Dredges up every cliche about druggy, obnoxious dreamers on the fringes of Hollywood and assumes that said cliches have the power to shock and surprise.

As good as The Motel Life is for the actors, that's how bad it is for the viewer.

This kind of psychological mystery, with its suggestion of fugue states, needs to work by hints and whispers, but Pali Road has pretty low expectations of its audience. It ought to be light on its feet, but it lumbers.

Crossover has one redeeming quality: a heart that's in the right place. It's a bad movie with a good message -- but does anyone really want to pay $10 for an ABC After School Special version of "He Got Game"?

Don't even try to make any sense of this --none of it elicits a moment of genuine concern.

Think of all the ways “Apartment 7A” could have slyly addressed these times, or, conversely, more fully explored the practices of the Castavets’ cult. Instead, it's just a retread, and that’s why it’s bad. The devil is in the details.

The film's hymn of praise quickly grows cloying, thanks partly to a relentless musical soundtrack.

When Christian Bale allowed himself to play Bruce Wayne in "Batman Begins," he was slumming - and to good effect. But with Terminator Salvation, this ostensibly serious actor takes up residence in the action ghetto, and it's not a good fit.

There are phony movies made every week, but this is in a different category - a phony movie that seems a distortion of something real, a phony movie offered in place of the real movie von Trier could have made, but it would have cost him something. Some blood, some truth, some soul. What we're left with instead is an empty gesture.

Original enough to come up with new ways to go wrong. For one, the film is a blatant showcase to promote O'Neal as a rap artist.

A stink bomb of a movie.

Great to look at but not much fun to watch… An emotionally uncommitted picture that's smirky and mawkish, by turns, and at heart, empty. [14 Dec 1990, Daily Datebook, p.E1]

Quid Pro Quo, billed as a "neo-noir" about a paraplegic journalist drawn into a shadowy world of disability fetishists, is choked by allegory and pretension. It's an O. Henry tale gone wrong.

There are all kinds of dull movies. There’s check-your-watch (or phone) dull. There’s run-into-the-bathroom-to-splash-water-on-your-face dull. And then there’s Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore, which is standing-up dull.

It’s essentially an animated film, fronted by a live-action Downey and Michael Sheen’s one-note villain. Only Antonio Banderas, in a small role, truly seems to be having a great time.

With The 15:17 to Paris, director Clint Eastwood overwhelms the extraordinary with the mundane, turning the true story of three Americans who helped subdue a gunman aboard a European train into a tedious film.

What's completely baffling is that everyone in the film thinks Nomi is one heck of a dancer, even though her one move -- throwing her arms out stiffly -- is straight out of "Dr. Strangelove."

The film has a fairly clever and original premise — one that’s better left unspoiled as a third act reveal. But the path to it is bizarre and beguiling with too many moments that feel like an episode of “CSI” or “Without a Trace” with much better cinematography and worse dialogue. It kind of makes you wonder what the hell Wan was doing here.

What is meant to be brave comes off as gimmicky and immature.

Yet, it's watchable -- not remotely enjoyable, but watchable.

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.