Rex Reed

The insurmountable problem is that Imogene is not a very original, dynamic or charismatic character, and Kristen Wiig is not a very original, dynamic or charismatic actress. Nobody in this movie is really appealing enough to be much fun. The state of New Jersey should sue.

Ant-Man is a brainless bore and a colossal waste of money, time and computer-generated special effects.

Ambiguous and ludicrous at the same time, director Mr. Nichols (Mud) claims to have structured Midnight Special as a fast-moving thriller, but it’s slow as an inchworm and about as thrilling as buttermilk. Clearly, he’s been watching too many Christopher Nolan movies.

Motherless Brooklyn is so messy, confusing and pointless that you don’t know what’s going on half the time, and couldn’t care less.

I can’t imagine any film starring Jane Fonda to be a total loss, but This Is Where I Leave You, a vulgar, inept and gruesomely contrived load of junk misleadingly labeled a comedy comes perilously close.

Labored and boring, The Mountain Between Us is a soap opera in the snow that fritters away the time and talents of Kate Winslet and Idris Elba for all the wrong reasons.

After.Life, with a pretentious point between the two words in the title for no explainable reason, is a horror film with a macabre style but few of the creepy chills of cheaper, cliché-riddled thrillers that are a dime a dozen these days.

It still has a long way to go before the term Mumblecore (which sounds like a Harry Potter major at Hogwart's) can be confused with the term Class Act.

A creepfest so stupid it makes trashy slash-and-burn epics like "Humans Versus Zombies" and "I Spit on Your Grave" seem like Molière and Proust.

A horror anthology consisting of five episodes by different directors with more imagination than skill, Nightmare Cinema will make you scratch your head more than your goosebumps. Each story is designed and determined to scare the living daylights out of you, but I promise you more yawns than screams.

Movies get crazier and more incomprehensible every day, but you don’t know demented until you see Winter’s Tale.

As the film builds to a feverish hysteria, you have to work hard to keep from laughing.

Incompetently directed by Scott Coffey and weakly written by Andrew Cochran, a rotten egg called Adult World is anything but.

Blame who you must, but whatever went wrong with 6 Souls, God had nothing to do with it.

There’s no humanity in this grave disappointment that justifies the passion his fans feel for the father of the iMac. Steve Jobs and all of the characters around him fail to come to life in any absorbing fashion. They’re not real people; they’re all hashtags.

You can sum it up with a few smiles, a weak premise that never pays off, and a narrative that is nothing more or less than a big piece of zero.

Being Frank festers uncomfortably from start to finish.

Gifted and sincere as she always is, there's not much Ms. Seyfried can do with this tripe.

Never catches fire or fully engages the imagination in the nightmarish way it should.

Expensive, derivative and boring as mattress ticking masquerading as designer fabric.

Red Right Hand, another routine crime-thriller with a title that makes no sense, is a violent and nauseating excuse to entertain the portion of what is left of that dwindling movie audience that lives for nothing more than a lot of posing, crunching and muscle-flexing, not always in the same order.

At the movies, bad things happen to good people all the time. But it’s especially lamentable to see two sterling silver talents of the caliber of Gary Oldman and Emily Mortimer trapped in a mindless trifle like Mary. It’s a watery tale of supernatural nonsense at sea as lost and immobile as a beached mackerel.

The result is such a bomb—exaggerated, infuriating, and about as funny as a root canal without anesthesia.

Pretentious (it thinks it’s a comedy but descends into depression faster than you can fill a Prozac prescription) and self-indulgent (whole scenes are thrown in for no reason except to stretch a five-minute sitcom pitch into nearly two hours of phony, contrived tedium), it’s a mess begging for coherence.

Based on an overly imaginative book by Stephen King’s son Joe Hill, it’s a movie that doesn’t exactly unfold as much as hyperventilate.

Mostly it just redefines the word “asinine.” Marcia Gay Harden never makes a wrong move, but this movie is so futile, one goes away convinced that the moves she makes are hardly worth making.

And there is Ewan McGregor, who makes entirely too many movies and only occasionally makes an effort to speak the kind of English anyone can understand.

I hated it, but reluctantly give it one star for whimsical sets and costumes, and there’s a minute sprinkle of suspense while you wait for a point of view that never arrives.

This turkey is too clumsy and boring to make much of a ripple in the summer landscape.

Color it long, clumsy, gimmicky, schmaltzy and pointless.

Shaving too fast with an old razor blade, I’ve had more scares than anything in Heretic from my bathroom mirror.

The film knocks itself unconscious trying to be whimsical and offbeat, but is so contrived that it is as embarrassing as it is unfunny.

Burlesque is the celluloid equivalent to a Big Mac attack, and any resemblance to a plot is purely coincidental.

Never Let Go never manages to answer any of a number of recurring questions adequately, and the movie makes no more sense than one of those head-scratchers by M. Night Shyamalan, which it annoyingly resembles.

All I know is it’s excruciatingly dull. It pains me to see industrious people wasting time, chasing their tails and turning into butter when they could be taking a nap — which is what I did at regular intervals during The Female Brain.

Almost three hours long, a lugubrious sludge of mud soup called Cloud Atlas deserves a limp nod for pure guts, I suppose, but what I'd really like to do is burn it.

She’s (Moore) the best thing in this toxic carnage of creepy, self-indulgent decadence, but under the direction of loopy Canadian David Cronenberg, she goes beyond the limit of acceptable artistry.

The result is pretty to look at, with the misty lakes and foreboding forests of Denmark beautifully photographed and the costumes lavishly designed, but the sad (and boring) result has none of the bold thrust or festering passion originally created by the Bard.

Big Ass Spider, lazily directed by Mike Mendez and unwisely written without a trace of necessary camp by Gregory Gieras, aims for satire and settles for stale shtick. It ends with the song “La Cucaracha,” leaving the door open for more insects to come. Cockroaches, anyone?

It’s next door to impossible to believe the dreadful Mary Magdalene could be the work of Garth Davis, the Australian director who caused a global sensation with the wonderful, award-winning 2016 film "Lion." That one was full of life and heart and adventure. The new one is dead on arrival. A disappointing theological follow-up to Lion, it’s dull as dirt.

This awful rehash, badly directed by Vincenzo Natali (Splice), reeks of stale, recycled ideas.

I endured this modest, sometimes vulgar and often insulting family flick for one reason only: an unusual chance to watch the charming, likable and woefully underrated Tom Hanks clone, Tom Everett Scott, in a rare leading role. Big mistake. We should all have stayed home with a good book or worthwhile rerun of a real family film like "Meet Me in St. Louis."

Like Steven Spielberg, [Howard]'s films are usually polished, coherent, and suitable for all ages. His obsession with Eden delivers none of those things, and it’s so vile, pretentious and confusing in style over substance that a lot of it is downright unwatchable.

For a subject of so much titillating eroticism, the script (co-authored by the director and Mikko Alanne) is as dull as navel lint, the lighting is like an undeveloped hospital X-ray and the director has no idea how to move actors around in frame to make them feel like anything more than talking corpses.

Awkward music cues and choppy camera work add baggage to a film so overwrought that its excesses seem more unintentionally silly than bleakly disturbing.

One hour and forty minutes of gibberish about three generations of empowered female superheroes wreaking havoc on a postapocalyptic twilight zone, written and directed by a terrible filmmaker named Julia Hart. She’s no Rod Serling.

I’ve had bigger scares from the windows at FAO Schwarz.

This is a director whose only interest is in entertainment without a trace of originality. He isn’t interested in quality, only in length, noise, and stale ideas from old movies. There’s plenty of all three in Ambulance.

Detachment drives a coffin nail through a noble profession with such ruthless virulence that it makes no point at all.

She (Watts) produced it to show off the range of her obvious talent, and deserves an A for effort in a vehicle that rates a D for dreary, desolate and depressing. The rest of The Wolf Hour deserves an F for forget it.

Jumping, jerking and bellowing all over the screen, the same cannot be said for Kevin Hart. He may have garnered a few laughs telling homophobic jokes in his old stand-up comedy routine, but when it comes to playing a completely realized character in a full-length film, he’s as funny as a case of shingles.

Helen Hunt is a good actress with an Oscar on her mantle and practically no ability to choose a decent movie script based on quality or entertainment value. She’s been absent from the screen far too long, so it’s a pleasure to welcome her back, but not in a labored, amateurish charade as bad as I See You.

Filmmakers never seem to run out of footnotes to history during World War II. This one is better served in the pages of a novel. It doesn’t work on film.

All we know is that the only sure way to avoid the loss of any more I.Q. points in the world today is to stay away from movies like Erased.

Valhalla Rising is nothing more than an updated version of the kind of time-honored Hollywood Viking movie Kirk Douglas used to do in his sleep, which means lots of inhuman, bone-crunching violence and no plot.

In a lurid, lumpy and lugubrious mess called The Adderall Diaries, misguided first-time director Pamela Romanowsky cleaves a pointless film out of a foggy memoir by writer Stephen Elliott (About Cherry) about a murder case he pursued with no resolution.

2024 is very young, but in the months ahead, I seriously doubt things will get any worse than Mean Girls.

I love the publicity quotes by Baz Luhrmann stating that his intention was to make an epic romantic vision that is enormous. Also: overwrought, asinine, exaggerated and boring. But in the end, about as romantic as a pet rock.

Michael Shannon is a convincing and resourceful actor who is now too established and viable to settle for enigmatic roles in meaningless, throwaway movies with zero possibilities for commercial success like a thing called Frank & Lola.

In an age of zombies, werewolves and oversexed vampires, teens won't be shaking in their Uggs over ugly women with bad teeth flying around on brooms, and with its graphic depictions of tortures, mutilations, gang rapes and myriad examples of child abuse, it's no longer a fairy tale suitable for children.

The actual Chilean earthquake killed 300 people and turned thousands more homeless, but this movie distills everything for comic effect. Everyone gets robbed, raped, impaled, mutilated, decapitated or burned alive. But that’s not all. Crawling through the blood-drenched debris, here comes the tsunami!

For an old-fashioned crime thriller, you need real pros. Mr. Statham is to acting what Taco Bell is to nutrition.

Sightseers is a morose, unsettling blend of pathology for sport and murder for laughs.

Before the carnage ends, the entire cast has been tortured, mutilated and murdered by so many weapons it’s hard to keep them straight. When the shotguns, box cutters and machetes run out, it’s time to cue the flesh-eating attack dogs.

Who goes to the movies for 104 minutes of punishment? Where is John Wayne, now that we need him?

The Trollhunter writers either have an abundance of imagination or they've been smoking a controlled substance.

Bad movies waste time, but a contrived, empty-headed dinosaur movie called 65 wastes more of it than anything I’ve seen lately.

Call The Master whatever you want, but lobotomized catatonia from what I call the New Hacks can never take the place of well-made narrative films about real people that tell profound stories for a broader and more sophisticated audience. Fads come and go, but as Walter Kerr used to say, "I'll yell tripe whenever tripe is served."

Implausible even for an overly ambitious sci-fi monster flick, it also begs, borrows and steals every effect, idea and image from other people’s horror movies that were much better the first time around.

Contrived, pretentious and not worth seeing even for the perverse pleasure of watching first-rate talents make second-rate fools of themselves.

It’s fifty times more boring than the first one. It is also fifty shades dumber.

On a scale of one to four stars, any film with a bit part for Helen Mirren, no matter how small and insignificant, deserves at least one. But nothing else about Berlin, I Love You rates a single mention.

It’s hard to label a film this empty, but the word “worthless” comes to mind instantly.

What it turns out to be is a preposterous puzzle that fails every test under scrutiny, leaving the spectator with a “Huh?” that is meant to be uttered only while chewing gum.

The director is Joe Dante, a protégé of B-movie producer Roger Corman, who makes cheesy horror spoofs like "Gremlins" and "Piranha," along with a few good ones like "The Howling." This is not one of the good ones.

How many ways can a film go wrong? Too many to list, and Trespass finds them all.

Identity Thief is so bad it’s hard to believe it wasn’t directed by Judd Apatow or the Farrelly Brothers.

There is no hope on the horizon for movies as leaden as The Exploding Girl.

A number of questions await anyone who lasts the full 88 minutes. What just happened? Was the suicidal composer a lunatic devil worshiper who planned for his daughter to follow in his footsteps? Will anyone else ever hear the sonata of the damned? Does anyone care?

It’s nice to see a movie about kids that extols the virtues of intelligence over sex, sports, bad music, ugly clothes and tattoos, but aside from some nice autumnal shots of Ivy League college campuses, there’s nothing in HairBrained to sustain much interest.

The film, poorly edited and weakly unfocused by Turkish writer-director Deniz Gamze Ergüven, is a real mess.

Looking lovely and catatonic, Angelina Jolie, who now calls herself Angelina Jolie Pitt, has come up with an exercise in self-indulgence for herself and husband Brad that is so boring it defies description. By the Sea is not only a dog; it’s a dog that’s got fleas.

It takes just under two hours of tedium before you find out what’s in the bag, and you might be sorry you waited.

A miserable hunk of depressing junk.

For an alleged psychological thriller, The Night Clerk has no thrills, suspense or tension.

The Road Within backfires by emphasizing the same quirks and imbalances it seeks to soften. Reducing it to the genre of idiot comedy doesn’t advance the cause, either.

Although it has a calm and intriguing noir-ish style (up to a point), there is nothing lucid enough to recommend about Manhattan Night, including the film itself.

For meat-headed incoherence, a badly written, poorly directed and confusingly acted muddle of global nonsense, The Gunman is another ill-conceived entry in the latest dopey trend of middle-aged men blowing up stuff.

An hour and 20 minutes into this two-hour-and-11-minute endurance test, a hungry Kaiju attacks the city of Hong Kong and eats the neon signs of every Cantonese restaurant in Victoria Harbor. It’s sort of worth waiting around for.

A ludicrously pretentious train wreck masquerading as a movie.

Richard Brooks made a tougher and much better film about the tragedy of compulsive gambling in his 1985 film "Fever Pitch," and in 1949’s "The Lady Gambles," even Barbara Stanwyck made a more convincing fall from respectability into casino hell than Mark Wahlberg does here.

Staying awake during this ordeal of incompetent, incomprehensible stupidity is not difficult. It’s so noisy that you can hear it in the next town. Staying interested is something else entirely.

Unfortunately, with only the bare outline of a script, no acting is required. The structure of the film is 89 minutes of brutality with a college degree. This is a warning, not a recommendation.

The laughs are few and slow in coming, and you’re not five minutes into the film before you know why. Despite a lively performance by Mary Elizabeth Winstead, Nina is a big bore with a small talent and a one-track mind.

As a memorable work of cinema, it misses every important mark by a mile.

It is really not about anything at all except the mistakes, pitfalls and dumb decisions that plague the career of talented but misguided Australian actor Guy Pearce in his attempts to become an American film star.

It's a stupid farrago of aborted ideas, misguided actors, lame direction, submental writing and follow-the-dots plotting that never comes anywhere within a 10-mile radius of what I used to call coherent filmmaking.

The latest example of the humiliations lovely seniors desperately seeking employment are forced to endure in order to call themselves working actors is a dismal comedy without a shred of wit, imagination or originality called The Fabulous Four.