So bad it's almost like performance art, or those cheap records from the '60s, where the Chipmunks sing the Beatles' greatest hits.

There’s enough craft and intelligence at work here that you can’t dismiss Raze as meaningless sadism, but not nearly enough to make it worth the unpleasantness of actually watching it.

Such an inept bundle of work -- crying out for the filmmaking equivalent of Ritalin, but still sluggish as syrup -- that it doesn't even provide an opportunity to ogle properly.

The pacing is off, the emotional tone is wobbly, and none of the actors seem to be acting in the same style or the same movie.

With The Good German, Soderbergh -- generally a terrific and creative filmmaker -- apes a style, and a way of seeing, that he clearly doesn't understand. It feels like a hit to the stomach.

Anything Else isn't just the latest Woody Allen movie; it's also the smallest. His pictures seem to be getting tinier and tinier, and after you've seen them they leave nothing but a tinny echo and a bad taste. Anything Else is misanthropy writ small. Allen is too stingy to be generous even with his contempt.

For all the filmmakers' talk about reinvigorating the franchise for a new generation, and all their attention to technical details, this is a sloppily conceived remake with no passion for the genre or this story behind it, a movie that assumes its audience is brain-dead and likes it that way.

Year One sets prehistoric comedy back at least 20 years.

You would never have predicted it from the breakout success of "Pretty Woman" nearly a decade ago, but it turns out that the pairing of Richard Gere and Julia Roberts has ripened over the years into something resembling month-old brie.

It's a little bit Tolkien, a little bit Lucas, a little bit "Matrix," a little bit "Dune" and rather too much Philip Pullman, all stuck together with some powerfully expensive effects and lots of cute kids doing tai chi.

I hated this movie; I wish I could unsee it and will it out of existence. But that’s not the same as thinking it’s worthless or corrupt or entirely inept. It’s more like a massively self-indulgent prank, inflicted on the world by some reasonably intelligent young men, which makes it the most bro-tastic project of all time. Mo’ bro than this, no es posible, amigos.

There's not enough fast and even less furious.

The picture starts off slick and amusing, gets convoluted, draggy and strange round about the midway point, and ends up just plain ludicrous.

This might be the edgiest film of the year -- if the year were 1982.

By the movie's numbingly predictable end, the notion of a visually unleashed cinema seems like a monstrous mistake -- we've handed over the atom bomb to the Teletubbies!

For a movie that's supposed to be about speed and movement, Torque is a peculiarly slow kind of torture. Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition -- especially not in an action movie.

It's mostly terrible. The movie has no sparkle, no charm, nothing to sweep us off our feet.

A dreary, ludicrous thriller.

An academic exercise driven by adolescent ideas that never shape themselves into a narrative: in short, a movie that can never dislodge the art fatally wedged up its butt.

Sayles speaks the language of cinematic formula so automatically -- his reunited lovers slow dance to a jukebox in a dark, deserted cafe and wait unannounced outside each other's workplaces when they want to talk -- that he's forgotten that real people don't do this stuff.

Unlike the original -- which, in a crazy stroke of genius, allowed Shakespearean thespians like Claire Bloom and Maggie Smith, plus Bond babe Ursula Andress, to mix it up as jealous goddesses -- the new Clash of the Titans is frightfully low on babes.

Cinderella Man is ostensibly the kind of old-fashioned drama that sends audiences home with a satisfied glow. But like so many of Howard's movies, there's something canned and phony about it -- it left me feeling cooked and dehydrated, as if I'd fallen asleep on a tanning bed.

Off the top of my head, I'm guessing that Season of the Witch claims a place in the top five all-time bizarre and pointless homages to art cinema.

This is a love story, all right, but it has less to do with the flaws of capitalism than it does with Moore's unwavering fondness for the sound of his own voice, and for what he perceives as his own vast cleverness.

A vehicle for teen singing sensation Mandy Moore. As vehicles go, it's an Edsel.

The direction on Johnson Family Vacation is numbingly slack; the synapses between the scenes don't spark effortlessly, as they should, and the whole enterprise feels dragged-down and belabored.

Boring at best and insidious at worst.

A well-intentioned, profoundly silly and borderline insulting movie.

A pallid, mediocre tale that treacles its way through well-worn channels.

When the enchanted crab is the most appealing character in a movie, you know you're in some serious metaphoric hot water.

The film is a plodding, earnest adaptation that strips the source of its richness and ambiguity.

You'd have thought, in his infinite wisdom, the Lord would at least send stinkers like this direct to video.

It pretends to examine how self-absorbed we are as a culture, only to be consumed by its own self-absorption. It's also badly constructed, humorless and emotionally sadistic .

One of those movies that you continue to pull for even after it becomes clear that it isn't very good.

A 3 hour fusillade of cliches.

It's not much fun, and it's not particularly edifying. Even people who are curious about Holmes (he was better known by his screen name, Johnny Wadd; here, he's played by Val Kilmer) won't find out much about him.

It’s not just that Chappie is a mishmash of familiar ingredients whose story quickly slides off the rails into a swamp of action-movie clichés, or another misbegotten project from the Land of Intriguing Premises. It doesn’t have an intriguing premise in the first place. It’s cluttered, goofy and incoherent from beginning to end, and much too long.

This alleged thriller, which might be described as "'Gaslight' Goes to College," is one of the most incoherent features in recent memory.

This film "Phantom" takes everything that's wrong with Broadway and puts it on the big screen in a gaudy splat.

A movie that's laughable without, alas, even being enjoyably awful.

It's a flat, clumsy piece of filmmaking. When Phillippe and Ward are in bed, the shots are so badly matched that I believed they were having sex, just not with each other.

It would be destined for the trash heap of Shakespeare adaptations, if not for its female lead, and its heart, 17-year-old Claire Danes.

A humorless picture, a somber, arty exercise in deep denial of its exploitation roots. The dialogue is stiff and mechanical and the performances are too.

Instead of effervescent and mercurial, the movie is simply muddled. Lee has far too much skill to be delivering work that so often degenerates into incoherence.

Stay away from this cautionary tale about the gay porn industry -- it blows.

No director in the history of moviemaking has expended so much effort in the service of drying up and blowing off the landscape.

Spends a lot of time advertising how exciting it is, without actually being exciting.

It's sad when a bit of grim futuristic silliness like Repo Men falls short on all counts, down to the most basic level of entertainment value.

A leaden exercise in what can go wrong when movies attempt to explore mysterious forces with dated special effects and easy symbolism...a soggy mess.

Poops out before it ever really gets going.

LaBute is some kind of find: an auteur for people who don't like movies.

The result is a bombastic, flashback-ridden farrago of skulking villains, scenery-chewing actors, sub-"Ivanhoe"-style dialogue and what seems like a dozen pretty, flaxen-haired men storming in and out of rooms in snits.

Edward Norton's dopey directorial debut gives interfaith romance a bad name.

An Adam Sandler comedy, which means it bears only a superficial relationship to the customary conventions of moviemaking, and also that there's no use getting all worked up about that.

The most sterile of bodice-rippers, a genteel soap opera in which the sex and intrigue are so muted, so tasteful, that they practically blow off the screen in a scattering of dust.

Middlebrow kitsch, but kitsch straining for respectability and therefore without the energy that can make kitsch entertaining.

So clumsy and crass that it makes you doubt the pleasure of the first movie.

Stupid, empty and -- worst of all -- fantastically boring.

"Bambi" meets "Godzilla": Disney goes for the goo in a by-turns gory and sappy new epic of computer-generated images.

For a movie that’s supposedly about delivering weightless, uncomplicated fun, Pixels is an overwhelmingly sad experience.

Even with the outlandish characters, gaudy colors and gay satire, this smug John Waters knockoff can't stand up to the real thing.

Sutherland is the only actor in Fool's Gold who isn't trying too hard, perhaps because he doesn't have to. He's the movie's only treasure, hidden in plain sight.

There's no doubt we need more movies for grown-ups, with jokes that don't hit us over the head, but The Men Who Stare at Goats doesn't fit the bill. At best, it might hypnotize you into a stupor.

Ludicrous trash, but it has style.

There's something offensive about how Mamet continues to win praise as a serious filmmaker with such a joyless picture, a picture that -- intentionally -- gives the audience so little.

No wonder Arlene (Hunt) keeps a bottle of vodka in the chandelier. You would too with this demonic, passive-aggressive, New Age munchkin (Osment) trying to run your life.

The sort of thing you can't believe anyone would want their name attached to.

You could definitely call it awful, and I'm about to do so, repeatedly and effusively. In fact, One Day is an appallingly bad movie made by talented people who could and should have done much better, but somehow all drove off the cliff together.

Actually, the wonder The Polar Express induces feels something like a coma.

Owen Wilson doesn't have a single good line in the dismal Drillbit Taylor. So how is it that almost everything he does is funny?

If only Leap Year were an anomaly, the kind of picture that comes along only once every four years. Instead, it's yet more evidence that romantic comedies are only getting worse.

Stallone returns in a gangster remake that wears itself (and the audience) out trying to be cutting-edge stylish.

A brain-dead version of a dark and complex work.

It's a shame when an actor like Sylvester Stallone, who's always at his most appealing when he just hunkers down and lets himself be a big galoot, feels he has to make a bid for respectability.

An uninspired, recycled Mafia gags caper.

Ben Stiller, the movie's star, pretty much sinks the whole enterprise.

Isn't particularly assaultive, but it can still make you feel that you never want to see another car chase, explosion or gunfight again.

The movie is so thoroughly lousy. It's loud, brash and obvious, full of car chases and explosions and gunplay.

Between the 12th floor and the 14th floor, boredom awaits!

Shot after shot photographed at wobbly, off-center angles for no particular reason, weigh every action sequence down with super-slo-mo in lame imitation of "The Matrix" or end every single scene with a vertical wipe.

Totally unwatchable if it weren't for Ashley Judd.

If it were terrible, you could at least sink your teeth into it; but Welcome to Mooseport is like a biscuit soaked in water, ready to be gummed instead of chewed.

It's a comedy, a political thriller, a love story: Barry Levinson's Man of the Year tries to be all things to all people and fails on every count -- a little like the generic, ineffectual politicians it's pretending to excoriate.

Stoker, which plays something like a remake of “The Addams Family” mixed with “The Paperboy” — but without the laughs of either – belongs in a special category of movie badness, or perhaps two different but overlapping categories. It’s a visually striking but fundamentally terrible film made by a good or (some would say) great director.

Unless you're a lover of tigers, there's probably no reason to see Jean-Jacques Annaud's Two Brothers. And maybe not even then.

The problem with “Wolverine” isn’t that the mythology is detailed and potentially confusing — you could say that about any number of movies based on comic books, even some of the good ones. The bigger issue is that “Wolverine” is so uninvolving that you might not care whether you remember what happened 10 minutes ago.

May be the shoddiest and most incoherent piece of big-budget action moviemaking since "Armageddon."

Dragonfly wants desperately to be the spiritual heir to "The Sixth Sense," but it's not even as effective a thriller.

That whole aspect of October Baby creeped me out a lot more than the blood-curdling failed-abortion story did, honestly. I've seen a lot of movies where crazy and impossible things happen, and you just have to roll with them. Real life is much more frightening.

New Moon, on the other hand, merely follows a dictated formula. It's a cheap, shoddy piece of work, one that banks on moviegoers' anticipation without even bothering to craft a satisfying experience for them. Its pandering is an insult.

A loud, garish and very untimely romantic comedy.

Put Bruce Willis and this bewildering World War II movie in front of the firing line.

Life in the Bronx is hard, all right. Getting through a movie shouldn't be harder.

Another Jerry Bruckheimer-Michael Bay demonstration of spectacle -- noise, stunts, the aforementioned incoherent editing -- taking precedence over story and character... by far the most brutal American picture released this summer.

Speaking as someone who despises almost every aspect of the Thatcherite social-economic consensus that has defined the capitalist world for thirty years (and almost every aspect of Thatcher's actual policies), she deserves more than this.

Director Cook and screenwriter Anthony Frewin were both intimates of the real Kubrick, which I guess counts for something. But for what, exactly? Does it uniquely qualify them to make a mean-spirited, trashy and intermittently funny film about a guy who wasn't Kubrick?

Like so many self-conscious directors, Julie Taymor wrecks Shakespeare's already disastrous play with her own horrific vision.

Renders Jonathan Safran Foer's best-selling 2005 novel into unconvincing Hollywood mush.