A flabbergasting waste of time and talent.

In a year of mass culture that gave us HBO’s excellent “Chernobyl,” Joker can claim the grimmest depiction of a meltdown.

Most of the ingredients for a strong, tough film are there, and they have been sadly botched by a few key collaborators.

Although a literal movie adaptation of Seuss' 1957 classic "The Cat in the Hat" might have run 20 minutes, is it too much to ask that the filmed material preserve the author's sensibility?

It's passable.

A lame duck.

The movie's heart, of course, is with poor addled Mike and his kids, but 17 Again works only fitfully to make the Efron/Perry character worth a story.

Of all the teen performers out there, Duff has to be the blandest (especially since the Olsens hit the skids).

Well, it's pretty bad, a long way from the dash and satisfactions of the earlier picture.

This low-budget comedy will most likely try the patience of a paying audience with its uneven pacing, wavering tone and poor production quality.

Stranded in this charmless fantasy, Stiller is reduced to his old halting, squirming tricks.

What could have been a juicy, pulpy noir, based loosely on the real-life 1976 Mustang Ranch love triangle involving Joe and Sally Conforte and Sally's boxer paramour, instead has the dramatic consistency of rice milk.

Too bad the movie concentrates on the male point of view because it kicks to life when Zellweger is on screen.

I won't pretend there aren't moments of sweetness here--there are, aplenty. But the promise of true emotion goes bust with bad acting, cheap writing and false sentiment.

Formulaic romantic junk.

Give David Arquette credit. He shares nearly all his screen time in See Spot Run with a clever canine and a cute kid and still manages to pull off his usual nutty-slapstick routine with gusto.

It's strictly rental material. [06 Oct 1996, p.11]

Were it not for young star Amanda Bynes' energetic good nature in the face of drab dialogue and wooden stereotypes, What a Girl Wants might have been a career-ending movie violation rather than just an embarrassing fender-bender.

He's a washout at the car wash, she's a waitress with a dream. Together they motor off to Tinseltown in search of fame, glory and, maybe, Bert Convy. It's a country-western love story that'll tug at those heartstrings, folks, and, no, I'm not making any of this up. [21 June 1985, p.6C]

What’s missing is not simply surprise, or the pleasurable shock of a new kind of ghost comedy. It’s the near-complete absence of verbal wit, all the more frustrating since Keaton is ready to play, and he’s hardly alone.

Final Destination 3 is a gorefest that should either slake your worst appetites or drive you to the exits.

Welcome to Marwen is a misjudgment only a first-rate filmmaker could make.

The Love Guru”does not bring out Myer's best, and aside from a deft early Bollywood parody, there’s nothing visually to help the fun along.

Cursed with an honest title, Failure to Launch waves a white flag in scene after scene, declaring surrender. We give up! We do not know how to make a decent mainstream romantic comedy!

The pathos really are shameless, arriving with killing regularity and false humility.

An oppressively cute Manhattan time-travel romantic comedy that’s lost in time, space and cliches.

The Ninth Configuration is neither frightening nor funny nor inspiring, although it strains to be all of these. [30 Sep 1985, p.3C]

Isn't just the weakest of the "Die Hard" pictures; it's a lousy action movie on its own terms.

Rampage is a drag.

It lacks a sharp look and satisfyingly fleshed-out story and compensates with one numbing round of insect- or human-based peril after another.

After experiencing about a half-hour of Grodin's yelling, you sit in your seat imagining how much funnier Last Resort could have been if it had been written by, directed by or starred Woody Allen, Albert Brooks or Steve Martin. The answer is: a whole lot funnier. [09 May 1986, p.43]

In the end, Protocols of Zion is all context--a bit here about Father Coughlin, a minute there about the Holocaust, a stint with "The Passion" and a brief shot of Levin watching the beheading of Daniel Pearl--no soul.

It's tough to get on board with these monsters. They don't get the banter they--or we--deserve, and the screenwriters lean on wearying stereotypes.

Sometimes, you can use a smaller devil to catch the Devil, the movie suggests. But in this case, the entire movie goes to hell in record time.

Dominik drains the complication and, saddest of all, the screen wiles, from a plainly complicated legend.

This is “True Lies” without the striptease or the Arab-maiming.

The slapstick is awful; the pathos isn't much better, though it's far more plentiful.

I'd be lying if I said I didn't laugh at some of this--though it's not as funny as Laurel and Hardy as toddlers in "Brats." But I wanted to slap myself whenever I did.

The film is a fancy-pants muddle in terms of technique. And if Bloom doesn't do something about his smirky tendency to troll for audience approval, his career may be severely limited.

This movie also offers less: less wit, less charm, and only a few scraps of the old movie’s crucial songs (though “Baby Mine” receives its moment, in a campfire rendition).

An exhausting, predictable, even maddening moviegoing experience.

Serves as both an homage to and shameless thief of its influences. The result: a sprawling, deformed, undisciplined piece of cinema that hobbles along on weak, genre-splicing tactics.

Not without its humorous moments, but they are too few and far between.

Just a schlock romance pumped with testosterone.

The film's crude humor and violence -- cartoonish, but still violent -- should offend parents of younger kids. Yet its ultra-broad, pratfall-filled comedy will satisfy only the most indiscriminate teens.

Almost comes as a breath of fresh air. Too bad it's so foul.

The music is drippy and constant, the wobble from comedy to drama feels off, and the dialects have been reamed in the Irish press. Charm resists calculation; even if actors get some going, even if a writer creates an approximation in or between the lines, deliberately manufactured charm curdles so easily. The one success story of Wild Mountain Thyme belongs to Blunt, who has yet to give a poor or lazily considered performance.

Despite a big budget, lots of technical flair and a good cast headed by Sarah Polley and Ving Rhames, it's mostly a bloody mess.

Aside from influences such as "A Christmas Carol" and "It's a Wonderful Life," Click is so much like the Jim Carrey vehicle "Bruce Almighty"--Steve Koren and Mark O'Keefe worked on both--the writers could sue themselves for plagiarism and then write a screenplay about it.

Black Snake Moan strikes me as hogwash. It fundamentally does not work; its consciously far-fetched, out-there notions of the things damaged people do in the name of love are reductive and go only so far. It's as if the premise were tethered to a radiator or something.

Calling a sequel Are We Done Yet? is like calling it "Enough Already."

Written by Nick Moore, Ruckus Skye and Lane Skye, the script just doesn't give us enough material to care about the story, which is devoid of subtext and keeps everything on the surface.

The Producers on screen, as a musical, does not work. It is not very funny. It doesn't look right. It's depressing.

Writer-director Thom Fitzgerald's ambitious but hopelessly inchoate AIDS drama is actually three separate, sequentially-told stories.

A well-intentioned, ill-conceived blip of a movie that just happens to star two of the most esteemed actors of our time--Michael Caine and Christopher Walken.

Our Flick of the Week is Brian De Palma's disastrous film of Tom Wolfe's seminal '80s novel, The Bonfire of the Vanities. And the biggest mystery of many surrounding this production is why anyone of De Palma's intelligence would want to take a great book - a truly great book - of wit and bile and soften it into platitudinous pablum? [21 Dec 1990, p.C]

The atmosphere in Serenity, by design, imparts a slightly uneasy and hermetic feeling. In Baker Dill, who sounds like a line of gourmet pickles, Knight has the makings of a compellingly messed-up antihero. That’s a start. If movies were all start, then this one might’ve worked.

While this production certainly ranks above Van Damme's prior efforts, it's still full of the sort of macho overkill typical of today's action genre. [09 Aug 1991, p.B]

Maybe if Mindel had focused more on his characters, less on the silly "noir" trickery, his film would do Garity justice. As it is, go find better work, kid.

It is scattered, weightless, impossible to get hold of, and somehow, after seven years and more than 10 hours of screen time, I could not tell you what these films are about.

Watching this movie is like spending two hours and 27 minutes staring at a gigantic aquarium full of digital sea creatures and actors on wires, pretending to swim.

Despite original touches, Cut Sleeve Boys is mostly a mediocre gay-themed movie plagued by tired humor and slapdash filmmaking.

Not only is [Penn's] film overlong and overwrought, it suffers from a pacing that is so deliberate it is positively sluggish. [04 Oct 1991, p.K]

Despite a few interesting moments, Iron Eagle looks and sounds like an extended televison commercial that encourages young people to be all they can be . . . in a supersonic fighting machine. [20 Jan 1986, p.3C]

Perhaps if you are a Sega-head or Nintendo freak, and your mission in life is to rack up awesome scores on Double Dragon, you may find this loud and tedious movie more enjoyable than I did. But I doubt it. [04 Nov 1994, p.M]

The film is a rogue hunk of hooey.

The TV episodes invariably embed a character or a bit of dialogue in your brain that you continuously describe or repeat to your friends. No such find in the movie, though the offbeat soundtrack is very gettable.

The film has one objective: to smack its audience in the face with fleeting, competing wows, over and over.

A mostly bland, sporadically crude, by-the-numbers romantic comedy about two gay men in love.

Compared to so many varied and skillful female-driven hits such as "Bridesmaids," or this summer's "Trainwreck" and "Spy," Sisters isn't worth talking about.

(Kids) are likely to reject Grizzly Falls as though it were a piece of chewed-over bear fat.

There's almost no reason to see the movie, unless you have no qualms about wasting your time.

This is a generic action picture. What also is missing are scenes in which Nolte and Murphy could relate to each other quietly and with some wit. [8 Jun 1990, p.C]

While director Eric Valette provides the occasional chill, the disturbing spooks aren't enough to make this boat float. Burns sleepwalks through One Missed Call totally devoid of charisma, and Sossamon muddles along, going through the motions.

When a movie keeps repeating its title, you know it's a stinker.

We're reminded of Police Academy because this is another story about outcasts and rejects banding together to beat the odds in a macho profession. And we're reminded of The Sting because that's how we feel after the movie is over. Stung.

While the actresses seem authentic in these interviews, they are forced and unconvincing in Jaglom's script, which centers on characters who might kindly be described as narcissistic Harpies. [21 Jun 1991, p.G]

Like all B-movies (or in this case, pseudo B-movies), "Skeleton" contains sparkling moments of promise and camp performance.

The real trouble with Psycho III is that it's one sequel too many. Norman and his Gothic manse have already been drained of creative resources. [03 July 1986, p.A]

Turturro is the one thing that's right with the movie. Perhaps the weakest thing about the new "Deeds" is its utter lack of a strong viewpoint and real emotion.

Hit & Run is pretty rancid as comedy. Worse, the chases are strictly amateur hour, all shortcut editing and no gut satisfaction.

A mild and static attempt at sincere camp.

A lot of the rougher stuff, depicting Ig's late-inning vengeance, is sadistically misjudged. It's hard to jerk tears a beat or two after gleeful rounds of brutality, even if it happens to, or because of, dear wee Daniel Radcliffe.

Lacks the meanness of so many recent gross-out comedies. With the sparkling Diaz leading the way, the lame humor is much more palatable.

Jumper, the film, goes everywhere and nowhere.

The film may be bad-and mad-but it's not predictable.

Everything happens quickly in Fatal Affair, since it’s all plot and no character. These movies are what they are: disposable; full of shiny, unstained, high-end kitchen countertops.

IF reminds us how certain key ingredients — charm, wit, clarity, emotional tact and resonance — cannot be willed into narrative existence, or fixed in post.

Falls prey to a boatload of screenwriting cliches that sink it faster than a leaky freighter.

The Favor is a sex comedy without sex-and pretty much without comedy. [29 Apr 1994]

The derivative nature of it all wouldn't be so bad if the script and acting weren't so plain and unenticing, while the adventure and the plot-the future is dominated by tyrranical baddies whom Swayze and the ranchers valiantly battle-are slow-moving and mostly empty.

The pretty, empty, emotionally frictionless and touch-free new Rebecca adaptation may suit the pandemic dictates for social distancing, but the drama fails to spark.

This lazy sequel is a lump of coal in a dirty stocking.

This is what happens when someone doesn't make a sequel to a hit movie fast enough. Someone else, with a lot of brass, makes a ripoff that is even less satisfying. [19 Aug 1988, p.A]

Often ridiculous, mostly poorly written and, surprisingly poorly acted too. No matter how many flashy scenes the filmmakers shoot, the bad lines just keep dripping down. [21 Aug 1998]

As generic as its title, College Road Trip feels like a first draft, the one the studio brings to the rewrite team that, in this case, never got hired.

Tries mightily to give these warmed-over cliches the proper seasoning, but in the end, these leftovers fail to satisfy. [12 March 1999, Friday, p.L]

Is it a political movie? Yes. A movie with strong ideas and issues? Yes. But propaganda with its heart in the right place is still propaganda, and seldom easy to watch.