Ty Burr

Speaking as both a parent and a critic, I do believe I'd rather drive rusty railroad spikes through my eyes than have to sit through one more computer generated family film about talking animals. The bad news for Hollywood is that after seeing Barnyard my kids feel the same way.

Four Christmases is essentially "Meet the Parents" quadrupled.

The result is movie goulash: made with love, impossible to digest.

Family, sadly, is a plate of leftovers: a bland, baldly written melodrama about two longtime best friends and their messed-up families.

Meant to be an insider's tale, but it feels like it comes from the cinema of hangers-on.

The problem with the "Alien vs. Predator" series is that the humans keep getting in the way.

Despite exotic locations, epic cinematography, and much spectacular crash and bang, this "Mummy" feels like a threadbare toss-off.

2 1/2 hours of tumescence disguised as a motion picture.

A film of singularly boneheaded conceits, Butterfly is populated by, and appears to have been made by, stoned college dudes more hung up on oh-wow twists than the need to make sense.

Pain & Gain, a jokey but fatally tone-deaf true-crime caper, plays like “Fargo” for idiots.

Hobbled by its vaguely insulting comic-book version of the '60s and by a humorlessness that can only come from talented people convinced they're creating work for the ages.

At nearly two hours, Mirrors is overlong for a summer horror toss-off, and the movie's three or four false endings make it seem even more of a haul.

A bumptious splatter farce that manages to improve from awful to moderately engaging as its cast is winnowed down to the five guys themselves.

The cast is earnest and they almost convince us they’re doing important rather than self-important work.

The leads are all vaguely Protestant and all suspiciously chipper, yet this dopey farce somehow backs itself into cross-dressing, gender reversal, and gay camp while insisting that everything's in good, butch fun. [23 Feb 2007, p.D10]

Innocuous amusement for 5- to 8-year-olds and other people stuck in the anal stage of development.

Ramsay delivers an overdirected, conceptually obnoxious art film that's torture to sit through, listen to, and think about.

Ye bites off substantially more than he can chew.

A sociopolitical prankumentary in which the prank blows up in the filmmaker's face, exploding-cigar style.

This needless sequel amps the silliness to DEFCON-4 levels of frantic surrealism and overstuffs the running time with famous faces. It’s a pop quiz instead of a movie, and it’ll be dated by tomorrow morning.

The Take represents the downside of the new documentary renaissance.

Perhaps because Campbell is a purist at heart, My Name Is Bruce is as awful as anything he has done - a broadly silly gore comedy in which no gag is too cartoonish to be indulged in at least once and preferably three times.

Sure, go ahead and take the kids. But, for pity's sake, read them the book first.

Dumbed down, tarted up, and almost shockingly uninspired, it's the worst superhero movie since "Green Lantern."

Jarmusch has come up with a dud.

Settles for the cliches of American suspense films, right down to an ending that leaves the door open to a possible sequel.

Wilde is stuck with the harder job of simultaneously playing sexy, innocent, conniving, and heartsore, and the effort appears to give her a headache. "This is kind of like an old movie," Liza says to Jay in one scene. Lady, don't you wish.

Takers might have made a perfectly decent little B heist movie, but someone had to go and forget to give the cameraman his Ritalin.