Peter Travers

This pooped party brings you down from all the jokes that don't land and the flop sweat pouring off good actors whose forced cheer is exhausting.

All this is conveyed in the remarkable performance of Ronan, an Oscar nominee for Atonement. She and Tucci -- magnificent as a man of uncontrollable impulses -- help Jackson cut a path to a humanity that supersedes life and death.

Except for a rare scene of shaggy charm, nothing works. Nothing.

Starting to feel sick? Just you wait.

Lulls aside, Wain and Showalter deserve camp kudos for getting the details right.

Stuber traps two talented dudes — Kumail Nanjiani and Dave Bautista — in a car that’s going nowhere so fast that Thelma and Louise would hop right on.

Surprise is lacking. Ditto humor, though Miles Teller (Whiplash), as a thorn in Four's side, gets in a few fun licks by not staying on the film's draggy tempo. Otherwise, Insurgent stubbornly fails to surge.

The movie ultimately reveals itself as a pretender with no balls. Creatively, it's all wet.

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.

In the end, the audience is rewarded with a steadily riveting provocation that jabs at the culture of money that makes us all complicit.

Wait a hot minute here. Can a new Transformers movie actually be bearable? Let’s not get carried away, but a diverse cast and the absence of ham-handed former director Michael Bay qualify as a step in the right direction.

To shine in a turd like this shows Brody has the stuff that -- damn the Oscar jinx -- makes an actor last.

All I can cull is: don't mess with Mother Nature and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Fortune-cookie stuff. Erase All.

A flabby farce that might win a pass at the box office because it's just so cute and family friendly. But where's your edge, guys? Where are the laughs that walk a tightrope?

The snotty rich bastard? That role goes to Eugenio Derbez, Mexico's biggest star, who's allowed to speak a big chunk of his dialogue in Spanish, complete with subtitles. It's the one original idea that this retrofitted Overboard has to offer. The rest of the movie wears out its welcome muy rapido.

Hanks is one of the most likable actors on the planet. But Inferno just lays there onscreen, pancake-flat and with no animating spark to make us give a damn.

No dice...But no apologies are needed for Shannon--she earns her star spot.

Once again, it’s the script (by newcomer David Rich) that shoots the picture’s promise all to hell.

A cheerless and unappetizing plate of piffle that deserves to be smashed against a wall or at least sent back to the kitchen.

Stinks worse than dino dung. Sure, the creatures look good.

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.

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

Suffers from lulls and lapses and one lulu of a casting gaffe, but this keenly observant spoof of the fame game is hardly the work of a burnout.

Close gets laughs, as does Bette Midler as a Jewish rebel. But the sting is gone.

Diesel has chosen to keep selling stupid to audiences who are inexplicably eager to gobble it up. Damn shame.

How do I hate Armageddon? Let me count the ways.

It plays like like a video game in which the goal is to kill as many of these green-blooded monsters as you can before time's up. It's fun for about 10 minutes, and then the tedium seeps in.

It took four screenwriters to turn a potent premise into mush. There’s some compensation in a solid supporting cast, especially Fyvush Finkel of TV’s Picket Fences as the world’s oldest bellboy. But director Barry Sonnenfeld shows little of the wicked spirit he brought to The Addams Family.

Robert De Niro – wait for it – in the role of a mobster. Now there's an original idea.

Has no vital signs at all, just crushing dull repetition that makes one noisy, violent scene play exactly like the last one.

"Your incompetence is most taxing," says the chief vampire (Bill Nighy). A line that pretty much nails this rusty Blade.

Transformers: Dark of the Moon - high on any list of the worst blockbusters ever - is a movie bereft of wit, wonder, imagination, and any genuine reason for being. Watching it makes you die a little inside.

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

Though the movie stalls frequently before it finds its balance, Woodley makes us care.

Alex Cross has been neutered on film, deprived of his sexuality, his family, his friends.

The money shots of the living tableau are padded with jokes that feel embalmed before the actors get them out of their mouths.

The movie deserves a stake through the heart.

It's difficult to imagine a summer film programmed more cynically than this repugnant sequel. RoboCop 2 is all machine, and it's all vile.

Audiences with a brain cell left have only one choice: Look for the first exit on the right.

One raucous night, one raunchy party, "American Graffiti filtered through "Dazed and Confused" and the Shermer High films of John Hughes.

With that cast, we rightfully expect fireworks. What we get is the film equivalent of a wet blanket.

There’s no doubting Potter’s laudable ambition to capture the swirling headspace of her brother, who died in 2013. But in trying to restore his dignity in fighting the dying of the light, she’s neglected to portray him in the human terms that would let us share his spirit.

Quite a spectacle, but the movie falls flat.

It gets the job done for trick-or-treat season, but this sequel falls short of expectations by sidelining its luminous star Jamie Lee Curtis and substituting rote mayhem for an inventively scary frightfest.

Clooney is too talented and committed a filmmaker not to get in his licks. But with Suburbicon, he's made a movie that is tonally at war with itself.

An epic bore that believes if you make a movie long and loud and repetitive enough, audiences will conclude it's saying something profound. Wrong.

Larry Crowne is more than a missed opportunity. It's alarmingly, depressingly out of touch.

Awful.

Morning sickness afflicts most of the potential mommies. For me, the movie itself triggered the vomiting.

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?

Director Mike Barber springs a twist ending that makes you sit up and stifle those yawns.

Way to go, Battleship: Take the crassest of cynical junk, slather it in jingoism and sell it as rah-rah fun for right-wingers.

It's slick girlie stuff, but the cast makes it go down easy.

A personal best for producer Jerry Bruckheimer, a triumph for Scott and a war film of prodigious power. You will be shaken.

A patently bogus romcom in which every note rings false.

In his screenwriting debut, Glee's gifted Chris Colfer, 22, proves he can lace a line with sass and soul. The downside of Struck by Lightning, besides the fact that Colfer's character, Carson Phillips, is struck dead in the first scene, is that Colfer hands himself all the best lines.

Are we always still in high school in our heads? 21 Jump Street thinks so. And Hill and Tatum are just the crazy-ass comedy team to prove it.

DeMonaco shows a sure hand at building tension. Too bad the film devolves into a series of home-invasion clichés. The Purge was almost on to something.

Some actors don't need top-shelf material. Just the pleasure of their company is enough. And so Al Pacino, Christopher Walken and Alan Arkin turn the insubstantial Stand Up Guys into solid entertainment.

May be only loosely true, but it is thoroughly Hollywood.

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

A collection of moldy gags that director Tim Story tries to polish. Not with these turds, pal.

No knock on serving up an action-jacked Michael B. Jordan in an R-rated, red-meat, military thriller. But this clumsy update of Clancy’s 1993 bestseller should have been way better than a generic, one-note, cash grab.

Offers dumb fun without apology.

A promise unfulfilled.

Turitz keeps it comic and romantic in just the right doses. Looking for a fun date flick? You found it.

Cruz is a dish, but her movie is as soggy and indigestible as Styrofoam.

Some people find this twisty and twisted psychological thriller arty and pretentious. I find it arty and provocative.

The dialogue starts at risible and descends from there.

This is rock-solid entertainment. McConaughey, a cunning mesmerizer in the courtroom, steers this Lincoln into what could be a hell-raising franchise. More, please. Soon.

Could 1960s-style sex, drugs and rock & roll really have been this dull?

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.

Director Vadim Jean is lucky that his low-octane comedy is long on Short.

McConaughey, despite alarmingly orange makeup, does justice to the role, a hard-drinking, shipwreck- hunting senator's son with a 007 way with the ladies.

Even the great ones hit snags. With The Limits of Control, Jim Jarmsuch gets tangled up in his own deadpan.

This comedy is packed with p---- jokes, the cruder the better.

A ham-handed melodrama that trivializes an important topic: the role of the teacher in a violent classroom.

The spectacle feels lifeless and what could have been a challenging moral provocation dissolves into sappy, feel-good pandering. Lawrence and Pratt deserve better. So do audiences.

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

It's Vincent D'Onofrio as Pooh-Bear, a drug lord who's snorted so much meth his nose had to be replaced by a plastic one, who kicks ass.

Judd is slumming again in ths lame suspense yarn that could barely pass as a TV quickie without the bankable names of Judd, Tommy Lee Jones and director Bruce Beresford.

Monster Trucks is a wreck, fueled by the crazy belief that noise and repetition can disguise the lack of credible writing, directing, acting and FX.

But the bad boys achieve something a budget can't buy: an easy, natural rapport that makes you root for them. For comedy and thrills, Lawrence and Smith are a dream team.

An appallingly clumsy and stupid take on drugs, kidnapping and suicide in suburbia.

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

Purists, be warned: This scare-flick quickie has as much relation to the 1953 Vincent Price classic with the same title as Paris Hilton does to acting.

The self-congratulatory histrionics of Williams, lower lip trembling as he triumphs over torture in the name of the human spirit, represents a trend in Hollywood to make accessible melodrama out of unspeakable tragedy.

Just a "Rambo" rehash.

A dementia subplot torpedoes the laughs, leaving Tiffany Haddish and writer-director-star Billy Crystal adrift in a comedy fizzle that forgets to be funny.

The script hits rough patches, especially when Phoebe and Wolf get it on, but the sisters cut to the heart.

This movie made my ears hurt. Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett and James Ellroy could have turned this pulp into insinuating jazz. What's here is a cartoonish bore.

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

By the end, Vantage Point is such a unholy mess of drooling sentiment and sloppy loose ends that you’ll hate yourself for being suckered in.

It's refried comic beans that smell stale and smack of desperation.

A violent cartoon that trivializes apartheid. If there's any justice, the birds of loneliness will be circling the box office.

I don't know what to make of Act of Valor. It's like reviewing a recruiting poster.

The result this time is just as hit and miss. But when it hits, yowsa.

Final Analysis suffers from something much worse: terminal shallowness.

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

By the end, when the three Shafts hit the streets in identical long coats like something out of The Matrix, the message is clear. Rough justice is back to stay. Women are out of the picture, except for sex. Dinosaurs again walk the earth with misogynistic and homophobic impunity. These are the laughs, folks. Don’t be surprised if they stick in your throat.

The strapping Owen as a guy who can't handle himself and cutie-pie Aniston as a witchy woman? I don't think so. Talk about derailed.

There's a strong movie in this life, but writer-director Leon Ichaso ("Sugar Hill") hasn't found it.

Suicide Squad wussies out when it should have been down with the Dirty Dozen of DC Comics. Audiences complained that Batman v Superman was too dark and depressing. So director-writer David Ayer (End of Watch, Fury) counters with light and candy-assed. I call bullshit.

Phantom, still running on Broadway after sixteen years, is a rapturous spectacle. And the movie, directed full throttle by Joel Schumacher, goes the show one better.

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

It's love with tragic complications, and director Luis Mandoki drags the torture out for two-plus hours.

The brooding RPatz doesn’t bite. But his movie does.

It plays like an opportunity missed.

We also learn that five of his books, written in secret, will be published between 2015 and 2020. Can't wait to read them. Can't wait to forget this movie.

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.

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.

Alexander breaks the key rule that makes movies move: Show, don't tell.

It's not just hard to believe any of this, it's impossible. And director Jon Turteltaub (Phenomenom) directs with robotic cheerlessness.

It gives me no pleasure to report that Aloha is still a mess, a handful of stories struggling for a unifying tone.

Cowabunga, the vigilante demi-gods on a half shell are back, and more inane and irritating than ever. Their antics make the 112 minutes it takes to watch this frenetic followup to 2014's Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles a torturous mindfuck for any sentient being over the age of infancy.

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

Crass manipulation can clean up at the box office, so do your part: Nail this flick as a bottom feeder and pay the bad word forward to three others.

What's good? A mesmeric, bottle-blond Christopher Walken as Max Zorin, hellbent on global domination as a product of Nazi experiments, Grace Jones' zowie star at his henchman, and Duran Duran's title song. Otherwise, I'm out.

To cut Toys a minor break, it is ambitious. It is also a gimmicky, obvious and pious bore, not to mention overproduced and overlong.

This kind of pandering FX padding, unnurtured by humor or heart, is what shifts Jupiter Ascending from a shambles to a fiasco. In an effort to win back audiences by lowering their standards and their daring, the Wachowskis wind up where you never expected to find them creatively: on the ropes.

It could have been crazy-good trash.

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.

Potter gets the period details right, but the film itself has long since flown off the rails, miring good intentions in rank soap opera.

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).

Dillon is a potent combination of looks, charm and menace, as he proved in Drugstore Cowboy, but Dearden’s script fails to provide the raw material that would let him go beyond the stereotype.

Tarsem uses the dramatically shallow plot to create a dream world densely packed with images of beauty and terror that cling to the memory even if you don't want them to.

The title of this limp retread of "Minority Report" -- both films are based on stories by Philip K. Dick -- presumably refers to the reason the big names involved did this movie.

The chance for delicious satire melts away quickly in Butter, a spoof without oomph.

It's all a jumble and, worse, a damned impersonal one.

Hal claims that a Lantern's only enemy is fear itself. The thought of a sequel to this shamelessly soulless Hollywood product scares me plenty.

A romantic thriller of more than usual ineptitude.

Admirers of Irving's sprawling tome are sure to find Birch a botch.

No matter Bateman and Reynolds make The Change-Up seem a lot better than it is. Each earns a star in my review. The movie would be literally nothing without them.

Wherever you find yourself in the Perry equation, Medea herself deserves a final high-five. Perry hints that she may come back in a younger version, not played by him. But Medea will never be the same without her creator. In A Medea Family Funeral, she hosts a memorial service that defines the term hellzapoppin. And Perry correctly and adoringly gives her the last word in which she lets all the women have for letting any damn man abuse them. Hallelujah, sister!

The film is a sham, with good actors going for the paycheck and using beards and heavy makeup to hide their shame.

The Green Hornet doesn't suck. But don't expect it to hang together either, what with the clashing tones and melting logic.

There's nothing to distract you from a plot so tired there are tire tracks from other racing movies all over it.

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 is crap as we know it, a 113 minute package of romcom suck.

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.

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.

The Gunman degenerates into dreary setups for guns and gore. Penn merits more. So do we.

Murphy looks comatose delivering the played-out poopy jokes.

This dizzyingly intricate film reveals new facets each time you see it. We leave Vertigo unsettled, like Scottie, who ends up on the edge of a precipice. Hitchcock is daring us to leap. He has prepared the ultimate fix for a cinema junkie: a movie to get lost in.

Too limp to deliver.

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.

Bloated, boring, repetitive, draining.

Flawed? You bet, but the film of the Broadway musical about teen suicide is not the crime against humanity some claim. Yes, Ben Platt, 27 is playing a high school kid, but he inhabits the role he created on stage with every fiber of his being and hits you like a shot in the heart.

This sugarcoated and sanctified biopic sees Michael Jackson as a creative musical genius with a terminal case of arrested development. Except for the glorious music and star Jaafar Jackson, this is an insight-free gloss on a life minus anything raw, relatable and scandal adjacent.

So what's not to like? There's the bad CGI, the choppy pacing, the comically intense acting, the repetition, the dullness and mostly the idiot plot about how there's only one male dragon and everything will be fine if they kill the Big Dick. Wha? Somebody get a hose and put this Fire out.

Go Ahead And Scoff. But This cheap-jack sequel to the 1982 cult favorite about a hunky scientist (Dick Durock) turned talking plant delivers more tacky hit-and-miss hilarity than a Cineplex-ful of teen-sex comedies.

Is it the worst of the seven screen Sparks so far? Nope. My vote still goes to 2009's "The Last Song" with Miley Cyrus mothering those unhatched turtle eggs. But it's still pretty damn insufferable.

The shortage of wit and the excess of goo can be summed up in Sandler's line to these children of divorce: "I'm like the stink on your feet — I'll always be there."

A movie utterly devoid of wit , excitement and any reason for being.

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

Chainsaw is produced by Michael Bay (Bad Boys I and II), which explains its soullessness. But nothing explains the flaw in this bad boy: How can a movie scare you when you’ve seen it all before?

If you can buy the pillow-lipped Angelina Jolie as a psychic FBI agent in Montreal to hunt a serial killer, then you can swallow the other implausibilities in this retread thriller.

Writer-director Angelina Jolie's attempt to emulate European art cinema is a slow, sodden, stupefyingly dull take on a 1970s marriage gone bad.

I'm OK with Entourage onscreen because it's really a victory lap for a cast that once earned our DVR-ready affection. To echo Perry Farrell: "Yeah! Oh, yeah!" As for the haters? Hug it out, bitches.

Terminator Genisys fires on all action cylinders when director Alan Taylor (Thor: The Dark World) follows the model James Cameron set in the first two films, still the glory of the series.

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.

Bad Boys II has everything. Everything loud, dumb, violent, sexist, racist, misogynistic and homophobic that producer Jerry Bruckheimer and director Michael Bay can think of puking up onscreen.

Hemsworth and Thompson, who has the makings of a major star, do the heavy lifting. And, miraculously, they keep it light, breezy and watchable. Memorable? That’s asking too much.

There's no arguing that Cuba Gooding Jr. is trying to do right by the mentally disabled James Robert Kennedy.

This movie really moves. But a fleet of tanks couldn’t help the brothers Dowdle push past the plot holes in this rancid mess.

Confessions is no more than a painless time-waster. But the beguiling Fisher is well worth the investment.

It's hard to deny that The Rite is guilty of sins against its audience.

The "Citizen Kane" of flatulence.

They are all victims of a script of such colossal banality and gross stupidity that smiles freeze on their faces, leaving them looking trapped and desperate, much like the audience.

Despite Joan Cusack, whose comic spark earns the film its only star, Raising Helen is like tumbling into chick-flick hell.

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.

If you laughed at Tim Story's first "Think," based on Steve Harvey's bestselling advice book for women, you'll probably ride along for this jacked-up, Vegas-set sequel in which dudes and dolls offer sexist approaches to throwing a bachelor party.

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.

It's a shallow, melodramatic device that would sink most actors. But Lewis is not most actors. In fact, despite age and illness, he remains a mesmerizing star in front of the camera, compelling to watch even (and especially) when sitting perfectly still.

This black-comic assault on family entertainment is going to set a lot of teeth on edge -- If only his (De Vito's) material were better this time.

The sequel barely makes the grade as holiday fun, but wash it down with holiday cheer, put your brain on low power, let forgiveness into your heart and it’s—sound the trumpets—passable.

I don't like this movie. I don't like how it walks, talks, struts and sells itself. I find it contrived, tortured, humorless, infuriating and interminable. And yet if you care anything about film and the creative drive that still exists in the people who make them, then Third Person needs to be seen.

Preacher Reitman won't be satisfied till we stomp our smartphones. LOL. WTF.

Kramer takes on a hot, unwieldy topic in Crossing Over -- the dream that immigrants have of U.S. citizenship and the nightmare of achieving it, especially with shortcuts. I'm sure Kramer will be picked to pieces for trying something while Hollywood crap climbs the box office ladder. There are all kinds of nightmares.

The last of the summer's movie epics is a digitalized eyesore hobbled in every department by staggering incompetence.

The kid in us knows that even in a pokey, predictable sequel like this one you still stick around for the scary parts with the stampeding dinosaurs. But the wonder and awe of the Spielberg original have gone pfft.

Questions: Did everyone involved in this botched thriller OD on speed? Does jimmy-legs director D.J. Caruso think if he slowed down the action we'd figure out how stupid the plot is?

In Guncrazy, Davis delivers pow entertainment with a twist: It matters.

Forget fever – this floral-scented fiasco is so lifeless you can barely feel a pulse.

The movie dulls the social edge of J.D. Vance’s bestselling memoir about the Rust Belt’s white working class, but the performances of Glenn Close and Amy Adams make up the difference. As Mamaw, the chain-smoking matriarch of the clan, Close is simply sensational.

A tale of alien abduction, Proxmity serves as an in-and-out impressive calling card for debuting feature writer and director Eric Demeusy.

Even a search party would be hard-pressed to find a spark between Harrison Ford and Kristin Scott Thomas in Pollack's latest tear-jerker.

Where's Sandler in all this? Lost in gimmicks that smack of desperation. Damn it.

Stupefyingly stupid thriller.

Working from a script by the gifted Christopher Hampton (Dangerous Liaisons, Atonement), who seems to have traded his wit for a paycheck, Fontaine manages the trick of making sex joyless. Like porn. Then she tops that by draining her film of variety, longing and feminist insight. Like farce. Ouch.

It bristles with the brute force he brought to 1986's underrated "52 Pick-Up."

There’s not a real or spontaneous minute in it.

As a movie, Papa improves every time it shuts up and allows action to define character.

No cliché is left unturned, and Gordon compensates with slick action.

What once bubbled up from a sincere love of Greek family has now congealed into the all-too-familiar Hollywood tale of milking a cash cow until cries for mercy.

You know a sequel isn't working when, ten minutes into the movie, a voice inside your head starts screaming, "Please make it stop!"

Propaganda is a bitch to act. And this misguided movie leaves Hudgens buried in it.

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.

In a year of craptaculars, The Tourist deserves burial at the bottom of the 2010 dung heap. It offers talented people trapped in creative inertia. A microscope and a search party could not discover any trace of chemistry between Johnny Depp and Angelina Jolie.

Lawrence forgoes his knack for verbal comedy and replaces it with crude nonstop mugging.

The movie is full of possibilities. Frustratingly, only a few of them are realized.

This feeble followup to 2010's godawful "Clash of the Titans" sucketh the mighty big one.

Here they're just putting "Pirates of the Caribbean" in a saddle and pretending we won't notice.

It's Carell who projects the movie's only sense of mischief. But it's too little and too late.

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").

The film collapses because Lee can't sew these vignettes into a seamless tapestry. He's more interested in getting even than he is in getting it right.

The motor of the plot, involving nuclear terrorism, not only knocked Bad Company out of last year's release schedule due to 9/11 sensitivity, it stops Rock and Hopkins from sustaining a comic rapport. The waste is criminal.

No comedy this year can beat this dud for mealy-mouthed hypocrisy.

Overthought, overwrought and thuddingly underwhelming, this high-profile misfire makes a congealed gumbo out of Robert Penn Warren's Pulitzer-winning 1946 novel and the Oscar-winning 1949 movie that followed it, sinking a classy cast in the goo.

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.

Charlie Day owns one of the highest-pitched male squeaks in the business and he puts it to hilarious use on It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia. I could watch him in anything – but Fist Fight is pushing it, given that's it's always raining a storm of comic clichés that quickly drowns any semblance of audience goodwill.

The sequel, also directed by Harold Ramis, is painfully padded.

The movie damn near lives up to that promise. Picture the Marx brothers and the Coen boys collaborating on a valentine spiked with mirth and malice.

"GoodFellas" Oscar winner Pesci, who hasn't appeared onscreen in a major role since 1998's "Lethal Weapon 4," is a dynamo of conflicting emotions. And Mirren, bawdy in ways that erase all memory of her award-winning role as Elizabeth II in "The Queen," is magnificent.

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.

It's sad to see risk-taking director Mike Figgis (Leaving Las Vegas, Hotel) do a generic thriller for a paycheck and then not even screw with the rules.

Where "Drive" shrewdly mystifies, Only God Forgives stupefies. You can see its gears grinding. But I'll always hang on for a rare talent like Refn. Even when he stumbles, he leaves you eager to see what he's up to next.

Peachy for fans and painful for newbies, this animated joyride is on the run for box-office glory. So what if doesn’t have an ending. It just stops as if totally exhausted. Now that I can relate to.

Turns into a bogus drivel courtesy of a sitcom monster.

There is one high note. You can approach Speed Racer as the trippiest stonerfest since Stanley Kubrick took his space odyssey.

Here's Madge one more time doing something for which she is eminently unsuited – directing.

The kind of movie that TV stars do when they're on hiatus and trying to squeeze one in.

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

Here's a comedy of punishing tedium that pretends to be hip when it's so five minutes ago.

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.

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.

Critics and audiences should unite to KO this loser.

Guy flicks can be just as galling as the chick variety. Here's Exhibit A in how to lose an audience in ten minutes.

Crossing "A Beautiful Mind" with "Sex Kittens Go to College," first-time director Stephen Gaghan (he wrote Traffic) causes a head-on collision.

It's a little early for self-parody in the career of Vin Diesel. But he's a calamitous cliché in A Man Apart.

I laughed once or twice during this flat and fatuous farce, mainly because director and co-writer Greg Coolidge lifted a lot of it from "Office Space."

Stephen Rodrick's New York Times article about the making of The Canyons had humor, suspense and propulsion. They should have made that movie. What we have here is dead on arrival.

Critics will pick on this overstuffed sequel to the 1996 animated-live-action hoops hit. It’s what we do when an alleged creative enterprise turns into a corporate ad campaign. Expect no grumbles from the under-13 crowd eager to eyeball LeBron James jamming in cyberspace with cartoon royalty.

There's no thrill in Gone because you can see every surprise coming. It lies there flapping like a dying fish. Skip it.

Trash.

Joe Wright's origin story of Peter and the lost boys has to be the dimmest, deadliest take ever on J.M. Barrie's Pan myth.

Righteous Kill, a.k.a. The Al and Bob Show, is a cop flick with all the drama of "Law and Order: AARP." This movie defines drag-ass.

By showing signs of intelligent life in a universe of diseased, digital drivel, Assassin's Creed stands above the herd of movies based on video games by default.

You leave Lady thinking there are still voices in Shyamalan's head well worth a listen.

The compensation comes in the three lead actors, all way too good for the material dished out by writer-director Tom Gormican.

Audiences forced to endure the 109 coma-inducing minutes of Serena should bring an e-book or a soft pillow.

Feels fake, forced and indigestible.

The actors hit the jackpot, but only in terms of their paychecks. The audience gets a tension-free, tight-assed, "Casino" ripoff that leaves them thoroughly fleeced.

Spade goes sweet and gooey. This is nucking futs.

It’s always a downer when talented artists pour everything they’ve got into a film that stubbornly refuses to come to life. That’s the case with Lucy in the Sky.

Then there's the movie itself, which should be crazy, stupid fun but settles for just stupid.

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.

Velvet Buzzsaw is never less than a feast for the eyes even when it reduces the plot to B-level butchery. What’s missing is the potent provocation that Gilroy seemed to be developing at the start.

The bad news isn’t that Carrey and Daniels got old, it's that the jokes did. The spirit is still willing in Peter and Bobby Farrelly, the original writer-directors, but the sagging flesh is weak from prolonged repetition.

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

Martin is a gifted physical comic. He deserves an original role tailored to his own talents. Watching something this borrowed just makes me blue.

The half-star rating goes to John Krasinski for heroically rising above this vile dung heap of a movie.

Cringingly earnest, totally unremarkable fable.

Does he (Hartley) succeed? Not with a movie this plodding, peevish and gimmicky. Is it fun to watch him try? Me, I'll take failed ambition over hack efficiency any day.

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.

Branagh's take on the play comes right up to the edge of disaster but stubbornly refuses to leap in.

Nothing can match seeing Theron and Blunt try to out-camp each other, providing the only glimmer of entertainment in a film dedicated to being ponderous. No one sings "Let It Go," but my advice to audiences is to do just that before mistakenly buying a ticket.

Watching De Niro and Stallone piss all over their most iconic roles provides no pleasure. It made me feel – Sad. Sad. Sad.

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.

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

Talk about disappointing. Director Doug Liman exuded style and cool in "Swingers," "Go" and "The Bourne Identity." He lost his way in the star bloat of "Mr. and Mrs. Smith," and now his mojo is buried in this amped-up sci-fi chase flick.

Following "Derailed," this comic turd makes it two strikes for Jennifer Aniston. She looks great, but her acting is board-stiff.

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.

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.

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

Get out your pooper-scoopers. Doo happens June 14th, warn the ads for Scooby-Doo. And they say there's no truth in Hollywood.

A product that will delight car junkies and drive cinephiles to swear off film until fall.

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.

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.

Here's a shrieking bore of a horror flick.

Certainly blunt, and since Anderson and Bach are veterans of the porn trade, there is no skimping on the sex.

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.

Then the aliens show up, chased by Morgan Freeman as a nut-job Army colonel, and the movie degenerates into a sorry, silly, gory, punishingly overlong creature feature.

Hit-and-mostly-miss.

The Expendables 3, trading on our affection for action stars of the past, has officially worn out its already shaky welcome.

It's the Bay touch you feel in the way actors register as body count, characters go undeveloped, and sensation trumps feeling. A nightmare, indeed.

Anselmo, basing his script on a true story, juggles more plots than a full season of "The O.C.," setting his cast adrift in a sea of soap-opera bubbles.

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.

Every paying audience member deserves their 12 bucks back.

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

The real evil in this flick isn't Blackheart (Wes Bentley), the devil's son, it's the soul-sucking devil of modern cinema: Hollywood formula.

What I can’t figure out is how director Peter Hyams can remake a 1956 movie from the great Fritz Lang and not learn anything about suspense, pacing and storytelling in the process. This movie is beyond boring. You could stay warm for two hours by striking a match to the wooden acting.

Something lazy, slow, shallow, stupid, amateurish, unfunny, unsuspenseful, uninformed, unspeakably dull and witlessly written, directed and acted (the special effects suck, too).

There's no telling how the unflatteringly photographed Applegate delivers a comic line on the big screen, because Tara Ison and Neil Landau haven't written her any. And it's painful to see pros like Joanna Cassidy and John Getz stuck in this sewage. Director Stephen Herek does what you'd expect from the man who gave us Critters and Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure, i.e., grinds out the film equivalent of processed cheese.

What DePalma has never made is a dull movie. Until now.

Never comes as close as spitting distance to a laugh.

Film critics have been asked to say as little as possible about M. Night Shyamalan's new scare film about the perils of messing with Mother Nature. Fair enough. But I will say this: It's not happening.

This unholy mess shouldn't happen to a King, much less a paying customer.

Despite the efforts of an A-list cast led by Robert De Niro, this so-called family entertainment is barely passable piffle.

Big, loud and lurid, but no less entertaining for that.

It's not easy hanging talents like Ferrell and Hart out to dry. But Get Hard gets the job done. It's one limp noodle.

Jeez, did the "surprise" climax have to be this eye-rollingly stupid?

Demolition Man is sleek and empty as well as brutal and pointless.

One look at the dreadful mess that is Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance will turn your whisper into a primal Cage scream: MAKE THIS MOVIE STOP!

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.

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

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.

The script by Linda Woolverton stays surface faithful to the characters created by Lewis Carroll, but the film has lost its soul.