“Avoiding unhappiness is not the road to happiness,” Hector writes in his book. But avoiding this movie might be a good start.

Most of Arkansas — Duke’s home state, by the way — just falls flat, despite individual scenes here and there that work.

So you get comments from the likes of Paul Rudd, Adam Carolla and Judd Apatow, all trying to be funny, but not one says anything remotely amusing or worth hearing.

Arrives in theaters today with a sheet over its head and a tag on its toe. So to speak. What we have here is a complete systemic failure, a comedy that's not funny, with action that's not thrilling.

A lame pastiche of Hollywood romances.

Imagine the worst "Deadwood" episode ever, and you'll get an idea of the general tone of Beowulf & Grendel, which is full of anachronistic cursing, tortured syntax, dark humor and lots of hairy, homely, filthy-looking people.

Blows an opportunity to be as great as its subject.

Serious Moonlight is a tonal disaster, distasteful and sentimental by turns. It was probably a mistake to have Hines try to walk that same delicate line that took Shelly her entire career to master.

It's harmless.

Supercharged and lifeless, frenetic and stone-cold dead, a barrage of action scenes that look fake, yet make you wonder if fake is the new real.

A self-indulgent mess.

Nowhere near as bad as "Coneheads," but still isn't worth your time.

The artistic signature is unmistakable — 30 seconds in, you’d know you were watching a Wes Anderson movie. But Anderson’s human connection seems to have short-circuited, so that his irony now bypasses the world and becomes an ironic contemplation of his own work. This is a dead-end, and it’s just not interesting.

Hitman: Agent 47 takes an austere European aesthetic and combines it with Hollywood mindlessness, and the result is like a guilty pleasure, minus the pleasure.

These scenes of raving nonsense might have seemed radical in, say, the 1970s. Now they’re just tiresome.

A documentary that doesn’t have the stomach to tell the story of what happened on Jan. 6 explicitly, and to express the real threat to American democracy that that day represents, is of no use to anybody.

What this really is is a great deal of screaming and running from room to room, wacky chase scenes, the old bag switcheroo, dim-bulb crooks and zany antics. Everyone is working hard, but as with Sofia Vergara's costumes, there isn't enough material.

An unfunny fish-out-of-water comedy.

A dreadful exercise, with a script full of contradictions and empty gestures and a leading lady who's such a novice it hurts to watch her.

There’s more to life than just stories and really, Djinn and Alithea just need to get a life.

Gran Turismo is just the same cars, going around and around and around.

It’s rather amazing that Sophie Cookson, who has most of the screen time as young Joan, isn’t detestable in the role. It tells you that she’d be perfectly charming in another movie. Actually, Dench is more off-putting here, if only because destructive naivete is more forgivable in the young.

The Ex isn't painful, horrible or despicable, but it is an amazing mess.

The big trouble with Raising Arizona is that the Coens overdrew their wild and crazy yarn, and overdo almost every gag and gimmick. [20 Mar 1987]

If there was ever a human being who needed a visit from the ghosts of Christmas past, present and future, this is the guy.

A film that looks way more fun to make than it is to watch. There’s a stubbornness to the comedic approach, mostly in its unwillingness to age since the first “Super Troopers.”

Consists of long stretches of boredom, banal dialogue and contorted metaphors, interrupted by flashes of ugliness. See it if you want to be put off of sex for a month - longer if you're older, and perhaps for years if you're very young.

Neither funny nor outrageous nor horrifying nor conventionally affecting.