Stephen Holden

A lumpy three-and-a-half-hour glob of Civil War history.

They play cotton candy effigies of themselves named Kelly and Justin, and the best that can be said is that they don't embarrass themselves.

A macho fantasy of physical control, grace and invincibility in which women are all but absent.

All too soon, Machete Kills collapses into a deranged, directionless splatter comedy that exhausts its bag of tricks, many of them recycled from this grindhouse auteur’s 2010 spoof.

Comic mishap, whose satire already feels out of date.

The tone of Knife Fight is mean until the movie flips a switch and turns pious and mawkish as Paul tries to make amends for past sins. Whether playing it sleazy or noble, Mr. Lowe brings little emotional weight to his role.

A bubbling crockpot of farcical mush to warm the tummies of anyone who really and truly misses "The Brady Bunch," and I mean really and truly.

Even if it ends on a hopeful note, this is a feel-bad movie that leaves a bitter aftertaste.

Admirably high-minded and visually gorgeous but fatally anesthetized by its own grandiosity.

A scare movie about gambling addiction, is as grim and lurid as any in the recent spate of films about the evils of crystal meth.

Annapolis has enough material for an exciting trailer. But that's all the movie really is: a trailer tricked out with protracted boxing sequences and an undernourished romantic subplot that culminates in a single tepid kiss.

As flimsy and manipulative as the shallowest Hollywood fantasy.

Silly, heavy-handed film.

An empty, farcical blood bath that's virtually shock-free except for one preposterous plot twist.

The movie is so sloppily written and directed that its bits of bluster never cohere.

Ms. O'Neal's Grace is a fluttery Blanche DuBois type who transforms into a ranting madwoman wreaking havoc. Instead of an ax, she wields scissors. From here on, the movie is a grotesquely overacted, ineptly staged screamfest.

The movie acts like screwball comedy, but there are no laughs as Daisy and Jay’s connection lurches toward implausible romance.

If National Treasure mattered at all, you might call it a national disgrace, but this piece of flotsam is so inconsequential that it amounts to little more than a piece of Hollywood accounting.

Because it unfolds like a garish hybrid of Simon Birch and What Dreams May Come, with some horror-movie touches thrown in to keep us from nodding off, "The Sixth Sense" appears to have been concocted at exactly the moment Hollywood was betting on supernatural schmaltz.

The Book Thief is a shameless piece of Oscar-seeking Holocaust kitsch.

Terminally scatterbrained gangster farce.

An awkward, long-winded mash-up of therapy session, horror movie and survival tale with pretensions of psychological depth.

Years from now, if Mark Christopher's timid, meandering film 54 is spoken of at all, it will probably be lumped together with Whit Stillman's ''Last Days of Disco'' as one of two movies released in 1998 to bungle the same opportunity.

In Good, the anemic screen adaptation of C. P. Taylor's play about a respectable "good German" who passively acquiesces to Hitler's agenda, Viggo Mortensen, miscast and ineptly directed by Vicente Amorim, plays John Halder, a liberal, mild-mannered literature professor who becomes a Nazi.

A comedy that is so scatterbrained and long-winded that much of it feels invented on the spot. (It’s also a half-hour too long.)

The movie is so incoherent that its screenplay, by Mr. Drolet and Mr. Richards, might as well have been scrawled between takes as it was being filmed.

An unsalvageable mess.

You see, this character, who is given no back story, is Life with a capital L. He is the Forneys' guardian angel who rouses them out of their funk. Given the movie's U-turn into allegory, maybe he's supposed to be a punk Jesus. Not even Mr. Gordon-Levitt's unremittingly savage performance can begin to salvage such hokum.

A sloppy, exploitative act of star worship created (if that's the right word for cynical hackwork) around Mr. Lautner, the pouty 19-year-old heartthrob of the "Twilight" franchise.

The story is a clever sitcomy contraption, the dialogue is pedestrian.

Bogus on every level, right down to its half-hearted trick ending.

Robert Kane Pappas’s documentary about scientific experiments in life extension, makes a digressive, disorganized hash of a fascinating topic.

Its narrative continuity is so sketchy and the screenplay so haphazard that the movie doesn’t add up to more than trash, seasoned with pretentious religiosity.

A murky ecclesiastical horror film, may be the nadir of the subgenre that produced "The Exorcist" (at its high end) and "Stigmata" (at its middle-to-low end).

Plods along in its sloppy, joshing way, it tastes like pasta sauce that has sat on the shelf long after the expiration date on the can.

Corny, suds-drenched movie. The kindest way of looking at this roughly patched-together story is as the cinematic equivalent of the music it memorializes.

The spectacle of actors of the quality of Russell Crowe, Aaron Paul, Janet McTeer, Octavia Spencer and Jane Fonda earnestly struggling to wring eye moisture from hammy, flat-footed dialogue (credited to Brad Desch, an unknown), while maintaining some dignity, is depressing proof that an actor is only as good as his or her material.

Lullaby, the directorial debut of Andrew Levitas, a jack of all artistic trades, is the kind of manipulative, cliché-infested hokum that alienates moviegoers by its insistence on hogging all the tears.

A wooden police thriller that is as dull as it is impenetrable and ultimately beyond ludicrous.

Beyond the lugubrious pageantry, there is no sign of emotional or spiritual life in the film, only windy posturing.

Daddy’s Home is an ugly psychological cockfight posing as a family-friendly comedy. Laugh-free — except for some farcical, life-threatening stunts at the expense of Will Ferrell’s character, Brad — it is best avoided unless a movie that has the attitude and mind-set of a schoolyard bully happens to be your thing.

Because all of this looks blatantly unreal, and because the timing of the shock effects is so haphazard, Dead Alive isn't especially scary or repulsive. Nor is it very funny. Long before it's over, the half-hour-plus bloodbath that is the climax of the film has become an interminable bore. [12 Feb 1993, p.C16]

(Patricia Arquette's) irritated reactions to her dire situation have all the force of a pet owner's whiny complaints when her feline refuses to use the cat box.

A catastrophe worth noting only for the presence of its name cast.

Less a movie than an essay.

What one word might best describe Payback? How about "loathsome"?

The movie, like its lovers, is really two films smushed together in the faint hope that sheer incongruity can grind out laughter.

In this elongated, formula-ridden sitcom posing as a movie, the date-weary Manhattan singles exchanging acerbic banter suggest the tougher, far less intellectual offspring of Woody Allen characters drenched in a whiny Seinfeldian dyspepsia.

The film has no idea of how to develop its one-joke premise. The tepid love scenes are as erotically charged as a home movie of a little girl hugging her Barbie doll, and the satire as cutting as the blunt edge of a plastic butter knife.

Deteriorates into a gory shoot-'em-up gangster movie with a quick-fix ending that leaves many threads dangling. It could have been something more.

A moth-eaten stranded-in-the-desert yarn that throws in every cheap trick in the manual to pump up your heartbeat, is so manipulative that the involuntary jolts of adrenaline it produces make you feel like a fool.

Mr. Edwards, who wrote and directed Land of the Blind (it's his debut film), might counter that the movie is a Brechtian comedy that's not supposed to make literal sense: the big picture is what matters. But the big picture is a mess.

Are they fools or heroes? Because the movie can't decide, neither can we. And without an emotional payoff, Play It to the Bone ends up stranded in serio-comic limbo.

As cinematic Armageddons go, this one is a real bust...Although it succeeds in crudely outlining the fable of a magic toy box and the demonic secrets carried down in the bloodline of its inventor, it is otherwise incoherent and (except for Mr. Bradley's Pinhead) wretchedly acted. Farewell, Pinhead and company. You won't be missed.

Feels like a movie whose story was slapped together during filming. Its three phases -- Southern pastorale, Sudsville and Kablooie -- don’t really connect.

The worst flaw of Willard is a clunky tone-deaf screenplay based on Gilbert Ralston's original and updated by the director. Barely a line flies by that doesn't land with a wooden thud.

The movie is so inept in almost every particular that even its love scenes, when a grimacing Kris Kristofferson mashes his grizzled face against an impassive Cheryl Ladd, are likely to produce giggles.

It is no wonder that the insufferable romantic comedy Happythankyoumoreplease, set in New York, looks and sounds like a flop pilot for a television sitcom.

Can a feature-length movie be built on minutiae like jammed copying machines, unsent business letters and orientation programs for new employees? This innocuous wisp of a film, as weighty as a scrap of fax paper caught in an updraft, suggests that the answer is no.

You may view Untraceable, as I do, as a repugnant example of the voyeurism it pretends to condemn.

A rancid little nothing of a movie that baldly recycles plot elements of "There's Something About Mary."

As the movie methodically plods forward on a screenplay (by Shawn Slovo) consisting entirely of clichés and watered-down exposition, it becomes sadly apparent that its only reliable asset is the gorgeous view.

There are brave, boundary-breaching movies, and there are mad, foolhardy ones. Harry and Max belongs to the latter breed.

Short-circuits the novel's quirky charms and period atmosphere by its squeamish attitude toward gritty circus life and smothers the drama under James Newton Howard's insufferable wall-to-wall musical soup.

You have to admire the effort its attractive cast expends pumping life into stilted, flowery dialogue that confuses pretentious attitudinizing with profound insight.

Doesn't really know how to end. But if its melodramatic final moments are ludicrous, they don't seriously dilute the acidity of the sour little swatch of urban sociology that has come before.

The movie is so devoid of emotion that its ritualized gore acts as a narcotic. Filmed in shades of red, with a minimal screenplay, Only God Forgives looks like a ghoulish fashion shoot in hell. Three words should suffice: pretentious macho nonsense.

Miss Beals's performance sinks this already muddled mess of a movie like a stone.

The glum, episodic and unbelievable Arthur Newman is the film equivalent of a dysfunctional computer sloppily assembled from discarded parts of other machines.

Impenetrable mess of a movie.

As tightly plotted as a standard French farce.

Ultimately as sycophantic as it is needling.

Throughout Happy Hour, observations that mean next to nothing are presented as nuggets of profound enlightenment.

At a certain point this would-be shocker suddenly jerks into high gear and becomes a blatant, incompetent rip-off of "Psycho."

But after 15 minutes, this yellow-orange vision of spiraling circles of hell, snorting devils and demonic shapes continually morphing out of one another, begins to seem redundant and conceptually impoverished.

One thing you can say for Ed, a chimpanzee whose baseball-playing expertise propels the Rockets, a minor-league team, to glory: his behavior is a lot more human than any of the other characters in this flimsy, laugh-free family comedy

The steady performances of Tom Wilkinson, playing a kindly priest, and Emily Watson, an angelic mother, in Alejandro Monteverde’s Little Boy do little to offset the cloying sweetness of a movie that has the haranguing inspirational tone of a marathon Sunday-school lesson.

Even by the crude standards of teenage horror, Final Destination is dramatically flat.

So clogged with kooky gadgetry and special effects and glitter and goo that watching it feels like being gridlocked at Toys "R" Us during the Christmas rush.

The glimmers of wit and carnival humor in the “Fast & Furious” franchise are nowhere to be found in Getaway.

What a frantically dull spectacle this vanity project is.

Played in a loud sketch-comedy style that might be described as "Gay Mad TV." The haranguing, badly acted farce wears out its comic welcome within half an hour.

Most of the meager charms of the chaotic romantic farce A Guy Thing spring from the deft comic contortions of Hollywood's ultimate nerdy sidekick, Jason Lee.

Even though its characters tote cellular phones and live in ultramodern high-rise apartments, the film still has a sleazy 1970's ambiance. And while Mr. Bronson goes through the motions of revenge with his characteristic deliberation, he looks puffy and sounds terminally bored.

Death in Love hasn't a drop of humor or hope. Its dull, smudged look makes every environment appear joyless and claustrophobic.

A facile exercise in nihilism posing as an indie "Training Day" with street cred. Don't believe it.

Celtic Pride has ingredients that could have made for a tough knockabout farce. Unfortunately, the film, directed by Tom De Cerchio from a screenplay by Judd Apatow, doesn't know the meaning of the term "light touch.

Homecoming is coldly efficient for what it is. But what it is is trash.

Just Before I Go, the directorial debut of Courteney Cox, lurches along a wobbly line between salacious comic nastiness and nauseating sentimentality. The two strains are so poorly integrated that the screenplay (by David Flebotte) feels like pieces from two different projects mashed together with little oversight.

A largely incoherent movie that generates little suspense and relies for the majority of its thrills on close-up gore.

With the dog days of August upon us, think of this dog of a movie as the cinematic equivalent of high humidity.

All you really need to know about Say It Isn't So,the latest flatulent noisemaker from the Farrelly Brothers' gross-out comedy factory, is that late in the movie, Chris Klein punches a cow from behind and finds his arm stuck inside.

Mr. Oldman and Mr. Ford are the only actors in the film, directed by Robert Luketic (“Legally Blonde”), skillful enough to navigate the yards of jargon-packed boilerplate in Jason Hall and Barry L. Levy’s thudding screenplay.

One long, 1980s-style inspirational cliche.

The screenplay is so haphazardly constructed that when the movie seems to be ending, it refuels with preposterous new developments.

This misty-eyed Southern nostalgia piece, in treading the line between sappy and sanguine, winds up mired in tear-drenched quicksand.

Turns into a meticulously choreographed bang-by-the-numbers action fantasy that I would accuse of peddling evil if the film weren't so dumb and incoherent.

An incoherent mess.

A movie that knows its audience. Its underlying philosophy might be: why try harder when this is all they expect?

Despite its occasional flashes of brilliance (every Rudolph film has them), this unsavory stew never comes to a boil.

This disjointed, desperately whimsical film is simply not funny: not for a minute.

This portrait of 20-something gay men and their straight friends is a joyless exploration of middle-class deadbeats (with the exception of Ephram) lost in a torpid funk of low self-regard. Because they’'e not rich, there is no sleazy zing of "Less Than Zero"-worthy glamor.

Sadly, Mr. Smith has made a movie so false and blatantly icky that it's the film equivalent of making goo-goo noises and chucking a baby under the chin for 103 minutes. At the end, all you're left with is drool and a mountain of baby powder.

Ms. Paltrow is not the only star in the film who tries gamely to churn this cinematic glass of diluted skim milk into something resembling butter.

A shrunken, cowardly movie in deep denial of its true nature, which is far uglier than it is ever willing to admit.

This female revenge comedy is so dumb, lazy, clumsily assembled and unoriginal, it could crush any actor forced to execute its leaden slapstick gags and mouth its crude, humorless dialogue.

Every truly awful movie epic has a point of no return, a moment when the accumulated bad lines and bogus sentimentality become so cloying that the best defense against a mounting queasiness is an awed amusement. The Postman, offers a new opportunity for levity every few minutes after its first hour.

It is painful to watch an actor as skillful as Mr. Dorff reduced to delivering flat repetitive dialogue that would make any actor look foolish.

Barely watchable.

The movie is so witless and confused in tone that its seedy racetrack clientele only emerge as dim, inarticulate cartoons.

Spike Lee carries his political exasperation beyond outrage into chaos. The carelessness with which he hurls his feelings about hot-button topics onto the screen is the filmmaking equivalent of last-ditch marketing: grab everything in sight, roll it up into a big messy mud ball, and hurl it against the wall, hoping that something sticks.

The only reason I can think of to watch Vivi Friedman's flat, satirical farce The Family Tree - and it's not a good enough reason - is the opportunity to play a game of spot the semi-star.

This stomach-turning exercise in gratuitous sadism -- wears a nasty smirk on its face right down to its end title comment, "Gotcha."

One of the worst films to sport the label “romantic comedy.”

A confusedly misconceived hybrid of interracial buddy comedy and imitation Marx Brothers farce.

Teeters from a noisy sitcom (only one step removed from "The Beverly Hillbillies") to brickbat satire until it collapses in a pool of redemptive mush.

Did I mention that Upside Down is simply awful?

The range of Ms. Locklear's lobotomized acting runs from mild irritation to mild melancholy, expressed without expression.

If there is any humor to be gleaned from this concept, it is nowhere to be found in a movie so shoddily made that there is little continuity between scenes and not a laugh or even a titter.

You might reasonably assume that any movie starring Mr. Rourke and Mr. Murray would have to have something to recommend it. But aside from a haunting musical interlude, in which Mr. Rourke, with pathetic ineptitude, mimes playing a trumpet, Passion Play is barely palatable.

A vile, witless sex comedy.

As the jaundiced, disjointed, drug-infested story heads toward its dismal conclusion, its reputable actors vainly struggle to infuse the goings-on with a deadpan psychotic zaniness. But even when viewed sideways, Perception is not funny; it's hardly anything at all.

The movie's computer animation is so cut-rate and its direction (by Joe Chappelle) so slack that the attacks are virtually terror-free.

The movie’s most disturbing aspect, of which the filmmakers could not have been unaware, is the physical resemblance between Mr. Elba and Ms. Larter to O. J. and Nicole Brown Simpson. It lends Obsessed a distasteful taint of exploitation.

Beneath its studiedly ugly surface, this bargain-basement answer to "Thelma and Louise" is as loathsome as any mindless, blood-drenched Hollywood action-adventure yarn.

Rarely has a film exhibited a bigger disconnect between urban realism and utter ludicrousness.

Once Ice-T sticks his mug in the window of the couple's BMW and begins haranguing the wife in bad stage dialogue, all credibility flies out the window.

The Hangover Part III, directed by Todd Phillips from a screenplay he wrote with Craig Mazin, is a dull, lazy walkthrough that along with "The Big Wedding" has a claim to be the year's worst star-driven movie.

Might have generated a laugh or two had it not forced the actors into uncomfortable extremes of caricature.

As this chaotic barrage of muscle flexing, swordplay, fireballs, crude digital effects and comic-book quips hurls itself off the screen, it's like having several garbage cans clogged with stale pizza, lukewarm cola, soggy French fries and greasy, ketchup-stained napkins emptied over your head.

The only heat that rises from the movie is mechanical.

Easily the most inept episode of the Halloween series, The Curse of Michael Myers, which opened yesterday, is so busy cramming half-baked supernatural rigmarole into its formula that it has forgotten how to be suspenseful.

This catastrophe of a movie zigzags drunkenly between action-adventure and surreal comedy with some magical realism slopped over it like ketchup.

What Horrible Bosses 2 lacks in nasty repartee, it tries to make up for in poorly staged comedy chases and break-ins. It is the Hollywood equivalent of a rambunctious little boy pointing to the toilet and squealing, “Mommy, look what I made!”

When a sheriff's deputy (Carla Gugino) visits the house, I Melt With You turns into a ludicrous, cheap horror thriller that sheds any claims to integrity. By the end, you feel nothing, not even contempt.

What sets this syrupy swatch of kitsch apart from other films peddling a dogmatic religious agenda is the serious money that obviously went into it.

To say that Justin Zackham’s farce The Big Wedding takes the low road doesn’t begin to do justice to the sheer awfulness of this star-stuffed, potty-mouthed fiasco.

What does it add up to? Um ... I have no idea and don’t really care. Just because the characters waste their time doesn’t mean you should waste yours watching them circle the drain.

So lazy and slipshod it confuses the mere flashing of kinky soft-core imagery with naughty fun.

The moment the movie loses its lighthearted spirit is the moment it loses touch with reality

Although the concept seems promising enough, it is undone by disastrous casting decisions and an utter lack of ensemble unity.

This clumsy, poorly written action thriller is such a complete catastrophe that you wonder how actors with the stature of Mr. Hopkins and Mr. Pacino were bamboozled into appearing in it.

A film that desperately wants to be a music video circa 1983.

Why Mr. Foxx, who was so impressive in "Any Given Sunday," chose to make a movie so boring and idiotic that it barely meets minimal standards of lowest- common-denominator entertainment.

The best and maybe the only use to be made of the catastrophic screen biography Modigliani is to serve as a textbook outline of how not to film the life of a legendary artist.

It is the kind of film that only a certain breed of cinematic cultist could tolerate. Its grade-school-level acting, for instance, is so rudimentary that it makes the cast of "The Blair Witch Project" (which Ice From the Sun seems to be consciously parodying at times) appear Stanislavskian.

The queasiness produced by this sentimental weepie builds into a wave of nausea during its interminable finale.

A preposterous, prurient whodunit.

Ludicrous, impenetrable and headache-inducing.

More than sad, it's slightly sickening to consider the technology, talent and know-how squandered on Hostage, a pile of blood-soaked toxic waste dumped onto the screen in an attempt to salvage Bruce Willis's fading career as an action hero.

It is not a compliment to suggest that a demonically possessed piece of machinery embarked on a bloodthirsty rampage has more personality than most of the flesh-and-blood characters in The Mangler, a horror movie based on a Stephen King story.

This strident exposé may gladden the hearts of some anti-’60s conservatives, but it is a shapeless mess steeped in prurience. Its grain of truthfulness, however, is just enough to leave you unsettled in the pit of your stomach.

The movie... hasn't the foggiest notion whether it's a soap opera or a horror film, and wanders around in a generic fog.

An excruciating demonstration of the unsalvageability of a movie saddled with an amateurish screenplay.

Bottom-feeding monstrosity of a comedy.

With its red lighting and Hades-like smoke and fog, the lurid look of The Big Bang suggests a tacky disco inferno. I have a mental picture of the film's creators, stoned out of their minds on who knows what, cackling crazily as they outline a movie that would have more appropriately been titled "The Big Goof."

There is not a laugh to be found in this rancid, misogynistic revenge comedy.

Ms. Ryan's lean, eagle-eyed golden girl is enough to curdle milk.

So inept on every level, you wonder why the distributor didn't release it straight to video, or better, toss it directly into the trash.

It's a little sad to see actors of the quality of Christopher Plummer and Jonny Lee Miller struggling straight- faced to dignify this sewage.

Incoherent mess of a film.

The Singing Forest was written and directed by Jorge Ameer, whose film "Strippers" opened three years ago and remained the single worst movie I had ever reviewed -- until now.

No doubt there are those who will deem Simon Birch ''heartwarming.'' It is exactly the kind of movie that has given that hackneyed superlative a bad name.

Thoroughly incoherent... A dreary fizzle. [12 Jan 1996, p.C12]

Even by the standards of its bottom-feeding genre, Dirty Love clings to the gutter like a rat in garbage.

For all the cinematic crimes against him, there has been no book-to-screen translation of his work quite as atrocious as Hemingway's Garden of Eden.

A convoluted, hysterical mess of a movie with grandiose spiritual airs and not a drop of humor.

This imbecilic, mean-spirited farce, which sneers at adults, leaves you wondering: where are the Three Stooges when we really need them?

Putrid comic stew.

Cheesy, amateurish film.

It doesn't get worse than Grown Ups, Adam Sandler's sloppy entry into this year's man-child-comedy sweepstakes. Lazy, mean-spirited, incoherent, infantile and, above all, witless.