Blindness is one of the most unpleasant, not to say unendurable, films I've ever seen.

CB4 is a profoundly confused movie, combining rap music with a satire of the world of rap. Working both sides of the street, it gets caught in traffic. The film stars Chris Rock and Phil Hartman from Saturday Night Live, but it doesn't have SNL's smarts -- and worse, it doesn't have any sense of what's funny. On a structural level, it's incompetently written and directed.

If Flashdance had spent just a little more effort getting to know the heroine of its story, and a little less time trying to rip off "Saturday Night Fever," it might have been a much better film.

This adaptation of the young adult science fiction novel “The Knife of Never Letting Go” (the first in a trilogy) is sunk by the nearly unwatchable and unlistenable execution of the main premise.

The movie labors under an enormous handicap: A much better, more intelligent and more exciting film has already been made about this same subject.

A deplorable film with this message: If you're a 14-year-old girl who has been brutally raped and murdered by a serial killer, you have a lot to look forward to.

Did you (Garry Marshall) deliberately assemble this movie from off-the-shelf parts or did it just happen that way? The film is like a homage to the cliches and obligatory stereotypes of its genre.

Bored out of my mind during this spectacle, I found my attention wandering to the subject of physics.

If it can be said movies have personalities, I give you three words to sum up the basic core identity of Safe Haven: Bat. Bleep. Crazy.

A film overgrown with so many directorial flourishes that the heroes need machetes to hack their way to within view of the audience.

Striking Distance is an exhausted reassembly of bits and pieces from all the other movies that are more or less exactly like this one.

Boring, repetitive and maddening about a subject you'd think would be fairly interesting: snowboarding down a mountain.

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.

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.

It's got cheesy special effects, a muddy visual look, and characters who say obvious things in obvious ways.

The kind of movie that would be so bad it's good, except it's not bad enough to be good enough.

The jokes in The Week Of are big and obvious and sometimes mildly tasteless.

There's not a moment in this story arc that is not predictable.

Lumbering from one expensive set piece to the next without taking the time to tell us a story that might make us care.

Nobody needed to make it, nobody needs to see it, Jackson and Levy are too successful to waste time with it. It plays less like a film than like a deal.

The dreary, derivative and punchless action comedy “Love Hurts” is proof that a movie can have an 83-minute running time and still seem like a slow-motion slog.

It’s never a good thing when a film about a dying man sometimes has us wondering if some of the people in his life will be better off without him.

Too bad that robots, unlike humans, cannot be discovered in one movie and go on to star in another. I'd like to see No. 5 in a film more suitable to its talents.

I couldn't believe a moment of it, and never identified with little David.

Tells the story of a violent sociopath. Since it's about golf, that makes it a comedy.

Age of Extinction is just another warmed-over, cynical, ATM machine of a movie. It’s soulless eye candy.

This is a slick con, all flash and no substance. Now You See Me seems awfully sure of itself, with self-important, intrusive music, sweeping tracking shots and actors chewing up the scenery.

This is a visually arresting film with two attractive and charismatic lead actors, but it’s doomed by the melodramatic twists and turns, and the ridiculous behavior by nearly every major character.

Rough Night doesn’t begin to cover it. It’s also “Painfully Unfunny Night,” “Contrived Night,” “Unsurprising Plot Twist Night” and also, “How Do These Dimwits Ever Make It Through Any Night”?

Color of Night approaches badness from so many directions that one really must admire its imagination. Combining all the worst ingredients of an Agatha Christie whodunit and a sex-crazed slasher film, it ends in a frenzy of recycled thriller elements, with a chase scene, a showdown in an echoing warehouse, and not one but two cliches from Ebert's Little Movie Glossary: The Talking Killer and the Climbing Villain.

A movie like this is harmless, I suppose, except for the celluloid that was killed in the process of its manufacture, but as an entertainment, it will send the kids tiptoeing through the multiplex to sneak into "Spider-Man 2."

Given that director and co-writer Florian Zeller’s “The Father” was a powerful and nuanced and creatively presented original work with Anthony Hopkins winning an Oscar for his moving portrayal of a man with advancing dementia, it’s truly shocking how Zeller’s “The Son” is such a tone-deaf, emotionally manipulative, leaden stumble into the abyss.

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.

Thin and unsatisfying.

It is a terrible film, and it skirts (but does not cross) the line of offensiveness...but it is undeniably watchable in the same way you can’t turn away from a talent show featuring a medley of acts that are pretty awful but quite confident they’ve got something to share.

Once Upon a Crime is not grand larceny, but not good enough to qualify for much more than rental viewing. [10 March 1992, p.27]

This is a surprisingly cheesy disaster epic.

If there's anything worse than a movie hammered together out of pieces of bad screenplays, it's a movie made from the scraps of good ones.

Take Me Home Tonight must have been made with people who had a great deal of nostalgia for the 1980s, a relatively unsung decade. More power to them. The movie unfortunately gives them no dialogue expanding them into recognizable human beings.

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

It’s almost astonishing how unfunny this movie is, given the talents of primary cast members Ed Helms, Taraji P. Henson, Betty Gilpin and David Alan Grier. They’re all troupers and they dive headfirst into the material, but the dialogue they’re delivering and the situations they’re mired in make it impossible to wring even a smile, let alone a legitimate laugh, from the material.

Ewan McGregor is a versatile and durable actor who has spent a lot of time on film sets, and someday he might become an accomplished filmmaker, but his feature directorial debut is one of the most unfortunate literary adaptations in recent memory.

Pure Luck is a bad movie, all right - with leaden timing, a disorganized screenplay, and stretches where nothing much of interest seems to be happening.

They say an elephant never forgets, which means that I have an enormous advantage over Tai, who plays Vera, because I plan to forget this movie as soon as convenient.

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.

This is a disaster by committee.

The problem is that the material's stretched too thin. There's not enough here to fill a feature-length film.

All of the elements are here for a movie I would probably enjoy very much, but somehow they never come together.

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.

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

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

Tucker's scenes finally wear us down. How can a movie allow him to be so obnoxious and make no acknowledgment that his behavior is aberrant?

Jogs doggedly on the treadmill of comedy, working up a sweat but not getting much of anywhere.

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.

The movie offers brainless high-tech action without interesting dialogue, characters, motivation or texture.

Run, don’t walk, away from any temptation you might have to see the off-putting, unfunny, clunky and cartoonishly terrible would-be mob comedy “Mafia Mamma,” which is so lacking in subtlety, cohesion and humor, it makes “Murder Mystery 2” seem like a Rian Johnson thriller.

There must still be a kind of moony young adolescent girl for which this film would be enormously appealing, if television has not already exterminated the domestic example of that species.

A mess. It lacks the sharp narrative line and crisp comic-book clarity of the earlier films, and descends too easily into shapeless fight scenes that are chopped into so many cuts that they lack all form or rhythm.

The best things about Parker are the two lead actors. Although working with material that is lackluster even by his standards, Statham manages to demonstrate a commanding screen presence that cannot be dismissed.

The Blue Lagoon is the dumbest movie of the year. It could conceivably have been made interesting, if any serious attempt had been made to explore what might really happen if two 7-year-old kids were shipwrecked on an island. But this isn't a realistic movie. It's a wildly idealized romance, in which the kids live in a hut that looks like a Club Med honeymoon cottage, while restless natives commit human sacrifice on the other side of the island.

The average issue of Mad magazine contains significantly smarter movie satire, because Mad goes for the vulnerable elements and Scary Movie 3 just wants to quote and kid.

When you make films from junk TV, more often than not you’re going to wind up with a junk movie.

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

Gator is yet another Good Ol' Movie, and not, I fear, the summer's last. If only it had a Good Ol' Plot worth a damn, it might have even been a halfway tolerable ol' movie.

Careening wildly from the black comedy tone of the aforementioned sequences to deadly serious World War I battle scenes, from somber spy thriller to broad comedy, The King’s Man has little of the wickedly outrageous and subversive style of the original film as it flies this way and that and never sticks the landing.

Prostitutes have inspired some of the most unforgettable characters in fiction. As for all of its effect on Angelina, she might as well have saved herself the wear and tear and stayed in the laundry.

Dark Skies is a bore that even the most forgiving genre buffs will find difficult to defend or endure.

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

Joyful Noise is an ungainly assembly of parts that don't fit, and the strange thing is that it makes no particular effort to please its target audience, which would seem to be lovers of gospel choirs.

Writer-director John Hamburg (writer of “Meet the Parents,” director of “Along Came Polly” and “I Love You, Man”) has the ability to wring big laughs out of absurdist situations, but in Me Time, nearly everybody delivers their lines in the forced manner of 1980s sitcoms, the situations bear little resemblance to anything that would occur in the real world.

When Chase bothers to actually play a character, he can be very effective (his "Funny Farm" was one of the best comedies of 1988). But sometimes he seems to be covering himself, playing detached so that nobody can blame him if the comedy doesn't work. In this film he seems to have no emotions at all; consider the scene where he discovers that the woman he made love with has died during the night.

Sitting through the smug and convoluted and ridiculous Now You See Me 2 is like being subjected to a dunk tank again and again — and then being handed a wet towel when it’s finally over.

For all the visceral depictions of hatred and violence and human destruction, it feels as if the director is chasing his own tail and forgetting about making it all mean something.

A loud, dopey chase film filled with substandard shootouts.

It's the most lugubrious and soppy love story in many a moon, a step backward for director Sam Raimi after "A Simple Plan."

A lazy, crummy-looking, poorly paced, why-bother follow-up that lacks the Christmas bells to go full-out politically incorrect.

Its centerpiece is 40 minutes of redundant special effects, surrounded by a love story of stunning banality.

The Fourth Kind is a pseudo-documentary like "Paranormal Activity" and "The Blair Witch Project." But unlike those two, which just forge ahead with their home video cameras, this one encumbers its flow with ceaseless reminders that it is a dramatization of real events.

Unless a story has been introduced to make the shooting part of the plot, it can get pretty dreary. 100 Rifles is pretty dreary.

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.

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.

If there's anything I hate more than a stupid action comedy, it's an incompetent stupid action comedy. It's not so bad it's good. It's so bad it's nothing else but bad.

Oh, did I dislike this film. It made me squirm. Its premise is lame, its plot relentlessly predictable, its characters with personalities that would distinguish picture books.

Even with all its pyrotechnics, and even with arguably the finest and deepest team of actors ever to appear in any of the three dozen movies about the big guy, King of the Monsters careens about all over the place in search of an identity, never really finding its footing as a campy treat, an exciting popcorn adventure or a monster movie with humans we actually care about.

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.

So anyway, what happens in Life As We Know It? You'll never guess in a million years. Never.

Strange, that movies about Satan always require Catholics. You never see your Presbyterians or Episcopalians hurling down demons.

A clever movie until it turns excessively gory, "Bride of Chucky" leaves a nasty taste in the mouth. [19 Oct 1998, p.33]

Basically just a 98-minute trailer for the autumn launch of a new series on the Cartoon Network.

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.

Certainly better than "Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen." How so? Admittedly, it doesn't have as much cleavage. But the high-tech hardware is more fun to look at than the transforming robots, the plot is as preposterous, and although the noise is just as loud, it's more the deep bass rumbles of explosions than the ear-piercing bang of steel robots pounding on each other.

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.

A big, ugly, ungainly device to give teenagers the impression they are seeing a movie.

Plays like a genial amateur theatrical, the kind of production where you'd like it more if you were friends with the cast. The plot is creaky, the jokes are laborious, and total implausibility is not considered the slightest problem.

A tedious exercise in style, intended as a meditation on guns and violence in America but more of a meditation on itself, the kind of meditation that invites the mind to stray.

Even most of the fine actors, including Aubrey Plaza, John C. Reilly and Cheryl Hines, at times seem lost as to whether they should be playing the material for laughs, or going for a more straightforward approach and letting the laughs come to them.

This is slick trash. A bloated, unfunny, sometimes downright bizarre train wreck featuring some of the loudest, longest and least entertaining actual train wrecks in recent memory.