A ham-fisted cautionary tale of religious fanaticism that would have been hooted out of even 19th-century theaters as melodrama of the most lurid kind.

The script is drippy, humor-free and old-fashioned:

The One is all sound and fury, and nothing else.

Jane Fonda does an about-face on her persona and her talent, playing a teetotaler and, what's worse, a pious bore.

I managed to get through the biker extravaganza Hell Ride, a narcissistic piece of soft-core porn and macho camp, by mashing it together in my mind with the equally woeful, family-friendly biker comedy "Wild Hogs." After all, both are full of hellions gone to seed.

Nothing in this film -- even Robin Williams, alas -- is funny.

A murder caper that could have been written by Agatha Christie during a pub-crawl.

It's a sad day for film lovers when the best thing that can be said about a Western is that it's pleasant.

The film is in desperate need of flow. It plays like a collection of bits, skits that have been thrown together with little eye to continuity.

Of Madonna's considerable talents, making the camera love her isn't one: The screen seems to go dead every time she's on it.

The story is without an original thought, the characters little more than caricatures (unappealing ones, at that) and the filmmaking so uninspired that it's hard to imagine anyone embracing it with anything more than a shrug and a wonder why they didn't wait to catch it on TV.

Watching a Pokemon movie is like drowning in a sea of cute.

Like Adam Sandler's "Mr. Deeds," this is a hybrid, hipster-cornball movie that wants to celebrate common folk but unapologetically uses words like "trailer trash" to describe them.

Venom isn't worth a critic's venom, but a brief condemnation is in order.

Painstakingly painful.

But if the idea of tiny, little Sally Field in the Charles Bronson part strikes you as a bit silly, that's only the beginning of the idiocies. [12 Jan 1996]

Manipulates the audience.

About on the level of an After School Special put together by people in a real hurry to get on with their lives, Ed plays pretty dead for all except the very dumb at heart.

The New Guy doesn't have a new idea in its head, but it trods over the old ground with such wit and heart that its lack of originality can be overlooked, if not entirely forgiven.

Retro in a refreshing sort of way, a return to those sci-fi films of the 1950s, filled with cheesy special effects and over-the-top acting, but with a gem of an idea at its core, and all done with just enough wit and inventiveness to keep audiences in the cheap seats happy.

Adam Sandler does Frank Capra wrong. His unfunny remake stomps all over the honest values and endearing qualities of the original.

Bride Wars has possibly the worst comedy idea since "Springtime for Hitler," with almost no room for redeeming camp.

Bottom line: Juwanna Mann is a drag - in every sense of the word.

How can we make the entire movie disappear?

Godsend is two-thirds of a good movie, with a final third that's just downright awful. So much wasted potential only makes the whole thing that much more painful.

Newcomers to the Mike Myers experience will leave this love train early.

Finds it as impossible to locate a laugh in glittering Bora Bora as it was for Operation Enduring Freedom to nail Osama bin Laden in gritty Tora Bora.

In its own B-film, let's-make-them-jump-out-of-their-seats way, Bats is quite the hoot.

The less said the better.

It has graceful layers and folds and a nice swing to it, and Jackson moves superbly in it. Unfortunately, I'm talking about the kilt, not the movie.

A catastrophically messy action-movie mash-up.

It's hard, bordering on impossible, to evaluate this movie without stepping on people's beliefs.

Unfortunately, whenever Beautiful threatens to work as parody, it veers uncomfortably into pop psychology.

Oh, this is all so terribly not good.

It's hard to figure who this picture is supposed to be for. Although a cartoon, it's way too mean-spirited and crass for young kids (parents, be forewarned!). And the idea that any substantial number of adults would find this sort of thing entertaining ... let's pray civilization hasn't come to that.

Stupid. Illogical. Simplistic. Pandering. And those are its good points.

Lowbrow humor is one thing...but Love Stinks sinks the bar beyond comprehension.

Why would anyone pay to see this movie?

Christmas with the Kranks is so calculated that it's pathetic, a warm-hearted holiday greeting card with not one scintilla of honest emotion inside.

A story about unmotivated characters trapped in an ill-conceived plot.

Most of the film is one big blooper reel. There's not enough of a gap between the rejects and the finished movie.

A fuzzy, feel-good movie about baseball, babes and believing in yourself.

This sophomoric film has little to do with Elvis, and everything to do with putting as much carnage as possible on screen under the guise of art, poetry, choreography, taxidermy.

An awful film about an awful time.

Doing a sequel to "The Mask" without Jim Carrey sounds like a really bad idea. As Son of the Mask proves, it is.

Even with help from a pathetic Kid Rock and a boost from always-on Christopher Walken, Spade can't pull this off.

There's a movie opening today that is so indistinctive I can barely remember its name.

The only way sober adults will keep awake is wondering how the lead mobsters on "The Sopranos" -- who also are amateur film critics -- will rank the movie next year on HBO.

Stay away from this movie. Brainless cartoonish violence.

Dr. Seuss' The Cat in the Hat is gorged with shtick and gadgetry. When it comes to highlighting everything better left in the dark, it makes even the Matrix sequels look like works of genius.

There's little that's special about Underclassman, certainly nothing that Murphy and Eddie Griffin haven't done better in movies far funnier than this.

It's stupefying in its dullness and vulgarity.

Gummo is one of the most repellent cinematic efforts in recent memory. Whatever small audiences it attracts -- and they will be drawn mostly by the prospect of watching something "shocking" -- will wind up leaving the theater in a state of disgust. [21 Nov. 1997, p.5E]

The only bits worth watching are the scenes where Olsen is in full Carrey mode and Richardson is doing his best Jeff Daniels. The spot-on impersonations take the mind off the plot, the poo-poo gags, the clunky chase scene and the ripped-off finale.

The collateral damage of action products like Ballistic is to the sensibility of the audience.

Excruciating...The movie proves to be singularly unfunny and static almost from the non-get-go. Virtually nothing happens; the movie is all premise.

This movie doesn't play; it just lies there, waiting to be kicked around by anyone unfortunate enough to have shelled out good money to see it.

Relentless in its crudity, so indiscriminate in its pursuit of tasteless laughs, so pure in its determination to offend, one almost has to admire it. It's even funny. Sometimes.

Goes straight to hell, and in this case it is its own handbasket.

Bullock does her damndest to be nerdy and instead becomes excruciatingly artificial - a malfunctioning verbal fun machine.

A grade-B rumination on what a nasty guy the devil can be.

Weekend at Bernie's II only proves what critics have known for years: that on the planet of the bad movies, there's no life after death.

Just plain bad.

Gets credit for avoiding the easy path. Too bad the path it chooses doesn't lead us anywhere we want to be taken.

There's something junior varsity about the whole sensibility that makes the new version seem more dated than the old one.

Glitter does no one any favors.

The plot is as thin and confusing as it sounds.

An odd little movie. And not in a good way.

Hands-down, the best James Brolin-in-an-Italian-accent movie ever.

The bottom line is that the studio's marketing strategy is just a tad incomplete. Instead of hiding Pinocchio from critics, Miramax should have hidden it from everyone.

If the movie were merely unfunny, one might dismiss it with an airy wave of the hand in a paragraph or two without breaking a sweat or digging into the old adjective tool box, but "Car 54, Where Are You?" is actively repulsive.

An underlit, overlong, underwritten and overloud albatross of a movie.