One of those movies that an audience knows is terrible the minute it starts.

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.

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.

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.

Heartlessness, stupidity, cynicism, and greed are a demoralizing combination for movie-going. We pay to see a movie that doesn't respect us for being there at all.

A miscast, underwritten, drably directed adaptation of a very popular novel, it's the feel-bad film of the summer and an almost perfect example of how not to turn a book into a movie.

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.

A pox upon history and an insult to the 16th president of the United States. It's that, of course - actually, that's the point - but this joyless, deafening cinematic headache commits a different crime. It's a sin against entertainment.

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

This is a terrible little movie even by the standards of the genre.

Not that there’s all manner of comedy craftsmanship demanding study here, but the movie does seem to be a funny jumble of contradictory impulses.

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

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

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.

The best we get here are modest action diversions.

Deep in the swampy hearts and minds of some filmmakers, embarrassing stereotypes still fester, gathering moss and slime.

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.

None of what we see is at all credible.

Me, I'm a Johnny Rotten man, so this limp culture-clash comedy with a heart of patchouli just made me want to stab my eyeballs out.

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.”

The movie has elements of road picture, social satire, and odd-couple romance, but mostly it's about lack of pacing and tone. Somewhere very (very) deep in here is a whiff of "Citizen Ruth," and who knows what Alexander Payne might have done with this material. Instead we know what writer-director Robbie Pickering has done with it, and that ain't much.

This purposefully bad dystopian gangsta drama - imagine a "Boyz 'n the Hood,'' "Mad Max,'' and "Breakin' 2: Electric Boogaloo'' mash-up - simply fails.

Unfunny, predictable, and vulgar, it’s the generic equivalent of a Judd Apatow movie. As always, you get what you pay for.

The movie wants us to find this frightening, but there's no suspense, no terrifying images.

The squirminess stands out here because there's so little going on the rest of the time.

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.

It's always raining or snowing or misting. This makes for a nice visual, but it also makes the scenes look interchangeable. This is even more of a problem because the writer-director, Michael J. Bassett, imparts no shape to the story. Many movies suffer from worse problems, but not many waste the talents of Max von Sydow, as Solomon's father, or Pete Postlethwaite.

Will your preschoolers enjoy it? Perhaps. Is it worth 88 minutes of their lives, or yours? Not in a world where "Sesame Street" is on TV every day. Not even in a world where "Sesame Street" didn't exist.

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

Well, fair's fair. George W. Bush got Michael Moore and "Fahrenheit 9/11." Now Barack Obama gets Dinesh D'Souza and 2016: Obama's America. Both films are wildly partisan attack documentaries made by wildly partisan and generally annoying polemicists (D'Souza is more personable, actually, than Moore).

Somewhere between John Cassavetes’s “Husbands” (1970) and “The Hangover” (2009) you will find Last Vegas. Not necessarily a bad place to be, except the film unfortunately has the madcap hilarity of the former and the emotional intensity of the latter.

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

In the end, it’s hard to remember another action entry that expends so much energy on frenetic blacktop choreography and attention-deficit editing with so little to show for it.

Back to the Future III has no future. The reason is that it never works up much of a past as it sends its gull-winged DeLorean time machine back to the Old West. In effect, it goes back to the Age of Steam and runs out of gas. [25 May 1990, p.45]

The film’s zippy graphics are a treat, but its zippy arguments are slipshod.

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

Hess has made a classic rookie director mistake: Any spoof has to be at least as smart as the thing it’s spoofing, and this one’s twice as dumb.

One of those loud, cringe-y female-empowerment comedies that feels like it was made by people who hate women.

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.

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

As for the dialogue, although the characters talk really fast, swear a lot, and overlap their lines, what they’re saying isn’t very funny or authentic. It’s as if David Mamet collaborated on writing an episode of “Two and a Half Men.”

Just one more touch of “realism” in a sexual melodrama played so straight that it’s nuts.

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

There’s no redeeming this softcore nonsense, which plays like a script that “Storage Wars” stumbled across in Joe Eszterhas’s old locker.

Despite such attractions as Gabriel Byrne as a vampire with a skin disease and a décor that combines Hogwarts with “Suspiria,” the only lesson learned here is that Hollywood needs fresh blood.

Misogynistic, homophobic, scatological — none of these words come up in any of the spelling bees that take place in Jason Bateman’s directorial debut, but they apply to the film.

The Quiet Ones simply has nothing to say.

Ultimately, what Fantastic Four delivers is change for change’s sake, rather than change for the better.

No doubt a labor of love, the result is just plain laborious for the audience.

Grim, ridiculous, and dull.

As an actor, Braff does thin-skinned sad-sack quite well. As a writer, he’s hopelessly banal. As a director, he’s a disaster.

The film is stuck in the inconsequential rut of the series. The characters are static, and the comedy is situational rather than dramatic.

This is mythology that’s famously transportive in every sense, but the animators struggle to take us anywhere truly captivating, or even clearly defined.

None of this is as riotously zany as it wants to be.

For the sequel, London Has Fallen, Butler and director Babak Najafi (HBO’s “Banshee”) strike a tone that’s more consistent — consistently dumb.

It’s an idea that could make for decent genre viewing, if only its cast had some range, and its indie reach didn’t exceed its mainstream-polished grasp.

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.

Roland Emmerich’s Stonewall reduces these events to a backdrop for caricatures that were already passé in William Friedkin’s “The Boys in the Band” (1970).

Denounce the cynics who pander such pabulum as entertainment for children.

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.”

It’s like a nightmare in which you are trapped in an endless Kmart aisle of horrible holiday cards.

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

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.

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

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.

The Bodyguard is a misfire. It's one of those perplexing but complete failures where all the ingredients show up, but somehow manage never to jell into anything convincing. [25 Nov 1992, p.35]

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]

There's about one TV commercial's worth of funny gags in PCU a poorly executed one-joker about political correctness on campus...But any laughs quickly become redundant and wear thin, and the uselessly involved plot spirals off into absurdity. [29 Apr 1994, p.49]

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

Four writers are credited with the script, and their combined efforts yield just one scene with genuine verve.

Unless you're on its let's-laugh-at-the-loonies wavelength, The Dream Team is singularly unfunny. The writing and direction are smugly vacant, behaving as if the basic concept is so innately hilarious that neither need bother fleshing it out with characterization and inventiveness. The only thing prodigious about The Dream Team is its cheap witlessness. It makes Rain Man look like King Lear. [07 Apr 1989, p.35]

A witless mess with more scriptwriters than laughs. [12 May 1989, p.46]

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]

This feeble excuse for a comedy made me angry, and if you have any cherished cinematic feelings for the quartet of actresses at its center, you may feel angry, too.

Fogelman is familiar with the genre, having created the Emmy-nominated “This Is Us,” which has been deft enough in its treatment of loss to make it one of NBC’s most-watched shows. Life Itself fails to elicit the same sniffles, instead drowning its cast in a sticky, soggy script.

Garner bulls her way through the film with determination and a minimum of facial expressions, like someone who’s been told to clean up something awful and just wants to get it over with. So what if Charlize Theron did it better in “Atomic Blonde,” last year’s female-led brawler that is in every conceivable way superior to Peppermint?

Maybe if Mapplethorpe hadn’t been commissioned by the Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation, it would have been a batter movie. As it is, this sour, undernourished biopic is a disappointment just shy of a disaster — a portrait of a boundary-destroying artist that stays well within the safe borders of convention.

The dullest and shoddiest action-adventure flick of the year, with only a few cute Sean Connery moments to rescue it from total, sheer and utter bogosity. [01 Nov 1991, p.29]

Since a film like Mr. Magoo relies - literally and figuratively - on sight gags, they ought to be hilarious and razor-sharp. But the film's gags couldn't work their way through melted butter. [25 Dec 1997, p.C6]

The most uncomprehending sequel of the last few years. It shows no awareness at all of what made the first film work so surprisingly well. What little emotion it summons is superficial and sentimental. The rest of the time it falls back on dumb farce and embarrassing Brit-bashing, climaxing with a vacuous chase scene. And this in a film that's supposed to be more mature than its predecessor. [21 Nov 1990, p.37]

The humor in Leave It to Beaver is doggedly bland, with a conventional story line that's no more inventive than watching four episodes of the TV show scrunched together and interwoven. [22 Aug 1997, p.F6]

The film is too long for some toddlers and too dull for some older children, and anyone over 12 will likely find it as much fun as a 75-minute root canal. [03 Apr 1998, p.D9]

He (Barinholtz) works hard to creatively lampoon a nation divided, and his first-timer’s ambition and thematic investment are admirable. Disappointingly, though, he lacks storytelling chops, aiming for wildly provocative satire but instead churning out a technically spotty screed.

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.

When you become a megastar like Arnold Schwarzenegger, you must expect your past to jump up and bite you - especially if you've made a stinker like this one. A great rental for frat parties, this Manhattan melodrama features Zeus sending Arnold, as Hercules, to present-day New York. [06 Dec 1991, p.62]

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]

It's a movie Playboy spread, with irksome misogynist overtones. And, as the camera swoops liberally along the tropical seaport, it's hard to imagine how such a lovely spot was made to seem so tawdry and so tedious. [28 April 1990, p.8]

Like "Fire Birds," another recent special-team flick, Navy SEALs is a transparent attempt to showcase adventure sequences. Plot? Character? Who has time for subtlety amid all those dangerous maneuvers? It's all an excuse for the action - but even the action in Navy SEALS is dismal. [20 July 1990, p.32]

Neil Jordan's High Spirits wants to be a supernatural comedy. But it isn't super, it isn't natural, it isn't high, and it isn't spirited. [18 Nov 1988, p.33]

Cyborg is cyboring. [07 Apr 1989, p.34]

A not-so-funny thing happened on the way to Atlantic City, and Dan Aykroyd decided to make an offensively tedious movie about it. [16 Feb 1991, p.14]

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.

One hundred and thirty-two minutes of shrill, self-satisfied jazz hands, The Prom may be the biggest disappointment of the season.

To call Johnny Mnemonic a disaster would be giving it too much credit. Disasters land loudly, resoundingly. This one lands with a dull thud. [26 May 1995, p.87]

The scenes with Keaton and Irons, too, rise above the mediocrity-unto-badness of Love, Weddings & Other Disasters on the strength of the actors’ charisma alone. Irons thaws satisfyingly as a snob finding unexpected love, and Keaton remains adorably, engagingly herself, turning her character’s blindness into a la-di-da form of grace. They are diamonds at a garage sale, and they deserve better.

For a movie that's supposed to be sex-driven, Jade has the sexual energy of a dead battery. [13 Oct 1995, p.42]

Bruce Willis appears to be one of those actors for whom there is no middle ground. His action films are either "Die Hard" or "Hudson Hawk." His latest, Striking Distance, is a "Hudson Hawk." It should have been called "Striking Out." [17 Sept 1993, p.51]

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]