It boggles the mind that after six years of silence, all Tarantino has to offer is this garbage.

For Tim and Eric, what's funny is what's odd, ultra-cheap, pathetic or scurvy - and what's funniest of all is that some people just don't get it.

Filled with overly processed situations it tries to sell with manic energy, "Kranks" is canned, hammy and rolling as fast as it can.

Supposedly he's suffered, supposedly there are demons lurking within, but guess what: This is a movie. If we can't see it, it's not there.

Repressed desire! A sultry soap-opera star! Incest! Gay politics! "La Mujer de Mi Hermano" has it all. Now if it only had a decent plot.

What has gone wrong in director Matthew Vaughn’s process that he can offer up an awful mess like “Argylle” and just hope that nobody will notice? He must notice.

Hollywood hit-making at its efficient, formulaic worst.

There is little debauchery to be had in Laurence Dunmore's adaptation of The Libertine. In fact, hedonism has never looked so bleak.

Numbing.

It’s a poorly made film, with rough edits, distracting staging and plot contrivances that can be predicted to the moment.

You can get away with almost anything in a farce except failing to be funny, and that's what kills Death at a Funeral.

Doesn't accomplish its objective.

Director-co-writer Gary McKendry seems to know a thing or two about hard-fisted fight scenes, but he muddies up the visuals with obligatory spasms of shaky-cam.

Clocking in at two hours and 20 minutes, it seems intended to have been a crime epic in the vein of Michael Mann’s “Heat,” about two men of talent and spirit who happen to be on opposite sides of the law. And it’s sort of like that, if you can imagine a Michael Mann picture that has been set on fire and dropped from an airplane.

An unbroken flow of sad or nasty incidents.

It boasts only loose ties to the 1954 romance "Three Coins in the Fountain." And it's best not to even think of "Roman Holiday," the gold standard for hanging, and driving, and doing as Romans do. Rent that instead.

It’s awful. But it could be where movies are going — into a wasteland.

While it's beautifully shot, it's way too slow.

The film is morbid and mawkish, and packed with enough forced whimsy to make you scream.

This time the martial arts philosophy lesson rings hollow. [10 Feb 1990, p.C5]

It's forgettable matinee fodder.

Black Widow is what happens when movies abandon human values for the emotional deadness and emptiness of the superhero movie.

That Vampires Suck is a step above god-awful is something of a miracle.

The problems with Thanksgiving are many, starting with the awful script by Jeff Rendell. Not only is the story — concocted by Roth and Rendell — predictable, but there is not one clever line of dialogue in the whole 107-minute film. The cast and characters are bland.

The dreary teen drama Step Up appears to be cobbled together from bits and pieces of successful movies.

A desperate, pathetic mess.

An awkward and aggressively unfunny film.

Without a compelling - and convincingly compelled - character at its center, the details in this film lack an agonizing drop-by-drop tension. The various pieces fall apart like the shattered mirrors that figure in the crimes. [15 Aug 1986]

As pleasantly earnest as Jim Belushi tries to be, and as pert as Linda Hamilton is as his plucky wife, their new movie Mr. Destiny is so contrived, pokey and predictable that it becomes a test of viewer patience. [12 Oct 1990, p.E5]

Numbing and inert.

A dull film with unsympathetic characters brought together by a gimmicky premise that's handled with no imagination and a pristine fraudulence of emotion. Aside from that, it's great.

A glob of comedy, drama, action and suspense.

Runs out of ideas long before the projector runs out of film.

Fast Color is not a success, in that it’s not enjoyable as entertainment. It doesn’t hold an audience.

Not only a step back in time - to 1431 - but a step back in this martial artist's international film career.

Highly visual but cold. It's undeniably inventive, but also relentlessly fey and self-consciously zany and, in terms of story, it moves with audacious slowness.

An overblown action monstrosity with no surprises, no exhilaration and no thrills.

A whimsical but flat-footed attempt to account for several lost months in the life of Jean-Baptiste Poquelin, known to the world as Molière.

Thinking people also like a little drama with their science fiction. On that score, Annihilation comes up short.

The Persian Version tries to pivot and fashion itself as a celebration of women’s strength across the generations, but it’s transparently something else — a daughter’s attempt to come to terms with a problematic mother. And it’s an effort in which there can be no suspense because Keshavarz’s strenuous effort to whitewash mom tells us that the movie, and the relationship, can only resolve in one way.

Only a couple of good gags in its pileup of otherwise lame jokes keep the production from being an unqualified stinker.

The Black Phone has better-than-average acting, an interesting period setting and well-developed characters. But it runs out of story less than halfway through, forcing the filmmakers to repeat the same kinds of actions, over and over, in order to stretch it to feature length.

In the end, Da 5 Bloods feels like a clumsy hybrid of two fine impulses — to make a heist movie set in Vietnam, and to make a statement about race in 2020. Alas, each intention doesn’t serve the other, and so both go unrealized.

At 86 minutes, Beavis and Butt-Head Do the Universe feels twice that long. Most of the good laughs are front-loaded in the premise; the rest pop up every 15 or 20 minutes, which isn’t exactly prime Mel Brooks ratio.

Seemingly intended as a celebration of the power of books, it's an occasionally incoherent, sleep-inducing picture that reduces narrative to mere mechanics.

Almost every moment has flashes and explosions and a pulsing, relentless soundtrack. It's like being trapped inside a video game.

A bloody mess.

Yonkers Joe is incoherent, succeeding neither as an exciting gambling ride nor a touching family story.

Exactly one minute longer than its predecessor, but it's a dragged-out exercise, with no epic scale and no spirit worth talking about.

The plot movement feels very much like an unpleasant formality, shoved forward by tiresome devices.

If you think of Pompeii as a ride, a conveyance for special effects, and not anything resembling an emotional experience, indifference can almost be a good thing.

There's no satisfaction and no pleasure to be gained by sitting through it. The characters are ludicrous and, worse than that, boring. And this is despite all the lead actors doing the best they can.

In a word, bull - cruddy, foul-smelling and fly-specked, an excuse for a series of cheap sex scenes and single-entendre gags. [15 June 1988]

Any good will built up during the decent first half hour is quickly vaporized.

The young actors are adequate, but they’re not intrinsically interesting, so their interior movements hold no fascination. With that in mind, The Kid Who Would Be King should have been an hour long, but an extra 20 minutes, just to stretch it to feature length, would have been forgivable. But a full 120 minutes for this was just borderline crazy.

This movie could really use an Avon Barksdale, but even actor Wood Harris, who played drug kingpin Barksdale in "The Wire," seems a bit lost.

The Peasants is filled with sniping, fistfights, brutal violence and sexual assaults and becomes unbearable through its nearly two-hour running time. Most of these characters you wouldn’t want to spend more than five minutes with, if that.

Asako’s only appeal seems to be that she’s very pretty. Her depth of character she apparently keeps to herself.

It's two hours of your life wasted, time once spent that can never be regained. Don't go. Don't do it. [30 Mar 1988]

Remaking Get Smart for the big screen might have sounded like a bad idea, but the movie shows it to have been something else: a REALLY bad idea.

Killers is the most gorgeous-looking torture porn film I have ever seen — and has a couple of tremendous action sequences. But it is also thoroughly disgusting.

De Palma seems to be trying too hard to make somebody else's great movie, once again an Alfred Hitchcock movie. Would someone please tell this guy to relax?

It's a well-meaning but ultimately feeble and misguided attempt to say something profound about the aftereffects of the 2001 attacks on New York.

You've probably seen this movie before, watching a child play with his toy Hot Wheels cars after eating multiple bowls of sugary breakfast cereal.

The movie's promise -- to provide a balanced argument -- goes unrealized, and all we're left with is the spectacle of an idiot bullying a genius.

A lightweight and sentimental exercise that succeeds at little except maybe inspiring the viewer to go out and find a decent curry.

The real problem with This Is 40 is its lack of truth, that Apatow wanted to express something about married life, and it eluded him. After all, no less than Kierkegaard once said that the actual dynamics of marriage are beyond the scope of art, and he was the best movie critic of the 19th century.

The last 15 minutes finally get it together for what passes as a movie experience with a considerable "gotcha!" quotient.

With “After Yang,” the distinctive filmmaker Kogonada has made a movie that is at once ambitious yet timid, asking big questions but providing no answers, not even clues. It’s a thought experiment, but a thought that meanders.

Vantage Point has nothing going on. There's no artistic, philosophical or even jolly entertainment reason for adopting this strategy. It's just arbitrary, a gimmick.

Spending an hour and a half inside a uterus might be more entertaining than this tiresome sequel.

There are chase scenes and car pileups. This wasn't fresh in 1980. It hasn't gotten any fresher.

At 88 minutes, Minions: The Rise of Gru struggles to find enough story to encompass its run time, ending up feeling substantially longer as a result.

In the early going "Wild Bill" looks interesting -- an audacious wallow in violence and Western legend. Then 20 minutes in, writer-director Walter Hill puts his cards on the table. It's a dead man's hand.

The opening to John Carter is a dud, a battle between airships made of woven bamboo, bursting into computer-generated flame over a sandy terrain. There's nothing to see, nothing to think about, nothing to care about, and nothing to feel, just emptiness. The emptiness is never filled over the course of 132 long, barren minutes.

Kang is so over the top and jumbled in his storytelling, this could be his Michael Cimino ("Heaven's Gate") moment.

Unfortunately, by the time the movie gets around to the parts that might have dazzled us, Emancipation already lost its audience.

The fifth entry in the John Rambo series is called Rambo: Last Blood, and we can only hope that’s a promise.

Incidentally, this is an Ang Lee film, though, beyond the first-rate production values, you wouldn’t know it. Lee seems happy that he has embraced technology, but what’s the point if the technology is in the service of an empty exercise? He has made one movie like this and doesn’t need to make another.

Zoom is a C-list production in every possible way, from the actors and the special effects to the music and the script. Even the product placement is completely third rate.

There's nothing particularly wrong with A Kid in King Arthur's Court and nothing right with it, either. Parents will take their kids to see it and suffer, but the pain is mild.

It's a big disappointment.

Cast adrift in this aimless movie, Ahmed seems lost. His performance is one in an unfortunate tradition of weepy Hamlets, and his problems are compounded by the fact that his weepiness is unconvincing. Each time he teared up while delivering a soliloquy, I felt that he was trying to sell me a used car.

Convoluted.

The film Cirque du Soleil: Worlds Away highlights both the strains of the franchise and the willingness to promote the brand at any cost - including a coherent narrative. It's a big promo reel, and not a carefully disguised one.

Why Lopez decided to do this inept, cliche-infested film is anyone’s guess. She may be an actress of limited range, but her work includes solid movies like “Selena” and “Out of Sight.” Unfortunately, Lopez’s resume now includes this stinker. And we’re all the dumber for it.

From watching this meandering, stilted movie, anyone unfamiliar with Charles Dickens' novel would be not only disinclined to pick it up but also clueless as to why it's considered great.

The Nutcracker in 3D will be barely recognizable to fans of the beloved holiday classic. Imagine watching Tchaikovsky's ballet after taking a handful of peyote - on a day when all of the dancers call in sick and the orchestra decides to play a different set of the composer's works.

It's an assaultive work about an assaultive fellow.

By the time we get to the last 20 minutes, Empire of Light is so scattered, so without impact or focus, that every scene could be the last. Ending it anywhere would make equal sense, because making sense is no longer a possibility. The movie is a glossy wreck.

There's an appeal here, for sure, but if you're not 8 years old you may never figure it out.

Williamson's script, which he also directed, is spiteful and shallow.

Dispiriting mess. The movie is bad in a boring way: tepidly paced, disjointed and lacking any emotional hook.

This film never had any business being stretched into a feature, much less one running 106 minutes. At that length, Biosphere is soporific and repetitive and puts viewers in the position of always being two steps ahead of it.

Setting out to make a cult movie is almost as strange as setting out to make a camp movie. Or setting out to make a movie that's so bad it's good. If you know you're doing it, you're not really doing it.

A handful of acting moments aside, Being Flynn is a drama without much in the way of rewards.

Take the worst things about independent movies - the wallowing in an unpleasantness, the narrative unsteadiness, the next-to-no story. Then combine those with a hefty dose of light comedy. The result: the big, fat tonal mess that is Happy Tears, a charmless film about two sisters who come together to care for their demented father.

The tone of “The Exorcism” is deadly serious, but one wonders if the premise might have worked better as a scary comedy rather than as a scary drama.