Peter Hartlaub

The movie plays more like a WB network teen drama than something audiences should be expected to pay to see.

May not be a very enjoyable movie, but at least the badness is in good taste.

Sporadic on-field violence is only a tiny reason that Gracie disappoints, but it's indicative of the film's greater problem. Producers Elisabeth and Andrew Shue seem so intent on creating a hero out of the main character and villains out of almost everyone else, that they've completely distorted reality.

Way too serious for its own good. The best vampire movies are some combination of sexy, scary or campy. This one is 100 percent earnest, and the hazy mysteries taken from Rachel Klein's book aren't strong enough to keep the audience engaged.

The makers were clearly paying attention to the smaller details. But somehow, they missed all the big things that made the first Point Break a memorable escapist film of its time.

Devoid of thrills, and with nothing even vaguely frightening to distract moviegoers, it becomes clear that the story wasn't worth telling in the first place.

Often frustrating and at times incomprehensible, the Bourne/Bond clone keeps the pulse racing but ultimately fails to satisfy.

Piles cliched character upon cliched character, and then doesn't give any of them very much to do.

The result is a well-intentioned mess -- a dishonest fantasy that begins with promise and gets more frustrating with every scene.

At best a little boring and at worst stomach-churningly offensive.

It's a movie packed with so many idiot characters that Rob Schneider is cast as the cool guy -- and sort of pulls it off.

Props to the Weinstein Brothers for having the guts to release a slasher film on Christmas Day. Too bad this one is the cinematic equivalent of tryptophan.

The 3-D 1D movie is aimless, seemingly deceptive and spreads a poor message: that it's OK to act extremely immature, as long as you have millions of blind followers who think it's cute.

At best, it will be remembered as "that exorcism movie with Eric Bana." More likely, "that exorcism movie where everyone has a bad New York accent."

Smurfs: The Lost Village has the look of a film that was rushed, and made on a tight budget. At best, it’s an adequate cinematic babysitter.

“Avoiding unhappiness is not the road to happiness,” Hector writes in his book. But avoiding this movie might be a good start.

Nowhere near as bad as "Coneheads," but still isn't worth your time.

If there was ever a human being who needed a visit from the ghosts of Christmas past, present and future, this is the guy.

A film that looks way more fun to make than it is to watch. There’s a stubbornness to the comedic approach, mostly in its unwillingness to age since the first “Super Troopers.”

Although it isn’t a top-flight horror movie — too slow for thrill-chasers, too ridiculously fictionalized for historians — the film serves as a proper 99-minute commercial for that San Jose tourist spot.

Has all kinds of good intentions, but the comedy is too broad and the pacing is clumsy. And then there's the Andy Griffith sex scene.

This is the animated children's film equivalent of "Another 48 Hours."

A film to be enjoyed only by science-fiction movie completists and middle school boys with extreme cases of attention deficit disorder.

Belongs in a less ambitious category of sequels, alongside the creatively lacking “Alvin and the Chipmunks” and “Ice Age” movies.

How can this movie not be fun?

Kind of a bore.

Mostly it serves as a comprehensive manual of bad places to hide from a masked killer.

It's just too bad that almost nothing in the movie seems original. The "Thriller" video may have featured hokey dancing zombies, but at least someone was making an effort.

The narrative is a mess, and the overly long action sequences are easily forgotten.

A movie that features a cartoon rodent eating his brother's feces, and do you really need to know more about this update of Ross Bagdasarian's iconic musical creation?

It's a movie that scrounges so desperately for laughs, it features both a flatulent moose and a flatulent train.

Has maybe a half-dozen moderately frightening scenes.

Don't invest too much in the word "Golf" at the beginning of the title. Golf in the Kingdom is arguably less of a sports movie than the first "Harry Potter." (At least someone won that game of quidditch ...)

The movie appears to be a contrived, poorly produced attempt to sell more of the author's books.

Humorless, confusing and not very fun to watch.

A well-intentioned horror film that is weighted down by stellar cast members who for the most part act as if they don't want to be there.

Every moviegoer will have his own breaking point, when The Mortal Instruments: City of Bones surpasses the mundane and enters the ridiculous.

Some people clearly had a good time making this film. Whether you have a good time watching it depends almost entirely on your Pony love walking in.

Who wants to spend a minute on the Strip with the chance that there might be people as annoying as the characters played by Cameron Diaz and Ashton Kutcher walking around?

At times, "European Gigolo" feels more like an international incident than a movie.

The movie is overly long and much too intense for small children, yet it's filled with dialogue and plot turns that are too juvenile to thrill adult audiences.

The need for a sequel was zero - proved by the fact that the characters end the movie pretty much exactly where they started it.

The reboot of the "Friday the 13th" series is a pretty big mess - not particularly scary or interesting or even gory by 21st century movie standards.

If you see only one bad movie this year, definitely make it Knowing. The first major disappointment from director Alex Proyas is a disaster movie, a horror picture, a "Da Vinci Code"-style thriller and an end-of-days religious film all at once.

It’s a poorly made film, with rough edits, distracting staging and plot contrivances that can be predicted to the moment.

Doesn't accomplish its objective.

That Vampires Suck is a step above god-awful is something of a miracle.

Any good will built up during the decent first half hour is quickly vaporized.

This movie could really use an Avon Barksdale, but even actor Wood Harris, who played drug kingpin Barksdale in "The Wire," seems a bit lost.

It's a well-meaning but ultimately feeble and misguided attempt to say something profound about the aftereffects of the 2001 attacks on New York.

You've probably seen this movie before, watching a child play with his toy Hot Wheels cars after eating multiple bowls of sugary breakfast cereal.

The fifth entry in the John Rambo series is called Rambo: Last Blood, and we can only hope that’s a promise.

Zoom is a C-list production in every possible way, from the actors and the special effects to the music and the script. Even the product placement is completely third rate.

The film Cirque du Soleil: Worlds Away highlights both the strains of the franchise and the willingness to promote the brand at any cost - including a coherent narrative. It's a big promo reel, and not a carefully disguised one.

The Nutcracker in 3D will be barely recognizable to fans of the beloved holiday classic. Imagine watching Tchaikovsky's ballet after taking a handful of peyote - on a day when all of the dancers call in sick and the orchestra decides to play a different set of the composer's works.

By the end, I was adding my own internal "Deadwood"-style profanities to McShane's clean dialogue. "For the sake of the (God-@#$%) kingdom, cut it (the @#$%) down!" Movies about mile-high beanstalks shouldn't require additional audience imagination.

Although the movie doesn't turn the Zodiac saga into a slasher film, it has the look of a straight-to-video movie, or at best a Project Greenlight production.

Completely ridiculous, but fun to look at.

That closing-credits sequence is by far the funniest thing in the disappointing movie,

Like most movies based on games, this film appears to have been quite literally doomed from the start.

All the brains, heart and courage in the world can't save a movie that doesn't have a third act.

While Kal Penn manages a decent lead performance as Taj, the writing is terrible.

The new version is a weak facsimile of an already mediocre film.

Captain Underpants is a very popular book series that doesn’t seamlessly translate to the big screen, and the filmmakers can’t solve this problem. The result is a cinematic wedgie: a little too dark, a little too nihilistic, a little too empty.

Crossover has one redeeming quality: a heart that's in the right place. It's a bad movie with a good message -- but does anyone really want to pay $10 for an ABC After School Special version of "He Got Game"?

Bornedal invests so much time in the characters - Jeffrey Dean Morgan and Kyra Sedgwick play the split parents of the girls - that there are times you will forget this is a horror movie. It's Kramer vs. Kramer vs. Lucifer.

Even the element of surprise isn't enough to save this film, which has too many slow parts and features an ending that's extremely tepid by 21st century horror movie standards.

We get a lot of hapless victims in an expensive endeavor that is surprisingly lifeless.

There are isolated moments of humor, and even charm. The visual effects are at times outstanding. But these positives are overwhelmed by the uninspired whole.