Phar Lap wastes its brilliant potential through embarrassingly inept acting, a cloying soundtrack, stereotyped characters and pedestrian direction. [13 Jul 1984]

Like criticizing the light fixtures on the Titanic. This ship was going down anyway.

There are plenty of things that go bump in the night. “The Watchers” proves they’re only effective if you don’t sleep through them.

With little going for it except its references to part one, The Neverending Story II is a neverending disappointment. [09 Feb 1991, p.11]

By the time the giant, snarling spider shows up - the most boggling of the movie's various "holy schnitzel" touches - parents of the littlest "Hoodwinked" fans may be feeling hoodwinked themselves.

The Women on the 6th Floor is delicate and sensitive and utter bollocks - a bourgeois wet dream made to soothe the souls and stir the loins of powerful men in midlife crisis. But some of us wish we could see this movie told from the maids' point of view.

The Take represents the downside of the new documentary renaissance.

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

The film’s visual look is as inert as its screenplay, and its attempts to make the real racing scenes look like Gran Turismo gameplay by overlaying the game’s graphics with live footage fall embarrassingly flat.

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.

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.

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]

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.''

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.

One thing you have to give Bay credit for: He has a knack for bringing A-list talent down to his level. Like Mark Wahlberg, Oscar nominee for “The Fighter” and “The Departed.”

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

The Son is so concerned with trying to get an emotional rise out of the audience, to choke us with its pathos, that it fails to create believable three-dimensional characters.

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.

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."

One of the big problems with Romeo Is Bleeding is its voiceovers. Gary Oldman, as the crooked cop protagonist, drowns in them like quicksand. [4 Feb 1994, p.54]

A crass, witless knockoff of better films.

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.

A film of singularly boneheaded conceits, Butterfly is populated by, and appears to have been made by, stoned college dudes more hung up on oh-wow twists than the need to make sense.

Another gay movie that luxuriates in emotional implausibility.

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

The saddest part is that "Deck" wastes four comic talents ranging from the near-genius (Matthew Broderick, Danny DeVito) to the inspired (Broadway star Kristin Chenoweth ) to the charming (Kristin Davis of "Sex and the City").

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?)

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.

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.

Alazy rip-off of ''Dog Day Afternoon'' that is too limp to even offend.

Jingle All the Way packs into its queasy bag everything we've learned to dread about the so-called holiday season. If it doesn't bring on an attack of Seasonal Affective Disorder, nothing will. [22 Nov 1996, p.E6]

Irene in Time is the initial first-run feature to debut at the Stuart Street Playhouse, Boston’s newest art house cinema. Both the theater and its audiences deserve much better.

Gross and tasteless...this high-school romp mixes the gross and tasteless with sentimental mush.

The accidental comedy sensation of the year to date.

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.

Once upon a time, you'd go to see a grade-C genre movie like this willing to trade consistency and artfulness for a few stray thrills or oddball charm. But Darkest Hour doesn't have even as much character as those Discover commercials.

Playing Clouseau's exasperated boss, Cleese rams his head into a wall minutes into the action. That's a powerful image, insofar as his headache was mine.

Consider this the sequel to "Ernest in the Army " that the late Jim Varney never got around to making. It's not very good but at least it's not evil.

Cool as Ice ends up seeming tired as well as twisted. The man whom promoters call the rap-era Elvis has negative charisma. [19 Oct 1991, p.11]

An embarrassing romantic comedy from Rob Reiner.

The flat tire of summer movies.

Every scene featuring these bumbling cops is painful.

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.

This one, a comic vacuum, is close to amateurish. [22 May 1992, p.32]

If you doubt that August is the boneyard for movies too poor to release in other months, here’s The Kitchen, an addled and actively unpleasant crime comedy-drama with a high-profile cast and a mean streak a mile wide. Based on a limited-edition comic book and completed in July 2018, the movie’s been sitting on the shelf until enough people are on vacation to not see it.

Slides instantly into the realm of the forgettable.

A wan, derivative entry in the torture-porn cycle.

Virtuosity doesn't really compute, but there's going to be more of its kind of cyberaction, not less. [4 Aug 1995, pg. 51]

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

Even an experienced director would have his hands full making anything out of this script. Four screenwriters are credited, and as any movie buff knows, the more writers, the worse the movie. Nowhere Faustian, this one aspires to camp classic status, but lurches lamely into vile gross-out territory. [10 Feb 1989, p.48]

Cradle of lifelessness.

A video game barely disguised as a movie. Violent, and the monsters are scary for younger children.

The plot is a canvas on which to bludgeon the audience with action sequences that have been shot for maximum overstimulation.

Suburbicon is George Clooney’s sixth feature as a director and the latest spiral downward in terms of quality.

Messing should know this is precisely the kind of movie Grace would ridicule Will for dragging her to see.

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

A black-dressing young intellectual of my acquaintance recently ascribed a "lazy generosity" to Garfield and his daily antics. If so, the movie gets the laziness but misses the generosity.

The only thing that keeps Cool World from imploding is that Bakshi turns it into a series of animator's riffs, with little explosions of toon action erupting like video game novas into the foreground of the story that isn't happening. [10 Jul 1992]

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.

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.

Julie Davis, tries desperately to fill (Woody)Allen's Coke-bottle glasses, but it fails. Miserably.

As perfectly bad horror movies go, Wrong Turn is something new: a gore-splattered workout flick.

When this Vin Diesel vehicle isn't pointlessly frenzied, it's narratively inert, wasting some decent production design, and a French-flavored cast primed for fun.

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.

Eleanor the Great is one of the worst and most distasteful movies I’ve seen in a long while.

As for Hawke's direction, if there is any, it certainly isn't apparent. The shots are frequently bland and uneven, and the players act as though their only instruction was ''Just show up at the set and remember your lines.'' At least they seem to have gotten that much right.

After "Gothika " and "Catwoman ," a viewer has to wonder: Why does this woman keep making thrillers if she can't bring herself to be thrilled?

Scares up few chills.

It's ultimately just a rigorous personal training film made by people who don't seem to like movies or the people who go to them.

Wonder Wheel, Allen’s new film, is one of the Very Bad Ones. Set in a post-WWII Coney Island that glows with the hues of popsicles at sunset, it’s a strained adultery melodrama that appears to have been written poorly on purpose, as a sour parody of 1950s theatrical clichés.

King Arthur: Legend of the Sword is stupid enough to send you back to the one movie that did the saga right by ripping it to shreds, 1975’s “Monty Python and the Holy Grail.”

His [Director Tony Scott's] pornographic lust for bloodletting, gunplay, and out-of-control camerawork far exceeds his abilities to tell a story.

The kind of comedy that takes the fun out of stupidity.

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).

If ridiculous, hackneyed, gratuitously violent slasher movies aren't your thing, don't go near Venom with a 10-foot snake pole.

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.

Pain & Gain, a jokey but fatally tone-deaf true-crime caper, plays like “Fargo” for idiots.

It's a movie only a psychic could love, since a psychic would know to stay home or see "Zodiac" instead.

The resulting movie is a nauseating flight of Hollywood navel-gazing.

Quaint and crass get together — or would that be “bump uglies”? — with awkward, thoroughly flat results in The Big Wedding, an ensemble comedy with a tonal cluelessness as surprising as the name cast that signed on for it anyway.

Pink Cadillac, you might say, is low on gas. [26 May 1989, p.43]

Never quite as dumb as "Harold & Kumar," but it's nowhere near as smart, and that's what kills it.

Probably would have worked better as a slamming soundtrack than as a muddle-headed movie.

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.

Despite all the hyperventilating, the movie fails to consider what these crimes mean when, say, the residents of the White House happen to be black. The filmmakers recognize that identity politics are often a trap door. But it's one they're helpless to save themselves from falling through.

A genre cheapie from its digital-video camerawork to its Casiotone soundtrack to its bland, buff cast, the movie is a cultural watershed in a dry gulch.

An action flick loaded with cars, chrome, and silicone, is everything you'd expect it to be, and yet so much less: less character development, less believability, and most unforgivably, less escapist entertainment.

There isn’t a single original idea to be found here, nor a twist you can’t predict immediately. This film has what Siskel and Ebert used to call “the Idiot Plot.” That is, a plot that doesn’t contain a single credible moment, and would be over if everyone involved wasn’t an idiot.

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

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.

A lame romantic comedy that is neither romantic nor comedic.

A sex comedy that appears to have been made by people who've never actually had sex.

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

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

If you were ever curious how a bad director can destroy the work of two talented actors and a slight, but funny, script, you need look no further than Educating Rita. [28 Oct 1983]

Worse than junk, in fact. Beyond Borders so trivializes the plight of the world's displaced peoples that it becomes actively obnoxious.