Last Man Standing is such a desperately cheerless film, so dry and laconic and wrung out, that you wonder if the filmmakers ever thought that in any way it could be ... fun.

The movie seems to reinvent itself from moment to moment, darting between styles like a squirrel with too many nuts. There is one performance that works, sort of, and it is by Marisa Tomei,

Hell Night is a relentlessly lackluster example of the Dead Teenager Movie.

The best shot in this film is the first one. Not a good sign.

Too many characters, not enough plot, and a disconnect between the two stars' acting styles.

One of the most profoundly stupid movies I've ever seen.

It's a movie with so many inconsistencies, improbabilities, unanswered questions and unfinished characters that we have to suspend not only disbelief but also intelligence.

Cool World is a seriously troubled film, so ragged I doubt if even the director can explain the story line.

The Ridiculous Six is sunk by a terrible script by Sandler and Tim Herlihy and some truly cringe-inducing work by a few of the players.

An odd, well-made and thoroughly unpleasant thriller.

Winter’s Tale is a good old-fashioned train wreck of a film. This is one of those deals where all the ingredients are Grade A, but the final product is a dud.

The writers never solved the problem of incorporating the top-heavy special effects into their thin little plot.

Laughter for me was such a physical impossibility during National Lampoon's Van Wilder that had I not been pledged to sit through the film, I would have lifted myself up by my bootstraps and fled.

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.

A movie about two old codgers who are nothing like people, both suffering from cancer that is nothing like cancer, and setting off on adventures that are nothing like possible.

This is a clichéd, cynical, occasionally offensive, pandering, idiotic film that redefines shameless.

Berenger, McNamara and Eleniak perform what was demanded from them within the confines of the flimsy script. The story, though, is painfully short on laughs, never building a foundation for the attachments forged by film's end. [26 Apr 1994, p.30]

A horrible experience of unbearable length, briefly punctuated by three or four amusing moments.

Leads us down the garden path of romance, only to abandon us by the compost heap of uplifting endings. And it's not even clever enough to give us the right happy ending. It gives us the wrong happy ending.

Pitch Perfect 3 feels like an encore nobody asked for.

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.

Seventh Son moves at a fairly quick pace and has a sense of humor about itself. That doesn’t mean it’s thrilling, or funny. Just that it’s a quickly forgotten pile of junk.

The only reason I am rating this movie at one star while Little Indian, Big City received zero stars is that Jungle 2 Jungle is too mediocre to deserve zero stars. It doesn't achieve truly awful badness, but is sort of a black hole for the attention span, sending us spiraling down into nothingness.

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

The movie was executive produced by Quentin Tarantino. Shame on him. He intends it no doubt as another homage to grindhouse pictures, but I've seen a lot of them, and they were nowhere near this bad. "Hell's Angels on Wheels," for example: pretty good.

Unfrosted is one of the worst films of the decade so far.

For years there have been reports of the death of the Western. Now comes American Outlaws, proof that even the B Western is dead.

We have the first serious contender for Wasted Opportunity of the Decade.

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.

Sarah Michelle Gellar, the nominal star, has been in her share of horror movies, and all by herself could have written and directed a better one than this.

The philosopher Thomas Hobbes tells us life can be "poor, nasty, brutish and short." So is this movie.

You wouldn’t want to spend five minutes with these insufferably juvenile jerks, let alone an entire movie.

The fatal flaw in Godzilla 1985 is that it is a bad movie with aspirations of being a good bad movie.

What it looks like is warmed-over Tarantino mixed with a third-rate tribute to the Coen brothers with a dose of David Lynch-ian madness, two decades late to the party.

An assault on the eyes, the ears, the brain, common sense and the human desire to be entertained.

Sometimes it works to show their lips moving (it certainly did in "Babe"), but in Good Boy! the jaw movements are so mechanical it doesn't look like speech, it looks like a film loop.

The Perfect Man crawls hand over bloody hand up the stony face of this plot, while we in the audience do not laugh because it is not nice to laugh at those less fortunate than ourselves, and the people in this movie are less fortunate than the people in just about any other movie I can think of, simply because they are in it.

A particularly nasty and mean-spirited action picture, with the dramatic depth of an arcade game.

Although the movie may appeal to kids in the lower grades, it's pretty slow, flat and dumb.

Shameless in its use of mental retardation as a gimmick, a prop and a plot device. Anyone with any knowledge of retardation is likely to find the film offensive.

Supplies us with a first-class creature, a fourth-rate story, and dialogue possibly created by feeding the screenplay into a pasta maker.

A movie that contains one funny scene and 91 minutes of running time to kill.

Anything that holds our interest can be entertaining, in a way, but the movie seems to have an unwholesome determination to show us the victims being terrified and threatened. When I left the screening, I just didn't feel right.

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.

So ludicrous in so many different ways it achieves a kind of forlorn grandeur.

I am so very tired of this movie. I see it at least once a month. The title changes, the actors change, and the superficial details of the story change, but it is always about exactly the same thing: heavily armed men shooting at one another.

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.

A movie, based on the popular Dean Koontz novel, that seems to have been made by grinding up other films and feeding them to this one.

I'm Gonna Git You Sucka is a comedy that feeds off the blaxploitation movies, and although, like all good satires, it is cheerfully willing to be offensive, it is almost completely incapable of being funny.

Toy Soldiers, a film with earnest performances and professional production values, is constructed out of characters, situations and gimmicks that will be instantly recognized by the weary viewer. There is nothing new here.

Given the lurid, stupid, loony and unintentionally laughable nature of this espionage thriller, I found some measure of entertainment studying the vastly different approaches taken by Costner, Jones and Oldman — three of our finest actors over the last 30 years.

To call A Lot like Love dead in the water is an insult to water.

The only true horror about Clive Barker's Hellraiser III is that this movie was ever made. It is the worst of the series, offering nothing but cheap scare scenes, a weird message about healing the wounds of the Vietnam War and sex scenes too explicit for kids. The acting is soap-opera shallow. [22 Sep 1992, p.33]

The lockstep mentalities who made this movie tell their story entirely from a boring male point of view, supply us with male wimps and studs who are equally uninteresting, and view women only as wet T-shirt finalists. What a letdown for horny movie critics.

This is an ungainly movie, ill-fitting, with its elbows sticking out where the knees should be. To quote another ancient proverb, "A camel is a horse designed by a committee." Life or Something Like It is the movie designed by the camel.

Staying Alive is a big disappointment.

House of the Sleeping Beauties has missed its ideal release window by about 40 years. It might -- might -- have found an audience in that transitional period between soft- and hard-core.

Screwballs opens outside the local hot dog stand, where a giant inflatable hot dog is swinging back and forth like a pendulum, gently nudging the backsides of two teenage girls. From such beginnings I suppose we should not anticipate a masterpiece, but the opening shot is the high point of this dumb movie.

Hocus Pocus is a film desperately in need of self-discipline. It's one of those projects where you imagine everyone laughing and applauding each other after every scene, because they're so convinced they're wild and crazy guys. But watching the movie is like attending a party you weren't invited to, and where you don't know anybody, and they're all in on a joke but won't explain it to you.

A deserted island movie during which I desperately wished the characters had chosen one movie to take along if they were stranded on a deserted island, and were showing it to us instead of this one.

This is a genuinely interesting idea, filled with dramatic possibilities, but the movie approaches it on the level of a dim-witted sit-com. Thoughtful scenes are followed by slapstick, emotional moments lead right into farce, and the movie doesn't have an ounce of true moral courage; it sidesteps every single big issue that it raises.

Pulling off a premise this creepy and cockamamie would require a lot of skill, far more than can be found in the director of "Deuce Bigalow: Male Gigolo" and the writers of "A Very Brady Sequel."

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.

Firewalker is a free-form anthology of familiar images from the works of Steven Spielberg, subjected to a new process that we could call discolorization. All of the style and magic are gone, leaving only the booby-trapped temples, the steaming jungle and such lines as, if I remember correctly, "Witch, woman, harlot - I've been called them all!"

This is a would-be comedy that's not as funny (nor as satirical) as the movies that inspired it.

Renaissance Man is a labored, unconvincing comedy that seems cobbled together out of the half-understood remnants of its betters.

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.

Jaws the Revenge is not simply a bad movie, but also a stupid and incompetent one - a ripoff.

A very bad movie and a genuinely moving experience.

Maybe after years of banging his head against the system Friedkin decided with The Guardian to make a frankly commercial exploitation film. On the level of special effects and photography, The Guardian is indeed well made. But give us a break.

The Twilight Saga: New Moon takes the tepid achievement of "Twilight" (1988), guts it, and leaves it for undead.

Sandler is making a tactical error when he creates a character whose manner and voice has the effect of fingernails on a blackboard, and then expects us to hang in there for a whole movie.

Neither funny nor scary, Buffy ends up as little more than a bunch of stereotypes (Reubens excepted) squaring off with each other as true love triumphs. Maybe it should have been called "Pee-wee's Big Denture," and given people something to sink their teeth into. But for now, Buffy remains lifeless. [31 Jul 1992, p.43]

In asking us to believe David Spade as a romantic lead, it miscalculates beyond all reason.

The movie is so choppy in its nervous editing that a lot of the time we're simply watching senseless kinetic action.

The screenplay has so many characters, and they're in so many different places, that the only way to keep them halfway straight is for them to be calling each other all the time. There are even several scenes in which the phone rings and no one's at home. No one of this Earth, anyway.

It has no edge, no hunger to be better than it is. It ambles pleasantly through its inanity, like a guest happy to be at a boring party.

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

There’s not much difference between this nudity-packed yet remarkably dull crime drama and the ’90s-vintage, sleazy pay-cable erotic thrillers it’s referencing, if not emulating.

Hulk Hogan can hoist 400-pound wrestlers over his head, but the former heavyweight champ still can't carry a movie in the hero's role. [11 Oct 1993, p.30]

All concept and no content.

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.

Situations aren't explored, characters aren't developed, timing is ignored, but every 30 seconds there's a would-be laugh. Because all we're supposed to do is laugh, the movie is deadening.

The first film had maybe a shred of realism to flavor its romantic comedy. This one looks like it was chucked up by an automatic screenwriting machine.

Despite the pairing of the eminently likable and talented Will Ferrell and Amy Poehler as the leads, and about a dozen recognizable (and usually funny) supporting players, The House is a fetid, cheap-looking, depressing and occasionally even mean-spirited disaster.

The cinematography has a washed-out, dull tone. The special effects are mediocre. With a few exceptions, the dialogue is stilted and filled with expository passages so obviously intended to explain things to us, I half-expected characters to turn to the camera and say, “Here’s what you need to know so you can understand what’s happening.”

A garage sale of gay issues, harnessed to a plot as exhausted as a junkman's horse.

Her dad was right about one thing. Something terrible did happen to her (Duff) in Los Angeles. She made this movie.

Last year, I reviewed a nine-hour documentary about the lives of Mongolian yak herdsmen, and I would rather see it again than sit through The Frighteners.

There are scenes here where Breillat deliberately disgusts us, not because we are disgusted by the natural life functions of women, as she implies, but simply because The Woman does things that would make any reasonable Man, or Woman, for that matter, throw up.

Maybe 7-year-olds will enjoy this PG-rated stuff, but it's not funny. [12 Nov 1993, p.39]

Take the “smart” out of “Booksmart,” the “super” out of “Superbad” and the edge out of “The Purge,” and you get the Hulu movie The Binge, one of the worst comedies of this or any other year, notable only because it features what might just be the most terrible performance in Vince Vaughn’s up-and-down career, and I say that with no glee because I’m a Vince Vaughn guy.

Now I am faced with this movie, the most anticlimactic non-event since Geraldo Rivera broke into Al Capone's vault.

In the stunningly tone-deaf and horrifically unfunny The Very Excellent Mister Dundee, Hogan plays himself in a “Curb Your Enthusiasm”-esque conceit gone terribly wrong.

"Deep Rising" was one of the worst movies of 1998. Virus is easily worse.

It is depressing to reflect on the wealth of talent that conspired to make this inert and listless movie.

You've seen it all before, ad nauseum: Myers' face reflected in a windowpane, Myers appearing in deep focus over the shoulder of an oblivious victim, a strung-up body swinging from an overhang into the path of a screaming character (the Shape has a flair for the dramatic) and lots and lots of screaming characters. [4 Oct 1995, p.51]

Part 2 seems even more like a Stallone vehicle than the first movie. I'm not even sure it's intended as a comedy. It's filled wall to wall with the kind of routine action and violence that Hollywood extrudes by the yard and shrink-wraps to order.