Peter Travers

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 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.

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

This mumbo-jumbo plays like The X Files on Prozac. No wonder the actors look narcotized.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

For starters, it blows. Madonna continues to mistake a knack for striking poses with the interpretive skill of a real actor.

Plods along in the Oscar-winning, yawn-inducing tradition of "Out of Africa," making me yearn for something less "National Geographic."

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.

Contrived, manipulative and shamelessly sentimental, this film is notable for the courageous reach of Sean Penn, who gives a bold, heartfelt performance.

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.

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

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.

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

Martin Sheen makes his directing debut with this military drama mixed with laughs. It isn’t awful — just bland, which is worse.

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.

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

This SCI-FI swill is the brain-child of director Mark L. Lester (Class of 1984), who says it’s really about “kids and the future of urban public education.” No, it’s not. It’s about kids and teachers kicking ass for two benumbing hours. What a waste.

For the first time, the Farrellys seem to be embarrassed by their own crudeness. For the first time, they should be.

The true story of the LaMarcas, well told by the late Mike McAlary in Esquire, has been pounded into TV-crime mush by screenwriter Ken Hixon and director Michael Caton-Jones. Shockingly, the acting doesn't help.

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

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

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

Makes you gag.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

Despite melodramatic lapses -- the gripping action recalls Walter Hill's 1981 "Southern Comfort" -- this is Schumacher's most ambitions film since "Falling Down" in 1993, and it plays to his strengths with young actors.

Trash.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

Slick-dick director Simon West, of "Con Air" and "The General's Daughter" infamy, continues to show no flair at all for blending action and character. Jolie and Lara deserved better. So did we.

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.

The saddest element of Two if by Sea is watching Bullock get dragged down in the drivel.

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.

When a chick flick goes wrong -- and this one hits a dead end in hell -- it's a wipeout.

Rifkin has conjured up a new low in cinematic ineptitude.

Never comes as close as spitting distance to a laugh.

Small jokes are buried under elaborate setups. Sight gags are repeated to the point of exhaustion — a woman’s shoe steps in gum, then toilet paper, then . . . you get the point. Most painful of all, serious actors strain to be funny.

A dreary film that's damn near torture to sit through.

Environmentalists are up in arms. "Where did the shit go?" they want to know. The answer is painfully obvious: into the screenplay.

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

There's no code to decipher. Da Vinci is a dud -- a dreary, droning, dull-witted adaptation of Dan Brown's religioso detective story.

Plot analysis is useless, since the film's fate rests with MTV comic Shore in his feature debut.

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

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.

Murphy looks comatose delivering the played-out poopy jokes.

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

American Pastoral, Roth's magnum opus, needed a film revolutionary on the order of Paul Thomas Anderson, Alejandro González Iñárritu or the Coen brothers to re-imagine it for the screen. McGregor's timid approach does no one any favors, including Roth – and especially the audience.

How can a film look so radiant and be so hollow?

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

Except for Connery, who is every inch the lion in winter, nothing here feels authentic.

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

Despite the strong presence of Kick-Ass star Chloe Grace Moretz as Cassie, the movie is selling the same old YA yada yada yada that made phenoms of "Twilight" and "Divergent."

It's a major dud.

Beware 2012, which works the dubious miracle of almost matching "Transformers 2" for sheer, cynical, mind-numbing, time-wasting, money-draining, soul-sucking stupidity.

It just plain sucks.

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

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

Critics and audiences should unite to KO this loser.

Never achieves liftoff.

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 only their stuff had a spark of life it might be forgivable, but Allegiant plods along like a franchise on its last legs. Who remembers where we left off last time in Insurgent? My point exactly — no one.

It's a paranoid thriller without suspense, urgency or a single new thing to say.

Since the new Recall is totally witless, don't expect laughs. Originality and coherence are also notably MIA.

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.

This flabby comedy deserves only one thing: to fall on its fat one.

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

Every attempt at fright lands with a deadening thud. For shock value, Wingard and cowriter Simon Barrett simply repeat stuff from the original film, only this time louder, lamer, duller and stupider. Scarier? That got lost in the woods with whatever you spent for a movie ticket.

When a Spike Lee film doesn't fly, it sinks like a stone.

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

It could have been the 21st-century Showgirls. I wouldn't have missed that for the world. Instead, Burlesque, starring Cher and Christina Aguilera playing drag queen versions of themselves with all the vitality of Madame Tussauds wax dolls, is a bust that lacks the pizzaz and bugfuck nuttiness of Paul Verhoeven's 1995 trash epic.

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

I can't believe that even the most rabid chick-flick masochists wouldn't gag on it.

Strands Matt Damon and Casey Affleck (both named Gerry) in a desert with little to say and do except lose themselves in an existential wasteland of doomed beauty.

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

Every scare is telegraphed. Every surprise is recycled from a better thriller. Even the devil would send this one back.

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

As for the ladies who think any kind of chick flick is preferable to football, be careful what you wish for.

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.

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

Unforgettable is definitely the wrong title for a movie you want to erase from your memory the second it ends.

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

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.

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.

It's the perfect Valentine's date night movie, but only with someone you hate.

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.

The young Smith has energy, but not the acting chops. And he's no miracle worker. The burden of carrying this dull, lifeless movie is just too much. And it's hell on an audience. It's not a good sign when you sit there thinking – Make. It. Stop.

There may be worse movies this summer than The Great Gatsby, but there won't be a more crushing disappointment.

I wanted Paquin, who deserves better than this, to call on her vampire pals from "True Blood" and yell, "sic em!" Oh wait, they're already bloodless.

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.

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.

The first Young Guns, in 1988, was an endurance test for all but those who think ogling young actors in tight britches is a fascinating way to spend two hours. Though it seems impossible, the sequel is even more excruciating.

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

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

A dull, dumb and unforgivably dated thriller, free of thrills and any kind of perfection.

Director Antoine Fuqua (Training Day) can stage action, but he can't save a trivializing, reactionary script featuring a Hollywood star (read America) as a global savior.

The poster for this movie should read: Hello, Suckers!

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.

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.

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

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

No go. Marshall deserved better than this misbegotten tribute.

This third hunk of Pie is a worn-out gross-out, a remnant of a genre that now seems so five minutes ago.

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.

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

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.

You might think there's no downside to a movie that peeks up the skirts of babes in micro-minis, but writer-director Angela Robinson's dimwitted satire is libido-killing proof to the contrary.

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 clumsy package of clichés.

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

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.

Is it the clumsy script or the switch in directors -- Beeban Kidron in for Sharon Maguire -- that has sucked out the charm of the original and replaced it with crude pratfalls and enough shag gags to stuff the next three Austin Powers movies?

Ah jeez. I actually wanted this one to be good. Or at least decent. Or at least a reminder of what got us all fired up about the first Die Hard in 1988. But A Good Day To Die Hard, the fifth in a creatively exhausted series, is total crap.

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

The most shocking thing here is the fact that Peter Chelsom directed it. His 1995 movie, "Funny Bones," is a genuinely transgressive piece of dark comedy. I can't detect a trace of Chelsom in Hannah Montana, which means he won't have to wear a blonde wig to hide his shame.

I'm guessing it's the pressure of an idiot script by Gary Scott Thompson and understandably clueless direction from Jon Avnet that forces Pacino to ham it up so vigorously that you want to garnish him with cloves and a slice of pineapple.

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

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

Onscreen, Nina barely scratches the surface much less draws blood. For the essence of a legend, listen to the real Simone sing "I Put a Spell on You." She sure as hell does. This movie emphatically does not.

There's something pernicious about a toxic mix of sitcom and snickering sex jokes getting packaged and effectively sold as wholesome fun for the family.

Here's a shrieking bore of a horror flick.

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."

Like the worst civics lesson, this movie bores away at you till your reactions are dulled.

The only people likely to get a kick out of Gigli -- the first screen teaming of Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez -- are Madonna and her director hubby Guy Ritchie. Finally there's a movie as jaw-droppingly awful as their "Swept Away."

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 fifth entry in the Ice Age series is a loud, lazy, laugh-starved cash grab that cynically exploits its target audience (I use the term advisedly) by serving them scraps and calling it yummy. Even two-year-olds can see through the hustle.

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.

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

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

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.

Aiming for the heartfelt hilarity of "Superbad," I Love You, Beth Cooper is just super bad.

It's all stupefyingly unfunny. Hot Pursuit is one hot mess.

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.

There I sit, suffering total numbness of body and brain, no longer having to wonder what it might be like to be buried alive in gooey marshmallow.

Upchuckingly unfunny.

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

Lacks the active verb it promises. It defines blah.

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

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

A comedy so devoid of wit and point that not mentioning the other actors trapped in this rathole would be an act of charity.

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.

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

Don't ask whether or not you should take The Day After Tomorrow seriously. Don't take it at all.

Start hating me now, Twihards, but the sexless, bloodless, padded and plodding Breaking Dawn, Part 1 is the worst Twilight movie to date. (I don't get it either.)

Diapers, even from three babies, can't stink worse than this.

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.

I have the same allergic reaction to this open faucet of tear-jerking swill as I do to the 1996 Nicholas Sparks novel that inspired it.

I'd prefer to think of Sandler in "Punch-Drunk Love," the one good movie of the three he did this year.

Build a comedy around Jim Carrey in manic mode and they will come. Case in point: Fun With Dick and Jane, a pointless, painfully unfunny and yet inexplicably popular remake of the 1977 fizzle with Jane Fonda and George Segal.

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

This is Berg's debut outing as a director, but other first-timers, namely Joel Coen (Blood Simple) and Danny Boyle (Shallow Grave), had it all over him for blending horror and hilarity.

Director Michael Hoffman sprays on the tears like a toxic mist. Avoid like the plague.

The true audiences for Fifty Shades of Grey are gluttons for punishment — by boredom.

Not since Gus Van Sant inexplicably directed a shot-by-shot remake of Hitchcock's "Psycho" has a thriller been copied with so little point or impact.

This movie hits all the wrong notes.

Yikes! I saw Pixels as a 3D metaphor for Hollywood's digital assault on our eyes and brains. Not funny. Just relentless and exhausting.

Hollywood has again turned a challenging book into negligible cinema. Forget the $13 million budget and the reputations involved. This Handmaid’s Tale is merely a piss-poor rehash of The Stepford Wives with delusions of grandeur.

Yikes! Chris Renaud and Kyle Balda direct strictly for short-attention spans on a fruit-loopy palette that made me want to puke. Had Dr. Seuss lived (he died in 1991), I'm confident he would have puked as well.

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.

It could have been crazy-good trash.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

This movie isn't over-the-top -- it doesn't know where the top is. Trash addicts will eat up every graphic minute, even if they prefer to wait for the DVD.

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

Jonah is fated to ride alone. Don't make the mistake of keeping him company.

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

The real burned-out case is director-writer Peter Bogdanovich. The Last Picture Show made his reputation, and these aging Texans trying to rediscover their innocence obviously touch him deeply. But Bogdanovich’s style has turned heavy, crude and incoherent.

Result? It's not scary, just busy.

Hiddleston is not what's wrong with this movie. But damn near everything else is.

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

Bloated, boring, repetitive, draining.

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

I'm dumbfounded by the idea of remaking a movie that was no damn good in the first place. Is it the possibility of making it better? The exact opposite happens with Flatliners.

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.

This is the safe and sorry Disney version, suitable for anyone under 10 or gullible to the point of idiocy.

Something cold and mechanical has seeped into the sequel. The divas push so hard for fun, it kills the spontaneity that fun needs to breathe.

"Irritating" doesn't begin to describe Julia Roberts as Katherine, an art-history prof who arrives at Wellesley in 1953.

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.

Feels fake, forced and indigestible.

"Sixth Sense" rip-off.

The perfect summer movie, that is if you're eight years old or under. For the rest of us, the sequel to the first "Fantastic Four" that miraculously amassed more than $150 million in 2005, is a plotless, brainless, witless bore.

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

Delivery Man is one joke stretched to the breaking point. Mine was reached.

Final Analysis suffers from something much worse: terminal shallowness.

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.

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.

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

Grating.

It galls me that Hollywood thinks we're shallow enough to swallow this swill. Or am I just being paranoid?

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

The real plague is the movie, a sci-fi hodgepodge of bad history and worse special effects.

What's onscreen is a godawful mess, leaving the actors to suck wind while the film collapses around them. If you've never played the game, you might as well watch the movie stoned.

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.

Director Luke Greenfield, the auteur behind "The Animal," starring Rob Schneider, wants to pass off this limp-dick farce as social satire. Ha!

This lame-ass chick-flick sampling of "Crazy Heart" is more like country Kryptonite.

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.

Estevez means well. But having your heart in the right place is no excuse for insipid ineptitude.

At one point, Black puts out a fire by pissing on it. It's my job as a critic to piss on this dumb excuse for a movie. Consider it done.

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.

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

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.

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."

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

The movie plays like an evangelical prayer meeting, though I'd hold the hallelujahs. The characters we came to admire as vulnerable misfits hit the stage like visiting royalty and with a nonstop perkiness that makes the Von Trapps look like manic-depressives.

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").

Roth takes three powerhouse actors -- Julianne Moore as the mother, Samuel L. Jackson as the cop who interrogates her and Edie Falco as another woman who lost her son -- and reduces their talents to rubble and their characters to screeching cliches.

The cheap thrills wear off way fast, and we're left with atrocious acting, feeble writing and clueless directing (from first-timer Steven Quale). The horror! The horror!

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

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

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.

George Orwell’s dystopian satire of aggression in the form of anthropomorphic farm animals becomes a cutsey, cardboard kiddie cartoon of staggering ineptitude and an endurance test for audiences of all ages.

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

Valentine's Day is a date movie from hell.

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.

Talk about your quick-buck exploitation.

Oh, how good actors can trap themselves in drivel.

Nothing the skunk does can begin to match the stench of this movie.

Even wild man Gary Oldman, as a priest ready to eighty-six the wolfman with silver nail polish, can't liven up this humorless hogwash. And it's just sad to see the legendary Julie Christie stuck playing the grandmother.

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.

The movie that might have been goes down in flames.

An irredeemably dull tale.

Call it "Apocalypto" for pussies -- a PG-13 rating, puh-leese! -- or prehistory for peabrains. Just don’t call it friendo. 10,000 B.C. will take your money, rob your time and hit your brain like a shot of Novacaine.

Not to be catty about it, but the stench of the litter pan is all over this big-screen $90 million disaster-in-waiting.

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.

This crap is supposed to be the chick flick antidote to Super Bowl fever. Ha!

Director Burr Steers, of the terrific "Igby Goes Down," is stuck polishing clichès.

It's a lame trailer, but the movie itself is much, much worse.

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

Director Brian De Palma’s $45 million film version of the book is superficial, shopworn and cartoonish. On film, Bonfire achieves a consistency of ineptitude rare even in this era of over-inflated cinematic air bags.

A romantic comedy so numbing it feels like Novocaine.

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

It's a monster fail.

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

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

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.

Director Garry Marshall is a menace. He keeps killing holidays with all-star comedies in which a laugh would die of loneliness.

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

Cage and Baruchel work hard to stay accessible, but the computer-generated effects come on like heavy artillery blowing away any hint of flesh and blood. The Sorcerer's Apprentice should be rated U for Untouched by Human Hands.

Sorry, no XOXO for this slick, hollow hooey.

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

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.

I can't detect the hand of Hill in even a single scene in Bullet in the Head. It plays like a Stallone vanity project, impure and stupefyingly simple.

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 cast got to spend a month shooting on Bora Bora. So that explains why they're in the movie. Why you'd spend good money for a ticket to watch them have all the fun and not have any fun yourself passes understanding.

If you ever admired Julia Stiles, Selma Blair and Jason Lee -- and who didn't? -- don't watch them crush their careers in this laugh-free romantic comedy.

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

Is there an audience for this? Sadly, yes. There’s nothing wrong with a movie that cheers American heroes. But this one does so by reducing everything else to cardboard.

If you stay and watch the endless end credits, there's a short scene that hints a sequel is coming. That's what I call real pain.