The movie is a paid holiday for its director, Harold Becker. I say this because I know what Becker is capable of.

You’ll hear the warning bells signifying a Category 5 Pretentiousness Alert right from the start of the ponderous and stiff psychological drama “Elyse,” and it’s not a false alarm.

Eyes of Laura Mars tries to say Serious Things about fashion photography, corruption in advertising, and the violence in our society. It does not succeed, but it tries. We would not, however, hold its Serious Things against it, if the movie also succeeded as a thriller. It doesn't, unless your idea of being thrilled is having people leap out of the shadows and then turn out to be friends.

The problem with The Amityville Horror is that, in a very real sense, there's nothing there. We watch two hours of people being frightened and dismayed, and we ask ourselves... what for? If it's real, let it have happened to them. Too bad, Lutzes! If it's made up, make it more entertaining. If they can't make up their minds... why should we?

Plays like a collision between leftover bits and pieces of Marvel superhero stories. It can't decide what tone to strike.

Would it have been that much more difficult to make a movie in which Tom and Sarah were plausible, reasonably articulate newlyweds with the humor on their honeymoon growing out of situations we could believe? Apparently.

If you're a fan of extreme skateboarding, motorcycling and motocross, this is the movie for you. If not, not. And even if you are, what's in the film other than what you might have seen on TV? Yes, it's in 3D, which adds nothing and dims the picture.

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.

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.

House of D is the kind of movie that particularly makes me cringe, because it has such a shameless desire to please; like Uriah Heep, it bows and scrapes and wipes its sweaty palm on its trouser leg, and also like Uriah Heep, it privately thinks it is superior.

It doesn’t take itself too seriously, but it’s not nearly as self-deprecating and funny as it needed to be.

The Woman in the Window is filled with dramatic touches such as a dizzying overhead shot of a staircase, a skylight just begging for someone to come crashing through, pieces of evidence conveniently left lying about and visual references to far superior noir thrillers, including the aforementioned “Rear Window.” It’s also filled with cheap scares, false alarms, dumb cops, loud storms and tricky camera angles designed to make us feel as disoriented as Anna. The only thing those elements really succeed in doing is giving us a headache.

Ansiedad is a smart charmer, and well-played by Cierra Ramirez, she should really be above this sort of thing - above the whole movie, really.

Gun Shy is a loud bang signifying nothing, a tired and second-rate actioner — and an embarrassing resume entry for the likes of Antonio Banderas (“Desperado,” “Once Upon a Time in Mexico”) and Olga Kurylenko (“Oblivion,” “Quantum of Solace”).

The best thing about The Hero of Color City is its good voice talent — and its running time of only 77 minutes. Other than that, this is a pretty lame computer-generated animated movie that will likely not engage kids much past the first grade.

Stealth is an offense against taste, intelligence and the noise pollution code -- a dumbed-down "Top Gun" crossed with the HAL 9000 plot from "2001."

A labored and sour comedy.

The hypodermic needle, which has been keeping a pretty low profile in the movies, deserves a better comeback than it gets in Dr. Giggles. So does the medical profession: Even those who still believe in it will find little to recoil from in this un-hellacious tale of a mad doctor's mad son returning to his small hometown to make murderous house calls. [26 Oct 1992, p.27]

Shirley MacLaine is still a big-screen force. With a quick dismissive glance or a sharp-edged delivery of a one-liner, she creates a handful of genuine and genuinely funny moments.

The kind of movie beloved by people who never go to the movies, because they are primarily interested in something else--the Civil War, for example--and think historical accuracy is a virtue instead of an attribute.

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

The plot risks bursting under the strain of its coincidences, as Sara and Jon fly to opposite coasts at the same time and engage in a series of Idiot Plot moves so extreme and wrongheaded that even other characters in the same scene should start shouting helpful suggestions.

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.

The screenplay by Kim Barker requires Bullock to behave in an essentially disturbing way that began to wear on me. It begins as merely peculiar, moves on to miscalculation and becomes seriously annoying.

So much talent — and everyone goes down with the ship in one of the worst movies of 2021.

I laughed, yes, I did, several times during Deuce Bigalow: Male Gigolo. That's proof, if any is required, that I still possess streaks of immaturity and vulgarity.

It is the anti-Sundance film, an exhausted wheeze of bankrupt cliches and cardboard characters, the kind of film that has no visible reason for existing, except that everybody got paid.

If you liked the original, the best way to preserve that memory is to stay away from this sequel.

Invasion U.S.A. is a brain-damaged, idiotic thriller, not even bad enough to be laughable.

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

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.

The film is a sharp disappointment to those who have been waiting for 10 years since the master's last film. The best that can be hoped is that, having made a film, Coppola has the taste again, and will go on to make many more, nothing like this.

Spade, clearly bored with his petulant-pipsqueak persona, does the kind of sleepwalking that gets ridiculed on TV by David Spade. Make no mistake: He's over this. [2 Feb 1996, p.31]

The poster art for A Thousand Words shows Eddie Murphy with duct tape over his mouth, which as a promotional idea ranks right up there with Fred Astaire in leg irons.

Return to the Blue Lagoon aspires to the soft-core porn achievements of the earlier film, but succeeds instead of creating a new genre, no-core porn.

Needful Things is yet another one of those films based on a Stephen King story that inspires you to wonder why his stories don't make better films. The movie only has one note, which it plays over and over, sort of a Satanic water torture. It's not funny and it's not scary and it's all sort of depressing.

Why do they persist in making these retreads? Because RoboCop is a brand name, I guess, and this is this year's new model. It's an old tradition in Detroit to take an old design and slap on some fresh chrome.

Some of these people make my skin crawl. The characters of Sex and the City 2 are flyweight bubbleheads living in a world which rarely requires three sentences in a row.

An idiotic ode to macho horseshite (to employ an ancient Irish word). It is however distinguished by superb cinematography.

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

Not only am I ill-prepared to review the movie, but I venture to guess that anyone who is not literally a member of a Scooby-Doo fan club would be equally incapable. This movie exists in a closed universe, and the rest of us are aliens. The Internet was invented so that you can find someone else's review of Scooby-Doo. Start surfing.

Blame It On Rio has the mind of a 1940s bongo comedy and the heart of a porno film. It's really unsettling to see how casually this movie takes a serious situation. A disturbed girl is using sex to play mind games with a middle-aged man, and the movie get its yuks with slapstick scenes where one guy goes out the window when the other guy comes in the door. What's shocking is how many first-rate talents are associated with this sleaze.

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.

Pants and wheezes and hurls itself exhausted across the finish line after barely 65 minutes of movie, and then follows it with 15 minutes of end credits in an attempt to clock in as a feature film.

An agonizingly creaky movie that laboriously plods through a plot so contrived that the only thing real about it is its length.

The characters in these movies exist in a Twilight Zone where thousands of rounds of ammunition are fired, but no one ever gets shot unless the plot requires him to.

Much of the “humor” in Daddy’s Home 2 is of questionable taste at best.

Monster-in-Law fails the Gene Siskel Test: "Is this film more interesting than a documentary of the same actors having lunch?"

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.

There's little that's new in the material, and nobody seems to have asked whether the emotional charge of blatant racism belongs in a lightweight story like this - even if the racists are the villains.

This project is dead in the water. Read the book. Better still, read "Victory."

The people in this movie are dumber than a box of Tinkertoys.

The Spirit is mannered to the point of madness. There is not a trace of human emotion in it. To call the characters cardboard is to insult a useful packing material.

All great farces need a certain insane focus, an intensity that declares how important they are to themselves. This movie is too confident, too relaxed, too clever to be really funny. And yet, when the cowboys sit around their campfire singing a sad lament and then their horses join in, you see where the movie could have gone.

This may be one of the least artful holiday films ever made. Even devout born-again Christians will find this hard to stomach.

The title gives fair warning. If you watch this movie, you’re in for an absolute, unmitigated, cringe-inducing, “WHAT IN GOD’S NAME WERE THEY THINKING?” disaster.

What did we really, sincerely, expect anyway, from a movie in which Karl Malden plays a character named 'Wilbur,' and Slim Pickens plays a character named 'Tex'?

The Wizard is finally just a cynical exploitation film with a lot of commercial plugs in it, and it is so insanely overwritten and ineptly directed that it will disappoint just about everybody and serve them right for going in the first place.

The sad thing about A Night at the Roxbury is that the characters are in a one-joke movie, and they're the joke.

Arsenal is garbage. The cast includes familiar faces...but it’s still a trashy, blood-spattered, sadistic thriller with a goes-nowhere plot, overwrought dialogue and a throbbing soundtrack that’ll leave your ears ringing.

This film is a total dud and an insult to the intelligence of anyone who would see it — especially the seniors who clearly are the movie’s target audience. “Just Getting Started” simply never does get started. It’s D.O.A.

Just when it seems about to become a real corker of an adventure movie, plunges into incomprehensible action, idiotic dialogue, inexplicable motivations, causes without effects, effects without causes, and general lunacy. What a mess.

An inept assembly of ill-matched plot points, meandering through a production that has attractive art direction (despite the immobile mouths).

With The Comedian arriving in theaters, it’s safe to say I now have only nine spaces left on my list of the 10 Worst Movies of 2017.

There is not a single scene in this movie that I found amusing, original or interesting. What we really have here is a documentary of the actors wasting their lives.

The action, direction and special effects are all better than the last time around, which isn't saying much, since Death Wish II was so ineptly directed and edited that it was an insult even to audiences that were looking for a bad movie.

I recommend that Kelly keep right on cutting until he whittles it down to a ukulele pick.

Aggressively simple-minded, it's fueled by the delusion that it has a brilliant premise: Eddie Murphy plus cute kids equals success. But a premise should be the starting point for a screenplay, not its finish line.

At the time, I was never interested in getting into a fight with the toughest kid in high school. And now that I'm not in high school, I am even less interested in seeing a movie on the subject, particularly a bad one.

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

Seagal has been quoted as saying he isn't proud of the films he's done, that he wanted to move onto more serious fare. In that light, it's possible to see the wretched excesses of On Deadly Ground as self-punishment. To each his own, but when the audience is punished, we're standing on the wrong ground. [21 Feb 1994, p.25]

Life Itself begins with a cinematic shell game, with Fogelman pulling a short con on the viewer for no discernible reason.

The result is not merely a bad film, but a waste of an opportunity. As he approaches 85, Winters is still active, funny, enthusiastically involved in painting and could have been the subject of a good film. This isn't it.

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.

It tries for the greatest realism in its obligatory shots of gas tanks exploding, and yet includes such absurdities as a local news helicopter that tracks all of the competitors all the way from LA to New York. To be sure, without the traffic copter the story would have been impossible to follow - but then why follow the story anyway? In the meantime, can we possibly hold our breath for "Gumball Rally?" I'll bet I can.

This one's several cabins down from the original Bill Murray crowd-pleaser, with gross-out and make-out gags misfiring in tedious succession. [26 Jul 1992, p.6]

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.

I’m all for bawdy, politically incorrect, wildly inappropriate humor — when there are consistent and genuine laughs to be mined from the material. This stuff just sits there like a steaming pile of stuff you walk around.

Too bad the Catholic League is so busy attacking good films, like "Dogma," that it can't spare the time to picket bad ones.

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

By the end of Children of the Corn, the only thing moving behind the rows is the audience, fleeing to the exits.

A film is a terrible thing to waste. For Roman Coppola to waste one on A Glimpse Inside the Mind of Charles Swan III is a sad sight to behold. I'll go further. For Charlie Sheen to waste a role in it is also a great pity. I stop not: For Bill Murray to occupy his time in this dreck sandwich is a calamity.

The level of intelligence of the screenplay of "Saturn 3" is shockingly low - the story is so dumb it would be laughed out of any junior high school class in the country - and yet the movie was financed. Why?

I wouldn’t be surprised to hear Michelle Darnell was a hilarious onstage comedic creation. On film, she is a flimsy, one-dimensional, tiresome character, surrounded by equally unconvincing and unfunny players.

Ninjas triumph over anything -- except stupid cliches. [18 Apr 1995, p.24]

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

A visually ugly film with an incoherent plot, wooden characters and inane dialog. It provided me with one of the more unpleasant experiences I've had at the movies.

Given the considerable comedic talents of Rob Corddry, Craig Robinson, Adam Scott et al., and the ragged, what-the-hell charms of the original “Hot Tub Time Machine,” it’s surprising how rotten this movie is from start to finish.

Underclassman doesn't even try to be good. It knows that it doesn't have to be. It stars Nick Cannon, who has a popular MTV show, and it's a combo cop movie, romance, thriller and high school comedy. That makes the TV ads a slam dunk; they'll generate a Pavlovian response in viewers conditioned to react to their sales triggers (smartass young cop, basketball, sexy babes, fast cars, mockery of adults).

If he wants a future in the movies, Andrew Dice Clay is going to have to play somebody other than himself.

Bad movie. Ugly movie.

Collateral Beauty is a fraud. It is built on a foundation so contrived, so off-putting, so treacly, the most miraculous thing about this movie is this movie was actually made.

A fitfully funny, aimless, unnecessary thriller.

The movie is unpleasant to look at. It's darker than "Seven," but without sufficient purpose, and my overall memory of it is of people screaming in the shadows. To call this a comedy is a sign of optimism; to call it a comeback for Murphy is a sign of blind faith.

There is not a spark of chemistry between Chris and Jamie, although the plot clearly requires them to fall in love. There is so much chemistry involved with the Anna Faris character, however, that she can set off multiple chain reactions with herself, if you see what I mean.

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 movie is pretty bad, all right. But it has a certain charm. It's so completely wrong-headed from beginning to end that it develops a doomed fascination.

When actors grin as much as they do in "Undercover Blues," you know that something is seriously the matter. [10 Sept 1993, p.40]