Sluggish, uninspired drama.

They pull it off, but even if you believe in Santa, you'll never believe that this is any sort of holiday classic.

Slow-witted, clumsy and almost pathologically reliant on crude name-calling for laughs - Horrible Bosses represents the lowest end of the comedy spectrum.

An exploitation film if ever one was made. [15 Feb 1985, p.D10]

More toy commercial than movie.

Deadly dull and as wooden as a hitching post, Quigley is set in the Australian outback where the mercury often tops 100 degrees, but there's no heat in this movie, no spark of ingenuity or life. [20 Oct 1990, p.E4]

There's only one excuse for the sentimental and ham-handed I Am Sam, and it's not to tout the rights of the mentally disabled.

Two predictable disappointments here (among many): As usual, these high school kids appear in fact to be played by folks who have left college well behind them; and, sadder, Just One of the Guys was directed by a woman -- women filmmakers being a worthy cause under almost any circumstances -- yet betrays no higher consciousness regarding kids and sex roles than Porky's 3. [30 Apr 1985, p.B3]

It never comes close to touching the audience's heart.

An overly convoluted, tiresome mystery that exists primarily to antagonize the audience, Basic consists almost entirely of dense exposition, then concludes by laughing at anyone who tried to pay attention.

This shameless cheerleader of a documentary is the sort of propaganda you might expect in a Republican campaign ad or perhaps featured at a small theater located somewhere in Fantasyland.

A romantic comedy need not be original to work. It just needs, you know, romance. Something to swoon over. What Two Weeks Notice provides, however, is a lot more messy.

Unimaginative, exasperating film, hopefully but fruitlessly recycled after the success of 2002's ebullient Whale Rider.

The Warcraft hardcore can rejoice. Everyone else can move along. There’s not much to see here.

Singleton's sloppiest, laziest movie to date, springing to life in fits and starts, risibly mawkish and occasionally gripping, and often feeling like it was made up on the set.

Largely devoted to whatever laughs may be coaxed from the sound of a freshman belching and the sight of some mighty mature-looking coeds removing their blouses. There's some nose-picking, too, but not enough to save the picture. [20 July 1984, p.D6]

Unless you're a constipated horse or a lover of truly tasteless cinema, A Fine Mess is one you don't want to wander into. [8 Aug 1986, p.D15]

Even though Taking Lives is not very good, it does contain a) a cool car chase and b) a sex scene in which Jolie goes topless. For some, this will be enough entertainment.

An insufferably artsy, pretentious work, the sort of picture that gives art films a bad name.

A forced and wholly unnecessary sequel.

Death to Smoochy? Yes, please.

The ghastly first half of this romantic comedy -- is as close to unwatchable as any moment in "Bride Wars." The fact that it stars Renée Zellweger just makes it harder to bear.

McCarthy wanders around this movie like he's lost. You'll suffer the same fate in Kansas. [23 Sep 1988, p.E5]

The dancing, while reasonably entertaining, isn't anything you haven't seen before on MTV or BET, although the soundtrack might be a worthwhile investment for hip-hop fans.

There are frothy romantic comedies and then there is Jet Lag, a movie so thin it borders on nonexistence.

If the Giorgios were more interesting, perhaps Brooklyn Lobster would feel less sluggish. But as it is, the crustaceans' unhappy destinies are more compelling than the colorless lives of their captors.

You may not be able to keep your lunch down after viewing his film, but you'll at least be momentarily intrigued. [24 Sep 1987, p.C6]

The best story here is the one about how Stolen Summer made it to the screen; that's more compelling than anything that happens in Pete's world.

Alan Metter (Back to School) directed this wildly uneven trifle. Most of the jokes are tasteless or stupid. [08 Mar 1988, p.B5]

Chetwynd's design, to show the POW plight in terms as dreary as its reality, works against the movie at almost every point. [20 May 1987, p.D8]

No rose-colored memories can improve this tedious interpretation of the famous girl detective's adventures. Nancy Drew falls somewhere between "The Haunted Mansion" and the live-action "Scooby Doo" movies in terms of quality but is more irritating than either.

The arsenal is empty, and there’s nowhere for The Truth About Emanuel to go except — unfortunately — downhill.

There are more fight scenes in this movie than the first two installments, but the plot is silly and the come-from-behind climax isn't believable. The movie's only asset is Griffith's hammy performance. [30 June 1989, p.H12]

Sometimes I suspect there is secret high-stakes contest in Hollywood among filmmakers to try and come up with a movie without a single original idea. If so, Life As We Know It is a contender.

Feels static and constricted, its intensity dulled by overreliance on dialogue.

Flowers' ''style'' suffers from attention deficit disorder, leaving just enough vital information for you to follow the convoluted plot. But just when one story gets rolling, he's off and chasing another.

There is absolutely nothing in this prequel/remake that improves on the first film or negates it in any way. If you've never seen The Thing - and you really should - stick with the genuine 1982 article and skip this elaborate act of mimicry.

If you think putting grapes in your nostrils is hilarious, you'll like Good Burger. And if you think taking the grapes out and eating them is even funnier, prepare to fall in love. [25 July 1997, p.4G]

Art School Confidential, the first disappointment from director Terry Zwigoff, is all glum, dour cynicism.

There's plenty of action, but it's all the same.

With its unfathomably stupid plot, half-hearted laughs and slow-witted action, can only be considered a waste of time. Especially yours.

In Snow White and the Huntsman, this talented but woefully miscast actress (Stewart) is expected to rally an entire army of soldiers, even though she usually looks like she forgot the combination to her locker.

If "Casino Royale" and "The Bourne Ultimatum" represent the new breed of 21st century action, then Rush Hour 3 is Stone Age stuff. The movie aims for irreverent, but delivers irrelevant instead. Let's hope the Rush Hour series stalls here.

Instead of watching a professional actor pretending to be intellectually disabled, we're watching a jackass pretending to be a dimwit pretending to be intellectually disabled.

The movie is a clumsy and uninspired mess, which is not to say that it's not funny.

The unrelentingly dull Where the Money Is tests his (Newman's) legendary charisma in a way no actor could overcome.

Jason Statham gives the best performance. Dolph Lundgren gets the best character arc. Terry Crews gets the best gun. Jet Li gets the best kill (you'll know it when you see it).Arnold Schwarzenegger gets the best cameo. And Sylvester Stallone? He gets the blame.

The actors are their usual reliable selves; you can't really blame them for the unlikely mess Levity becomes.

A by-the-numbers sports drama with a death grip on clichés and acting every bit as flat as the mat, seems unlikely to draw much of a crowd.

For anyone who digs hardcore motorcycle racing, Supercross delivers enough engine-revving, dirt-spewing motorcross action to satisfy even the most intense adrenaline craving.

There's no real reason to see this movie. It's exhausting and pointless and not amusing enough to make up for its failings. You can do better. The filmmakers could have done better. Honestly, you're better off staying home and making hummus.

A fairly tedious, stupid picture.

Jurassic World gives you exactly what Howard’s character promises at the beginning — More! Bigger! Faster! — but you know there’s something deeply wrong with a film that expects you to shed tears over digitally created prehistoric creatures and rubber brontosaurus heads instead of rooting for, you know, people.

There's a startling moment 10 or 15 minutes into The Adjustment Bureau - the only time, really, when the film achieves any level of surprise. The dispiriting dullness of this dreary misfire hasn't had time to settle in and thicken: The movie hasn't yet revealed its utter and thorough ineptitude.

There are jokes in this story of a 7-year-old adoptee from Heck, but most of them are funny despite the clumsiness of their telling. The rest aren't funny at all. [1 Aug 1990, p.D7]

The film is cold, and despite the principals' considerable thrashings, utterly uninvolving. The overarching theme, gunplay notwithstanding, is tedium. [02 Jun 1989, p.5]

Exorcist III is as gory, convoluted -- and deafening -- as any Nightmare on Elm Street sequel. [21 Aug 1990, p.C4]

The best stuff in Jumper comes early, while the movie is still busy explaining its scenario. It's only when all the pieces are in place and the story actually kicks in that things start to fall apart, and quickly.

If the story were not already stupid and cynical, the casting would kill the film in any case. Garner is utterly lost as a top sergeant; he doesn't even swear well, and some of the movie's most uncomfortable moments are those in which he tries. [16 Mar 1984, p.D10]

Laughs are widely spaced, and hardly seem worth the trouble. [22 Apr 1985, p.D4]

You, too, will roll your eyes at the film's lazy script, which is littered with gags pilfered from earlier movies and cartoons. In one scene, a loose boulder goes crashing down on Spade and Farley's mountain retreat. Heck, even Wile E. Coyote knew better than to build his house on the side of a cliff. [5 Feb 1996, p.4C]

Incredibly inane and boring special effects fiasco. [15 June 1988, p.D7]

Astoundingly, considering the fall of this film series from low aim to no aim at all, the original cast remains aboard. [8 Apr 1987, p.D8]

Take away the art direction, and Johnny Mnemonic is nothing more than a clunky chase flick, done with little skill or subtlety. [27 May 1995, p.6G]

Most certainly a personal work -- so personal, in fact, that I can't imagine anyone but Coppola being able to sit through it.

In New Jack City, director Mario Van Peebles seems determined to show that he can make a movie as shallow and violent as any white Hollywood hack. No problem: He did it. [8 Mar 1991, p.G12]

Glitter, the kind of movie only 11-year-old girls who dot their i's with hearts would find bearable.

Shameless in its desperate grab at the heartstrings.

A soulless, witless, landfill contraption that Smith once would have mocked mercilessly.

Never achieves takeoff.

Men in Black 3 is so dull and empty, it's the first movie that has ever made me think "Thank God this is in 3D."

The things that stay with you are the dull, boilerplate love story, the laziest performance of Liam Neeson’s career as a murderous gunslinger and the distracting amount of makeup Seth MacFarlane sports in the film.

The unfortunate aspect of Class, which is glossier than Private Lessons and marginally more believable than My Tutor, is that its laughs are built around the suffering of a prime candidate for intensive therapy. Thus while the kids are watching one movie -- boy loses virginity, ya-hoo -- adults in the audience will be watching another -- wife and mother has an emotional breakdown at the hands, literally, of a 14-year-old. The latter, of course, is not funny. [25 July 1983, p.C6]

A measure of redemption is offered in an opening montage and in the climactic bike-race sequence; in each, the stunts of the stand-ins are breathtaking. In all other respects Rad, which was directed by Hal Needham (a former stunt man who "directed" the Smokey and the Bandit series) is crudely made, the visual equivalent of a 10-speed with training wheels. [2 Apr 1986, p.D6]

Even the most forgiving moviegoer will recognize this movie as the blatant cash-grab that it is.

Shyamalan takes the beloved Nickelodeon anime series -- the full title was Avatar: The Last Airbender -- and turns it into 103 minutes of overproduced, stilted nonsense.

Fantastic Four is so bereft of all the things we expect from a superhero movie — humor, excitement, adventure, awe — that it plays like a drawn-out pilot episode for an upcoming TV series no one would ever watch again.

We're told that what matters about art is not the image but the emotion it provokes. Well, Godard's King Lear definitely provokes an undeniable reaction: the splitting headache. [17 Jun 1988, p.C5]

There's something innately distasteful about The Crush. Here's a movie that casts a hopelessly lovestruck -- and mentally disturbed -- teenager as a villain. The camera ogles Silverstone's body every chance it gets, then invites you to hiss at her as she goes about her evil deeds. What's more, the movie -- which is nothing more than the latest take on the increasingly routine female-from-hell genre -- takes itself very seriously, giving the proceedings a realism that only serves to heighten the unsavoriness of the thing. [8 Apr 1993, p.F3]

The movie, however, is the sort of picture in which people run around doing everything except the most logical thing to do, because that’s the only way to keep the nonsensical plot spinning.

Before it's done, Hello Mary Lou has touched most of the bases, flirting with taboos (incest, locker-room lesbianism, fingernails on the blackboard) and purloining effects from the Nightmare on Elm Street series. It's a badly made film, as awkward as can be, and long stretches of it make no sense whatsoever. Nor does it manage, as the better slasher films do, to re-create a high-school milieu of even passing authenticity. [21 Oct 1987, p.D5]

Jack and Jill contains long stretches of squirm-inducing tedium in which Sandler riffs and ad-libs far longer than he should.

Mazursky never makes the case for his hero's disaffection, and Cassavetes is not one of those screen presences for whom we are willing to fill in the blanks. [24 Sep 1982, p.D2]

If Annapolis is not the worst movie to date of this still-young year, it is certainly the most hackneyed, as well as the most depressing.

It's a cannibalization of "Sleeping With the Enemy," a not-so-good Julia Roberts film, with a ridiculous female-empowerment subtext and a relentlessly stupid script that goes nowhere you can't predict before the opening credits roll.

An invasion of the body snatchers is preferable to realizing that the true horror perpetrated here is not on the characters but on the audience.

Unfortunately, The Corsican Brothers isn't very funny. This does not exactly make us nostalgic for other, less purposeful C- and-C films, but it does serve as a sad reminder that their first, Up in Smoke, for all its excesses, was funnier than anything they have been able to manage since. [30 July 1984, p.C5]

Looks exquisite, but don't bother digging deeper.

Watching Wilson and Hudson toil thanklessly through this mess is more laborious than writing the Great American Novel. And a lot less lucrative.

At heart, it is a Saturday- morning cartoon; the film might in fact have looked better as an animated feature. [30 Jun 1982, p.C6]

For the most part Blame It on Rio is witless, predictable and bland, despite Donen's fascination with the topless-beach scene (his camera combs the shore for breasts with the unsubtle fervor of a pig rooting for truffles). [18 Feb 1984, p.D7]

With it's buxom, raven-haired star, Elvira, Mistress of the Dark skips a chance to spoof B-movies and instead shatters the all-time record for breast jokes in one movie. There's at least one every three minutes, and a tassel- twirling ending that stretches the limits of this PG-13 picture. But the real immorality here is that a quirky character -- yes, Elvira has her moments -- is played like an unfunny bimbo with one-liners that die quick deaths. [04 Oct 1988, p.C4]

Sitting through Little Fockers is a soul-sucking, dispiriting experience.

There isn’t a moment of spontaneous fun or humor in this long, turgid movie, the latest let-down for rabid DC Comics fans who’ve been waiting for someone to pick up the baton Christopher Nolan left behind and do this universe justice. With “Suicide Squad,” the long wait continues.

For a movie that's all about camouflage, this sketch comedy epilogue turns out to be its most creative disguise: a thin coating of humor slapped on an otherwise ponderous film.

Who writes this stuff, anyway? Does this not sound like utter gibberish? Surely, this film did not actually get made, did it? Yes, it did. I have seen it. But you, oh, fortunate one, don't have to. Consider yourself lucky.

Return to the Blue Lagoon? Why, exactly, would anyone want to? [05 Aug 1991, p.C3]

Every summer movie season usually has at least one spectacular, disastrous flame-out, and although the dog days of August still loom, I doubt there will come a big-budget blockbuster worse than Cowboys and Aliens.