Wesley Morris

The new, live-action The Little Mermaid is everything nobody should want in a movie: dutiful and defensive, yet desperate for approval. It reeks of obligation and noble intentions. Joy, fun, mystery, risk, flavor, kink — they’re missing.

It’s all a mess of ideology and theology, of flowing robes, flying fists, karma, camp, cant and can’t: can’t act, can’t kick, can’t marshal any art.

The only thing I want less than a thriller about a school shooting is a thriller whose other main character is the main character’s iPhone.

More than half the reason I went to see this movie is because I miss “Fool’s Gold,” too. But that movie is 11 years old. And the days of low-stakes thingamabobs with some stars and even a little bit of writing are gone. Instead of a caper with Kate Hudson, McConaughey has got a mess written and directed by Steven Knight.

Something feels off with von Trier’s sense of artistry now. Something feels stuck, like his head’s wound up lodged in his rear, which brings the movie closer to “The Human Centipede” than I would have thought. But this isn’t cinematic horror. It’s proctology.

All the makers of Texas Chainsaw 3D cared about was getting your $16.

This isn't a genre-less character study, it's myopic romantic comedy, and watching a woman of Catherine Zeta-Jones's easy carnality and fathomless beauty compete for the attention of Gerard Butler, who's pining for Jessica Biel, is dismaying, like spotting Anna Wintour in line at a soup kitchen.

This is all a long way of saying that the best way to better understand the man who made those and dozens of other movies is simply to see them. There's no case to be made for a mangy shortcut like Hitchcock. It's all surface and formula.

Nothing works. Or some of it works, but that doesn't matter because what's working is so deeply, painfully boring.

This is a terrible little movie even by the standards of the genre.

Some bad movies can make you feel awful for the people who made them and worse for the audience that shows up. The actors, the script, the camera: There's nowhere good they can go. For Greater Glory is that kind of bad movie: a total embarrassment.

The movie wants us to find this frightening, but there's no suspense, no terrifying images.

Seeing her (Schilling) and Efron fumble at each other is like watching a stick of butter and a bag of flour not turn into a cake.

The directors don't know how to make this new plot funny or infectious. Most promises of comedic pleasure go as unfulfilled Stifler's T-shirt. This movie hasn't a clue where to begin the donation process.

Jeff Who Lives at Home devotes so much of itself to mocking the loneliness and personal shortcomings of these characters that once it stops jabbing and turns serious, you start laughing.

Good Deeds is the first of the 11 movies he's written and directed to try a one-tone-fits-all approach. Sadly, that tone is funereal, and it's always a beat out of step with the rhythms of both real life and most movies.

It's got both a soap opera plotline and a Chuck Norris-load of taxpayer-financed gadgets and gear. It also has Reese Witherspoon in another terrible part.

Even by the unambitious standards of some children's movies and many movies that star Caine, this one has a difficult time making a case for itself as anything other than an adventure in baby-sitting.

For too long, this movie asks us to be interested in something that rarely in the history of the service industry has been sustainably entertaining: how dull certain jobs can be.

You could cast this movie with potato chips and still get cheers when one of the bad guys is cuffed. It doesn't matter that none of it is to be believed.

It's doom that we're meant to feel here. And repulsion. I hate to say, but I shrugged.

No one onscreen was actor enough to make us believe we were watching actual people commit or require actual exorcisms.

New Year's Eve is fun in the way that eating at a buffet is fun. It's two hours of foods that have nothing to do with each other piled high on a plate because it was too cheap to resist.

None of what we see is at all credible.

One of those movies that an audience knows is terrible the minute it starts.

Really, all Six is going for, with the generous application of both hardware supplies to the skin and feces to the camera, is a tired commentary on his shallow talents: They're excremental.

If Bunraku were serious about subverting or reinventing the genres it's cobbled together, Moore would play the gunslinger or the samurai or the crime boss. But no. All she gets are a couple of scenes that demonstrate that she still looks great soaking wet.

It's a crude, queasy, ugly remake of a crude, queasy, ugly, yet artistically superior 40-year-old Sam Peckinpah movie.

Heartlessness, stupidity, cynicism, and greed are a demoralizing combination for movie-going. We pay to see a movie that doesn't respect us for being there at all.

The movie is terrible partly because it's badly written, directed, and conceived and partly because it lacks the necessarily thematic coherence to accomplish proselytism of any kind.

It's all emotionally counterfeit, and that bogusness infects the comedy.

It's not that Jenna Fischer is miscast in A Little Help. It's that she's mis-everything else: misused, misdirected, misanthropic.

Even by the standards of mental-institution-movie misogyny, what an accidental but predictable creepshow this is.

You don't want to think, what would Preston Sturges or Alexander Payne do with this material? But there is a seed of satirical cynicism in this movie that a smart, clear mind could have finessed. Jake Kasdan is not that director. He doesn't appear to know what to do.

There's just very little in Beautiful Boy that feels fresh or new or truly raw. The houses, that title, every emotion, even the false moves: They're all generic.

The film is remarkably stunted.

I don't know whether she's (Hudson) drunk, stoned, or simply out of her mind, but if it weren't so sad watching her pick away at this skimpy, overlong romantic lie, she might be entertaining.

The movie is swept up in earnest self-importance.

Hop may have taken years to design and animate, but it feels as if minutes were required to compose it.

Never achieves the exhilarating feat of exemplifying the types of Hollywood movies it wants to unpack.

The characterization couldn't be more flagrant if the soundtrack creaked out an oldie by a certain ancient pop quintet: You're a candy girl.

Drive Angry is something new for Cage - a movie that feels like it's straight FROM cable.

Seeing her (Kidman) in junk like this is a bit like watching the Queen of England eat a Taco Bell chalupa.

It's the latest in the blank-from-hell genre, in which misogyny and entertainment are made to seem indistinguishable while the blank makes life hell for someone who then is cornered into striking back.

Howard never decides on tones that complement each other, and the dissonance is jarring.

After a while, the movie tires of the witch business and trots out a plot twist that permits the effects department to spend money. Some moviegoers might find the bait-and-switch funny.

A migraine inducement that you'd think Jack Black had gotten out of his system years ago. Yet he still finds an excuse to wear a blazer and shorts and fling his bodily orb like Angus Young on Guitar Hero night at the neighborhood bar.

The dismemberment and torture are now shtick. The filmmakers - "Saw" veterans - struggle to imbue this movie with the usual righteousness.

The Strauses don't care about how to keep an audience. Their movie has no sense of suspense or dread - Skyline is an apocalypse movie that plods like one of Romero's zombies.

A depressing show of how truly, madly, deeply outmoded Hollywood can be.

They have the chemistry of step-siblings, so a movie that has them make out is, as the one of the few girls in the theater exclaimed, "so gross."

The truth is, indeed, still out there. And when Carter finds it, may he heed its wisdom: Let go.

Bangkok Dangerous is bad without lifting a finger toward interesting. The trouble with it is that the people who've made it don't appear to understand life enough to allow any of it into their movie. This is an airless affair.

Has no intention of taking a more sophisticated path to make its point.

Neither epochal nor epic in its ludicrousness. It's just run-of-the-mill trash.

Relentlessly bland.

If your name's on the marquee, chances are your agent's already dead.

The Strip makes you appreciate what hard work effortless comedy is.

At least one chapter in the yet-to-be-written book "When Bad Movies Happen to Good People" belongs to the folks of Company Man.

The film's centerpiece is a massacre at a wet T-shirt contest, which the horror director Alexandre Aja has a good time staging (yes, Eli Roth, we see you with the water gun). But it feels like an imitation of B-movie beach schlock and John Waters. The visual humor lacks wit or nerve.

For Hilton haters, the stupid and grotesque remake of House of Wax will only stoke their schadenfreude.

The lack of sexual tension is astounding.

Stardust certainly could have gone somewhere fun. But the magic and zip you need to get a blimp like this off the ground is scarce.

Might as well have been written by a rushed piece of software. The program calls for a surprise engagement, a street fight complete with crotch punches, an apartment eviction, and a runaway child - all in about five minutes. As an obstacle course, this is mighty efficient. As comic storytelling, it's painful, not too far from being socked in the crotch.

The casting alone should warn you about what kind of bottom this movie's going to hit.

The product of immaturity. It approaches suffering with a meaninglessness that must be a luxury for anyone who has never lost anyone, or is incapable of empathizing with someone who has.

The movie treats trysting as comedy and yet is stingy with the laughs.

Positively reeks of self-importance -- the jokey, ham-fisted, pseudo-socially relevant, punch-pulling kind. It reeks worse of acting -- the Jack-Lemmon-in-a-coma Kevin Spacey kind.

At some point, I just tired of looking at all the nicely composed shots unworthy of the stock they're printed on. Lives are at stake here, and I don't mean Julia's and her annoying pals'. I mean the lives of you and me, the only pronouns that really matter here.

Wields its Middle America values and moralistic flogging of idiosyncratic lifestyle choices like a flipped bird.

Boring, mediocre movie.

A horror film with a moral. No matter how nasty a gang of murderers is, the moviemaker calling the shots is ultimately worse.

Swing Vote is a satire that's afraid to satirize.

The latest Guy Ritchie shoot-em-up, is a joke. You laugh with it but mostly at it.

This movie is wretched, condescending, and sad, like watching an elderly man spend more than 100 minutes tapping his arm for the youth vein -- which he never finds.

A horror film whose only scare is that it was made at all... As with so many stupid horror movies in these post-''Scream" times, this one is at such a creative loss that all it can do is make its audience feel duped for having purchased a ticket.

Fun here is fleeting.

Grant and Parker stand around as if they're waiting for someone to yell, "Cut.'' He's in one movie. She's in another. Neither is any good.

Tom Six's movie has the freakiness and sadism of its genre, but it's so heavy with self-appreciation -- Dude, we had the craziest premise for a movie! -- that it can't lift off into the perverse ecstasy of decent exploitation. That was also the problem with "Snakes on a Plane.''

Like so many of these farm-raised films, this one looks polished, but takes no risks, offers no surprises, and contains a final sequence that's laughable for its lack of courage.

Between fights, the film can't even rely on the luxury of Lindo, Isaiah Washington, Russell Wong, Rottweiler rapper DMX or the scary Henry O as Han's father to make it watchable - the dialogue is wreaking more havoc than Li.

The movie fails to conjure the wonder of the Ray Bradbury short story that inspired it.

Breaks new ground both as an abominable enterprise in guy-talk and as no-budget hackwork.

Moore can't help but be rotten. She has no grace and little nuance, which is why she's always best as a hard-ass in movies.

This movie brings to mind much better cable TV shows like the marijuana comedy "Weeds,’" the one-on-one psychodramas of "In Treatment," and the astonishingly cinematic "Breaking Bad."

There is much to learn from Picasso and Braque Go to the Movies. First, a wealth of sharp professorial minds and great artistic eyes is no guarantee of equivalent documentary moviemaking. Second, when making a sort of thesis statement, it helps to have a thesis.

Aeon Flux is the sophomore picture from Karyn Kusama, who's first movie was a modest boxing film called "Girlfight." Here she's in over her head. The movie's sexual and scientific ideas never come through, and the characters would be fun only if they came with a joystick.

It’s a fascinating story: part genetic mystery, part socio-racial tragedy. However, Laing’s life, despite its inherent melodrama, does not automatically lend itself to the screen.

It's an experience as frustrating as watching Jeff Gordon drive a stock car through a bowl of oatmeal.

It's too cryptic and unfulfilled to serve as a tool for anything beyond its own obfuscation.

Another gay movie that luxuriates in emotional implausibility.

Watching the movie made me long for the big , risky ideas and entertainingly fearless filmmaking in David O. Russell's "I Heart Huckabees " and Spike Jonze's "Adaptation ," which Kaufman wrote. Both were similarly conceptual escapades, but they let it all hang out.

This is the most-off-the-mark adaptation of a novel since Brian DePalma's what-was-that "Bonfire of the Vanities."

Neither thrilling nor psychological, but it's chicly shot and edited and is pretty much art-directed to death.

Every ounce of the film feels artificially upbeat.

There is still a great horror movie about foreclosure to be made. In the meantime, this movie plays games. (How many rounds of hide-and-seek should an audience tolerate?)

The secret here is that the movie is rather tasteless. It has the high, slightly nauseating stink of perfume on garbage.

It has a little something to irritate everybody. People looking for romance will find only cardboard lovers. People looking for a resounding musical will find it odd that the camera runs away from the lip-synching cast. And people looking for opera -- well, shame on you.