The biggest puzzlement about "What'' is what it's doing in major movie theaters around the country when it so clearly belongs on one of those small cable channels given to peculiar programming.

Made mostly by white people, it's a film largely about how awful white people are -- just the kind of thing many white viewers will love and consider important. But however you might feel about this kind of movie, Map of the Human Heart is fake merchandise, an unfelt, boring travelogue that covers itself in its anti-racist, anti-war message and then dares audiences to notice its barrenness at the core. [14 May 1993, p.C6]

If you see Alice Through the Looking Glass, prepare to lean forward in your seat just to stay awake.

Tag isn’t interesting at all, but its failure is. It’s the kind of movie that makes the viewer ask questions, such as, why isn’t this working? Why is this bombing? Why is this dying the death? Why am I shifting in my seat just to stay conscious? The movie seems like it should be funny, but it’s not, so why?

What could have been a brilliant short becomes deadly, stretched to feature length. The last hour of Nadja takes on the pace of a stranger's vacation video. In a sure sign of desperation, the careful tone of the opening is abandoned in scattershot attempts at cheap laughs. The film's world is undermined, and Nadja gets as precious, smirky and as boring as a Hal Hartley picture.

If London were a comedy, it just might work. Instead, it's a dead-serious marathon of angst from cool kids old enough to know they're mouthing cliches.

The new comedy is screechingly inane and skitters in nine directions at once.

In her feature debut, Manzoor does something truly bizarre here, and not in a good way. She gets a whole audience rooting for love to triumph but then tries to make a lovable heroine out of the irrational, malevolent character who wants to undermine everything the audience is looking forward to.

Zero is more of an intellectual exercise in which you’re never given all the variables to solve the problem — and then you find your calculator was on acid the whole time anyway.

(Driver) is stuck in a mess of a movie that suffers from awkward writing, a plot with major disconnects in plausibility, an annoyingly screechy kid character and cheesy production values.

The action sequences are just as ridiculous as the romance parts, but at least James seems comfortable with the pratfalls and gross-out scenarios.

Sarsgaard and Jones are good actors, and both are fine. The real star, though, is sound designer Ian Gaffney-Rosenfeld and his team, who bring a depth and dimension to the story that sorely needs it.

Friedkin is steeped in gore, like some cinematic Macbeth, and it's obscuring his artistic vision.

About as awful as a film can be without being the ultimate awful, which is boring.

Ouija has something wrong with it from the first five minutes.

An action blockbuster that's one of the biggest misfires in its genre since "Godzilla."

Suffers from some of the deficiencies common to first features. It is sincere and earnest but the product of an assumption that the milieu itself is compelling enough to command an audience's attention.

An overstuffed, underfed numbskull movie.

The Adventures of Ford Fairlane, is a stiff, guaranteed to disappoint just about everybody, except those rooting against him. [11 Jul 1990, p.E1]

The last half-hour of “Opus” is an unbearable slog, with an unsatisfying ending.

The bad news is that the characters and situations are platitudes and the story is so heavy-handed that the film is hard to sit through.

It’s all about as exciting as watching two drawings fight each other on a computer monitor.

Daniels has the talent to make a genuinely complex horror film. What was “Precious,” if not a horror movie made all the more chilling by its lack of supernatural elements? But for “The Deliverance,” Daniels simply dusts off the same crab-walking, veins-a-popping demon moves we have seen a million times.

Shoot 'Em Up is not only the title of Hollywood's latest descent into nonsensical mayhem but pretty much sums up the entire inane plot as well.

Muddled, to put it kindly.

An overwrought weepie, it may be inspired by the recent dramas of Pedro Almodóvar, but it comes off as Almodóvar Lite -- muy lite.

A glossy piece of trash.

Ghost Rider has everything you don't want from your superhero movie, including lack of logic, boring action scenes, bad acting in the supporting performances, a brutally slow 114-minute running time and cringe-worthy dialogue.