The superhero genre screams for a makeover, or at least a smart deconstruction, but Hancock isn't that movie. It just ups the foolishness ante.

That this relentless barrage of psychological and physical torture is extremely well made and powerfully performed--Watts hurls herself into her physically demanding role with heroic conviction--somehow makes it worse.

The folks who served up this formulaic swill seem to think comedy grants you a free pass from credibility. Our lonely hero's artificial Yuletide enthusiasm is more than odd: it's not recognizably human.

Sarah Thorp’s lazy script lurches from the lame to the ludicrous.

The creepy subtext of his (Sandler's) behavior is something this crude, mirthless comedy tries not to notice.

After the schadenfreudian thrill of watching beautiful people humiliate themselves wears off, it has the same annihilating effect on your will to live.

As adroit and charming as Witherspoon is--and she gives it her all--she cannot rise above the embarrassingly broad, witless material.

Irreversible takes an adolescent pride in its own ugliness. “I Stand Alone" told me something about the world; this one tells me more than I want to know about the calculating mind of its maker.

Flat, distressingly witless -- To put it bluntly -- the thrill is gone. Nobody did it better. But that was then.

It stinks. The movie is so inert -- and Madonna’s performance so starkly amateurish -- that it’s impossible to take it seriously as an allegory about class and gender.

Neil LaBute’s Possession is bad, but not spectacularly bad, which is disappointing.

You know a romantic comedy is in trouble when you root for the hero not to get the girl.

Cameron Diaz, Christina Applegate and Selma Blair are asked to humiliate themselves many times over in The Sweetest Thing, and they do it with such game good spirits that they ought to get the actor’s equivalent of a Purple Heart.

I staggered out of this shameless, interminable movie feeling as if I'd been force-fed a ton of mealy, artificially sweetened baby food.

Every role is miscast. Whose idea was it to have the boyishly British Bale play an illiterate Greek peasant, or the elegant Hurt a gruff-voiced country doctor? Cruz’s run of bad luck in American movies continues.

Nutty paranoid thriller.

A tired, confused romantic comedy/noir thriller with all the suspense of an infomercial. Buy the poster; skip the movie.

If you harbor any fond feelings for the original, stay far away from this mess.

If this is what Hollywood considers serious, important filmmaking, maybe the movie industry should stick to the low road.

What was a ragged but often hilarious charmer has been genetically altered into a deafening and desperate mutant.

A disappointingly slack, hackneyed comedy.

This is a farfetched premise, and the movie pays a price for it.

The dialogue is inane, the acting wooden, and Roger Christian's directing choices are a lesson in sci-fi film cliché.

Unfortunately, the strong ensemble cast is not able to hold together this often wayward and meandering story.

Hampered by a silly plot and flat script.

Final destination? Video store bins.

The combination of Shandling's button-down TV sensibility and Nichols's good taste produces a film whose tone is out of sync with the simple, ribald conceit and is only mildly amusing at best.

As dumb as the film is, the actors escape relatively unscathed.

Screenwriter Ropelewski piles one silly plot contrivance upon another, and the characters start behaving like nitwits.

The foreboding, dark camera-work is effective in setting the mood for this sinister, eye- popping, frequently ridiculous thriller.

Like people who compulsively giggle whenever they tell you bad news, the movie runs for cover in lame, comic shtick.

Hilariously incompetent.

A disaster: dull, predictable, at times cringe-worthy.

The flick's ultimate flaw? For a movie about space travel, it's an awfully uninspired trek.

A half-hearted comedy whose jokes are far from a knockout.

All shots and no scenes, which is nice for a picture book but deadly for drama.

Kids will be bored, the rest of us baffled.

A lumbering, self-important three-hour melodrama that defies credibility at every turn.

Everyone in the film is either annoying or unpleasant.

Rapidly veers towards tired 80's territory rather than offering anything new and fresh.

So bland and un-lived in you want to pour Tabasco all over the screen.

Save yourself from this mess.

About as bad as it gets?a thrill-less "Speed" wannabe.

Despite some funny lines and situations, this comedy falls short.

The crude humor in Drop Dead Gorgeous does not have a moral point to it. It's just crude.

A "croc" of nonsense.

Bad, but not criminally so.

Matthew Lillard of "Scream," flies like his nickname and tries to bring the film some comic relief not already provided by the stultifying stupidity of the script.

It's just a standard, mediocre horror flick that wants to be taken seriously. The creators missed the point entirely: even teenagers know that there's no audience for this type of film anymore.

Every once in a while a film comes along that's so inexplicably ghastly that there's just no point in making nice about it.

This echo of the WWII internment of Japanese-Americans is the only new gimmick in Edward Zwick's entry in the cliche- terrorist genre.

Everything in Rounders is right there on the surface. Watching it is about as exciting as playing poker with all the cards face up. [14 Sept 1998]

All the surprises strenuously cooked up by screenwriter Patrick Smith Kelly and director Andrew ("The Fugitive") Davis can't overcome the movie's inability to make us care about any of its paper-thin characters.

It's punishingly dull for fully half of its two hours and 45 minutes.

With the talent involved in Sphere -- director Barry Levinson, novelist Michael Crichton and actors Dustin Hoffman, Samuel L. Jackson and Sharon Stone--how could it fail? Somehow, it does.

If only the movie itself had so much spunk—Flubber bounces but it never flies.

The usually reliable director Michael Caton-Jones hasn't a clue how to freshen up such stale material.

An empty videogame of a movie about interplanetary pest control.

Screenwriter Akiva Goldsman has written quips, not characters and Joel Schumacher still seems miscast as a Bat-action director: he stages the mayhem confusingly and the comedy too broadly.

The film suffers dearly because of the two underwritten, emotionally unavailable characters at the film's center and when all is revealed at an amateur dance contest, the music — and the modicum of tension the movie has created — dies.

The special effects are definitely the best thing about this curiously bland disasterthon.

Howard Franklin's Larger Than Life is so bad that even the elephant seems embarrassed. [11 Nov 1996, p.78]

Rent the devastating "The Boys of St. Vincent" to see how slick and hollow Sleepers is, how little it reveals about the real nature and effect of child abuse. [28 October 1996, p. 74]

Director Joe Johnston ("Honey, I Shrunk the Kids") turns this fantasy into a mean-spirited exercise in terror.

What we want to know is why we should care about any of these stick figures. Eszterhas seems as bored with them as we are. He's just moving his dopey plot along, leaving Friedkin to fill in the gaps with car chases and irrelevant chinoiserie.

Once the film devolves into teary hospital scenes and courtroom shtik, you might pine for Thelma and Louise's daring road to oblivion. [20 Feb 1995, Pg.72]

An amiable comedy without a thought in its point head. [2 Aug 1993, p.55]

Trying for a tone somewhere between an art film, an absurdist comedy, a horror movie and an old Saturday-matinee serial, he's made a handsome, cripplingly self-conscious thriller that's devoid of any real thrills. [3 Feb. 1992, p.65]

Like Sherman McCoy, the hero of Tom Wolfe's "The Bonfire of the Vanities," Brian De Palma makes one fatal choice that leads to disaster. The disaster is the movie The Bonfire of the Vanities. The choice was De Palma's decision to film it as a cartoon -- a broad, black, wannabe savage comedy. Every unfortunate moment of this screechy, heavy-handed movie is a result of that basic misconception, compounded by the fact that the comedy is staged by a man who seems to have temporarily lost his sense of humor. [24 Dec 1990, p.63A]

The strenuously improbable finale in an indoor zoo -- incorporating every available lethal animal Hollywood could rent -- will have you on the edge of your seat . . . straining for the exit. Movies don't get much more impersonal than this. [28 May 1990, p.72]

Rourke, a good actor, is reduced to doing his whispering-wacko shtik. Supermodel Otis has a marvelous face and can smile and breathe heavily at the same time. Only Jacqueline Bisset gives a real performance, as Claudia, a fiscal whiz who gets her real kicks not form the carnal but the commercial. [7 May 1990]

Inflated to more than two hours, spiced up with lyrical pseudeo-erotic sex scenes, Scott's Revenge is long on candlelight and billowing white curtains and short on emotional potency. [26 Feb 1990, p.66]

The densely populated movie, pumped up with unnecessary crowd scenes and a handful of utterly extraneous male characters, is as garish and busy as a TV game show. As directed by Herbert Ross, it is so intent on persuading the audience that it is having a heartwarming emotional experience you almost expect TelePrompTers to flash in the theater, instructing you to laugh and cry. [27 Nov 1989, p.92]

Black Rain is the sort of movie where, if you see a motorcycle race at the start, you know you'll get one in the climax. The script is routine formula swill, at best. [02 Oct 1989, p.70]

Just about everything in Turner & Hooch is predictable, and the one thing that isn't is unforgivable...Turner & Hooch is expertly executed dreck. [14 Aug 1989, p.56]

Writer John Patrick Shanley, whose mix of comedy and romantic whimsy produced intoxicating results in Moonstruck, mixes thrills, social satire and romantic whimsy in The January Man and gets mush. The whodunit is spectacularly implausible, the comedy misjudged, the romance forced. [30 Jan 1989, p.70]

My advice to moviegoers: Just say no. [16 Nov 1987, p.108]

Hill is a modern-day Peckinpah. But is there really a need for this pointless, graphic violence in the 1980s? Is this escapism, or is it just a distasteful, needless reflection of what has become horrifyingly common in the real world?... Only small boys will be able to keep a straight face. [4 May 1987, p.77]

Though an expensive production, padded out with special effects and side- trips to Nepal, it fails to achieve any grandeur or dash. Murphy seems to be present mainly to mock the film's pretentions and shoddy plotting, as if the producers deliberately had chosen a piece of third-rate pulp, pumped millions of dollars into it, and then brought in Murphy to make them look stupid. [22 Dec 1986, p.75]

The first half concerns our hero's satirical misadventures on earth, except that director Huyck has the comic finesse of Hulk Hogan. The second half is an overproduced orgy of car crashes and monsters, in which Howard must save the world from the Dark Overlords of the universe. George Lucas was the executive producer. The Force was not with him. [25 Aug 1986, p.63]

Pirates is pure Polanski, but it's unfortunately not good Polanski. Attempting to revamp the swashbuckler genre the way he parodied Dracula movies in "The Fearless Vampire Killers," he's produced an abstract action comedy so emotionally detached it's impossible to stay involved. [28 July 1986, p.70]

3 Men and a Cradle has precious few laughs. Shot in a strangely grave, twilight style ill suited to the sitcom premise, the movie plods dully from one foreseeable irony to the next. [26 May 1986, p.72]

The Clan of the Cave Bear is dog. [27 Jan 1986, p.69]

Even Hudson's greatest fans will concede that storytelling has never been his strongest suit. But watching his latest effort -- a big, grittily handsome epic full of grand landscapes and painterly images of fallen soldiers -- one has the disconcerting feeling that the real drama is happening somewhere else, just out of Hudson's sight, in one of the many crucial scenes that have been left out of the movie...There may be a smashing movie on the cutting-room floor, but what's on screen is a shambles. [30 Dec 1985, p.62]

Spies Like Us does have a few yuks, or at least yukettes, but there's only a semi-smidgeon of inventiveness in this ponderous farce. [16 Dec 1985, p.84]

The indignities inflicted on the Chester family by writers Jeremy Stevens and Mark Reisman are barely clever enough to sustain a half-hour TV show. Carl Reiner directed this tepid farce, as if half asleep. [26 Aug 1985, p.62]

By the time Pale Rider wends its solemn, deliberate way to the final showdown, all of its tantalizing potential has bitten the dust. The woefully inadequate screenplay by Michael Butler and Dennis Shryack takes every mundane turn available, reneging on its mythical promises. [1 July 1985, p.55]

Such soft fare that it makes your eyes feel gummy. Andrew Bergman's script has no comic tension and no thrills. [3 June 1985, p.65]

But the script by Timothy Harris and Herschel Weingrod mistakes busyness for funniness. They make Monty Brewster a fading minorleague pitcher. But we want screwballs, not curve balls. Watching the frantic Brewster try to spend 30 million bucks is more tiresome than hilarious. [3 June 1985, p.65]

Leonard's tight, vivid brushstrokes have been turned into cinematic graffiti. [6 May 1985, p.73]

The Slugger's Wife isn't remotely provocative -- or even entertaining. It's an example of creative anorexia: the movie is so thin you leave the theater feeling you've watched the outtakes by mistake. [1 Apr 1985, p.87]

Movies this bad make you wonder if somebody's kidding. [03 Sep 1984, p.73]

Newman has certainly directed well in the past (Rachel, Rachel), but he flounders helplessly here, unable to find a tone or a shape for his comical-mawkish story. [12 Mar 1984, p.89]

Under the tone-deaf direction of Peter Yates, Krull manages to be both lavishly overdone and bizarrely half-baked. [08 Aug 1983, p.55]

One can safely doze through the extremely bland first hour, which feels more like an advertisement for marine theme parks than a suspense movie. [1 Aug 1983, p.47]

A vile concoction. [25 July 1983, p.75]

You don't have to be a Hitchcock idolater to see that this dumb, dull, plodding, pseudo-camp bore is a callous, commercial parasite. [13 June 1983, p.78]

Downright repetitive! [30 May 1983]