Depressing. So is director Marshall Curry's avowal in the press notes that the film will leave viewers with "a more nuanced view of the world."

RV is a horrible movie about horrible people, and just because they call it a comedy doesn't mean we have to play along.

Bornedal invests so much time in the characters - Jeffrey Dean Morgan and Kyra Sedgwick play the split parents of the girls - that there are times you will forget this is a horror movie. It's Kramer vs. Kramer vs. Lucifer.

A ho-hum thriller about corporate spying in the high-tech world, comes off as a lot more preposterous than paranoid, and it takes no more than a few frames for the eye rolling to commence.

Filmmakers can’t depend on funny actors to go out there cold and bring back laughs. They have to be given funny things to do.

"Spider-Man 2" was a textbook example of how to make a sequel: Deepen it, make it funnier, give it more heart and come up with a strong villain and a good story. Spider Man 3, by contrast, shows how not to make a sequel.

No, this is not good. This is just not good.

The plot’s outrageousness — which includes Michael Stuhlbarg as a Ted Kaczynski-esque town crazy — would go down better if there were a sympathetic character or two (or, absent that, some laughs), but no dice.

Hoodwinked is a computer-animated, "Shrek"-style satire of "Little Red Riding Hood" that offers a few laughs but overall is pretty tired.

Even the element of surprise isn't enough to save this film, which has too many slow parts and features an ending that's extremely tepid by 21st century horror movie standards.

It's a dreadful exercise, tin-eared and sincere, bereft of any truth or inspiration.

Crooklyn is loud and raucous and occasionally cruel. The actors shout their dialogue, the kids trade insults and the movie has the strained, desperate-for-fun anxiety of a TV sitcom. [13 May 1994, p.C1]

Lacks the clever twists and turns that made the original such fun. The sequel has exactly one twist, and it's not very clever.

This is a needlessly dull movie that should have gone back to the drawing board.

But the film suffers from a major and unforgivable flaw, one that grows more implausible and ridiculous over time.

A wildly implausible thriller.

It's hard to tell if Cage's performance is a grand stab at all-out, no-holds-barred comic acting or one of the worst dramatic performances in a film this year. [2 June 1989, Daily Datebook, p.E8]

Dick Cheney deserves better than this — or worse. So does Lynn Cheney, played by Amy Adams, who strains in vain to give dimension to a script that paints Mrs. Cheney as little more than an amoral social climber.

With its flat story, numbed-out protagonist, and faux artistic lighting and set design - everything is dark or moody or darkishly moody or moodily dark - Max Payne seems a good half hour longer than its running time.

They try to make Beverly adorable, and the movie comes off strained and dishonest as a result.

This lurid thriller comes to life in fits and starts, and then sinks into the bog of its own cleverness once again.

When you walk out of the theater feeling more empathy for the tortured monster than his Bride, the experiment has failed.

Will-o’-the-Wisp, a flight of fancy from Portuguese provocateur João Pedro Rodrigues, has a few ideas, a fun little musical sequence and quite a bit of eye candy. But it seems like a series of tonally different short films mashed together — an art installation rather than a movie.

The biggest betrayal of The Traitor is its crime against the usually compelling Mafia movie genre. This is an offer you can refuse.

By the end A.I. exhibits all its creators' bad traits and none of the good. So we end up with the structureless, meandering, slow-motion endlessness of Kubrick combined with the fuzzy, cuddly mindlessness of Spielberg.

The movie's bereftness of invention can be measured by how no story element builds on another. Instead, Happy Feet Two is plotted so that a bunch of disparate things happen, until it's time to end the movie.

It is a very good performance in a very bad movie.

A third-rate effort, with a weak script, cheap-looking effects and no genuine frights.

Film anybody's trip to Italy, and it would be more interesting than this, or at least equally boring.

Song to Song is Terrence Malick’s first truly awful film. In it, he does all the things that Malick does, except for all the great things that Malick does.

More than confusing. It's opaque.

That Summer leaves me with Beale fatigue. It would seem to appeal to “Grey Gardens” completists only.

Approximately the last hour of Dante's Peak is made up of action scenes, and how well one likes computer-generated destruction will determine how well one likes the movie.

This latest from director Wayne Wang, about the friendship of two young women, travels from 2011 to 1997 to 1829 to 1838, in search of a reason for the audience to keep watching and start caring. That reason is never found.

In an attempt to be complex and fair-minded, a simple story becomes a jumble of confused motivations.

Wilson and Helms favor Bradshaw in likability. But they are not two hours’ worth of likable, in a film this flawed.

To call this effort misguided would be kind. The job this "prequel" does on the original Dumb and Dumber is the movie equivalent of surgery that removes all the vital organs and then gives the patient a prosthetic third arm. What's needed isn't there, and what's here we don't need.

Of course, the real problem here isn’t that Ritchie isn’t Noel Coward, but that he’s not clever or funny in his own right. The Gentleman isn’t offensive, and it’s not even good enough to qualify as coarse. If it weren’t mildly annoying, it would be as close to nothing as an experience can be.

Unfortunately, the scares aren’t particularly scary, the lessons aren’t particularly compelling, and the ultimate resolution takes far too long to arrive at a conclusion that’s far too pat.

We get a lot of hapless victims in an expensive endeavor that is surprisingly lifeless.

The movie goes to Vienna, to Egypt and to Italy and was probably more fun to make than watch.

It's just horsing around that comes to nothing. No, it's worse. It's horsing around designed to disguise nothing as something.

Plays like a movie that some teenage boy cooked up in his chemistry lab. There are lots of potent things floating around in it - sexual initiation, drugs, fantasy-land wealth, brute violence, primitive rituals, Diane Lane and Donald Sutherland - but the mix just sits there without producing any notable reactions.

If, while watching The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, you start wondering why Ben Stiller is acting strange, the answer comes during the closing credits: "Directed by Ben Stiller."

It is an embarrassment and an insult to a character that has been beloved by kids for 45 years.

Those who stuck with the troubled pop icon after his universe shifted from the charts to the tabloids probably will find equal measures of inspiration and heartbreak in the documentary. For everyone else, it's a strange offering.

For all the beautiful scenery and Thoreau-like contemplation, Evil Does Not Exist stalls, then implodes.

The Dutch thriller Borgman gets credit for being original, but not for being original in a compelling way.

She is a great talent, a legend, someone who has made enduring classics, and just the fact that she’s still working at 86 is a gift. But somehow none of that makes The Life Ahead, coming to Netflix on Friday, Nov. 13, an experience worth having.

So disturbing it makes you uncomfortable watching it.

A mostly inoffensive nothing of a film with one or two mild chuckles and lots of chop-socky commotion.

Rendered nearly unwatchable by overblown close-ups and an unrelenting shaky-cam.

North is director Rob Reiner's first flat-out failure, a sincerely wrought, energetically made picture that all the same crashes on takeoff. It's strange and oddly distasteful, at its best managing to be bad in some original and unexpected ways.

The big problem of Good Boys is not that it’s harsh or nasty or outrageous or tasteless or shocking or appalling. The problem is that it’s none of those things, when it should have been all of those things. It’s safe and sentimental, with just a few mild laughs.

Degenerates in the second half.

Home Again is plain vanilla, from start to finish.

The problem with Popcorn is that it's just as ridiculous as the horror movies it satirizes. [02 Feb 1991, p.C3]

As for Fraser, his clumsy humanity is endearing, but by now, assuming he has invested wisely, he should have enough money saved so as to not have to waste his talent anymore.

Dismal final installment.

There's no point complaining that Honey is a tired reworking of an old formula, because it's intended for a young audience that doesn't know the formula.

Oliver Twist" meets "A Clockwork Orange" meets a reckless abandonment of credibility.

Witless banter might have won Ginger Rogers for Fred Astaire, but Thompson is too smart for that.

The bad outweighs the good and the cringes outnumber the laughs in Brüno, a disappointment from Sacha Baron Cohen, whose "Borat" was one of the funniest movies of the decade.

There are isolated moments of humor, and even charm. The visual effects are at times outstanding. But these positives are overwhelmed by the uninspired whole.

Raymond & Ray aims for the kind of gentle, offbeat wistfulness of a “Little Miss Sunshine” or “Sunshine Cleaning,” but with uncomfortable awkwardness instead of eccentric ingenuity.

A letdown despite its intriguing premise.

Imagine if instead of creating new music, a recording artist kept putting out the exact same album, just playing the songs a little louder each time. That's what it feels like watching Transformers: Age of Extinction.

Freaky is, dare we say, soul-sucking?

No longer fresh -- though that's to be expected in a sequel -- it contains none of the virtues that made the first one anarchic and original.

Cmera work can't do anything about the barrenness of the screenplay, nor the sense of fundamental insincerity at the core of the film. [03 Sep 1993]

Cheesy.

If only it weren't based on a true story. It might have been a good movie.

The movie doesn’t just suffer by comparison to “High and Low” (itself adapted from Evan Hunter’s novel “King’s Ransom”); taken by itself, its pace drags, its tone staggers and its ideas are muddled.

De Palma plays both sides against the middle, and eventually the thing collapses. Instead of simply pursuing what seems to be his vision of the story, about a flawed but decent man getting martyred to a corrupt system, he tries not to offend and ends up making empty and confusing gestures. When at the end of this remarkably cynical movie, Morgan Freeman, as a principled trial judge, stands up and makes a speech about decency -- ''Decency is what your grandmother taught you'' -- it's hard not to laugh out loud. [21 Dec 1990, p.E1]

Hellion is so sincere and so dull that some might mistake it for a true work of art.

The movie is a mess.

Too bad the movie is spoiling the view.

Here, where even the stepmother has a backstory, Cannon seems intent not just on trying to blot out the original’s sexism but also its mystery. In trying to be safe and copacetic with modern sensibilities, this Cinderella neuters itself.

A wannabe weepie about a woman diagnosed with breast cancer, is Spain’s equivalent of a Lifetime movie, but it’s often lifeless, even with a decent performance by Penélope Cruz.

The film's overburdened, silly plot renders it a disaster.

A bunch of gags, most of which you've seen in the trailer, strung together by any means necessary.

Lacking the velocity and excitement of an action movie and the reality of good drama, The Mother is the worst of both worlds.

As writer and director, Cronenberg devises for himself a compelling situation, but a situation is not the same as a story. Within 20 minutes, Cronenberg has written himself into a hole, one populated entirely by passive characters who do nothing but get cut up or watch other people get cut up.

In King Arthur, everything goes wrong. The film combines the plodding sincerity of a Ph.D. dissertation with the brains of a high-concept Jerry Bruckheimer- produced blockbuster (which it is), and no one benefits.

Surprisingly, the results are embarrassing. As puppetry, Team America is stilted. As satire, it's gutless and lazy. And as comedy, it barely delivers laughs.

Morgan Freeman's voice is heard as the narrator, which is in itself the stuff of parody. Then we listen and get lost within two sentences, because the narration is so poorly written that Freeman himself probably didn't know what he was talking about.

If nothing else, Fitzgerald has demonstrated how huge a challenge the AIDS epidemic is on a worldwide scale, and how it will take a concerted, intelligent effort to solve it. It'll take a lot more than throwing money around.

It's a bomb - not the usual bomb, but a time bomb, despite a 20-minute stretch at the beginning that goes along nicely. [17 May 1991]

The best thing you can say about this “Moment” is that, at a breezy 92 minutes, it’s a brief one.

One more small thing: Every other scene in Saw IV starts and ends with a potential victim pressing "play" on a tape recorder, to the point where it's almost funny.

The movie's excruciating length is without dramatic or thematic justification.

Not only not funny, it's unfunny. It kills humor. Sit in a room by yourself, look at a blank screen for 90 minutes, and you'll have more of a chance of laughing at your own thoughts than you will at this movie.

Just awful. But uniquely awful -- awful in a way that might just attract a cult audience. [3 Sept 1993]

Metro, the new Eddie Murphy cop picture made in San Francisco that opens today, goes beyond cliched: It's shameless. The relationships, plot turns -- even the action sequences -- are trite and uninspired. Murphy is fresh, as usual, but "Metro" is not.

Self-serious, pointless and silly.

Even when it tries to be funny, there’s never any point of connection. The emotions in White Noise are neither real nor meant to be real. The audience is always watching from a distance — until, finally, it starts wondering why it’s watching at all.

This is a sloppy hash of a movie, poorly directed and plotted in a way that looks as if it were improvised on the spot.

Knows its audience and doesn't stint on the flatulence jokes, poop jokes, leg-humping dogs and moments of homo-panic.