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

Superman IV is a pathetic appendage to the series, a dull, shoddy film that makes the minimal 1950s TV series seem rife with production values by comparison. [27 July 1987, p.10C]

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

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.

A big, empty picture full of star turns, artificial energy and jokes that don't quite work, even if stars Willis and Perry do their best to slam them across.

A fast, slick, outlandish fiasco that starts out well and then seems to drop right off a cliff.

A mess of a movie, a no chills nightmare about what happens to a group of rubes at a Carolina truck stop when the machines go nuts. [29 July 1986, p.3]

Another slapstick comedy from the folks who created Police Academy by ripping off the comedy style of Airplane. [22 Apr 1985, p.4C]

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]

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.

The first starring vehicle for shock comic Andrew Dice Clay, The Adventures of Ford Fairlane, turns out to be the kind of detective spoof worn out 30 years ago by Bob Hope and Jerry Lewis, though refitted with salty language, graphic violence and an attitude toward women that makes the Marquis de Sade look like Phil Donahue. [11 Jul 1990, p.18]

Bride Wars really does not capture the mood of the moment. It comes from a different time, a different planet.

It's not particularly funny or trenchant, and its portrayal of noxious high school cliques never amounts to more than was shown in "Heathers." [19 Feb 1999]

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.

It's tempting to call traveling on Juwanna Mann, except it never goes anywhere. This film fouls out.

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.

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.

Even for John Hughes, who writes movies in less time than most people write postcards, The Great Outdoors seems unusually slapdash.

About halfway through the violent, fantasy adventure Highlander, one character talks about how it was the custom during ancient times to throw babies into a pit of hungry dogs. Well, there were more than a few times during this hyperviolent film in which I felt as if I were a baby being thrown to a dog of a movie.

A typically weak sequel that has no legitimate artistic reason for being. [July 22, 1983]

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

Downright scary in some places, Godsend might be more potent if it wasn't watered down by religious trope predictability.

Selleck's persona can seem coherent and mildly pleasant in the airless, miniature world of series television, but when he walks into the larger, more physical world of movies he melts away. There's too great a disparity between his bulk and his whining delivery, and he carries himself awkwardly on screen, as if he knew he was taking up too much space. [3 Feb 1989, p.A]

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.

Just the same auld same auld.

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]

The polite word for all this is "repurposing," a euphemism for "hauling someone else's garbage."

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]

The director is first-timer Mike Bigelow. Nothing's paced or shaped for maximum payoff; the shooting and editing rhythms add only clutter and noise, and the slapstick is strictly of the skull-banging, ear-splitting variety.

Collateral Beauty is much more shallow nonsense than anything else.

A jumbled nonsensical mess.

It's not much to hijack. But playing a lovelorn version of himself, in love with Adam Sandler in a dress, a lisp and breasts, Al Pacino holds a gun to the head of the comedy Jack and Jill and says: I now pronounce you mine.

The results are boring boring.

Perfect late-summer drive-in fare.

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

A laughably bad, offensive movie with holes in its story that you could drive a truck though.

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.

A real stinker. It doesn't have the courage of its own bad taste, or that of its villain.

Spends its first three-quarters confronting us with one of the most dislikable characters in recent memory.

A lamebrained attempt at horror that is just a derivative pastiche of ideas lifted from other bad films.

Its humor stems precisely from our enjoying its lead character's rotten behavior.

What we get, while rarely boring, is a succession of senseless scenes bathed in formula-thriller blue light, full of blazing Uzis, exploding helicopters and sentimental male bonding.

Stewart's insistently ironic delivery of every line becomes an irritant in a movie that is already monstrously irritating.

It's true that there has been a shocking dearth of talking-horse pictures lately, but even so, Hot to Trot has few pleasures to offer.

We have to take the sexual tension on faith, as with everything in this formulaic glob of a script.

There are comedies that make you double over in laughter, and there are comedies that are eerily unfunny to the point where you start thinking about a class-action suit.

Father Figures is a movie, ostensibly. I'm pretty sure it is. Moving images were projected, along with recorded sound, which indicates it is a movie, but the effect was so listless, low-energy and profoundly unentertaining that I jotted down in my notes "what even IS this?" It would be more accurate to describe the experience as a nearly two-hour borderline hostage situation, with torture involving bad, offensive and unfunny "comedy."

It's probably best to leave talking animal stories in the care of comedic filmmakers.

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

The movie drags down everyone involved, regardless of their apparent talent.

One imagines that fans of Chase and Aykroyd will be mildly pleased with the results. As political humor, though, Spies is an uneasy blend of seriousness and farce--a picture whose antiwar theme seems designed to let its makers cash their paychecks and, at the same time, feel good about themselves. [06 Dec 1985, p.A]

A disgusting, artless shocker...A cruel film that offers teen-age girls in peril, as well as a gruesome beheading. Only for sickies. [11 July 1980, p.8]

There’s not a thrill to be found in this ostensible thriller, a rote kidnapping exercise taped together with digital blood spatter and an overly dramatic score, vaguely gesturing at global crises from five years ago.

This predictable, uninspired third installment to the endless saga won't win over non-believers.

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

I always enjoy Elizondo; he has a way of elevating some pretty lame banter, and thanks to New Year's Eve he has his way all over again.

Nothing in this movie is properly focused; everyone keeps talking about a character whom we never meet and does not matter; the tone keeps slipping around from indolent satire to thudding sincerity, and the Challenger shuttle disaster backdrop is queasy-making at best, offensive at worst.

Terrible but, in its squealing way, sporadically fun-terrible.

This sophomoric little gimmick picture -- although at times, serving as no more than a showcase for daredevil snowboarding -- provides enough powder power to keep the audience laughing, even over the rocky parts.

Phony, disingenuous family entertainment, suffocated by its green bean casserole approach to Middle America, spineless cardboard characters and paper-thin plot "twists."

Sluggish and preposterous, full of violence and cliches.

Seriously, the running time of Fantasy Island should be listed as “sometime tomorrow."

[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]

Aside from providing a lesson about movies with titles that provide their own bad review, Say It Isn't So gives low humor a bad name.

A possessed-car film that beat Christine by a few years but is a much inferior version. [02 Feb 1993, p.3C]

There's some solid talent here, but Gottlieb's overemphatic direction reduces them all to broad caricature--the kind of crazed mugging that isn't often seen outside the boundaries of Saturday morning kiddie shows. [13 Feb 1987, p.A]

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.

Haven't we seen the oh-my-gosh-my-spouse-is-secretly-an-assassin-but-you-know-a-nice-one routine once too often?

Schlock that could and should have been better.

Neither drama nor comedy, Summer Catch is a long, slow lob of a movie that never crosses the plate.

Life Itself is an emotional mugging, not a movie.

The most horrifying film of 2007, Bratz is based on the popular line of collagen-lipped, doe-eyed slut-ette dolls and their male companions, "the boys with a passion for fashion ... and the Bratz!" (In other words, they're bi-curious.)

A bloody mess...The effects are nothing you haven't seen before; the acting is so broad, it borders on the ridiculous; and the story, once intriguing, has become ludicrous. [11 March 1996, p.C3]

A mind-numbing, bloody, ridiculous experience.

Has to explain itself through so much of the film that there's just not much film left.

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]

As if by deliberate and vaguely sadistic design, Hoodwinked Too! Hood Vs. Evil leeches the fun clean out of the first "Hoodwinked" (2005).

This one's a certifiable soul-sucker, dining out on its characters' venalities while wagging a finger at the horror, the horror.

Even with a new leading man and a more family-friendly rating, some things never change: The Mask still stars Industrial Light & Magic.

The Last Airbender (they couldn't use the series' "Avatar" title because another film got there first, without all the bending) is more about marshaling extras and interpolating tons of computer-generated effects and keeping the factions straight. It's a tough sit.

For all its promise of lively trailer-park humor, Joe Dirt digs, then lies in its own grave, killed by blah characters, lame jokes and cliches you can see coming a mile away.

So derivative and crass that it's far more entertaining to try to think of the dozens of films it's ripping off than it is to take any of it at face value.

The coarse material, from a screenplay by Seth Winston and Michael J. Nathanson, is roughed up even more by Dragoti's abrasive exaggeration, both of performance (there's a terrifying sequence in which Hicks finally gets her long dreamed-of engagement ring and goes into a frenzy of triumph and delight) and of visual style (visits to the office of sinister shrink Wallace Shawn are filmed in weird expressionist off-angles). [14 Apr 1989, p.D]

The actors had little to work with in this passe social satire, but sharper performances might have saved Marci from total humorless ruin.

One of those frustrating movies that takes forever to get where it's going, and once arriving, the frustration is increased because one realizes how much better it should have been.

Worth your time and money? Fuhgeddaboutit.

A study in formula film making and a lousy movie. [03 Sep 1985, p.5C]

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?

Children's films can be thrilling affairs for parents and kids. Unfortunately, this film is not likely to thrill either group.