Six has now made a film deliberately intended to inspire incredulity, nausea and hopefully outrage. It's being booked as a midnight movie, and is it ever. Boozy fanboys will treat it like a thrill ride.

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.

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.

Quite simply, this is one of the worst films of 2013.

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

A plot like this is so hopeless that only acting can redeem it. Lopez pulls her share of the load, looking geuninely smitten by this guy and convincingly crushed when his secret is revealed. But McConaughey is not the right actor for this material.

Any movie that employs an oven mitt and a plumber's friend in a childbirth scene cannot be all bad, and I laughed a lot.

A technically proficient horror movie and well acted.

Isn't a bad movie, just a reprehensible one. It presents as comedy things that are not amusing. If you think this movie is funny, that tells me things about you I don't want to know.

Everything chugs along briskly and reasonably entertainingly until running off the rails a bit with a wildly overcomplicated finale.

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.

A lame-brained, outdated wheeze about a couple of good ol' boys who roar around the back roads of the South in the General Lee, their beloved 1969 Dodge Charger.

There's only one character we can identify with - a San Francisco police detective played by David Caruso - and he doesn't drive the plot so much as get swept along by it.

Michael Cimino's Desperate Hours is an attempt to take a 1950s crime classic and remake it by turning up the heat, but Cimino has set the heat too high, and the result is an overwrought melodrama with dialogue even a True Detective editor would question.

There is a lack of drama and telling detail. When events happen, they seem more like set pieces than part of the flow.

The events involving the big speaking competition are so labored that occasionally the twins seem to be looking back over their shoulders for the plot to catch up.

A lame and labored comedy.

This clunky dud about a same-sex union would have come across as trite and behind-the-times 20 years ago, let alone in 2015.

The Longest Ride” treats us to a twist that’s so ridiculous I think we’re almost supposed to laugh. It’s not quite on the “Are you KIDDING ME!?” level of awfulness as the big reveal in “Safe Haven,” but it’s close. It’s close.

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.

There are countless comic possibilities in Last Resort, most of them unrealized. The movie seems to have depended on a concept rather than a screenplay. Characters are set up, and never pay off.

This is a full-bore, PG-rated, sweet rom-com. It sticks to the track, makes all the scheduled stops and bears us triumphantly to the station. And it is populated by colorful characters, but then, when was the last time you saw a boring Irishman in a movie?

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.

The Punisher is so grim and cheerless, you wonder if even its hero gets any satisfaction from his accomplishments.

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.

The January Man is worth study as a film that fails to find its tone. It's all over the map. It wants to be zany but violent, satirical but slapstick, romantic but cynical. It wants some of its actors to rant and rave like amateur tragedians, and others to reach for subtle nuances. And it wants all of these things to happen at the same time.

The Shack is a well-acted and sometimes moving but far too often slow-paced and unconvincing spiritual journey.

The Fan would have worked better had it dissected the mechanics that shape celebrity adulation. Instead, The Fan takes a knife-wielding action route that leaves film fans feeling - dare I suggest it - cheated? [16 Aug 1996, p.35]

The curious case of two appealing performances surviving a bombardment of schlock.

It’s a well-photographed story with an intriguing setup, but soon we’re mired in a meandering, stilted story with forced dialogue and some surprisingly subpar performances from the talented cast.

October Baby is being promoted as a Christian film, and it could have been an effective one. Rachel Hendrix is surprisingly capable in her first feature role, and Jasmine Guy is superb in her scene. Unfortunately, the film as a whole is amateurish and ungainly, can't find a consistent tone, is too long, is overladen with music that tries to paraphrase the story and is photographed with too many beauty shots that slow the progress.

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

To spend 82 minutes watching Not Another Teen Movie would be a reckless waste of your time, no matter how many decades you may have to burn.

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

Ride Along 2 is the movie equivalent of a cover band. We’ve seen it all before, and often in much better films.

The result is a very unfunny movie. It's routine, predictable, and dumb - real dumb.

The movie doesn't know how odd it seems to cut from the bloodshed in the ring to the dialogue of the supporting players, who still think they're in a comedy.

An astonishingly bad movie, and the most astonishing thing about it comes in the credits: Written by Elaine May, Warren Beatty, Chris Rock, Lance Crouther, Ali LeRoi and Louis CK. These are credits that deserve a place in the Writers Hall of Fame.

Of the two co-stars, what I can say is that I’m looking forward to their next films.

An aggressively unwatchable movie.

The actors do their best. The problem here is simply a formulaic screenplay and less-than-inspired direction.

This is a disaster by committee.

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.

A vanity production beyond all reason. I am not sure, however, than the vanity is Dylan's. I don't have any idea what to think about him.

You remember Captain Video. He was a science fiction hero on the old DuPont TV network. He and his trusty sidekick (Bucky? Rocky?) were forever landing on strange planets and sneaking around rocks. After three weeks, you realized that the rocks were always the same. Same here.

On its own terms, this movie is diseased and corrupt. I would have admired it more if it had found the courage to acknowledge the real relationship it was portraying between Howell and Rutger, but no: It prefers to disguise itself as a violent thriller, and on that level it is reprehensible.

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.

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

Apart from funny supporting work by the inventor of the Mind Control and the guy in the "Q" role, the movie is pretty routine.

When the suffering of real children is used to enhance the image of movie stars who fall in love against the backdrop of their suffering, a certain decency is lacking. Beyond Borders wants it both ways -- glamor up front, and human misery in the background to lend it poignancy.

Careful What You Wish For is aiming for lusty, lurid, B-movie titillation, but it’s not nearly as sexy nor nearly as clever as it would like to be.

I guess you have to be in the mood for a goofball picture like this. I guess I was.

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.

It's skillfully mounted and fitfully intriguing, but weaves such a tangled web that at the end I defy anyone in the audience to explain the exact loyalties and motives of the leading characters.

Directed with a more fittingly dark, austere, horror-movie vibe by Keith Thomas and featuring grounded performances from an excellent cast headed by Zac Efron, Sydney Lemmon and newcomer Ryan Kiera Armstrong, this Firestarter is a combustible supernatural thriller that embraces its borderline campy qualities and works well enough as 21st century drive-in escapist fare.

The movie presents the surfaces of Obermaier's life but never lets us understand who she was.

Egerton is miscast. He and Hewson have nary a spark in their love scenes. Dornan overplays his hand. Foxx belts out nearly every line as if he’s trying to be heard above a parade of fire engines on a Fourth of July parade

Made me feel like I was sitting in McDonald's watching some guy shout at his kids. Price of Glory gives us two hours of that behavior, and it's a miscalculation so basic that it makes the movie painful when it wants, I guess, to be touching.

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

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.

The problem with everyone in King Kong Lives is that they're in a boring movie, and they know they're in a boring movie, and they just can't stir themselves to make an effort.

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.

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.

There's not much original about the film, but it's played with high spirits and good cheer, there are lots of musical interludes, and it's pitched straight at families.

A messy but hungry film like this is more interesting than cool technical perfection.

As a movie, it knows little about men, women or television shows, but has studied movie formulas so carefully that we can see each new twist and turn as it creeps ever so slowly into view.

If this movie had been a satire, it could have been deadly.

There hasn't been a pirate movie in a long time, and after Roman Polanski's "Pirates," there may not be another one for a very long time. This movie represents some kind of low point for the genre that gave us Captain Blood. It also gives us a new pirate image to ponder.

This movie is all elbows. Nothing fits. It doesn't add up. It has some terrific free-standing scenes, but they need more to lean on.

A horrifying thriller, smart and tightly told, and merciless.

Weekend at Bernie’s makes two mistakes: It gives us a joke that isn’t very funny, and it expects the joke to carry an entire movie.

There are about 25 minutes of reasonably well-shot extreme skiing (filmed by stunt skiers in the Canadian Rockies), arbitrarily inserted in nearly two hours of substandard boredom. If you were ever a teenager, you've already seen this film. If you are one now, you can do a lot better than wasting an afternoon on this. [25 Jan 1993, p.24]

The movie's funny in the opening scenes and then forgets why it came to play.

As a viewer, we intuit that it is more, or less, than it seems: That in some sense, the whole project is a scam.

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.

The star power trio of Samuel L. Jackson, Selma Hayek and Ryan Reynolds have a few funny exchanges, and there are a couple of physical shtick routines so over the top it’s as if they dusted off the Monty Python playbook for a modern-day action film — but there are far more misfires than direct comedic/dramatic hits in this blood-drenched, explosion-riddled, live-action cartoon of a film.

Repo Men makes sci-fi's strongest possible case for universal health care.

A mushy and limp musical fantasy, so insubstantial it keeps evaporating before our eyes. It's one of those rare movies in which every scene seems to be the final scene; it's all ends and no beginnings, right up to its actual end, which is a cheat.

Here is a movie that will do for cheerleading what "Friday the 13th" did for summer camp.

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.

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

Any plot discipline (necessary so that we care about some characters and not the others) has been lost in an orgy of special effects and general mayhem.

This lame tale just falls completely flat.

There might indeed be a fine movie lurking within the pages of that original source material, but “The King’s Daughter” is not that movie.

In the home stretch, Fifty Shades Freed leaves the sexy stuff behind and turns into a combo platter of a cheesy, easily solved mystery-thriller and an overwrought, daytime soap opera melodrama.

Unless this is a parody of “Star Wars,” it looks like we’re in for a long and ponderous, CGI-dominated slog filled with stock characters, slow-mo battle sequences and interminable flashbacks designed to give clarity to a murky and convoluted story. Spoiler alert: It’s not a parody. We should be so lucky.

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.

The Lazarus Effect is nothing but a cheap horror film cloaked in scientific mumbo-jumbo.

The movie's story actually does work as a story and not simply as a wheezy Hollywood formula. Sometimes you walk into a movie with quiet dread and walk out with quiet delight.

The plot becomes a juggling act just when it should be a sprint. And there's another problem: Is it intended as a comedy, or not?

[A] basically brainless but intermittently adrenalizing, mostly-just-for-kids reboot.

Your Highness is a juvenile excrescence that feels like the work of 11-year-old boys in love with dungeons, dragons, warrior women, pot, boobs and four-letter words.

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.

Both of us have seen "The Tall Blond Man with One Black Shoe," the French comedy that inspired this Hollywood retread. The French movie is about a case of mistaken identity. The American movie is about the same case of mistaken identity. The French have a name for this phenomenon: deja vu. So do we: ripoff.

Hollywood Knights is a stupid movie that relies on flatulence for jokes, but Michelle Pfeiffer had to start somewhere. [18 Oct 1999, p.43]

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.

Chop off the last two or three minutes, fade to black, and you have a decent film.

Not bad so much as inexplicable. You watch in puzzlement: How did this train wreck happen?