Mexican filmmaker Antonio Serrano applies the fantasy device so haphazardly as to render it irritating instead of surprising.

Badly made, badly acted and badly written. [07 May 1994, p.E3]

The schmaltz is relentless in The Legend of 1900, the newest film from "Cinema Paradiso'' director Giuseppe Tornatore. It comes in waves, it leeches onto every surface and it turns decent actors into sticky-sweet fuzzballs.

A film with no theatrical core and no integrity in the writing, acting or storytelling.

Sirât is a film of impression and feeling, not logic or plot.

A purposely inane mishmash of maudlin love story, gastrointestinal gags and shredding snowboard scenes, Out Cold has a couple of laughs but mostly wipes out.

It's only January, but already we have a strong candidate for the most thunderingly stupid movie of the year.

An attempt at a beautiful film about renewal -- about past love, love lost, longing and rediscovery -- but it has no emotional truth.

A mess, and that's really a shame.

Every so often an obviously talented person makes a bad movie, and that’s what we have in Nope. The talent is there, the movie is dead on the screen.

It's a grueling 70-minute march toward the end credits.

Ill conceived and unworthy (and dull and ridiculous).

It tries to get by on charm. It doesn't.

For about an hour of its running time, The Magic of Belle Isle seems like a tiresome, sentimental and slow-moving story about a grumpy old man redeemed by the sweet spirit of a rural town and by the nice family that lives next door. But no, it's even worse than that.

The film is a particular disappointment considering its pedigree.

The appeal of A Rainy Day in New York, to the extent it has any, is nostalgia.

Turns into one long wallow.

With its bigger budget and wider scope but less gripping story, “Peninsula” is much more of a generic, CGI-reliant action movie that often feels like a video game coupled with a few pages ripped from the scripts of “Mad Max” and “Escape From New York.”

Ugly. ..and unpleasant -- and clueless on a grand scale.

Visuals can't fill a spiritual vacuum, and Stay remains a pretty package that's empty on the inside.

The result is an incredibly disorganized movie with a few funny scenes -- most of which are revealed in the commercials.

The foundational mistake came when someone said, “Hey, let’s make another ‘Alien’ movie.” Newsflash: The alien concept is dead. Leave it alone, and leave poor Ian Holm out of it.

The production values are first rate. But you will wait in vain to hear a good reason for this movie's existence.

A fall-off in writing is part of the problem, but I think a more important issue is the replacement of Terry Zwigoff (“Crumb”) as director. Zwigoff’s humor is razor-sharp and incisive, qualities missing from Bad Santa 2.

The Ghost and the Darkness could have been an effective film about the virtues of courage for its own sake. But the picture is too lightweight, too posturing and too self-important to go in an introspective direction.

The result is that rare movie specimen, a completely intentional, expertly guided work of art that fails almost completely.

Chase is so dull in this film, he looks as if he's sleepwalking.

And then there’s the real problem with Pitch Perfect 3: The best thing about the first movie — the singing — feels like an afterthought.

A slow-moving family drama guaranteed to induce a nap if not somnambulism.

A dead-serious piece of activist filmmaking.

Much of the action onscreen doesn't ring true. Seasoned independent film director Henry Jaglom doesn't just explore the subject - he smothers the audience with it.

There’s just one big problem here: It Comes at Night is about as enjoyable for the audience as it is for the people in the movie. On both sides of the screen, misery reigns.

IF may have the sheen and aura of an expensive, important production, with a good cast and lots of famous names in voice roles (Steve Carell, George Clooney, Richard Jenkins), but the movie is a disordered wreck that confuses impulse for inspiration and dissipates any impossibility of impact by constantly switching focus.

This isn't pleasant to watch. Neither is it amusing, intellectually engaging, whimsically fascinating, coldly satirical or painfully poignant, though at any given moment in this erratic film director Tom Tykwer might be trying for one of these conflicting tones.

Burns presents two mildly amusing fellows wrestling with romance and expects the audience to see them as embodying universal dilemmas. At the very least, he wants us to take these guys as seriously as they take themselves.

The Shack is unshakable in its religious message, and that’s admirable in a cynical world. But viewed objectively as cinema, it’s just not a very good film.

Sometimes it's unpleasant, sometimes it's insincere, and for long stretches it's boring.

Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves feels like Daley and Goldstein, who also co-wrote with Michael Gilio, asked ChatGPT, the artificial intelligence chatbot developed by OpenAI: “Write a Marvel movie except with ‘Dungeons & Dragons’ characters.” Seconds later, this spit out.

Thus, we find ourselves watching an ice-cold movie about competition that contains not a shred of rooting interest.

By the end, Downsizing is one of those great ideas that should have just stayed an idea.

Never penetrates Cobain's circumstances or character.

A Dog’s Purpose is peril porn; the animal grows old or faces tragedy and expires over and over, reincarnating into a new dog with the same brain.

It’s just not very fun or engaging.

Melissa is the only fully developed character in an overlong, badly paced film filled with cliched dialogue and accented by pleasant yet forgettable music.

Most of Thor: Love and Thunder is a mess, pleased with itself and tonally everywhere. As bad as one of the better “Pirates of the Caribbean” movies, but that’s still pretty horrible.

Eisner has almost nothing on his mind, no political rumblings, nothing behind the urge to upgrade vintage trash.

It's hard to sit all the way through Aeon Flux while fully awake.

The sequel is one big tease.

Essentially, this is a two-person picture that falls flat.

The movie’s one and only idea renders itself boring, with still half the movie left for the audience to endure.

A ponderous and dreadful film.

Dreary movie.

The film is like watching a very bad play as presented by a very bad director.

So it’s not my bag, but I went into Jackass Forever with the best intentions.

The Snowman is ugly and nasty, but that’s not the worst of it. The worst is that it’s boring and makes no sense.

A tired and dispiriting affair that takes forever to get going.

It's possible there has never been anything like it. It contains memorable dialogue, vivid characters and several superb scenes, and yet it still manages to be wrong, a complete miscalculation.

Because there’s nary a situation that seems reality-based and uncontrived in this movie that has all the subtlety of a sledgehammer, filled with over-the-top cardboard characters that seem sneered upon by their creator. If Mirabella-Davis doesn’t believe in his characters, why should we?

The problem with Fingernails is it takes itself too seriously. Co-writer and director Christos Nikou takes a clinical, dramatic approach to such a high-concept, over-the-top and ridiculous premise. He seems so enamored by the concept of the movie that he forgot that the movie was supposed to be about relationships and not the testing.

The movie [Sugarman] made gives little indication that she understands teen girls, dramatic or plain. Much of Confessions seems clueless and -- even worse for moviegoers of any age -- listless.

The movie’s stylistic idea gets in the way of its story, and the story is too slim to sustain a full-length feature. And as the political ideas become as self-conscious as the style, Where Is Kyra? starts to feel a little like poverty porn.

It's the worst kind of convoluted thriller -- it can never unravel satisfactorily because there's nothing simple at its center, just more confusion.

It's both amazing and depressing how much talent goes to waste in the lame adaptation of Kurt Vonnegut Jr.'s 1973 absurdist novel.

It’s just cheap, it’s bad, and a completely out-of-left-field Pink Floyd reference — one of their employees is named Syd, the other Barrett — doesn’t help. It just feels like part of the general sloppiness.

There's only so much Soderbergh can do. Gray's Anatomy is made up mainly of Gray, and there's a whole lot of Gray going on. The story is unremarkable. Gray's observations, pedestrian.

The Cable Guy doesn't know when to pull the plug. Much of the film plays like a personal boob tube with Carrey trapped inside, determined to act his way out in a mugging freak show. He's a disturbing mixture of psychopath and pathetically misguided lonely soul.

The best thing about “Living Boy” is the performance of Cynthia Nixon, who plays Thomas’ emotionally unstable mother.

A funny comedy for about 90 seconds. Then Bette Midler goes off a cliff.

This one is a long, archetypal journey that screeches to a halt a few stops short of its destination.

The fact that Grandma is played by Jane Fonda, flouncing around in natural fabrics, should tell you something. It should tell you there is no casting decision or character nuance or plot turn too obvious to indulge.

80 for Brady is a good-natured effort, and that good nature keeps it from becoming hateable. But still, it’s fairly awful.

Fennell (“Promising Young Woman,” “Saltburn”) is a skilled filmmaker who can put over her ideas. The problem is that all her ideas here are bad — self-defeating, enervating and, in several places, unintentionally hilarious.

Martha Marcy May Marlene is a strange case, a drama that's disturbing and yet inert. Writer-director Sean Durkin builds an atmosphere of dread, which means that he persuades us to believe in the characters and in the central situation. But he doesn't build interest.

The film ends up landing in a confused middle category. It's neither a coherent, discrete work nor a zany tribute to the late actor.

Here's a tiresome feature that could be made into a wonderful 20-minute film -- or, with a few adjustments, into two or three 10-minute shorts.

The story, based on a novel by Victor Headley, is pointless and occasionally ridiculous. And the movie is hardly helped by a protagonist that we’re expected to care about, even as he does an unending series of colossally stupid, violent and self-destructive things.

In Godsend, we have the spectacle of three good actors tied to the mast of a sinking premise.

UglyDolls is a mind-numbing, low-rent version of “Toy Story,” with saccharine songs and a plot with echoes of, no kidding, the Holocaust. If you’re under 10, you might like it.

It’s billed as another horror comedy, but when tidbits of humor manifest, it feels forced. There are few notable moments.

[Hartley] changes the script enough so that the integrity of his experiment goes out the window. But he doesn't change enough so that the narrative can have any suspense.

Dull and unilluminating.

The bottom line here is that Cyrus is ghastly in The Last Song, bad not just in one or two ways, but in all kinds of ways.

Watching The Goldfinch is like reading a novel where someone ripped out every third page from front to back. You can tell there’s a good story, with compelling characters, and maybe a strong mystery. But the connective tissue is missing to the point of constant distraction.

Gets everything wrong, starting with a title that indicates a somewhat innocent romantic transgression.

Director David Kellogg tries to inject energy into the picture with speeded-up sequences and smash-bang cutting, and the art direction is bright and eye-catching. But it's just gourmet dressing on dead lettuce. The movie is unable to balance Ice's aspirations to genuine adult-level coolness in a story clearly designed to appeal to the sensibilities of pre-teenage girls, and the result is bland and often absurd. [22 Oct 1991, p.F1]

Runner Runner is less than mediocre, but it's not repellent, which means that to watch it is to root for it - and to be disappointed.

Opportunities for comedy are missed by miles. Davidson gets gonzo gags, Palmer is 007 with a heart, Murphy and Longoria try to exist in reality. That halfhearted miasma of genres results in tonal confusion. Murphy throws in what seem like ad libs to spice up a moribund script, but it’s not enough to add flavor to a bland stew.

It's dreadful, but it's a special kind of dreadful -- the kind designed to appeal to intelligent people on principle.

To be sure, The Death of Dick Long is a weird one, in that it starts out intense and gradually loses steam, until nothing really matters and the audience might as well leave. This movie could be used in film schools to teach how not to structure a story.

Bram Stoker's Dracula is a lovingly made, gorgeously realized, meticulously crafted failure. It has big names, a big budget, big sets, a big, thundering score and even big hair. But it doesn't do it. It doesn't excite or fascinate but just lies there on the screen. [13 Nov 1992, p. C1]

A mindless comedy where the blatant racial stereotypes are outnumbered only by the flatulence jokes. The best thing that can be said about this movie is it falls just short of being an international incident.

It is never a good sign when the audience is two steps ahead of the characters on the screen. Waiting for them to catch up wears everyone out.

The presence of Washington lends the picture a much-needed dose of authenticity. But in the end Virtuosity is disconnected and uninvolving, despite -- or maybe because of -- a climax that comes in three distinct waves. One section seems to be a half-hour sound-and-light show.

Sordid, brutal and depressing.

A lot of resources went into making G-Force - a lot of talent, a lot of money, a lot of marketing - and there's not much to show for it, not even some halfway imaginative 3-D gimmickry.

By taking the “dark” out of the dark comedy, “The Roses” can’t decide what it wants to be, and becomes as flimsy as its setting: Mendocino is played by a seaside town in Devon, United Kingdom, and it looks more like New England than Northern California.

Recalling the earthiness Broderick Crawford brought to the original, I couldn't help thinking Gandolfini should have been cast as Willie.

Mean-spirited and not remotely clever, though it strives for archness at every turn.