Peter Travers

First-time director and screenwriter Hue Rhodes shows no discernible talent for dialogue, humor and, especially, pacing.

Launches the fall season with a crashing thud.

It feels manufactured to be suitable for mass consumption.

While the first movie steadily tighened its vise, the second loosens its grip through strained acting and incoherent plotting.

Gordon, who died shortly after the first Arthur, never had to see the luckless 1988 sequel that made his beloved characters seem like strangers. The new Arthur, insipid when it should be infectious, leaves the same deadly impression.

The bloodsuckers in this thriller may not have much bite, but here's a movie that can -- it's guaranteed -- drain the life out of an audience in minutes.

Zane, a good actor in the right circumstances (Orlando, Dead Calm), is trapped by screenwriter Jeffrey Boam (Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade) and Australian director Simon Wincer (Free Willy), who don’t give him anything to act.

The new Mummy is, how can I put it? Just freakin' awful.

How the hell did Ben Affleck, 29, wind up replacing Harrison Ford, 59, as our hero? Who's next as Ryan -- Ozzy Osbourne's guppy son, Jack? Chronology hasn't been this royally fucked with since Memento.

Talk about your pious frauds. I've got a better way to show your disgust for Internet scum: Don't see Untraceable.

There's a difference between exposing misogyny and crassly exploiting it.

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.

Some bad movies should carry a leper's bell to warn off ticket buyers. Such a contagion is Charlie St. Cloud, a load of mawkish swill starring Zac Efron (bereft of the talent he showed in "Me and Orson Welles").

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.

A romantic comedy so numbing it feels like Novocaine.

This Parker spits in our collective eye. Don't blame us for spitting back.

Transformers 2 has a shot at the title Worst Movie of the Decade.

This, however, is not Mamet – it's a beast of roaring stupidity that devours everything in its path, including the veteran filmmaker.

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.

I found myself wishing that Taymor would turn off the sound and fury and let The Tempest speak for itself. My wish wasn't granted.

A borrowed idea -- hello, "Blade Runner," hi there, "Matrix" -- but an idea nonetheless.

It's a major dud.

Nothing can save this repetitive bore. Dude, where's your memory?

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

In between scenes of the muscleheads torturing their victim, Bay indulges his taste for treating women as sluts and grisly brutality as a nifty excuse for a cheap laugh. Pain and Gain is personal all right. You leave these characters with the distinct impression that they're Bay's kind of people.

Even with sex, drugs, hip-hop and a murder, these four stories are dull, dull, dull, dull.

It's probably the movie event of the summer if you're an eight-year-old girl who doesn't get out much.

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.

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.

Shopworn propaganda.

Whatever juice is left in the "Cop" franchise or in the once unstoppable career of Eddie Murphy peters out ignominiously in this poor excuse for a sequel.

The shopworn script by Pablo F. Fenjves, who ghost-wrote the unpublished O.J. Simpson book, If I Did It: The Confessions of the Killer, gets no help from director Asger Leth (Ghosts of Cite Soleil).

Jammed with story threads that don’t cohere, Cirque commits the cardinal sin for a vampire movie: It’s bloodless.

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.

The 'roo doesn't talk, except in a dream sequence…I'm dying here.

At 87 torturous, laugh-free minutes, the film could change the most avid cat fancier into a kitty hater.

The movie left me with the feeling of being trapped with a person of privilege who won't stop with the whine whine whine.

The Host basically comes down to a vote for Team Jared or Team Ian. I voted myself into oblivion about half an hour in. Niccol, who once added mystery and suspense to the sci-fi of 1997's "Gattaca," is no match for the giant marshmallow that is The Host.

It's getting harder to sustain a rooting interest in the career of Johnny Knoxville.

An indigestible chunk of romantic marshmallow.

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.

If you see one Minnesota movie this year, make it "Fargo." This botch job should be stamped direct to video.

Blomkamp and his wife and co-writer, Terri Tatchell, stack the deck. Instead of awe, we get "E.T." - aww.

What I can't figure is why anyone would want to release this tripe in theaters just when Fanning has nearly lived it down. They ain't no friends of mine, or any other moviegoer.

If you don't see where this is going, you've never seen a movie. Sorry it had to be this one.

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

Director Gillian Armstrong turns Sebastian Faulks' pungent novel about World War II into a soporific.

Veering between sentimentality and exploitation with a few misguided stops at raunchy sex farce, Reign Over Me never finds a tone to suit its purpose.

It's soft-core pap for horny boys and their hornier dads.

A triumph for the machines, more proof that we do indeed live in the Matrix.

A two-hour search for a pulse... A miscalculation from a prodigious talent who has forgotten that you squeeze the life out of romance when you don't give it space to breathe.

The Vow is a sopping hankie of a romance for women who love to suffer and the men who love them.

Sadly, what Parkland becomes is a crying shame.

The Beverly Hillbillies is not, as the saying goes, a critic’s picture. Still, you want to root for a movie that wallows without shame in leering, fatuous humor. I did — for about 15 minutes — then the sameness set in like an overdose of Beavis and Butt-Head.

Good-natured fun when it isn't stale, which is most of the time, this talky comedy set in a Chicago barber shop is a sitcom pilot disguised as a movie.

The film wants to make a case for Parker as the first modern woman. It gets the look and the attitude right, but it can't find her heart.

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.

It's sledgehammer whimsy, and it's not talking to me.

Even the stalwart Nolte drowns in the laughable idiocy of the Wingo-Lowenstein love affair, which lifts Tides to the fiasco class.

A trio of appealing actors is trapped in an action-spiked romcom death-sentenced by a lack of humor, heart and a coherent reason for being.

I could puke.

What happened, bitches? Didn't the letdown of The Hangover Part II – basically Part I set in Thailand but minus the laughs – teach you anything? Guess not.

Regrettably, Bergman can't do much with a one-note script by Jane Anderson that reduces Perez to a grating cliché, Cage and Fonda to a parody of Ken and Barbie and our interest in what could happen to them to dry ash.

Even director Carl Franklin, an artful purveyor of sterner stuff in "One False Move" and "Devil in a Blue Dress," can't prevent One True Thing from descending into chick-movie hell.

What a bold notion for a movie, and what a bust in terms of execution.

Teenagers, even non-ninjas and non-turtles, have been eating up this cinematic waste product for weeks now. In one way, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles is a triumph for producer Michael Bay in that it is equally as godawful as his "Transformers: Age of Extinction" and a hit nonetheless.

This spark-free film has no place to go on their resumes except under the heading of "Cringing Embarrassment."

Laced with such rampant misogyny that the laughs stick in your throat.

Do you really need me to tell you how scary this horror show isn't?

A fine case ... but none weighty enough to keep this fluff from evaporating as you watch it.

From the lowercase lettering of the title to the deadly familiarity of the plot, there is much to grate on your nerves in this TV Afterschool Special trying to pass as a real movie.

The result is a failed and lifeless experiment in which everything goes wrong.

One of the worst movies of this or any year.

We're getting more of the same, but less of the impact, like weed from a bad dealer.

A clumsy package of clichés.

Lethal Weapon 3 offers mediocrity wielded by experts. It's not a movie, it's a machine.

What Dick rendered potent, Nolfi renders preposterous.

What the film lacks is suspense, surprise (the new ending is a dud) and passion.

Rob Cohen, who last directed "The Skulls" --ouch! -- can consider this one another career-killing skid mark.

Director Sydney Pollack zapped out a taut thriller in "Three Days of the Condor". But The Firm is mostly flab, in the manner of Pollack's elephantine Havana.

It's not so bad that it's good. It's so bland that it's boring. Not even worth a hissss.

Grating.

Drab in the extreme. Timothy Dalton's second and wheezing, final turn as 007 was barely recognizable as a Bond film.

Whatever qualms you might have about romanticizing mental illness, the misguided Benny and Joon thinks it's just darling.

To be honest, I started hearing things, too. Just when Jones was delivering an inexcusably sappy speech about baseball being "a symbol of all that was once good in America," I heard the words "If he keeps talking, I'm walking."

The movie, however, is a crock.

The language is leaden, the pace glacial and the characters indecipherable. It's easier to read the actors -- they all seem eager to win an Oscar. Fat chance.

This afternoon-TV special trying to pass as a real movie earns an extra half star solely for Samuel L. Jackson, who brings his usual fire to the role.

If you're gay and/or eight years old, HSM3 is the movie event of the year.

It's not the trite talk that sends Cruel Intentions into a tailspin, it's the lightweight casting.

Derivative and blindingly dull, Quick Change is an occasion for a quick nap.

I am really sick of people going easy on this dud remake...Instead of the luminous Audrey Hepburn as Sabrina, the awkward chauffeur's daughter who goes to Paris and comes back a swan, we have Julia Ormond, a decent actress without an ounce of the movie-star glamour the part demands. Instead of Humphrey Bogart as Linus, the elder boss-man brother on the Long Island, N.Y., estate where Sabrina's father works, we have Harrison Ford at his most dour.

Writer-director Roman Coppola is trying to capture a time he's too young to remember, when the French New Wave reinvigorated film art.

Jolie comes to this party ready to bite, but the movie muzzles her. Even at 97 minutes, Maleficent is still one long, laborious slog.

"You're an awfully hard man to like, Hitler." Few serious films could survive a line like that. Max certainly doesn't.

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.

Even Cate Blanchett can't save this misbegotten horse opera.

This movie hits all the wrong notes.