There's run-of-the-mill bad, and then there's a movie like Hardware. [14 Sep 1990, p.E3]

This plot leaves ample room for viewers to sweat the small stuff, like whether Trevor Nunn's score is more Marines ad or deodorant commercial.

This makes Hostiles something of a slog, but a movie-literate slog containing some impressive scenes.

First, and perhaps most important, it should be disclosed that my 4-year-old laughed pretty much nonstop throughout Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Squeakquel. This was his "Citizen Kane."

You can almost say it simulates an experience of brain injury in the audience: Nothing adheres, nothing connects. It's just nonstop cuteness, poses and emptiness - with nothing logically following from one moment to the next. It would be exaggerating to call it torture, and yet why split hairs?

Held back by a story and script that is often silly and confusing.

Foy is anything but mysterious or feral. Rooney Mara and Noomi Rapace, who previously played this role, seemed appropriately weird, but weird depends on hiding something, and Foy hides nothing.

Happy End is the latest from Michael Haneke, an uncompromising filmmaker whose work is sometimes brilliant and sometimes hard to watch, and sometimes both, but not this time. Happy End is just hard to watch.

It's astonishing that so much money, talent, technical expertise and visual imagination can be put in the service of something so stupid.

Big, opulent and frequently wretched, Pinocchio is so bad that its American distributor, Miramax, opened it on Christmas Day with scant advertising and no advance press screening.

Diego also lacks any nuance as a character. He is grim and humorless, like most everything else about this film.

Going after one innocent man was bad enough. Going after another constitutes a pattern. This marshal isn't a hero. He's a menace.

Everything connected with the lovers, who are the point of the movie, is either ordinary or unwittingly funny, and the laughs come early.

So inept it's almost entertaining.

Wonderstruck should not be confused for a brilliant but challenging film. Rather, it’s narratively deprived and with entire sections that are completely charmless.

The film occupies that peculiar space that many of us would prefer to believe doesn’t exist, a movie that’s worthy but often inert, by turns enriching and enervating: a good boring movie.

You can’t make a raunchy comedy and a sentimental paean to motherhood at the same time. You have to choose either one or the other. Raunchiness or sincerity. Try to do both, and you end up with a flailing, unfunny wreck, like the mix of contradictory and self-defeating impulses that we find here.

This version is a well-meant but corny distillation -- a whole lot of bombast and phony exaltation in the name of entertaining enrichment.

Lame, haphazard teen comedy.

The movie is occasionally clever, but still inferior to last year's "Twilight" film, mostly because the story is so muddled.

We’re supposed to be taking a fun thrill ride here, with a little existentialism to boot, but Copshop can’t escape its arrested development.

Perfunctory, thrill- free sequel.

The character motivations are weak, and the story is poorly structured. But its camera work, possibly intended to distract audiences from the movie’s flaws, only compounds its problems. It distances the audience and makes Jason Bourne a chore to sit through.

Has more in common with a horror movie than with a genuine political work.

Two hours of senselessness and overkill, decked out in lurid, bad-trip colors.

For all its hidden-camera footage and teary confessions, the movie rings as true as an episode of MTV’s “Real World.”

McCarthy is one of our finest physical comedians. Every moment of physical comedy she performs here is cringey.

First Purge further lessens the drama by offering a hero and villains too mercenary to care about.