Wesley Morris

The movie might have worked if it winked more - or if it played things completely straight.

The film is like watching Ozzy Osbourne bite the head off a rubber bat -- it's only almost heinous.

Cult shocker has been turned into throwaway megaplex fodder.

Brutally dumb canine comedy.

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.

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?)

It has no pulse, no apparent breath.

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

Neither (Bullock/Reynolds) brings out anything good in the other, and watching them try hurts the eyes, the tummy, and the libido.

An undernourished exercise in pop critique.

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.

Rarely is a movie audience asked to put up with so much noise for such a thankless payoff.

The movie is a work of ambivalence. Is English making fun of these women? Or is she making a pilot for Lifetime?

A particularly egregious array of Kodak moments.

The lack of sexual tension is astounding.

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.

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

I watched at least a quarter of My Soul to Take, the worst horror movie Wes Craven's made perhaps ever, with the glasses off. It was shot - and is available - in a standard format, and, like many conversions, the 3-D gimmick is like watching a movie through an ashtray.

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.

A one-trick action thriller that feels like a poor cousin of an episode of ''24." Call it ''12."

The grime, filth, slop, vomit, and crotch-nibbling pigs double all too easily as a recipe for this movie's failure. It hasn't been made so much as excreted.

When it was over I felt vaguely embarrassed. I wasn't just leaving a movie theater. I was taking a walk of shame.

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

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

A terribly self-satisfied lecture about the ubiquity of quantum physics in spiritual life, is dishonest enough to suggest that even its cavalcade of scientists and mystics might not know anything about such topics as reality and the sub-atomic world.

The writers don’t write, the director doesn’t really direct, and the actors don’t exactly act. They wait for the movie’s contraptions to impale them.

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

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.

A powerful film of suffering and sacrifice and desperation. But it's vacuous, banal, and, where its mix of sentiment and grisliness is concerned, rather despicable.

Like the horror-flick hacks who infest Hollywood like termites, the Pangs don't build suspense, they assault the senses with twitchy photography and Danny's editing.

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.

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

Most atrocious movies build into their badness, as lacks of talent, ideas, self-confidence, or a total hatred of an audience, are revealed. This one gets it out of the way up front and never looks back.

Too dumb to realize that the senselessness is viral.

It's mesmerizing nonetheless for its flagrant disregard for narrative, character, pacing, performance and good lighting.

The movie is swept up in earnest self-importance.

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.

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.

It's another standard-issue bad star-vehicle action-comedy, this time for Cedric.

Most of American Psycho just sits there, looking at trouble, rather than looking for it - complacent, overjoyed in fact to exist at all.

This is an inept and unsubtle romantic fantasy about how black people and white people don't mix.

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.

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

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.

The movie actually does feel like an Americanized work of Hong Kong moviemaking. But the desperate, derivative style, the nonsense plotting, and leggy, horny women are applied like too much MSG.

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.

Gabizon never establishes a consistent tone or point of view. Instead, we hop from one episode to the next, with no momentum and no reason to care about these people.

The thrill of the ridiculousness is gone. So is all the mystery that made Statham so appealing in the first place.

Saltburn is the sort of embarrassment you’ll put up with for 75 minutes. But not for 127. It’s too desperate, too confused, too pleased with its petty shocks to rile anything you’d recognize as genuine excitement.

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.

The movie's no good: It's written, directed, performed, photographed, edited, and marketed on a fifth-grade reading level; despite that and its twin stars' saucer eyes and ropy limbs, it's no Muppet movie either.

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.

Lila is all come-ons without any charm.

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

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

The real problem with Harsh Times is Jim himself. Bale goes at the part with his usual intensity, but the character still seems like a psycho without psychology or a soul.

There's no real journalism here, just the sort of appalling revisionism that can turn a bloodbath into a beach party.

The result is a unique time at the art house: a work whose badness becomes guiltily pleasurable, like a Harlequin romance novel masquerading as a dissertation.

Unsalvageable B-movie junk.

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

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.

This is by far the most embarrassing of his seven movies.

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.

The most dispiriting thing about Anger Management is that its cameos seem like leftovers.

This is not a movie. It's a coming attraction for a theme park.

A football epic on performance enhancers that may be more flagrantly flawed, more shockingly predictable and just plain cornier than its rickety predecessors.

Builds into a shapeless riff on the existentialist misery of company.

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.

Noe's summation is an ideological sucker-punch from a filmmaker who gets off on abusive relationships. He may as well have thrown a big ''whatever'' up on the screen.

The trouble with the movie is basically everything. It's long, sloppy, and -- to both the quantum-physics ignorant and informed -- steadily implausible, never exciting in either its skill or its ludicrousness.

Taken? You bet.

Nothing about this movie works, not the title (it used to be called "Clubland "), not Blethyn's attempt to inject comedy into her rickety stereotype of a character.

Unlike most of what Moore has been in, Dedication is unlikely to delight retirement homes on movie night. But it's not imaginative, lively, or true enough to speak to its intended audience of American Apparel shoppers, either. It's a slog.

Flawless is what happens when a filmmaker has no sense of naturalism, no sense of realism and no real natural sense.

It's actually a pretty lousy thriller.

Ludicrously written and appallingly directed by ex-film critic Rod Lurie, seems to pride itself on the fact that it never (ever) leaves the greasy-spoon milieu in which the president and his staff are trapped by heavy snowfall.

Shyer's version is a thing of infinite emptiness and nauseating vanity. It's not funny, alluring, affecting, or erotic, just conceited.

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.

Franco can be exhilarating in movies -- tremulous, unhinged, a little wild. Here his jaw never stops quivering and his eyes stay welled up, advertising a breakdown that never comes. Not that Myles has a presence a man would fall apart over. She's too professional to drive anybody crazy.

Rarely have clips from so many good and great movies been put to such dull use.

Every boogeyman and slasher cliché this movie borrows was better somewhere else. Although it probably wasn't grosser.

The movie might have been more tolerable had Besson searched harder for a performer and not a specimen. Barbara Stanwyck in her prime might have made more sense.

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 Banger Sisters so frequently features Hawn running around in revealing attire, tossing instructions at exhausted people that I'm inclined to think of it as a workout video.

Television is a state of mind. And the makers of Saw III have delivered the most despicable episode of "One Life to Live" ever.

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

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.

This story could have gone in a number of more inspiring allegorical directions but winds up your average bedtime story instead.

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.

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

An erotic thriller. It is also an Atom Egoyan picture, which means any claims either to actual eroticism or conventional thrills are theoretical at best.

The laughs come in all the wrong places when they come at all.

The Lost City is Andy Garcia's ballad to Havana during the Cuban revolution. You'll have to forgive the penthouse view, though -- it's the only one Garcia can seem to find.

Ideological disaster!

Man on Fire is ponderous and bloated, dragging the Bible and Giannini into its swirling cesspool. Scott can't give the movie any real emotional weight. And Washington gives his first lifeless performance.

A slick, supercharged popcorn flick of the erstwhile Bruckheimer-Simpson brigade in which the only thing more shameful than the proceedings is a very well-paid male star assigned to make you less aware of that sucking sound.

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

It’s network television drama, starring actors best known for their TV work and full of the petty gripes and mild worries of characters who really have nothing compelling to worry about.