Steven Rea

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

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

Profoundly knuckleheaded.

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.

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.

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

No one is getting at anything in The Strangers, except the cheapest, ugliest kind of sadistic titillation.

This is no "Raging Bull."

About as not-funny as a comedy can get.

The whole affair has a painfully self-conscious, self-referential air. Jokes land with a thud, and so, alas, does Rocky, who seems to have forgotten how to fly.

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

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

Icky, incoherent thriller.

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.

The contrast to Ramis' last picture, the inspired Groundhog Day, is marked. [12 Apr 1995, p.F03]

Feels stagy, stiff and entirely unnecessary.

Sitting in the theater, watching Knight of Cups, you hear an incredible amount of thought-balloon babble, but you don't hear anything approaching the sublime.

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]

A fairly dreadful melodrama drenched in self-pity.

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

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.

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

The violence is plenty, and pointless.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

Sgt. Bilko, from the late, great Phil Silvers sitcom about an incorrigible con artist scamming the daylights out of the U.S. Army, has been turned into a not-very-funny film vehicle, just as The Flintstones was transformed into a not-very-funny film vehicle, and The Beverly Hillbillies, and Dragnet before them. [29 Mar 1996, p.05]

Apocalyptically awful romantic comedy.

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.

Essentially a series of walking character sketches. The storytelling is slack and lackluster, the cliches rampant.

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

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.

An unfortunate collision of earnest coming-of-age cliches and off-key acting, Evergreen almost, and certainly unintentionally, presents itself as parody.

If the moral of Click is a stop-and-smell-the-roses bromide about how family comes first, the real message of this sappy, potty-mouthed seriocomedy is that a steady diet of Drakes and Hostesses will do you no good.

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

Completely unappealing people.

Entertainingly goofy for about 30 minutes. And then, for the next two hours-plus, it's agony.

With the raunch quotient cranked up several notches, the sequel is calculated, cynical and, worse, not funny.

The Wolfman feels like a film reedited and reworked so many times it has lost all narrative rhythm and suspense.

This tale of a white mother's kid gone missing in a black New Jersey neighborhood - and the tensions and news media attention that ensue - is pretty much pure jive.

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

How'd this thing get made?

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.

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.

Laughably bad adaptation of a Guy de Maupassant novel.

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

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

Drawing comparisons to "The Wire" may be unfair, but taken on its own, this anemic vehicle for Ice Cube and Tracy Morgan to mug and jive through is just weak, weak stuff.

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

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

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

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.

There's nothing remotely fantastic about this Fantastic Four.

A pity-party of Hollywood narcissism.

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.

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

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

What a mess.

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

What a mess.

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

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

An overblown hodgepodge of volcano-baked desertscapes, Egyptoid-gone-baroque architecture, and gladiator-geared storm troopers with goofy headpieces, The Chronicles of Riddick bears no resemblance to the movie that spawned its namesake.

I nodded off watching Just Visiting.

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.

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?

Williams, going full throttle as the desperate deposed kiddie icon Rainbow Ralph, is, well, simply exhausting.

A forced-march comedy.

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

An astoundingly senseless 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.

How to count the ways that Be Cool isn't? For one thing, it looks terrible: grainy, ill-lit, edited with blunt, rusty shears.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

"The Godfather" without Brando, "GoodFellas" without Scorsese, "The Sopranos" without Gandolfini - 10th & Wolf is all that, and less.

8 1/2 Women is a collage-y, self-reflexive sort of film that is designed to shock but more often just annoys.

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

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.

Painfully cute drama.

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

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

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."

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.

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

Stay home and watch Friends. It's cheaper, funnier and mercifully shorter. [8 March 1996, p.08]

Murderously unfunny.

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

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