A case of ho-hum humping leading to boring betrayal. The ingredients are predictable and the snail's pace is punishing. [26 Oct 1990, Daily Datebook, p.E3]

Has many grotesque sex scenes, interspersed with sights of Chong rambling in a dissociated way as she sits in her squalid apartment.

It's a ho-hum-er, almost a complete bummer. [6 Jan 1989, Daily Datebook, p.E1]

Damsel is a misguided exercise, a 113-minute mistake and a waste of time, but it does have a good opening.

Director Q. Allan Brocka loads up the screen with eye-candy for every preference -- no one keeps a shirt on for long. Think Skinemax with a gay twist. But his script overdoses on pop culture references and bitchy wisecracks that his trying-too-hard cast can't quite pull off.

All the movie's narrative gymnastics can't disguise the fact that it's inauthentic at its core and that its story just isn't worth telling.

The jump gimmick sounds as if it might make a cute romantic movie. But If Lucy Fell has so little meat that it plays like a television sitcom that somehow grew into a feature-length movie. It's airy, fluffy and ultimately uninteresting.

A mess.

It isn't simple bad taste that Formula 51 deals in, but a total vacuum of feeling.

Harmon proves that he can act stupid, and that's not enough to make the movie funny… You're supposed to like Freddy (Harmon), and you're supposed to like his brainless students… But you hate everybody. [24 July 1987]

Hernandez's debut feature is a thuddingly slow, often wordless portrait of emotional pain.

Highlander: The Final Dimension is no more compelling than the average pile of bricks.

Numbskull entertainment.

Jackpot! involves a fight to the finish between the abundant charisma and likability of leads Awkwafina and John Cena and the impossible material they were given. The actors lose, because nobody could survive so many jokes based on groin kicks and bathroom humor or a movie premise as lacking in context as it is sky-high in concept.

Extremely boring.

It is a mess of a film, botched but also misconceived, with a central performance by Natalie Portman that evokes nothing about Jackie Kennedy, beyond the stylish clothes and the secret smoking.

There are six standard types of violence in film these days: Tarantino, comic book, Scorsese, martial arts, horror and stupid. For stupid, look no further than Centurion.

Someone should steal this concept and make a decent movie out of it.

In essence, everything good in Self/less was derived from “Seconds,” and everything bad the writers and the director came up with on their own.

The filmmakers offer very few clues, just more aqua filters and low-contrast visuals. And with each new jarring edit, the viewer cares less and less, until the 100 minutes seem to stretch on forever.

None of it works, except for some moody cinematography, the on-screen charisma of lead actor Brad Pitt, moussed to the max as Johnny Suede, and the sheer likability of a few of his co-stars. [05 Feb 1993]

A frustrating movie, a work of immaturity from a director who should be past the empty gestures and self-protective distance of his early work.

Annoying, soporific and singularly humorless.

A movie like this depends on clever bits and incidents, but there's little invention here to disguise the film's formulaic nature.

It’s a clinical product crafted on the assembly line of the studio floor with pieces plucked liberally from better movies before it, and crammed so thoroughly with sight gags and wordplay it hopes you won’t notice that there’s no “there” there.

The movie suffers from two fatal ailments -- a dearth of vitality and a story that's shapeless and uninflected.

The bottom line is that the filmmakers are working with nothing here — no characters to speak of, no interpersonal relationships, no story with any suspense or capacity to engage, and no script with any humor or wit. What can they do?

Overall, A Goofy Movie is an incoherent mess that jumps from one unlikely, brainless, crash-bang situation to another, with each element of a protracted father-son bonding story increasingly out of synch with the others.

Vigilante movies hold a firm place in cinematic history, but for them to work, the vigilante needs to be a sympathetic anti-hero.

The Road Within is never good. The presentation of Tourette’s syndrome may be authentic, but everything else about the movie — the emotions, the characters, the situations — rings false.

A half-baked disappointment...never flies, never comes close to meeting its own expectations.

The movie's most inexcusable failing is that, despite all the flashbacks, we never get a sense of what this relationship was like when it worked.

Neither original nor presented in a convincing way.

This picture is disgusting. [15 Aug 1986]

Loach and screenwriter Paul Laverty draw everything in simplistic, overstated terms. The good guys are pure and spunky, the bad guys bellicose and one-dimensional, the conflicts stripped of nuance.

Rarely do two lines go by without Fellowes changing something, always for the worse.

If Max and his "Hell" collaborators feel stymied by the summer hit "The Hangover," they'd be justified to scream to the bromance gods that someone stole their film's concept. But those guys did it the right way, bro.

It will bring joy in a way certainly not intended, as one of the most gloriously and unwittingly silly films ever devised by a major American filmmaker.

Daddy’s Home 2 is an excessively negative, strained and predictable comedy.

A horror “comedy” about a deranged 12-year-old boy with a script that feels like it was written by a deranged 12-year-old boy.

Nothing but a showcase for the inherent comedic gifts of Cameron Diaz. The problem is she doesn't have any.

Might be a blast of ridiculous fun -- the way truly bad movies tend to be -- if it weren't so noxious and reprehensible.

What we have in this film is a whole lot of nothing, and the little that's there is irritating.

As a Jerry Bruckheimer production and a game adaptation, Prince of Persia has every business being jumpy and sequential, and as a frivolous summer popcorn flick it has every business being inane.

Another inert, soul-dead action drama that turns actors into zombies...It's garbage.

Lucas Black, who looks as much like a high school kid as George Bernard Shaw, speaks in a thick Southern accent that hasn't been heard on any leading man since the second act of "Our American Cousin."

There is not one line of dialogue or one sight gag in About My Father that can’t be found in other bad comedies, and Maniscalco . . . and director Laura Terruso seem to believe the path to humor is to go as far over the top as possible.

A revenge-fantasy Western that wants to luxuriate in its B-movie roots but suffers from dull direction and an even duller central performance.

What can you say about a comic sci-fi adventure that’s neither funny nor thrilling, but is packed with awesomely rendered visuals of dumb-looking things?

Loser is just as it sounds.

The moments of action are interspersed with lengthy plot developments that are hard to follow.

Ultimately, the people who made “Lightyear” bet too much on the appeal of Buzz, when they really needed to be deepening him and transforming him. Buzz is no Woody, and to sustain an entire movie, he pretty much had to be.

It can be charmingly elliptical at first (and even again toward end, when things get momentarily, gleefully weird), but the film gradually loses its power as Parthenope’s life becomes a kind of pointless merry-go-round showcasing new permutations of her seductive beauty.

Seriously lacks both romance and comedy.

Wow, when Disney misses the "reimagining" mark, it really misses.

Saint John of Las Vegas was a bad script that somehow got made into a bad movie with good people in it.

Behind Enemy Lines has a wretched script and a director (first-timer John Moore) who either has no taste or doesn't know what he's doing.

Fly to the Moon is absolutely awful. The only interesting thing about it is how long it takes for a viewer to figure out how bad it really is.

This is the type of movie that you should be getting for free on television.

Yes, the life expectancy of a chipmunk maxes out at 10 years in captivity. So biologically, we must be coming toward the end of this franchise. That’s not the type of thing a critic looks up when filmmakers make more of an effort.

Results are all that matter, and the result here is that The Desolation of Smaug fails in almost every way, as a story, as an adventure, as a piece of art direction and as a visual spectacle.

A rule of thumb for characters in heist movies: If the idiots hatching the scheme swear it's "foolproof," it isn't. If they say they've got a rock-solid alibi, they don't. If they're convinced nothing could possibly go wrong, something will.

With the exception of Jessica Lange, who tears into her fairly brief role as a wealthy and wicked former movie star, everyone in Marlowe is directed as if to seem groggy with depression. It’s as if they’re all bored with the story before they tell it, and then they tell it while trying not to fall asleep.

With Hard Candy, the innocent are tortured along with the guilty -- the innocent, in this case, being the audience.

Save the price of admission to this dull retread and go have your hair done.

While the plot is worthless and the battle scenes cheap-looking and unengrossing, Wing Commander has clearly defined characters and relationships. In other words, the film's young actors have nothing interesting to say, but they say it well.

Sonatine eliminates the one virtue American action films can legitimately claim -- vitality -- and replaces it with fake- existential claptrap wrapped in an inept narrative.

Going into Sisters, the thought is, “It’s Tina Fey and Amy Poehler. How bad can it be?” Going out, the thought is, “Now we know.” It can be downright awful.

At 100 minutes, it feels about 80 minutes too long, and that’s not a good sign. Lazer Team might have made a fun and pleasant short.

If only the projectionist could be persuaded to play the first 10 minutes over and over for two hours, this might be a satisfying movie. Unfortunately, the middle and the end feature a weak lead character, choppy fight choreography, humorless dialogue and computer-generated effects that look as if they came from the "Ghostbusters II" era.

If the film has any value at all it's as an example to illustrate the point that even a mediocre horror movie requires a certain amount of inspiration. At least a sense of fun, a little life and enthusiasm. Dr. Giggles is put together strictly by the numbers. It aims low -- at the floor -- and misses. [24 Oct 1992, p.C3]

It's a bitter pill to swallow, featuring a quartet of unsympathetic characters and an unrelenting air of misanthropy.

Kin is not a snoozer, at least, and the Baker brothers are certainly not untalented, but their genre-mashing experiment doesn’t work on any emotional level.

If you’re talking about “Venom: The Last Dance,” you know you’re talking about something unimportant. If you’re writing about it, you know you’re doing something embarrassing. But what about the people who made this movie? What level of awareness do they have?

Chevy Chase continues his string of starring roles in bad movies. [16 Feb 1991, p.C3]

While the original was serious, Old Guard 2 is merely forlorn. Its story holds little interest and, to make matters worse, it doesn’t even end. Instead, it stops mid-story, promising a sequel that feels less like a promise than a threat.

Its story meanders and doesn't build, and the pace is deadly.

They take on special powers that the filmmakers are incapable of making interesting, partly because the characters are ciphers, and partly because the story is listless and uninventive.

Despite all the mayhem, “The Golden Circle” often feels slow and belabored, particularly in its middle section, when inspiration is nowhere to be found, and the chaos seems to be there just for the sake of being there.

Between “Jexi” a few weeks ago and now this, October has ended up becoming quite a great month for bad movies about scary software.

Tries screwball and gross-out comedy and fails on both counts.

A very stupid movie, with many more failed jokes than successful ones. Worse yet, much of the comedy is kind of mean.

The film doesn't make a case for Lavoe as an important artist.

The whole thing is monumentally gruesome and just as monumentally cynical, a riot of grisly cliches designed to titillate and amuse.

A film so self-centered that even the director's most dedicated stalkers might find it a bit too narcissistic.

The comedy never really takes off because it's phony.

The film is confusing and awkwardly timed, and it drags.

The film has some chuckles, if no belly laughs; it has some warmth, if no great heat.

The already confusing story loses all hope of clarity as day turns to night — the second half of the movie is in near-darkness, making even the stylish visuals hard to decipher. What little interest you have in the characters is effectively extinguished as well.

A limp, slow-moving and desperately unfunny comedy.

It takes a winning recipe and adds some distinctly Hollywood flavors...The result is a botched job.

It doesn't help that Glitter is such a derivative mishmash of cinematic and real-life situations that it's nearly impossible to count all the ways.

Dreadful teen comedy with a "Cinderella" theme.

While there's no blood to be seen in Supercross, the film is rated PG- 13, due to some crash scenes, a little strong language and some mild sexuality. That's a shame. This movie was tailor-made for 12-year-olds.

It's unpleasant where it should be pleasant, convoluted where it should be streamlined, anxiety provoking where it should be easy, and long, long, long - at least 20 minutes longer than it has a right to be.

The Thing Called Love should have been a nice, middle-key romance, with a few gentle digs at Nashville's fevered, wildly competitive country-music scene. Instead, it's a hapless, well-intentioned mess -- running in half a dozen directions at once, looking half-planned and semi-improvised, and featuring a skittish, overly mannered performance by Phoenix. [16 March 1994, p.E1]

In concept alone, Ravenous is anything but appetizing, but in execution it's worse than you'd imagine.

The fact is that too much time is spent with the British characters in the film, time that could have been spent really getting into Rani’s story. She was fighting for the independence of India, but the filmmakers lost their own colonial battle.