Tasteless but sporadically uproarious black comedy.

Repackage clichés and stereotypes with attractive young performers in a simple-minded script that panders to the teen audience.

For a noir, the film is way too talky and convoluted, yet for a physics lesson, it's trash.

When the legend of Elvis is reimagined as a mushy Christian heartwarmer in The Identical, it’s as if “Boogie Nights” is playing in the background while we hear about the life story of Edna, Dirk Diggler’s nice librarian cousin from Idaho.

Unoriginal but effective raunchy drag comedy.

James Franco, all is forgiven. His woebegotten “Oz: The Great and Powerful’’ is practically a masterpiece compared to this eyeball-gougingly ugly, charm-free animated musical sequel.

Consistently stale but not altogether unpleasant.

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.

Not as vile as "Sleepover," nor as tangy as "Mean Girls."

De Niro mostly looks miserable and very tired (a document glimpsed on-screen hilariously claims his character was born in 1970) and prattles on endlessly about forgetting the past.

Even by the extremely low standards of the genre, When in Rome gets failing marks for chemistry, credibility and even coherence.

Basically Jaws, but, you know, on land. With a bear. [29 Jun 2014, p.20]

A rote exercise in both animation and storytelling.

Stinks even by the standards of late summer movie garbage.

Dumb and unwatchable.

For a movie that so strenuously rips off “Ghostbusters” and “Men in Black,” R.I.P.D. manages to come up with fresh new ways of being absolutely terrible.

An Iranian comedian named Omad Djalili plays Picasso, that sexually combustible Spanish bull, with all the earth-shaking allure of, say, Andy Richter.

All hopes for suspense and plot twists are snuffed out about as quickly as the film's black characters.

There's a hint of nostalgia toward the end, with Jason encountering two nubile female campers in a virtual reality Camp Crystal Lake -- but it merely serves as a reminder that the franchise should have quit while it was ahead.

Hollywood movies are rarely as contemptuous of the audience as Dragonfly, with its half-witted, treacly New Age sappiness and its mechanical borrowings from other, better supernatural thrillers.

"I am surrounded by oceans of boredom," the campy Abraham complains at one point. It's a sentiment audiences are bound to share.

The noise level reminds me of Canal Street in Chinatown on a Sunday afternoon.

There’s a secret at play in After, which director Pieter Gaspersz communicates via many side-long glances. I won’t give it away, but it’s a fairly far-fetched twist that feels out of place in this realism-based drama.

Good grindhouse fun until a last act that's like a meeting of a psychoanalysts' convention.

The often difficult-to-follow plot is sort of "Traffic" for nitwits.

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.

A jaw-droppingly terrible animated musical that mismatches George Lucas’ inane story about a pair of fairy princesses to an oddball selection of the “Star Wars’’ creator’s favorite pop tunes.

Actual abduction may be preferable to the movie of the same name, but only if your kidnappers don't torture you by forcing you to watch it.

Director Mark L. Mann seems to be searching for the meaning in aimlessness, and in lowered expectations. But too often the narrative left me feeling the titular “um.”

One of those "Lifetime"-esque horror stories of evil husbands in the suburbs.

Vanity productions don't come much worse than One Third, an amateurish, dialogue-free curiosity courtesy of Yongman Kim, the founder of the Greenwich Village institution Kim's Video.

Director Annette Haywood-Carter films the proceedings with a sepia-tinged prettiness, but this is a Southern “Downton Abbey,” minus the loopy plot turns and wisecracks that make that series so addictive.

Like the lobby of a Donald Trump building, it looks ever so expensive and amazingly cheap at the same time.

Ultra-glossy weepie turns out to be something of a guilty pleasure.

Some handsome location shooting in New Orleans doesn’t make up for the Oscar winners’ relentless hamming and a plot that twists way beyond credibility.

Family Tree, which seems to have been written using indie-film Mad Libs, devolves into way too many quirky subplots.

With an emotional depth roughly equivalent to that of his lacrosse stick...

Uneven but occasionally hilarious teen comedy.

Syd is a jerk whose anger does not make him interesting. The only reason to keep watching is because you hope someone will drop a piano on his head.

Good-natured but mostly unfunny.

Director Andy Fickman (“Paul Blart: Mall Cop 2”) favors poop jokes and the cringe-humor of watching little kids court danger with a nail gun, kerosene, an ax and sometimes literally fire.

If 65 million years of evolution have been building up to this movie, then Darwin was wrong. But there's no intelligent design here either.

Bereft of inspiration, the agonizingly witless screenplay - blamed by the credits on George Gallo - resorts to pathetic cheap jokes about flatulence and impotence, lame slapstick and that juvenile gag about the horror of two men waking up naked in the same bed.

Occasionally amusing, extremely gross, but mostly tedious.

This film is headed quickly for DVD. In the video store, though, it isn't funny enough to be shelved in the comedy section nor dirty enough to be filed with the smut. It might be useful in propping up a wobbly chair, though.

Brain-dead film.

Cisneros is an appealing actor, but he and Falling Awake get buried under a welter of clichés.

Burzynski is dull, dull, dull, even for an infomercial.

The dialogue is banal and the acting, especially Wortham's, is unconvincing. Even the sex and nudity, of which there is a lot, grows tiresome after a while.

I’d rather wake up next to a severed horse head than ever watch Gotti again.

Should you get Carter? Sure - but make it the Michael Caine classic Warner Bros. is releasing on video next week.

Sporadically funny, dumbed-down version.

Exceedingly lame.

Just Before I Go is a “Garden State” retread in which filthy jokes gradually cede ground to sentimental slush.

Plays like an unintentional mashup of “Being There” and “Elf.”

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]

Captivity is torture porn without the sex. Cuthbert squirms, screams, weeps and pleads for her life with great conviction. Slick, sick sleaze.

It's all so insincere, you can almost imagine the filmmakers rubbing their hands together at the prospect of ripping off the public.

With so many worthy movies being made in Europe, it's a crime that something as mediocre as Erotic Tales gets a release here.

The Return is about bullets, bombs and boobs - the biggest boob being Van Damme, natch, but there are also mammaries aplenty.

A relentlessly dull film that's shot on eyeball-gougingly ugly digital video.

A 2010 movie that could have been made in 1940.

Do your kids a favor - and take them to see something more worthwhile than the relentlessly vulgar and stupid See Spot Run.

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.

That this exercise in vulgarity was made at all is shameful. Dark Crimes is punishing to watch.

Stay Alive is D.O.A, a notion of an outline of a rough draft of a killer video-game flick.

Boasts special effects that are really spectacular - too bad it lacks flesh-and-blood characters.

There's no excuse for a thriller as lame, leaden and unthrilling as Godsend, which manages to take a potentially interesting subject - human cloning - and use it to put audiences to sleep.

The Love Guru is even funnier than "Wayne's World" or "Austin Powers." Not.

You wouldn't call The Boondock Saints II: All Saints Day a taut thriller. More like a fleshy, messy, jangled frenzy of shootouts and much discussion about the mechanics of romantic entanglements that bloom between prison inmates.

It really couldn't have been easy for Jason Lee ("Almost Famous") to keep a straight face while saying, "I'm not in this for the money.''

A wink of self-awareness might have made this a guilty pleasure; instead it's a howler along the lines of this fall's "Law Abiding Citizen."

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."

Excruciatingly unfunny.

Strings together 60 amateurish short films to tell us drugs are cool, man.

A vile and laughless follow-up to Schneider's 1999 hit.

The Will Smith weepie Collateral Beauty couldn’t be more calculated and manipulative if it slapped you on the back, shoved a giant lollipop into your mouth and immediately tried to sell you a time share in Tampa.

Music is totally unwatchable.

To describe Love, Honor and Obey as a cross between "Duets" and "Snatch" doesn't begin to suggest how desperately unfunny this musical gangster comedy is.

This adaptation is so sloggy it feels like wading through thigh-deep snowfall, stained scarlet from all the gratuitous gore.

A tediously self-absorbed variation on "The Big Chill" and "The Return of the Secaucus 7."

It's pretty sad if you're a comic and Al Pacino is the funniest thing in your movie.

A schmaltzy, smutty and mean-spirited quasi-satire.

Not especially scary or funny, this lame comedy-thriller wastes a decent cast in a plodding tale.

Has its moments of interest, including two excruciating vocals by Arquette and Caan -- and a George Clinton score that contains a theme eerily similar to that of "American Beauty."

Pierre is at best competent as the star, director and writer of this good-natured compendium of ghetto movie clichés, which doesn't have an awful lot to offer in the way of laughs, pacing or originality.

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.

The cheesy techno-thriller The Outsider is a blaring B-movie that doesn’t have much going for it, but it does have an engaging action hero in its leading man, a snarling Cockney badass named Craig Fairbrass.

A vague, syrupy soundtrack plays across scenes both current and past, making the whole thing feel like a bad soap opera.

A good cast equipped with cute names is forced to muddle through terminal whimsy in this less-than-magical adaptation of Aimee Bender's adult fairy tale, sluggishly directed by Marilyn Agrelo, who more successfully helmed the delightful documentary "Mad Hot Ballroom."

Desperately unfunny and unexciting.

Sickeningly violent and inane movie.

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

Rarely does a movie go so thoroughly wrong in so many ways.

Darkness Falls was formerly known as "Tooth Fairy," but could just as well have been titled "Dumb Then Dumber" for the way its plot makes decreasing sense even by the low standards of B horror flicks.

Someday, when gay Americans enjoy full equality, we can all hope their sexuality will finally stop being used as fodder for dopey, hopelessly contrived dramas like I Do.

Imagine “The Graduate” as rewritten by a golden retriever, and you’ll have some inkling of the intelligence level in the rom-com All Relative.

The animated, Hanukkah-themed musical is, in fact, 75 minutes worth of belching, barfing and poo-jokes braided into a Grinch-meets-Scrooge-meets-"It's a Wonderful Life" storyline that's as stale as last year's potato latkes.