved by tucking his lower lip under his upper teeth, so that he looks just as rabbity-stoopid as he sounds.

Poisonously smug, one-joke indie comedy.

Top-heavy with whimsy, so muddled it makes Mission: Impossible look like a model of narrative cohesion, The Saint is the apo-theosis of the new incoherence, with the cliches of espionage and action thrillers jammed together like bumper cars.

The movie has no wit, no charm, no cleverness, no traction. Simply put, it is no fun.

Navy SEALs isn’t just the most stupidly didactic action movie since The Green Berets. It’s the dullest action movie since The Green Berets.

As an actor, Raymond is whiny and annoying, but not nearly so much as the film.

Is there anything more dull than an ineptly cynical fairy tale?

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.

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

It's really a dramatic sinkhole.

As the naughty ghost pal of Phoebe Cates, an obnoxious British actor named Rik Mayall is like Michael Keaton’s Beetlejuice without the juice. In Drop Dead Fred, all he does is smash and spill things and say many, many potty words.

Just... bad. As in BAD bad.

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.

Inocent Blood is an unbelievably lethargic horror comedy directed by John Landis (An American Werewolf in London). Anne Parillaud, the French star of La Femme Nikita, is less sexy than morose in the role of a modern-day vampire who preys on mafiosi. Why mafiosi? For no good reason other than that it allows Landis to stage a lot of scenes in which cut-rate Italian hoodlums stand around yelling at each other.

For the audience, it's like watching the dreckiest of teen puppy courtships trying to pass itself off as ''Annie Hall.'' La-de-blah.

Manderlay is turgid and hollow.

An inept low-budget thriller.

A grisly piece of torture porn.

Samuel L. Jackson, call your agent — and fire him.

The Libertine is such a torturous mess that it winds up doing something I hadn't thought possible: It renders Johnny Depp charmless.

This may be the only would-be blockbuster that's a sprawling, dissociated mess on purpose. It's a perverse landmark: the first postmodern Hollywood disaster.

The movie’s petty folly — its failure of imagination and morality — is that it actually goes out of its way to turn the Manson murders into schlock horror.

The real problem is the movie itself. The plot, with its interlocking contrivances, is like a machine that keeps trapping the actors in its gears. Since they aren't allowed to relate to each other on a simple human level, the spangly back-and-forth chemistry on which a romantic comedy depends is nowhere in sight.

Bilko is a weightless comic creation, and Steve Martin, perhaps sensing this, drifts through the movie with a misplaced balletic goofiness.

George Lucas is turning into the enemy of fun.

There's something uniquely embarrassing about a rock & roll fable that is no more authentic (and no less coy) than an episode of ''The Monkees'' yet insists on presenting itself as the epitome of rebel-yell cool.

The film isn't just bad; it's a barely coherent, inert mess -- a heart-tugger for voidoids.

With Mr. Magoo, it’s the filmmakers who seem blind.

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.

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

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.

This may be the first talking-animal movie in which the critter hero seems to have been body-snatched by a commentator from C-SPAN.

A black comedy in the form of vicarious serial punishment.

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

It's like a pastry that's been sitting on the shelf for 60 years.

In every way dreadful.

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

The comedy is nonexistent.

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

Halloween: Resurrection comes closer to comatainment.

Most of the jokes are so lame that Chevy Chase can’t even be bothered to look nonchalant. A sadder excuse for a movie would be hard to imagine.

Dour, absurdist, gruesomely awful.

The movie is one soporific, depressed, deadeningly vague scene after another.

It’s essential to recognize Uys’ patronization of the Bushmen for what it is: a beguiling form of racism.

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

The film is a jokey, nattering fiasco, as awful as Hudson Hawk. And yet, like that famous disaster, it never loses its aura of precocious self-satisfaction.

There’s something weirdly innocent about Shanley’s ineptitude: He seems to be inventing the oldest cliches for the very first time. The movie doesn’t really hit bottom, though, until he has Ryan deliver an ickily earnest monologue about how her character is ”soul-sick.” I think she means, ”Pass the Pepto-Bismol.