Steven Rea

Criminal, with its criminally lazy title, is mostly Costner's to growl and scowl his way through.

One of those what-were-they-thinking projects in which good talent is on very bad display.

Chloe & Theo is a mess of a message movie, simplistic, sappy, silly.

Unrelentingly grim, plodding, and close-to-incoherent adaptation of Tom Rob Smith's best-selling mystery.

Serena is one long eye-roll of calamities and corn.

If Matthew Weiner's Are You Here is good for anything, it's to illustrate how the themes and conflicts he has worked out with such depth and dexterity in all these seasons of "Mad Men" can go terribly amiss with the wrong actors, wrong backdrop, wrong tone, wrong time.

Nicely timed to cash in on the Ebola panic, Cabin Fever: Patient Zero - the prequel to the gross-out franchise about a lethal flesh-eating virus and its party-hardy victims - isn't going to do much for the tourism trade in the Dominican Republic.

This movie feels like it has a million jokes, and every single one arrives with a lethal thud.

Director Rob Meltzer, who made the kind-of-amusing meta short "I Am Stamos," directs things in shameless, let's-get-this-thing-over-with style, throwing in some gratuitous topless (female) nudity and allowing the usually amusing Kristen Schaal to let loose with a barrage of potty-mouthisms.

This Romeo and Juliet is hard to take seriously - and simply hard to take.

The sort of generic crime thriller - stick-figure characters, pointless muddle of plot, people entering and exiting SUVs and Lear jets with a sense of urgency - that feels like it could drag on forever, and drag us down into a purgatory of stupefaction with it.

In the annals of sequeldom, Kick-Ass 2 has to be one of the lamest follow-ups ever.

The film has been directed in a murky, rhythmless fashion by Niels Arden Oplev.

The violence is plenty, and pointless.

Hobbled by a laughably bad script and a uniformly uncharismatic cast.

Laughably bad adaptation of a Guy de Maupassant novel.

As far as director Nicole Kassell and writer Gren Wells are concerned, the C in Big C must stand for cute. The film reaches into the pits of moviegoing hell when it finds Marley on a celestial white couch, ringed in billowing white curtains, communing with God. And God is embodied by Whoopi Goldberg.

A lazy assemblage of sketch-comedy raunch, mock-schlock TV ads, and ideas that even the writers of "Mall Cop" and "Observe and Report" would have tossed.

The greatest lacrosse movie of the 21st century - and, unless I'm mistaken, the only lacrosse movie of the 21st century.

This heavy-handed muddle of a cop thriller is just impossibly bad.

An astoundingly senseless thriller.

Completely unappealing people.

Hands-down the most nightmarishly awful film of the year.

Beastly offers a thoroughly dopey reread of the "Beauty and the Beast" fairy tale.

Nostalgia for the '80s - big hair, Madonna, cocaine, big hair, Duran Duran, more cocaine - is all well and good. Unless it's practiced with the charmless ineptitude of Take Me Home Tonight.

What distinguishes The Dilemma in this genre is its resounding unfunnyness, its emotional dishonesty, and the general unlikability of its cast of characters.

Cage appears as a knight of the Crusades, slogging across the continents, slaying infidels and unbelievers and anyone else who gets in his way. There isn't a minute when it looks like he's having fun.

Murderously unfunny.

Full of kerplunkingly unfunny jokes and ex-"Saturday Night Live" cast members turning up to do shtick.

A mix of "Alice in Wonderland" and William S. Burroughs, "Psycho" and the psychotic. It's pretty much a squirmy experience all around.

I'll be darned if I can think of a more excruciating, ponderous, remarkably unfunny and inert cinemagoing experience to come down the pike in ages.

Totally lame.

Envy makes a pretty entertaining three-minute trailer. If only they'd left it at that.

The cast, especially The Game, does a fairly good job with this meager material, but it's like trying to make chateaubriand out of Spam.

Somnambulistic pacing, kerplunkingly unfunny jokes, and mugging thespians making fools of themselves. Truly torturous spectacle.

A riotously awful biopic rife with stereotypes and boxing movie cliches, Against the Ropes represents -- among other things -- a woeful turn in its star's career.

This startlingly lame tale about a young upstart challenging a veteran leader of the pack doesn't update the genre, it simply recasts it.

Plodding and virtually plotless (employee gets caught in maw of machine, blood squirts, boss tells everyone to get back to work, employee gets caught in maw of machine...), The Mangler might have been amusing if it had been played for laughs. Instead, this dreary yarn is hardly played for anything. [6 Mar 1995, p.D02]

Has to be one of the nuttiest, sappiest (literally), most unintentionally hilarious spectacles to come down the time-travel turnpike in eons.

Tobey Maguire, terribly miscast and squeaky (that voice - it belongs to a kid!).

Guy Ritchie's Revolver premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival two years ago September. That's 26 months on a shelf somewhere, depriving moviegoers the thrill of jaw-droppingly awful Ray Liotta line readings, of bloody shoot-outs, bags of money, cutaways to frosty babes sucking on lollipops, and even a bit of violent anime.

Maybe if there was something going with the dialogue - snappy Chandlerisms, say, or even just sentences that made sense - the fussy digital artifice of The Spirit wouldn't seem so, well, dispiriting.

Profoundly knuckleheaded.

Lewd, crude, blessedly brief.

How'd this thing get made?

Uptown Girls gives the impression that everyone behind the camera just threw up their hands in helpless resignation.

A pity-party of Hollywood narcissism.

Art-directed within an inch of its life, Sleuth has the smirky gloss of a project that everyone involved with thinks is terribly good, and terribly clever. These people - Branagh, Pinter, Law and the usually great Caine (even in bad stuff) - are laboring under an epic misconception. Sleuth is just terrible.

Cross "Get Shorty" with "State and Main" - Hollywood hustlers, colorful crooks, crafty poseurs, and a production crew on location - and you have the stuff of The Last Shot. One other thing: eliminate anything funny.

Basic Instinct 2 is supposed to help Stone show it's possible for a woman to be sexy in her late 40s. But it's Rampling - who is 60 - who comes off as the more provocative and alluring. Stone's purring, snarling, bedroom kink is embarrassing.

A slasher spoof of sorts, except that unlike the "Scream" pics, scant effort seems to have gone into the spoofing aspect of the story.

It's too gauzy, and - with its Ron Bass script - too goopy by half.

I nodded off watching Just Visiting.

Maybe, you think, there is something daring and brilliant going on here: an excursion into the darkest territories of the human soul. But no. In the end -- or the beginning -- there is no point to all this. Or at least not a point worth making, and making us watch.

About as not-funny as a comedy can get.

Gets stupider as it moves along. By the end, you just don't care whether that cold-hearted snake Petrovich (that would be Reno) gets his comeuppance. Just bring on the Battle Bots, please!

While this cheesy, heavy-metal melange of horror, space hooey and cowboy shoot-'em-ups isn't exactly dull, it isn't anything to write home about either.

By the end of the film's two-hour stream of Be-Here-Now-isms, anyone left in the audience will be wanting to yell, "Put a sock in it!" to old Soc.

The movie heads in a disastrous direction: namely, a police academy ceremony... This lets-wrap-this-thing-up moment sucks the life and the honesty out of an otherwise compelling portrait of tainted lawmen, tainted law.

Burns' writing style is full of tepid Woodyisms about sex and romance, with Allen's Jewish guilt supplanted by the Christian variety. [23 Aug 1996, p.03]

What a mess.

Ostensibly a comedy, and a feeble and innocuous one at that, Post Grad is one of those what-were-they-thinking?

Domino is less a movie than a hyperkinetic slide show - presented during a nuclear attack.

A stagy, arty, and uncompelling account of the Welsh writer and his menage-y relations.

Reaches breathtaking lows of incoherence, sexism, racial stereotyping, and -- did I say incoherence?

An unintentional high-tech hoot.

Feels stagy, stiff and entirely unnecessary.

A bubble-brained comedy with as much bearing on the real world as a Pokemon cartoon.

This is no "Raging Bull."

What a mess.

88 Minutes proves itself to be a maddeningly mediocre, ineptly manipulative "real-time" thriller.

Connoisseurs of giant, gnarled chunks of charred flesh, rejoice! There's plenty of it -- or stuff resembling it -- in the slasher-fest convergence of two killer franchises.

Like a grade-school version of an Indiana Jones adventure.

Hoffman's turn as the drag queen has its endearing and comically catty moments, but Flawless' utter phoniness subsumes all efforts at honest acting.

Feels like it's been homogenized and Hollywoodized to death.

Laughably predictable and lamentably unfunny, Laws of Attraction practically creaks from the effort exerted by its cast, straining to bring snap and panache to a hackneyed exercise. Sno Ball, anyone?

This low-budget, high-gore sequel can be effectively frightening at times, and just plain boring, too. The suspense builds, the blood gushes, the momentum dissipates. It's an unsatisfying mix.

Painfully cute drama.

Instead of paying homage to these creepy creatures of bygone Hollywood, Sommers seems to be unwittingly lampooning them. The first few minutes of Van Helsing, shot in black and white, look like outtakes from Mel Brooks' gagfest "Young Frankenstein."

Another high school vixen movie, this one with a potty mouth (the vixen) and pretensions of social commentary (the movie), Pretty Persuasion brings to mind a number of other titles, all better.

Duplex's tenant-from-hell scenario is as predictable as it is tedious -- a tinny, unsatisfying throwaway farce.

The film quickly turns unintentionally, and unrelentingly, awkward.

The thing about stoner comedy is that, well, it helps to be stoned.

It doesn't help any that Wahlberg, looking perpetually dumbstruck, is among the clunkiest line-readers working in movies today.

A forced-march comedy.

Affleck, for his part, behaves as if a Zero from "Pearl Harbor" dropped one too close to his noggin. He looks permanently shell-shocked.

A syrup-thick New Age ghost story of the same sappy stripe and mawkishness as another Costner foray, "Message in a Bottle."

Trapped between edgy art flick and exploitation psychothriller, The Quiet manages to be neither, and manages to be pretty awful in the bargain.

The kind of glossy, Hollywood-forged waste of time that would depress even the most happily lackadaisical retiree.

An embarassingly unfunny, stumblebum adaptation of Toby Young's memoir.

A flat-out cynical attempt to launch a new Lethal Weapon-like franchise.

Another tale of Tinseltown drugs, sex and excess - has transferred itself to the screen with mind-boggling, laugh-inciting horribleness.

Awesomely ridiculous thriller.

What Never Die Alone is is a hackneyed tale of vengeance set in the 'hood, teeming with stock characters, slo-mo gunplay, and rampant misogyny.

I'm ripping up my Lars Von Trier fan club card.

A mercifully fleet and lamentably uninteresting adaptation of the DC Comic about a war-weary Confederate soldier.

Often incomprehensible (a combination of jumpy editing and lots of thick British Isles accents) and hardly ever entertaining - even unintentionally.

A frighteningly unfunny comedy. [17 Feb 1995, p.05]