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.

Because McQueen can be so effective in action pictures, The Hunter is all the more frustrating: Didn't anybody point out that the script was a mess that made no sense? Didn't anybody have the guts to? Maybe they thought superstar McQueen would save the day. Pictures like this could finish him off.

Porky's is another raunchy teenage sex-and-food-fight movie.

Rubber-stamped from the same mold that has produced an inexhaustible supply of fictional Southern belles who drink too much, talk too much, think about themselves too much, try too hard to be the most unforgettable character you've ever met, and are, in general, insufferable.

Although I did not understand the story, I would have appreciated a great deal less explanation. All through the movie, characters are pausing in order to offer arcane back-stories and historical perspectives and metaphysical insights and occult orientations. They talk and talk and somehow their words do not light up any synapses in my brain.

So many scenes in Wilson play as if they’re dropped in from a different genre.

The dialogue is schmaltzy and often painfully unfunny. The special effects are often so 1980s-bad... Time and again, terrific actors sink in the equivalent of cinematic quicksand, helpless against the sucking sound of this movie.

There’s nothing and no one to like in The Hitman’s Bodyguard. This is one loud, generic, forgettable late summer action flick.

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.

Maybe there's too much talent. Every character shines with such dazzling intensity and such inexhaustible comic invention that the movie becomes tiresome, like too many clowns.

Dungeons & Dragons looks like they threw away the game and photographed the box it came in.

A painfully stolid movie that lumbers past emotional issues like a wrestler in a cafeteria line, putting a little of everything on his plate.

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.

I’m not going to say the ridiculous and off-putting romantic text-message dramedy “Love Again” is the worst movie of the year, but it might be the most implausible film I’ve seen so far in 2023, and I’m not necessarily excluding “The Super Mario Bros. Movie,” “Cocaine Bear” and “65” from the competition.

This is a disappointing waste of good acting talent, coupled with a very pedantic and not very intriguing story from first-time screenwriter Christina Hodson.

The Great Wall is so fantastically misguided and so wonderfully bad, I could see some coming for the action and staying for the camp laughs.

Bad films are easy to make, but a film as unpleasant as Baby Geniuses' achieves a kind of grandeur.

Rarely has a film centered on a character so superficial and unconvincing, played with such unrelenting sameness. I didn't hate it so much as feel sorry for it.

The Lonely Guy is the kind of movie that inspires you to distract yourself by counting the commercial products visible on the screen, and speculating about whether their manufacturers paid fees to have them worked into the movie.

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

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

The movie is set up as a valentine to Vardalos. She should try sending herself flowers.

Even with a terminally ill teenage son character, a pill-popping absentee mother and a crotchety grandpa character, The Forger is consistently ineffective as a sentimental tearjerker — and an even bigger failure as a heist movie.

A closing scene, rousingly patriotic, takes place back on the football field. I think I'm beginning to understand why the Chinese were not reckoned to be a prime market for this film.

Perhaps movies are like history, and repeat themselves, first as tragedy, then as farce.

An average Adam Sandler comedy, which, sadly, means it’s a below-average comedy — because whatever comedic fire and bursts of genuinely inspired humor Sandler once possessed have long ago burnt out.

The plot is just high-tech Swiss Cheese, filled with holes and smelling like last week’s refrigerator contents.

This loud, bombastic, often incoherent mishmash of magical-themed storytelling simply was not worth whatever effort went into it. While there are some acceptable action sequences, it’s the screenplay — complicated by some less than inspired performances — that dooms “Warcraft” at every point along the way.

Uncle Buck attempts to tell a heart-warming story through a series of uncomfortable and unpleasant scenes; it's a tug-of-war between its ambitions and its methods.

An innocuous family feature that's too little/too late in the fast-moving world of feature animation.

What we basically have here is a license for the filmmakers to do whatever they want to do with the special effects, while the plot, like Wile E. Coyote, keeps running into the wall.

Movies like this demonstrate that when it comes to stupidity and vulgarity, only the best will do for our children.

Director/co-writer/actor Zach Braff’s Wish I Was Here is a precious and condescending exercise in self-indulgent pandering, featuring one of the whiniest lead characters in recent memory.

There is nothing funny about the situation in Teaching Mrs. Tingle.

The Legend of Zorro commits a lot of movie sins, but one is mortal: It turns the magnificent Elena into a nag.

It involves teenagers who have never existed, doing things no teenager has ever done, for reasons no teenager would understand. Of course, it's aimed at the teenage market.

Maybe I've lost touch with silly, brainless entertainments like this. Let's hope so: One of the purposes of growing up and getting an education is to learn why movies like Spaced Invaders are a waste of time. And yet, a small, far-away voice inside of me says there once was a time when I would have liked this movie, when I was young and open to wonderments.

A package like this looks OK on paper, but goes nowhere. It turns all of the characters into chess pieces, whose relationships depend on the plot, not on human chemistry. Since the plot is absurdly illogical, you’re not left with much.

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

Cats is a slick and tedious and weird-looking exercise in self-indulgence.

You want gore, you get gore. Hatchet II plays less like a slasher movie than like the highlight reel from a slasher movie.

Obviously made with all of the best will in the world, its heart in the right place, this is a sluggish and dutiful film that plays more like a eulogy than an adventure.

I cringed.

I don’t think you and I need to connect on InstaSkypeChatFaceSnapTweeterBook for you to understand I’m saying we’ve seen this movie before. It’s just usually not this smug or condescending or muddled or inconsistent.

This material is wearing out its welcome. I have mastered all of the lessons The Karate Kid movies have to teach and all of the surprises they have to spring. I am also intimately familiar with the plot formula, so that nothing in this third film comes as the faintest surprise. Perhaps it is time, as Mr. Miyagi might say, to study something else.

I went to Crossroads expecting a glitzy bimbofest and got the bimbos but not the fest. Britney Spears' feature debut is curiously low-key and even sad.

We’re not buying what the script is selling, not for a hot second.

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.

As for Shaquille O'Neal, given his own three wishes the next time, he should go for a script, a director and an interesting character.

Too bad the movie relies on special effects to carry the show, and doesn't bring much else to the party.

The Jackal, on the other hand, impressed me with its absurdity. There was scarcely a second I could take seriously.

Nearly 50 years after William Friedkin’s “The Exorcist” elevated the horror genre to Oscar-level greatness and produced chills and thrills that resonate with us to this day, the direct sequel The Exorcist: Believer is a tasteless, tacky, uninspired and just plain lousy knockoff that upchucks pea soup-colored porridge all over the legacy of the original, from the crummy-looking and tedious exorcism sequence to the murky cinematography, to the return of an iconic character who is given an absolutely awful and borderline offensive storyline.

I seem to be developing a rule about talking animals: They can talk if they're cartoons or Muppets, but not if they're real.

A dull collection of unlikable, paper-thin characters, all of them stuck in a story that has nowhere interesting to go.

The sequel to Tim Burton’s 2010 mega-hit “Alice in Wonderland” is loud, frantic, stunningly unfunny, off-putting and riddled with mediocre, out-of-tune work from normally outstanding actors. It’s one of the great movie disasters of 2016.

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

A classic species of bore: a self-referential movie with no self to refer to. One character after another, one scene after another, one cute line of dialogue after another, refers to another movie, a similar character, a contrasting image, or whatever.

The plot was an arbitrary concoction.

"Clerks" spoke with the sure, clear voice of an original filmmaker. In Mallrats the voice is muffled, and we sense instead advice from the tired, the establishment, the timid and other familiar Hollywood executive types.

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

The running time is 104 minutes, but it felt longer than “The Brutalist.”

The movie makes no attempt to really imagine what it would be like to inhabit another body; it just springs the gimmick on us and starts unreeling its sitcom plot.

Everybody knew to wait for the outtakes during the closing credits, because you'd see him miss a fire escape or land wrong in the truck going under the bridge. Now the outtakes involve his use of the English language.

The dialogue and exposition scenes in G.I. Joe are like something out of a Saturday morning cartoon from the 1980s, but the PG-13 violence is a little intense for the 7-year-old boys (and girls) who might love this stuff.

They say this is Halloween Ends. I say: Can we get that in writing?

I kind of like the idea: A cheesy '80s band called the Suburbans reunites for a tribute album. I kind of like the cast: Everyone from Jennifer Love Hewitt to Robert Loggia pops up. I even kind of liked their "hit song," and probably would have bought their album in my teens. But it's impossible to like this movie, and there's no kind way to say it. [29 Oct 1999, p.30]

As the plot twists grow increasingly ridiculous and some of the main characters have to act like complete idiots just to keep the story rambling along, “Fatale” commits the crime of somehow becoming tedious and dull even as the body count piles up.

Joe Dirt is so obviously a construction that it is impossible to find anything human about him; he is a concept, not a person.

The Electric State short-circuits from a severe case of Character Overload, with great actors mired in hopelessly silly and underwritten parts.

What a mess. What a pretentious, uneven, off-putting, not-nearly-as-clever-as-it-thinkd-it-is MESS.

Everything about this film feels forced, clunky and overwrought.

It’s difficult to imagine anyone appearing in this film thought of it as more than a payday.

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.

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.

Here’s proof two females can make a bickering-opposites-action-comedy that’s just as lousy and sour as any clunker starring two guys.

The movie makes two mistakes: (1) It isn't very funny, and (2) it makes the crucial error of taking its story seriously and angling for a happy ending.

A march through the swamp of recycled ugly duckling stories, with occasional pauses in the marsh of sitcom cliches and the bog of Idiot Plots.

While I clearly cannot recommend this film, I have to admit there were a couple of amusing moments.

The film is a gloomy special-effects extravaganza filled with grotesque images, generating fear and despair.

This is an extra-cheesy and terrible film.

The good idea: Richard Pryor plays a character who is blind, and Gene Wilder plays a character who is deaf, and once they become friends they make a great team. The possibilities for visual comedy with this idea are seemingly endless, but the movie chooses instead to plug the characters into a dumb plot about industrial espionage.

There must be humor here somewhere.

A lightweight and basically unnecessary attempt to once again bring some cinematic life to one of the lesser teams in the Marvel Universe.

A first draft for a movie that could have been extraordinary.

It's unnecessary in the sense that there is no good reason to go and actually see it.

A long slog through perplexities and complexities.

It is not faulty logic that derails The Hills have Eyes, however, but faulty drama. The movie is a one-trick pony.

Lucy in the Sky is an irritatingly self-conscious, maddeningly rudderless and scatterbrained story that bounces all over the place and never finds an identity.

Newsies is like warmed-over Horatio Alger, complete with such indispensable cliches as the newsboy on crutches, the little kid, and of course the hero's best pal, who has a pretty sister.

Is it a hard-R road trip comedy that makes no apologies for politically incorrect humor — or a sweet family film with a message about tolerance and acceptance? It’s both, I suppose. And neither element is particularly convincing or particularly funny.

Bootmen is the story of a young dancer and his friends who revisit the cliches of countless other dance movies in order to bring forth a dance performance of clanging unloveliness.

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

It knows the words but not the music; while the Farrelly brothers got away with murder, The Sweetest Thing commits suicide.

Love and Bullets is a hopelessly confused hodgepodge of chases, killings, enigmatic meetings and separations, and insufferably overacted scenes by Steiger alternating with alarmingly underacted scenes by Bronson.

None of the action is coherent; shots and shells are fired, people and killed or not, explosions rend the air, SUVs spin aloft (the same one more than once, I think), and there is no sense of strategy.

Sure, the pricey special effects are impressive to behold (though, as usually the case, the 3D is nothing to text home about). And yes, at times “Valerian” creates a strange and beautiful universe. Which ultimately means nothing, because the plot is paper-thin.

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]

Another one of those road comedies where Southern roots are supposed to make boring people seem colorful. If these characters were from Minneapolis or Denver, no way anyone would make a film about them.