Too bad the movie relies on special effects to carry the show, and doesn't bring much else to the party.

The Jackal, on the other hand, impressed me with its absurdity. There was scarcely a second I could take seriously.

Nearly 50 years after William Friedkin’s “The Exorcist” elevated the horror genre to Oscar-level greatness and produced chills and thrills that resonate with us to this day, the direct sequel The Exorcist: Believer is a tasteless, tacky, uninspired and just plain lousy knockoff that upchucks pea soup-colored porridge all over the legacy of the original, from the crummy-looking and tedious exorcism sequence to the murky cinematography, to the return of an iconic character who is given an absolutely awful and borderline offensive storyline.

I seem to be developing a rule about talking animals: They can talk if they're cartoons or Muppets, but not if they're real.

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

The sequel to Tim Burton’s 2010 mega-hit “Alice in Wonderland” is loud, frantic, stunningly unfunny, off-putting and riddled with mediocre, out-of-tune work from normally outstanding actors. It’s one of the great movie disasters of 2016.

The problem is, the plot wavers from nearly indecipherable to semi-ridiculous to … I stopped caring.

A classic species of bore: a self-referential movie with no self to refer to. One character after another, one scene after another, one cute line of dialogue after another, refers to another movie, a similar character, a contrasting image, or whatever.

The plot was an arbitrary concoction.

"Clerks" spoke with the sure, clear voice of an original filmmaker. In Mallrats the voice is muffled, and we sense instead advice from the tired, the establishment, the timid and other familiar Hollywood executive types.

The Flower of My Secret is likely to be disappointing to Almodovar's admirers, and inexplicable to anyone else.

The running time is 104 minutes, but it felt longer than “The Brutalist.”

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.

Everybody knew to wait for the outtakes during the closing credits, because you'd see him miss a fire escape or land wrong in the truck going under the bridge. Now the outtakes involve his use of the English language.

The dialogue and exposition scenes in G.I. Joe are like something out of a Saturday morning cartoon from the 1980s, but the PG-13 violence is a little intense for the 7-year-old boys (and girls) who might love this stuff.

They say this is Halloween Ends. I say: Can we get that in writing?

I kind of like the idea: A cheesy '80s band called the Suburbans reunites for a tribute album. I kind of like the cast: Everyone from Jennifer Love Hewitt to Robert Loggia pops up. I even kind of liked their "hit song," and probably would have bought their album in my teens. But it's impossible to like this movie, and there's no kind way to say it. [29 Oct 1999, p.30]

As the plot twists grow increasingly ridiculous and some of the main characters have to act like complete idiots just to keep the story rambling along, “Fatale” commits the crime of somehow becoming tedious and dull even as the body count piles up.

Joe Dirt is so obviously a construction that it is impossible to find anything human about him; he is a concept, not a person.

The Electric State short-circuits from a severe case of Character Overload, with great actors mired in hopelessly silly and underwritten parts.

What a mess. What a pretentious, uneven, off-putting, not-nearly-as-clever-as-it-thinkd-it-is MESS.

Everything about this film feels forced, clunky and overwrought.

It’s difficult to imagine anyone appearing in this film thought of it as more than a payday.

It's a nine days' wonder, a geek show designed to win a weekend or two at the box office and then fade from memory.

Sweet and high-spirited and with three dancers who are so good they deserve a better screenplay. This is really two movies: A stiff and awkward story, interrupted by dance sequences of astonishing grace and power.

Here’s proof two females can make a bickering-opposites-action-comedy that’s just as lousy and sour as any clunker starring two guys.

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.

A march through the swamp of recycled ugly duckling stories, with occasional pauses in the marsh of sitcom cliches and the bog of Idiot Plots.