The Tax Collector is an underachieving, exceedingly violent urban gangster film with a meandering storyline and a contrived final twist.

While the actors do a yeoman’s job in presenting their characters with aplomb (especially Jesse Metcalfe, as Wesley’s lawyer), the entire film simply comes off as a two-hour, jazzed-up movie version of a sermon.

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

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.

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 actors cannot be faulted. They bring more to the story than it really deserves.

It's a shaky-cam meander through an unconvincing relationship, with detours considering the process of making the film. At 91 minutes, it seems very long.

The only thing more insane and contrived than the Big Reveal is the epilogue, which contains not one but two maddeningly bizarre developments that are beyond strange and inconsistent, even for a movie that’s been strange and inconsistent all along.

Well, you can't fault the actors. That must mean it's the fault of the writer and director. Take is a monotonous slog through dirgeland, telling a story that seems strung out beyond all reason, with flashbacks upon flashbacks delaying interminably the underwhelming climax.

This whole movie is crazy, with all sorts of well-known folks stumbling and bumbling about in search of a character. At times Reach Me is undeniably intriguing, mostly because it’s just so weird and disconnected. Eventually, though, it just becomes tiresome.

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.

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”).

This movie is a real curiosity. It's dead. I don't mean it's bad. A lot of bad movies are fairly throbbing with life. Mannequin is dead. The wake lasts 1 1/2 hours, and then we can leave the theater.

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.

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]

Assembles the building blocks of idiot-proof slasher movies: Stings, Snicker-Snacks, false alarms and point-of-view baits-and-switches.

It is a real film. Not a slick exploitation exercise with all the trappings of depravity but none of the consequences.

If Dirty Grandpa isn’t the worst movie of 2016, I have some serious cinematic torture in my near future.

It’s just a muddled, overcrowded, trigger-happy heist movie brimming with clichés while constantly trying our patience.

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.

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

Here's a movie without an ounce of human kindness, a sour and mean-spirited enterprise so desperate to please, it tries to be a yukky comedy and a hard-boiled action picture at the same time.

These actors, alas, are at the service of a submoronic script and special effects that look like a video game writ large.

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.

If The Informers doesn't sound to you like a pleasant time at the movies, you are right. To repeat: dread, despair and doom. It is often however repulsively fascinating and has been directed by Gregor Jordan as a soap opera from hell, with good sets and costumes.

What we basically have here is a license for the filmmakers to do whatever they want to do with the special effects, while the plot, like Wile E. Coyote, keeps running into the wall.

The Last Airbender is an agonizing experience in every category I can think of and others still waiting to be invented.

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