The thesis-driven story precludes much dramatic discovery, and the looming shuttle disaster only exacerbates the sense of heavy-handedness.

This frantic sequel finds the diaper-obsessed heroes and their foolish parents marooned on a desert island, where they encounter the family from a more charming Nickelodeon cartoon.

Like so many other CGI behemoths, this dull action fantasy ultimately squashes rather than inspires one's sense of wonder.

Part of the idea here was to play in the ambiguous zones where Las Vegas tackiness, LSD hallucinations, Gilliam beasties, and lots of vomit become difficult to separate.

As silly as it sounds, but strangely dull.

Godawful allegorical western from the height of the cold war (1958), with lanky Yankee Gregory Peck caught between two superpower ranchers who are fighting it out over water rights. Directed by William Wyler in that glassy, studied way of his that gives craftsmanship a bad name.

The pretty-pretty visual style is evidence of a close study of Days of Heaven, as well as a complete misunderstanding of it. With Leo McKern and William Daniels; photographed by Nestor Almendros, forced into garish effects far below the level of his talent.

The script is stupid, the acting is wooden, the special effects are laughable, the vintage-80s synthesizer score is cheesy. The movie's paranoid premise is boiled down from two superior sci-fi movies, Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) and The Day of the Triffids (1962). And there are no trolls.

Huyck's direction is resolutely uninvolved—every shot of every arrhythmically paced scene cries out for instant anonymity—and only Jeffrey Jones's sardonic scenery chewing as an archetypally deranged scientist keeps things marginally watchable. Lea Thompson is completely out of her element as Howard's sexpot girlfriend (though graduated, thankfully, from the treacly virginality of SpaceCamp), and as for the guy(s) in the duck suit . . . well, he/they deserve our condolences and prayers.

Landis never bothers to account for the friendship that springs up spontaneously between these two antipathetic types, but then he never bothers to account for anything in this loose progression of recycled Abbott and Costello riffs and fumbled Strangelovean satire.

Angry fish travels to the Bahamas for the Christmas holidays, plotting revenge against the family of a vacationing New England widow (Lorraine Gary). Noel, noel, a charming gift idea with suggestions of inverted seasonal myth—until director Joseph Sargent swamps it all in antimythical literalism and predictable lunchtime theater.

The ugly, aggressive, proliferating effects were all I could begin to contend with, and trying to keep interested in them was like trying to remain interested in a loudmouth shouting in my ear.

With very little modification, this archly innocuous children's musical could have been marketed as a sequel to Invasion of the Body Snatchers.

An appalling piece of junk that tries to redo The Odd Couple and Grumpy Old Men in presidential terms.

If Frank Capra had directed the Three Stooges in a Disney Christmas release, the results would have been considerably better than this godawful Fox comedy (1994) by writer-producer-director George Gallo.

The film is ugly on so many levels—from art direction to human values—that it's hard to know where to begin.

Under the direction of last-minute replacement Richard Benjamin, the results are insufferable—grotesque, chaotic, demoralized.

Pretentious, boring, and consistently uninvolving, this effort by producer Robert Evans and director William Friedkin to make comebacks with an incoherent Joe Eszterhas script simply won't wash.

Queasily suspended between drag theatrics (Faye Dunaway and Brenda Vaccaro camping it up on a soundstage replica of a carnival spook house) and Spielbergian wholesomeness (Canadian Helen Slater as a toothy, Aryan Ubermadchen), this is one comic-book feature that doesn't fly.

This 1998 sequel seems almost deliberately designed to disappoint--our enjoyment is supposed to lie in making fun of the obvious red herrings, contrived opportunities to show cleavage, melodramatic dialogue, gullible characters, and inevitable to-be-continued ending.

Director Colin Higgins plays foul with the audience, constructing some of the most dishonest suspense sequences ever filmed, and ends with a thriller that is obnoxious and manipulative in the extreme. If it were exciting, I suppose it wouldn't matter, but it's not: Higgins can't be bothered to bring the slightest bit of conviction to his plot, which takes nearly two hours to run its unimaginative course.

The most obnoxious case of masculine swagger since Andrew Dice Clay, with just a tad of Paul Lynde thrown in for spice, Jim Carrey defies you not to bolt for the exit while playing the title hero in this 1994 comic mystery.

None of the characters or ideas is allowed to develop beyond its cardboard profile.

Imagine combining bad imitations of the "Ace Ventura" and "Austin Powers" movies and you'll have a rough idea of this feeble Dana Carvey farce.

Distributors are clearly scraping the bottom of the barrel with this flimsy exposé of presidential adviser Karl Rove.

Wasn't worth Allen's time and isn't worth yours.

If your idea of a good time is watching a lot of stupid, unpleasant people insult and brutalize one another, this is right up your alley.

Michael Tolkin and Bruce Joel Rubin's straightforward script and Mimi Leder's toneless direction make this attempt so boring that the titles counting down the months, weeks, and finally hours to impact are best used to gauge how soon the movie will be over.

Mechanical, soulless.

Given the audacity, it would be a pleasure to report that the results are hilarious, but most of it isn't even funny, and the sense of "anything goes" hangs heavy over the film as it develops.

Shameless exercise in high-tech sadism.

The current national priorities should be as follows: reduce carbon emissions and stop funding the films of M. Night Shyamalan.

The unfunniest comedy I can recall seeing in ages.

The dearth of ideas is exemplified at the end by a Mary Tyler Moore freeze-frame of Graham leaping in the air.

This gross sex farce actually has a point, though about half the population won't like what it is.

Romantic comedies should never be this exhausting. Despite a few good zingers, Mars Callahan's vitriolic take on the sexes sinks under the weight of its secondhand psychobabble and smug apercus.

Creatively it's a giant step backwards.

Full of meaningless tragedies left unjustified by the absurdly optimistic ending .. (an) intolerable story.

The talented director Bill Duke (A Rage in Harlem, Deep Cover), who brought distinction even to The Cemetery Club, his previous outing, goes to sleep here, and it's hard to blame him; why stay awake for insulting hackwork like this? James Orr and Jim Cruickshank wrote this malarkey.

As if to justify a serious discussion of this comedy before dissing it, some reviewers have pointed out that it evokes Casablanca. Maybe that's why the plot seems imposed on the characters.

Virtually unendurable.

The inevitable isn't worth the wait.

One reason this production-design vehicle is so incredibly boring is that the characters keep having to explain the plot to one another.

Screenwriter Marc Moss can take credit for the film's laughable dialogue.

Director Jonas Pate should be run through a wood chipper for daring to quote "Fargo."

This gross-out action comedy gets good mileage from its high-energy music and World Championship Wrestling characters, and leads David Arquette and Scott Caan are expertly pathetic.

Despite the cast -- Kevin Bacon, Matt Dillon, Neve Campbell, Denise Richards, Daphne Rubin-Vega, Theresa Russell, Robert Wagner, and Bill Murray -- I found it preposterous.

Stephen Gaghan, who scripted this turkey, landed in the director's chair after Edward Zwick (Glory) bailed out, and you can almost smell the flop sweat.

Inept script delivers a series of juvenile gags.

Ludicrous and inept, this low-budget 1985 splatter film directed by former Chicagoan Stuart Gordon tries to compensate for its complete failure to establish even a sliver of credibility by inflating the usual quotient of giggly camp humor and squishy gore effects...It's this kind of flat-footed stuff that gives garbage a bad name.

This is supposedly a big-budget production, though on several occasions the scientist hero (Edward Burns) seems to be walking in place before a rear-projection screen.

David Morse, who plays the driver, gives a relatively sharp and understated performance -- for me the only bearable thing in the movie.

This grasping comedy targets kids of all ages but will please no one as it exploits exhausted ideas about adolescence.

An epic about the Irish patriot (Liam Neeson) during the last years of his life (1916-'22), it clearly represents a lot of thought on Jordan's part, yet it's dramatic and cinematic sludge.

Overwritten by Billy Crystal and Peter Tolan, overdirected by Joe Roth, overplayed by most of the cast, yet typically undernourished.

Alas, the plot eventually takes over, and it's exceptionally ugly and unpleasant.

Only in the last third, when he gets down to the business of telling a story, does The Brown Bunny become a porn movie -- though not in the sense you'd expect.

"Friday" had moments of stoned charm and telling neighborhood detail; this second sequel never gets beyond the angry, cruel, and misogynist.

I only laughed once here, at a Treat Williams reaction shot; the rest of the time I was trying to figure out why Allen made this movie.

Grossly unimaginative.

First-time directors Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski must have written the script for this comedy when they were about 12--and not changed a word.

The shticky dialogue undercuts the solid genre plotting, which undercuts the humor.

Doesn't do much with its pseudosavvy characters.

The plot exposition gets laborious in spots, the period flavor is only occasional and approximate, and the direction tends to be clunky, yet the strong secondary cast helps to take up some of the slack.

For most of the running time I was mainly confused, as well as mildly nauseated by the gross-out details of a tale that tends to be more slimy than scary.

This stupidly contrived thriller is all the more disappointing if you admire previous work by Berry and director James Foley (After Dark, My Sweet).

The most subtly revolting aspect of the movie is how it manages to exploit violence for cheap thrills, in part by equating submission with love.

Wastes most of its 110 minutes making impotent jokes about male sexual behavior and the repugnance of old women.

The picture is completely devoid of cinematic interest, adopting instead a tiresome theatrical aesthetic in which showy monologues are filmed in interminable, usually ill-chosen long takes.

This insufferable romance-adventure includes vague comedy as well as unintentional humor, and its target audience seems to be preadolescents who won't notice the calculated enthusiasm with which it sidesteps sexuality.

This multigenre parody is excruciatingly slow and unamusing; a go-go dancer in the opening and closing credits does as much in a few minutes to shake up our perspective on a bygone aesthetic as the entire narrative in between.

I had a pretty good time with this until the end, when I felt so soiled by the filmmakers' cynicism and the characters' gratuitous viciousness that I wanted to take a bath.

Sicko horror film from Australia, whose sadism is topped only by its absurdity.

Painfully unfunny.

Moving in fits and starts, mawkish in its sincerity, and at times disjointed in its lumpy structure.

Nearly all the SF premises are accorded the status of Andrew Dice Clay one-liners - which means that they, along with the characters, keep changing from one scene to the next.

The narrative is murky and ludicrous, the action violent and nihilistic, the contemporary western ethos painfully pretentious.

Brian De Palma dedicates this 1983 feature to Howard Hawks and Ben Hecht, authors of the 1932 original, though I doubt they would find much honor in his gory inflation of their crisp, 90-minute comic nightmare into a klumbering, self-important, arrhythmic downer of nearly three hours.

I don't know the novel, but judging from the script by Crichton and John Patrick Shanley, this must be scraping the bottom of the Crichton barrel.

Wolfgang Petersen and writer Andrew Marlowe, apparently afraid to really make fun of any American icons, challenge us to take the story straight no matter what, but the only thing this ponderous movie has going for it is its unintentional humor.

Awful light drama.

The elaborate climax set in a Paris bakery is the least boring part of this trained-animal movie.

Craven seems to have set out to make a bad movie, and he's succeeded.

There is hardly any point in discussing the direction of a picture like this, in which almost every shot has been predetermined by the requirements of the special effects, yet director Richard Marquand fluffs the two or three real opportunities he has, rendering the long-delayed character climaxes with a chilly indifference.

The usual Spielberg rhetoric about the sanctity of childhood and the beauty of dreams seems wholly factitious in this crass context, which even includes a commercial--in the form of a rock video--for the tie-in merchandise.

Screenwriters Keith Merryman and David A. Newman interweave four asinine, underdeveloped plot lines, and Tim Story's prosaic direction reduces their script to a shambolic nightmare.

The grasping novelty of the visuals doesn't rival the uncharismatic leads or the hopelessly, unironically banal plot.

This asthma-inducing adventure set on K2 starts out seeming as if its corny storytelling and phony-looking settings were designed to show that it's as much about genre-movie conventions as anything else.

The gratuitous use of the city (New Orleans) during Mardi Gras is the least of this movie's unoriginal sins.

Ludicrous revenge thriller.

In the hands of Preston Sturges, this could have been the basis for some snappy mordant comedy, but Stephen Herek (Mr. Holland's Opus) sees only fields of corn, winding up with one of those pseudodeep stories (e.g. American Beauty) that Hollywood takes for spiritual.

By ordinary movie standards it's awful, but fans of cinematic dementia should have fun for about half an hour.

Director Bruce McCulloch, an alumnus of the Canadian TV show "The Kids in the Hall," lacks the sense of scale and timing needed for a feature film, and Lee's voice-over about fate that brackets the narrative only highlights its shapelessness.

Offers the same crudely effective variation on the hatred and fear of hillbillies in "Deliverance."

When nostalgia, hypocrisy, and indifference to history converge in the kind of shameless Capracorn manufactured here, one can either be stupefied by the filmmakers' cynicism or fall for the package hook, line, and sinker.

Directors Gerard Ungerman and Audrey Brohy don't provide much analysis, instead telling the familiar stories of the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq.

Even with the bar lowered, this seems appallingly bad, a lazy assortment of weak punch lines, sentimental music cues, and trite situations.

There's so little urgency to the plot that one eventually feels not even the actors and filmmakers believe for a second in what's going on.