Decadence is supposed to be fun, surely, or at least more fun than the desperate, sludgy, frantic mess of Suicide Squad.

A stodgy, moribund plodder loaded with stock characters that wouldn’t have felt edgy in 1983 and has about the same contemporary urgency as your average late-night rerun of “CSI: NY.”

Perhaps the most startling aspect of Suffragette, which for better or worse is a standard-issue historical drama, well constructed but not especially capacious or original, is its depiction of how far female activists were willing to go in order to prove that they could stand alongside men.

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

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

Did this overstuffed quality of Entourage, its KFC Double Down too-much-is-not-enough-ness, ultimately work on me? Absolutely not.

I have to assume that Russell Crowe and Warner Bros. did not deliberately set out to insult and anger the Armenian diaspora and its friends around the world, or to participate in covering up a monumental 20th-century crime that shaped the world we live in and remains swathed in too much historical shadow. They disgraced themselves by making this movie the way they did, and then redoubled the disgrace by releasing it this week.

Cohen had neither the chops nor the clout to prevent Get Hard from ending up, no doubt through the normal process of producer rewrites, focus groups, worried agents and weevil infestations, as a confused and contradictory mess. More to the point, it’s almost never funny, and full of elementary screenwriting blunders.

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.

Wild is a Hollywood holiday movie "based on a true story," meaning that its view of reality is conditioned by the three-act structure and the pop-Christian teleology of sin and repentance.

This could have been a story of immense heroism, tragic sacrifice and agonizing historical irony, and it hints in that direction, in its stiff-upper-lip fashion, before retreating into a vain search for a happy ending and an effort to turn itself into “The King’s Speech.”

Director James Marsh (already an Oscar winner for the documentary "Man on Wire") and screenwriter Anthony McCarten (adapting Jane Hawking's memoir) opt for the safe, pretty, and reassuring English period-piece choices the whole way through, as if deliberately underselling the fact that this is a story about two remarkable people facing extraordinary circumstances.

With Men, Women & Children and the equally laborious “Labor Day,” Reitman has gotten trapped amid the crumbling edifice of Hollywood. It’s turning him old before his time.

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.

Don’t get me wrong, I like trash just fine, and the twisty-loo, triple-abduction plot of Prisoners certainly kept me watching to the end. (You’ll figure out some of screenwriter Aaron Guzikowski’s plot twists, but not all of them.) It’s the imitation-David Fincher pretentiousness that gets on my nerves.

Fitzgerald’s influence could have crept in there by osmosis, and whatever other charges you want to level against Spring Breakers – such as incoherence, plotlessness, salaciousness and mind-numbing monotony – it has no lack of high concept.

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.

Pretty much three well-staged action sequences strung together with the dumbest imaginable connective tissue.

Identity Thief reaches impressive heights of laziness and idiocy.

Seriously, this is one of the strangest and most painful films in recent memory.

Luc Besson and Liam Neeson and the rest of the furriners who made the inept and offensive Taken 2 don't seem to have gotten the memo from Jason Bourne: Americans don't think our spooks are good guys anymore.

One could and perhaps should use scare quotes around "intellectual" when it comes to someone who would crank out a piece of campaign-season partisan hackwork this crude and sloppy. (By this standard, James Carville looks like Immanuel Kant.)

A moment of silence, please, for Kate Hudson's career.

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.

It's exactly the sort of movie that Hollywood specializes in, the kind which seems on paper as if it ought to be entertaining, but winds up a massive and chaotic drag.

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.

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

J. Edgar turns out to be one of the worst ideas anybody's ever had, a mendacious, muddled, sub-mediocre mess that turns some of the most explosive episodes of the 20th century into bad domestic melodrama and refuses to take any clear position on one of American history's most controversial figures.

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.

Can someone explain what Nicolas Cage and Nicole Kidman are doing in a chaotic and sadistic home-invasion thriller, shot in digital colors so radioactive they appear to have leaked out of the Fukushima nuclear plant?

What's really depressing is that some viewers may be deluded into thinking there's something of substance in "Centipede II," when it's more like a DC Comics version of Pier Paolo Pasolini's notorious "Salò, or The 120 Days of Sodom," with the sweeping condemnation of Western culture stripped out and the mean-spiritedness cranked to 11. If you want to check this out for a stomach-turning giggle, don't let me stop you. But please, let's not pretend it means more than that.

Rarely has a film with such a great cast and so many moments of terrific writing and such high dramatic goals been so messy and disorganized and fundamentally bad.

A fourth-rate Hollywood thriller that bungles a lot of thievery from better movies, is entirely bereft of suspense or excitement and features a leading man who absolutely, positively cannot act.

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.

It's all just an embarrassment, the kind of pointless slog you'll encounter on Netflix in two years and wonder, How the hell did that get made?

It's a dumb, ugly and, most of all, painfully unfunny movie.

A would-be tween-oriented hit so scrubbed and sanitized and not worthy of paying attention to that it can barely be said to exist at all.

Gingival surgery would be more fun than watching this brain-draining, spirit-sucking attempt at a stoner spoof, which combines the cutting edge of frat-boy wit, the excitement of a mid-'80s made-for-TV action flick and the authenticity of a Renaissance Faire held in an abandoned field behind a Courtyard by Marriott.

It was boring and silly but not atrociously bad. No, that's much too glowing; allow me to back up and rephrase. It is atrociously bad, basically.

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.

Inside of five minutes I felt an urgent, blinding hatred for almost all its grotesquely overprivileged characters.

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.

They kill me, these guys. No, seriously. If they make any more of these movies, they might as well kill me.

That's the culture we live in, where the once-proscribed Pleasure Principle has become iron law and where the recycled, bloated, fish-belly emptiness of something like TRON: Legacy carries boredom to extravagant new heights.

Saw 3-D is in 3-D. Really, really bad 3-D.

This well-crafted example just piles imaginary atrocities on top of real ones, and then halfheartedly claim that it means something. Well, it doesn't.

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.

The guys abuse each other in what's meant to be fraternal affection but feels more like the discomfort of being stuck together in a terrible movie.

It's a challenge to take a comic-book adaptation that stars Josh Brolin, John Malkovich and Megan Fox and drain nearly all the fun out of it. Jonah Hex is one of those movies that combines a certain amount of being ridiculous on purpose with a great deal of pseudo-profound silliness.

Indeed, this movie's offensive on many levels, but Arabs and Muslims don't get to feel special. It relies on stupid stereotypes because it's a stupid movie that's offensive to virtually everyone.

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.

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.

Maybe I'm expecting too much of Cyrus. But The Last Song rests heavily on her alleged appeal, and I can't remember the last time I came across such a singularly charmless teenage performer. I hesitate to even use the word "actress."

A comedy of remarriage that makes divorce look like a state of grace.

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.

Scorsese is pushing, I guess, for something that combines a '40s horror-thriller with a contemporary psychological tragedy. What he ends up with is more like a Hardy Boys mystery directed by David Lynch.

A Garry Marshall movie has to be funny in order to be anything at all, and this one is so deeply involved with its pseudo-meaningful roundelay of beautiful but inexplicably lovelorn people as to be teeth-grindingly, mind-warpingly boring.

Both mean-spirited and self-conscious. It's all style and no soul, which wouldn't be a problem if its style at least gave us something to look at, or to laugh at. But From Paris With Love, filmed on location in Paris, has a raggedy, greasy, dingy look: It's the movie equivalent of an unbathed, unshaven French boyfriend (the bad kind). It thinks it's suave, but it just smells bad.

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.

"Morgans" does bear the distinction of boasting the sourest cast ever assembled outside of a Lars Von Trier production.

A perfect storm of a movie disaster: You've got good actors fighting a poorly conceived script, under the guidance of a director who can no longer make the distinction between imaginativeness and computer-generated effects. The result is an expensive-looking mess that fails to capture the mood, and the poetry, of its source material.

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.

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.

Neither funny nor honest. The exact opposite of a retreat, it's merely exhausting.

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.

It's a limp romantic drama that occasionally lifts its drowsy head to attempt a wan smile, a picture that starts out being harmlessly dull and ends, somehow, in a place that feels insultingly manipulative.

So contemptuous toward its own characters, and its audience, that it chokes off any visceral thrills it might have offered. The movie substitutes calculation for brains, and the filmmakers seem to think we'll all be too stupid to notice.

Just when you think your jaw can't drop any lower in appalled amazement, comes a romantic comedy so lunkheaded and ill-conceived that it makes your average, idiotic Kate Hudson-Matthew McConaughey outing look like the reincarnation of Hepburn and Grant.

Until that final, inevitable kiss, we have to listen to them, and the clatter of their crude, brainless exchanges is unbearable.

I Hate Valentine's Day is a horror show masquerading as a romantic comedy. Maybe Vardalos is just in the wrong line of work.

Year One sets prehistoric comedy back at least 20 years.

Disposable crap.

Terminator Salvation has no brains and no soul; it's just a mass of stiff, creaking metal joints. Clearly, the machines have won.

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.

In Crank: High Voltage, Statham just looks miserable, as if appearing in this lousy picture just sucked all the heart right out of him.

It's possible Hill has a style, of sorts. But he doesn't work from the heart, or from the gut, as a good comedy director generally needs to. He operates from one guiding question: "How disturbing can we make this sh**?"

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

If Alex Proyas' Knowing were reasonably entertaining -- instead of just dour, pointless and tedious -- it would be a camp classic.

It's time to start recognizing that not all escapist entertainment is created equal. And that some of it isn't even entertainment. Miss March is, to use the vernacular of the escapist moviegoer, the biggest pile of crap I've seen in ages.

Boring at best and insidious at worst.

One of the most dreadfully unnecessary movies in recent memory.

A loud, garish and very untimely romantic comedy.

On second thought, maybe just about everyone should stay away from this drearily cheerful little picture that isn't nearly as funny or as heartwarming -- or even as topical, given the economic climate -- as it thinks it is.

It's both slack and bloated; I've been to Catholic wedding masses that had more zip. I think it clocked in at fewer than 90 minutes, but it seemed to last longer than most marriages do.

With Yes Man, Carrey has bled the well dry, doing everything he knows how to do, over and over again, just to prove that he still knows how to do it. It's exhilarating to see brilliance in a comic; but by the time you start smelling it, the game is over.

Overall Seven Pounds is too heavy-handed and maudlin to be comprehensible, let alone moving. The real shocker is that not even Smith can rescue it.

A jumble of spare parts and leftover dialogue, as if it had been assembled out of unused bits of every movie where an unknown whatzit threatens our way of life and the government goes into full institutional pants-crapping panic mode.

Watching The Boy in the Striped Pajamas, it struck me that weaving a touching little tale about a death-camp friendship is actually a pretty bad way to teach kids about the Holocaust.

His scattershot and ad hominem attacks against many different forms of religious hypocrisy don't add up to a coherent critique, and he's not qualified to provide one.

The whole vibe is so shrill and frantic that the truly accomplished actresses, like Bening and Bergen, are left to flounder. The less nuanced ones -- that would be you, Debra Messing -- are, to use the idiom of the movie, as pleasant to watch as a bikini wax is to feel.

It's impossible to tell what's going on at any given moment in Tomb of the Dragon Emperor; it's even harder to care about being able to tell.

Watching Streep and her two BFFs, played by Christine Baranski and Julie Walters, grinning and giggling their way through Mamma Mia! I felt I was being thoroughly, and unenjoyably, punished.

Offensive to Hindus. Never mind the Hindus; The Love Guru is offensive to pretty much anyone with a brain.

This isn't a picture filled with wonder and a sense of fun; it's so jaded and crass that I almost wonder if it's a highly unscientific experiment designed to gauge how little audiences will settle for these days. Manic and multicolored, Speed Racer is an excess of nothingness.

The story sounds great, on paper: It''s got interracial romance and betrayal, political and ethnic violence, and a faint feminist undercurrent. But the resulting movie is so pretty and so utterly lifeless you can almost smell the embalming fluid coming off the screen.

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?

The picture, despite the grand panoramic scale Emmerich has tried to give it, is dopey and static. Its finest moments belong to the thundering herd of woolly mammoths who storm through the picture sometime in its first half-hour.

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.