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Honkytonk Man is Clint Eastwood's long, long ramble through the American Southwest in search of period, in search of character, in search of self-control. As a director, at least, he never finds the latter -- among the many things wrong with his latest film is that he apparently could not bring himself to slice away any of the flab. [22 Dec 1982, p.D18]

How to quadruple your fun: stay home. [17 July 1996, p.2D]

Berliner deserves something better, as do all the actors -- even Moore, who's starting to look very interesting and European.

Lands with a thud right from its painfully unfunny prologue and maintains its plodding, exasperating course straight through to its car-chase-and-shootout finale.

The more Shrink tries to get you invested in the emotional turmoil of its characters, the more you want to reach into the screen and shake them and tell them to get over themselves.

After a while, hearing Martin say ''Zee area eez zecure!'' doesn't cut it any longer, and that's pretty much all The Pink Panther has to offer.

Footloose is for an audience that wants something easy to think about, a conflict in which the two sides are easy to distinguish and an "enemy" who is easy to look down upon. It's for the folks who like to skip dinner and go right to the cream- filled finale, and though not quite evil, it's as silly as can be. [1 Mar 1984, p.D12]

Deadly dull.

On Deadly Ground has all the thrills and suspense of a rerun of Barney and Friends. [22 Feb 1994, p.D5]

Sound and image are consistently bad, and Piranha II is the first film in my experience to give screen credit (in opening and closing titles) to a man in charge of "special effects and prosthetics." It can't be an easy way to make a living.

For a B-movie, Split Second contains a surprising amount of talk -- dull talk. The film could use more action sequences; even those it does have are badly handled and unexciting. [7 May 1992, p.F8]

Too small to be a spectacle, too humorless to take seriously and too stupid to pass muster at a middle school writing workshop.

But if My Date With Drew is what passes for filmmaking these days, the movie industry is in more trouble than we thought.

Few expected Basic Instinct 2 to be very good, but no one expected it to be this boring.

Part II is even dumber than Meatballs, which was plenty dumb enough. [01 Aug 1984, p.C4]

A failure on every conceivable level -- from its trite, pedestrian dialogue to its static, torturous pacing.

The Last Song, yet another maudlin remake of a Nicholas Sparks bestseller.

Ferrara displays a surprising lack of imagination throughout, sticking to the original film's predictable Who'll be next? progression. [21 Feb 1994, p.C6]

Operative marketing concept: There are thousands, not just one, born every minute. [5 Aug 1986, p.B5]

An unsatisfying, overly restrained bore, capped off by an ending so strange and inconclusive, it feels like something you'd find on the ''deleted scenes'' portion of a DVD.

Dismal.

So thunderously unfunny...There is no reason for an 82-minute movie to feel so very, very long.

It's all as foolish as can be, and tedious in the bargain. The Clan of the Cave Bear acts as a parody of the earlier, more accomplished Quest for Fire, but since even that film was funny despite itself, this is not much of an accomplishment. On the evidence, it is hard to tell which way Hannah, who was Ron Howard's mermaid in Splash, is traveling on the old evolutionary ladder. [27 Man 1986, p.C6]

A horror/sci-fi/action mishmash that aims to be the kind of brainless timekiller once used to round out the bottom of a double bill at the drive-in.

You'd be hard pressed to find a more routine, more shamelessly by-the- numbers flick than this one. Predictability? In the case of Nowhere to Run, everything feels recycled -- even the title. [21 Jan 1993, p.F5]

It is surprisingly dull...Sheen and Sweeney appear dazed, or merely bored, throughout, as if they had ODd on the film's determined sleekness. The director, Peter Werner, is best known for his work on installments of Moonlighting. Alas, his TV roots are showing, and No Man's Land seems like nothing so much as a "special, two-hour episode" from the little screen. [29 Oct 1987, p.7]

It's not every movie that makes you wish Vin Diesel would run in and start blowing up stuff.

Freejack is among the most incoherent sci-fi action films we've seen in a while, despite the credentials of producer- screenwriter Ronald Shusett, who brought us Total Recall and Alien. [24 Jan 1992, p.G5]

Wilson's plot compulsively leaps from paper-thin to near-incoherent.

Despite some clever stunts and Varney's energetic persona-recycling, Ernest Goes to Camp, which was directed by the same man who makes the Ernest commercials, requires heroic patience for those much over 12. [25 May 1987, p.C8]

It's supposed to be funny, and first-time writer-director Tom Ropelewski wastes no time in making this known, by banging the audience over the head with gags that range from brainless to crude. [16 Feb 1990, p.G5]

Now here's the reason America won't love Garfield: The Movie: Garfield's gone from the listless feline we all know and love to a fast-stepping, break-dancing cat about town. What's worse, the other characters are even farther from their roots.

Sophomoric.

A handsome, sincere, well-meaning bore.

The times have caught up with Almodóvar, who is now 63: He thinks he’s still pushing the envelope, but he comes off as old-fashioned and outdated.

Road is about as much fun as a flat tire. [10 Apr 1987, p.D5]

If you're going to be offensive, by all means be offensive. Be tasteless! Be "There's Something About Mary." But at least stick to your guns, and don't wuss out when it counts.

To be fair, it must be acknowledged that there is a spectacular decapitation in the film's very first scene, and a couple of head-bashings later on, and these are enough to jolt one awake. But most of the film is so flatfooted that one longs for the batterings of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre or at least the campy excesses of Fright Night. [14 Oct 1985, p.C6]

One of those blessedly rare films based on a self-help book, is remarkable in one sense: It prevents "The Lake House" and its magical mailbox from being the most ridiculous concept on screen this summer.

Limps along, spinning not a silken web but an extremely derivative, tattered one not likely to snare anybody's interest.

Bulletproof is a lobotomized rehash of Midnight Run. [11 Sept 1996, p.4D]

Lee remains a superb entertainer -- like Oliver Stone, he's incapable of ever being boring -- but in She Hate Me, he comes dangerously close to seeming trivial, a crank-for-crank's-sake.

Formidably stupid.

That's My Boy more than lives up to its R-rating - including one gross-out gag repulsive enough to make you put down your popcorn.

Hard Target is pretty much a bust from every conceivable aspect, except the visual -- it looks terrific, and one sequence, a shoot-out on the streets of New Orleans between Van Damme and a progressively larger number of bad guys, comes close to capturing the trademark frenzied, exhilarating feel of Woo's previous work. [20 Aug 1993, p.5]

If only someone had recognized the inherent vileness of the premise, we might not have been subjected to this hideous Rumor at all.

The cleverness begins and ends at the basic fact that it is being done. Really, it would be much more fun just to rent one of the originals.

Terrifyingly dull movie.

It's a dreadful bore. [23 July 1993, p.G5]

Once the premise has been established, the film goes absolutely nowhere.

Lester's film is so clearly about getting even rather than about troubled youth or any other societal problem that it seems, like Death Wish II and a hundred others, a waste of that energy. [16 Nov 1982, p.B4]

So I Married an Axe Murderer is a clumsy mishmash of Saturday Night Live sketches and a rambling comic-thriller plot that wastes the promise of twisted laughs presented by its '50s B-movie title. [30 July 1993, p.G7]

Only the quips aren't funny. Not much about the script is amusing at all. Worse, the director, Herbert Ross, who once had a reputation for grace, has been growing clumsier for years and now seems to have lost his timing. [14 Sept 1993, p.E6]

The trouble starts with the script, and it doesn't end there.

Hershey isn't bad in the role of the victim; she looks durable and acts like a survivor. And Furie does throw in a couple of nifty scares between the rapes, which are gratuitous and disturbing. The rest of the film is by-the-numbers B-movie thriller. [09 Feb 1983, p.D6]

This noisy, formulaic film turns out to be immediately forgettable, except for the parts that are so ridiculous they leave you shaking your head in wonder hours later.

The best thing you can say about Just a Kiss is that it isn't every romantic comedy that throws in suicide, bondage and a plane crash in between all the bed hopping.

An homage to the original so shabbily made and so witless that we can only hope it disappears into history -- and fast. [06 Apr 1984, p.D1]

Mr. Jones is an even bigger disappointment when you consider it's directed by Mike Figgis (Internal Affairs, Liebestraum), who has shown talent for off-kilter thrillers. Saddled with a routine and unimaginative script here, he indulges in well-worn cliches, including setting his big scene between Gere and Olin against a thunderstorm (which inadvertently drowns out part of Olin's dialogue). [9 Oct 1993, p.G4]

A confused mess of music video montages drowns out the rest of the action, depicting the foursome in a variety of sexy romps that clash with the plot.

Enormous in its scope and colossal in its stupidity.

Even a supporting turn by Vincent Cassell as Otto Gross, a fellow psychiatrist, cocaine addict and unapologetic adulterer, fails to enliven the movie: A Dangerous Method makes even a cokehead hedonist boring.

The Rookie groans loudly and often under the load of its cliches. [07 Dec 1990, p.G11]

The plot, a series of missed connections, grows boring. The action scenes have no oomph. And the actors are lost. As the disheveled Dan, Cusack is charming, but he can't make this tired tourist tale go. And he can't fall down a mountain as well as Kathleen Turner. [19 May 1987, p.D5]

The tone is all over the place, which makes the movie difficult to take neither seriously nor as popcorn fluff.

Could there be a more inappropriate time to release a cheesy horror movie about evildoing in Louisiana.

Momoa, a familiar face from "Game of Thrones" to "Baywatch," has the muscles but not the imposing persona and barbaric presence that Conan requires.

The setting is no longer a summer camp, but a woodsy "confinement center" for the young and deranged; it's the kind of place in which, when a slow-witted inmate begins to taunt the guy chopping wood, one is impelled, with justification, to cover one's eyes. [3 Apr 1985, p.D7]

The worst thing about Encino Man is that it lacks the blockhead convictions of its predecessors, movies that at least hewed to the (il)logic of their heroes' know-nothingness -- reveled in that condition, in fact. In Encino Man, Link winds up teaching everyone Valuable Life Lessons, which has the unsettling effect of making the movie seem even dumber than it is. If such a thing is possible. Dude. [23 May 1992, p.E4]

Anyone who wants to enjoy himself at a good movie about a high school geek who undergoes a transformation should go see "'Spider-Man" again instead.

Where "Seven" seemed to radiate diabolical evil, Saw just radiates idiocy.

Another joyless, brain-numbing adventure through lackluster Indiana Jones territory.

Road House makes Cocktail look like a documentary. [19 May 1989, p.6]

This movie hypocritically entertains viewers by appealing to the same sadistic qualities it professes to condemn. There is real suffering going on in Latin America -- and this movie has nothing to do with it. [24 Sep 1984, p.C1]

May be among the most excruciating mainstream movies to spew forth from Hollywood in years.

An annoying, tedious little film.

Paced at the speed at which Arctic ice melts, The Dust Factory is a sluggish, heavy-handed fable overloaded with talk of paradise and the man in the moon.

The visuals are really the only compelling reason to see Appleseed.

Christina Ricci is the best thing about this otherwise misguided, retro remake of the 1965 movie that starred Hayley Mills. [09 Aug 1997, p.2G]

In its early moments, the movie evokes everything from "The Social Network" to "Casino." By the end, the film has become as exciting as a game of Old Maid. R-rated thrillers are hardly ever this dull and listless, but this movie manages to eradicate all of Timberlake’s charisma and makes you flash back to Affleck’s "Paycheck"/"Gigli" era. How does this even happen?

An object lesson in wasting a talented comedian. The film is so far off base that Candy winds up an action hero, and his co- star, Eugene Levy (who was even weaselier on SCTV) gets the girl. [15 Aug 1986, p.D2]

Emits a fishy odor, like a recruitment film for an obscure cult you'd rather stay away from.

Everything about this excruciatingly dull, talky film screams made-for-network-TV: The I'm-only-here-for-a-paycheck performances by famous actors; the Crate and Barrel catalog mise-en-scene; the syrupy, heartwarming score that lays the pathos on so thickly you gag on it.

Sarandon blends into the background, having practically nothing to do except stand around and wring her hands as the two men in her life battle it out in a passive-aggressive war. It's enough to make her want to run off with Thelma.

Two energetic and wonderfully physical comedians, each among the best of his generation. But in their movie, The Toy, they do not amount to much. Pryor seems unhappy about some of his lines and situations, and well he might. It's hard to know just what Gleason thinks, as he is able to deliver even atrocious dialogue with a misanthropic zest that is always appealing, but he has a right to be embarrassed, too. [20 Dec 1982, p.B7]

Embarrassingly shoddy film.

If you really love "Bull Durham," don't go near Play It to the Bone. It will break your heart.

The dumbest, most risible retelling ever made of the exploits of legendary bank robber Jesse James.

Gas -- the hot air variety -- is exactly what Driven is made of.

The movie is less painful than having your kidneys removed, but Turistas doesn't offer a trip entertaining enough to take.

As human Kewpie dolls, the Olsens' basic function is to try on as many new outfits as humanly possible within the span of 86 minutes (guaranteed to be the longest 86 minutes, New York or otherwise, you've ever spent in the dark).

Hellbound is long overdue at the video morgue. [23 Dec 1988, p.C5]

This utter waste of time has next-to-nothing to do with the infinitely wittier golden-age National Lampoon movies.

I'm not big on getting lectures from produce, and the Jonah story is not exactly fresh from the crisper, but Jonah is engaging enough for parents looking to introduce their kids to the veggiest story ever told.

The scattershot nature of the script, which feels as if it had been made up on the spot, leaves the actors looking like they're enjoying some private joke not shared with the audience. Self-indulgent does not even begin to describe it.

A curiously inert and talky action picture about good-looking mutants on the run from bad (but equally good-looking) ones, Push wastes a decent idea and stylish direction on a script that's much more Ingmar Bergman than Stan Lee.

It's just as boring and dumb as it sounds. This is the kind of movie that uses a shot of a bare butt as a punch line, and thinks having Encino Man's Brendan Fraser do a walk-on re- enaction of that movie's frog-eating scene is a clever cameo. As if. And Shore needs to freshen up his act: You can only act like a buffoon for so long before people start thinking of you as one. Remember Andrew Dice Clay? [2 July 1993, p.G5]