Rex Reed

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

Credulity is strained on every level in scene after repetitive scene. The shallow screenplay robs the actors of success whenever they strive for any kind of badly needed comic relief, which is probably why the acting seems so bland and unconvincing.

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

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

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.

It’s lifeless as a stump, and destined for box-office doom.

This contrived, pointless, blindingly boring vehicle is a pathetic, desperate attempt to keep Halle Berry and Mark Wahlberg’s careers alive.

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.

What one does not expect is a load of total trash full of gimmicks instead of ideas, stolen scenes from other movies instead of originality, amateurish posturing instead of professional performances, clueless meandering instead of organized screenplays, and pointless confusion instead of clear-eyed direction.

Not only is it the worst movie I have seen this year, this dog is one of the worst movies ever made.

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.

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.

Thanks to sluggish direction by Rachel Lambert and a screenplay by three entire people who fail to display the focused writing talent of even one, this is a slogfest from beginning to end.

I guess it claims to demonstrate how repetitive and routine the lives of professional assassins can be (yawn), but in my opinion, movies about them have an obligation to be juicier and more consistently fascinating than American Star.

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

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.

It’s as scary as a pumpkin pie left in the oven too long. Instead of horror, it’s pretty funny.

Written and directed by Garth Davis from a 2018 novel I never want to read by Iain Reid, Foe is not just a bad dream. It’s a colossal nightmare.

Like all Wes Anderson movies, it is enigmatic, artificial, infuriatingly self-indulgent and irrevocably pointless.

The Boogeyman, a pointless, misguided and totally incomprehensible waste of time, is yet another horror film that exists for the sole purpose of exploiting the endless desk-drawer doodlings of writer Stephen King.

The dialogue is witless and dull. The direction by Tony Dean Smith gives the actors nothing meaty to do beyond mouthing words designed to move the narrative forward.

It’s annoyingly lumpy, shockingly pedestrian, and instantly forgettable.

It’s not much to examine at length, much less remember, but if you’re in the mood for a Hallmark card to revive your faith in gooey rom-coms, Love Again is not the one.

The worst film since Babylon, this surfeit of loud, obnoxious, violent junk audaciously claims to call itself a vampire farce, but there isn’t a genuine shred of originality anywhere in sight and it’s as witty as an ambulance with a flat tire.

A lumbering bore called Inside is a crucially wooden and mechanical vehicle for the peculiar talents of Willem Dafoe that amounts to nothing more than nearly two hours of pretentious bilge.

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

Even for a third-rate farce with two stars who appear together onscreen for no more than a total of five minutes, it’s derivative and preposterous—worse than a rejected TV pilot, and about as romantic and funny as a root canal.

This movie goes downhill so fast it turns inadvertently from horror to comedy, but when they see the box-office grosses, I don’t think director Brad Anderson or screenwriter Will Honley will be the ones who laugh.

It’s a preposterous debacle that might work better as a Halloween skit on Saturday Night Live, but it takes itself seriously, which makes it seem even sillier. I found the result too sick and disgusting to describe, but not interesting enough to care.

Crimes of the Future is a load of crap. I would like to find a more civil way to describe even a sick and depraved barf bag of a movie like this one, but it defeats every reasonable attempt to try.

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.

The movie is sewer drainage, but it does give Melissa Leo a rare chance to quote lines by the Bard she would never otherwise be asked to deliver.

Watching The Lost City is the cinematic equivalent of slogging your way through monkey poop.

Depraved, delirious, and downright stupid, Last Night in Soho is two hours of amateurish drivel by B-movie director Edgar Wright (Baby Driver, Shaun of the Dead) that pretends to be half-retro Swingin’ Sixties comedy and half-horror thriller.

No Time to Die may not be the worst James Bond movie ever made, but it’s in heavy competition as the dullest one since Octopussy.

It slogs on, piling on scenes and memories of every sci-fi epic and film noir from Blade Runner to Chinatown, but who cares?

The target audience — people who waste their lives playing video games — might be amused by a movie about devices designed for the sole purpose of destroying everything in sight, but the serious audience the film industry wants to lure back to brick-and-mortar cinemas won’t find much substance here.

Old is asinine.

This moronic parable inspired by Donald Trump’s treatment and attitude towards illegal immigrants is a disgrace, but so is almost everything else on the screen these days.

The entire enterprise is so muffled and dull you can’t believe what you’re watching.

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

Vulgar, contrived and incomprehensible.

It was written with empty-headed desperation and directed with minimal imagination by Guy Ritchie, one of the most incompetent filmmakers of the century.

In a bargain-basement bomb called Inherit the Viper, three siblings survive one gruesome moment after another without any of them adding up to anything significant or life-affirming. Despite a running time of only 85 minutes, it feels like days of mean-spirited self-indulgence.

The only reason I wanted to see it at all is Kristen Stewart, but she is so wasted that she should have stayed in bed.

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?

Despite its desperate efforts to justify the homicides, there’s nothing remotely innovative or even goofily satirical about it. The lousy actors, incompetent writer and clueless director remain nameless. That’s my good-deed Christmas gift to all involved, and better luck next year.

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.

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.

Gary Oldman, in the worst performance of his career, plays a one-eyed slum lord and master villain named Ezekiel Mannings.

There’s nothing to make your hair stand on end in The Shed because it’s not convincing. Despite walk-ons by a pair of experienced professionals, Timothy Bottoms and Frank Whaley, the actors are unknown for a reason, and despite familiar weapons of self-defense such as fires, shotguns, hatchets and chainsaws, the plot is jokey and the action defies all logic.

Honey Boy is a dolorous example of an alarming trend in modern movies — the miraculous ability of an infinitesimal talent to raise money for an obnoxious, self-indulgent film about his own life designed to appeal to absolutely nobody except the arrogant subject himself. In this instance, the jerky centerpiece in love with himself to the detriment of everyone in the audience is Shia LaBeouf.

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.

Even a guest appearance by Jamie Lee Curtis couldn’t bring this celluloid zombie to life.

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.

Directed by Ang Lee (Brokeback Mountain) with an impressive cast that includes Will Smith and Clive Owen, the sci-fi action thriller Gemini Man should be better than the ossified bore it is. Instead, it substitutes the gimmicks technology-freaks might call “innovative” for anything that remotely resembles any element of plot, character development, or entertainment value.

Ho-hum. Running with the Devil is yet another generic drug trade thriller that defies coherence, embraces clichés, and wastes the time and talent of Nicolas Cage.

It’s good to have Demi Moore making a comeback after a prolonged absence from the screen, but not in a load of unmitigated crap called Corporate Animals. It’s never smart to make up lists of the worst movies ever made, because every time you do, something comes along that is even worse than what you saw before. But I think it’s safe to say that in the final top ten tally, this abysmal dreck will come in close to the top.

It’s a disaster.

Slogging along from one slaughter to the next, a benign narrative unfolds about a family of savages hell-bent on their own self-destruction, with no redeeming qualities.

Bad movies are indigenous to summer, but rarely have I ever seen one as bad as Cold Blood.

The result is a limp and minor effort both in front of the camera and behind it.

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.

A Swedish-German co-production in English, Euphoria should be called Dyspepsia. It lulls you into a disagreeable stupor clearly labeled “who cares?”

It’s just tired, desperate and preposterous.

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.

Being Frank festers uncomfortably from start to finish.

Avoid it at all costs if you value your sanity.

Dementedly written, and directed as though it was under the influence of something stronger than cough syrup.

A miserable hunk of depressing junk.

In a violent, stupid and nauseating creature feature called Ma, she (Spencer) plays a cruel, bloodthirsty monster who tortures and kills off half of a suburban town for fun. It’s a horrible disgrace, but don’t say I didn’t warn you.

Nothing makes much sense here, including the title. There are no poison roses, although The Poison Rose would have been aided immensely by even one poison daffodil.

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

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.

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.

Clarkson has given many memorable, invigorating performances in the past, but in Out of Blue she goes through the motions of a hard-boiled cop with charmless brunette hair, off-the-rack clothes and convincing detachment like someone who is constantly being rudely interrupted from a long nap.

Ineffectual, irrelevant and amateurishly conceived from start to finish, this movie is so bad it could kill off Nancy Drew forever.

Simmons silently mopes and boozes with conviction, but everyone with dialogue comes off like planks of plywood, thanks to the flat, one-dimensional screenplay by the director and her writing partner, Tony Cummings. You wait for some revelation that might make you feel you haven’t spent these 81 minutes in vain. It’s no use. By the ambiguous ending, like Steve’s answerphone, you’re not here. You left a long time ago.

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.

This anemic little so-called thriller is the next best thing to a prescription for 30 mg Dalmane.

Another anemic and pointless stringing together of stories that are not worth telling, Untogether follows the truncated lives of a group of lost souls in Los Angeles with an overdose of paralyzing cinematic anesthesia.

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.

The new year is not even a month old, but a hunk of junk called Serenity already qualifies as the worst film of 2019. Both moronically written and directed with shocking, amateurish ineptitude by Stephen Knight.

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."

The result is 96 minutes of excessive eccentricity and unfocused gibberish that seems like 96 days at hard labor with no hope for commercial success. Color it gone.

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.

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.

The first thriller of the new season is a bomb called State Like Sleep, and it’s about as thrilling as a power failure in Antarctica. One of the January cast-offs that failed to make the cut in the 2018 year-end releases, it’s a good example of why January is always dreary, in more ways than one.

Jennifer Lopez can’t act, the meatheads responsible for the stupidest screenplay of the year can’t write, and I don’t know anybody with one hour and 43 minutes to waste in a busy holiday season, so a cinematic disaster called Second Act has nothing to recommend it, even as a temporary refuge from traffic gridlock.

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.

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

Aside from bad filmmaking, I don’t know what any of this means. I do know Harris Dickinson is the chief attraction as well as the only reason to suffer through a revolting score of punk rock songs and an interminable series of fuzzy, flashing camera angles advertising neon signs for sex clubs and gay bath houses.

The nicest thing that can be said about this demure little Canadian trifle is that it’s a film that finally gives the gifted, self-assured and sadly underrated Alessandro Nivola a leading role.

Stephen Dorff, a good actor who seems to have temporarily run out of luck, is back in a loopy and desultory “psychological thriller” without a single thrill and the psychology of a paperback called "Psychology for Morons."

Half modern western, half thriller, an unspeakable waste of time called Bad Times at the El Royale is depraved, self-indulgent trash that is a narrative mess and, at nearly two-and-a-half hours in length, seems to go on forever.

Nothing about I Still See You attempts to succeed on any level of logic, including the script, peppered with pseudo comic book mumbo-jumbo.

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.

An unwatchable sci-fi creep-out by eccentric French director Claire Denis, it stars Robert Pattinson, who devotes himself these days to art films in an effort to live down his reputation as a sexy television vampire.