There’s really nothing else to say about Gold, beyond one general point: It is illustrative of what’s particularly fun about being a critic in January. For most of the year, bad movies have the same general ailments. But in January, they have exotic diseases. They have things wrong with them that you’ve never seen before.

The effort is undermined with crass humor, mugging and slapstick.

It has a weak story that provides no tension, feeling or interest. Its opening action sequence is just a long, drawn-out dud, filmed by director John Moore in the worst modern style of quick cuts and smeary, jittery photography.

A convoluted mess, but there have been worse.

As weird as it sounds.

To put it bluntly, Wiig and McCarthy are funny, but Kate McKinnon and Leslie Jones aren’t. McKinnon, in particular, is shockingly out of place, and she helps drag down the movie.

Although the movie doesn't turn the Zodiac saga into a slasher film, it has the look of a straight-to-video movie, or at best a Project Greenlight production.

Brutally dumb canine comedy.

Despite good reviews at this year's Sundance Film Festival, this is the kind of squishy lost cause that gives liberal guilt a bad name.

Higher Learning says nothing new or challenging and is too naive to inspire controversy.

The thriller is populated by the usual dimwits who stumble into horrific situations and don't have the good sense to leave, and it tries to pass off some of the sorriest excuses for zombies ever seen.

With almost nothing else going for it, the sequel will likely be a disappointment to everyone except 10-year-old barf joke aficionados and a few stoned adults.

A bigger mess than the gas crisis.

The best thing that can be said for “Kinds of Kindness” is that it’s never quite boring, despite being 164-minutes long and lacking much of a story.

The picture gives us two protagonists and sets up a situation in which only one of them can have a decent life. Then, having devised this sour souffle, the screenwriters find no adjustment to make it palatable. The resolution is flip, at best.

A childish, empty effort.

Filth & Wisdom is dead in the water, an excruciating bore even at a compact 84 minutes.

With no subtitles to explain what's going on in Yu-Gi- Oh!: The Movie, there's no reason for adults to come anywhere near it.

Woodley has been first-rate in everything she’s been in, particularly the “Divergent” series. But there’s something about her performance here that feels like the sincere and dutiful dispersal of medicine.

Badly made and poorly written, Blended is a rehash of Adam Sandler's 2011 comedy "Just Go With It," only without Jennifer Aniston and without laughs. It not only gets the big things wrong. It gets the small, easy things wrong.

Don't let this dog out -- please.

Nora Ephron directed it and had a hand in the screenplay, but without Travolta this film would have no reason for being.

Completely ridiculous, but fun to look at.

Wonder Park, frankly, isn’t very much fun. It becomes so enslaved with its nonsensical plot that it forgets this is supposed to be about coming to terms with the possible loss of a loved one. It gets lost in its own Rube Goldberg machine.

A lot of talented people with the best of intentions got together and made The Last Face, and yet it’s an almost unwatchable flop.

Really, The Expendables 3 has only one thing going for it, beyond the unremarkable novelty of seeing lots of celebrities in a lousy movie. It has Mel Gibson, who is at his grim, tormented and quirky best here, playing someone who has crossed a moral line and has no regrets.

The best that can be said of this charmless animated picture is that whether or not it ends happily -- an outcome you're unlikely to give a hoot about -- it does, happily, end.

If it happens to hit you right - that is, if you happen to catch its wavelength of tear-and-a-smile whimsicality - the movie will speak to you.

A cliché movie about love, orneriness and several maddening tourists.

But Eastwood is undercut by the unbearably weak screenplay by Nick Schenk, who adapts a 1975 novel by N. Richard Nash. Schenk has turned in good work for Eastwood before, including “Gran Torino” and “The Mule,” but here his strategy seems to be having his characters explain everything that they’re doing and feeling, much of which should be delivered visually. Action is character, after all.

A comedy so unfunny, it's tragic.

The only inspired part of “Abigail” is the performance of Weir, a 14-year-old Irish actress best known as the title character in Netflix’s “Matilda the Musical.” She brings verve and joy to her vampire ballerina, dancing circles around the rest of the cast.

The movie’s ridiculous.

That closing-credits sequence is by far the funniest thing in the disappointing movie,

Isn’t It Romantic isn’t romantic, and it isn’t funny. It’s a bad idea stretched to feature length, a gimmick picture that never gets past its gimmick and never grows into something better. It runs 88 minutes and runs about 80 minutes too long.

In the same genre as the Farrellys' "There's Something About Mary" and "Dumb and Dumber," only lousy.

A well-intentioned, but all-thumbs down drama.

Lacks a certain je ne sais quoi.

The Signal starts off as an alien version of "Blair Witch Project" and then drifts off into cold plotlessness. But for a while, a little while, it seems like it just might be interesting.

This is trash on a big budget, but trash nonetheless.

It's a complete mess, the spectacle of filmmakers blowing up their movie and everything in it, because they can't think of anything else to do.

Despite its sometimes bloody content, the mood of Happy Death Day is remarkably sappy, aimed at the broadest possible audience for a film of its genre. Think of it as “slasher lite” and an acceptable date movie for unadventurous types, and you have the gist of it.

The bottom line with Andrea Arnold's Wuthering Heights is that the writer-director has taken Emily Brontë's tale of undying passion and rendered it passionless.

Why, if Chase is such a funny guy, does he make such unfunny movies?

This brand of eccentricity does not suit Cusack. He lacks Cage’s manic gleam and irrepressible sense of play. Cusack comes off as glum and a bit lost, negating Miller’s effectiveness as bogeyman.

It provokes nothing but yawns, and the sex it explores is stuff everybody knows about and says, "So what?"

It takes about 20 minutes to catch on that Friday is without narrative drive - and about as long to figure out that the film offers nothing better in place of it.

The laughs come in all the wrong places when they come at all.

The comedy, to the extent there is any, consists mainly of Carrey's verbal asides and strained reactions to people. The script gives him very little to work with.

Just about everything in The Chronicles of Riddick is impenetrable, from the convoluted story to the dark and baroque art direction. It's an inane film rendered sometimes laughable by an atmosphere of dead-serious reverence.

Like most movies based on games, this film appears to have been quite literally doomed from the start.

See No Evil directed by James Watkins (“The Woman in Black”), is not that interesting. Nor is it much of a horror movie or psychological thriller, despite carrying the Blumhouse imprimatur. For more than half of its nearly two-hour length, it plays more like the James McAvoy variety hour — which can be highly enjoyable if you do not mind one actor being the entire show.

As vile, unredeeming and thoroughly unpleasant experiences go, I Spit on Your Grave at least has one thing interesting about it. It's a document of the most paranoid fantasies that urban, Northern people have about a rural Southern people.

Long before the end, audiences will stop worrying about the characters and start worrying about themselves — about when they’ll get to leave.

Eternals is like a movie about a horse race that concentrates all its attention on characters that neither own a horse nor like to gamble.

Liotta's acting can't redeem senseless violence.

Complete with cliches and culturally cringe-inducing stereotypes — poor but happy villagers, sweaty villains — Peruvians will hardly use this film in their tourist advertising.

About as close to pure mall fodder as you'll see.

All the brains, heart and courage in the world can't save a movie that doesn't have a third act.

Father-daughter relationship lacks impact.

It looks spiffy. It has an attractive cast. Marcel Zyskind's cinematography seethes and shines. And it's a crock.

Anyone who puts production gloss above performance, plot, dialogue and editing may thrill to Drawing Restraint 9.

A distasteful, overlong slog, but at least the filmmaker appears to have put everything he wanted to up on the screen.

A movie that seems to have been made by people who don’t understand the history, true nature or appeal of their iconic characters.

It shambles and ambles, seemingly without focus or pattern, from one thing to the next. Yet at the same time, it's predictable, not from moment to moment, but in its outlines.

An unbearable exercise in provocation.

To their credit, by the time the movie ends, Blunt and Johnson have made the sale. I believed them and liked seeing them together. They don’t make Jungle Cruise worth seeing or even worth tolerating. But for scattered minutes across this wasteland, they make it less painful.

Boundaries is a slog, a succession of weak and uninteresting incidents, leading to a conclusion that seems foreordained.

Until its final seconds, Seven Days in Utopia is just a piece of gee-whiz, G-rated, nicely shot evangelism outfitted as a golf movie. Then it cuts away at the pivotal moment that's normally the life's blood of inspirational sports dramas - and becomes something vastly more obnoxious.

Depictions of an aide talking about her hospital vigil and her words of comfort to a distraught Laura Bush are creepy and exploitative -- and borderline disgusting.

An annoying little film that attempts to be lascivious but is merely ludicrous.

Let us recall that the first film was, in its blithely vulgar way, hilarious. And let us demand a moratorium on coked-out-baby jokes, which seriously kill the buzz.

There's something painful about watching Scarlett Johansson, who looks as if she never had an indecisive moment in her life, struggle to seem ineffectual.

Owen is a magnetic, sensitive presence at the center of a movie that doesn't deserve him and that barely deserves to be seen.

While Kal Penn manages a decent lead performance as Taj, the writing is terrible.

The new version is a weak facsimile of an already mediocre film.

John Lennon once said, "There's a great woman behind every idiot." This time, I'm counting seven of them.

Captain Underpants is a very popular book series that doesn’t seamlessly translate to the big screen, and the filmmakers can’t solve this problem. The result is a cinematic wedgie: a little too dark, a little too nihilistic, a little too empty.

Has no truth, wisdom or honesty, and it's barely entertaining.

The big disappointment of The Babymakers is that it doesn't come close to being worthy of its two stars, Paul Schneider and Olivia Munn.

Dredges up every cliche about druggy, obnoxious dreamers on the fringes of Hollywood and assumes that said cliches have the power to shock and surprise.

As good as The Motel Life is for the actors, that's how bad it is for the viewer.

This kind of psychological mystery, with its suggestion of fugue states, needs to work by hints and whispers, but Pali Road has pretty low expectations of its audience. It ought to be light on its feet, but it lumbers.

Crossover has one redeeming quality: a heart that's in the right place. It's a bad movie with a good message -- but does anyone really want to pay $10 for an ABC After School Special version of "He Got Game"?

Don't even try to make any sense of this --none of it elicits a moment of genuine concern.

Think of all the ways “Apartment 7A” could have slyly addressed these times, or, conversely, more fully explored the practices of the Castavets’ cult. Instead, it's just a retread, and that’s why it’s bad. The devil is in the details.

The film's hymn of praise quickly grows cloying, thanks partly to a relentless musical soundtrack.

When Christian Bale allowed himself to play Bruce Wayne in "Batman Begins," he was slumming - and to good effect. But with Terminator Salvation, this ostensibly serious actor takes up residence in the action ghetto, and it's not a good fit.

There are phony movies made every week, but this is in a different category - a phony movie that seems a distortion of something real, a phony movie offered in place of the real movie von Trier could have made, but it would have cost him something. Some blood, some truth, some soul. What we're left with instead is an empty gesture.

Original enough to come up with new ways to go wrong. For one, the film is a blatant showcase to promote O'Neal as a rap artist.

A stink bomb of a movie.

Great to look at but not much fun to watch… An emotionally uncommitted picture that's smirky and mawkish, by turns, and at heart, empty. [14 Dec 1990, Daily Datebook, p.E1]

Quid Pro Quo, billed as a "neo-noir" about a paraplegic journalist drawn into a shadowy world of disability fetishists, is choked by allegory and pretension. It's an O. Henry tale gone wrong.

There are all kinds of dull movies. There’s check-your-watch (or phone) dull. There’s run-into-the-bathroom-to-splash-water-on-your-face dull. And then there’s Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore, which is standing-up dull.

It’s essentially an animated film, fronted by a live-action Downey and Michael Sheen’s one-note villain. Only Antonio Banderas, in a small role, truly seems to be having a great time.

With The 15:17 to Paris, director Clint Eastwood overwhelms the extraordinary with the mundane, turning the true story of three Americans who helped subdue a gunman aboard a European train into a tedious film.

What's completely baffling is that everyone in the film thinks Nomi is one heck of a dancer, even though her one move -- throwing her arms out stiffly -- is straight out of "Dr. Strangelove."

The film has a fairly clever and original premise — one that’s better left unspoiled as a third act reveal. But the path to it is bizarre and beguiling with too many moments that feel like an episode of “CSI” or “Without a Trace” with much better cinematography and worse dialogue. It kind of makes you wonder what the hell Wan was doing here.