Spins an unconvincing, miscast noir tale.

It's the cinematic equivalent of an all-dessert meal: After the initial jolt, the lack of any real nourishment is apparent, and it becomes a struggle to stay awake.

A soul-killing sequel that gets its kicks torturing and murdering children and offers little hope or redemption. King has long wanted to commit “Redrum” on the reputation of Kubrick’s film, which he openly despises. Nearly 40 years later, this adaptation of King’s 2013 book “Doctor Sleep” doesn’t so much tarnish Kubrick as embarrass itself.

This is the downside of Roberts' giant success and her dazzling ability to charm: Every time she goes plain, as she did in the little-seen "Mary Reilly" and "Michael Collins," our princess simply fizzles.

There's nothing here but a concept and a marketing and merchandising strategy, at the center of which somebody - oh, no - had to come up with an actual movie.

An entirely unconventional, hypnotic, meandering film.

Not since "An American Werewolf in London" in 1981 reset the standard for man-to-wolf transformations has anyone tried to get away with special effects as pitiful as the ones in this movie.

Doesn't look like a movie somebody made. It looks like a movie somebody hallucinated and put up on the screen.

But their comic talents are completely wasted by an inane script whose idea of humor is to make jokes about lung cancer and the notorious Tuskegee experiment on black men with syphilis. [20 Jan 1998]

A coming-of-age story that gets it all wrong.

But the film written, directed and starring stand-up comic Hitoshi Matsumoto has, like most superheroes, a tragic flaw: It isn't funny.

Maybe Glazer’s movie will be of use to people naïve enough to believe that nobody without horns and a pitchfork can be the devil. Everybody else will learn nothing from this film.

Chinese Portrait is a great art installation, but a thoroughly unsatisfying film.

At times, it actually hurts to watch.

The movie equivalent of an idiot who, to avoid scorn, starts acting like an even bigger idiot, so as to get in on the joke, too...It takes everything and nothing seriously, depending on what the filmmakers think they can get away with at any given moment, and the result, while not painful to watch, is ridiculous.

While many of the film’s action sequences are in slow motion, it’s the story’s narrative (credited to Snyder, Shay Hatten and Kurt Johnstad) that really crawls.

Represents his (Smith) first act of cinematic cynicism, his first crime against his own talent. With this action comedy, he has given us 110 worthless minutes, a bad formula movie like every other bad formula movie.

Lange seems at a loss to know how to convey Martha's malevolence -- and writer-director Jonathan Darby offers almost no guidance.

Blanchett's performance is Soderbergh's biggest mistake. He either encourages or permits her to play Lena as a Greta Garbo caricature, which is mildly amusing if you're interested in Garbo, but if you're interested in Lena and The Good German, you're out of luck.

An overwrought drama.

This thick, leaden production starring Bob Hoskins and Patricia Arquette - and an uncredited Robin Williams - has a sophomoric air, even though it faithfully follows the book.

The concept might have worked well on paper. But on screen, at least how Chase Palmer has directed and co-scripted it, those clashing elements exert weak gravitational pull.

This film is like cynicism transformed into celluloid, a movie made without love and with no vision, except of dollar signs.

Something so sappy, no one would believe me if I told them. It has to be seen to be disbelieved.

The script is as bland as they come.

It's a shame Arnold is stuck on the loudmouth clod schtick, because there are moments he's downright pleasant on screen. But in Carpool, these moments are kept to a minimum.

Hao doesn't seem to have a point of view. Mongolian Ping-Pong is episodic and meandering, with several tedious stretches.

Smith deserves a 21st century reassessment, but you won’t find it here.

The film is neither fish nor fowl nor some arresting new entity, but a lumpish coagulation of conflicting impulses and unrealized gestures.

There's no attempt at humor in Dead Silence, but the biggest sin in the film is the lack of scares.

Aquaman continues to revel in the outdated 1970s superhero ideal that mankind is unquestionably worth saving. Add to that some awkward dialogue, a poorly conceived visual effects palette, and a soul-crushing and bladder-crushing 139-minute run time, and you have another disappointing entry in the DC Comics cinematic universe.

In execution, the film is all sidekicks and sight gags, with little story cohesion or purpose.

It turns out to be just as bad as any routine French romantic comedy - illogical, inconsistent and sloppily written, a charmless, tasteless, witless waste of time.

American Reunion isn't a total wash. Its one saving grace is Eugene Levy as Jim's dad.

A complete washout, a joyless, pointless and fundamentally idiotic enterprise.

No matter how you dissect it, Clash of the Titans will never, ever be a serious motion picture.

The film is glossy, but awful. Frenetic, but awful. Expensive, but awful. ... And awful.

Isn't some sober history lesson that bogs down in long speeches and tedious facts. It's about style, it's about fashion, it's about rock 'n' roll busting out in medieval France.

Features an exceedingly dapper Richard Gere in a series of nice suits and handsome close-ups that serve no purpose other than to remind us how exceedingly dapper Richard Gere looks in nice suits and handsome close-ups. The rest of the movie registers as a loss of: time, money, talent and logic.

Welcome to Marwen does not work as a drama of addiction, and frankly it doesn’t work as a celebration of Hogancamp’s creations, which work best as stunning still-photo images.

One could criticize A Night at the Roxbury for being a comedy that provides not a single laugh. That would be too easy.

The experience of seeing Causeway isn’t what you’d imagine while trying to decide whether to watch a 92-minute movie about a veteran’s slow recovery. It feels more like moving in with her — invisible — for weeks, and watching as she makes a sandwich or stares into space. That isn’t drama. That’s practically audience abuse.

Day Shift pauses for a promising concept every now and then before zooming off to its next helping of amped-up gore. The graphic violence is never terribly disturbing, mostly because it’s rendered with cartoonish exaggeration.

No matter how well made, well acted and well intentioned, Lying Dingbat Procrastinator movies are excruciating to watch. Case in point: People Like Us, a film hell-bent on dragging its protagonist (and, sadly, us) through the LDP narrative playbook.

Just an odd mess of a movie. That you feel anything at all is a tribute to the acting talent of Dinklage and Goggins, who occasionally make us care.

If Zabeil didn’t want to deliver a formula picture, he needed to come up with something better than the formula.

Standing Ovation is an innovative film in the sense that every minute or so it comes up with a different way of being annoying. Moreover, it often goes for a layered effect, in which it's annoying in two or three ways simultaneously.

Carax, with Pola X, has become a parody of himself with a self-indulgent, overreaching style that many viewers will find a struggle to watch -- provided they can contain their contempt for pretentiousness.

If you want to see Li and Statham in an underwhelming martial arts film, rent "The One" instead. Li talks considerably more in that movie, but at least he punches a lot of people out.

The Woman in the Window is, unfortunately, one of Wright’s amazingly bad movies, and this is a shame, with Amy Adams at the center of it.

Thankfully, the movie clocks in at a mere 105 minutes. The Marvels doesn’t have much to say, but at least it says it quickly.

The director's most painfully slow movie yet.

The “Paranormal Activity” films, to their credit, build slowly, backloading the chills in the second half. That means, to get through that first hour, the characters have to be interesting, but these self-absorbed Gen Z wannabe filmmakers are anything but.

To watch Boulevard is to keep circling back, over and over, to the question: Was it merely an actor’s misguided inspiration, to take a repressed character and turn him into a grievously depressed one? Or was Williams simply unable to do it any other way?

At its best, it captures the last-days-of-Pompei feeling that was in the air at the time — a mix of frenetic celebration, paranoia and despair. But alas, the documentary soon derails into bogus history, specious arguments and a self-blinding variety of political bias.

An acquired taste.

This seemingly good idea results in disaster. Allen has no insight into the current generation of young people, and his film is just a jumbled rehash of themes and motifs that he's explored elsewhere.

Beneath the handsome production values, the steady motor of Ron Howard's direction and the solid acting of Mel Gibson as a flashy airline tycoon whose son is abducted in Central Park, Ransom is pure poison: the kind of hang-'em-high rouser that feeds off our basest impulses and prods us into cheering the hero on as he commits grisly, retributive acts of violence.

Bastian is a difficult kid to sit and watch for 90 minutes -- self- important and with a shrill voice. The story is all over the place, setting the audience up for things that never pan out and defying its own logic. [09 Feb 1991, p.C3]

SWAT is better than "Gigli," but so is most outpatient surgery.

Director Sammi Cohen takes an attention-deficit disorder approach to storytelling, in which every feeling and plot twist is punctuated by a current pop song, and any hint of emotion or thoughtfulness is interrupted by a needle drop.

The movie's onslaught of psychobabble is the annoyance most likely to ruin your evening. Imagine getting stuck on a ski lift with Dr. Phil for nearly two hours.

A sour romantic comedy that arrives in theaters just in time to spoil Valentine's Day. Its plot is a catalog of unpleasantness. Its characters are repellent.

Twenty minutes in, the movie is already operating at a deficit, and it never recovers.

May be a good tactical move for the artist's career, but it's a bad movie.

While it's filled with quality actors, this James Bond tale for tweens feels like something you should be getting for free on television.

The enjoyment one wants from GIs fighting these creatures is stunted by the film’s lack of energy and imagination.

Amateur gives the impression of a sloppy first draft. It begins with a splash, meanders until it reaches feature length, then ends abruptly.

The Distinguished Gentleman isn't much of a movie - it's a mess, in fact. [04 Dec 1992]

Nearly unbearable.

When viewing the action thriller London Has Fallen, there’s no escaping the reality that you’ve seen everything on the screen before — many, many times. For every bullet, and you will lose count, there is a cliche.

It is crystal clear who screwed up this tortuously slow-moving romantic drama.

It takes one of the most gifted screen actresses of her generation and casts her out to sea with nothing to hold onto but a hideous script that’s all attitude without depth or understanding.

Nearly a scene-for-scene rip-off of "National Lampoon's Summer Vacation" -- where the only substantive change from the original is a reversed travel route.

The freshest thing about Breakin' All the Rules is its dropped "g.''

A hodgepodge of half-baked visual styles can't disguise the fact that this dismal thriller is all situation and no story.

A whimsical modern fairy tale.

A "nonstop thriller" that is also a nonstop dud. Underline the word "long" in the title.

Yes, there are funny lines, but nearly all of them are familiar to fans; it’s almost like a greatest hits of “Addams Family” quotables.

Sometimes indie pictures like this, with over-the-top acting and outrageous situations, are meant as a calling card for its creators - a chance to show their wares to others in the industry. So calling all producers, there is one tour-de-force performance in Scenic Route: the makeup team of Brian Kinney, Sara Robey and Maia Wagle. Admire their work, and bring earplugs.

At its core, Star Trek: Section 31 suffers from a kind of existential emptiness. It appropriates some of the surface-level iconography of “Trek” but fails to uphold its spirit. It nods to continuity, but the dense lore feels like a gatekeeping exercise and the breezy tone undermines the gravitas of its own premise.

Has a gutsy premise, but no guts.

The One and Only Ivan has within it a much more interesting film waiting to break out that really could have been for the whole family, but alas it is trapped within the cement walls of Disney’s cookie-cutter formula.

Numbskull cinema scrapes new depths.

This is a film that, in some ways, is too complex for the kids, yet leaves the adults feeling left out, too.

Unfortunately these characters are stuck in a picture that is little more than a gory mess, heavy on the smoke machines and thunderous sound track, but with no suspense and not much interest. Split Second is just a series of killings that come, one after the other, until the movie hits feature length, and then it's the bad guy's turn. Since these killings all consist of a heart being yanked out of a human body, Split Second isn't pretty. I've long since lost my weak stomach, but this movie is definitely not for the squeamish. [2 May 1992, p.C3]

Blackhat is pretty much nonsense, which Mann directs with such misplaced energy and with such little natural instinct for the material that, for most of the running time, the movie’s problems seem entirely his fault.

Jexi feels hopelessly out of step with the moment. Despite its subject matter, it’s a flip phone movie in a smart phone world.

Mary is a fictionalized and heavily dramatized account of the life of the Virgin Mary, but the movie’s great and only pleasure is in watching Anthony Hopkins play King Herod as a homicidal maniac.

This is just plain bad - and it's a surprise.

“Dead Men” is a jumble of half-baked impulses.

Takes its name from the king protea, the national flower of South Africa. The stunning, artichoke-like shrub may be fragrant, but the movie's pretty much a stinker.

The only performer who breathes any life into the proceedings is Vincent Perez.

A curiously downbeat, rather cold work without much passion or science that portrays a woman whose life was brimming with both.

For all the characters butting heads, all the street fights and all the explosions (there are plenty of those), Street Fighter may very well put you to sleep. [24 Dec 1994, p.E1]

The movie is made even worse with embarrassing flashbacks, painful voiceover, and inane dream sequences. It’s like a Merchant-Ivory film – on Quaaludes.

An ill-advised and severely wussified remake.

You can watch 100 movies and never see such joyless joy as in Blinded by the Light.