The biggest puzzlement about "What'' is what it's doing in major movie theaters around the country when it so clearly belongs on one of those small cable channels given to peculiar programming.

Made mostly by white people, it's a film largely about how awful white people are -- just the kind of thing many white viewers will love and consider important. But however you might feel about this kind of movie, Map of the Human Heart is fake merchandise, an unfelt, boring travelogue that covers itself in its anti-racist, anti-war message and then dares audiences to notice its barrenness at the core. [14 May 1993, p.C6]

If you see Alice Through the Looking Glass, prepare to lean forward in your seat just to stay awake.

Tag isn’t interesting at all, but its failure is. It’s the kind of movie that makes the viewer ask questions, such as, why isn’t this working? Why is this bombing? Why is this dying the death? Why am I shifting in my seat just to stay conscious? The movie seems like it should be funny, but it’s not, so why?

What could have been a brilliant short becomes deadly, stretched to feature length. The last hour of Nadja takes on the pace of a stranger's vacation video. In a sure sign of desperation, the careful tone of the opening is abandoned in scattershot attempts at cheap laughs. The film's world is undermined, and Nadja gets as precious, smirky and as boring as a Hal Hartley picture.

If London were a comedy, it just might work. Instead, it's a dead-serious marathon of angst from cool kids old enough to know they're mouthing cliches.

The new comedy is screechingly inane and skitters in nine directions at once.

In her feature debut, Manzoor does something truly bizarre here, and not in a good way. She gets a whole audience rooting for love to triumph but then tries to make a lovable heroine out of the irrational, malevolent character who wants to undermine everything the audience is looking forward to.

Zero is more of an intellectual exercise in which you’re never given all the variables to solve the problem — and then you find your calculator was on acid the whole time anyway.

(Driver) is stuck in a mess of a movie that suffers from awkward writing, a plot with major disconnects in plausibility, an annoyingly screechy kid character and cheesy production values.

The action sequences are just as ridiculous as the romance parts, but at least James seems comfortable with the pratfalls and gross-out scenarios.

Sarsgaard and Jones are good actors, and both are fine. The real star, though, is sound designer Ian Gaffney-Rosenfeld and his team, who bring a depth and dimension to the story that sorely needs it.

Friedkin is steeped in gore, like some cinematic Macbeth, and it's obscuring his artistic vision.

About as awful as a film can be without being the ultimate awful, which is boring.

Ouija has something wrong with it from the first five minutes.

An action blockbuster that's one of the biggest misfires in its genre since "Godzilla."

Suffers from some of the deficiencies common to first features. It is sincere and earnest but the product of an assumption that the milieu itself is compelling enough to command an audience's attention.

An overstuffed, underfed numbskull movie.

The Adventures of Ford Fairlane, is a stiff, guaranteed to disappoint just about everybody, except those rooting against him. [11 Jul 1990, p.E1]

The last half-hour of “Opus” is an unbearable slog, with an unsatisfying ending.

The bad news is that the characters and situations are platitudes and the story is so heavy-handed that the film is hard to sit through.

It’s all about as exciting as watching two drawings fight each other on a computer monitor.

Daniels has the talent to make a genuinely complex horror film. What was “Precious,” if not a horror movie made all the more chilling by its lack of supernatural elements? But for “The Deliverance,” Daniels simply dusts off the same crab-walking, veins-a-popping demon moves we have seen a million times.

Shoot 'Em Up is not only the title of Hollywood's latest descent into nonsensical mayhem but pretty much sums up the entire inane plot as well.

Muddled, to put it kindly.

An overwrought weepie, it may be inspired by the recent dramas of Pedro Almodóvar, but it comes off as Almodóvar Lite -- muy lite.

A glossy piece of trash.

Ghost Rider has everything you don't want from your superhero movie, including lack of logic, boring action scenes, bad acting in the supporting performances, a brutally slow 114-minute running time and cringe-worthy dialogue.

Girl 6 is glossy, technically proficient and a glib waste of time. Lee and his screenwriter goof around with phone-sex rhetoric ("I wanna service your juicy kielbasa''), but that gets tired quickly.

It's an uninspired and instantly forgettable film. But it completely succeeds by its own standards: an 87-minute rainy-day distraction that will probably make a zillion dollars.

The film is like watching Ozzy Osbourne bite the head off a rubber bat -- it's only almost heinous.

Nothing really works here, and nobody seems to have put in a huge amount of effort, except maybe the marketing department -- there are many product placements.

A Family Affair never even makes the case as to why these people should be together.

Noe isn't a graceful filmmaker. He wants to traumatize his audience, barnstorm us, make us pay in anxiety and sweat and scorched nerves for the ugly truths he wants us to swallow.

The movie reveals itself as not merely dull, but pointless.

The chief problem with Your Highness is its lack of imagination - its misuse and overuse of language and visual riffs that are only marginally amusing at best.

It looks like an exploding art project - but fails to capture the books' childlike voice and charm.

Sadly, fun is a rare element on Pandora, as “Borderlands” trudges through its treasure hunt scenario and endless ripoffs of better franchises from “Lethal Weapon” to “Star Wars.” It makes you want to go home and blow up your Playstation.

Goes nowhere.

Has to go down as a failed comedy. It's just not enough of a comedy.

This is how bad Table 19 gets: At a certain point in the movie, there is absolutely no reason that any of the characters would remain at the wedding or anywhere near it. So the movie devises a false reason to keep them in the general vicinity.

Its single biggest failing - an affront to Lewis Carroll and the charms of nonsense literature - is that it makes sense.

Credit the director for one thing. He could have stretched it to three hours, but he gets in and out of this mess in less than two.

Less an original product than a shoddy tribute to other mediocre cop movies.

With most movies that fail, the fault can be ascribed to carelessness or lack or inspiration or cynicism. But Chelsea Walls, directed by actor Ethan Hawke, is clearly a labor of love.

Coppola has no trouble convincing viewers that Marie Antoinette is an interesting historical subject, but there's a big distance between that and creating a fascinating personality or fashioning a compelling narrative.

Encino Man is so puerile and sophomoric that, by comparison, ''Fast Times at Ridgemont High'' is ''Our Town,'' and ''Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure'' is ''Gulliver's Travels.'' For that matter, Pauly Shore makes Wayne and Garth, the two cable TV rec-room rockers of ''Wayne's World'' fame, seem like they belong at the Algonquin Hotel round table. [22 May 1992, p.D3]

There should be drama here, but everything falls as flat as the withered valley floor. Not all is lost: The cinematography and special effects are quite competent. The script just leaves us thirsty for more.

Heartfelt but interminable movie.

The Nut Job 2 isn’t maddening like “Smurfs 2,” where you continue to hate yourself years later for spending the money. It’s an adequate babysitter that completely fails to inspire.

It’s so uncritical of its subject that it has the unintended effect of undermining its mission, which appears to be recruiting new devotees of the faith.

Here Balasko, best known as a comedian, is particularly satisfying. But the reward is too small on the investment, and the film's resolution is downright irritating - not just a waste of time, but a waste of time with attitude.

While "Saw" and "Saw II" were pretty good splatter films hampered by spectacularly unbelievable endings, Saw III is annoying for almost the duration of the movie.

Scream 7 is anything but cutting edge.

Worst of all, in promoting its hero's eccentric journey as a voyage of healing, the movie replaces emotional precision and intellectual honesty with syrupy sincerity and insistence. It turns boring and cute and begs us to love it.

Almost everything about the movie lands with an emphatic, preordained thud.

Only in the movie business could someone sell such shoddy merchandise and expect people to buy it. If The Hunger Games: Mockingjay — Part 1 were an appliance, it would be a broken toaster that people would toss in the garbage. Except that analogy is too kind, in that “Mockingjay” would be half a toaster.

Like Disney’s tepid 2019 live-action remake of “The Lion King,” it’s virtually a beat-by-beat remake of the original, but without the original’s energy and movement.

Everything about the idea of Mr. Popper's Penguins sounds lovely, and everything about the actual movie is ugly.

Logan Lucky is not a contemptible piece of work. It’s a genuine effort by talented people that never quite comes off.

The Lighthouse is more than four times longer than a “Twilight Zone” episode, and 100 times worse.

A dreary little thriller that irritates more than it thrills.

Saltburn is a remarkable combination of smart and stupid. Its problem is that it’s superficially smart and deeply stupid. It’s clever and amusing in 20 different ways, but when it really matters, it descends into ridiculousness.

The banter, often Smith’s strong suit, is witless and tiresome, mostly obsessive conversations about minor characters in “Star Wars” and other aspects of pop culture. It’s probably not Smith’s intention, but we end up feeling sorry for the characters, that they inhabit such a tiny mental landscape.

What makes Aloft better than dismissible is that it’s a sincere failure, not a cynical one, and the cinematography is arresting. In fact, for scattered seconds throughout the movie, Aloft is beautiful to look at.

It's implausible, cartoonishly overdrawn.

Listen Up Philip wants to say something meaningful about human relationships. But like a frustrated writer staring at a blank piece of paper, the words just never appear.

There’s a weepy turn in the sentimental third act, and why not? Nothing else was working.

Alan Bates and Charlotte Rampling are the brave stars of this pretty but sterile adaptation of the Anton Chekhov stage classic.

Cool World is less artful, short on scripted finesse, and is lacking technical acumen. [11 Jul 1992]

Standard hack-and-giggle fare, with a few wisecracks mixed in with the gore.

When the end finally arrives, it brings no sense of completion, just a sort of numb awareness that the pain has stopped.

The only thing to take from the wreckage of “Lisa Frankenstein” is the performance of Soberano, in her Hollywood debut. She finds comedy in a weak script and radiates goodness without being boring. Let’s hope she has better movies in her future.

It's a strange thing, this type of whimsy. Kari offers us ideas in place of characters, and yet he expects us to see through these ideas to the real-life conditions they represent - and then to respond to them in kind.

Diamantino is one of those movies that looks super fun to make but is mind-numbing to actually watch.

As far as formulaic, empty and disappointing comedies go, The Watch is far from the worst. About every seven or eight minutes, perhaps a dozen times over the course of the picture, the movie generates a medium-size laugh. Not a big laugh.

More than the usual bad or even numbingly horrible movie. It's an amalgam of many of the modern cinema's worst tendencies and modern filmmaking's most unfortunate misconceptions.

A single 125-minute monstrosity of a cop movie.

When You're Strange is a remedial Doors class, taught by a professor who sounds as if he's doing voiceovers for car commercials.

Plodding and unfunny.

Could hardly be called a success -- it's rather a likable disaster.

Haunted Mansion shouldn’t have been rebooted, but if made, it should have clocked in at a modest 90 minutes.

Norm of the North feels as if it intended to be a better movie, but got confused along the way.

Too ludicrous to be taken seriously, but not entertaining enough to rate as camp.

In the long history of bad movies about bad illnesses, A Little Bit of Heaven just might be the worst.

The Cave is National Geographic mixed with Roger Corman, and by the end you'll probably be wishing you saw "Red Eye" instead.

Has an unrelenting staccato quality. Some would say a jackhammer quality.

The best thing about All I See Is You is that it’s not afraid to experiment. But it’s an experiment that went wrong, a film in which ambiguity trumps complexity.

Michael can't be killed, and so a ''Halloween'' picture can never really end. It can only stop. And since it can stop anywhere, it may as well stop sooner than later. This one stops later, and by the time it does it's hard to care. [17 Oct 1989, p.E4]

I know this is heresy on a number of fronts, but much of The Love We Make is boring.

There's run-of-the-mill bad, and then there's a movie like Hardware. [14 Sep 1990, p.E3]

This plot leaves ample room for viewers to sweat the small stuff, like whether Trevor Nunn's score is more Marines ad or deodorant commercial.

This makes Hostiles something of a slog, but a movie-literate slog containing some impressive scenes.

First, and perhaps most important, it should be disclosed that my 4-year-old laughed pretty much nonstop throughout Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Squeakquel. This was his "Citizen Kane."

You can almost say it simulates an experience of brain injury in the audience: Nothing adheres, nothing connects. It's just nonstop cuteness, poses and emptiness - with nothing logically following from one moment to the next. It would be exaggerating to call it torture, and yet why split hairs?

Held back by a story and script that is often silly and confusing.

Foy is anything but mysterious or feral. Rooney Mara and Noomi Rapace, who previously played this role, seemed appropriately weird, but weird depends on hiding something, and Foy hides nothing.

Happy End is the latest from Michael Haneke, an uncompromising filmmaker whose work is sometimes brilliant and sometimes hard to watch, and sometimes both, but not this time. Happy End is just hard to watch.