High-minded sleaze, the film deceives you with its first 10 minutes, which are interestingly creepy.

It's a juicy premise, but the enactment is so dumbed-down -- by turns preposterous and predictable -- that you couldn't possibly fault your jaded children for yawning and rolling their eyes.

Airborne is a fairly shameless little picture, but at least it follows the First Rule of Cinema. It gives us something interesting to watch: the climactic hill race, with the largely unidentifiable racers zooming and hurdling one another on hairpin hillside curves...Unfortunately, Airborne also follows the First Rule of Bad Movies. Instead of telling a story, the filmmakers follow an outline (or, in this case, an in-line).

Carell's pal and "Daily Show" colleague Jon Stewart has a cameo as himself, one of a chorus of godless media star non-believers who do not see God's larger plan for Evan. Yes, well. At least "The Daily Show" is funny.

The pacing throughout is languid. Your eye becomes fixated on the hideous 70s wallpaper behind them. If only the story's interstellar narrative developments had the intensity of that wallpaper. Rod Serling might've gotten a great hour out of it (the story, that is, not the wallpaper). It simply is not two hours' worth, no matter how many quantum leaps into the unknown Kelly takes.

Noisy, cut into a head-snapping blur with little room for Cena to even try showing emotion, 12 Rounds is an occasionally exciting but always empty experience.

It's Bay World. And after an hour of Pain & Gain, it felt more like "Pain & Pain."

We've since seen plenty of self-satisfied smart alecks, and Freddy, as written and played, brings nothing new to the party.

What a disappointment Weird Science is! A wonderful writer-director has taken a cute idea about two teenage Dr. Frankensteins creating a perfect woman by computer and turned it into a vulgar, mindless, special-effects-cluttered wasteland.

Here and there, in the father/son scenes, you see a glimmer of an honest interaction. All in all, I'd rather watch a "Ned's Declassified School Survival Guide" rerun.

Absurdly unrealistic at times.

Because Stonewall turns everyone into a sentimental or suffocating "type" instead of a dimensional character, the results are sheer noise.

It's a movie that puts Samuel Jackson in kilts, Robert Carlyle in a red Jaguar, and the audience -- if they have any sense at all -- out in the lobby, looking for another picture.

Usually what you're laughing at is ugliness, and that leaves a foul taste long before the 85 minutes have expired.

Accomplishes something I would have thought impossible. It made me appreciate its 1994 predecessor, "The Flintstones."

The jokes seem lame and the rivalry fraudulent, as the two boys play with their big guns.

A lot of nostalgia movies are so in love with their period details that they squander plot and character time on lingering shots of antique cars and storefronts. They wear their vintage with the self-conscious smirk of a 40-year-old stepping out in her prom dress. It's a hoot, of course, but it doesn't guarantee a good time. [25 Sep 1987, p.L]

Jason Lives is not a good movie. It is as predictable as a City Council vote in the Daley era; a lamely acted film filled with the most contrived slaughter and utterly lacking in suspense. [4 Aug 1986, p.C5]

The Navy will no doubt like what it sees, yet a project such as this should impart some sense of the times we live in.

The events of the movie may be a little bit true, or a lot, but hardly any of it plays that way.

The first "H&K" caught people off-guard with its canny idiocy and zigzagging, picaresque treasure hunt premise. By now, there's no catching anyone off-guard with these two, except by way of the most off-color and off-putting means possible.

I find Lars and the Real Girl adorable in the worst way, bailed out only by most every member of its excellent cast.

Ultimately, Stateside ends up a diluted, scattered drama--less than the sum of its parts, but with an impressive cameo list.

The folks who made this movie apparently had nothing inside their heads, either.

The film's main fare is three Stephen King horror stories, presented as comic books come to life. Stringing them together are scenes about an all- American youngster, a Creepshow comics fan who outwits the neighborhood bullies with his mail-order Venus flytraps. The Creep, who delivers the comics, acts as host for this anthology. It's a complicated framing device, but it puts the film squarely in the camp of kids' movies. [07 May 1987, p.3C]

It's not a film, it's an excuse to show victims bleeding at the mouth, or getting shot in the eye, or plucking out their own eyeballs. Most gruesome of all, the sequel oozes dialogue that is best described as "functional."

Add the American work ethic to an Italian bedroom farce, give it to a director reknowned for small, natural, gently humorous films, and you come up with Loverboy, a comedy that is more often distasteful than funny. [2 May 1989, p.7C]

Shelley Long stars in a limp copy of "Private Benjamin" with a location switch from the Army to the Girl Scouts. Long plays a Beverly Hills wife who decides to take over the local troop of spoiled brats. A number of tedious jokes about conspicuous consumption fall flat and Long is no Hawn when it comes to comedy. [24 March 1989, p.A]

The "Showgirls" of superhero movies. This is not a compliment. A vacuous lingerie show posing as feminism, it's the biggest movie hairball this side of "Garfield."

My Father, the Hero isn't just a one-joke movie, but believe it or not, that's by far the best joke. [4 Feb 1994, p.K]

there's no joy in this movie. It's a safe, compromised, even preachy, fable; a wannabe hip romp that never gets going. [07 Jul 1995]

It sounds like standard Cinderella stuff (and the script comes complete with plenty of allusions to princesses in towers), but it's played here with an emphasis on possessions and possessing that borders on the obscene… It's a pretty ugly movie. [23 Mar 1990, Friday, p.C]

It's miscast, barely functional in terms of technique, stupid and unnecessary. Other than that….

A tedious picture about a remorseless serial killer, played by Matt Dillon.

Just the same auld same auld.

A buddy cop film in which one of the cops continually quotes dialogue espoused by fictional cops, in everything from "Heat" to "RoboCop," and not once is it funny.

To say this movie's premise is bonkers is putting it mildly.

Not much of Class Act makes any sense, which is all right, but not much of it is funny either. [05 Jun 1992, p.B]

It's the premise of Crazy People that what the American public really responds to in advertising is absolute honesty. If that were true, then the ads for the film would proudly point out that "Crazy People" is cloying, derivative and never more than mildly funny. [11 Apr 1990, p.2C]

But while Downey is up to the material, and then some, the material is not up to him. The film plods along with the sort of creaky literalism that blunts its attempts at other-worldliness. It says something that Elisabeth Shue, in a bit part as Downey's frustrated girlfriend, has more presence than anyone else in the movie. Her sphere of real time and space is credible; the fantasy world the film attempts to create is not. [13 Aug 1993, p.C]

It is one of the conventions of movies that maladies of the brain make people more childlike, lovable and full of life, as in, most recently, "Rain Man" and "Awakenings." But Regarding Henry drops even the marginally realistic trappings of those films in favor of pure fantasy, a fantasy of starting over, of returning to the womb. [10 July 1991, p.C-1]

A half-silly, half-earnest indie with the soul of a John Hughes-era sex comedy.

The most joyless revisionism since Disney's "The Lone Ranger.

There's some fun potential here, but Marvin's direction is plodding enough to snuff it fairly quickly. Yet Charlie Sheen, promising in his second-banana appearances in Lucas and Pretty in Pink, emerges with his promise intact. Sheen already has the reserved but powerful manner of a Wayne or an Eastwood; with a little more maturity, he could be a contender.

"Damage" is a fruit bowl reduced to a raisin. [22 Jan 1993, p.B]

For a while, director Roth plays this stuff relatively straight, and Willis periodically reminds us he can act (the grieving Kersey cries a fair bit here).

Yogi Bear gives cheap hackwork a bad name. Which is a shame, because hackwork made this industry.

It would still be a stinker even if it wasn't cloaked in a dark shroud of cultural and political relevancy. It's just that bad.

Unintentional comedy that will bore even the 15-year-olds at which it is undoubtedly aimed.

Watching Heather Graham, Tom Cavanagh and a stridently adorable Alan Cumming do their wide-eyed, moony thing in the romantic comedy Gray Matters raises the question: Is it possible for a filmgoer to be twinkled to death?

Jovovich and Krause are as photogenic and blandly naive as their predecessors, and their ultimate commingling is, if anything, even tamer than in the original. Veteran television-movie director William A. Graham and screenwriter Leslie Stevens have fashioned a 98-minute tropical vacation ad. [02 Aug 1991, p.B]

Pure, witless discombobulation.

One redeeming feature of this picture is that it will make great fodder for those make-fun-of-the-movie TV shows.

The storyline isn't coherent, the music stinks, the characters are one-dimensional, the dialogue is insipid and it is neither funny nor romantic.

A lame comedy about the quirky true story of the 1988 Jamaican bobsled team that competed in the Calgary Winter Olympics...The intelligence level of the comedy insults preteens. [1 Oct 1993, p.C2]

Pyun obviously enjoys filming Armageddon, and Cyborg is visually interesting even at its most preposterous. Everything is in ruins, with enough scenes in burnt-out factories to give new meaning to the term "loft living." Still, the plot is hopelessly confused, there are cuts that don't match and scenes that move suddenly from full sun to late afternoon. [07 Apr 1989, p.B]

It's bankrupt in terms of imagination. All he (Romero) does is place his zombies in the basement of a missile silo and have a few crazed military types scream at the zombies and at each other. End of movie. [03 Sept 1985, p.5C]

Only Sarah Paulson, as the Spirit's doctor and sometime lover, seems to be in there playing the scenes as if she were a human being in a comic book superhero scenario, as opposed to a comic book character stuck in a cruddy movie.

Child's Play would probably be sickening if it weren't so relentlessly stupid.

So dark and dirge-like are its first 85 minutes that a few uplifting minutes at the end can't dissipate the somber cloud Noel summons.

What exactly is funny about "Basic Instinct" or "Fatal Attraction"? Other than sending up specific scenes-say, Sharon Stone's uncrossed legs from "Basic Instinct"-there is no humor to be mined. The "Airplane" films kidded the genre rather than just duplicating scenes; director Reiner is operating at the level of a high school parodist. [29 Oct 1993, p.C2]

The film is full of carefully balanced moral proclamations, to the point where it begins to resemble an episode of "Nightline." [15 Jan 1988, p.B]

First-time director Rachel Talalay and writer Michael DeLuca provide nothing but clumsily played stock characters who fail to earn the sympathy necessary for a stand-up-and-cheer conclusion. [15 Sept 1991, p.C6]

As the movie slowly slogs along to its dreary, moralistic conclusion, Ryder`s sharp presence seems to recede into a candy-colored fog of sentimentality.

You'd have to go back to "My Stepmother Is an Alien" to find a male fantasy/nightmare this off-putting.

Offers only one point of interest beyond the breasts of its second female lead: Aniston's barely disguised disdain for her material.

Junk food laced with testosterone.

A feature-length commercial for the Nintendo electronic games system, so thinly disguised that it wouldn't even fool a Reagan-appointed FCC commissioner. [15 Dec 1989, p.G]

Despite some imaginative fatalities, is less a movie than a slick video game.

Slow-paced and repetitive, Needful Things is overlong and overwrought, and the whole thing should be promptly exorcised. [27 Aug 1993, p.A]

[Chris Elliott]'s spoof of a young seaman's apprenticeship seems desperate as he piles special effects willy-nilly atop jibes at stupid old salts. [14 Jan 1994]

Kathy Baker, as Burden's elegantly sodden mother, shows the only sign of interpretive life in this stiff-jointed enterprise. She has about five minutes on screen; she's lucky that way.

This is the third in a hyper-violent and rather stupid series of thrillers about an adult child killer--with knives for fingers--who is burnt to death but now has returned to haunt more teenagers in their sleep. The kids are all patients at a clinic where group therapy fails to stop their nightmares. What you get for your money are scenes with a severed head, the simultaneous injection of 10 hypodermic needles presumably filled with heroin and four long tongues that turn into arm and ankle straps for a sex scene. Whoopee! The film's only blessing? It just may be bad enough to kill off the series.

Will come off as insipid, unfunny and too serious at times for its own good.

The kind of movie that produces a particular series of questions: How the heck did this get made? Who needed a tax shelter? Who had money to burn?

As directed by Daniel Petrie from the slightest excuse for a story by Stephen McPherson and Elizabeth Bradley, Cocoon: The Return amounts to little more than a desperate effort to fill a couple of hours of screen time, to which the commercially potent title can be affixed. [23 Nov 1988, p.C1]

Life Itself is an emotional mugging, not a movie.

This limp, lifeless, one-joke action comedy sequel, directed by David Kerr, comes 15 years after the 2003 "Johnny English," and manages to overstay its welcome, even at a scant 88 minutes, mostly because writer William Davies didn't bother to write anything other than "Johnny English is bad at spying."

Alan Johnson`s direction is so limply amateurish that the entire project quickly descends to the level of a cheesy backlot production. The action lurches along without the slightest regard for logic or pacing, and there are Dominick`s commercials with more sophisticated characterization.

Crummy video-store flick. [28 Dec 1990, p.S2]

It sets a tone, all right. A lot of gamers (sorry, "filmgoers") may well enjoy writer-director Michael Davis' ultraviolent lark. It's not meant to be taken seriously. But films like this are worth taking seriously because they're genuinely cruddy and hollow and, yes, vile.

This movie is crushingly ordinary in every way, which with Rand I wouldn't have thought possible.

Bewilderingly bad.

All the principals in this cinematic mess have had moments of glory on stage and screen, and one can only hope they got paid well for participating in this comedic embarrassment.

From my vantage point, it doesn't include a single laugh.

"We had fun, didn't we?" asks Prince at the end, just before he goes to heaven. It's nice that somebody did. [04 Jul 1986, p.3C]

An almost mystifyingly bad movie.

Unlike Richard Pryor, whose rough language adds an important rhythmic punctuation to his monologues, Murphy uses vulgarity to shock and divide his audience.

What's remarkable is how absolutely every character in the film is a movie cliche.

There's always room for debate, but John Schlesinger's The Believers could be the dullest movie ever made about child sacrifice. [10 Jun 1987, p.4C]

The kind of fascinatingly bad film only a really gifted and fearless moviemaker could make: a 92-minute long raggedy-raunchy vision of sex, transit and alienation in which Gallo focuses on himself so obsessively, it's as if he'd become his own stalker.

A limp retelling of the werewolf legend that is about as frightening as a rubbery Richard Nixon mask.

It's the neediest movie of 2011, and one of the phoniest.

A weirdly out-of-scale movie that constantly juxtaposes the trivial and the cosmic, less to comic effect than to a mounting sense of muddle and uncertainty.

Newbie director Richards shoots all the women like slabs of meat, and his self-seriousness throughout London--some of it tries to be funny, a lot of it is funny by accident--borders on the delusional.

Al Pacino has become a self-involved film star, and he`s one of the stars I hate.