Rick Groen

There are a few laughs at the start of This Is the End, and a couple more at the end of This is the End. As for the endless middle, it’s middling.

Not just bad, but weirdly, fascinatingly bad.

It’s hard to argue with the title here – Safe Haven, indeed. This is all about safety in the Hollywood workplace. Why make a movie when making a Hallmark-card-with-dialogue is so much less risky?

Never one to shrink from the challenge of parodying the already parodic, along comes Marlon Wayans to do in A Haunted House what he once did in "Scary Movie." And do it much, much worse.

A lightweight flick about a heavy-duty subject, A Dark Truth plays like a TV movie back in the days when TV wasn't worth watching.

Clint has a script. Actually, Clint has too much script, one of those schematic by-the-number jobs that telegraphs its every pitch.

2 Days in New York plays like 2 years in Attica. You don't watch this movie so much as serve it out, a light comedy doled out as a heavy sentence.

It's a dumb-ass comedy done strictly for a seriously large paycheque.

Will be construed by the faithful as an embarrassment of riches and by the rest of us as cruel and unusual punishment.

The film sputters and stalls and winds up behaving like the worst sort of oldster – passing gas and pretending to be deep.

Another Nicholas Sparks novel, another cinematic brush with insulin shock.

Call me Grumpy, but this seems less an adaptation than a random assault.

Film encyclopedias may beg to differ, the Cahiers du Cinéma might correct me, but, as far as your humble correspondent knows, Wanderlust is the first mainstream movie ever to star a Floppy Prosthetic Penis.

W.E. is a heavily made-up face masquerading as a movie and demanding to be admired – demands that might just leave you with an acute pain in the other end.

Valuable life lessons always come at a steep price, and this one is no exception. Sorry, but you'll have to shell out for The Divide and then suffer through its nearly two hours of bloody inanities. Weigh the balance, make your choice.

Add up these three intentions – the down-and-dirty tone, the tender and uplifting message, the starring vehicle – and the math ain't funny. Bottom line: This movie is a whole lot less than the sum of its parts.

In today's cultural climate, any remake of Conan the Barbarian can only be considered (a) redundant or (b) a cruel case of rubbing salt in our cinematic wounds. Either way, it ain't a pretty sight – in fact, it's downright barbaric.

Over on the aliens side, it's hard to make out faces, but there's no doubt about their place of origin: These slimy, growling, bug-eyed and distinctly non-scary things are straight from central casting.

Bad Teacher should be a hoot. But it isn't. Love the theory here, hate the practice.

Apparently, somebody thought it was time for a remake. Clearly, somebody was dead wrong.

Don't mean to boast, but I can suspend my disbelief as willingly as any credulous moviegoer. Yet not even an industrial crane would have helped here.

Wisdom lies in taking a pass on Hall Pass, but bravery demands something else, something far more instructive: Watch it, every vacuous frame, if only to measure the precise aesthetic distance from blessing to curse.

Where the hell is the movie?

As for Keitel, he pops up in a brief cameo as a housing contractor, with a dump-truck full of sand, the one that De Niro is standing right behind. The pair engage in a heated argument, as they once did so memorably those many years ago, and then the truck dumps that load exactly where you know it must. An esteemed actor gets buried but, what-the-fock, the franchise laughs on.

A three-hour oration, rambling and familiar and repetitive, during which director Oliver Stone uses the assassination of John Kennedy as an elaborate pretext for delivering a dull sermon. [20 Dec 1991]

View from the Top never gets off the bottom -- comedies don't come much flatter.

Other than a few gratuitous montage sequences, plus a patently clumsy echo of the shopping scene in "Pretty Woman," Marshall refuses to pull his share of the load, forcing his beleaguered cast to fend for themselves.

The movie degenerates from the merely farcical to the appallingly tasteless...As the end draws mercifully near, one character proclaims: "This ship needs blood to survive." A film needs more than that. [22 May 1980]