Peter Travers

Lee Cronin makes two hours of borrowed horror inspiration—The Exorcist should sue—feel like an eternity.

Director Jonah Hill’s satire of Hollywood cancel culture in the age of TMZ leaves out all the laughs that define character and sinks Keanu Reeves and an all-star cast in a muddle of jokes creaky enough to qualify for assisted living.

Shallow, sycophantic and absent a single unguarded moment, Melania is a near-two-hour infomercial disguised as a documentary. What’s the movie actually worth as entertainment? I’ll start the bidding at two cents.

Seven is not a lucky number for this amateurish return to the well of a once hella horror franchise that drops the ball on gore, giggles and a reason to care. Its disposable, defanged thrills feel like chatgpt prompts fed the wrong info about what constitutes scary.

This medieval borefest drags down the talents of Sophie Turner and Kit Harington, but can be commended for one thing: truth in advertising. It’s dreadful to the max.

Chris Pratt sits in a witness hair for most of this action movie while I sit in wonder about how a movie with such timely potential—an AI arbiter (Rebecca Ferguson) serving as judge, jury and executioner— manages to fall so hard on its fatuous pretentions.

A low point in the career of the legendary James L. Brooks, starring gifted actors who seem, all of a sudden in a fit of group amnesia, to have forgotten how to act.

Oh, What. Crap. This lump of coal in our holiday stocking entraps Michelle Pfeiffer and is flat, stilted, lazy and so stretched out with Xmas clichés that you want to scream, bah-humbug.

An inexcusable horror sequel that lowers the bar to zero in terms of fun and fright. The only thing that scares me is this turd’s inevitable box-office success.

Colin Farrell rolls the dice that maybe he can save this mess of an Edward Berger movie about a gambler’s addiction. Not this time

Everyone looks pretty and cries ugly in this glossy, grit-free tearjerker from the bestselling Colleen Hoover that traps the actors in marshmallow and gives soap opera a bad name.

Ruth Ware’s murder-at-sea bestseller is star powered by Keira Knightley, but this water-logged whodunit sinks like a stone.

A numbingly dull follow-up to two “TRON” epics that even Jared Leto and a great score by Nine Inch Nails can’t make great again.

Even a double dose of the great Robert De Niro taking on the grandpa roles of feuding mob bosses Vito Genovese and Frank Costello, can’t lift this gimmicky, grating, draggy attempt to join the pantheon of classic gangster cinema. It’s a losing battle.

How do you cram a cast of A-listers, led by Bill Murray, Jennifer Coolidge and Pete Davidson, into a crime caper so laugh deprived that calling it a comedy qualifies as false advertising? Here’s your answer. And it’s a crying shame.

Jeremy Piven tap dances for Hitler and turns playwright Arthur Miller’s cautionary short story about art’s accommodation to power into a well-meaning family project (his sister directed) that stumbles when it most needs to soar

We all need a little Christmas now, but not this cynical cash grab faking it as holiday fun. The mind boggles that it cost $250 million to produce a big, bloated fiasco about Dwayne Johnson and Chris Evans trying to save kidnapped Santa (J.K. Simmons). Bah, humbug

Even talented people can make terrible movies. Case in point: this all-star, devil-made-me-do-it horror show from Lee Daniels with an overqualified cast, underfunded special effects, a sinkhole of a script and a nutso confidence in its own nonexistent profundity.

Josh Hartnett does his best playing a serial killer and devoted dad living in the same body. But you don’t need a sixth sense to know that director M. Knight Shyamalan is running on empty as his patchwork thriller slips from disappointment to disaster.

Soon to be infamous for bad decisions, this despairingly off-kilter toon looks like a movie, talks like a movie, but feels like a cynical cash grab propelled by the idiocy of turning our favorite mouthy, shamelessly lazy cat into a blah action hero voiced by Chris Pratt.

Millie Bobby Brown fights a heroic battle as a princess bride up against a digital dragon, but it’s not the damsel but the audience that will suffer distress from the nonstop, numbing repetition that turns this Netflix movie dull and dreary way too fast.

God-awful is too wimpy a word for this superdiva cash grab that sinks Dakota Johnson and cast in what feels like a random batch of half-baked ideas tossed at the screen in the cynical assumption that we’ll buy any lazy hack-work that is Spider-Man adjacent. Resist at all costs.

Forget the rumor that Taylor Swift wrote the books this sad excuse for a romcom is based on. Bryce Dallas Howard is wasted as a cat lady who writes thrillers—Henry Cavill and Sam Rockwell play spies—but this whole dull, plodding, cartoonish mess lands with a thud.

Start the new year off wrong with another Kevin Hart misfire that doesn’t even try to be funny, preferring to slide by as a humdrum heist movie that steals time you'll never get back.

With everything going for this dystopian thriller about humans being replaced by replicants, including two hottie Irish Oscar nominees in Saorise Ronan and Paul Mescal as young marrieds in crisis, this stifling sci-fi misfire hits theaters as an epic botch job.

Wild Bill Friedkin’s original 1973 take on demonic possession was thrillingly too much. This safe and sorry sequel from David Gordon Green is boringly too little. Believe this: If you let the marketing devils lure you into this one, you’re in for an unholy mess.

Audience goodwill is really the only thing this third chapter of Greek family bonding has going for it as writer-director star-Nia Vardalos keeps pushing the same brand of ethnic humor. And I mean, really pushing, another reason this followup falls so painfully flat.

Hilary Swank looks like she’d rather be anywhere else than starring as a journalist and grief-stricken mother in this overblown, undercooked drug drama about America’s opioid crisis that makes its scant running time of 89 minutes feel like a torturous eternity.

Jennifer Lopez and all the mothers out there deserve better than this gross, cringey gorefest about a military-trained assassin (JLo) who makes up to the pre-teen daughter she gave up at birth by instructing her in the fine art of killing bad guys. Happy Mother’s Day, indeed.

Ever since Knives Out snapped the whodunit back to wicked life, it’s harder to accept a lazy, dim-witted mystery that wastes the starshine of Sandler and Aniston on 89 minutes of sequel piffle. One of those new AI bots could have coughed up a script with more personality.

Director Kenya Barris disastrously trades cutting social satire for romcom pablum when a Jewish podcaster (Jonah Hill) and his a Black fiancé (Lauren London) find their love imploding after her dad (Eddie Murphy) and his mom (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) plan a wedding across racial battle lines

Hugh Jackman acts his heart out as a parent unable to cope with his clinically depressed son, but even he can’t save this poor relation to The Father from descending into two hours of misery porn.

Question for Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson: What happened, dude? How did your passion project playing a Black DCEU posterboy for anger management become a humorless, chaotic bummer that leaves you holding the bag for an epic failure to launch?

All the drama seems to have happened off camera for director Olivia Wilde and stars Harry Styles and Florence Pugh. What's on screen is a glossy, repetitive retread of The Stepford Wives with a dash of The Truman Show and no discernible personality of its own.

Queen Latifah and Ludacris drive right into a brick wall of action cliches.

Hi-Diddle-Dee-Dee, it didn’t work for me.

Despite the star presence of Kevin Hart and Mark Wahlberg, this laugh-starved, buddy comedy is crushingly dim-witted and disposable.

A slumming Jamie Foxx is cool to the max as a vampire hunter gunning down bloodsuckers in sunny LA. But you leave this goofy but mostly godawful action-comedy feeling pummeled, beaten down by an avalanche of sound and fury signifying the usual nothing.

The Delia Owens bestseller about sex and murder in the Carolinas comes to the screen as an antiseptic, airbrushed, miscast misfire that takes so few risks with the publishing phenom that it feels more embalmed than a freshly imagined version of the book.

If long, loud and ludicrous is your kind of movie escapism, check out director Michael Bay’s latest shot of adrenalized, de-humanized filmmaking as a psycho bank robber (Jake Gyllenhaal) commandeers an ambulance as a getaway car. Entertaining? Exhausting is more like it.

Jared Leto goes the extra mile to bring a minor-league villain from Marvel Comics to the big screen, but this botched horrorfest about the so-called “living vampire” is less deserving of a sequel than a stake through its heart.

What a bummer to kick off 2022 at the movies with a lame, gender-flipped mission impossible. Chastain and her team of women warriors could have shown the guys how action cinema is done. Instead, director Simon Kinberg traps them in an empty, soulless mess.

Manufactured for the ‘Kissing Booth’ crowd, this gender-swapped, TikTok-friendly update of the 1999 teen hit sounds awful and it often is, but enough charm pokes through the cracks to sucker anyone who ever fell for a makeover fable.

Even Hugh Jackman's indisputable star power can't light up the pretentious, pseudo-poetic, sci-fi murk of this thundering misfire, which will only make you remember other, better movie mindbenders. ‘Blade Runner’ anyone?

There's nothing ‘tomorrow’ about a recycled sci-fi jumble that places all its bets on yesterday.

Amy Adams leads an overqualified and underserved cast as an agoraphobic child psychologist who thinks she sees a murder in this ‘Rear Window’ ripoff that just lies there, static and dreary, awaiting an animating spark that never comes.

You know a ghost story is a hot mess when it strands a stellar Amanda Seyfried and a top cast in a remote, country house haunted by toxic masculinity, dangling plot threads and nothing worth hearing or seeing.

It’s a form of actor abuse to see the legendary Morgan Freeman trapped in this relentlessly violent and vapid mess that does offer one lesson to students of cinema in how to do everything calamitously wrong.

Despite an intriguing premise that suggests a ‘Lord of the Flies’ in space, Neil Burger’s fun-free thriller about young hotties playing astronauts quickly devolves into is a dud that never makes sense of its borrowed convictions or any sense at all.

This comedy misfire starring McCarthy and Spencer as unlikely superheroes is hardly a crime against cinema. It just a bumpy road to blah in which the actors look to be having a way better time than you will. That’s messed up.

A hot mess that throws a wet blanket of dystopian drivel over fresh young stars Daisy Ridley and Tom Holland. Chaos Limping is more like it.

Doug Liman’s gimmicky dud about a London diamond heist set during the pandemic falsely assumes that quarantined audiences are panting to see films about the hell of living in quarantine. Despite a starry cast led by Anne Hathaway, Locked Down is a major letdown.

Even marking on a B-movie curve, Unhinged is running on empty.

There is nothing distinctive about this toxic available-on-demand tripe except the absence of Mark Polish, though Michael didn’t spare his wife Kate Bosworth from acting duty in a thankless role. One thing’s for sure: This downpour of offensive ethnic stereotyping is a total washout.

It’s slog, slog, slog, all the way.

The best way to handle this relentlessly nice movie that deserved a touch of nasty, is to enjoy the few flashes of what have been before the sheer heaviness of the production stomps out all the fun.

This ultra-violent, ultra-stupid smarm-bomb deserves to take a few lumps before shuffling off to the digital boneyard.

One adjective you don’t hear much anymore is “preposterous,” defined as “contrary to nature, reason or common sense.” Yet the word applies perfectly to Inheritance, a blithering botch job of a thriller that begs the question: “Come on, are you f**king kidding me?”

From its generic title to an ending you can see coming from outer space, Blood and Money follows a path rutted with enough clichés to cover the three million acres of Maine forest land where the film is set.

For those who mistake Love Wedding Repeat for a comedy with actual laughs, consider yourselves warned.

Helms, a master jester on The Office, seems to have forgotten everything he’s ever learned about comic timing to judge by fiasco. Since Coffee and Kareem also credits Helms as a producer, he has only himself to blame.

On film, The Last Thing He Wanted settles for just being hollow. It’s the last thing any of us wanted.

The only genuine, blood-curdling scream incited by this stupefyingly dull time- and money-waster comes at the end, when the notion dawns that Blumhouse’s Fantasy Island is meant to spawn sequels. Stop it now, before it kills again.

This out-and-out disaster dissolves in a puddle of botched intentions that will leave children sad and confused and adults scratching their heads.

What we have here is a comedy on life support, with Haddish and Byrne valiantly performing futile acts of resuscitation. Sorry to report: The patient died.

Shot three years ago, this soggy horrorshow gives credence to the belief that January is the month Hollywood uses to bury its mistakes.

Attention, moviegoers searching for the worst movie of the year: We have a late-breaking winner. Cats slips in right under the radar and easily scores as the bottom of the 2019 barrel — and arguably of the decade. Even Michael Bay’s trash trilogy of soul-destroying Transformers movies can’t hold a candle. What happened?

We could give you 21 reasons not to see 21 Bridges — and not single one that’s worth the price of admission.

Emmerich can crack the whip on computer pixels like nobody’s business. But in sacrificing a reckoning on the human toll of war for cardboard characterization and showoff fx, he’s left an empty space where the soul of the film should be.

This misbegotten sequel to 2014’s not-so-hot Maleficent is a torturous exercise in brightly-colored monotony that chokes on repetitive screenwriting, amateurish directing, paycheck performances and digital hardware for a heart. Kids under five (months) might be fooled, but sentient filmgoers know a scam when they see one.

All the green-screen magic it takes for Smith to mix it up with a mass of pixels passing for a Fresh Prince-era version of himself does not compensate for a dull plot, achingly familiar characters and dialogue that’s no fun at all.

The only achievement in transferring The Goldfinch from page to screen is that it’s a botch job for the ages.

The Kitchen is deadly serious — and worse, deadly dull, even when it tries to act tough by laying on the violence and a heaping side of gore.

Dark Phoenix doesn’t just suck big time. It’s the worst movie ever in the X-Men series.

They say it’s all in the timing, especially when it comes to funny business. But in The Hustle everyone’s inner comedic clock is calamitously off. The setups are flat, the jokes don’t land and the actors don’t — or won’t — connect.

The dialogue starts at risible and descends from there.

A stuffy, soggy slog of a movie that fails to generate sparks or a lick of dramatic sense.

The batshit bonkers Serenity fails on every level, first as entertainment and then as a new-agey thumbsucker about a magical, mystical tour through the subconscious. Serenity finds new definitions of bad that almost make the damn thing worth watching for its magnificent flameout.

Arriving just in time to win a place among the year’s worst films, Robin Hood — bursting with an entitled sense of its own non-existent coolness — falls flat on its fat one.

Slow torture for kids and grownups alike, The Nutcracker and the Four Realms gives a bad name to the very concept of family entertainment.

This year gave us the best and most imaginative Marvel film in "Black Panther." Now we have the worst.

No matter how much money this clunker makes, this is a movie that never should have happened.

How do you rate a cinematic black hole that doesn’t deserve a single star? Do you simply give it five eyerolls? Better question: How does a movie, with all the talent in the world going for it, become a such a blithering botch job?

Even if male stars from Neeson to Bruce Willis have been riding the same gravy train for decades, Garner has the talent to make us expect more. She needed support from the filmmakers. But what did she get? A lazy facsimile of the revenge movie she so richly deserved. There’s no reason audiences should accept it.

Maybe its gargantuan god-awfulness is not a exactly a sin against cinema. But throw away your money on a ticket and you’re in for two hours of certain hell.

Blue Iguana makes the freshly minted Oscar winner (for his totally worthy performance in Three Billboards) work way too hard to cut through the film’s blatant stupidity and buffet of clichés.

John Travolta, trying earnestly to act his way through a ton of lousy makeup and an even heavier slab of bad screenwriting, plays mafioso John Gotti in this chaotic biopic that jumps all over the place but still fails to manifest a pulse.

At least it looks super fly. It's too bad that Director X (born Julien Christian Lutz), the Canadian short-form film master for the likes of Rihanna, Drake and Nicki Minaj, stumbles when he has to stretch a scene past video length.

A few primo bits sneak through.... But mostly we’re watching the bawdy life being drained out of a once subversive franchise. Action Point is the first Jackass-related movie to play it safe. Now that is truly painful.

Some may feel like this smirking sex farce goes down easy. Others may choke on it – or worse, feel like they've wandered into the cinematic equivalent of Christian Grey's Red Room of Pain?

McCarthy falls into the same trap she did in "Tammy" and "The Boss," the two other movies she wrote with her husband/director Ben Falcone. By that we mean she allows her laugh instincts to get buried in a blanket of bland.

Yes, you read that correctly: zero stars. When talented people create one of the worst movies ever made, you have to ask: What the hell happened?

The listless, leaden acting, writing and direction in this breathtakingly stupid bomb-ola defies audiences to stay conscious through its drag-ass 88 minutes.

Mostly, it's a collection of spare suspense parts that someone ransacked at the movie dump and is trying to resell as fresh product. Good luck with that.

What we have in the misbegotten mess called Kings is a film of countless good intentions – one that starts going bad in its first scene, gets worse form there and then dissolves into pure chaos.

Enduing a full 120 minutes of this sh*tstorm takes its toll. Bitterness, anger, malice, bad blood – that’s acrimony, baby. And that's what you'll feel if you blow the price of ticket on this hack job.

With this last entry, we have officially hit the bottom of the barrel. Whips, chains, butt plugs and nipple clips are nothing compared to the sheer torture of watching this movie.

It shouldn't happen to anyone, much less a Dame – not a movie of such barreling awfulness as Winchester, which strands the great Helen Mirren in a gothic house of cards that collapses on actors and audiences alike.