Rene Rodriguez

There isn’t a moment of spontaneous fun or humor in this long, turgid movie, the latest let-down for rabid DC Comics fans who’ve been waiting for someone to pick up the baton Christopher Nolan left behind and do this universe justice. With “Suicide Squad,” the long wait continues.

The Legend of Tarzan doles out big beats of action at regular intervals to keep you awake, like a drunkard clashing trashcan lids in an alley late at night. But your eyelids grow heavy anyway.

The Warcraft hardcore can rejoice. Everyone else can move along. There’s not much to see here.

Played by Adrian Sparks in a style better suited for dinner theater or a Key West tourist attraction, Hemingway comes across as a complete cypher. Everyone in the film keeps talking about his genius, but other than a scene in which he writes a short story on the back of a napkin, the movie doesn’t try to humanize or explore his talent.

Demolition is so busy trying to be profound, the film doesn’t have much use for humor.

Most of this is tedious instead of unintentionally amusing.

What ultimately sinks The Visit is that Shyamalan, who had previously come up with new and ingenious ways to frighten us, resorts to familiar jump-scare tactics in which things suddenly pop into the frame, accompanied by loud sound effects. There’s no real sense of danger, no menace.

Fantastic Four is so bereft of all the things we expect from a superhero movie — humor, excitement, adventure, awe — that it plays like a drawn-out pilot episode for an upcoming TV series no one would ever watch again.

Jurassic World gives you exactly what Howard’s character promises at the beginning — More! Bigger! Faster! — but you know there’s something deeply wrong with a film that expects you to shed tears over digitally created prehistoric creatures and rubber brontosaurus heads instead of rooting for, you know, people.

This is pure Disaster 101 formula, although distilled to the minimum amount of dialogue and characters possible.

Sadly, Jupiter Ascending turns out to be the exact opposite: the worst movie the Wachowskis have ever made.

The film is so gleefully ridiculous that you start to suspect the filmmakers were in on the joke and forgot to tell the actors.

Once the premise has been established, the film goes absolutely nowhere.

The things that stay with you are the dull, boilerplate love story, the laziest performance of Liam Neeson’s career as a murderous gunslinger and the distracting amount of makeup Seth MacFarlane sports in the film.

A wan gloss on a horrific nightmare.

Transcendence is "Her" for dummies.

The movie, however, is the sort of picture in which people run around doing everything except the most logical thing to do, because that’s the only way to keep the nonsensical plot spinning.

The lack of effort, right down to the unimaginative title, is dispiriting.

Homefront is done in by uninspired action scenes in which Statham’s athletic prowess is rendered unwatchable by hyper-editing, a shameful reliance on child-in-peril cliches to move the story forward, and so many loose ends that you wonder if 20 minutes were accidentally cut out from the movie.

In its early moments, the movie evokes everything from "The Social Network" to "Casino." By the end, the film has become as exciting as a game of Old Maid. R-rated thrillers are hardly ever this dull and listless, but this movie manages to eradicate all of Timberlake’s charisma and makes you flash back to Affleck’s "Paycheck"/"Gigli" era. How does this even happen?

Director Stuart Blumberg’s movie, which features a surprisingly starry cast, comes off as superficial and trite.

Only genuinely talented people can make pictures this bad and misguided. “This whole thing is unacceptable,” Lil remarks at one point. That goes for the movie, too.

The entire movie bears the whiff of a vanity project — a modestly budgeted bone Universal Pictures threw at Diesel so he would keep starring in Fast and Furious pictures. Those movies are bank; Riddick is rank.

Getaway makes the Transformers movies seem like they were shot in slow motion. You see all these vehicles smashing into each other, but the movie is never thrilling.

You’re Next is built on such an enormous pile of guff, it’s practically insulting.

The times have caught up with Almodóvar, who is now 63: He thinks he’s still pushing the envelope, but he comes off as old-fashioned and outdated.

The Purge isn’t just stupid; it’s also pretentious and often makes no sense.

There’s exactly one good scene in all of The Hangover Part III, a hilarious bit of business halfway during the end credits that reminds you what made the original film so good.

Oz the Great and Powerful is an oppressive, bloated bore.

Time to give the shoot-’em-up thing a rest, guys: It’s tired and played out, and so are you.

An unsalvageable wreck.

An excruciating and melodramatic comedy.

Hitchcock spends too much time off the set of Psycho, where the real story was, and focuses instead on incidental matters that feel like outtakes. Mother would not have been pleased.

There isn't a moment in the entire picture in which you will recognize an element of your own life.

This Must Be the Place is as emotionally zonked-out as its protagonist, and just as difficult to warm up to.

Despite all the freaky business on display - and there are moments here when you cannot believe your eyes - The Paperboy suffocates you with boredom like a hot, wet blanket. You want to push it away and escape. It makes sleaze boring.

The movie even fails on a psychological level, never illustrating how, in a pressure-cooker environment and swept up by mob-think mentality, we are capable of committing acts that innately repel us.

There are several cameos in For a Good Time, Call… by famous actors portraying the girls' phone-sex clients, including Kevin Smith and Seth Rogen, but they've been clearly been left to improvise, and they don't put much effort into their routines.

Even the story-within-a-story structure doesn't pay off. This material needed more substance and ideas - and less flash and sumptuous production values.

The best moments in director David Koepp's slight, dull movie are the scenes in which bike messenger Wilee pauses at busy intersections to figure out the path of least obstruction.

Chuck Norris is also in this movie, although you should know that he gets roughly five minutes of screen time, half of those devoted to his telling of a Chuck Norris joke. That is as funny as the movie's self-aware humor gets.

This is ultimately a movie about highly intelligent people in pursuit of trivial nonsense: At least Mulder and Scully caught a real monster every once in a while.

Aggressively, defiantly stupid.

An irritatingly contrived drama.

Enormous in its scope and colossal in its stupidity.

That's My Boy more than lives up to its R-rating - including one gross-out gag repulsive enough to make you put down your popcorn.

In Snow White and the Huntsman, this talented but woefully miscast actress (Stewart) is expected to rally an entire army of soldiers, even though she usually looks like she forgot the combination to her locker.

Men in Black 3 is so dull and empty, it's the first movie that has ever made me think "Thank God this is in 3D."

Battleship is a board game for children, so it stands to reason a film adaptation would also be aimed at kids. But did they have to gear it to really dumb kids?

The latest collaboration between Cohen and director Larry Charles proves the formula they created with "Borat" and then started to milk dry with "Brüno" has finally run out of juice. Time to move on, guys.

The movie has an undeniable visceral power. It is also a loud, grating wallow in dime-store despair, a cheap and hollow button-puncher.

"The silence will kill you!" warn the posters for Silent House. That's only if the boredom doesn't get you first, though.

This is the kind of colossally misguided vanity project.

The action, which bookends the movie, is atrocious, defying all laws of gravity and physics and machine gun-edited into incomprehensible lunacy.

Man on a Ledge just made me think of an old Van Halen song: Jump.

Neeson is always compelling, even in a movie as ridiculous as The Grey.

You need lots of gifted people chasing after the same bad idea to make a movie as colossally misguided as Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close.

This odious, hypocritical movie marks director David Gordon Green's graduation into full-on hack.

Jack and Jill contains long stretches of squirm-inducing tedium in which Sandler riffs and ad-libs far longer than he should.

Even a supporting turn by Vincent Cassell as Otto Gross, a fellow psychiatrist, cocaine addict and unapologetic adulterer, fails to enliven the movie: A Dangerous Method makes even a cokehead hedonist boring.

There is absolutely nothing in this prequel/remake that improves on the first film or negates it in any way. If you've never seen The Thing - and you really should - stick with the genuine 1982 article and skip this elaborate act of mimicry.

Why does The Big Year's trailer intentionally hide what the film is really about? Here's why: Because bird-watching - or birding, as practitioners prefer to call it - makes for a stupefyingly boring movie.

Abduction is a crass and lowbrow attempt to cash in on a young actor's heat - an exploitation picture where the person being taken advantage of is too young to notice.

You know this supposedly risqué comedy is in trouble when the funniest gag involves a foot cramp during sex.

The talented actors are game, but they are done in by the shallow nature of their characters, none of whom behaves in a manner remotely resembling real life (they don't really seem to be related, either).

Momoa, a familiar face from "Game of Thrones" to "Baywatch," has the muscles but not the imposing persona and barbaric presence that Conan requires.

Every summer movie season usually has at least one spectacular, disastrous flame-out, and although the dog days of August still loom, I doubt there will come a big-budget blockbuster worse than Cowboys and Aliens.

The tone is all over the place, which makes the movie difficult to take neither seriously nor as popcorn fluff.

Even the most forgiving moviegoer will recognize this movie as the blatant cash-grab that it is.

The Conspirator hits a new nadir for Redford: Sitting through this stage-bound, talky, stiffly-acted movie reminded me of having to endure the Hall of Presidents attraction at Walt Disney World (one of the few existing bits of proof that Disney had a dark and evil side).

The film will probably play a lot better in dorm rooms with plenty of beer kegs and bongs on hand, but in the confines of a movie theater, it's deadly - the sort of bad comedy Mel Brooks made late in his career, until he finally smartened up and quit.

With Kaboom, Araki takes a huge step backward from the maturity and restraint he demonstrated in 2004's "Mysterious Skin," his best and most-assured film to date.

A stiff, unconvincing epic.

British satire loses something when it's handled by Americans: You miss the perspective that a foreign culture brings, so instead of wit and humor, you end up trafficking in self-congratulatory clichés and sentiment.

There's a startling moment 10 or 15 minutes into The Adjustment Bureau - the only time, really, when the film achieves any level of surprise. The dispiriting dullness of this dreary misfire hasn't had time to settle in and thicken: The movie hasn't yet revealed its utter and thorough ineptitude.

This excruciatingly dumb, formulaic picture, which somehow required the work of four screenwriters but contains not even one single, fleeting moment of wit or humor.

Sitting through Little Fockers is a soul-sucking, dispiriting experience.

The film suffers from a severe lack of urgency and emotional engagement. You can't get involved in a movie in which the characters all seem to be harboring double identities.

With such a large cast, none of the actors is able to turn her character into a fully realized person.

The best stuff in Jumper comes early, while the movie is still busy explaining its scenario. It's only when all the pieces are in place and the story actually kicks in that things start to fall apart, and quickly.

Take away the art direction, and Johnny Mnemonic is nothing more than a clunky chase flick, done with little skill or subtlety. [27 May 1995, p.6G]

Most certainly a personal work -- so personal, in fact, that I can't imagine anyone but Coppola being able to sit through it.

Glitter, the kind of movie only 11-year-old girls who dot their i's with hearts would find bearable.

A soulless, witless, landfill contraption that Smith once would have mocked mercilessly.

Never achieves takeoff.

Shyamalan takes the beloved Nickelodeon anime series -- the full title was Avatar: The Last Airbender -- and turns it into 103 minutes of overproduced, stilted nonsense.

There's something innately distasteful about The Crush. Here's a movie that casts a hopelessly lovestruck -- and mentally disturbed -- teenager as a villain. The camera ogles Silverstone's body every chance it gets, then invites you to hiss at her as she goes about her evil deeds. What's more, the movie -- which is nothing more than the latest take on the increasingly routine female-from-hell genre -- takes itself very seriously, giving the proceedings a realism that only serves to heighten the unsavoriness of the thing. [8 Apr 1993, p.F3]

The Mangler is one of the worst movies we've seen in years, and we've seen a lot of movies. [6 Mar 1995, p.5C]

If Annapolis is not the worst movie to date of this still-young year, it is certainly the most hackneyed, as well as the most depressing.

A $100 million production of a 10-cent script, is so clunkily written, so bereft of any engaging ideas or emotions, you'd think De Palma would have sneered at it on first reading and passed

Looks exquisite, but don't bother digging deeper.

A compendium of missed opportunities, uninspired action and clichés so tired, you wish the screenwriters had called 911, too.

Who writes this stuff, anyway? Does this not sound like utter gibberish? Surely, this film did not actually get made, did it? Yes, it did. I have seen it. But you, oh, fortunate one, don't have to. Consider yourself lucky.

The problem with Revolver is that it is Ritchie's first attempt at a ''serious'' look at the underworld, but the result is so pretentious and muddled it's almost a little embarrassing.

So needlessly convoluted, so crammed with subplots within subplots, it simply forgets about its gangland "Romeo & Juliet" premise.

A shockingly, unbelievably bad movie.

Lands with a thud right from its painfully unfunny prologue and maintains its plodding, exasperating course straight through to its car-chase-and-shootout finale.

The more Shrink tries to get you invested in the emotional turmoil of its characters, the more you want to reach into the screen and shake them and tell them to get over themselves.