Owen Gleiberman

The movie is a feminist lesson instead of what it should have been (and once was): a tough, synthetic, high-gloss entertainment that wears its heart on its lacquered fingernails.

Ralph Bakshi's first feature in nearly a decade would like to be a down-and-dirty "Who Framed Roger Rabbit," but Bakshi isn't up to the task.

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.

An action-choked dud in which even the closing outtakes barely deserve to be left on the cutting-room floor?

As a satire of new-style collegiate types, this MTV production actually evinces a few germs of rancid wit.

The most excitingly original movie of the year.

Murphy speaks in a breathy lisp, as if his mouth had been partially buttoned shut, and he doesn't give himself the nerd's traditional redeeming feature of a geeky, slide-rule intellect. Norbit, all frozen gawk, is just a very dim bulb.

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

A romantic comedy with all the confectionary value of one of those watery diet shakes; it practically evaporates while you're watching it.

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

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.

One of those desultory F/X and no script potboilers that seems to restart itself with every new scene.

Studded with Lampoon/John Hughes anachronisms.

Basic Instinct 2 isn't bad, exactly, but it lacks the entertaining vulgarity of the first film; it's Basic Instinct redone with more ''class'' and less thrust.

Dour, absurdist, gruesomely awful.

The film is consistently fun, and Tucker's comeuppance ? will leave you gasping (if not gagging) with laughter.

Stone's latest penance is Gloria, the Sidney Lumet-directed dud that sprung from the singularly bad idea of remaking John Cassavetes' oddball 1980 character study. I mean, really, did anyone even like the original?

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.

The movie is short on wisdom, but it might have gotten by if it had had better filth.

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

The audience gets the message (religious fanaticism: bad), but nothing we see is convincing on its own.

If any of these characters were half as resonant as Wenders appears to think they are, the film might have seemed charming instead of merely stranded.

It's hardly much of a thrill to see The One recycle, on a lower budget, the slo-mo bullet dodges from "The Matrix," along with unspectacular variations on several other of that film's time-bending demolition-ballet effects.

This morphing of "The Bad News Bears" and a "Three Stooges" episode parades its dumbness with such zip that it almost passes for clever.

A clunky family-therapy soaper.

The creepy-faced robot twin babies are funny (for a while); the rest of the film is not. It's like "Meet the Parents" with Dr. Phil as the officiant from hell.

I'm happy to report, though, that even a dud like Spy Hard can't completely douse the stumbling Zen charm of Leslie Nielsen, whose genius is that he never quite sheds the illusion that he isn't in on the joke.

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.

Obsessed has little plausibility, but at moments it's an entertaining bad movie, and the performers are vivid.

Soft-core trash with a tent-show hook.

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

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.

Pauly Shore, the reptilian imp from MTV. Reeling off Valley Dude slang in a slurry monotone, as if he could barely be bothered to make his lips form words, he’s a fey sleazebag in hippie duds — a cross between Jim Morrison and Richard Simmons. The most interesting thing about watching Pauly Shore is wondering how long it will be before he has to take a day job.

As Nomi, Elizabeth Berkley has exactly two emotions -- hot and bothered -- but her party-doll blowsiness works for the picture.

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

Director John Singleton offers bits of suspense, but Abduction is less a movie than a piece of engineering, a glumly ludicrous cat-and-mouse blowout designed to win Lautner male fans along with his girl demo.

There's only one place that a movie like this one can possibly be heading, and that's to a demagogic blowout of violent, femme-power payback. Enough gets there by way of far too many tedious detours.

Tastefully embarrassing.

A Jekyll-and-Hyde teen comedy that sounds like a Pauly Shore reject, but Qualls moves his marionette body around with a true clown's effervescence, and he does rubber-faced parodies of youth cool that are just what youth cool deserves.

Playing with Fire . . . is a barely glorified sitcom made in the overlit and benignly smart-mouth Nickelodeon house style.

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

It's every bit as nonsensical and overitalicized a mess as ''The Whole Nine Yards.''

The backstories keep piling up, with nods to "The Shining," "The Ring," and a dozen other gothic supernatural chillers, yet the result doesn't remotely scare you.

The only fun is in watching Stallone square off against Alan Cumming and Mickey Rourke.

An idiot variation on Frank Capra's ''Mr. Deeds Goes to Town,'' might have been thrown together in even less time than it takes Sandler to get dressed in the morning; it feels sort of like the dumbest corporate comedy of 1987.

Bride Wars pretends to be a satire of wedding mania, but since there's virtually nothing else to the movie, the satire comes depressingly close to endorsement.

A synthetic yet shrill sadomasochistic cartoon.

Roland Joffé brings an artful video-grunge look, and not much else, to this "Saw" clone.

As anyone who has peered in on the actual WNBA for five minutes knows, professional women basketball players are as tough as men. That the film treats this as a joke isn't funny -- it's the height of lame condescension.

Jean-Claude Van Damme's latest dud.

It’s a good movie: tense, bold, angry, empathetic, provocative, observant, morally engaged. And also, to be honest, a trifle gimmicky.

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

It takes the movie all of 15 minutes to descend into sub-Spielbergian banalities about poor Max's search for his absentee dad.

The umpteenth recycled shocker about a mystical dark child with an aura of disaster.

An eminently watchable B-movie nightmare.

Now that the series is, it can be said that the most disturbing thing about the Saw films is the way that they turn torture into a wink of megaplex vengeance. They're made, and consumed, as a big bloody joke, and that's scary.

It’s a functional piece of exploitation — an efficient little crime-porn snuff-thriller potboiler. It’s like a fast-food meal that makes you think, “Okay, that wasn’t good for me, but I got what I paid for.” A film like this one is a junk-franchise burger: tasty, processed, and basically fake.

Myers is trying for another of his endearingly hormonal imp-egomaniacs, but hidden behind a wavy beard, a wax-curled mustache, and an astoundingly ugly squashed fake nose, he's a little too grotesque.

By the end of Collateral Beauty, you’d have to have a heart of stone for the film not to get to you a bit, but even if it does, you may still feel like you’ve been played.

Thanks to Vaughn, Favreau, and the stray sharp lines that pop out of everyone else, the film at least offers the lively sound of egos that still know how to swing.

It just makes you want to flip on the tube to see the real (fake) thing.

The film should have been called ''Lock, Stock and Two Wilting Barrels.''

There’s a story, and a mythology, and a prestige actress who knows how to push moodiness to the point that, in this series, it’s just about her only mood, but none of it, in the end, gets in the way of the splatter.

In The Bounty Hunter, the couple that foils a bunch of tiresome grade-C thriller goons together stays together. Whether or not that's a recipe for love, it's certainly not a formula for romantic-comedy magic.

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

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.

One more case of a winning ''SNL'' character tamed by the wan, fizzled farce around him.

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.

New Year's Eve is dunderheaded kitsch, but it's the kind of marzipan movie that can sweetly soak up a holiday evening.

This underworld fairy tale is so soggy and sentimental it's like a new genre: Hallmark noir.

In its hostile sitcom way, Christmas With the Kranks is a paranoid comic nightmare of conformity gone mad.

It will have you groaning between yawns.

Few comedies have worked this hard to make everyone on screen look this dumb.

A black comedy in the form of vicarious serial punishment.

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

Lacks even the good, guilty setup of "I Know What You Did Last Summer" -- the sense that the heroes are fleeing the consequences of their own crime.

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

Freddie Prinze Jr. has a look in his eye that is equal parts self-infatuation and boyish flash of fear.

This is a high octane ride that starts to leak gas before it even gets going.

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

The characters twirl around like mini tornadoes, but between random brash moments of technological eye-tickling, Son of the Mask sags more than it spins.

The movie is "Star Wars" with martial arts, plus a touch of "The Last Emperor." Technically, it's not badly done; I enjoyed the physical clash of elements, the water balls rising like sculpture in the air.

Populated by ersatz versions of stars who, in this case, are fairly vanilla to begin with.

Ends up blowing its own joke. Instead of making Joe blissfully arrogant in his Southern rock dude myopia, it turns him into a shuffling masochistic loser.

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.

Someone (Myers?) came up with the bright idea of turning the Cat in the Hat into the worst Vegas nightclub spritzer of 1958. He's become a furry version of Rip Taylor: a walking, talking vaudeville idiot box.

The comedy is nonexistent.

Has the look of a great fairy tale -- all that's missing is the tale.

For Sandler, it's not just when he grew up. It's the garden of idiotic innocence, something that, in Grown Ups 2, he is helping to keep alive.

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.

There are brutal scenes with razor blades and other impromptu devices of erotic torment, but what makes the movie a trial to sit through isn't just the heroine's pain-freak tastes.

Halloween: Resurrection comes closer to comatainment.

"Species" at least had the benefit of Henstridge's glazed porn-doll perversity, but this time any glimmers of sexual ominousness are buried in a lame, desultory chase plot and in the woefully underimagined special effects.

Doesn't contain a single scary or imaginative moment.

If you've always longed to see a Cold War satire done in the hit 'em over the head frantic camp mode of ''Love, American Style,'' then Company Man is the movie for you.

A watchable bad movie, but it's far from your typical cookie-cutter blockbuster. There are no shoot-outs or car chases, and there isn't much romantic suspense, either.

Ritchie made a movie that never pretends to be more than a guilty pleasure of soft-core kitsch, and Madonna and Giannini (son of Giancarlo, costar of the original) achieve a lively S&M chemistry.

This rusty jalopy of a movie, which is so ramshackle it's nearly enough to make you forget how tossed-together the 1976 ''Car Wash'' was.

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

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.

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.

Far more grotesque than the first Human Centipede - in fact, The Human Centipede 2 (Full Sequence) could be the sickest B movie ever made.

Epic Movie is just timely enough to conclude with a wink and a nod to Borat. I only wish that it had been bold enough to go Borat on HIM.

Tyler Perry hasn’t generally been in the business of sequels, but apart from Joe’s overly salty soul-food patter, this one has a joyless, obligatory, cardboard feeling that marks it as one of Perry’s least satisfying films.

Presents undercover law enforcement less as a profession than as an accessory, an excuse to pout and glower chicly, to stand around in nightclubs acting like a sullen version of the Last American Rebel.

A grisly piece of torture porn.

The Last Face would have been a better movie if it had an actual screenplay, rather than the bare-bones one credited to Erin Dignam.

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

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

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.

In its mingling of horniness and disgust, Tomcats attains a convoluted cleverness.

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

A flat, heebie jeebies thriller.

The movie is merciless sending up "Juno's" self-satisfied hipster gobbledygook, and it's quite funny to see Hannah Montana still promoting her tie-in products as she lies crushed and dying under a meteor.

Friendly yet toothless, College musters little energy even as anarchic-party-movie nostalgia.

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]

Just... bad. As in BAD bad.

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

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

A thriller primarily about the movement of Cindy Crawford's breasts beneath a succession of ever-smaller T-shirts.

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

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

Dudsville.

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.

The Avengers is too enervated to qualify as even a full-scale disaster.

There have been worse ideas, but in this case the execution isn’t good enough to bring the notion of an emoji movie to funky, surprising life.

The movie doesn't so much extend Schwartzman's antic outsider persona from ''Rushmore'' as uglify it, reducing him to the ultimate Uncool Anti-WASP.

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.

In Date Movie, the hormones, anxiety, and princess jealousy that fuel the majority of Hollywood love stories are made so excessive that the romance itself is revealed to be...every bit as big a crock as it usually is.

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.

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.

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

Unplanned isn’t a good movie, but it’s effective propaganda — or, at least, it is if you belong to the group it’s targeting: those who believe that abortion in America, though a legal right, is really a crime. It’s hard to imagine the movie drawing many viewers outside that self-selected demographic.

Just a lumbering, poorly photographed piece of derivative sci-fi drivel, full of grunting extras scampering around in animal pelts and more dank, trash-strewn sets than I ever care to see again.

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.

Writer-director-stars Zach Cregger and Trevor Moore, of the Whitest Kids U'Know, here prove the crassest, most maladroit moviemakers you know.

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

The Farrelly brothers could burp out a movie funnier than The Hottie & the Nottie, a farce of corrupt stereotypes that's never more grotesque than when it pretends to be more than skin-deep.

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.''

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.

"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.

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.

Fans will gorge on this deft, year-by-year portrait of the ultimate enduring cult band.

The Bounce Back was co-written, directed, and edited by Youseff Delara, and for a while he creates some lively screwball tension.

There’s hardly a moment in Dangal that doesn’t go according to the numbers, but after 160 minutes’ worth of formula, the movie certainly hits a note of touching tribute to the way girl power is sweeping the world.

There was a time when audiences lined up around city blocks to see the movies of Lina Wertmüller. Behind the White Glasses lets you revisit a bit of that passion, without quite nailing what it was.

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.

The movie is a mess, yet once the thriller plot kicks in, you do start to absorb it as a “silent” film, tuning into the visual atmosphere of stalker fear and rusty chemical entropy.

The Elephant and the Butterfly is a movie too cool-headed and present tense for backstory.

Something has a few observations to make about the perils of contemporary parenthood, but instead of whipping them into tension it douses them in catch-as-catch-can thriller vagueness.

The Specials, in the end, is not a very compelling movie. It’s arduous and rambling and repetitive; it skitters across the surface of the story it’s telling. The film lacks a vibrant structure, but more than that, it never brings us close to the people it shows us.

When someone finally make that great drama about our national addictions, it will need to be a more complex horror film. This one is a little too much “Alien Invaders,” not enough “They Came From Within.”

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

It’s the casualness of the drug use, extreme yet just another part of life, that’s the 2020 element. Kristen wants to have her dope and eat it too. And that means turning herself into an invisible junkie.

Becoming a successful stand-up comic is an uphill climb, one that not everybody is cut out for, and The Opening Act is a likable ode to those hard knocks.

Atarrabi and Mikelats isn’t a movie for everyone — in fact, by design, it’s probably a movie for very few. Yet it confirms the reverent audacity of Eugène Green’s talent. He’s 73 years young. He still has the chance to make a film that will blow the world away.

In the last 20 minutes, Keean Johnson, who mostly acts cool and on top of things, drops his guard, letting in an honest ripple of pain and fear. He hits a true note, and the fact that Marcus can’t hear it almost makes up for the doom-laden whimsy of the rest of the movie.

Nelson, who has the ace documentarian’s flair for making history far more interesting than the mythologies it’s cutting through, has directed a film that stays true to the epic devastation crack left in its wake and, at the same time, examines all the ways that the government and the media used the grim reality of crack, turning it against the very people who were being victimized by it.

Made You Look is a lively and fascinating stranger-than-fiction art-world doc, and what drives it are two essential mysteries: Who could have created fake paintings that looked this astonishing? And even then, how could all the experts have been fooled?

"Amundsen” is a visually stately yet naggingly underscripted movie that never quite finds its dramatic center.

Brendan Fitzgerald, the director of The Oxy Kingpins, fills in the nuts and bolts of how the racket actually operated the way Scorsese did in “The Wolf of Wall Street” and “Casino,” giving the audience a wide-eyed, engrossing, information-packed street-smart tutorial.

Larry Flynt for President tells a story so wild that the documentary plays as a succulent time machine of sordid 1980s mishegas.

It’s a performance film, a delectable slice of nostalgia, and a testament to how one gorgeously raucous rock ‘n’ roll moment can reverberate through the decades.

“Nightclubbing” is a raw inside slice of punk nostalgia and punk history.

So how could this be a responsible movie? In the following way. “Alex’s War” is not a piece of pro-Jones propaganda. It’s closer to a piece of media-age vérité that assumes we know what the facts are, and that we don’t need to have our hands held as Jones spews forth his red-pill view of reality.

Loughren is a compelling character. So are the cops, and so, in his way, is the documentary’s “star,” who we hear on tape (from Graeber’s extensive interviews with him), and who comes equipped with an earnest explanation for why he killed all those people.

The Modelizer feels like a sketchbook version of the movie it could, or should, have been.

What’s strange about Together 99 is that it looks like a Lukas Moodysson film (natural light), it moves like a Lukas Moodysson film (the documentary-like flow), but it’s blanketed with a sodden forlorn Swedish bourgeois cynicism that makes you think Moodysson needs to get out more.

Howery’s line readings sound improvised, and that’s a good thing. He’s the ebullient, fast-talking spark plug of a formula comedy with a cheap engine, though one that putters along harmlessly enough.

The film’s attitude seems to be: Come for the pierogis and goulash, stay for the humanitarian valor. Fair enough, but I wish the movie had drawn a deeper connection between the taste of freedom and the taste of Veselka.

Becoming Madonna, in other words, does not live up to the basic concept that it’s about Madonna becoming Madonna. Yet the strange thing about the movie is that it convinces itself it is about that by treating the glory days of her career as if she were still “becoming” who she was.

In “Something Beautiful,” with the songs employed as catwalk power anthems, you see how Miley Cyrus, in elevating her erotic aura, is trying to be a performer of mystery — to let her beauty singe our eyeballs, to let it vibrate into the cosmos. Yet it’s all a little insular.

It’s Perry’s version of a holiday movie and a connect-the-dots love story, but it’s cliché-driven in such a minimal way that it almost makes you yearn for the Perry movies that can feel like a long night of channel surfing all rolled into one.

Newport & the Great Folk Dream is a rapturous documentary — elegant and transporting, full of scratchy lyrical black-and-white images and performances that have a timeless power.

In Joe’s College Road Trip, Tyler Perry doesn’t just let his hair down, he isn’t just having down-and-dirty fun — he’s wildly, deliriously profane. The movie is a rude and rollicking lark, which makes it an anomaly in the Perry canon.