There is a funny movie lurking at the edges of Splash, and sometimes it even sneaks on screen and makes us smile. It's too bad the relentlessly conventional minds that made this movie couldn't have made the leap from sitcom to comedy.

An earnest but hopeless attempt to tell a parable about a man's search for redemption. By the end of his journey, we don't care if he finds redemption, if only he finds wakefulness.

A lot of the dialogue is intended as funny, but man, is it lame.

Painfully long, exceedingly tedious, consistently unimaginative and quite dopey.

If the movie is a lost cause, it may at least showcase actors who have better things ahead of them.

The filmmakers made no effort to empathize with their prehistoric characters, to imagine what it might have really been like back then.

Rampage might not be the worst movie of the year so far, but it’s a contender for most pointless.

In the earlier films, we really identified with the small cadre of surviving humans. They were seen as positive characters, and we cared about them. This time, the humans are mostly unpleasant, violent, insane or so noble that we can predict with utter certainty that they will survive.

Armand Assante, on the other hand, is one of the best movie actors of his generation. But he isn't very funny in Fatal Instinct.

Underwater breaks no new ground as a sci-fi horror flick — other than as a possible contender for the murkiest movie ever made.

(Li)'s scenes are so clearly computer-aided that his moves are about as impressive as Bugs Bunny doing the same.

Hoot has its heart in the right place, but I have been unable to locate its brain.

In a world already corrupted with Amy and Joey, and Woody Allen and Soon Yi, the last thing we need is a movie like "The Crush" masquerading as entertainment. [6 Apr 1993, p.29]

It's slick, it has impressive production values and the acting is appropriate to the material. So why did I find myself so indifferent to the movie? Maybe because it never generated any sympathy for its characters. This is filmmaking by the numbers, without soul.

Plays like a tired exercise, a spy spoof with no burning desire to be that, or anything else.

There are those who will no doubt call The Postman the worst film of the year, but it's too good-hearted for that.

An Innocent Man has all the elements to put us through an emotional wringer, but the movie never works up any enthusiasm for them. It's the most relaxed crime movie of the year.

This is not the story of a fugitive trying to sneak through enemy terrain and be rescued, but of a movie character magically transported from one photo opportunity to another.

At every moment in the movie, I was aware that Peter Sellers was Clouseau, and Steve Martin was not. I hadn't realized how thoroughly Sellers and Edwards had colonized my memory.

A witless recycling of the H.G. Wells story from 1895, with the absurdity intact but the wonderment missing.

The movie deserves more stars for its bottom-line craft, but all the craft in the world can't redeem its story.

The Hollars is an uneven, ineffective and self-conscious dysfunctional family comedy/drama with a Sundance-y vibe, and scene after scene in which the greatly talented and usually quite likable cast members keep stepping in big piles of wrong choices.

​I’ll tell you what got Taken. A hundred and twelve minutes of my life got Taken.

Stiller the director does a fine job of making Zoolander 2 look like an actual spy movie, but we’ve seen far better takeoffs, including “Spy” and “Kingsman: The Secret Service” in just the last couple of years. As for the jabs at the transient nature of popular culture and the ridiculousness of high fashion world — easy, tired targets.

In the lurid and cheesy and sometimes unintentionally funny political thriller Runner, one of the most intriguing and eclectic casts of the year is wasted in a murky cesspool that comes across as a third-rate version of “House of Cards” with a little bit of “Scandal” thrown in for bad measure.

Because the opening scenes of Sleeping with the Enemy are so powerful, the rest of the movie is all the more disappointing. The film begins as an unyielding look at a battered wife, and ends as another one of those thrillers where the villain toys with his victim and the audience.

It's surprising to see a director like Michael Apted and an actress like Jennifer Lopez associated with such tacky material.

Zipper might be entertaining enough in a campy way for you to watch it on demand as long as you’ve got a really big bowl of popcorn and an even bigger glass of wine (or the non-alcoholic elixir of your choice) to get you through. Might. Be.

You know there's something wrong with a sex movie when the good parts are the dialogue.

Starts promisingly as an attack on modern commercialized sports, and then turns into just one more wheezy assembly-line story about slacker dudes vs. rich old guys.

It's a simple, wholesome parable, crashingly obvious, and we sit patiently while the characters and the screenplay slowly arrive at the inevitable conclusion. It needs to take some chances and surprise us.

It's ironic that a movie taking aim at the dangers of science run amok would invest so strongly in the science of its slick filmmaking and special makeup effects and so little toward the development of a cohesive screenplay, but such is the case with The Island of Dr. Moreau.

Maybe this is unreasonable, but I can’t help thinking that if you’re going to make a movie with “Oz” in the title, you’d better be prepared to kick in at least a little inspiration. Yet that’s precisely what’s missing — so utterly absent it’s almost impressive in a way — in the painfully uninspired Legends of Oz.

In Step Brothers, the language is simply showing off by talking dirty. It serves no comic function, and just sort of sits there in the air, making me cringe.

Footloose is a seriously confused movie that tries to do three things, and does all of them badly. It wants to tell the story of a conflict in a town, it wants to introduce some flashy teenage characters, and part of the time it wants to be a music video. It's possible that no movie with this many agendas can be good; maybe somebody should have decided, early on, exactly what the movie was supposed to be about.

This is an astonishingly uninvolving and at times almost laughably melodramatic effort, marred by overwrought voice-over narration from Theron, a relentless barrage of scenes depicting horrific human suffering and a love story featuring one-dimensional characters we don’t particularly care about.

The astonishing success of the original "MiB" was partly because it was fun, partly because it was unexpected. We'd never seen anything like it, while with MiBII, we've seen something exactly like it.

A brutal, crude, witless high-tech CGI contrivance, in which no artificial technique has been overlooked, including 3-D.

Made me want to spray the screen with Lysol. This movie is shameless. It's not merely a tearjerker. It extracts tears individually by liposuction, without anesthesia.

Tom Hardy is one of the best actors in the world, but as he flounders his way through Venom, we’re reminded even the finest talents can sink under the weight of a terrible movie.

The only thing less satisfying than the build-up is the finale, which goes from mind-boggling to you’ve got to be kidding me.

As screenplays go, this is as idiotic as it gets. There are a couple of marginally funny moments in the movie, like the belching contest, but they don't go anywhere.

I am just about ready to write off movies in which people make bets about whether they will, or will not, fall in love.

The movie pretends to show poor black kids being bribed into literacy by Dylan and candy bars, but actually it is the crossover white audience that is being bribed with mind-candy in the form of safe words by the two Dylans.

The movie is silly beyond comprehension, and even if it weren't silly, it would still be beyond comprehension.

There are few things more depressing than a weeper that doesn't make you weep.

Burnt Offerings is a mystery, all right. What's mysterious is that the filmmakers were able to sell such a weary collection of ancient cliches for cold hard cash.

In the case of David O. Russell’s jaw-droppingly terrible, aggressively tasteless, profoundly unfunny and interminably dull conspiracy thriller and would-be comedy “Amsterdam,” the all-star ensemble has less chemistry than a high school freshman on the first day of class.

Intrusion is a derivative, manipulative, convoluted and dopey story that dishes up one scary movie cliché after another before careening out of control with a late plot development so insanely implausible, so far out of left field, it’s as if someone accidentally deleted 20 pages of the script during production and nobody noticed.

This is the kind of movie that is so witlessly generic that the plot and title disappear into a mist of other recycled plots and interchangeable titles.

What possible reason was there for anyone to make Did You Hear About the Morgans? Or should I say "remake," because this movie has been made and over and over again, and oh, so much better.

What we have here is a witless attempt to merge the "Twilight" formula with the Michael Bay formula.

Virtually every big twist and every major reveal in The Commuter is telegraphed well in advance, and from the moment the train leaves the station and the story really begins to kick into gear, we find ourselves rolling our eyes about every 10 minutes.

All the cutting-edge pyrotechnics in the universe can’t overcome the uneven (and ultimately unsatisfying) screenplay.

How bad is “Fallen Kingdom”? How terrible is a movie that pounds us with a pretentious, nearly operatic score while indulging in B-movie clichés and calling for the main characters to make idiotic decisions just to keep the story rolling? I have to dig deep into the Awful Sequel Playbook to draw parallels to this exercise in wretched excess.

It's too unfunny to be comedy, too ordinary to be sci-fi and too flat to be action. But give the cinematographers credit: All that dark mood lighting does make it much easier for moviegoers to snooze. [5 May 1992, p.31]

Narrow Margin is a clumsy version of the Idiot Plot, dressed up as a high-gloss chase thriller. The Idiot Plot, of course, is any plot that would be resolved in five minutes if everyone in the story were not an idiot. And rarely has there been a film in which more idiots make more mistakes than in this one.

Unfortunately, there's otherwise not much meat to King's Thinner.

This movie is a study in wretched excess. It is so smoky, so dusty, so foggy, so unfocused and so brownish yellow that you want to try Windex on the screen. A director is in deep trouble when we do not even enjoy the primary act of looking at his picture.

Throughout the game, during the action sequences and especially during the timeouts and strategy sessions, the “celebrity” fans are a huge distraction — and making things even more bizarre, their numbers include Pennywise the Clown from “It” and the murderous, rapist gang known as the Droogs from “A Clockwork Orange.” Who in the name of Bugs Bunny thought this was a good idea?

It offers certain pleasures, but suffers from an inability to structure events or know when to end a shot. And it has an ending that is simply, perhaps ridiculously, incomprehensible.

The Hunger is an agonizingly bad vampire movie, circling around an exquisitely effective sex scene.

A slick production of a lame script, which kills time for most of its middle half-hour. If anyone in the plot had the slightest intelligence, the story would implode.

Tuff Turf is the worst teenage exploitation movie since "Where the Boys Are".

It’s just an awful and ridiculous and clumsily edited B-movie mostly of interest because of the name cast, an insanely horrible concert within the film — and the incredible back story about the making of “Grizzly II,” which could be great material for a fictional adaptation a la “Argo” or “The Big Short” or “American Hustle.”

The whole thing is just so sloppy and dumb and overflowing with clichés.

This is a dismal, dreary and fairly desperate movie, in which the actors try very hard but are unable to overcome an uninspired screenplay.

Like the Bond movies, the "Die Hard" films thrive on brilliantly wicked villains. In this edition, we barely know which bad guy is the main bad guy. The script is filled with heavy-handed dialogue about parents and their children, framed by well choreographed but generic action sequences.

This is one of those 93-minute movies that seem about 88 minutes too long. Or not worth making in the first place.

A watered-down take on the sci-fi classic "Solaris," by Stanislaw Lem, which was made into an immeasurably better film by Andrei Tarkovsky.

It's a lot of things, but boring is not one of them. I cannot recommend the movie, but ... why the hell can't I? Just because it's godawful? What kind of reason is that for staying away from a movie? Godawful and boring, that would be a reason.

An awesomely silly, tasteless and half-witted movie.

Here's a movie without an ounce of human kindness, a sour and mean-spirited enterprise so desperate to please, it tries to be a yukky comedy and a hard-boiled action picture at the same time.

A clumsy, off-putting, uninvolving hybrid of domestic tragedy and sci-fi drama with zero payoffs and one of the most infuriating codas of any movie this century.

It’s potentially fresh and unique material, but from the first scenes through the tone-deaf conclusion, Capone is a noxious film about a noxious man — a gruesome and grotesque viewing experience that tells us nothing new about Capone while rubbing our noses in one detestable scene after another. By the time we get to a typically overblown scene in which a diaper-wearing Capone wields a gold-plated Tommy Gun while on a shooting spree, we surrender.

Imagine how great it would be to see a vehicle worthy of the respective likability, comedic chops, intelligence, onscreen charisma and beauty of Tiffany Haddish and Rose Byrne. No, I mean you’re really going to have to imagine that, because Like a Boss is not that movie.

A cringe-inducing mess.

Emma writes everything down and then offers helpful suggestions, although she fails to supply the most useful observation of all, which would be to observe that the entire novel is complete crap.

A film so amateurish that only the professionalism of some of the actors makes it watchable.

When flashbacks tease us with bits of information, it has to be done well, or we feel toyed with. Here the mystery is solved by stomping in thick-soled narrative boots through the squishy marsh of contrivance.

It’s sloppy to the point of distraction — not that the forced hijinks and ridiculous storylines are actually worthy of our attention.

What a waste of a wonderful cast.

Most problematic of all is the character of fictional FBI Agent Jack Solomon (Jack O’Connell), who is tasked with leading the surveillance and digging up dirt on Seberg and becomes deeply conflicted about his job.

This is two hours and 27 minutes of pure dinosaur droppings, and the viewer is as helpless as a boat passing under a bridge on the Chicago River as the Dave Matthews Band unloads a torrent of foul waste from above.

Despite the considerable charisma of Kevin Hart and Josh Gad and a strong supporting cast, The Wedding Ringer has only one or two genuinely inspired bits of comedy, a few dopey moments when you laugh in spite of yourself — and long, long stretches of pointless montages, loud and unfunny physical shtick and far too much reliance on gay “humor."

[Figgis] has made a thriller that thrills us only if we abandon all common sense. Of course preposterous things happen in all thrillers, but there must be at least a gesture in the direction of plausibility, or we lose patience.

An uninspired assembly of characters and story lines that interrupt one another.

In the case of the awkwardly titled, swing-and-a-big-miss workplace comedy A Happening of Monumental Proportions, there are numerous scenes so tone-deaf, so off-putting and fundamentally unsound in structure and dialogue, the execution of those sequences is doomed from the get-go.

Time and again, Ride Along comes up with a clichéd setup — and then blows the payoff.

The whole movie has the feeling of a clone, of a film assembled out of spare parts from other movies, out at the cinematic junkyard.

Hook's visual sense is not acute here; he doesn't show the spontaneous sense of time and place that made his first film, The Kitchen Toto (1988), so convincing. He seems more concerned with telling the story than showing it, and there are too many passages in which the boys are simply trading dialogue.

I admire the craft involved, but the movie leaves me profoundly indifferent. After three earlier movies in the series, which have been transmuted into video games, why do we need a fourth one? Oh. I just answered my own question.

Good performances and an interesting idea are metamorphosed into one of the silliest movies in a long time.

For all of von Trier’s attempts to go big and go bold, the two Nymphomaniac films ultimately come across as a self-indulgent marathon run on a treadmill.

Let's say Roller Boogie is no better and no worse than the beach blanket/bikini/bingo/bongo movies, and from there you're going to have to take it by yourself.

Thorne’s performance as a college student and waitress with a hidden and perhaps nefarious agenda is the best thing in this howler of a wannabe psychological crime thriller, a nasty little film that requires every single one of the lead characters to behave in infuriatingly dopey fashion, just so the story can keep plodding along until we’re slapped with one of the most ridiculous and maddening twist endings in recent film history.

The one saving grace in Halloween III is Stacey Nelkin, who plays the heroine. She has one of those rich voices that makes you wish she had more to say and in a better role. But watch her, too, in the reaction shots: When she's not talking, she's listening.

The movie works so hard at juggling its cliches that it fails to generate interest in its story.