Butler serves the cause well, considering. Think that cause is a thankless one? Shhh, don’t tell Secret Service agent Channing Tatum or president Jamie Foxx, headed your way in June with, yes, “White House Down.”

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

As a five-minute sketch it would have been so-so. But as a 93-minute slog through witless puerility, it seems like an eternity in hell, baby.

It's an amiable little low-grade comedy that gets by with goofing on movies and TV shows as John Ritter, a couch potato Faust, signs up for a cable package from hell (it's got 666 channels - the devil's number, get it?) from satanic Jeffrey Jones. [14 Aug 1992, p.46]

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

Because Spun is so plotless it's almost avant-garde, we're meant to be delighted with its assortment of set pieces.

Village of the Damned has everything you want in a horror movie but the horror. [28 Apr 1995, p.90]

Drillbit Taylor sounds like a rediscovered blaxploitation movie or a name near the top of the NFL draft.

Anderson’s stab at rendering the Mount Vesuvius catastrophe with a 3-D “Titanic” gloss.

All the pieces are in place for an incisive tale of Brit-pop ego and madness, but filmmaker Stephen Woolley -- a celebrated UK producer ("The Crying Game") making his directing debut -- lets the story get away from him.

The Woman in the Window is a thriller, as you’ve no doubt figured out, but also has a throwback, Bette Davis vibe — Adams gets to do a lot of emoting — with a touch of horror movie thrown in.

It makes for a structurally glitchy inspirational exercise whose climax carries all the goosebump-making drama of a Pats preseason game.

In the end, the thing that Cussler's fans will probably object to most is the nonsensical way Sahara manhandles his story.

Jarmusch has come up with a dud.

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 film is almost as shaky as the science, but Nichols knows how to get the most out of what amounts to a one-joke comedy, and Bening works virtual miracles.

More spectacular special effects might have helped, or at least something more creative than a spaceship that resembles a giant Christmas tree ornament shaped like a corkscrew. Perhaps as a well-written play for a cast of three, Passengers might have been first class. Instead, it’s just another mediocre thrill ride.

A commercial Hollywood movie without pretensions. If there's no art here, it's still a good yarn - which is nothing to sneeze at these days.

Hampton's directorial inexperience shows, and the film remains curiously disjointed and devoid of suspense. [06 Dec 1996]

Judd is pretty much on her own - an assignment she mostly can handle with aplomb.

Monster Trucks might not be a complete lemon, but it’s hardly cherry.

A depressing piece of gun-crazy Hollywood scuzz that, with its gassy style and runaway immorality, makes a Tony Scott movie look like a Robert Bresson picture.

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.

The general consensus on this one: Rats.

Four Christmases is essentially "Meet the Parents" quadrupled.

By the time the film settles down to give us a few solid dramatic scenes, I appreciated the effort but had long since stopped caring.

In his second directorial effort, Mojave, Monahan has no such map to follow, and he wanders in a land of sophomoric pretentiousness and banal profundities.

The film feels long when it should be brisk, and it's bloated with stretches of hot, dead air. The racial kitsch goes nowhere.

Chappie boasts so many entertaining elements, particularly the lead motion-capture performance by Blomkamp’s go-to guy Sharlto Copley, its shortcomings don’t sink the movie.

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

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

The Quiet Ones simply has nothing to say.

Priest is based on a series of Korean graphic novels. What it's really based on, though, is other movies - a whole lot of other movies.

Darling Companion would be instantly forgettable if not for Keaton, who imbues Beth with a sorrow, warmth, wisdom, and rage that feel earned.

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

For all its propulsion (when it isn't slogging through would-be love scenes), Metro is unable to avoid seeming like yet another of the vanity movies that got Murphy into the career trouble from which he just extricated himself. Murphy vulnerable is more appealing than Murphy as supercop. [17 Jan 1997, p.D6]

The movie's a genuine oddity: a Latino action drama with one foot in bullet-spitting genre flicks -- '70s blaxploitation and '80s coke-kingpin films are the primary reference points -- and the other in raggedly personal family melodrama.

By taking nonsense seriously Outlander never achieves camp. It's a comic book that's mistaken itself for scripture.

It doesn't tap deeply enough into any of the characters to compel us to identify with one or another.

Deserves a place alongside "Life Is Beautiful" and, yes, even "Schindler's List."

Del Toro does remind you of Brando here; unfortunately, it's the Brando of ''Apocalypse Now,'' the one with the green face and puffy line readings. Jones fares better, even if he wears the same grieving-for-humanity expression throughout the film.

A fatally insubstantial film.

Kids who like the TV episodes will find more of the same here, and larger. [30 June 1995, p.53]

Gangster Squad is an almost movie. It's almost terrible. It's almost entertaining. But it's missing the shameless insanity of a wonderfully bad movie, and the particular vision, point of view, and coherence of some very good ones. So it sits there in between - loud, flashy, and unnecessary.

One hopes that, for their own good, when any of these actors are offered a script like this again, they’ll have the sense to just say no.

Lethal Weapon 3 is a big, dumb, noisy, comic strip of a movie that begins and ends in flames.

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

It's a ponderous but not unenjoyable comedy.

The ending steals actionably from "The Blair Witch Project," the movie that helped spawn these first-person chillers.

Kudrow and Robinson are intriguing casting and they get some sharp Bickersons material, but the movie unconvincingly shorthands how they got together. And Revolori’s horndog just feels like the film coasting on his quirky persona from “The Grand Budapest Hotel.”

Fletch Lives isn't a total zero. Three, or maybe four, of Chevy Chase's wisecracks work. But everything else about the film is feeble and poky. Even its tastelessness lacks the coarse energy of vulgarity. It's hard to believe that the world has had to wait five years for this witless, insipid sequel to "Fletch," an original that's easy to top. [17 Mar 1989, p.45]

Peculiarly entertaining exercise in bare-bones, Hollywood-style action heroism.

The loosey-goosey fun might be a bit much at the finish, but it’s still a laugh watching McCarthy try to get back on her feet.

A new misadventure whose negligibly refined formula somehow ends up being more consistently entertaining.

If you get dizzy watching Final Analysis, it may be because it's such a "Vertigo" wannabe. But director Phil Joanou is no Hitchcock, and Kim Basinger, its star, is no Kim Novak, even though Joanou poses and lights her in a critical lighthouse scene the way Hitchcock posed and lit Novak in that bell tower in "Vertigo." The big problem with "Final Analysis," though, is that Richard Gere's pivotal expert shrink is pretty easy to fool. Not until late in the film does he literally run to a library to learn about one of Freud's classic case histories. You have to suspend a ton of disbelief to buy the assumptions you have to make about him, starting with his gullibility. [7 Feb 1992, p.29]

His Unhinged character is a pill-popping mouth breather with a sweaty beard and big, big gut. He combines the cruelty of a bear-baiter with the appearance of an actual bear. It’s kind of a neat trick, actually: the unbearable bearishness of Russell Crowe. If Disney goes the “Jungle Book” route again, consider him a lock for Baloo.

Cox doesn’t so much chew the scenery as inhale it. Dano looks on in awe.

You can't blame John Cusack for jumping at the chance to play Igor.

Kevin James's latest comedy doesn't promise any bing or bang, only boom. Take it at its word.

A tawdry, predictable hunk of movie headcheese, and I still had a pretty good time with it.

Nightwatch quickly declines from creepy to silly. [17 Apr 1998]

Suicide Squad prides itself on being “dark,” but it’s really just jokey, cynical, and violent, not to mention visually ugly as sin. It’s as subversive as milk. But the cast and the pacing keep it moving.

He doesn't just kill a good buzz. He bludgeons it.

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.

If you thought the world couldn't get enough of bad spoof movies, you thought wrong.

The Goldfinch isn’t great literature but it is a good read. By breaking up the chronology and yanking the audience back and forth between Theo’s fraught youth and crisis-ridden present, though, the film prevents an audience from gaining emotional traction.

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.

For all its antic grasping it lies flatter on the screen than its graphic novel source lies on the page.

Ultimately, Father Stu is a movie about faith, but some kinds of faith have limits. So does casting. Wahlberg as a seminarian is one kind of stretch.

See it in the right sick frame of mind, and Tim and Eric's Billion Dollar Movie can be shockingly and terribly hilarious. Or not.

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

Watching Granger and Priya chase each other around a hotel like squirrels in a park, you wonder what these two see in each other.

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.

Movies that are entertainingly nuts don't come around very often, and when they do they need to be given their due.

In short, the financial crisis and social upheaval of 1930s France never looked so appealing.

If you're a fan of this Lord, find a copy of the 1999 DVD "Lord of the Dance" and don't waste your time with this flat vanity piece.

If “It’s a Wonderful Life” (1946) had mean Mr. Potter standing on the bridge ready to jump, rather than James Stewart’s beaten down hero George Bailey, it still would not have been as namby-pamby as Mark Pellington’s treacly and bromidic The Last Word.

The movie crassly repurposes tragedy to excuse its cliches.

The crew doesn’t much look the part either, save for Schaech’s Stalin ’stache. Yet the movie does show the ability to get past this, even with the weight of all its narratively risky conspiracy theorizing. It’s a shame the intrigue has to get torpedoed by elements that mostly feel correctable.

What the movie lacks most is a real sense of adventure.

Though Derrickson offers some new twists on old tricks, and evokes a mood of menace with rainy streets, gloomy interiors, and the transformation of comforting everyday objects into something horrible, the story soon devolves into variations of many movies we have seen before.

The stand-up routines — from Jackie and the pros alike — are funny and blue enough to shock a few laughs out of you, sometimes in spite of your better judgment, and the star seems once again genuinely invested in creating a character.

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

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.

When is a comedy not a comedy? When it’s not all that funny.

The movie seems terrified of true psychological complexity or perversity. It's less a family tragedy than a lousy country dirge.

The best there is to say is that it's better than ''Troy."

Part sketch-comedy cartoon, part Cracked magazine spoof, installment four is the most scornfully made yet.

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.

The film doesn't have enough innovation or pizazz to attract teenagers, and it lacks the novel charm that made ''Spy Kids'' a surprising winner with both adults and younger audiences.

National Treasure even has a rough time approaching the heart of ''The Amazing Race," a show that manages, in 44 minutes, to make you care about average folks as they follow clues across the globe.

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."

Three Fugitives isn't the total disaster that such remakes as "The Woman in Red" and "The Tall Blond Man with One Red Shoe" have been. It has moments, mostly having to do with physical comedy, of which Veber is a master. Mostly, though, you keep closing your eyes and wishing that when you open them, Nolte and Short will be gone, and Gerard Depardieu and Pierre Richard will appear in their place, as they deserve to. [27 Jan 1989, p.72]

Assassin is funnier and less awkward than her last concert film, 2004's ''CHO Revolution," but nowhere near as consistently gut busting as 2002's ''Notorious C.H.O." or (first and still best) 2000's ''I'm the One That I Want."

Entertainment so generically gentle, it doesn’t compare to last year’s similarly themed, tonally looser “Trolls.”

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.

The numbers just aren’t as dynamic as we might have hoped for from director Trish Sie, whose credits include alt-rock act OK Go’s “treadmill video” and other addictively innovative shorts.