Virtually every single element in Everything, Everything rings false and manipulative — and that’s BEFORE we get to a Big Reveal so contrived, so insanely implausible, so monstrously tone-deaf, we can see the entire movie plunging off a cliff, landing with a sickening thud in the Land of the Worst Movies of the Year.

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 Cobbler goes from bad to you-have-to-be-kidding in that final act, when we’re given a big reveal that makes no sense, even in the context of a bat-bleep crazy fable.

This isn't a strict remake of Sam Raimi's hugely influential 1981 horror classic, but it does include the basic framework and some visual nods to the original. On its own, it's an irredeemable, sadistic torture chamber reveling in the bloody, cringe-inducing deaths of some of the stupidest people ever to spend a rainy night in a remote cabin in the woods.

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.

A giant pile of shiny gift-wrapped garbage.

It's a total miscalculation from beginning to end, inspired by an idiotic decision to increase the average age of the Benji audience by starring him in a movie rated PG.

The movie is "Dawn of the Dead" crossed with "John Carpenter's "Ghosts of Mars," with zombies not as ghoulish as the first and trains not as big as the second. The movie does however have Milla Jovovich and Michelle Rodriguez.

A stunningly wrong-footed journey that begins with an attempt at bittersweet magic and ends on a series of sour and increasingly dopey notes.

The physical look of the picture is splendid. The screenplay is dead on arrival. The noise level is torture.

It’s badly written and inertly directed, with actors who don’t have a clue what drives their characters. This is one of those rare films that contains no chemistry at all. None. The actors scarcely seem to be in the same scenes together.

The only thing worse than the first three-quarters of Morgan is the supposed payoff, which veers from the dumb to the really dumb to the so-dumb-you’ll-hardly-believe-it. This is one of the worst movies of 2016.

In a film that is wall-to-wall idiocy, the most tiresome delusion is that car chases are funny.

Lipstick is a nasty little item masquerading as a bold statement on the crime of rape. The statement would seem a little bolder if the movie didn't linger in violent and graphic detail over the rape itself, and then handle the vengeance almost as an afterthought.

The movie should be praying to St. Jude, patron saint of lost causes. Maybe he could perform a miracle and turn this into a cable offering, so no one has to buy a ticket to see it.

A colossal miscalculation, a movie based on a premise that cannot support it, a premise so transparent it would be laughable were the movie not so deadly solemn. It's a flimsy excuse for a plot, with characters who move below the one-dimensional and enter Flatland.

With style and energy from the actors, with every sign of self-confidence from the director, with pictures that were in focus and dialogue that you could hear, the movie descended into a morass of narrative quicksand. By the end, I wanted to do cruel and vicious things to the screenplay.

I want to escape, Oh, Muddah Faddah -- Life's too short for cinematic torture.

The Brood is an el sleazo exploitation film, camouflaged by the presence of several well-known stars but guaranteed to nauseate you all the same.

Ice Station Zebra is a movie so flat and conventional that its three moments of interest are an embarrassment.

The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Part 2 carries a proud old name in the annals of exploitation, but its only ambition is to outgross the original film. It fails.

Some movies are no better than second-rate sitcoms. Other movies are no better than third-rate sitcoms. The Back-up Plan doesn't deserve comparison with sitcoms. It plays like an unendurable TV commercial about beautiful people with great lifestyles and not a thought in their empty little heads.

Yes, it is a movie. But just barely so. I’d say it’s more like an excruciating, embarrassing, profoundly unfunny, poorly shot and astonishingly tone-deaf screech-fest featuring some of the least charismatic performances this side of one of those dreadful “reality” shows.

I felt the Kids were too busy being hip and ironic to connect at the simpler level where comedy lives. They were brought down by their own self-protective devices.

The intended charms of the down-home period piece/Southern comedy/romance/drama Big Stone Gap were utterly lost on me.

The sad thing about Turk 182! is that, the whole project sounds like a High Concept movie, in which the idea of the Turk was allowed to substitute for a story about him. Sure, it would be neat to see a movie about a guy like this. But not this movie.

Monotonous, repetitive and sometimes wildly wrong in what it hopes is funny.

Doesn't have anything wrong with it that couldn't be fixed by adding Ebenezer Scrooge and Bad Santa to the cast. It's a holiday movie of stunning awfulness that gets even worse when it turns gooey at the end.

The target audience for Phantasm II obviously is teenagers, especially those with abbreviated attention spans, who require a thrill a minute. No character development, logic or subtlety is necessary, just a sensation every now and again to provide the impression that something is happening on the screen.

The Mummy is so wall-to-wall awful, so cheesy, so ridiculous, so convoluted, so uninvolving and so, so stupid.

McHale's Navy is an astonishingly bad film. Even if you never saw the early '60s TV series on which it is loosely based, you'll hate it. [18 Apr 1997, p.39]

The movie is astonishingly simple-minded, depicting characters who obediently perform their assigned roles as adulterers, cuckolds, etc.

V/H/S is an example of the genre at its least compelling.

El sleazo profoundo trasho zilch.

One regards Reign of Fire with awe. What a vast enterprise has been marshaled in the service of such a minute idea. Incredulity is our companion, and it is twofold: We cannot believe what happens in the movie, and we cannot believe that the movie was made.

It's the worst kind of bad film: the kind that gets you all worked up and then lets you down, instead of just being lousy from the first shot.

The Condemned is nothing but a creaky façade.

The Vanishing is a textbook exercise in the trashing of a nearly perfect film, conducted oddly enough under the auspices of the man who directed it.

This is an unholy mess — a jumbled, tone-deaf satire in which seemingly vital characters are introduced and then inexplicably disappear, never to return; superb actors disappoint by relying on old tricks they’ve used to much better effect in much better films, and every attempt at political commentary comes across as ham-handed and naïve.

It lacks all of the style and sense of fun of the original Critters (1986) and has no reason for existence - aside, of course, from the fact that Critters is a brand name and this is the current model.

The only redeeming value of Bohemian Rhapsody is it’s so bad, there’s plenty of room left for a much better biopic about the one and only Freddie Mercury.

New Year's Eve is a dreary plod through the sands of time until finally the last grain has trickled through the hourglass of cinematic sludge. How is it possible to assemble more than two dozen stars in a movie and find nothing interesting for any of them to do?

What happens next is a cross between "Night of the Living Dead," "The Birds" and a disaster movie, if you follow me.

I am so very, very tired of movies like this. Does the story line strike you as original? It sounds to me like another slice off the cheesecake of dreck.

This movie is a real mess, an incomprehensible, ugly, unstructured, pointless excursion into the murkier realms of one of the most confusing screenplays of all time.

Will I seem hopelessly square if I find Kick-Ass morally reprehensible and will I appear to have missed the point? Let’s say you’re a big fan of the original comic book, and you think the move does it justice. You know what? You inhabit a world I am so very not interested in.

This empty parody of "coming of age in the 'hood" movies is short on storyline, originality and legitimate laughs. [15 Jan 1996, p.30]

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

A couple of action sequences are well staged. That’s about it for the plus side.

Stargate is like a film school exercise. Assignment: Conceive of the weirdest plot you can think of, and reduce it as quickly as possible to action movie cliches.

Terror Train is a curious hybrid that doesn't seem to know just what it wants to be. It has, I guess, few artistic pretensions, and yet it's not a rock-bottom-budget, schlock exploitation film.

Here is the dirty movie of the year, slimy and scummy, and among its casualties is poor Jessica Alba, who is a cutie and shouldn't have been let out to play with these boys.

From what dark night of the soul emerged the wretched idea for The Nutcracker in 3D? Who considered it even remotely a plausible idea for a movie?

The director, whose name is Pitof, was probably issued with two names at birth and would be wise to use the other one on his next project.

It’s only mid-April, but I’m making an early reservation for The Other Woman to appear on my list of the 10 Worst Films of 2014.

The movie might have worked if it had been a satire of those awful made-for-TV Family Problem Movies.

Movies like Eye for an Eye cheapen our character by encouraging us to indulge simplistic emotions - to react instead of analyzing. It provides a one-in-a-million situation and tries to teach us a lesson from it; thoughtful audience members will be aware they're not being treated fairly. This is filmmaking at the level of three-card monte. If you don't believe me, see "Dead Man Walking."

The movie doesn't understand that embarrassment comes in a sudden painful flush of realization; drag it out, and it's not embarrassment anymore, but public humiliation, which is a different condition, and not funny.

Ghostbusters is a horror from start to finish, and that’s not me saying it’s legitimately scary. More like I was horrified by what was transpiring onscreen.

During the course of Failure to Launch, characters are bitten by a chipmunk, a dolphin, a lizard and a mockingbird. I am thinking my hardest why this is considered funny, and I confess defeat.

Mired in a plot of such stupidity.

A brainless feature-length sitcom with too much sit and no com.

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

Writer-director-star Angelina Jolie Pitt’s By the Sea is awfully pretty and mostly dreadful. It’s pretty dreadful.

This is one of the most irritating movies of the year.

Passes off pathological behavior as romantic bliss. It's about two sick and twisted people playing mind games and calling it love.

Wild Orchid is an erotic film, plain and simple. It cannot be read any other way. There is no other purpose for its existence. Its story is absurd, and even its locale was chosen primarily for its travelogue value...What is relevant is that I did not find the movie erotic.

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.

So strong, so shocking and yet so audacious that people walk out shaking their heads; they don't know quite what to make of it.

The screenplay reads like a collaboration between Jekyll and Hyde.

How this smart and funny man, he of the convulsive Tonight Show performances and the great Young Frankenstein, could end up putting his name on lame comedies like this one remains one of the great mysteries of the day. [28 July 1993, p.37]

Watching Doom is like visiting Vegas and never leaving your hotel room.

There have been articles lately asking why the United States is so hated in some parts of the world. As this week's Exhibit A from Hollywood, I offer Zoolander.

Maybe the dingo ate their screenplay.

The satire is broad and forced and unfunny, there’s no cadence to the setups and visual punch lines, and the likable cast is hopelessly lost. Some disasters should remain forgotten.

Myers has made some funny movies, but this film could have been written on toilet walls by callow adolescents.

Movies like this work if they're able to maintain a high level of energy and invention, as the Mad Max movies do. They do not work when they lower their guard and let us see the reality, which is that several strangely garbed actors feel vaguely embarrassed while wearing bizarre costumes and reciting unspeakable lines.

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.

Utterly clueless about its tone and has no idea how relentlessly it is undercutting itself. By the time we arrive at the obligatory happy ending, which is perfunctory and automatic, I felt sort of insulted. If Chandrasekhar thinks his audience will laugh at his vulgarity, why does he believe it requires a feel-good ending?

A perfectly good idea for a comedy, but it just plain doesn't work. It's dead in the water. I can imagine it working well in a different time, with a different cast, in black and white instead of color--but I can't imagine it working like this.

The screenplay is so murky, indeed, that I was never sure whether the Kids hated the Hitler Youth lads because they were Nazis, or simply because they didn't swing.

A flat and peculiar film.

Here is the most uncomfortable movie of the new year, an exercise in feel-good smut.

A terrible movie, sappy and dead in the water.

A lot of its jokes miss, the pace is slow, there are too many characters to keep track of and there's an unpleasant streak of nasty humor directed at characters who are fat, ugly, old or otherwise out of step with Southern California physical ideals.

The Tenant's not merely bad -- it's an embarrassment. If it didn't have the Polanski trademark, we'd probably have to drive miles and miles and sit in a damp basement to see it.

Aside from some fancy handiwork with a combination credit card/switchblade, Seagal appears stiff and arthritic during his karate scenes, lending worrisome credence to the notion that Seagal couldn't fight his way out of the Wrigley Field bleachers. [08 Oct 1996, p.34]

Stupefying dimwitted.

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.

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

If there is a shred of plausibility in the film, it comes from Bernard Hill's performance as Shirley Valentine's husband. He isn't a bad bloke, just a tired and indifferent one, and when he follows his wife to Greece at the end of the film there are a few moments so truthful that they show up the artifice of the rest.

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.

A fog of gloom lowers over The Whole Ten Yards, as actors who know they're in a turkey try their best to prevail.

Nothing about The D Train feels the least bit authentic, and worse, little about it is funny.

There is no need for this movie. That's true of most sequels, but it's especially true of Smokey and the Bandit II, which is basically just the original movie done again, not as well.

It’s awful, but disposable and easily forgotten.

No Such Thing is inexplicable, shapeless, dull. It doesn't even rise to entertaining badness.

No one in the movie has a morsel of intelligence. They all seem to be channeling more successful characters in better comedies. This would be touching if it were not so desperate.