Not very good.

Butter is a misfire. At 90 minutes it feels inflated, and though clearly intended as funny, it's difficult to locate, except in the most general terms, the focus of the movie's satire, and there's not a laugh to be had.

Scorsese stuffs the film with heavy-handed art direction and piles on a ludicrously ominous soundtrack. The soundtrack is a constant reminder of the movie's importance and only highlights its unimportance.

Noirish thrillers live or die by their plot twists and dialogue -- talk literally being cheap compared to action shots. Unfortunately, the script by first-time filmmaker Paul Thomas Anderson fails on both counts.

We all know how actors overact when they play Italians, and we all know how actors overact when they play brain-damaged characters, so just imagine Knight's performance as a brain-damaged Italian American.

The landscape shots are impressive, and it's fascinating just to look at the native people -- but after 10 minutes, you've had the experience. Connery is crusty, twinkling and attractive, but in reciting this ham-handed dialogue, the best he can do is be a good actor trapped in a bad film. [07 Feb 1992, p.D1]

All this could work, but Perkins never finds the proper tone in what is almost a spoof of the horror genre.

It’s a preening piece of work, aiming to flatter and please, while masquerading as something hard-hitting and daring. And because of all that, it’s a bore.

An utter debacle.

Visually, Jonah Hex is an orgy of overstatement: rapid edits, garish colors, harsh light.

Boyle isn't the first British or European filmmaker to make his obligatory zesty American road movie (apparently it's a dream for anyone raised on American cinema), but knowing that doesn't make A Life Less Ordinary any less tiring or its numerous pilferings any less obvious or annoying.

It’s a formula movie, which wouldn’t necessarily be a problem, except that it’s a sort of bad version of itself.

Stupid, derivative horror film that substitutes extreme gore for suspense.

Just because it's a conscious commentary on other vile, useless, pointless cinematic exercises doesn't make it any less vile, useless and pointless.

Just awful… There is probably not one interrupted 60-second stretch in which a line of dialogue doesn't clunk, an action doesn't ring false or an irritating plot turn doesn't present itself. [25 May 1991]

Chock-full of holes.

A feeble excuse for a movie.

Were there an award for most bizarre and dispiriting comedy-horror hybrid featuring killer dolls, the latest installment in the "Child's Play" series would have it locked up.

It could be considered an achievement that a full-length feature movie with a talented ensemble cast, led by Kristen Bell and Allison Janney, couldn’t create a single character that you would want to spend more than five minutes with, but there it is. Not even picturesque London can save this witless comedy.

A rather boring horror film.

In the end, the great fault of Terminator: Dark Fate is that the filmmakers didn’t trust what they had. They didn’t trust how much audiences enjoy Linda Hamilton and Arnold Schwarzenegger. They didn’t trust their audience’s interest enough to let the movie breathe. They thought Hamilton and Schwarzenegger could be seasonings for a dish of the usual slop.

That's a few too many agendas for one film.

The Village seems poised to become as cheesy in its effects as a low-budget horror film. Shyamalan's gracefulness keeps his movie just out of that abyss.

There’s one unalloyed good thing to be said for Damsel: It marks the end of Millie Bobby Brown’s apprenticeship. Her child actress years are over. She’s grown up and ready to star in movies that audiences can take as seriously as she does.

For all the precision shooting, Autumn is a colossal misfire, a tedious film noir wannabe. It doesn't even qualify as film gris.

Credit to Hart, though, for trying to make every scene, comic or sentimental, as strong as he can. He reads each line that’s supposed to be funny as if it is, locates Sonny’s emotional truth no matter how ridiculous the scene is, and never lets his signature energy sag.

The film’s broad performances, undemanding humor and not-too-frightening horror are all designed to appeal to kids (and older fans of the “Haunted House” series). Adults are advised to enjoy the living Spirit Halloween aesthetic of it all, and remember that you love your children while enduring the rest of this hollow experience.

Director Edward Zwick tried to make a great movie, but somewhere in the process he forgot to make a good one.

It's a sad sight when two big- name stars sink this low, especially when their demoralization and embarrassment are right up on the screen. [24 Aug 1991, p.C3]

The movie is overplotted, a soulless maze of special effects and relentless action.

There’s one big problem about No Ordinary Man: The Billy Tipton Documentary: It’s not really about Billy Tipton. Instead, it’s about how transgender representation is perceived in the media, chiefly between 1989, when Tipton died, and current times.

This isn't absurdity. This is nonsense - and it's as boring as nonsense.

Suffers from a problem in its rhythm. It's not that its pace is too slow, but that it's too regular, and this lack of syncopation makes it feel slow.

It is never remotely serious, and yet for the most part it isn’t funny, either.

For golden retriever lovers, "Fluke" is a must-see. For everyone else, wait for the video.

Humorless, confusing and not very fun to watch.

One pities poor Molly Parker, a fine actress who was somehow persuaded to disrobe for this degrading and dispiriting Wayne Wang film.

In a movie as hackneyed and as dull as Evolution, the small favors of Duchovny's performance stand out.

Could use script transfusion, or at least a few quarts of levity.

This is a movie of excesses that doesn't know when to settle down. It aims to be a slapstick comedy, a romantic comedy and a plain old romance but falls short of each goal.

The Unholy Trinity is a passable, 95-minute diversion, but an unremarkable one.

A well-intentioned horror film that is weighted down by stellar cast members who for the most part act as if they don't want to be there.

Every moviegoer will have his own breaking point, when The Mortal Instruments: City of Bones surpasses the mundane and enters the ridiculous.

Think of The Bubble as part of a pattern we could have anticipated. Pandemic movies almost can’t be any good at this point. The pandemic won’t be funny, interesting or anything anybody wants to think about until we’re safely beyond it by a few years. So, filmmakers, set your watches for pandemic nostalgia to commence circa 2027, and between now and then, just put it out of your minds.

So desperate and silly that here and there, it's a lot of fun.

The movie isn't hellish, because there's always hope of leaving it. It's more like purgatory, two whole hours of it.

Some people clearly had a good time making this film. Whether you have a good time watching it depends almost entirely on your Pony love walking in.

Who wants to spend a minute on the Strip with the chance that there might be people as annoying as the characters played by Cameron Diaz and Ashton Kutcher walking around?

Moon is boring. Agonizingly, deadeningly, coma-inducingly, they-could-bury-you-alive-accidentally boring.

What a waste of a great comedian. What demented casting.

Only Lovers Left Alive is simply dead, an exercise in style, bland humor and vague gesture that yet seems to have been made in the naive expectation of a conventional response - that is, of an audience's actually caring.

Bordello of Blood easily could have been called "Bore- dello of Blood." This gory vampire spoof is remarkably free of jolts, hardly registering as a fright film, with a series of weak special effects involving many globs of guts...The big themes in this lackluster second feature under the "Tales From the Crypt" banner are sex and religion. Both are presented with painfully sophomoric irreverence.

If For Greater Glory were a person, it would be wearing two different socks. It is a scattered mess, as earnest as a folk song, but like a folk song that goes on for two hours and 23 minutes. Not only does it never justify its epic length, it gets even the small things wrong.

Bezucha made something perverse, a feel-bad holiday film about a repellent family, with a milquetoast dad and a smug, devious harpy of a mom.

This is bad, borderline garbage, but disturbing, too, in that it’s just the kind of fake-clever awfulness that might be cinema’s future.

An empty exercise.

This remake of the 1981 horror classic starts well, but it soon degenerates into tiresome shock gore that overstays its welcome, despite the film's modest run time. Jane Levy as a heroin addict going through withdrawal is the one bright spot.

It’s not a cookie cutter superhero film or predictable horror film. That’s the good news. The bad news is that it’s form without enough content.

Numbingly dull and repetitive.

Spiffy-looking, well-intentioned but ultimately witless film.

The audience has already checked out, long before the formulaic finish.

Heavy-handed dialogue, flurries of melodrama and a silly ending make the whole enterprise sink like a stone.

The sequel might have the formula down, but it lacks everything that made "Anaconda'' fun.

Britney Vs Spears often feels just as exploitative as the case it portrays.

The least they could have done with the sequel Candyman : Farewell to the Flesh is make it scary. How they managed to give us a killer with a bloody hook going around eviscerating people and have him come off as mild as a butterfly is boggling.

At times, "European Gigolo" feels more like an international incident than a movie.

The movie is overly long and much too intense for small children, yet it's filled with dialogue and plot turns that are too juvenile to thrill adult audiences.

So, The King’s Man is a mess, purposeless, pointless, witless. However, it’s not obnoxious. At times, it can even be close to enjoyable watching it squirm and try to make sense of itself. It has a genial idiocy and one genuinely effective sequence, involving mountain climbing. So, to its credit, it’s never actively annoying. It’s just, from start to finish, a disappointment.

But throwing fairy dust in our eyes can’t make us think we’ve entered Fairy Land. It just takes a lowdown tale and inflates it until it bursts.

It would require a near-lethal injection of nitrous oxide to induce laughter.

Rod Lurie's heated but empty-headed remake re-creates the original's trudge toward savagery but can't re-create its social context - and doesn't bring anything new to the table.

This poor excuse for a thriller turns, with a great crunching of gears, into a mess of a buddy comedy. Either way, it misfires.

Moana 2 is finally here, ready to assault audiences this holiday season with one of the most ill-conceived sequels in Disney history. It took three directors to sink this movie — Dana Ledoux Miller, Jason Hand and David Derrick Jr. — and it’s so bad it feels like they did it on purpose.

Everything that’s good about Cruella can’t obscure the fact that it was a very bad idea. The movie makes gestures toward style. It has first-rate costume design. The soundtrack contains a series of well-loved but mostly irrelevant pop songs from the 1960s and ’70s. But we still end up with a movie that should never have been made.

As it stands,The Fourth Kind boasts a creepy kind of joke - and a confusing kind of horror.

The rat problem happens only on the graveyard shift, accounting for the title of Stephen King's all-time worst movie -- and he's got a lot of them. [27 Oct 1990, p.C3]

Ideally It Could Happen to You should be fun all the way, with the audience confident things will turn out right. Instead it's mostly annoying, with an ending that feels tagged on.

A disappointing sequel to the far funnier "Diary of a Mad Black Woman."

Nia Vardalos has such a warm, alert energy that’s impossible to hate My Big Fat Greek Wedding 2, even as it’s impossible to like it, even a little.

The need for a sequel was zero - proved by the fact that the characters end the movie pretty much exactly where they started it.

In the important things, in all the ways that really count, Caché is a handsome fraud.

The rambling Life Itself is a multigenerational drama about the messiness of life, but the emotional impact of the movie gets lost in the messiness of its screenplay. And though there is not one subpar acting performance, the film itself comes off as an exercise in self-consciousness.

An ill-conceived comedy.

The performers don't really seem at the top of their game here.

The reboot of the "Friday the 13th" series is a pretty big mess - not particularly scary or interesting or even gory by 21st century movie standards.

Squanders its comic capital on redundant bits about her perplexed family and secret society of fellow sex addicts.

The worst kind of avant-garde film, one that hides its lack of commitment to the story, the characters and the genre under cover of being experimental. It mocks form and plays with form but offers nothing in its place, just boredom, emptiness and the oldest metaphor in captivity, about grass coming up through concrete.

The only thing scary about the new version is realizing that someone keeps giving director Jan De Bont money to make movies.

Anyone can make a bad movie, but it takes a good filmmaker to make one as bad as I'm Not There.

About as weak a movie as can be made without actively trying.

Sollima knows how to film violence, so individual moments stand out. What Sollima can’t do is make a good movie from a bad script.

It plays like a string of cliches linked together to form a movie with not a single moment of surprise or originality.

The film isn't very interesting because it isn't well made.

If you see only one bad movie this year, definitely make it Knowing. The first major disappointment from director Alex Proyas is a disaster movie, a horror picture, a "Da Vinci Code"-style thriller and an end-of-days religious film all at once.

Efron makes what he can of an impossible role. He’s watchable, that helps.

The screenplay is so cognitively impaired that the filmmakers might have been better off hacking up "Fast Times at Ridgemont High," "Dazed and Confused" and "Dude, Where's My Car?" and then sticking together random bits with masking tape. At least that would have made some sense.

The movie lacks the one thing that the classic "Three Musketeers" story can't do without: panache.

A Quiet Place: Day One is about a cancer patient in hospice who hopes to die with dignity. Also, there are terrible monsters threatening humanity. What an odd idea for a horror prequel.