This movie is a raging, unwatchable bore, filled with unnecessary details and interminable ramblings. Though it runs a mere 76 minutes, it feels like 76 hours.

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

If only this movie weren’t as slow as a sleepwalkng turtle. The story is constructed like one big, dark joke whose punchline isn’t worth sitting through 110 minutes to hear.

Just as in the first film, I was put off by the white-savior narrative (Stilgar’s fervent belief quickly becomes grating), and the Hans Zimmer score that sounds as if Arrakis were in the Middle East rather than space.

Priscilla gives us little idea of the inner workings of Priscilla Presley. She’s an enigma in what is supposed to be a story of her empowerment.

If you asked an AI program to create a Wes Anderson movie, you’d get Asteroid City, the latest — and worst — film from the writer-director of “The French Dispatch” (2021) and “Isle of Dogs” (2018).

The self-congratulatory, back-patting nature of this film is what makes it so insulting.

Joe is one more in the line of Southern Gothic miserabilism that includes “Winter’s Bone” and “Beasts of the Southern Wild,” films that many have praised but some find condescending.

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

The Korean documentary Planet of Snail is spare and unemphatic - too much so - with an abiding sweetness of spirit.

Robinson’s dedicated commitment to the bit is a given, but the bit is so one-dimensional that Craig stops being believable or human.

The addition of Gunn, like the addition of a definite article to the title, means more of the same: a baroquely nasty, flauntingly mean two-plus hours of superhero action that is also (a much greater sin) noisily tedious.

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

It's two hours of slumming in a vision of hell hatched from bourgeois comfort. That, and not its unsavory subject matter, is what makes it bummer theater.

This musical should have taken center stage in Theater Camp. The dreadful story surrounding it deserves to get the hook.

It’s the cinematic equivalent of a classic-rock station, except instead of getting the genuine articles to serenade you, you’re stuck with a bunch of actors cosplaying famous folk singers.

Starting with a premise that a smart-aleck high school sophomore might take pride in, the film rallies late to make some points about patriarchy and female empowerment, but not before a barrage of clichés, tweeness, and inanity.

An abundance of style and an almost total lack of substance make Wong Kar-wai's Happy Together a visually arresting but ultimately unrewarding excursion. [31 Oct 1997]

Song deconstructs rom-com tropes in service to a much meaner drama, with unlikable characters, a flimsy love triangle, and a dark subplot that is poorly handled.

After watching the worst Anderson movie yet, I was envious of the guy who blew up; he got to leave after only two minutes of this wretched comedy, the title of which sounds like a Robert Ludlum novel adaptation.

Tries to wring laughs from just about every dusty stereotype about blacks and whites imaginable. But it's all cheap, lazy, and unoriginal.

It felt like I was watching a Wayans Bros. movie instead of one that expected me to take the ideas of dying and grief seriously.

Moore shows newsreel footage of Hitler delivering a speech. Only it’s not Hitler’s voice we hear. It’s Trump’s. Get it? Sure you do, and as you do the documentary slips the surly bonds of sanity — even of agitprop — to enter a realm of its own polemical making. Words cannot do justice to such an editorial decision. Well, maybe five can: intellectually null and morally contemptible.

People do stupid things all the time. My friend and I sat through Compliance, didn't we? But there is a level of stupidity displayed by the people in this movie that beggars belief. Their behavior is to stupidity as the Death Star is to a doughnut.

As morally engaged as the movie is, it’s also argumentatively slack. Precisely because it’s so easy to agree that hunger is bad, it’s hard to agree what to do.

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

The best audiences can hope for is that they, too, get amnesia and forget they ever saw this movie.

Ye bites off substantially more than he can chew.

The first step in getting beyond preaching to the converted is letting the other side show how wrong it might be.

Adrian Lyne pulls out more manipulative nonsense than Machiavelli ever thought of. Lyne stops at nothing to provoke artificial sentimental feelings from the audience. Like the movie itself, the audience's reaction is only skin deep. [18 Sep 1987, p.58]

Unfortunately, though, Rossato-Bennett and Cohen seem to think that the technique is a panacea. In fact, it is not even original, as music therapy in nursing homes has been around for some time.

This adaptation feels like a soap opera made by someone who has seen too much late-stage Woody Allen and flounders with the self-importance of a director unable to read either text or city.

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

The Legend of Ochi is being pitched as a family movie by A24, but I don’t believe most kids would enjoy this slow-moving slog set in the Carpathian mountains.

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.

Arachnophobia wants to be Jaws or The Birds, with killer spiders. It isn't. The movie lacks the skill really to tap our primal fears, and the spiders are the only things that don't seem mechanical in Arachnophobia. [18 July 1990, p.65P]

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

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.

Blink Twice may be aiming for a feminist statement, but it’s ultimately just a slasher movie with a bunch of one-dimensional Final Girls played by Alia Shawkat, Trew Mullen, Liz Caribel, and “Hit Man”’s Adria Arjona.

The Take represents the downside of the new documentary renaissance.

Is Borgman a fable? A fairy tale? A parable? An allegory? A burlesque of Western bourgeois life in the 21st century? One thing Dutch writer-director Alex van Warmerdam’s film isn’t is a black comedy, even if that’s what it’s meant to be. The movie’s black, all right, but a comedy has to be funny.

No one in the film offers a shred of real proof that IBM cheated.

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

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.

Unfortunately, a screenwriter’s fealty to the source material is often the kiss of death. Some things are just not translatable from a reader’s mind to a more objective and visual medium like film.

Gillespie and his editor Kirk Baxter cycle through scenes of these one-dimensional characters, headache-inducing montages of cable news footage, YouTube re-creations, and TikTok videos. The pacing is frenetic, but the content is mind-numbingly dull.

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

If nothing else, Beloved Sisters is one of the most visually striking biopics around. Too bad you have to wade through so much verbiage in order to enjoy it.

The big surprise is that none of these talented voice actors bring anything new or interesting to their one-dimensional roles.

"Star Trek VI" is one of the weaker additions to the Enterprise enterprise. It merely goes through the motions, including requisite moments that feel obligatory and uninspired. There's nothing gravely wrong here - no embarrassing scenes or egregious plot gaffes. There's simply nothing new, and certainly nothing fresh or reinvented. [6 Dec. 1991, p.53]

It plays like a crude "Godfather" parody, the sort that might amuse as a 10-minute sketch on "Saturday Night Live," but curdles and collapses as a 143-minute film. [09 Dec 1983]

A fine cast — Colin Firth, Matthew Macfadyen, Kelly Macdonald, Penelope Wilton — do their stiff-upper-lip best. It’s not good enough.

The result is like an issue of National Geographic gone mad.

The absurd plot twists in “Drop,” might be tolerable if the film weren’t so distastefully tethered to domestic violence.

Soapdish should have been a laugher. But this new spoof of TV soaps isn't nearly as funny as the real thing. Soapdish holds only the merest sliver of entertainment. [31 May 1991, p.28]

Fantastic Four: First Steps alternates between battle sequences that you’ve seen countless times and interminable scenes of exposition disguised as emotional beats. The actors play this poorly written material as if they were doing Ibsen, which is commendable, but their attempts fail because you truly don’t give a damn about their plight.

Mississippi Burning plays loose with truth, turning the history of the civil rights movement on its head. The filmmakers shamelessly transform what was ultimately a triumph of due process and nonviolent civil disobedience into an ugly might-makes-right spectacle. It's "Dirty Harry" coming at you from the left. [27 Jan 1989, p.72]

The movie is swept up in earnest self-importance.

The movie grows easier to like in the later, straighter going, as it stops pushing so aggressively to be naughty and lets its characters try on some introspection.

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.

Regrettably, it’s terrible poetry: a roughly chronological jumble of archival footage, unconvincing period reenactments, gauzy voice-overs, and half-baked ideas that makes one yearn for the stolid dullness of a History Channel documentary.

Puzzle is neither puzzling nor much fun. It reminds you how much better Julie Delpy told the same story in “2 Days in New York.”

Fierce and chaotic, the re-creations of war also fall short — the CGI in many scenes is shockingly bad. Whenever the movie threatens to become too dull, there’s a battle sequence. They start to blur together as the minutes slowly tick by.

For all its sugary sweet coating, this movie is nothing more than mindless, mundane distraction.

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.

The History of Sound is even more repressed than its characters, and at over two hours, that’s far from entertaining.

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

The more intense it gets, the sillier it looks. The only thing worth watching in this wannabe noir is Christian Clemenson's performance as Spader's permanently bummed-out pot-smoking brother. Clemenson alone fills the screen with the kind of individuality that makes you steadily deepen your belief in his character. But he's not enough to keep Bad Influence from degenerating into a ludicrous turn-off. [09 Mar 1990, p.27]

Even a fan, however, might prefer the excellent, recently released concert DVD "Pixies: Live at the Paradise in Boston" to this tepid behind-the-scenes experience.

Master Gardener is the third film in writer-director Paul Schrader’s redemption trilogy. The series includes 2017′s “First Reformed,” which is good, and 2021′s “The Card Counter,” which is not. Unfortunately, the trilogy ends with its worst entry, an excruciatingly slow white-savior narrative that aims to provoke yet does nothing but bore.

Precise, expert execution can’t compensate for forced situations and an unenforced imaginative rigor. It’s not so much that all the characters are so unsympathetic. It’s that they’re all so uninteresting. Caricature without gusto is shrink wrap covering . . . shrink wrap.

Field next tries to touch our hearts with her pitifulness. Stay away, crazy woman! At times she seems about to turn into Glenn Close in “Fatal Attraction.”

This is a movie with weapons-grade mommy issues.

The one-sidedness of Farmageddon isn't just an artistic failing. It's an argumentative failing, too.

As it adds extraneous characters, “Oh, Hi!” becomes so frustrating and unbelievable that I wanted to yell advice at the screen.

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.

Big Eyes may not be Tim Burton’s absolute worst movie — we’ll always have “Planet of the Apes” — but it’s pretty close to the bottom. It’s also the film that reveals his weaknesses as a director and, by their absence, his strengths. Gaudy, shallow, shrill, smug, the movie proves beyond a whisker of doubt that Burton has little interest in human beings unless they can be reduced to cartoons.

It can seem sometimes that Hollywood has a monopoly on stupid, obnoxious comedy. Anyone who sees Klown will learn otherwise. Comedy can be just as stupid and obnoxious in Danish.

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.

Despite a frisky soundtrack that starts off with James Brown’s “Sex Machine” — trust me, it’s downhill from there — this is the visual equivalent of Muzak. You don’t have to see it to have seen it.

Neither dense, distracting makeup nor confused, convoluted chronology can disguise the fact that Karyn Kusama’s Destroyer, scripted by Phil Hay and Matt Manfredi, is a mediocre mash-up of genre clichés.

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 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.

Song Sung Blue leans too far into biopic tropes, and Brewer rushes through tragic and life-changing events far too quickly for a film that runs almost 2½ hours.

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.

The script is too eager to rush to the high-concept payoff without providing dramatic or characterizational underpinning. [26 June 1992, p.34]

The New Age plays like "Night of the Living Dead," only with better clothes. [23 Sept 1994, p.52]

Despite the frenetic pace, “Saturday Night” falls flat and fails to raise one goose pimple.

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

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.

Oranges and Sunshine is like a Mike Leigh movie drained of all its bodily fluids.

The Whale is being hailed as the comeback vehicle for Fraser. The actor has been through a lot, and he deserves roles that showcase his numerous talents. But he fails to bring humanity to this character who lives in a state of constant apology. The role feels like a cynical grab for an Oscar, which he’ll probably win as the Academy loves masochistic malarkey.

This chronicle of an ’80s high school cross country coach leading a team of Mexican farm laborers’ kids to competitive glory may be based on a true story, but the forced drama doesn’t help it to feel that way.

What is offensive is how the masquerade punks these other people - and to no seeming purpose, other than to provide Gandhi with footage for this documentary.

A desperate, cynical self-parody.

This is no “Bridesmaids.” What the film’s premise has in novelty, it lacks in execution. The characters are uninspired, and they continue to lack depth and plausibility throughout.