Stephanie Zacharek

iIt sits on the screen in the flattest way imaginable, and the brightest colors in the world can't make up for all that's missing. 8 Women is perfumed kitsch, and it reeks.

What a dud of a story! You know what it needs to dress it up? Garden gnomes.

The problem with Kate & Leopold is that although this is supposed to be a romantic comedy, the best scenes are the ones in which there's no Ryan.

I can't recall ever having seen a single bad Ice Cube performance, and his utter charm even in flimsy material like this only reaffirms his gifts.

Directed by the enormously talented New Zealand filmmaker Taika Waititi, it’s well intentioned but ultimately numbing, an instance of fun overkill whose ultimate goal seems to be to put us into a special-effects coma.

The bigger question to ask about 300 is why, for a supposedly rousing tale of heroism, it's so curiously unaffecting.

The time may feel right for a wry dystopian sci-fi adventure-comedy. But as satires go, this one is more mild than habanero.

To deny Jackson’s complexity only flattens his genius—as well as his kindness and fragility—into something manageable, explainable. In the end, Michael does the same.

Spins toward its glum, dishwater-gray whirlpool of an ending, which doesn't have nearly as much emotional punch as it should. It doesn't leave you feeling spent -- only soaked.

There’s no pacing in Avengers: Infinity War. It’s all sensation and no pulse. Everything is big, all of the time.

A romantic comedy doesn't need to be original to be enjoyable, and yet The Proposal still falls way too short of the mark.

Safe House is a twisted claw of a movie, a picture so visually ugly that, to borrow a line from Moms Mabley, it hurt my feelings.

Hall strives to carry The Night House on her more-than-capable shoulders, but she can’t quite compensate for the moments when the movie is outright silly or, worse, boring.

Isn't assaultive or dumb, just slack and de-energized, as if its batteries start running down in the first frame.

It should be fun – but it isn’t. Ritchie, who wrote the screenplay from a story he conceived with Ivan Atkinson and Marn Davies, veers into territory that’s possibly anti-Semitic and maybe a little racist. It’s all a lark, so we’re not supposed to care, but some of the gags still leave a bitter aftertaste.

May be very much about feelings, but it's made with a drab, juiceless, tasteful efficiency that distances us from the characters instead of drawing us closer to them.

The new Dumbo is ostentatious and overworked, less a work of imagination than a declaration of how imaginative Burton thinks he is.

It follows the same essential pattern as its predecessor, but the ingenious loopiness is gone; the mechanism behind it grinds instead of whirrs.

There's so little love to be found in Dreamgirls. It's a product that promises magic, and yet gives us nothing to live on.

It's hard to care about a valiant groping for accuracy when a story is so badly told you can't tell what the devil is going on.

Ultimately feels somewhat overprocessed, and its humor is a little too broad at times -- it probably crosses the acceptable threshold of penis and boob jokes.

I suspect this picture is pretty close to what fans were hoping for, and for their sake, I'm glad it's markedly better than the two that preceded it. But Revenge of the Sith is still crap.

Everything in Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk should work — and yet the picture falls flat. It’s a story enslaved by a director’s approach rather than served by it. His mannered placement of the camera is hard to ignore, and the actors suffer for it.

With I Care a Lot, Blakeson (whose credits include The 5th Wave and The Disappearance of Alice Creed) takes the easy way out, showing smart women doing bad stuff without bothering to write actual characters for them.

Excessively intricate and extremely dull, the latest example of a filmmaker giving us a disjointed, overlong movie that’s unnecessarily confusing to follow.

Watching The Producers is simply exhausting.

The Running Man, directed by Edgar Wright and adapted from Stephen King’s 1982 novel of the same name, is dark all right. It’s also garishly obvious, and though it grabs for laughs here and there, it has almost zero wit.

The picture is mildly entertaining and stringently unoffensive (provided you're not a supersensitive upper-crusty type from Connecticut). Yet it has problems from the start.

Too bad it's not so funny. Almost every gag in Black Knight feels forced and contrived, as if the movie is desperate to squeeze laughs out of us.

Its spectacular special effects threaten to swallow characters whole, and there are times when overwrought and clumsy dialogue... nearly pitch you right out of the movie's mood.

It jumps around from song to song, and from plot point to plot point, unable to trust in the attention spans of modern children, or even just modern human beings.

Works neither as an exuberant rock 'n' roll picture nor as a heroic fable. It will rock you --straight to sleep.

The problem with contemporary Hollywood isn't that so many of the movies it's churning out are based on formula; it's that so many directors take perfectly good formulas and wreck them with bad filmmaking.

Parker IS to blame for the self-consciousness of her performance. She spends much of the movie swanning, not acting: Nearly every movement, every gesture, seems conceived for the benefit of the camera, as opposed to the truth of the character.

Feels like every other action thriller we've seen in the past three years, only it's more annoying -- and, in some cases, more appalling -- because it's trying so hard to distinguish itself.

Reverence can sap the life out of a film—that and too much acting. And boy, is there a lot of acting in The Bikeriders.

If you’re not expecting too much, Drive Hard is mindlessly entertaining, but it lacks that spark of madness that might have made it truly fun. At least Cusack is able to shed some of his usual overseriousness.

Sodden and glum, even in those moments where it's supposed to feel funny and light. It makes you feel trapped and flailing as the minutes tick by. If it encapsulates anything, it's the experience of drowning, not waving.

Feels deeply calculated rather than genuinely crazy.

More of a women's-prison movie than a supernatural thriller, and not a very good one at that.

Those jokes are mostly just toothless and silly. The plot is barely serviceable, but it will do, and most of the first movie’s cast has been reassembled under its flimsy umbrella.

Sometimes movies make sense in a logical way; sometimes they make only emotional sense. No Reservations makes no damned sense at all.

Thinking back on watching these performers, I see them mostly as an arrangement of bewildered actors awaiting orders, as if Ritchie hasn't bothered to tell them what he needs them to do. He’d sure make a lousy Mob boss.

Given how eagerly awaited this film has been, it’s safe to say that readers who love the series deserve a movie version made with more imagination, and less rote efficiency, than this one.

Before long, El Cantante disintegrates into a stylized jumble -- even a straightforward jumble would have been preferable.

The groom is a doofus, the bride has genuine screwball talent -- It's too bad that the movie is so disappointing.

Couldn't be more unhip -- it just never hits the groove.

Ghostbusters: Afterlife is less about zapping ghoulies than it is about Family, Reconnection and Forgiveness, which by now should be trademarked entities like Pepsi, Saran Wrap and Legos. Never funny or disreputable, Ghostbusters: Afterlife feels fully parent-approved—and where’s the fun in that?

What we really need from Stoned, the very thing that it fails to give us, is a sense of Jones as a human being.

There are hints of greatness, one or two artfully constructed scenes that remind you why you look forward to new Scorsese films in the first place. But as a highly detailed portrait of true-life corruption and bad behavior in the financial sector, Wolf is pushy and hollow, too much of a bad thing.

The visual originality of The Saddest Music is deceiving: Narratively and spiritually, the movie is bankrupt, even though it's so packed with stuff (including a set of shapely prosthetic glass legs filled with dazzling, fizzy beer) that you can hardly bring yourself to believe that it all adds up to nothing.

Damon is as buff as ever, maybe even more so... But watching him lumber through Elysium's bramble of lofty ideals is no damn fun.

The movie gets duller and less focused as it wears on.

The movie is at its best when it’s sopping with sentimentality and when it goes right over the top in its depiction of dorky destruction. Everything in between is a drag.

Aside from a few arresting visuals, Red Riding Hood is just a slog through the woods.

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.

Studied and overworked, this Blithe Spirit trips over its own ectoplasmic feet. Somewhere, Coward is scowling.

The sex scenes -- intense, affecting and emotionally raw -- are the best thing about this frustratingly limp movie.

Leaving the theater, I couldn't quell those waves of disappointment: It just should have been funnier.

The air leaks out of Gaudí Afternoon gradually but steadily, until all we're left with is a limp rag of a balloon.

Okja takes the worst impulses of Walt Disney, Wes Anderson, Tim Burton and Michael Moore and rolls them into one movie.

Takes plenty of twists and turns, each so implausible and silly that you have no interest whatsoever in finding out what the next one will be. The director, Paul McGuigan, is fond of fancy split-screen effects and stylish, snappy cutting, but he can't tell a story to save his life.

Challenges us to believe in the power of myth. But the big challenge here is surviving the tedium of Shyamalan's meandering inventiveness. What's supposed to be fanciful storytelling is really just audience punishment.

Fragmented and contrived, like a badly mapped-out scrapbook.

This is a movie that repeatedly calls out a dead kid just to make its points. If that’s your idea of entertainment—or even just adequate message-based filmmaking—run, don’t walk, to see Dear Evan Hansen.

Cruise pedals hard through The Last Samurai, and the exertion shows. In fact, the whole picture is belabored and lumbering.

Carell is on the fast track to becoming Robin Williams, a guy who lost the plot far too early on and began pouring his considerable comic gifts into brain-dead heart-warmers.

It takes too long for the story to come around to the fact that Will is just plain nuts - and even then, he gets over it in a heartbeat.

There's nothing in it to inspire excitement or even a mild glimmer of delight; it's almost offensive in its dullness.

Hits a new low of idiocy and crassness.

Rubber could have been a modest horror novelty, a wicked, malevolent version of "The Red Balloon."

"Piranha 3D" was ridiculous, gory and fun, everything Piranha 3DD is not.

Just when you think your jaw can't drop any lower in appalled amazement, comes a romantic comedy so lunkheaded and ill-conceived that it makes your average, idiotic Kate Hudson-Matthew McConaughey outing look like the reincarnation of Hepburn and Grant.

Extravagant in movie terms but stingy in emotional ones, it embodies all of Spielberg's bad impulses and almost none of his good ones: It's a grand display of how well he knows how to work us over, and yet the desperation with which he tries to get to us is repulsive.

Maybe I'm expecting too much of Cyrus. But The Last Song rests heavily on her alleged appeal, and I can't remember the last time I came across such a singularly charmless teenage performer. I hesitate to even use the word "actress."

Both the performance and the movie around it are virtually incomprehensible.

Any moron can make a bad movie. But it takes a special breed of schemer to make a picture as shameless as The Bucket List.

There's nothing offhand or spontaneous-feeling about Nanny McPhee; it's a highly mechanical piece of work, and its potentially delightful details are wasted.

Skyline is a piece of junk, even in a movie climate littered with expensive - though sometimes fun - junkiness.

They don't even look as if they're having fun. Their stint as cross-dressers is simply an endurance test for them, and for us.

The picture is just a catalog of strained camera moves and preprogrammed gags, with no wit or style.

CHIPS is just tiresomely stupid.

Cameron manhandles the real story, scavenging it for his own puny narrative purposes. It's a film made with boorish confidence and zero sensitivity, big and dumb and hulking.

Both mean-spirited and self-conscious. It's all style and no soul, which wouldn't be a problem if its style at least gave us something to look at, or to laugh at. But From Paris With Love, filmed on location in Paris, has a raggedy, greasy, dingy look: It's the movie equivalent of an unbathed, unshaven French boyfriend (the bad kind). It thinks it's suave, but it just smells bad.

No drama, no lyricism, just cornpone. It's too bad, because outlaws are, by their very nature, glamorous movie subjects.

Watching Streep and her two BFFs, played by Christine Baranski and Julie Walters, grinning and giggling their way through Mamma Mia! I felt I was being thoroughly, and unenjoyably, punished.

As The Muse chugs along, it becomes more apparent how tired and pointless it is.

A perfect storm of a movie disaster: You've got good actors fighting a poorly conceived script, under the guidance of a director who can no longer make the distinction between imaginativeness and computer-generated effects. The result is an expensive-looking mess that fails to capture the mood, and the poetry, of its source material.

A comedy of remarriage that makes divorce look like a state of grace.

Another insulting women's comedy.

The comedy is tepid, the action is dopey and even the violence is boring and occasionally cruel.

It's both slack and bloated; I've been to Catholic wedding masses that had more zip. I think it clocked in at fewer than 90 minutes, but it seemed to last longer than most marriages do.

Doesn't seem geared to kids at all: It's so adult that it's massively boring.

It takes a very clever schoolboy to make a movie as elaborately empty as Guy Ritchie's Snatch.

A weaselly little thing.

I can't remember ever feeling so glad that a movie was finally over. Lucas may have held my imagination hostage for two hours, but reclaiming it afterward wasn't hard at all.

Slackers is supposed to be a gross-out comedy, but the tastelessness of its jokes is nothing compared to its sheer cluelessness.

Watching a movie should never be such torture.

What a difference a comma makes — or would make, in the case of Jessie Nelson's lumpy, wretchedly unfunny Love the Coopers, whose title commands us to love people it's impossible even to like.

It's a limp romantic drama that occasionally lifts its drowsy head to attempt a wan smile, a picture that starts out being harmlessly dull and ends, somehow, in a place that feels insultingly manipulative.

It's lower on the food chain than a mere exploitation picture because it clings so desperately to the notion that it's a serious movie about violence; it doesn't even have enough integrity to serve up cheap, sick thrills for their own sake.

Shows about a third less craft than its all-too-lame predecessor, and it's only half as funny. If those are figures you can deal with, enter the theater at your own peril.

It's ostensibly about adults, but there's nothing remotely adult about it.

Phoenix is acting so hard you can feel the desperation throbbing in his veins. He leaves you wanting to start him a GoFundMe, so he won’t have to pour so much sweat into his job again. But the aggressive terribleness of his performance isn’t completely his fault.

Who would have thought that Cameron Crowe had a movie as bad as Vanilla Sky in him? It's a punishing picture, a betrayal of everything that Crowe has proved he knows how to do right.

Bening's prickliness is pure delight, but there's only so much she can do. It's a terrible fate for an actress to be upstaged by a humming p----.

Long before Serving Sara drags its butt to the finish line, you wish you were watching a different race.

Of all the characters in American Pie 2, male or female, Michelle is the only one who feels completely rounded and whole. She moves with unerring grace and subtlety through this feeble minefield of a movie, unharmed by the tepid jokes that flop and fizzle around her.

It's tempting to write off Because I Said So as just another dumb, bad comedy, made yesterday and forgotten tomorrow. But no matter how negligible this particular picture is, it's time to look a little deeper. If these are the only kinds of roles we can conceive for actresses who have grown into their faces, as Keaton has, it's no wonder so many younger performers are seeking the knife.

Aggressively offensive.

You will not like it on the screen, you will not like it -- not one scene!

Such weak medicine. Sure enough, it goes down. Keeping it down is another matter.

Neither funny nor honest. The exact opposite of a retreat, it's merely exhausting.

It's impossible to tell what's going on at any given moment in Tomb of the Dragon Emperor; it's even harder to care about being able to tell.

So contemptuous toward its own characters, and its audience, that it chokes off any visceral thrills it might have offered. The movie substitutes calculation for brains, and the filmmakers seem to think we'll all be too stupid to notice.

It's clear from the outset that a thriller is going to be big and dumb -- as opposed to tight and smart.

Paranormal Activity 2 sinks much lower than it needs to in order to get a rush out of us - and in the end, the rush isn't even that great. The movie puts us through the paces with minimal payoff.

Take Me Home Tonight isn't nearly as much fun as the '80s actually were. Even worse, it's less fun than most '80s comedies were - and that's bad.

One of those strained caper movies that's hardly any fun to watch and begins to vaporize from your memory minutes after it ends.

Toback has hit a new low. The candor and shrugging good humor Toback, at his best, used to show has been replaced by a repellent slurpiness: The whole picture seems coated with a slimy sheen of drool.

It's a movie barely fit for a cretin, much less a King. If you hear a door slam in the theater, you'll know that Elvis has left the building -- in disgust.

Not 10 minutes into the smeary mess that is The Man in the Iron Mask, the only sensible question to ask yourself is, "What am I doing here?"

It's a performance that screams "Look at me!" louder and bigger than an elephant dick. And every bit as subtle.

Leaves you feeling as if you've been alternately milked and bitch-slapped. Its manipulation is so clumsy and obvious -- and, ultimately, it goes so far astray from its original guiding principles -- that it leaves you feeling dangled and dazed.

For sheer ineptitude, crassness and unwatchability, American Wedding takes the cake.

Doesn't quite have the goods.

Isn't dubbed. But it sure feels like it. The characters open their mouths and their lips don't seem to be shaping the right words -- you can't believe any human beings would ever utter such ludicrous dialogue, with so little conviction.

Overall Seven Pounds is too heavy-handed and maudlin to be comprehensible, let alone moving. The real shocker is that not even Smith can rescue it.

It's dispiriting to see good actors doing smart, solid work with so much unadulterated garbage swirling around them. Scott's art is also death, and we, the audience, are the ones he's jabbing at with his ruthless paintbrush. It's about time someone told him where to stick it.

It's possible Hill has a style, of sorts. But he doesn't work from the heart, or from the gut, as a good comedy director generally needs to. He operates from one guiding question: "How disturbing can we make this sh**?"

Takes so many wrong turns it's barely an also-ran. It isn't the next best thing at all. Not even close.

Mildly grisly, assaultively noisy and tremendously boring.

It's so uncomplicated you could go out for spaghetti after the first 10 minutes and slip back into your seat just in time for the last 10, and you wouldn't feel you'd missed a thing, save a rumble or two.

Until that final, inevitable kiss, we have to listen to them, and the clatter of their crude, brainless exchanges is unbearable.

For those of you on a really tight entertainment budget, you'll be paying at least 8 cents per minute not to laugh. Your money is better spent on beans and rice.

With Yes Man, Carrey has bled the well dry, doing everything he knows how to do, over and over again, just to prove that he still knows how to do it. It's exhilarating to see brilliance in a comic; but by the time you start smelling it, the game is over.

Colorless and soulless in the extreme, it bears no one's fingerprints at all. There's no reason for this Oldboy to exist. It's so DOA, you stumble out of it wanting to eat something alive.

Offensive to Hindus. Never mind the Hindus; The Love Guru is offensive to pretty much anyone with a brain.

I desperately wanted Glitter to be trashy and over-the-top, to be so courageously awful. As it is, it isn't nearly bad enough to be that kind of good. It's simply there, all dressed up with no place to go, and that's the most damning thing you could say about it.

In its eagerness not to condemn any political view, its points are so blurry that you have no idea what it’s trying to say. Its meaning, to the degree that it has one, just slides off the screen in a jellied mess.

What hurts the most is the wholehearted dedication each of these actors brings to such truly horrendous material: they make Life Itself almost watchable – almost –but there’s no effective cure for this kidney stone of a movie. Please, please, just let it pass.

It's time to start recognizing that not all escapist entertainment is created equal. And that some of it isn't even entertainment. Miss March is, to use the vernacular of the escapist moviegoer, the biggest pile of crap I've seen in ages.

As a symbol of what some filmmakers and some studios think the public will buy, it's a horrific piece of work. How dare anyone put this piece of c--- in front of me. How dare anyone put it in front of YOU.

Every so often there comes a movie so tasteless, so nakedly pandering, so bodaciously ill conceived that you’ve got to see it to believe it. This year, that movie is Collateral Beauty.

The most depressing movie I've seen all year; in fact, I'm hard-pressed to name a movie aimed specifically at women that has ever made me feel as insulted and disgusted.

May be the worst romantic comedy I've ever seen, although I hesitate to make such a resolute pronouncement about a movie that's so barely even THERE.

It's merely nutty, a picture that appears to have been made by an individual who has fallen off the edge of reason. Watching it was misery.