Regaled for 50 years by the stupendous idiocy of the American version of Godzilla, audiences can now see the original Japanese version, which is equally idiotic.

To the degree that you will want to see this movie, it will be because of the surprise, and so I will say no more, except to say that the "solution," when it comes, solves little - unless there is really little to solve, which is also a possibility.

The Flower of My Secret is likely to be disappointing to Almodovar's admirers, and inexplicable to anyone else.

So strong, so shocking and yet so audacious that people walk out shaking their heads; they don't know quite what to make of it.

This film is about violence. All violence. Wall-to-wall violence. Against many of those walls, heads are pounded again and again into a pulpy mass. If I estimated the film has 10 minutes of dialogue, that would be generous.

The Tenant's not merely bad -- it's an embarrassment. If it didn't have the Polanski trademark, we'd probably have to drive miles and miles and sit in a damp basement to see it.

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.

What Raising Arizona needs more than anything else is more velocity. Here's a movie that stretches out every moment for more than it's worth, until even the moments of inspiration seem forced.

A giant pile of shiny gift-wrapped garbage.

Sasquatch Sunset is the kind of film that seems almost pre-ordained to reach some level of cult status. Godspeed to those who will embrace its epic-level gross-out factor. I guess I’m just more of a Bucky Badger guy.

Will I seem hopelessly square if I find Kick-Ass morally reprehensible and will I appear to have missed the point? Let’s say you’re a big fan of the original comic book, and you think the move does it justice. You know what? You inhabit a world I am so very not interested in.

Aside from Caine (who must labor under some secret contract that forces him to appear in every movie made with an English-accented role), the all-star cast plays like an inside joke, more made-for-television than anything else. [20 March 1992, p.41]

The filmmakers rely so heavily on cliches, on stock characters in old situations, that it's as if they never really had any confidence in their performers.

There is a kind of studied stupidity that sometimes passes as humor, and Jared Hess' Napoleon Dynamite pushes it as far as it can go.

An idea is not enough for a movie. Characters have to be developed, comic situations have to be set up before they can pay off and the story should have a conclusion instead of a dead stop. Real Life fails in all of those areas -- fails so miserably that it lets its audiences down.

I see so little there: It is all remembered rote work, used to conceal old tricks, facile name-calling, the loss of hope, and emptiness.

Like a cocky teenager who's had a couple of drinks before the party, they don't have a plan for who they want to offend, only an intention to be as offensive as possible.

This film is an affront. It is incoherent, maddening, deliberately opaque and heedless of the ways in which people watch movies.

A movie that filled me with an urgent desire to see Sarah Silverman in a different movie. I liked everything about it except the writing, the direction, the editing and the lack of a parent or adult guardian.

The Brood is an el sleazo exploitation film, camouflaged by the presence of several well-known stars but guaranteed to nauseate you all the same.

On the heels of his brilliant one-two punch of “Hereditary” and “Midsommar,” writer-director Aster stumbles badly in an impressively staged and photographed film that has flashes of stunning originality but for the most part careens madly between dark comedy and surrealistic horror, badly missing the mark in both genres. It’s funny here and there, but it’s never scary, and it ultimately commits the sin of becoming a well-made bore.

It's a nine days' wonder, a geek show designed to win a weekend or two at the box office and then fade from memory.

So unsuccessful in so many different ways that maybe the whole project was doomed.

Dead Man is a strange, slow, unrewarding movie that provides us with more time to think about its meaning than with meaning.

Harold is death, Maude life, and they manage to make the two seem so similar that life's hardly worth the extra bother. The visual style makes everyone look fresh from the Wax Museum, and all the movie lacks is a lot of day-old gardenias and lilies and roses in the lobby, filling the place with a cloying sweet smell.

I suggest a plan: Why not try flushing this movie down the toilet to see if it also grows into something big and fearsome?

If you walk out after 10 or 15 minutes, you will have seen the best parts of the film.

Besson has always demonstrated the ability to chuckle at the madness of his own material, and he provides some solid laughs from time to time. But these winks do nothing to erase the reality of a plot that becomes unintentionally hilarious.

There have been articles lately asking why the United States is so hated in some parts of the world. As this week's Exhibit A from Hollywood, I offer Zoolander.

Vulgarity is a very tricky thing to handle in a comedy; tone is everything, and the makers of "Fast Times at Ridgemont High" have an absolute gift for taking potentially funny situations and turning them into general embarrassment. They're tone-deaf.

This movie is so excruciatingly dumb I felt as if someone had shaved 10 points off my I.Q. by the time I bolted for the exits.

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.

Biloxi Blues may indeed be based on memories from Neil Simon’s experiences in basic training during World War II, but it seems equally based on every movie ever made about basic training, and it suffers by comparison with most of them.

Ghostbusters is a horror from start to finish, and that’s not me saying it’s legitimately scary. More like I was horrified by what was transpiring onscreen.

It's nice, but it's not much of a comedy.

The screenplay reads like a collaboration between Jekyll and Hyde.

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.

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

From start to finish, this film seems strangely out of touch, never more so than when it tries to come across as enlightened.

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.

Inexplicably, there are people who still haven't had enough of these movies. The first was a nifty novelty. Now the appeal has worn threadbare.

The characters are bitter and hateful, the images are nauseating, and the ending is bleak enough that when the screen fades to black it's a relief.. Videodrome, whatever its qualities, has got to be one of the least entertaining films of all time.

This new Footloose is a film without wit, humor or purpose.

It's all shot in muddy earth tones, on grainy Super 8 film, Hi Fi 8 video and 16-mm. If you seek the origin of the grunge look, seek no further: Young, in his floppy plaid shirts and baggy shorts, looks like a shipwrecked lumberjack. His fellow band members, Billy Talbot, Poncho Sampedro and Ralph Molina, exude vibes that would strike terror into the heart of an unarmed convenience store clerk.

I couldn’t wait for this movie to end.

Even though they look nothing like sisters, they’re believable as sisters. Every once in a while when we take a break from the thuddingly unfunny slapstick stuff, there’s a nice and genuine moment.

I was torn between walking out immediately and staying to witness a spectacle more dismaying than anything on the screen: the way small children were digging gratuitous bloodshed.

Robert Rodriguez has somehow misplaced his energy, his flair and his humor in this third film, which is a flat and dreary disappointment.

The standards for comic book superhero movies have been established by "Superman," "The Dark Knight," "Spider-Man 2" and "Iron Man." In that company "Thor" is pitiful. Consider even the comparable villains (Lex Luthor, the Joker, Doc Ock and Obadiah Stane). Memories of all four come instantly to mind. Will you be thinking of Loki six minutes after this movie is over?

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.

This is a messy, confusing, uninvolving mishmash of old-school practical effects and CGI battles that feels … off nearly every misstep of the way. It’s like watching a master musician play a piano he somehow doesn’t realize is out of tune.

This isn't a strict remake of Sam Raimi's hugely influential 1981 horror classic, but it does include the basic framework and some visual nods to the original. On its own, it's an irredeemable, sadistic torture chamber reveling in the bloody, cringe-inducing deaths of some of the stupidest people ever to spend a rainy night in a remote cabin in the woods.

Even with Cecil B. Demented, which fails on just about every level, you've got to hand it to him (Waters): The idea for the film is kind of inspired.

Nobody laughed. One or two people cried, and a lady behind me dropped a bag of M&Ms which rolled under the seats, and a guy on the center aisle sneezed at 43 minutes past the hour. But that was about all the action.

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.

The director is James Foley, who is obviously not right for this material.

We’re not even halfway through 2018, but when it comes time to compile my list of the worst movies of the year, I have a strong sense there will be a moment when I’ll be saying to Tag: You’re it.

Monotonous, repetitive and sometimes wildly wrong in what it hopes is funny.

The movie adds up to a few good ideas and a lot of bad ones, wandering around in search of an organizing principle.

This is a movie without wit, style or reason, and the true horror is that actors were made to portray, and technicians to realize, its bankruptcy of imagination.

There is a line and this movie crosses it. I don't know where the line is, but it's way north of Wolf Creek. There is a role for violence in film, but what the hell is the purpose of this sadistic celebration of pain and cruelty?

Feels uncomfortably stage-managed, and raises fundamental questions that it simply ignores.

Maleficent is an admittedly great-looking, sometimes creepy, often plodding and utterly unconvincing re-imagining of a famous romantic fairy tale as a female empowerment metaphor.

Betty Blue is a movie about Beatrice Dalle's boobs and behind, and everything else is just what happens in between the scenes where she displays them.

Mommie Dearest is a painful experience that drones on endlessly, as Joan Crawford's relationship with her daughter, Christina, disintegrates from cruelty through jealousy into pathos. It is unremittingly depressing, not to any purpose of drama or entertainment, but just to depress. It left me feeling creepy.

What a waste of a wonderful cast.

This is the most confused feature-length film I've ever seen.

I felt the Kids were too busy being hip and ironic to connect at the simpler level where comedy lives. They were brought down by their own self-protective devices.

It’s a dopey, only mildly chilling, uneasy mix of horror and dark comedy, scoring few points in either category.

From the unconvincing CGI to the meandering and convoluted storyline to the preachy messaging to the unfortunately hammy performances, “Megalopolis” is a most foul and unpleasant journey.

Caveman seems more in the tradition of Alley Oop, crossed with Mel Brooks's Two Thousand Year Old Man. But the only artistic cross-reference it can manage is from the opening scene of Stanley Kubrick's 2000.

This ensemble piece plays like “Crash” in a minor note, with one heavy-handed scene after another, all leading up to an ambivalent, unsatisfying ending.

Nothing about The D Train feels the least bit authentic, and worse, little about it is funny.

The movie has been slapped together by director Todd Phillips, who careens from scene to scene without it occurring to him that humor benefits from characterization, context and continuity. Otherwise, all you have is a lot of people acting goofy.

The three films of Body Bags were horrid, but they weren't horrifying. [06 Aug 1993, p.67]

This is a surprisingly cheesy disaster epic.

V/H/S is an example of the genre at its least compelling.

In more ways than one, this is one of the dopiest films of the year.

The problem is, the plot wavers from nearly indecipherable to semi-ridiculous to … I stopped caring.

The remake is so close to the original that there is no reason to see both, unless you want to prove to yourself that black and white photography is indeed more effective than color for this material.

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 a repetitive, pointless exercise in genre filmmaking--the kind of movie where you distract yourself by making a list of the sources.

An efficient delivery system for Gotcha! Moments, of which it has about 19. Audiences who want to be Gotchaed will enjoy it.

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

Pretty much a mess of a movie; the acting is overwrought, the plot is too tangled to play like anything BUT a plot, and although I know you can create terrific special effects at home in the basement on your computer, the CGI work in this movie looks like it was done with a dial-up connection.

It's a bludgeon movie with little respect for the audience's intelligence, and simply pounds us over the head with violence whenever there threatens to be a lull. Anyone can make a movie like this.

This empty parody of "coming of age in the 'hood" movies is short on storyline, originality and legitimate laughs. [15 Jan 1996, p.30]

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.

The movie stars Jim Carrey, who is in his pleasant mode. It would have helped if he were in his manic mode, although it's hard to get a rise out of a penguin.

Sweet and high-spirited and with three dancers who are so good they deserve a better screenplay. This is really two movies: A stiff and awkward story, interrupted by dance sequences of astonishing grace and power.

It is a thriller trapped inside a pop comedy set in Japan, and gives Reno a chirpy young co-star who bounces around him like a puppy on visiting day at the drunk tank.

The Awakening looks great but never develops a plot with enough clarity to engage us, and the solution to the mystery is I am afraid disappointingly standard.

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.

The kind of movie that somehow succeeds in moving very, very slowly even while proceeding at a breakneck pace. It cuts quickly back and forth between nothing and nothing.

It's a movie without a brain. Charlie's Angels is like the trailer for a video game movie, lacking only the video game, and the movie.

[A] cartoonish, offensive, overblown, clanging, steaming piece of ... cinema.

It considers, or pretends to consider, some of the most basic questions of human morality and treats them on the level of "Nancy Drew and the Secret of the Old Convent."

Here is a bad movie into which a great character seems to have dropped from another dimension.