Stephanie Zacharek

A moneygrubbing extravaganza, ugly to look at and interminable to sit through. No movie about the evils of excessive taxation should be this taxing.

Peep World barely seems like a movie. Withered and shrunken, it feels even too small for TV.

Cassandra's Dream, an earnest meditation on greed, desire, murder and class struggle, is one of Woody Allen's funniest movies in years -- except Allen doesn't know it.

So bad it's almost like performance art, or those cheap records from the '60s, where the Chipmunks sing the Beatles' greatest hits.

Crude gags mingle with squishy, underdeveloped messages about family and belonging and empowerment. And while self-abasement is part of the comedian’s toolbox, there’s something depressing about watching as a chortling Michelle airs her unmentionable area while spraying herself with self-tanner. McCarthy deserves better than this. She can aim higher.

Everything that made the original picture so sly, funny, and affecting is gone. Musical numbers spell out the obvious, and loudly.

With The Good German, Soderbergh -- generally a terrific and creative filmmaker -- apes a style, and a way of seeing, that he clearly doesn't understand. It feels like a hit to the stomach.

Anything Else isn't just the latest Woody Allen movie; it's also the smallest. His pictures seem to be getting tinier and tinier, and after you've seen them they leave nothing but a tinny echo and a bad taste. Anything Else is misanthropy writ small. Allen is too stingy to be generous even with his contempt.

Year One sets prehistoric comedy back at least 20 years.

Blue Jasmine is so relentlessly clueless about the ways real human beings live, and so eager to make the same points about human nature that Allen has made dozens of times before, that it seems like a movie beamed from another planet.

Babylon isn’t a film made with love, or even with any degree of exactitude; it pretends to be a movie about “loving movies,” but more than anything else, it seeks to reflect glory on its creator. It advertises its alleged extravagance and glamour, loud and hard, but only comes off looking tinny and cheap.

There’s only one reason to see The Huntsman: Winter’s War: Gowns! Insane, off-the-hook gowns.

For a movie that's supposed to be about speed and movement, Torque is a peculiarly slow kind of torture. Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition -- especially not in an action movie.

Unlike the original -- which, in a crazy stroke of genius, allowed Shakespearean thespians like Claire Bloom and Maggie Smith, plus Bond babe Ursula Andress, to mix it up as jealous goddesses -- the new Clash of the Titans is frightfully low on babes.

Cinderella Man is ostensibly the kind of old-fashioned drama that sends audiences home with a satisfied glow. But like so many of Howard's movies, there's something canned and phony about it -- it left me feeling cooked and dehydrated, as if I'd fallen asleep on a tanning bed.

This is a love story, all right, but it has less to do with the flaws of capitalism than it does with Moore's unwavering fondness for the sound of his own voice, and for what he perceives as his own vast cleverness.

A vehicle for teen singing sensation Mandy Moore. As vehicles go, it's an Edsel.

The direction on Johnson Family Vacation is numbingly slack; the synapses between the scenes don't spark effortlessly, as they should, and the whole enterprise feels dragged-down and belabored.

Boring at best and insidious at worst.

With the trillions of entertainment options available today, we can all afford to be a little more discriminating in how low we’re willing to stoop, and Me Time sets the bar around ankle height.

It pretends to examine how self-absorbed we are as a culture, only to be consumed by its own self-absorption. It's also badly constructed, humorless and emotionally sadistic .

It's not much fun, and it's not particularly edifying. Even people who are curious about Holmes (he was better known by his screen name, Johnny Wadd; here, he's played by Val Kilmer) won't find out much about him.

This film "Phantom" takes everything that's wrong with Broadway and puts it on the big screen in a gaudy splat.

It would be destined for the trash heap of Shakespeare adaptations, if not for its female lead, and its heart, 17-year-old Claire Danes.

A humorless picture, a somber, arty exercise in deep denial of its exploitation roots. The dialogue is stiff and mechanical and the performances are too.

Intentions don’t equal fully fledged works, and Folie à Deux stumbles on nearly all fronts. Even if the movie’s ambitions are admirable, you might end up too bored to care.

Dicks is so in love with itself and its own overworked kooky world that it treats the audience like the outsider in a threesome. Sometimes the self is the least interesting part of self-expression.

No director in the history of moviemaking has expended so much effort in the service of drying up and blowing off the landscape.

McKay’s style here is the equivalent of a knowing cackle; the whole enterprise, elaborate as it is, comes off as lacking in passion. The Big Short had an exhilarating kick, but it also left you feeling queasy over the destructive misdeeds you’d just witnessed. Vice just leaves you feeling sapped, advertising its cleverness without actually being clever.

Spends a lot of time advertising how exciting it is, without actually being exciting.

George Clooney’s statement-making black comedy Suburbicon, playing in competition here at the Venice Film Festival, is a misfire on nearly all counts.

It's sad when a bit of grim futuristic silliness like Repo Men falls short on all counts, down to the most basic level of entertainment value.

With Scott Pilgrim, Wright leaps over the line from chattery cleverness to all-out self-consciousness.

Poops out before it ever really gets going.

The Book Thief is just too tidy to have much impact.

The most sterile of bodice-rippers, a genteel soap opera in which the sex and intrigue are so muted, so tasteful, that they practically blow off the screen in a scattering of dust.

Sometimes a dumb action comedy can work perfectly well as a one-off, particularly if its writers and director can pull off the illusion that they didn’t have to work hard to earn our laughs. But The Hitman’s Wife’s Bodyguard is all work and no payday. Even in the service of airheaded entertainment, no one should feel compelled to take a bullet for it. It’s OK to let a franchise die.

Bateman, as both director and star, digs his heels in too hard to make the movie's points, using lots of ho-hum close-ups and wriggly camera work along the way.

Even with the outlandish characters, gaudy colors and gay satire, this smug John Waters knockoff can't stand up to the real thing.

Sutherland is the only actor in Fool's Gold who isn't trying too hard, perhaps because he doesn't have to. He's the movie's only treasure, hidden in plain sight.

There's no doubt we need more movies for grown-ups, with jokes that don't hit us over the head, but The Men Who Stare at Goats doesn't fit the bill. At best, it might hypnotize you into a stupor.

Actually, the wonder The Polar Express induces feels something like a coma.

Owen Wilson doesn't have a single good line in the dismal Drillbit Taylor. So how is it that almost everything he does is funny?

If only Leap Year were an anomaly, the kind of picture that comes along only once every four years. Instead, it's yet more evidence that romantic comedies are only getting worse.

It's a shame when an actor like Sylvester Stallone, who's always at his most appealing when he just hunkers down and lets himself be a big galoot, feels he has to make a bid for respectability.

Ben Stiller, the movie's star, pretty much sinks the whole enterprise.

Deep Water comes dressed up as an ‘80s-style erotic thriller, a genre that I, for one, would love to see revived. But it’s so tepid, so lacking in heat or even a pulse, that it’s about as sexy as a clogged artery.

Big-name star Liam Neeson looks on, trying to add some class to the joint, though even he seems to know it's a losing battle.

The spongy subtext of this and every Meyers movie is "We're being serious, but we're also being FUN!" No viewer must ever be made to think too much, feel too much, or be left out. She doesn't so much tell a story as lead a team-building exercise.

If it were terrible, you could at least sink your teeth into it; but Welcome to Mooseport is like a biscuit soaked in water, ready to be gummed instead of chewed.

It's a comedy, a political thriller, a love story: Barry Levinson's Man of the Year tries to be all things to all people and fails on every count -- a little like the generic, ineffectual politicians it's pretending to excoriate.

For every moment of raw, affecting insight there are zillions of milliseconds of Kaufman’s proving what a tortured smartie he is. I’m Thinking of Ending Things must have been arduous to make, and it’s excruciatingly tedious to watch.

The Devil All the Time is just a pileup of awful people doing terrible things, for no reason other than to prove how wretched humans can be. The template is pure Southern Gothic, but without the subtlety of top-drawer practitioners of the genre, like Flannery O’Connor and William Faulkner.

Unless you're a lover of tigers, there's probably no reason to see Jean-Jacques Annaud's Two Brothers. And maybe not even then.

The problem with “Wolverine” isn’t that the mythology is detailed and potentially confusing — you could say that about any number of movies based on comic books, even some of the good ones. The bigger issue is that “Wolverine” is so uninvolving that you might not care whether you remember what happened 10 minutes ago.

Dragonfly wants desperately to be the spiritual heir to "The Sixth Sense," but it's not even as effective a thriller.

New Moon, on the other hand, merely follows a dictated formula. It's a cheap, shoddy piece of work, one that banks on moviegoers' anticipation without even bothering to craft a satisfying experience for them. Its pandering is an insult.

The Golden Glove is, in the most basic sense, well constructed. It’s also the kind of movie you may end up wishing you’d never seen. Even hardcore Akin devotees should proceed with caution, and be ready for disillusionment. The craftsmanship is there. But Akin’s judgment has gone AWOL, and with it, his heart.

Life in the Bronx is hard, all right. Getting through a movie shouldn't be harder.

A dismally unfunny comedy, but that's not what's depressing about it. Worse by far is the palpable desperation in Goldie Hawn's performance.

This may be one of the most sluggish sports comedies ever made -- even the supposedly rousing final sequence feels belabored and chubby.

Moore's supporters are quick to impugn the liberal credentials of anyone who criticizes his presentation of the information he digs up (or, in some cases, makes up). For them, Michael Moore is the issues he talks about, so his detractors must be enemies of democratic principles. It's an old trick, akin to the way Pauline Kael was accused of being insensitive about the Holocaust when she didn't like "Shoah."

Harley Quinn’s entrance is the best moment in Suicide Squad. After that, you can leave. Robbie is a criminally appealing actress, likable in just about every way, but that intro aside, Suicide Squad doesn’t serve her well. It serves no one well, least of all its audience.

The whole exercise has the trying-too-hard vibe of a bad toupee.

Perfectly inoffensive and harmless, but it's also drab and inert.

Watching The Boy in the Striped Pajamas, it struck me that weaving a touching little tale about a death-camp friendship is actually a pretty bad way to teach kids about the Holocaust.

Everything he (Nolan) does is forced and overthought, and Inception, far from being his ticket into hall-of-fame greatness, is a very expensive-looking, elephantine film whose myriad so-called complexities -- of both the emotional and intellectual sort -- add up to a kind of ADD tedium.

It’s nearly impossible to care about any of the humans. For a guy with a job that almost no one on the planet has, Denny is shockingly dull, and Ventimiglia fails to vest him with even an iota of personality. The generally charming Seyfried is saddled with a bum role that mostly requires her to suffer beatifically, and Donovan and Baker, both marvelously subtle actors, are badly suited to playing monsters-in-law.

The real mystery at the heart of M. Night Shyamalan's latest: How does he persuade actors like Sigourney Weaver and Adrien Brody to act in his supremely lame movies?

Pulp needs a pulse -- without one, it's DOA. No matter how hard some of its actors work to resuscitate it, Assault on Precinct 13 is as lifeless as a corpse on a slab.

The movie can't distinguish between what's likable and human and funny and what's simply repellent. In that respect, it's just as indiscriminate as the reality TV it shakes its finger at.

If Alex Proyas' Knowing were reasonably entertaining -- instead of just dour, pointless and tedious -- it would be a camp classic.

It's an English movie doing its best to masquerade as the shallowest kind of Hollywood romantic comedy, as if somewhere along the way someone had made a calculated supposition that would be the only kind of comedy American audiences would buy.

All noise with very little fun, and almost no restraint.

It's hard to discern exactly whom this holiday tripe is for.

Just a string of cute gags and pouting on Isabella's part that's supposed to signify soul-searching.

In Crank: High Voltage, Statham just looks miserable, as if appearing in this lousy picture just sucked all the heart right out of him.

I Hate Valentine's Day is a horror show masquerading as a romantic comedy. Maybe Vardalos is just in the wrong line of work.

The movie works neither as a comedy nor as a lame melodrama -- its entertainment value is embarrassingly feeble.

Through it all, we’re supposed to relish the emotional complexity of the story, or maybe even just its dark humor. Amorality can be fun, but Marty Supreme has no emotional core—though it does try to grab us in its final minutes, when Marty is unrealistically redeemed in a moment of mawkish sentimentality.

It's desperately lifeless.

Wears off in about 10.8 minutes.

Just slides off the screen and disappears.

Every scene is coated with Marshall's thumbprints, ultimately connecting into a manhandled, mangled, misshapen whole, its themes written out in thunderously obvious cues.

The picture, despite the grand panoramic scale Emmerich has tried to give it, is dopey and static. Its finest moments belong to the thundering herd of woolly mammoths who storm through the picture sometime in its first half-hour.

Stumbles along laboriously, its jokes following one after another in a sloppy, flat-footed walk.

If you can get past the goofy writing, there's lots of noisy action in The Punisher, but little of it is particularly exhilarating. In fact, it's more of an endurance test. If you can sit through it, you should consider yourself duly punished.

On second thought, maybe just about everyone should stay away from this drearily cheerful little picture that isn't nearly as funny or as heartwarming -- or even as topical, given the economic climate -- as it thinks it is.

Mostly, The Kitchen flounders, taking one page from Quentin Tarantino here and another from Martin Scorsese there, without ever finding its own sense of authorship. Even the movie’s soundtrack — featuring Etta James, Heart and Fleetwood Mac, among others — feels like a desperate attempt to set a mood that never quite jells. There’s not enough heat in this Kitchen, but there’s nothing cool about it, either.

The movie is like a well-intentioned designer knockoff that doesn't know when to quit.

Suspect Zero is loaded with cheap thrills for the expensively educated.

Terminator Salvation has no brains and no soul; it's just a mass of stiff, creaking metal joints. Clearly, the machines have won.

This movie makes being young look like the opposite of fun, a spell you’ve got to break out of. Maybe that’s the ultimate revelation of the story of Peter Pan—but it shouldn’t be drudgery to get there.

The mythology he tries to build in Glass is rushed and sloppy; the surprise twist at the end is really just more of a damp wrinkle. Shyamalan believes so strongly in the dramatic impact of this trilogy that he almost makes you believe in it too — that’s his secret superpower. But the illusion is fragile. You don’t need a sixth sense to know you’re in for a letdown. The five you’ve got should be plenty.

Deadly dull.

Some clever soul might have done something moderately effective with this idea, but Krampus is too dumb to be scary and too listless to be entertaining.

It hovers somewhere in that never-never land of movies that try to do too much and don't quite live up to any of their ambitions.

Assassin’s Creed the movie is fairly innocuous. It’s also cheerless and dumb.