Roger Ebert

Its primary flaw is that it's not critical. It is a celebration of an idiotic lifestyle, and I don't think it knows it.

The good idea: Richard Pryor plays a character who is blind, and Gene Wilder plays a character who is deaf, and once they become friends they make a great team. The possibilities for visual comedy with this idea are seemingly endless, but the movie chooses instead to plug the characters into a dumb plot about industrial espionage.

New Year's Evil is an endangered species - a plain, old-fashioned, gory thriller. It is not very good. It is sometimes unpleasantly bloody. The plot is dumb and the twist at the end has been borrowed from hundreds if not thousands of other movies. But as thrillers go these days, "New Year's Evil" is a throwback to an older and simpler tradition, one that flourished way back in the dimly remembered past, before 1978.

This movie doesn't scrape the bottom of the barrel. This movie isn't the bottom of the barrel. This movie isn't below the bottom of the barrel. This movie doesn't deserve to be mentioned in the same sentence with barrels.

Cannonball Run II is one of the laziest insults to the intelligence of moviegoers that I can remember. Sheer arrogance made this picture.

All great farces need a certain insane focus, an intensity that declares how important they are to themselves. This movie is too confident, too relaxed, too clever to be really funny. And yet, when the cowboys sit around their campfire singing a sad lament and then their horses join in, you see where the movie could have gone.

Movies like this demonstrate that when it comes to stupidity and vulgarity, only the best will do for our children.

Tuff Turf is the worst teenage exploitation movie since "Where the Boys Are".

It's got cheesy special effects, a muddy visual look, and characters who say obvious things in obvious ways.

An agonizingly creaky movie that laboriously plods through a plot so contrived that the only thing real about it is its length.

Tora! Tora! Tora! is one of the deadest, dullest blockbusters ever made.

The Awakening looks great but never develops a plot with enough clarity to engage us, and the solution to the mystery is I am afraid disappointingly standard.

Excruciatingly boring.

They say an elephant never forgets, which means that I have an enormous advantage over Tai, who plays Vera, because I plan to forget this movie as soon as convenient.

Because the opening scenes of Sleeping with the Enemy are so powerful, the rest of the movie is all the more disappointing. The film begins as an unyielding look at a battered wife, and ends as another one of those thrillers where the villain toys with his victim and the audience.

Last year, I reviewed a nine-hour documentary about the lives of Mongolian yak herdsmen, and I would rather see it again than sit through The Frighteners.

Regaled for 50 years by the stupendous idiocy of the American version of Godzilla, audiences can now see the original Japanese version, which is equally idiotic.

A horrible experience of unbearable length, briefly punctuated by three or four amusing moments.

If Flashdance had spent just a little more effort getting to know the heroine of its story, and a little less time trying to rip off "Saturday Night Fever," it might have been a much better film.

Biloxi Blues may indeed be based on memories from Neil Simon’s experiences in basic training during World War II, but it seems equally based on every movie ever made about basic training, and it suffers by comparison with most of them.

Maybe there's too much talent. Every character shines with such dazzling intensity and such inexhaustible comic invention that the movie becomes tiresome, like too many clowns.

This is an ungainly movie, ill-fitting, with its elbows sticking out where the knees should be. To quote another ancient proverb, "A camel is a horse designed by a committee." Life or Something Like It is the movie designed by the camel.

A terrible movie, sappy and dead in the water.

To the degree that you will want to see this movie, it will be because of the surprise, and so I will say no more, except to say that the "solution," when it comes, solves little - unless there is really little to solve, which is also a possibility.

Emma writes everything down and then offers helpful suggestions, although she fails to supply the most useful observation of all, which would be to observe that the entire novel is complete crap.

I'm Gonna Git You Sucka is a comedy that feeds off the blaxploitation movies, and although, like all good satires, it is cheerfully willing to be offensive, it is almost completely incapable of being funny.

The Flower of My Secret is likely to be disappointing to Almodovar's admirers, and inexplicable to anyone else.

The movie has good special effects and suitably gruesome characters, but it's bloodless.

So strong, so shocking and yet so audacious that people walk out shaking their heads; they don't know quite what to make of it.

[Robin Williams] has been ill-served by a screenplay that isn't curious about what his life would really be like.

The movie is pretty bad, all right. But it has a certain charm. It's so completely wrong-headed from beginning to end that it develops a doomed fascination.

A lot of its jokes miss, the pace is slow, there are too many characters to keep track of and there's an unpleasant streak of nasty humor directed at characters who are fat, ugly, old or otherwise out of step with Southern California physical ideals.

A lame and labored comedy.

This film is about violence. All violence. Wall-to-wall violence. Against many of those walls, heads are pounded again and again into a pulpy mass. If I estimated the film has 10 minutes of dialogue, that would be generous.

I was torn between walking out immediately and staying to witness a spectacle more dismaying than anything on the screen: the way small children were digging gratuitous bloodshed.

Why do they persist in making these retreads? Because RoboCop is a brand name, I guess, and this is this year's new model. It's an old tradition in Detroit to take an old design and slap on some fresh chrome.

This is a surprisingly cheesy disaster epic.

This is a genuinely interesting idea, filled with dramatic possibilities, but the movie approaches it on the level of a dim-witted sit-com. Thoughtful scenes are followed by slapstick, emotional moments lead right into farce, and the movie doesn't have an ounce of true moral courage; it sidesteps every single big issue that it raises.

A closing scene, rousingly patriotic, takes place back on the football field. I think I'm beginning to understand why the Chinese were not reckoned to be a prime market for this film.

Footloose is a seriously confused movie that tries to do three things, and does all of them badly. It wants to tell the story of a conflict in a town, it wants to introduce some flashy teenage characters, and part of the time it wants to be a music video. It's possible that no movie with this many agendas can be good; maybe somebody should have decided, early on, exactly what the movie was supposed to be about.

The Tenant's not merely bad -- it's an embarrassment. If it didn't have the Polanski trademark, we'd probably have to drive miles and miles and sit in a damp basement to see it.

There is a funny movie lurking at the edges of Splash, and sometimes it even sneaks on screen and makes us smile. It's too bad the relentlessly conventional minds that made this movie couldn't have made the leap from sitcom to comedy.

“The Ghost and the Darkness is an African adventure that makes the Tarzan movies look subtle and realistic. It lacks even the usual charm of being so bad it's funny. It's just bad. Not funny. No, wait . . . there is one funny moment.

The poster art for A Thousand Words shows Eddie Murphy with duct tape over his mouth, which as a promotional idea ranks right up there with Fred Astaire in leg irons.

The movie deserves more stars for its bottom-line craft, but all the craft in the world can't redeem its story.

What Raising Arizona needs more than anything else is more velocity. Here's a movie that stretches out every moment for more than it's worth, until even the moments of inspiration seem forced.

I laughed, yes, I did, several times during Deuce Bigalow: Male Gigolo. That's proof, if any is required, that I still possess streaks of immaturity and vulgarity.

The movie doesn't know how odd it seems to cut from the bloodshed in the ring to the dialogue of the supporting players, who still think they're in a comedy.

The film is a gloomy special-effects extravaganza filled with grotesque images, generating fear and despair.

At every moment in the movie, I was aware that Peter Sellers was Clouseau, and Steve Martin was not. I hadn't realized how thoroughly Sellers and Edwards had colonized my memory.

Joyful Noise is an ungainly assembly of parts that don't fit, and the strange thing is that it makes no particular effort to please its target audience, which would seem to be lovers of gospel choirs.

An uninspired assembly of characters and story lines that interrupt one another.

One of the worst movies of this or any year.

Will I seem hopelessly square if I find Kick-Ass morally reprehensible and will I appear to have missed the point? Let’s say you’re a big fan of the original comic book, and you think the move does it justice. You know what? You inhabit a world I am so very not interested in.

Jarmusch is making some kind of a point. I think the point is that if you strip a story down to its bare essentials, you will have very little left. I wonder how he pitched this idea to his investors.

There is no need for this movie. That's true of most sequels, but it's especially true of Smokey and the Bandit II, which is basically just the original movie done again, not as well.

There is not a single scene in this movie that I found amusing, original or interesting. What we really have here is a documentary of the actors wasting their lives.

The filmmakers rely so heavily on cliches, on stock characters in old situations, that it's as if they never really had any confidence in their performers.

Hocus Pocus is a film desperately in need of self-discipline. It's one of those projects where you imagine everyone laughing and applauding each other after every scene, because they're so convinced they're wild and crazy guys. But watching the movie is like attending a party you weren't invited to, and where you don't know anybody, and they're all in on a joke but won't explain it to you.

If there's anything I hate more than a stupid action comedy, it's an incompetent stupid action comedy. It's not so bad it's good. It's so bad it's nothing else but bad.

There is a kind of studied stupidity that sometimes passes as humor, and Jared Hess' Napoleon Dynamite pushes it as far as it can go.

An idea is not enough for a movie. Characters have to be developed, comic situations have to be set up before they can pay off and the story should have a conclusion instead of a dead stop. Real Life fails in all of those areas -- fails so miserably that it lets its audiences down.

I see so little there: It is all remembered rote work, used to conceal old tricks, facile name-calling, the loss of hope, and emptiness.

Like a cocky teenager who's had a couple of drinks before the party, they don't have a plan for who they want to offend, only an intention to be as offensive as possible.

It’s badly written and inertly directed, with actors who don’t have a clue what drives their characters. This is one of those rare films that contains no chemistry at all. None. The actors scarcely seem to be in the same scenes together.

This film is an affront. It is incoherent, maddening, deliberately opaque and heedless of the ways in which people watch movies.

A movie that filled me with an urgent desire to see Sarah Silverman in a different movie. I liked everything about it except the writing, the direction, the editing and the lack of a parent or adult guardian.

The Brood is an el sleazo exploitation film, camouflaged by the presence of several well-known stars but guaranteed to nauseate you all the same.

Jaws the Revenge is not simply a bad movie, but also a stupid and incompetent one - a ripoff.

It's a nine days' wonder, a geek show designed to win a weekend or two at the box office and then fade from memory.

So unsuccessful in so many different ways that maybe the whole project was doomed.

Dead Man is a strange, slow, unrewarding movie that provides us with more time to think about its meaning than with meaning.

There is a bright spot. He (Poirier) used up all his doggy-do-do ideas in the first picture "See Spot Run."

Harold is death, Maude life, and they manage to make the two seem so similar that life's hardly worth the extra bother. The visual style makes everyone look fresh from the Wax Museum, and all the movie lacks is a lot of day-old gardenias and lilies and roses in the lobby, filling the place with a cloying sweet smell.

I suggest a plan: Why not try flushing this movie down the toilet to see if it also grows into something big and fearsome?

If you walk out after 10 or 15 minutes, you will have seen the best parts of the film.

Too bad the movie relies on special effects to carry the show, and doesn't bring much else to the party.

There have been articles lately asking why the United States is so hated in some parts of the world. As this week's Exhibit A from Hollywood, I offer Zoolander.

Vulgarity is a very tricky thing to handle in a comedy; tone is everything, and the makers of "Fast Times at Ridgemont High" have an absolute gift for taking potentially funny situations and turning them into general embarrassment. They're tone-deaf.

It's nice, but it's not much of a comedy.

The events involving the big speaking competition are so labored that occasionally the twins seem to be looking back over their shoulders for the plot to catch up.

Here is a film so dreary and conventional that it took an act of the will to keep me in the theater.

The screenplay reads like a collaboration between Jekyll and Hyde.

In the earlier films, we really identified with the small cadre of surviving humans. They were seen as positive characters, and we cared about them. This time, the humans are mostly unpleasant, violent, insane or so noble that we can predict with utter certainty that they will survive.

A movie that contains one funny scene and 91 minutes of running time to kill.

Last Man Standing is such a desperately cheerless film, so dry and laconic and wrung out, that you wonder if the filmmakers ever thought that in any way it could be ... fun.

None of the action is coherent; shots and shells are fired, people and killed or not, explosions rend the air, SUVs spin aloft (the same one more than once, I think), and there is no sense of strategy.

Let's face it. Nobody is going to Bolero for the plot anyway. They're going for the Good Parts.

Inexplicably, there are people who still haven't had enough of these movies. The first was a nifty novelty. Now the appeal has worn threadbare.

Stupefying dimwitted.

The characters are bitter and hateful, the images are nauseating, and the ending is bleak enough that when the screen fades to black it's a relief.. Videodrome, whatever its qualities, has got to be one of the least entertaining films of all time.

This new Footloose is a film without wit, humor or purpose.

It's all shot in muddy earth tones, on grainy Super 8 film, Hi Fi 8 video and 16-mm. If you seek the origin of the grunge look, seek no further: Young, in his floppy plaid shirts and baggy shorts, looks like a shipwrecked lumberjack. His fellow band members, Billy Talbot, Poncho Sampedro and Ralph Molina, exude vibes that would strike terror into the heart of an unarmed convenience store clerk.

The movie should be praying to St. Jude, patron saint of lost causes. Maybe he could perform a miracle and turn this into a cable offering, so no one has to buy a ticket to see it.

Robert Rodriguez has somehow misplaced his energy, his flair and his humor in this third film, which is a flat and dreary disappointment.

The standards for comic book superhero movies have been established by "Superman," "The Dark Knight," "Spider-Man 2" and "Iron Man." In that company "Thor" is pitiful. Consider even the comparable villains (Lex Luthor, the Joker, Doc Ock and Obadiah Stane). Memories of all four come instantly to mind. Will you be thinking of Loki six minutes after this movie is over?

This movie is a study in wretched excess. It is so smoky, so dusty, so foggy, so unfocused and so brownish yellow that you want to try Windex on the screen. A director is in deep trouble when we do not even enjoy the primary act of looking at his picture.

Even with Cecil B. Demented, which fails on just about every level, you've got to hand it to him (Waters): The idea for the film is kind of inspired.