Roger Ebert

Jiminy Glick needs definition if he's to work as a character. We have to sense a consistent comic personality, and we don't; Short changes gears and redefines the character whenever he needs a laugh.

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.

It's a bludgeon movie with little respect for the audience's intelligence, and simply pounds us over the head with violence whenever there threatens to be a lull. Anyone can make a movie like this.

The Crew is all contrivance and we don't believe a minute of it.

The movie is an invaluable experiment in the theory of cinema, because it demonstrates that a shot-by-shot remake is pointless; genius apparently resides between or beneath the shots, or in chemistry that cannot be timed or counted.

The photography, the dialogue, the acting, the script, the special effects and especially the props (such as a spaceship that looks like it would get a D in shop class) are all deliberately bad in the way that such films were bad when they were REALLY being made.

Walks like a thriller and talks like a thriller, but it squawks like a turkey.

Blindness is one of the most unpleasant, not to say unendurable, films I've ever seen.

CB4 is a profoundly confused movie, combining rap music with a satire of the world of rap. Working both sides of the street, it gets caught in traffic. The film stars Chris Rock and Phil Hartman from Saturday Night Live, but it doesn't have SNL's smarts -- and worse, it doesn't have any sense of what's funny. On a structural level, it's incompetently written and directed.

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.

The movie labors under an enormous handicap: A much better, more intelligent and more exciting film has already been made about this same subject.

A deplorable film with this message: If you're a 14-year-old girl who has been brutally raped and murdered by a serial killer, you have a lot to look forward to.

Did you (Garry Marshall) deliberately assemble this movie from off-the-shelf parts or did it just happen that way? The film is like a homage to the cliches and obligatory stereotypes of its genre.

Bored out of my mind during this spectacle, I found my attention wandering to the subject of physics.

A film overgrown with so many directorial flourishes that the heroes need machetes to hack their way to within view of the audience.

Striking Distance is an exhausted reassembly of bits and pieces from all the other movies that are more or less exactly like this one.

Boring, repetitive and maddening about a subject you'd think would be fairly interesting: snowboarding down a mountain.

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.

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

The kind of movie that would be so bad it's good, except it's not bad enough to be good enough.

There's not a moment in this story arc that is not predictable.

Lumbering from one expensive set piece to the next without taking the time to tell us a story that might make us care.

Nobody needed to make it, nobody needs to see it, Jackson and Levy are too successful to waste time with it. It plays less like a film than like a deal.

Too bad that robots, unlike humans, cannot be discovered in one movie and go on to star in another. I'd like to see No. 5 in a film more suitable to its talents.

I couldn't believe a moment of it, and never identified with little David.

Tells the story of a violent sociopath. Since it's about golf, that makes it a comedy.

Color of Night approaches badness from so many directions that one really must admire its imagination. Combining all the worst ingredients of an Agatha Christie whodunit and a sex-crazed slasher film, it ends in a frenzy of recycled thriller elements, with a chase scene, a showdown in an echoing warehouse, and not one but two cliches from Ebert's Little Movie Glossary: The Talking Killer and the Climbing Villain.

A movie like this is harmless, I suppose, except for the celluloid that was killed in the process of its manufacture, but as an entertainment, it will send the kids tiptoeing through the multiplex to sneak into "Spider-Man 2."

The kind of movie that somehow succeeds in moving very, very slowly even while proceeding at a breakneck pace. It cuts quickly back and forth between nothing and nothing.

Thin and unsatisfying.

This is a surprisingly cheesy disaster epic.

If there's anything worse than a movie hammered together out of pieces of bad screenplays, it's a movie made from the scraps of good ones.

Take Me Home Tonight must have been made with people who had a great deal of nostalgia for the 1980s, a relatively unsung decade. More power to them. The movie unfortunately gives them no dialogue expanding them into recognizable human beings.

Pure Luck is a bad movie, all right - with leaden timing, a disorganized screenplay, and stretches where nothing much of interest seems to be happening.

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.

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.

The problem is that the material's stretched too thin. There's not enough here to fill a feature-length film.

All of the elements are here for a movie I would probably enjoy very much, but somehow they never come together.

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.

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

Feels uncomfortably stage-managed, and raises fundamental questions that it simply ignores.

Tucker's scenes finally wear us down. How can a movie allow him to be so obnoxious and make no acknowledgment that his behavior is aberrant?

Jogs doggedly on the treadmill of comedy, working up a sweat but not getting much of anywhere.

Pretty much a mess of a movie; the acting is overwrought, the plot is too tangled to play like anything BUT a plot, and although I know you can create terrific special effects at home in the basement on your computer, the CGI work in this movie looks like it was done with a dial-up connection.

The movie offers brainless high-tech action without interesting dialogue, characters, motivation or texture.

There must still be a kind of moony young adolescent girl for which this film would be enormously appealing, if television has not already exterminated the domestic example of that species.

A mess. It lacks the sharp narrative line and crisp comic-book clarity of the earlier films, and descends too easily into shapeless fight scenes that are chopped into so many cuts that they lack all form or rhythm.

The Blue Lagoon is the dumbest movie of the year. It could conceivably have been made interesting, if any serious attempt had been made to explore what might really happen if two 7-year-old kids were shipwrecked on an island. But this isn't a realistic movie. It's a wildly idealized romance, in which the kids live in a hut that looks like a Club Med honeymoon cottage, while restless natives commit human sacrifice on the other side of the island.

The average issue of Mad magazine contains significantly smarter movie satire, because Mad goes for the vulnerable elements and Scary Movie 3 just wants to quote and kid.

This is a repetitive, pointless exercise in genre filmmaking--the kind of movie where you distract yourself by making a list of the sources.

Gator is yet another Good Ol' Movie, and not, I fear, the summer's last. If only it had a Good Ol' Plot worth a damn, it might have even been a halfway tolerable ol' movie.

Prostitutes have inspired some of the most unforgettable characters in fiction. As for all of its effect on Angelina, she might as well have saved herself the wear and tear and stayed in the laundry.

The director is James Foley, who is obviously not right for this material.

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.

When Chase bothers to actually play a character, he can be very effective (his "Funny Farm" was one of the best comedies of 1988). But sometimes he seems to be covering himself, playing detached so that nobody can blame him if the comedy doesn't work. In this film he seems to have no emotions at all; consider the scene where he discovers that the woman he made love with has died during the night.

It's the most lugubrious and soppy love story in many a moon, a step backward for director Sam Raimi after "A Simple Plan."

Its centerpiece is 40 minutes of redundant special effects, surrounded by a love story of stunning banality.

The Fourth Kind is a pseudo-documentary like "Paranormal Activity" and "The Blair Witch Project." But unlike those two, which just forge ahead with their home video cameras, this one encumbers its flow with ceaseless reminders that it is a dramatization of real events.

Unless a story has been introduced to make the shooting part of the plot, it can get pretty dreary. 100 Rifles is pretty dreary.

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.

It is a thriller trapped inside a pop comedy set in Japan, and gives Reno a chirpy young co-star who bounces around him like a puppy on visiting day at the drunk tank.

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.

Oh, did I dislike this film. It made me squirm. Its premise is lame, its plot relentlessly predictable, its characters with personalities that would distinguish picture books.

So anyway, what happens in Life As We Know It? You'll never guess in a million years. Never.

Strange, that movies about Satan always require Catholics. You never see your Presbyterians or Episcopalians hurling down demons.

Basically just a 98-minute trailer for the autumn launch of a new series on the Cartoon Network.

Certainly better than "Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen." How so? Admittedly, it doesn't have as much cleavage. But the high-tech hardware is more fun to look at than the transforming robots, the plot is as preposterous, and although the noise is just as loud, it's more the deep bass rumbles of explosions than the ear-piercing bang of steel robots pounding on each other.

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.

A big, ugly, ungainly device to give teenagers the impression they are seeing a movie.

Plays like a genial amateur theatrical, the kind of production where you'd like it more if you were friends with the cast. The plot is creaky, the jokes are laborious, and total implausibility is not considered the slightest problem.

A tedious exercise in style, intended as a meditation on guns and violence in America but more of a meditation on itself, the kind of meditation that invites the mind to stray.

Betty Blue is a movie about Beatrice Dalle's boobs and behind, and everything else is just what happens in between the scenes where she displays them.

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.

Because McQueen can be so effective in action pictures, The Hunter is all the more frustrating: Didn't anybody point out that the script was a mess that made no sense? Didn't anybody have the guts to? Maybe they thought superstar McQueen would save the day. Pictures like this could finish him off.

Porky's is another raunchy teenage sex-and-food-fight movie.

Rubber-stamped from the same mold that has produced an inexhaustible supply of fictional Southern belles who drink too much, talk too much, think about themselves too much, try too hard to be the most unforgettable character you've ever met, and are, in general, insufferable.

Although I did not understand the story, I would have appreciated a great deal less explanation. All through the movie, characters are pausing in order to offer arcane back-stories and historical perspectives and metaphysical insights and occult orientations. They talk and talk and somehow their words do not light up any synapses in my brain.

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.

Dungeons & Dragons looks like they threw away the game and photographed the box it came in.

A painfully stolid movie that lumbers past emotional issues like a wrestler in a cafeteria line, putting a little of everything on his plate.

Bad films are easy to make, but a film as unpleasant as Baby Geniuses' achieves a kind of grandeur.

Rarely has a film centered on a character so superficial and unconvincing, played with such unrelenting sameness. I didn't hate it so much as feel sorry for it.

The Lonely Guy is the kind of movie that inspires you to distract yourself by counting the commercial products visible on the screen, and speculating about whether their manufacturers paid fees to have them worked into the movie.

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

The movie is set up as a valentine to Vardalos. She should try sending herself flowers.

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.

Perhaps movies are like history, and repeat themselves, first as tragedy, then as farce.

Uncle Buck attempts to tell a heart-warming story through a series of uncomfortable and unpleasant scenes; it's a tug-of-war between its ambitions and its methods.

An innocuous family feature that's too little/too late in the fast-moving world of feature animation.

What we basically have here is a license for the filmmakers to do whatever they want to do with the special effects, while the plot, like Wile E. Coyote, keeps running into the wall.

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

There is nothing funny about the situation in Teaching Mrs. Tingle.

The Legend of Zorro commits a lot of movie sins, but one is mortal: It turns the magnificent Elena into a nag.

It involves teenagers who have never existed, doing things no teenager has ever done, for reasons no teenager would understand. Of course, it's aimed at the teenage market.

Maybe I've lost touch with silly, brainless entertainments like this. Let's hope so: One of the purposes of growing up and getting an education is to learn why movies like Spaced Invaders are a waste of time. And yet, a small, far-away voice inside of me says there once was a time when I would have liked this movie, when I was young and open to wonderments.

A package like this looks OK on paper, but goes nowhere. It turns all of the characters into chess pieces, whose relationships depend on the plot, not on human chemistry. Since the plot is absurdly illogical, you’re not left with much.

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

You want gore, you get gore. Hatchet II plays less like a slasher movie than like the highlight reel from a slasher movie.

Obviously made with all of the best will in the world, its heart in the right place, this is a sluggish and dutiful film that plays more like a eulogy than an adventure.

I cringed.

This material is wearing out its welcome. I have mastered all of the lessons The Karate Kid movies have to teach and all of the surprises they have to spring. I am also intimately familiar with the plot formula, so that nothing in this third film comes as the faintest surprise. Perhaps it is time, as Mr. Miyagi might say, to study something else.

I went to Crossroads expecting a glitzy bimbofest and got the bimbos but not the fest. Britney Spears' feature debut is curiously low-key and even sad.

As for Shaquille O'Neal, given his own three wishes the next time, he should go for a script, a director and an interesting character.

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

The Jackal, on the other hand, impressed me with its absurdity. There was scarcely a second I could take seriously.

I seem to be developing a rule about talking animals: They can talk if they're cartoons or Muppets, but not if they're real.

A classic species of bore: a self-referential movie with no self to refer to. One character after another, one scene after another, one cute line of dialogue after another, refers to another movie, a similar character, a contrasting image, or whatever.

The plot was an arbitrary concoction.

"Clerks" spoke with the sure, clear voice of an original filmmaker. In Mallrats the voice is muffled, and we sense instead advice from the tired, the establishment, the timid and other familiar Hollywood executive types.

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

The movie makes no attempt to really imagine what it would be like to inhabit another body; it just springs the gimmick on us and starts unreeling its sitcom plot.

Everybody knew to wait for the outtakes during the closing credits, because you'd see him miss a fire escape or land wrong in the truck going under the bridge. Now the outtakes involve his use of the English language.

Joe Dirt is so obviously a construction that it is impossible to find anything human about him; he is a concept, not a person.

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.

Sweet and high-spirited and with three dancers who are so good they deserve a better screenplay. This is really two movies: A stiff and awkward story, interrupted by dance sequences of astonishing grace and power.

The movie makes two mistakes: (1) It isn't very funny, and (2) it makes the crucial error of taking its story seriously and angling for a happy ending.

A march through the swamp of recycled ugly duckling stories, with occasional pauses in the marsh of sitcom cliches and the bog of Idiot Plots.

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

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.

There must be humor here somewhere.

A first draft for a movie that could have been extraordinary.

It's unnecessary in the sense that there is no good reason to go and actually see it.

A long slog through perplexities and complexities.

It is not faulty logic that derails The Hills have Eyes, however, but faulty drama. The movie is a one-trick pony.

Newsies is like warmed-over Horatio Alger, complete with such indispensable cliches as the newsboy on crutches, the little kid, and of course the hero's best pal, who has a pretty sister.

Bootmen is the story of a young dancer and his friends who revisit the cliches of countless other dance movies in order to bring forth a dance performance of clanging unloveliness.

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

It knows the words but not the music; while the Farrelly brothers got away with murder, The Sweetest Thing commits suicide.

Love and Bullets is a hopelessly confused hodgepodge of chases, killings, enigmatic meetings and separations, and insufferably overacted scenes by Steiger alternating with alarmingly underacted scenes by Bronson.

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.

Another one of those road comedies where Southern roots are supposed to make boring people seem colorful. If these characters were from Minneapolis or Denver, no way anyone would make a film about them.

There's no chemistry between Deeds and Babe, but then how could there be, considering that their characters have no existence, except as the puppets in scenes of plot manipulation.

The movie stars Jim Carrey, who is in his pleasant mode. It would have helped if he were in his manic mode, although it's hard to get a rise out of a penguin.

The movie is a paid holiday for its director, Harold Becker. I say this because I know what Becker is capable of.

Eyes of Laura Mars tries to say Serious Things about fashion photography, corruption in advertising, and the violence in our society. It does not succeed, but it tries. We would not, however, hold its Serious Things against it, if the movie also succeeded as a thriller. It doesn't, unless your idea of being thrilled is having people leap out of the shadows and then turn out to be friends.

The problem with The Amityville Horror is that, in a very real sense, there's nothing there. We watch two hours of people being frightened and dismayed, and we ask ourselves... what for? If it's real, let it have happened to them. Too bad, Lutzes! If it's made up, make it more entertaining. If they can't make up their minds... why should we?

Plays like a collision between leftover bits and pieces of Marvel superhero stories. It can't decide what tone to strike.

Would it have been that much more difficult to make a movie in which Tom and Sarah were plausible, reasonably articulate newlyweds with the humor on their honeymoon growing out of situations we could believe? Apparently.

If you're a fan of extreme skateboarding, motorcycling and motocross, this is the movie for you. If not, not. And even if you are, what's in the film other than what you might have seen on TV? Yes, it's in 3D, which adds nothing and dims the picture.

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.

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.

House of D is the kind of movie that particularly makes me cringe, because it has such a shameless desire to please; like Uriah Heep, it bows and scrapes and wipes its sweaty palm on its trouser leg, and also like Uriah Heep, it privately thinks it is superior.

Ansiedad is a smart charmer, and well-played by Cierra Ramirez, she should really be above this sort of thing - above the whole movie, really.

Stealth is an offense against taste, intelligence and the noise pollution code -- a dumbed-down "Top Gun" crossed with the HAL 9000 plot from "2001."

A labored and sour comedy.

The kind of movie beloved by people who never go to the movies, because they are primarily interested in something else--the Civil War, for example--and think historical accuracy is a virtue instead of an attribute.

The movie adds up to a few good ideas and a lot of bad ones, wandering around in search of an organizing principle.

The plot risks bursting under the strain of its coincidences, as Sara and Jon fly to opposite coasts at the same time and engage in a series of Idiot Plot moves so extreme and wrongheaded that even other characters in the same scene should start shouting helpful suggestions.

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.

The screenplay by Kim Barker requires Bullock to behave in an essentially disturbing way that began to wear on me. It begins as merely peculiar, moves on to miscalculation and becomes seriously annoying.

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.

It is the anti-Sundance film, an exhausted wheeze of bankrupt cliches and cardboard characters, the kind of film that has no visible reason for existing, except that everybody got paid.

Invasion U.S.A. is a brain-damaged, idiotic thriller, not even bad enough to be laughable.

An efficient delivery system for Gotcha! Moments, of which it has about 19. Audiences who want to be Gotchaed will enjoy it.

The film is a sharp disappointment to those who have been waiting for 10 years since the master's last film. The best that can be hoped is that, having made a film, Coppola has the taste again, and will go on to make many more, nothing like this.

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.

Return to the Blue Lagoon aspires to the soft-core porn achievements of the earlier film, but succeeds instead of creating a new genre, no-core porn.

Needful Things is yet another one of those films based on a Stephen King story that inspires you to wonder why his stories don't make better films. The movie only has one note, which it plays over and over, sort of a Satanic water torture. It's not funny and it's not scary and it's all sort of depressing.

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.

Some of these people make my skin crawl. The characters of Sex and the City 2 are flyweight bubbleheads living in a world which rarely requires three sentences in a row.

An idiotic ode to macho horseshite (to employ an ancient Irish word). It is however distinguished by superb cinematography.

This is the most confused feature-length film I've ever seen.

Not only am I ill-prepared to review the movie, but I venture to guess that anyone who is not literally a member of a Scooby-Doo fan club would be equally incapable. This movie exists in a closed universe, and the rest of us are aliens. The Internet was invented so that you can find someone else's review of Scooby-Doo. Start surfing.

Blame It On Rio has the mind of a 1940s bongo comedy and the heart of a porno film. It's really unsettling to see how casually this movie takes a serious situation. A disturbed girl is using sex to play mind games with a middle-aged man, and the movie get its yuks with slapstick scenes where one guy goes out the window when the other guy comes in the door. What's shocking is how many first-rate talents are associated with this sleaze.

Mommie Dearest is a painful experience that drones on endlessly, as Joan Crawford's relationship with her daughter, Christina, disintegrates from cruelty through jealousy into pathos. It is unremittingly depressing, not to any purpose of drama or entertainment, but just to depress. It left me feeling creepy.

Pants and wheezes and hurls itself exhausted across the finish line after barely 65 minutes of movie, and then follows it with 15 minutes of end credits in an attempt to clock in as a feature film.

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

The characters in these movies exist in a Twilight Zone where thousands of rounds of ammunition are fired, but no one ever gets shot unless the plot requires him to.

Monster-in-Law fails the Gene Siskel Test: "Is this film more interesting than a documentary of the same actors having lunch?"

There's little that's new in the material, and nobody seems to have asked whether the emotional charge of blatant racism belongs in a lightweight story like this - even if the racists are the villains.

This project is dead in the water. Read the book. Better still, read "Victory."

The people in this movie are dumber than a box of Tinkertoys.

The Spirit is mannered to the point of madness. There is not a trace of human emotion in it. To call the characters cardboard is to insult a useful packing material.

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.

What did we really, sincerely, expect anyway, from a movie in which Karl Malden plays a character named 'Wilbur,' and Slim Pickens plays a character named 'Tex'?

The Wizard is finally just a cynical exploitation film with a lot of commercial plugs in it, and it is so insanely overwritten and ineptly directed that it will disappoint just about everybody and serve them right for going in the first place.

The sad thing about A Night at the Roxbury is that the characters are in a one-joke movie, and they're the joke.

Just when it seems about to become a real corker of an adventure movie, plunges into incomprehensible action, idiotic dialogue, inexplicable motivations, causes without effects, effects without causes, and general lunacy. What a mess.

An inept assembly of ill-matched plot points, meandering through a production that has attractive art direction (despite the immobile mouths).

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 action, direction and special effects are all better than the last time around, which isn't saying much, since Death Wish II was so ineptly directed and edited that it was an insult even to audiences that were looking for a bad movie.

I recommend that Kelly keep right on cutting until he whittles it down to a ukulele pick.

Aggressively simple-minded, it's fueled by the delusion that it has a brilliant premise: Eddie Murphy plus cute kids equals success. But a premise should be the starting point for a screenplay, not its finish line.

At the time, I was never interested in getting into a fight with the toughest kid in high school. And now that I'm not in high school, I am even less interested in seeing a movie on the subject, particularly a bad one.

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

The result is not merely a bad film, but a waste of an opportunity. As he approaches 85, Winters is still active, funny, enthusiastically involved in painting and could have been the subject of a good film. This isn't it.

The remake is so close to the original that there is no reason to see both, unless you want to prove to yourself that black and white photography is indeed more effective than color for this material.

It tries for the greatest realism in its obligatory shots of gas tanks exploding, and yet includes such absurdities as a local news helicopter that tracks all of the competitors all the way from LA to New York. To be sure, without the traffic copter the story would have been impossible to follow - but then why follow the story anyway? In the meantime, can we possibly hold our breath for "Gumball Rally?" I'll bet I can.

The movie has been slapped together by director Todd Phillips, who careens from scene to scene without it occurring to him that humor benefits from characterization, context and continuity. Otherwise, all you have is a lot of people acting goofy.

By the end of Children of the Corn, the only thing moving behind the rows is the audience, fleeing to the exits.

A film is a terrible thing to waste. For Roman Coppola to waste one on A Glimpse Inside the Mind of Charles Swan III is a sad sight to behold. I'll go further. For Charlie Sheen to waste a role in it is also a great pity. I stop not: For Bill Murray to occupy his time in this dreck sandwich is a calamity.

The level of intelligence of the screenplay of "Saturn 3" is shockingly low - the story is so dumb it would be laughed out of any junior high school class in the country - and yet the movie was financed. Why?

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

A visually ugly film with an incoherent plot, wooden characters and inane dialog. It provided me with one of the more unpleasant experiences I've had at the movies.

Underclassman doesn't even try to be good. It knows that it doesn't have to be. It stars Nick Cannon, who has a popular MTV show, and it's a combo cop movie, romance, thriller and high school comedy. That makes the TV ads a slam dunk; they'll generate a Pavlovian response in viewers conditioned to react to their sales triggers (smartass young cop, basketball, sexy babes, fast cars, mockery of adults).

If he wants a future in the movies, Andrew Dice Clay is going to have to play somebody other than himself.

Bad movie. Ugly movie.

A fitfully funny, aimless, unnecessary thriller.

The movie is unpleasant to look at. It's darker than "Seven," but without sufficient purpose, and my overall memory of it is of people screaming in the shadows. To call this a comedy is a sign of optimism; to call it a comeback for Murphy is a sign of blind faith.

There is not a spark of chemistry between Chris and Jamie, although the plot clearly requires them to fall in love. There is so much chemistry involved with the Anna Faris character, however, that she can set off multiple chain reactions with herself, if you see what I mean.

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.

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.

Excruciatingly boring.

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.

The movie seems to reinvent itself from moment to moment, darting between styles like a squirrel with too many nuts. There is one performance that works, sort of, and it is by Marisa Tomei,

Hell Night is a relentlessly lackluster example of the Dead Teenager Movie.

The best shot in this film is the first one. Not a good sign.

Too many characters, not enough plot, and a disconnect between the two stars' acting styles.

One of the most profoundly stupid movies I've ever seen.

It's a movie with so many inconsistencies, improbabilities, unanswered questions and unfinished characters that we have to suspend not only disbelief but also intelligence.

Cool World is a seriously troubled film, so ragged I doubt if even the director can explain the story line.

An odd, well-made and thoroughly unpleasant thriller.

The writers never solved the problem of incorporating the top-heavy special effects into their thin little plot.

Laughter for me was such a physical impossibility during National Lampoon's Van Wilder that had I not been pledged to sit through the film, I would have lifted myself up by my bootstraps and fled.

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.

A movie about two old codgers who are nothing like people, both suffering from cancer that is nothing like cancer, and setting off on adventures that are nothing like possible.

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

Leads us down the garden path of romance, only to abandon us by the compost heap of uplifting endings. And it's not even clever enough to give us the right happy ending. It gives us the wrong happy ending.

The January Man is worth study as a film that fails to find its tone. It's all over the map. It wants to be zany but violent, satirical but slapstick, romantic but cynical. It wants some of its actors to rant and rave like amateur tragedians, and others to reach for subtle nuances. And it wants all of these things to happen at the same time.

The only reason I am rating this movie at one star while Little Indian, Big City received zero stars is that Jungle 2 Jungle is too mediocre to deserve zero stars. It doesn't achieve truly awful badness, but is sort of a black hole for the attention span, sending us spiraling down into nothingness.

The result is a very unfunny movie. It's routine, predictable, and dumb - real dumb.

The movie was executive produced by Quentin Tarantino. Shame on him. He intends it no doubt as another homage to grindhouse pictures, but I've seen a lot of them, and they were nowhere near this bad. "Hell's Angels on Wheels," for example: pretty good.

For years there have been reports of the death of the Western. Now comes American Outlaws, proof that even the B Western is dead.

Both of us have seen "The Tall Blond Man with One Black Shoe," the French comedy that inspired this Hollywood retread. The French movie is about a case of mistaken identity. The American movie is about the same case of mistaken identity. The French have a name for this phenomenon: deja vu. So do we: ripoff.

Sarah Michelle Gellar, the nominal star, has been in her share of horror movies, and all by herself could have written and directed a better one than this.

The philosopher Thomas Hobbes tells us life can be "poor, nasty, brutish and short." So is this movie.

The fatal flaw in Godzilla 1985 is that it is a bad movie with aspirations of being a good bad movie.

An assault on the eyes, the ears, the brain, common sense and the human desire to be entertained.

Sometimes it works to show their lips moving (it certainly did in "Babe"), but in Good Boy! the jaw movements are so mechanical it doesn't look like speech, it looks like a film loop.

The Perfect Man crawls hand over bloody hand up the stony face of this plot, while we in the audience do not laugh because it is not nice to laugh at those less fortunate than ourselves, and the people in this movie are less fortunate than the people in just about any other movie I can think of, simply because they are in it.

A particularly nasty and mean-spirited action picture, with the dramatic depth of an arcade game.

Although the movie may appeal to kids in the lower grades, it's pretty slow, flat and dumb.

Shameless in its use of mental retardation as a gimmick, a prop and a plot device. Anyone with any knowledge of retardation is likely to find the film offensive.

Supplies us with a first-class creature, a fourth-rate story, and dialogue possibly created by feeding the screenplay into a pasta maker.

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

Anything that holds our interest can be entertaining, in a way, but the movie seems to have an unwholesome determination to show us the victims being terrified and threatened. When I left the screening, I just didn't feel right.

There hasn't been a pirate movie in a long time, and after Roman Polanski's "Pirates," there may not be another one for a very long time. This movie represents some kind of low point for the genre that gave us Captain Blood. It also gives us a new pirate image to ponder.

So ludicrous in so many different ways it achieves a kind of forlorn grandeur.

I am so very tired of this movie. I see it at least once a month. The title changes, the actors change, and the superficial details of the story change, but it is always about exactly the same thing: heavily armed men shooting at one another.

Your Highness is a juvenile excrescence that feels like the work of 11-year-old boys in love with dungeons, dragons, warrior women, pot, boobs and four-letter words.

A movie, based on the popular Dean Koontz novel, that seems to have been made by grinding up other films and feeding them to this one.

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.

Toy Soldiers, a film with earnest performances and professional production values, is constructed out of characters, situations and gimmicks that will be instantly recognized by the weary viewer. There is nothing new here.

To call A Lot like Love dead in the water is an insult to water.

The lockstep mentalities who made this movie tell their story entirely from a boring male point of view, supply us with male wimps and studs who are equally uninteresting, and view women only as wet T-shirt finalists. What a letdown for horny movie critics.

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.

Staying Alive is a big disappointment.

House of the Sleeping Beauties has missed its ideal release window by about 40 years. It might -- might -- have found an audience in that transitional period between soft- and hard-core.

Screwballs opens outside the local hot dog stand, where a giant inflatable hot dog is swinging back and forth like a pendulum, gently nudging the backsides of two teenage girls. From such beginnings I suppose we should not anticipate a masterpiece, but the opening shot is the high point of this dumb movie.

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.

A deserted island movie during which I desperately wished the characters had chosen one movie to take along if they were stranded on a deserted island, and were showing it to us instead of this one.

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 lame-brained, outdated wheeze about a couple of good ol' boys who roar around the back roads of the South in the General Lee, their beloved 1969 Dodge Charger.

Firewalker is a free-form anthology of familiar images from the works of Steven Spielberg, subjected to a new process that we could call discolorization. All of the style and magic are gone, leaving only the booby-trapped temples, the steaming jungle and such lines as, if I remember correctly, "Witch, woman, harlot - I've been called them all!"

This is a would-be comedy that's not as funny (nor as satirical) as the movies that inspired it.

Renaissance Man is a labored, unconvincing comedy that seems cobbled together out of the half-understood remnants of its betters.

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.

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

A very bad movie and a genuinely moving experience.

Maybe after years of banging his head against the system Friedkin decided with The Guardian to make a frankly commercial exploitation film. On the level of special effects and photography, The Guardian is indeed well made. But give us a break.

The Twilight Saga: New Moon takes the tepid achievement of "Twilight" (1988), guts it, and leaves it for undead.