Ty Burr

So unfocused is Shonda Rhimes's screenplay and so flabby is Marshall's direction.

We haven't had a good Frankenstein, Dracula, or Wolf Man movie in a long time, so here's one where the whole gang shows up. One catch: It's not good.

Silly, obvious, clumsy, and just gruesome enough to keep jaded genre fans from angrily throwing popcorn at the screen.

In Undead, sadly, rigor mortis has set in.

Indeed a rip-off - a rehash of Hong Kong superstar Chow's greatest celluloid moments with an overlay of Hollywood action cliches, youth-flick silliness, and ah-so stereotypes.

Factory Girl is not, strictly speaking, a bad movie. It's something worse: an irredeemably banal drama about some of the most protean, contradictory creative forces of the 1960s.

Such a meticulously wrought piece of hokum that it's both easy to admire and impossible to warm up to.

There are two problems with A Good Day to Die Hard: It’s terribly filmed and nothing in it makes any sense.

Stupid, sadistic, misogynistic, confusing, and more than a little ridiculous. Here’s the thing, though: It keeps you watching, if only to see how tortured the plot or characters are going to get. I’m not sure that “entertainingly awful” is a recommendation, but the shoe fits.

It’s clear what MacFarlane is shooting for — nothing less than the chance to be both the Bob Hope and the Mel Brooks of his generation. Be careful what you wish for.

Unfortunately, Churchill the movie is simply dreadful, a stiff, melodramatic “Great Man” travesty that gets both the larger history and the details wrong while encouraging its star’s most overwrought excesses. What Cox serves in this movie is ham, poorly sliced.

In Made of Honor, the leads are beautiful and everyone else is a freak. So where does that leave us?

Its swooping 3-D visuals let fans briefly feel they can touch a group that barely exists behind a wall of beefy security men.

It all might wash in a Johnny Weissmuller “Tarzan” movie from the 1940s. It no longer suffices today. Filmmakers, it’s time to pack up Greystoke Manor. Tarzan is dead.

The Gospel of John is to "The Passion of the Christ" as tap water is to parboiled sacramental wine.

The upshot is that Blair Witch comes to the party very late and very tired, and it doesn’t improve from there.

If not better, a Part II always has to be bigger. In the case of The Hangover Part II, that means raunchier, nastier, darker. It also means much more predictable, which is ruinous.

“Baby” is to Helen Fielding’s original 1996 novel and its 2001 movie adaptation what “Sex and the City 2” was to the HBO series — a cause not for celebration but overdue burial.

Venom, the movie, is a reptilian Marvel mishmash whose touch saps the life force of almost everyone in it.

Dreadful.

A chick flick that makes its chick characters - and by extension its chick audience - look like hateful, backward toddlers, and there is something wrong with that.

McAvoy’s performance is a deep, deep shade of gonzo and by far the most enjoyable aspect of Victor Frankenstein — you don’t often see over-acting this enthusiastic or this flecked with spittle.

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]

When Laura Linney turns up about an hour into The Hottest State, you can see the movie that might have been.

Aliens in the Attic is conveyor-belt family product, an action/adventure/sci-fi/comedy made from the bland corporate DNA of Nickelodeon and the Disney Channel. It appears designed for families who never leave the mall.

Taken as a whole, The Sunlit Night is fey and inconclusive, and whether something of more substance got cut in the post-Sundance re-edit or was never there to begin with is at this point moot. The movie’s up a most beautiful creek without a paddle.

As for the movie itself, it's tolerable.

The larger problem is that the central duo is just plain dull.

Equilibrium just happens to be a really bad comic book.

Diary of a Wimpy Kid the movie returns Kinney's tale to live-action reality, and the party's over.

For a movie that's sexist, racist, and possibly the most deeply closeted gay love story to be released this year, After the Sunset is reasonably entertaining.

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

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

Be warned, though: This is the multiplex equivalent of ADD.

Aloha is as generic as its title. The islands exist solely as an exotic backdrop for the pretty Hollywood haoles to play in. Business as usual, and I never thought I’d say that about a Cameron Crowe movie.

A sludgy action thriller with an out-of-shape star, Blood and Money doesn’t have a lot going for it other than its setting: the uncharted north Maine woods in the dead of winter.

The movie must be bad, right? Worse, it’s a bore.

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.

There have been plenty of movies adapted from video games before, but Hitman may be the first one that actually feels like a computer wrote and directed it.

Pureed, predictable conflation of ''Alien'' and ''Titanic'' and ''The Shining.''

Faced with a limited location and concept, Renfroe points his camera everywhere: The movie's seriously overshot, never settling for one angle when five would do.

A movie about ordinary American heroes that stars ordinary American heroes. About 15 minutes of the film concerns the actual heroics. The rest is . . . ordinary.

Hopefully the last, of the fake trailer spinoffs of 2007's "Grindhouse." It makes last year's "Machete" look like "The King's Speech."

The Intern is bizarrely retrograde, implying that every working woman only needs a cuddly Yoda daddy to make it in the world of business. It’s soft in the heart — and soft in the head.

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

Nothing in How to Lose Friends feels fresh or on target.

Writer-director Liz W. Garcia depicts Leigh’s quandary with a heavy hand that gets heavier as the movie goes on, ending with one of those portentous freeze-frames that worked in “The 400 Blows” and never since.

The Covenant is dopey, formulaic stuff for the Friday night fright crowd. Worse for them, it's never remotely scary.

What it is, distressingly, is a mess - a ragbag of promising ideas and failed narrative, of good acting and plain old bad filmmaking.

Starts off mildly ridiculous, ascends to the full-blown ludicrous, and finally sails boldly off the edge of the absolutely preposterous.

Cherry is three movies in one, none of them fresh, all of them overlong.

Four Christmases is essentially "Meet the Parents" quadrupled.

So this is the little movie that caused the big fuss. And little it is, a dopey bro-com that piddles along delivering mild laughs until it turns overly, unamusingly bloody in the climactic scenes.

When it’s time for the hot sex scene between Timberlake’s ambitious Richie Furst and Rebecca (Gemma Arterton), his boss’s luscious second-in-command, the encounter is as charmless and chemistry-free as the wooden banter that has led up to it. I’ve had dentist’s appointments that were sexier.

The producers of Ella Enchanted probably assume, correctly, that many more kids haven't read the book than have, and they're out to give that audience a slick, shallow good time.

It achieves something previously thought impossible: It renders Billy Bob Thornton unfunny.

It's bigger, noisier, shinier, and dumber, and it has no earthly reason to exist.

Hirschbiegel and Watts don’t have the nerve for camp. Even a scene of a rejected Diana back at Kensington, forlornly playing Bach at her piano while mascara streams down her face, is played gloomily straight.

A woozy, wheezy impressionistic take on a woman’s nervous breakdown that aspires to the avant-garde but plays like a bad head-trip movie from the late 1960s. It’s dreadful. Worse, it’s not quite bad enough to be much fun.

The problem is that both Philippa Goslett's script and Paul Morrison's direction lack the stylistic craziness - the sense of real, lunatic danger - a project like this desperately needs.

A bad dopey Will Ferrell comedy – overlong, underwritten, as strained as its title, and running on schtick and storylines that are practically rims.

A glorious disaster.

She has been made lovable -- and a Vanity Fair with a lovable Becky Sharp has no reason to exist. It's as if Shakespeare had put Hamlet on Prozac: What's the point?

Has a welcome humor but only in theory, and theory, chilly and self-involved, is where this filmmaker seems most at home. Like its bio-digital sirens, the movie never quite comes alive.

Watching this movie in 3-D is very much like sticking one's head in a blender and hitting "pulse."

It's a working illustration of what differentiates movie stars from TV stars. When we buy a ticket for a George Clooney movie, it's because we want to see George Clooney (or Emma Stone or Tom Hanks or whomever). The real stars of "Glee," on the other hand, are the characters, not the actors.

Is there a statute of limitations for how many good actors can be wasted in a bad movie?

The ugly duckling of Nickelodeon's after-bath lineup. That's its strength.

Even the gunplay, of which there is plenty, feels secondhand.

The movie's primary pleasure is Hopkins, who manages to take the role of Father Lucas seriously without being serious about it at all.

A new movie based on Roth’s 1997 novel “American Pastoral” offers proof yet again that this writer’s great literary gifts are almost impossible to translate to the screen. Roth is a protean American inner voice. The movies, sad to say, remain better at exteriors.

Imagine some very smart people setting out to make a very naughty action film and shooting themselves in the foot. Voila: Crank: High Voltage.

The director deserves admiration for sticking to her guns, but here's a heretical notion: Maybe the producer's cut would have been a better movie. This version may be too late, but it's also too little, and that's what hurts.

Truly, there is nothing the woman (Isabelle Huppert) can't do - except save "Promise'' from the valley of the shadow of bad French movie pretensions.

The result is a movie that's both clever and stupid - an interesting feat.

If you're up for a relentlessly overripe melodrama that takes place in movie-Europe as opposed to the real thing (the Parisian streetwalkers in berets are a good tip-off), by all means catch Head in the Clouds.

Williams gives a performance that's honest and carefully wrought but on some level still a stunt. All that courtliness is wearing him out, and it's wearing us out too.

A laughably inept series of adolescent poses trying to pass itself off as a movie.

Pure Saturday matinee kiddie fodder and this close to going straight to DVD.

A comedy that can’t even admit to its own overwhelming sense of disgust.

Ye bites off substantially more than he can chew.

A blandly filmed and subtext-heavy talkathon that wastes a game cast on a group of characters about whom it's almost impossible to care. If this were a cocktail party, you'd be back home with a good book already.

Short, cheap, weird, and passably diverting.

It's a solid short film stretched to Silly Putty thinness.

The film pulls off the remarkable feat of immersing a viewer in their world without providing any insights whatsoever.

Worst of all, the movie's simply not very shocking. Madonna has made a career out of toying with image and ego, but this is a vanity project in the smallest sense possible.

The producers - Fox Films and the usually reliable Walden Media - have tried to gin up the story for multiplex audiences. They've succeeded in making a movie for no audience at all.

Both writer and director are men, which perhaps explains why much of the talk in Chick Fight about female empowerment and channeling one’s womanly rage comes off as lip service on the way to the next beat-down or snuggle-up.

Too many cliches and not enough energy have come along for the ride.

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.

One aches to think what the great "Looney Tunes" directors could have done with this material.

Earnest and predictable, Crossover deserves more than the horselaughs that will probably greet it in theaters -- but not a lot more. The movie is harmless, which is both its strength and its weakness.

How's the movie? Technologically incredible, aesthetically pretty hideous, and narratively lumpy: Kids who aren't cynics (i.e., 9 and under) will roll with it.

This is a story that needs to be told, but McKay turns out to be precisely the wrong man to tell it. By comparison, Oliver Stone is a model of sober restraint.

RV has teeth -- more teeth than the last few Steve Martin films, anyway -- but it's terrified to bite down, knowing that the paying audience would feel it more than anyone.

The tumultuous emotional, sexual, and literary relationship between Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West would make a fascinating movie — it’s a shame that Vita & Virginia isn’t it.

The Last of Robin Hood plays like a laboratory control experiment gone wrong: What would happen if you made a movie with a great cast and terrible everything else?

I don't know if I've ever seen a movie as spectacularly tone-deaf as Hyde Park on Hudson.

Jackson has marched the modern fantasy-action epic into a thundering blind alley; the movie exhausts your senses without ever engaging your imagination.

Heading straight to streaming platform Paramount+ without the embarrassment of appearing in theaters first, the movie is both blissfully incoherent and weirdly generic, as if it had been assembled from the spare parts of other movies and glued together with stuntwork.

A pleasant, thin, hammerlocked movie about the pleasures of breaking free - it's the Cliff Notes version of anarchic classics like ''Bringing Up Baby'' or ''What's Up, Doc?'' Should you want to take the graduate course, you'll find those films at your video store.

The film’s so formulaic your 6-year-old will be ticking off the plot points as they lope by.

Ball's trying to be honest about adolescent coming of age, but since he's dishonest about everything else, the movie collapses in on itself.

It can’t be easy to turn the story of Hawaii’s last royal into a waxworks parade, but writer-director Marc Forby has pulled it off.

The Messengers is textbook, and the course it's teaching is HSL: Horror as a Second Language.

Handsomely shot and with a likable lead in Kuno Becker, it also suffers from a script so outrageously generic you could buy it at Costco.

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

Zwigoff's overdue for a turkey, in other words. Art School Confidential is it.

An overstuffed turkey that's entertaining for all the wrong reasons.

What’s interesting about Vacation is that it holds on to the original’s acrid cynicism for the first 40 minutes or so before turning predictable and bland. There are some real, nasty laughs to be had here, but they’re front-loaded.

The line between gross-out humor that's inspired and the kind that's witless is fine indeed, and Movie 43 obliterates it with poop and movie stars.

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

If the director had brought any toughness of perspective - or at least the self-lacerating humor of 2002's "Igby Goes Down,'' still the reigning champ of screwed-up-Manhattan-prepster films - we might be able to digest George's follies without cringing.

With a by-the-numbers screenplay by Tripper Clancy and assembly-line direction from Michael Dowse (see his 2013 hockey comedy, “Goon,” instead), Stuber is just the umpteenth iteration of the buddy-cop action drama pioneered by “48 Hrs.” almost 40 years ago.

We get it: Stand Up Guys is supposed to be cutesy criminal magic realism. But Stevens, an actor turned director, never finds the right vibe, and the movie's genuinely creepy misogyny sours the attempts to go sentimental in the final act.

Beware of stoner rock stars talking politics. No matter where you stand on the spectrum, the ecological/anticorporate idealism of Greendale is so vague as to be insulting to anyone past the backpack-and-Birkenstocks stage of life.

Slightly better than it should be. For Tucker Max, this possibly represents a triumph.

Powerful stuff, but unpowerfully told.

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

Teenage boys will be in heaven. All others: Check, please.

Year by the Sea is for audiences who don’t trust the shiftiness of nuance and craft, of messages that rise up from dramatic situations rather than being pasted on top of them, and who would prefer their life lessons stated loudly and for maximum applicability.

Jennifer’s Body falls into the dispiriting category of dumb movies made by smart people, in this case a glibly clever writer and a talented director who think a few wisecracks are enough to subvert the teen horror genre.

As it is, the movie only shudders to life when Dickie Pilager's onscreen.

While there are moments of eldritch atmosphere and a few pro forma jolts, nothing here justifies our attention, let alone the film's inexplicable R rating.

The new Carrie is a thoroughly dispiriting remake — “retread” is the appropriate word — that could have been directed by any proficient Hollywood hack.

A by-the-numbers B flick with a preposterous script and a good cast trying their best.

Reasonably painless if you've never seen a comedy about the travails of newlyweds.

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

The actor/walking disaster known as Charlie Sheen gives a perfectly credible performance here. It’s the rest of the film that tries your patience.

We’ve been here before and many, many times, and Monday, newly available on demand, doesn’t give us enough reason to be here again.

Harmless in the extreme and it'll mute your kids for nearly 80 minutes, but why not just treat the little yard apes to the real deal and take them to ''Spirited Away''?

The result is a revenge thriller that's too taken with its own ambience to actually thrill.

The dialogue is brightly self-conscious, and sometimes it clicks. Just as often it curdles into an entitled whining.

There are about 15 minutes of genuine, bust-a-gut comedy in Bringing Down the House, and, surprisingly, they belong to Steve Martin, who hasn't been funny on film in years.

The plot proceeds from the charming to the manipulative to the shameless to the demented in gentle steps that may lull some audiences the way a frog can be boiled to death by degrees.

One doesn’t really want to beat up on Girl Most Likely, because it means well and everyone in it appears to be having a good time. But so many things are wrong with the film, from a script that’s bright but never sharp to the editing that leaves scenes hanging flaccidly in the breeze.

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.

The dialogue is as subtle as a placard, the drama manages to be both cooked-up and dull, and the movie’s fear of brainwashed, tech-addicted millennials is so broad as to be unintentionally funny.

Bacon makes an appropriately detestable villain; unfortunately, he's the most interesting character here. As for Love, well, this puts her one career rung closer to ''Hollywood Squares.''

If anything, Burke & Hare is a slaphappy mess that recalls Landis's earliest work on 1970s midnight movies like "Schlock'' and "The Kentucky Fried Movie.''

The movie’s a somber affair, but if you see it in the right frame of mind, it’s the guilty-pleasure hoot of the season.

And that dog -- or, rather, that digitally enhanced replicant -- is just plain creepy.

This third go-round for the "Wolf Pack" doesn't bother to Xerox the original 2009 hit comedy, as 2011's witless "Hangover 2" did. Instead, the new movie heads in different, if utterly formulaic, directions. So it's not terrible. It's just bad.

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

The film is low budget but puffed with self-importance, and it offers proof that Hollywood filmmakers should probably steer clear of topics that actually matter.

The movie plays like a global-political farce made by people who’ve never left the Upper West Side.

If you’re already a subscriber to Apple TV Plus and have absolutely nothing else to do, “The Instigators” is worth a look.

At nearly 2½ hours, the movie is fun to watch until it’s not, and then it becomes a chore.

For a movie about the Great Communicator, “Reagan” communicates surprisingly little.

It isn’t even a disaster; that, at least, might be interesting.

Shyamalan the elder makes suspense-horror dramas that either give a half-baked idea a fully baked cinematic treatment or vice versa; Shyamalan the daughter’s first feature-length film is just half-baked all around.

Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F is the cinematic equivalent of trying on your prom suit from 1984. Maybe it still fits, but not in the places it used to, and if you try to moonwalk, you’ll probably get a hernia.

If you’ve been committed to the MCU over all these years and iterations, you may find the new movie an acceptable entry in a never-ending saga. I say it’s spinach, and I say the hell with it.

Tost can’t match the oddball inspiration of his influences, and the results simply feel forced.

You know how a pop song from a moment in your past can bring that moment back to life in colors, smells, memories and emotions? “The Greatest Hits” takes that idea and literalizes it right into the ground.

Carpool is affably stupid Saturday-matinee fare -- good for opiating the kids for a few hours -- but let's just say it's no Big Bully.

Hopper peppers the cast with his usual assortment of fringe players (Dean Stockwell, Crispin Glover, Seymour Cassell), but his own cameo as a horny salesman is an embarrassment, and the dreadful script mistakes cuss words for wit every step of the way.

Son of the Pink Panther isn’t an unwatchable mess like 1982’s Curse of the Pink Panther; it trots along quickly with series veterans like Herbert Lom adding needed class. But there’s a void at the center of this film about Inspector Clouseau’s long-lost son, and its name is Roberto Benigni. Where Peter Sellers’ Clouseau had a blissfully out-of-it officiousness, the Italian comedian’s sole shtick is to beam idiotically. He’s that ruinous oxymoron: an unsurprising clown.

Starts with savvy concepts (televised mind control and man’s reliance on robots, respectively) and quickly devolves into sour, overwritten diatribes.

Any good will the movie generates, though, is grated right back off by Black, whose obnoxiousness has lost whatever charm it once possessed.

Sanctimonious claptrap -- an inert pageant of waxen figures that fails completely as drama even as it insults the sensibilities of anyone not clinging to rosy memories of the slave-era South.

A stultifying drama based on the 2009 season of the Abilene High Eagles, Lights suffers from sermonizing dialogue, amateurish performances, and an ugly racial blind spot disguised as white savior paternalism.

''Health Inspector" hopes to do for Larry what ''Ace Ventura: Pet Detective" did for Jim Carrey, who in this context looks like Noel Coward.

By far the funniest part of Strange Wilderness is the trailer for "Harold & Kumar Escape From Guantanamo Bay" that's running before it.

The tone is almost willfully off-putting. The parts that are supposed to be cute could give you the creeps. The film is almost a Platonic ideal of how to take an emotionally transfixing real-life story and get it wrong.

The Women on the 6th Floor is delicate and sensitive and utter bollocks - a bourgeois wet dream made to soothe the souls and stir the loins of powerful men in midlife crisis. But some of us wish we could see this movie told from the maids' point of view.

The Take represents the downside of the new documentary renaissance.

Everything about the movie feels secondhand, including the wheezy plot about a treasure map and buried gold. The real problem, though, is plain old sequel-itis: Because the first story completed the narrative of these characters, the only reason to make a second film is money.

Kick-Ass 2 is a special kind of crap: the kind smart people make for audiences they think are stupid.

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.

There’s nothing wrong with a good, dumb comedy, but “Bride Hard” doesn’t even qualify as in-flight entertainment.

The saddest part is that "Deck" wastes four comic talents ranging from the near-genius (Matthew Broderick, Danny DeVito) to the inspired (Broadway star Kristin Chenoweth ) to the charming (Kristin Davis of "Sex and the City").

Irene in Time is the initial first-run feature to debut at the Stuart Street Playhouse, Boston’s newest art house cinema. Both the theater and its audiences deserve much better.

The accidental comedy sensation of the year to date.

Consider this the sequel to "Ernest in the Army " that the late Jim Varney never got around to making. It's not very good but at least it's not evil.

If you doubt that August is the boneyard for movies too poor to release in other months, here’s The Kitchen, an addled and actively unpleasant crime comedy-drama with a high-profile cast and a mean streak a mile wide. Based on a limited-edition comic book and completed in July 2018, the movie’s been sitting on the shelf until enough people are on vacation to not see it.

A wan, derivative entry in the torture-porn cycle.

The plot is a canvas on which to bludgeon the audience with action sequences that have been shot for maximum overstimulation.

Suburbicon is George Clooney’s sixth feature as a director and the latest spiral downward in terms of quality.

A black-dressing young intellectual of my acquaintance recently ascribed a "lazy generosity" to Garfield and his daily antics. If so, the movie gets the laziness but misses the generosity.

After "Gothika " and "Catwoman ," a viewer has to wonder: Why does this woman keep making thrillers if she can't bring herself to be thrilled?

Wonder Wheel, Allen’s new film, is one of the Very Bad Ones. Set in a post-WWII Coney Island that glows with the hues of popsicles at sunset, it’s a strained adultery melodrama that appears to have been written poorly on purpose, as a sour parody of 1950s theatrical clichés.

King Arthur: Legend of the Sword is stupid enough to send you back to the one movie that did the saga right by ripping it to shreds, 1975’s “Monty Python and the Holy Grail.”

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

Never quite as dumb as "Harold & Kumar," but it's nowhere near as smart, and that's what kills it.

A genre cheapie from its digital-video camerawork to its Casiotone soundtrack to its bland, buff cast, the movie is a cultural watershed in a dry gulch.

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

A sex comedy that appears to have been made by people who've never actually had sex.

This is a young filmmaker who so wants to make every shot freighted with import that he ends up robbing his film of importance.

Worse than junk, in fact. Beyond Borders so trivializes the plight of the world's displaced peoples that it becomes actively obnoxious.

The exact cinematic equivalent of a classic Bob Dylan song. It's also proof that what is towering genius in one medium can go insanely wrong in another.

Manages a fairly rare trick: It's a movie that's both deeply felt and completely phony.

''Love" doesn't have a plot so much as it has a concept, scribbled in crayon.

Eerily similar in its story line to "In the Cut," the much pasted Meg Ryan sex-and-death thriller that came out last year. Only it's worse.

You've seen dozens of movies like this on cable in the wee hours.

The Lovely Bones, then, is something special: A spectacular, cringe-inducing failure as both a book adaptation and a film.

You feel like you're not watching the end of the world but the end of a career.

Despite all that onscreen turgidness, Anatomy of Hell is itself so much a matter of the mind that it never rises above theory.

One could forgive a budget this threadbare, performances this amateurish, a plot this tortuous if the 3-D effects passed the cool test. Sadly, watching ''Adventures" is an experience akin to seeing the world through dung-colored glasses.

Grim, ridiculous, and dull.

No one on the screen bothers to commit to a character.

A miscast, underwritten, drably directed adaptation of a very popular novel, it's the feel-bad film of the summer and an almost perfect example of how not to turn a book into a movie.

Some documentaries are an embarrassment of riches. Salinger is merely an embarrassment.

You come away with only the memory of Christie, the film's perfect California blonde, lying insensate on the beach in the final ravages of AIDS - a potent and frightening image the rest of The Informers can't live up to.

To paraphrase the T-shirt, everyone here went to the Isle of Capri, and all we got was this lousy movie.

Maybe if Mapplethorpe hadn’t been commissioned by the Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation, it would have been a batter movie. As it is, this sour, undernourished biopic is a disappointment just shy of a disaster — a portrait of a boundary-destroying artist that stays well within the safe borders of convention.

Picture Timberlake in the booth recording his lines and you have the best joke in the movie. Everything else is actively painful, a frenetic, unfunny mix of action, romance, dud dialogue, and icky things popping out of the screen.

There's not much else for viewers to do but give themselves over to the whims of the bad-movie gods.

Like most family movies these days, "Alvin" is torn between the glitz that sells and the homilies that endure. It's a load of Ting Tang Wallet-Wallet Bling Blang.

Hess has made a classic rookie director mistake: Any spoof has to be at least as smart as the thing it’s spoofing, and this one’s twice as dumb.

The Ten is a virtually snicker-free exercise in audience pain. It's less a movie than an endurance test.

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 pox upon history and an insult to the 16th president of the United States. It's that, of course - actually, that's the point - but this joyless, deafening cinematic headache commits a different crime. It's a sin against entertainment.

"Prison isn't all that different from a nightclub,'' comments Alig toward the end. Funny; this movie isn't all that different from prison.

The overall tone is one of mild Sex Pistols excess combined with Monkees-era high jinks.

The forced hijinks, sub-John Hughes emotional tropes, and Screenwriting 101 conventions — which include what can only be called Chekhov’s Taser — cut crassly against the grain of a subject that is fundamentally personal and inherently political.

Me, I'm a Johnny Rotten man, so this limp culture-clash comedy with a heart of patchouli just made me want to stab my eyeballs out.

If you boil off dialogue, performance, narrative logic and grind a movie down to the nub of genre, will there be any suspense left? The answer is yes, but only in a Pavlovian sense. You react to this dull shockathon like a wired lab rat who's seen it all before. And guess what? You have.

Carlos Carlei’s Romeo and Juliet is a failure of skill.

Musketeer's fight scenes are underlit, overmiked, and appallingly edited, with none of the spacious grace that even routine Asian action flicks get right. Worse, the narrative scenes make less sense.

One of those loud, cringe-y female-empowerment comedies that feels like it was made by people who hate women.

That this witless, formulaic sequel to the hit comedy Analyze This even dares to spoof ''The Sopranos'' is embarrassing. It's like Freddie Prinze Jr. slamming Gene Hackman as a bad actor.

So, yea, it is a stinker. But it is prophesied that in six months time you shall come across 10,000 B.C.’ in the land of Pay-Per-View. And you shall say: ‘‘Pass the popcorn.’’

Garner bulls her way through the film with determination and a minimum of facial expressions, like someone who’s been told to clean up something awful and just wants to get it over with. So what if Charlize Theron did it better in “Atomic Blonde,” last year’s female-led brawler that is in every conceivable way superior to Peppermint?

With ”Dennis,” Hughes takes har-de-har brutality to new depths — it’s a movie that seems made specifically to blunt the sensibilities.

This feeble excuse for a comedy made me angry, and if you have any cherished cinematic feelings for the quartet of actresses at its center, you may feel angry, too.

Making a comedy that celebrates binge drinking and cretinous behavior isn't a crime against nature. Making one that's as brutally unfunny as Beerfest is.

The script tries to work up sympathy for a character who’s not much more than the bastard trailer-park spawn of Jerry Lewis. Sadly, this is everything you ever thought an Ernest movie would be.

It's mostly harmless dum-dum stuff, though.

A pallidly "hip" revision of classic fairy tales that would be better told straight up if anyone had the nerve. It will divert small children, but so will a brightly colored object if you twirl it.

Unfunny, predictable, and vulgar, it’s the generic equivalent of a Judd Apatow movie. As always, you get what you pay for.

How inept is Serving Sara? It makes even Elizabeth Hurley seem graceless and ugly.

The scenes with Keaton and Irons, too, rise above the mediocrity-unto-badness of Love, Weddings & Other Disasters on the strength of the actors’ charisma alone. Irons thaws satisfyingly as a snob finding unexpected love, and Keaton remains adorably, engagingly herself, turning her character’s blindness into a la-di-da form of grace. They are diamonds at a garage sale, and they deserve better.

A dull little PG-rated spook story for tweener girls.

House of the Dead, sadly, is so bad it's bad.

Everything about Couples Retreat feels plastic, though: the jokes, the trees, the extras, the attitudes. It’s dumbed-down entertainment aimed at a dumbed-down audience - the comedy equivalent of a McMansion.

Shakespeare this ain’t. In the long, long history of “Romeo and Juliet” movie adaptations, “Juliet & Romeo” lands well below the 1996 Baz Luhrmann version starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Claire Danes and just above 2011’s “Gnomeo & Juliet,” in which the characters are portrayed as animated garden gnomes.

The film was conceived as a youthful tour of all that's wrong with the two-party system, with the likably shambling actor Philip Seymour Hoffman as host, but the breadth of subjects covered precludes any response other than nebulous discontent.

One hundred and thirty-two minutes of shrill, self-satisfied jazz hands, The Prom may be the biggest disappointment of the season.

Essentially, an act of terrorism against entertainment. It's inconsequential, potty - mouthed, extremely silly, and -- the worst sin of all -- dead boring.

3 Days to Kill is pretty terrible, but it’s not really Kevin Costner’s fault.

As an actor, Braff does thin-skinned sad-sack quite well. As a writer, he’s hopelessly banal. As a director, he’s a disaster.

The Last Airbender' is dreadful, an incomprehensible fantasy-action epic that makes the 2007 film "The Golden Compass,'' a similarly botched adaptation of a beloved property from another medium, look like a four-star classic.

The results are dull, of all things. The movie itself feels like an overstuffed burrito,

It's nearly unwatchable, a farrago of confusing direction, stupid plot coincidences, and banal dialogue.

At this late date, the rules of the adolescent slice-‘n’-dice genre have codified into ritual (teens + sex = death), suggesting that those who rent this may have bigger problems than just bad taste.

A weirdly airless disaster, a turkey so insistently DOA that the dialogue serves as its own epitaph.

It's a remarkably laugh-free comedy that takes on a dark subject and skitters along its surface.

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

Vengeance has the odor of court-ordered community service. The jokes never rise above the groin. The trees look plastic, the characters more so.

Saved from total puff only by the obnoxiousness of its star, who seems to be laboring under the delusion that he's the next Eddie Murphy.

For proof that some actresses can take on a misconceived role and get out alive, there's Huffman as Lilly.

The Heart Is Deceitful wants to cauterize us into feeling something -- anything -- but it's far too heartless to know what.

Rock the Kasbah is a pandering, poorly assembled botch that thinks it’s playing fair by Afghan popular culture but only manages to add insult to the countless other injuries inflicted upon that country. If it were any worse, they’d be screening it as evidence at The Hague.

Kranks is a feel-good movie in which every character is hateful (except, sigh, the cancer lady), and a Christmas movie too chickenhearted to mention Jesus.

Finding Amanda, unfortunately, is one vast, irritating surface.

The most painful movie so far in a year that's already scraping the bottom of the barrel, Your Highness is a tedious, dung-colored misfire that sullies the genre of "Monty Python and the Holy Grail" and "The Princess Bride."

It's more like "Porky's for Dummies," a thoroughly depressing teen farce in which Internet voyeurism has replaced human intimacy and where privacy is SO 20th century.

It wouldn’t be Thanksgiving without a turkey, and in Old Dogs, we have the season’s blue-ribbon gobbler.

If the producers had dug up Ted Geisel's body and hung it from a tree, they couldn't have desecrated the man more.

I truly believe our divided nation can be healed and brought together as one by Cats — the musical, the movie, the disaster. In other news, my eyes are burning. Oh God, my eyes.

An American Haunting sets the bar at a new low: It makes ''The Blair Witch Project" look like a masterpiece of world cinema.

Who on earth is this embarrassment -- easily the worst film of the year to date -- aimed at?

For a movie to pretend, in the face of the deaths of tens of thousands of Iraqi men, women, and children directly or indirectly caused by our presence there, that we can wage war without anyone really getting hurt isn't naive, or wishful thinking, or a jim-dandy way to spend a Saturday night at the movies. It's an obscenity.

An overlong, joyless, and inconsequential affair, full of dead air, and possessing only a few moments of jaw-dropping bad taste. It's a dull disaster.

A live-action film based on a line of dolls, it's pure marketing chum for tweeners: a proudly shallow, purposefully bland ode to girly-girl narcissism. I could actually feel my brain stem shrivel up as I watched it.

This is first-degree cultural homicide.

While the Nightmare on Elm Street movies possess a sick yet clever surrealism, and the first Halloween was at least well crafted, the Friday the 13th series has always been the cut-rate horror franchise, offering barely functional sex-and-slash pitched straight at the moron brigade. Jason Goes to Hell varies the formula a bit, with ideas swiped from The Terminator, The Hidden, and Alien, but after nine installments the impalements and dismemberments all look the same. So go to hell already, Jason — and take Sean Cunningham, the ”brains” behind this dreck, with you.

The original 1989 dead-guy farce maybe had a few laughs if you caught it on cable at one in the morning. Blind drunk. Weekend At Bernie’s II not quite that good.