Arguably as effective as Ambien at inducing sleep, but possible side effects include uncontrollable laughter.

All the film provides is this bulletin: Lefties are angry about the things Lefties are angry about, chiefly corporate profits.

As always, Dracula sucks blood. But his latest movie simply sucks.

Their heads spun 360 degrees. They vomited up green sludge. They violently shouted curse words...No, not the demonically possessed girls in “The Exorcist: Believer” — the awful movie’s furious audience.

No phrase terrifies me more than “for the fans,” because in the movies that tends to mean “awful and incomprehensible.” And so it does for “Mortal Kombat II,” an onscreen bucket of slop that people will give a pass to because losers cheer whenever a character, such as they are, is impaled or sliced in half.

Watching the film, I did manage to retain my empathy for the narrator, though: I was as desperate as he was to escape the situation I was in.

Exceedingly lame.

I'm beginning to think writer Nicholas Sparks isn't one person at all, but a roomful of ladies doing Harlequin-romance Mad Libs. Occasionally they'll hit a winning combination, as in the Sparks novel "The Notebook." More often, you get eye-rollers like "The Lucky One."

This franchise really belongs in the rearview mirror.

The awkwardly titled Unfreedom clearly waves the flag for acceptance and nonviolence — but it would be more effective if it invested as much in some cinematic nuance.

The movie's prideful silliness makes it semi-watchable in the manner of Saturday afternoon cable flicks like "Delta Force."

So feeble it fails even as train-wreck exploitation. I’d be unkind, but not entirely inaccurate, to label Coppola’s sophomoric, er, sophomore effort as a director an offer you can refuse.

The finished product looks like it was thrown together during a lunch break -- by a drunk person. The level of ineptitude on display in this urban version of "Three Men and a Baby" is simply gobsmacking.

Presumably, Deville wants to show life returning to normal after WWII, but in the context of this inert movie, "normal" equals "tedious."

Here, Saget can't even find a consistent tone, varying between all-out slapstick and attempts at dark comedy. Then again, it's hard to milk yuks out of murder, prison rape, bestiality, incest, homelessness and guns in school. [13 Jun 1998, p.023]

The three friends do things that venture beyond entertainingly dumb and into exasperatingly unbelievable.

Sounds like a great idea for a gay porno, but the soapy Save Me actually takes itself seriously.

Splinterheads might suffice some late night on cable, but that's about it.

Shove people into categories, then into a film like Think Like a Man, and it's a recipe for tedium.

Occasionally there is a striking image or a moment of wounded sweetness, but mainly the film provides ample proof that it's possible to be bizarre and boring at the same time.

The tragedy of Hutchins’ death overshadows anything that’s good about the film, sadly including her own grand cinematography.

A shrill farce that strains credibility even by the standards of black comedy.

As far as I’m concerned, death couldn’t arrive quickly enough for these eight stereotypically self-absorbed Los Angelenos gathered for Sunday brunch at which the hosts (Blaise Miller, Erinn Hayes) plan to announce the demise of their marriage.

The latest catastrophe from the Weinstein Co.

While there are some scattered laughs, the flimsy and nonsensical script - combined with the sledgehammer direction by Brian Robbins, make the similarly themed "Big Momma's House" look like Noel Coward.

Unfortunately, Scorpion King has none of the qualities -- epic sweep, relative originality and heartfelt bloodthirstiness -- that made "Conan" so trashily entertaining.

Do not see this movie if you like children, dogs, hands or Hungarian folk music. The Prodigy, the latest in a long, increasingly lousy line of bloodthirsty kid movies, might spoil all of the above for you.

Overlong, blandly soporific.

An excellent case for euthanizing the entire talking-animals genre.

As much as we like Alec as an actor, it's hard to imagine that any amount of editing and reshooting under his supervision could salvage his complete ineptitude as a director.

The dreary, direct-to-video quality of the script, acting and cinematography in this latest entry seemed to inspire more yawns than screams, and not a few titters.

“Solo,” sadly, should be frozen forever in carbonite.

If boy bands weren't already passé, Harry and Max would finish the job.

The film plays like one long commercial. The music's cool, but you're better off buying the CD.

There's potential here, but the script is entirely too, shall we say, Hollywood. There's even a dog-poop joke.

Boring and desperately unfunny.

How cheap-looking is the modern-day romantic tragedy Private Romeo? Take a couple of friends to see it, and the amount you spend may exceed the amount the filmmakers did.

Psst! Wanna vicariously experience a consciousness-raising LSD trip and watch Sarah Michelle Gellar star in some explicit sex scenes?

I’ve read ingredients labels that were scarier than The Purge: Anarchy, a plodding horror flick that mistakenly thinks it has big ideas.

Remember when Robert De Niro was an interesting actor? These days his talent, like his character in The Family, is in the witness protection program, never to be seen again.

Yunus would seem to be a prime candidate for a movie about his work. Unfortunately, director Holly Mosher's by-the-numbers documentary Bonsai People isn't the answer.

For all its detailed worlds, like the Mushroom Kingdom and Jungle Kingdom, the Nintendo film is just another soulless ploy to sell us merchandise that doesn’t bother to disguise its creativity-starved greed. Mostly the movie comes off like a video game we’re unable to play.

The characters are too cliched to be funny, and Jensen's script can't stay focused long enough to make an impression. Where is Lars von Trier when we need him?

At the start of Insidious 2, a young woman opens her mouth to speak and someone else’s voice comes out of her. Demonic possession? Nope, just some inexplicable dubbing to kick off this clunker of a horror sequel.

Confessions of a Shopaholic -- a "Devil Wears Prada" for Chico's customers.

The packaging of “Barbie” is a lot more fun than the tedious toy inside the box.

Step Up 3D is strictly 1D. Tired choreography and moldy hip-hop gestures accompany insipid characters.

A lazy, noisy ADHD-addled collection of animated clichés guaranteed to give anyone older than 5 a headache, even if you don’t see it in optional 3-D.

Another ridiculous anti-American screed by the minimalist Danish director Lars von Trier, who has never set foot in this country.

Sucky vampire flick.

With so many worthwhile movies out there just waiting for a release, it's a shame that this tired drama is getting a run.

This time the execs are lobbying us, yet the public grows increasingly furious as our tax dollars fund corporate welfare, bailouts and dumb ideas like the $41,000 golf cart that is the Chevy Volt.

Coogan and Isla Fisher, as his friendly ex-wife, are well-cast, if too mean and fake. But their comic talents are wasted on Michael Winterbottom’s sorry attempt at a mockumentary. Actually, it’s a bit greedy.

Goes up for the dunk and misses the hoop, the backboard and the point. Instead, it manages to both strike out and get sacked. Whose idea was it to remake "Slap Shot" a la Jerry Lewis?

Actually, Bruce, what stinks is the script — which is woefully lacking the kind of one-liners and memorable bad guys that helped make working-class hero McClane so iconic he’s still around after 25 years. Even the action sequences are pretty much by the numbers this time.

Cutesy? My pain was acutesy as the entire plot yawned before me.

Produced with the best of intentions by a California church and directed without distinction by first-timer Brian Baugh, To Save a Life would be bland and boring even as a half-hour after-school special.

THE mesmerizingly awful The Kid & I is a historic first: a comedy about the making of a vanity production that is ITSELF a vanity production.

Nobody is good in this thing. You’d think it would be nostalgic to see Dern, Neill and Jeff Goldblum together again, but they all act like old fogies, and they’re written to sound like morons.

Quickly devolves into a nonprescription alternative to Ambien.

A mockumentary that veers unsteadily between satire and an infomercial for Dash's Roc-A-Fella records.

Avoiding the usual vein-popping diatribes, he comes across as learned, calm and folksy. But much of what Gore says in this slide show he gives to people whose minds are not yet fully formed (undergraduates, actors) is absurd, and his assertions often contradict each other.

Isn't really a movie: It's a grab bag of mobster clichés lifted without finesse from "A Bronx Tale," "GoodFellas" and at least a score of lesser Mafia flicks.

This crowd-funded — and overcrowded — collection of interwoven stories, directed by John Herzfeld, plays like an amateur-acting exercise in which each participant picks a name and a couple of defining props.

The lackadaisical pace of CD3 is a disappointing surprise.

Draggy and incoherent.

The film is lousy with cartoonishly off-putting characters.

It boggles the mind to think that Elite Squad won the top prize at the prestigious Berlin Film Festival in February.

No "Schindler's List," to put it mildly.

Pulse bears more than a slight resemblance to a 1994 American horror called "Ghost in the Machine." They didn't screen that stinker in advance for critics, either.

Sorry, but if your sensibility is pure trashy camp, don't expect anyone not to laugh when you try to be earnest.

Drifts awkwardly between popcorn entertainment and angsty mood piece.

A girl with relationship woes can hardly set foot in Europe these days without finding herself hip-deep in yummy food and tasty men. The latest iteration of the story is Letters to Juliet or, as I like to think of it, "Eat Pray Hurl."

The documentary's director, Arnon Goldfinger, may have had a chance of expanding on the limited audience for such a film if said clan, the Bursteins, exhibited either talent or likability.

If the movie were funny, the implicit sermonizing would be more tolerable, but apart from four or five good one-liners, The Next Best Thing is a thudding failure as a comedy.

Poor Keaton, a capable actor who was absent from the screen for several years, is hamstrung by the material even more than in last year's dismal "First Daughter."

The street action is a grabber, but the story itself isn't.

Fresh off of winning the Best Director Oscar for "Nomadland," Chloé Zhao has upchucked one of the MCU's worst movies in ages.

William H. Macy lends a little class as a snail, but Smith nails it in the closing-credit outtakes: "Don't expect Robin Williams-caliber work."

In the ’80s, I hated Ronald Reagan, Bob Dylan and the Smurfs. It’s comforting to know I got one thing right.

In the future, more and more filmmakers will do exactly what The Great New Wonderful has done: conceal their lack of ideas by bringing up 9/11.

You can see better stuff on TV any night of the week.

Yes, it’s gross, and no, it’s not remotely original.

Someone describes his writing as "snarky, bitter, witless." The last part pretty well sums up this movie.

The characters are tired stereotypes, the sentimentality nauseating and the situation comedy way below the standards of the very worst WB or UPN shows.

There's obviously some philosophical comment on the alienating effects of ho-hum toil buried somewhere in this weird mess, which features an irritating, theremin-heavy score. But can you be bothered stifling a yawn and searching for meaning? I would prefer not to.

Enough to give you brain strain -- and the pay-off is negligible.

Watching Wake is akin to listening to anonymous neighbors argue about matters you know nothing about -- nor care about. You only wish they'd shut up.

“Venom”? More like cyanide. The latest movie off the Marvel assembly line is a disaster on every level, from the hatchet-job writing to the horrid performances. Like so many recent superhero movies, Venom has put its focus on juvenile humor instead of heart or action.

The movie is as lumpy and misshapen as a giant booger.

A decent idea for an episode of "Everybody Loves Raymond," The Do-Deca-Pentathlon falls short as a movie.

A moribund attempt to exhume the Jack Ryan techno-thriller franchise with a severely miscast Ben Affleck, is truly the 20-megaton bomb among this summer's blockbusters.

Director Uwe Boll and the actors provide scant reason to care in this crude '70s throwback.

This fantasy flop is sunglasses-and-fake-mustache bad.

The joke is on arthouse audiences who show up for Funny Games, which is basically torture porn every bit as manipulative and reprehensible as "Hostel," even if it's tricked out with intellectual pretension.

An embarrassing misfire...feels like a long, slow TV pilot about L.A. twentysomethings, only it lacks the polish and wit of your average sitcom.

Gibson’s got another strong performance in him, I think, but this Christmas crapola sure ain’t it.

There's no limit to Coyote Ugly's crass shamelessness.