The sheer brutality of Oldboy is stunning, especially a deeply disturbing scene in which Brolin tortures Samuel L. Jackson. But this is an unrelievedly grim and hermetic experience throughout, the cinematic equivalent of blunt trauma.

This unabashedly stupid comedy is, well, unabashedly stupid.

This Romeo and Juliet is hard to take seriously - and simply hard to take.

As full of terrible acting as it is devoid of suspense.

Tedious, ludicrous and harmless glimpse of the dawn of civilization.

A dull, formulaic theme-park ride whose only purpose is to make more pots of money.

How to count the ways that Be Cool isn't? For one thing, it looks terrible: grainy, ill-lit, edited with blunt, rusty shears.

The animation in Planes: Fire & Rescue is considerably better, the landscapes grander, and the 3-D flight and firefighting scenes more exciting.

If Sweet November were a puppy, it would have rabies.

The more movie magic Howard piles on, the less we care. And, boy, does he pull out all the stops, stocking the pic with a tub of red herrings, half a dozen plot twists, and more complex set pieces than a comic-book flick. I felt relieved when it was finally over.

Serena is one long eye-roll of calamities and corn.

The contrast to Ramis' last picture, the inspired Groundhog Day, is marked. [12 Apr 1995, p.F03]

This tale of a white mother's kid gone missing in a black New Jersey neighborhood - and the tensions and news media attention that ensue - is pretty much pure jive.

What has Campbell wrought? An intermittently amusing, interminable affair that for sheer ugliness and a scenery-chewing performance by Peter Sarsgaard has a certain Camp appeal.

With the raunch quotient cranked up several notches, the sequel is calculated, cynical and, worse, not funny.

In Glimmer Man, Steven Seagal shows not a glimmer of acting range. [07 Oct 1996, p.E07]

Unbroken is a grueling endurance test - for the audience just as much as for its cutout champion.

Has to be the sorriest excuse for a reprise since "Highlander — The Final Dimension."

Entertainingly goofy for about 30 minutes. And then, for the next two hours-plus, it's agony.

Messy and confused, the film is a mishmash of tropes from Shakespeare, heist movies, family melodrama, and romance novels hastily thrown together.

Apocalyptically awful romantic comedy.

The problem is that these stoic warriors infect Act of Valor with more wooden acting than you'd see at a ventriloquism school.

Robert Altman's Kansas City is a hollow period piece, a costume melodrama that's all jazzed up without a story to tell. [16 Aug 1996, p.4]

Parents in a masochistic mood can compound the headache-inducing experience by paying extra for the 3-D version.

Where the first pic breezed along with gags and gunplay, this forced follow-up is artificial to the hilt - fueled on a kind of trying-too-hard hilarity that makes even good actors look bad.

It's getting tiresome, this stuff.

A high-end version of "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre" set in the rarefied bistros, boites and brokerages of Yuppie Manhattan in the 1980s.

It's hard to say with certainty whether it's insufficient plot or insufficient interpretation that's responsible for Travolta's waxwork performance.

An unfortunate collision of earnest coming-of-age cliches and off-key acting, Evergreen almost, and certainly unintentionally, presents itself as parody.

If the moral of Click is a stop-and-smell-the-roses bromide about how family comes first, the real message of this sappy, potty-mouthed seriocomedy is that a steady diet of Drakes and Hostesses will do you no good.

There's nothing remotely fantastic about this Fantastic Four.

The kind of saccharine exercise that ought to do wonders for the cause of atheism. [15 July 1994, p.03]

Four film sequels and 14 years later, the best I can say of Ice Age: Collision Course is that it has nice coloring and good picture contrast.

The glitter and clinking of Rodman's collection of body jewelry are supposed to blind one to the dopiness of the screenplay for Double Team. [4 Apr 1997, p.10]

It's highly doubtful that you'll grasp even a little of The Truth About Emanuel after seeing this film. It's not so much a thriller as it is a ride on a runaway crazy train.

Just a big chunk of waste flushed from a Hollywood studio.

Eye for an Eye's filmmakers have climbed on some high horse of social commentary, pretending this stalk-or-be-stalked suspenser is a meaningful drama about a wayward justice system where the rights of criminals supersede the rights of victims and their families. But what about the rights of moviegoers? We deserve better than this. [12 Jan 1996, p.05]

All things are possible, Julie-san, Miyagi constantly encourages his young charge. All things may be possible, Miyagi-sensei, but not this movie. [10 Sep 1994, p.D9]

At 116 minutes, this third installment lumbers along like a serial killer in shackles.

A schmaltzy, deeply sentimentalized drama about American slavery and the rise of the Underground Railroad.

If Stealth were a recruitment film for aircraft-carrier duty, one would be tempted to say, "Mission accomplished." As a feature film, it's a washout.

A dull, drab and pointless rehash, Walking Tall ironically manages to diminish the Rock's stature as both a leading man and an action star.

OK, they squeezed one more lap out of this franchise. It's been a fun ride, but it's time to shut things down. If you get my drift.

A predictable, by-the-numbers TV-movie-sized affair which will break your heart - especially since it also contains brief flashes of horror greatness.

At one point, Statham chases down a sports car while pedaling madly on a kids' bike. Pathétique!

Essentially a series of walking character sketches. The storytelling is slack and lackluster, the cliches rampant.

The ads for The Sweetest Thing promise that if you loved "There's Something About Mary" and "My Best Friend's Wedding," then you can't miss this latest Cameron Diaz vehicle. Well, miss it.

Mike Myers, responsible for the picture's one, or possibly two, laughs.

Tommy Boy is little more than another invitation from Hollywood for moviegoers to suffer fools. There's no reason to do so gladly. [31 Mar 1995, p.05]

A fairly dreadful melodrama drenched in self-pity.

An ineffective, derivative, and awkwardly executed mash-up of ghost flicks and voodoo movies.

Stay home and watch Friends. It's cheaper, funnier and mercifully shorter. [8 March 1996, p.08]

Looks as if was cobbled together from stuff hanging around the cutting room at MTV.

There is mismatch of tone and content throughout The Kitchen, which is never sure how to pair its lurid turns of plot with its intersectional feminist ambitions.

Cage appears as a knight of the Crusades, slogging across the continents, slaying infidels and unbelievers and anyone else who gets in his way. There isn't a minute when it looks like he's having fun.

Icky, incoherent thriller.

Ride Along is a film so casual in its conception and execution, it should be titled Drive Thru.

Struggles mightily to find its loony essence. But Bullock's apple-cheeked larkishness is all flailing limbs and bug-eyed reaction shots - there's no there there. Cooper's character is woefully underwritten, Church's is yet another vain anchorman-wannabe cartoon.

If the Brothers Grimm had devoted themselves to farce rather than scary fairy tales, they might have produced something like Seventh Son, a whacko sword-and-sorcery exercise.

Monster-in-Law, where Bridezilla meets Godzilla, is a comedy so anemic, so toxic, that even Dracula wouldn't bite.

Full of kerplunkingly unfunny jokes and ex-"Saturday Night Live" cast members turning up to do shtick.

"Zis is not verking! Zee glitter cannot overpower zee artist!" That, in a sentence, sums up what is wrong with this picture.

Totally lame.

Johnny Mnemonic may aspire to be Blade Runner. It succeeds only in being a parody of Flipper. [27 May 1995, p.D09]

A piece of schlock from Garry Marshall.

A subpar 3D action comedy featuring four giant motion-capture animated turtles and a raft of human costars, including the dreamy-eyed Fox, wide-shouldered Perry, a remarkably slender Will Arnett, and Laura Linney, who looks tired and uncomfortable throughout the proceedings.

The cast, especially The Game, does a fairly good job with this meager material, but it's like trying to make chateaubriand out of Spam.

As a cinematic experience, it's like being locked in a coffin for an hour and a half.

Has to be one of the nuttiest, sappiest (literally), most unintentionally hilarious spectacles to come down the time-travel turnpike in eons.

Alas, this joyless affair doesn't have a clou.

An astoundingly senseless thriller.

Hot Rod never establishes its own personality.

When the slimy creatures pop out of the ground in Tales From the Crypt Presents Demon Knight, one of the hapless humans in their path advises that the most strategic weapon to try is "anything that destroys their eyes and frees their tortured souls." Anyone exposed to this nauseating piece of brain-dead nonsense may want the same treatment. [13 Jan 1995, p.16]

Characters are introduced as archetypes to serve as jokes and little more.

The film is based on the popular video game, and plays as a pathetically incoherent attempt to accommodate all the characters kids want to see come to life on the big screen. [26 Dec 1994, p.E05]

When the big caper finally arrives, you will neither grasp nor care about what's going on.

Proves a theory first advanced in the movie "Repo Man": The more you drive, the stupider you get.

This one is so bad that even Ed Norton couldn't get this mess to move through the sewer.

Reiner, who made "This is Spinal Tap," "The Sure Thing," "When Harry Met Sally" -- memorable movies all -- has made this silly slice of Lean Cuisine. And that, in the end, makes Alex and Emma an utter tragedy.

Cross "Get Shorty" with "State and Main" - Hollywood hustlers, colorful crooks, crafty poseurs, and a production crew on location - and you have the stuff of The Last Shot. One other thing: eliminate anything funny.

Can be described as whatever is the opposite of a Christmas classic.

I nodded off watching Just Visiting.

Maybe, you think, there is something daring and brilliant going on here: an excursion into the darkest territories of the human soul. But no. In the end -- or the beginning -- there is no point to all this. Or at least not a point worth making, and making us watch.

About as not-funny as a comedy can get.

While "Boogie Nights" was a dirge for the death of pleasure (which coincided with the death of the porn-film industry), Wonderland is death warmed over. Literally.

A standard-issue, ineptly executed serving of the genre's staples, from skeptical cops to an all-knowing psychic.

Even Boll seems to lose interest as the story unravels. By that time, the supernatural cliches, plot inconsistencies, dead ends and red herrings have piled up so high you can barely see the screen.

This insipid take on the teens-in-peril formula, with a snake-bit ghoul chasing kids around the bayou, is truly a fangless task.

Perhaps it's for the best that We Are Your Friends doesn't try to appeal to anyone outside its stars' own kind. Fewer people will have to see it.

There are a few nice scares in The Colony, and the female lead, Rookie Blue's Charlotte Sullivan, looks really, really cute in blond dreadlocks. But she can't save the movie, nor can her impressive costars, Bill Paxton, Kevin Zegers, and Laurence Fishburne.

This movie feels like it has a million jokes, and every single one arrives with a lethal thud.

Repetitive and tedious.

As a western, American Outlaws is an utter failure. As the basis of a "Mad TV" parody, it is an unintentional hoot.

Rarely do you encounter a movie without a shred of originality. You Got Served is such a cinematic vacuum.

Once upon a time there were made-for-television movies. Now there are made-for-television movies for movie theaters. The Perfect Man, another anemic Hilary Duff vehicle, is a case in point.

The wrestler carries himself with decency and without self-seriousness, the qualities that made Arnold Schwarzenegger a star. Austin deserves better material than this. So do we.

Connoisseurs of giant, gnarled chunks of charred flesh, rejoice! There's plenty of it -- or stuff resembling it -- in the slasher-fest convergence of two killer franchises.

This film about a career gal's date with fate careers out of control.