Color of Night approaches badness from so many directions that one really must admire its imagination. Combining all the worst ingredients of an Agatha Christie whodunit and a sex-crazed slasher film, it ends in a frenzy of recycled thriller elements, with a chase scene, a showdown in an echoing warehouse, and not one but two cliches from Ebert's Little Movie Glossary: The Talking Killer and the Climbing Villain.

A movie like this is harmless, I suppose, except for the celluloid that was killed in the process of its manufacture, but as an entertainment, it will send the kids tiptoeing through the multiplex to sneak into "Spider-Man 2."

Given that director and co-writer Florian Zeller’s “The Father” was a powerful and nuanced and creatively presented original work with Anthony Hopkins winning an Oscar for his moving portrayal of a man with advancing dementia, it’s truly shocking how Zeller’s “The Son” is such a tone-deaf, emotionally manipulative, leaden stumble into the abyss.

The kind of movie that somehow succeeds in moving very, very slowly even while proceeding at a breakneck pace. It cuts quickly back and forth between nothing and nothing.

Thin and unsatisfying.

It is a terrible film, and it skirts (but does not cross) the line of offensiveness...but it is undeniably watchable in the same way you can’t turn away from a talent show featuring a medley of acts that are pretty awful but quite confident they’ve got something to share.

Once Upon a Crime is not grand larceny, but not good enough to qualify for much more than rental viewing. [10 March 1992, p.27]

This is a surprisingly cheesy disaster epic.

If there's anything worse than a movie hammered together out of pieces of bad screenplays, it's a movie made from the scraps of good ones.

Take Me Home Tonight must have been made with people who had a great deal of nostalgia for the 1980s, a relatively unsung decade. More power to them. The movie unfortunately gives them no dialogue expanding them into recognizable human beings.

It’s a dopey, only mildly chilling, uneasy mix of horror and dark comedy, scoring few points in either category.

It’s almost astonishing how unfunny this movie is, given the talents of primary cast members Ed Helms, Taraji P. Henson, Betty Gilpin and David Alan Grier. They’re all troupers and they dive headfirst into the material, but the dialogue they’re delivering and the situations they’re mired in make it impossible to wring even a smile, let alone a legitimate laugh, from the material.

Ewan McGregor is a versatile and durable actor who has spent a lot of time on film sets, and someday he might become an accomplished filmmaker, but his feature directorial debut is one of the most unfortunate literary adaptations in recent memory.

Pure Luck is a bad movie, all right - with leaden timing, a disorganized screenplay, and stretches where nothing much of interest seems to be happening.

They say an elephant never forgets, which means that I have an enormous advantage over Tai, who plays Vera, because I plan to forget this movie as soon as convenient.

Even with Cecil B. Demented, which fails on just about every level, you've got to hand it to him (Waters): The idea for the film is kind of inspired.

This is a disaster by committee.

The problem is that the material's stretched too thin. There's not enough here to fill a feature-length film.

All of the elements are here for a movie I would probably enjoy very much, but somehow they never come together.

What Raising Arizona needs more than anything else is more velocity. Here's a movie that stretches out every moment for more than it's worth, until even the moments of inspiration seem forced.

This new Footloose is a film without wit, humor or purpose.

Feels uncomfortably stage-managed, and raises fundamental questions that it simply ignores.

Tucker's scenes finally wear us down. How can a movie allow him to be so obnoxious and make no acknowledgment that his behavior is aberrant?

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

Pretty much a mess of a movie; the acting is overwrought, the plot is too tangled to play like anything BUT a plot, and although I know you can create terrific special effects at home in the basement on your computer, the CGI work in this movie looks like it was done with a dial-up connection.

The movie offers brainless high-tech action without interesting dialogue, characters, motivation or texture.

Run, don’t walk, away from any temptation you might have to see the off-putting, unfunny, clunky and cartoonishly terrible would-be mob comedy “Mafia Mamma,” which is so lacking in subtlety, cohesion and humor, it makes “Murder Mystery 2” seem like a Rian Johnson thriller.

There must still be a kind of moony young adolescent girl for which this film would be enormously appealing, if television has not already exterminated the domestic example of that species.