Fatuous, sappy, and dull.

I'm genuinely of two minds about the picture. I want to say it's subtle, but I also want to say it's heavy-handed. I want to say it's incisive, but I have too many problems with its psychological elisions to let it off the hook.

Monumentally unimaginative. Thumbs down!

The laborious title of an even more laborious Cockney action movie that some people think is the cat's pajamas crossbred with the bee's knees.

Suicide Squad’s only triumph may be that it manages to make Batman v Superman look better by comparison. Bloated and baffling as that film was, it at least had a coherent aesthetic—a morose aesthetic, to be sure, but an aesthetic all the same. Suicide Squad, by contrast, is little more than a drab patchwork, its stitching the only thing uglier than the cloth.

It's no wonder that Crowe can't generate any real feeling. The narrative is alien to him on every level. The ear-grating dialogue is a good indication that he didn't know what he was doing; he's usually pitch-perfect.

At its worst, This Is 40 feels like being condemned to watch two hours of someone else's home movies - overly long, self-indulgent, and bone-crushingly banal.

Michael Caton-Jones' pompous and coarsely stupid inflation of what remains a superior thriller, Fred Zinnemann's The Day of the Jackal (1973).

RV is another disturbing entry in the dark cycle of movies that began for Robin Williams with "One Hour Photo" and "Insomnia" and has continued with "The Night Listener." I look forward with queasy dread to what he'll do in "Mrs. Doubtfire 2."

It's like a memorial service with killer special effects.

Schrader is like a reformed addict who isn't even honest enough to show what once gave him pleasure. He's the most dangerous kind of crusader. In Auto Focus, he makes you hate sex and movies equally.

This is a movie that sends you out shuddering, chuckling nervously, wanting to tell the people in line for the next show, "It's the feel-bad movie of the year!"

Welcome to Marwen is a tragedy, not because of how Mark’s story ends, but because it’s the work of a filmmaker who’s never been more sure of his craft, and never less connected to anything resembling actual human experience. The movie’s underlying theme is that fantasy is an escape from the real world that can help people return to it, but it doesn’t seem like Zemeckis is ever coming back.

The performances are so terrible that it's hard to know whether Cronenberg wants to signal that much of what we're seeing isn't "real" or he has just forgotten how to write for hemoglobular flesh vessels--i.e., human beings.

The filmmakers have separated themselves from all the emotions of filmmaking except anger.

A sour little psychodrama.

This forced march through a chamber of personal and sociological horrors is difficult to endure but easy to forget.

King Arthur is profoundly stupid and inept, but it's an endless source of giggles once you realize that its historical revisionism has nothing to do with archeological discoveries and everything to do with the fact that no one at Disney would green-light an old-fashioned talky love triangle with a hero who dies and an adulterous heroine who ends up in a nunnery.

An overinflated B-movie with no grace, no subtext, no wit, and featuring beefcake/cheesecake actors who look like they've been plucked from the soaps.

Blomkamp proceeds to spend the last two-thirds of his film crashing spaceships into lawns, or staging high-tech fistfights between Elysium’s stolid hero and his even duller arch-nemesis. It’s a waste of a perfectly good dystopia.

True to the rom-com tradition, the film ends in apologies, tears, and redemptive hugs, but the sour taste it leaves behind feels less like victory than like morning sickness.

A somnolent load of wank.

A melodrama in which the clichés prove more lethal than the bullets.

I found the movie cheap, muddled, and thoroughly devoid of insight.

Jumper not only makes the rules up as it goes along; it neglects to tell us what those rules are, which is both unfair and unfun.

The state of mind brought on by Speed Racer the movie is more akin to that phenomenon by which young infants, exposed to more stimuli than their systems are equipped to handle, will simply shut down.

Where are we? What is this empty, science-fiction-like space in which luxury goods and women who resemble them are ceaselessly rotated in front of our eyes? Oh, it's Hollywood.

There are any number of reasons why the vast majority of comedy sequels are borderline unwatchable, but there’s ultimately only one thing that the worst of them all share in common: They give the audience what they think they want, not what they don’t yet know they want.

This is a two-hour-and-six-minute snuff movie -- The Jesus Chainsaw Massacre -- that thinks it's an act of faith.

The movie is barely sufferable.

What was already a raucous put-on, a goof on Aldrich's brutal action movies, is now a hyperbolic, gross-out cartoon, with a cast of enormous ex-football stars (plus the 7-foot-2-inch Indian wrestler Dalip Singh) only adding to the air of facetiousness.

I had a hard time maintaining interest in (let along liking) any of these self-involved Hollywood twerps, and scene after scene is a grating mixture of self-aggrandizement and masochism.

Preposterous plot devices, leaden acting, and clunktastic dialogue are acceptable in a dance movie, but bad choreography is not, and it's during the dance scenes that Step Up 3D fails.

Made for the most excruciating two-and-a-half hours I've ever spent in a theater.

After two hours and 20 minutes of flamboyantly repulsive variations on this well-worn theme, even the strongest-stomached and most feminist of viewers could be excused for muttering, We get it already.

George Clooney is all by himself among living leading men in making smarm pass triumphantly for charm. But the movie lacks momentum, clarity, a decent payoff, and a location with the personality of Vegas.

This beautifully shot and painstakingly constructed film is a self-indulgent bucket of hogwash.

The project as a whole conveys a drab sense of bureaucratic necessity, a "let's get this over with" wheeziness.

A riot of sleazy camera moves, bad acting, and maladroit profane dialogue.

The 12 scenes of Irreversible--each shot in a single, semi-improvised take--constitute something of a tour de force. But so would being dragged through the streets by a wire noose.

Con Air is boring to the marrow.

Libel on one of the true visionaries of American business in the 20th century, a man unfairly demonized for doing what others strove to do but doing it faster and better.

Howard the Duck, the movie, is as bad as you've heard. Actually, it's worse. But its failings as a film have overshadowed the frequently brilliant 1970s comic book that inspired it. Using only the most superficial elements of its source material while discarding most of what made the comic interesting, the film serves as a textbook example of how to turn something into nothing.

I felt resentful of my own feelings of gratitude while watching The Kitchen, a joyless and exhausting movie that squanders the talents of a dream trio: McCarthy, Tiffany Haddish, and Elisabeth Moss.

He (Annaud) doesn't have a clue how to dramatize the romance. Fiennes, whose eyes are extremely close together, stares with a mixture of rage and longing at Weisz, whose eyes are extremely far apart, and the film turns into "The Dating Game" designed by Picasso.

The script plays goofy games, stopping the action for Tarantino-style small talk; piling on alternate, "Rashomon"-style flashbacks; and divulging its characters' secrets in no particular order.

Hordes of good actors evidently lined up to appear in Confidence, which wastes Weisz, Guzman, Logue, Forster, and Paul Giamatti, among others. Midway through, a grizzled Andy Garcia shambles in, chewing on a cigar, as an FBI agent; he's so fatuously hammy that his true narrative function is never in doubt.

It may or may not be the worst movie ever made, but it is one of the most unhinged.

It might even have been a landmark film about race relations had its aura of blunt realism not been dispelled by a toxic cloud of dramaturgical pixie dust.

All the rest of Thor's 113 minutes felt so synthetic and overfamiliar that those brief flashes of spontaneity stood out like Morse code messages from another, better movie.

This isn’t the churning of ambiguities; it’s a muddle, a mess.

The key, according to the film, is dialogue and altruism — namely, black overtures to white hate. The onus is as misplaced as the movie’s sympathies.

"Why don’t you watch my film before you judge it?” Sia tweeted in November, when outrage about the movie’s casting started to percolate. Well, I have watched the film, I am judging it, and it’s awful.

Yeah, they made a ton of junky movies in Hong Kong, but those were dazzlingly fluid and high-flying junky movies. This American retread has the same sort of hack plot but none of the bravura. It makes them look like monkeys, and not bulletproof ones.

Kaufman proves again how miraculously in synch with his material he can be. Directing a fourth-rate, maladroit, derivative mystery, he becomes a fourth-rate, maladroit, derivative director--worse even than a TV-movie hack.

Linda Hunt's spooky nun speaks of "a hundred levels of consciousness" between death and full, earthbound awareness: Where on that continuum do the executives who green-lighted Dragonfly reside?

You have to feel for the army of talented FX people who must have spent months on scenes--trying to compensate, with their artistry, for the lack of dramatic logic--and having to listen to those lines over and over.

The movie is bafflingly boring and ridiculous. Its loginess is exacerbated by the pacing of the writer-director, Martin Brest.

George Lucas does it his way in the pallid Phantom Menace. Even cultists will wish he'd hired a director and some writers.

Even by the standard of a fourth-in-a-series summer blockbuster, Wolverine, the first X-Men movie directed by Gavin Hood ( Rendition), is remarkably lame.

One of the least entertaining satires ever made.

Material so utterly conventional that you can predict every plot turn after the first half-hour.

I wouldn't exactly call it entertainment; I found myself wanting to apologize on behalf of obnoxious heterosexual Jewish men the world over.

The only surprise about U-Turn is the good reviews it got from people who should know better.

Serves up some of the most gruesomely misogynistic imagery in years, then ends with a bid for understanding. Are its makers so deluded that they think they're making the world a more compassionate place?

It's impressive, in the sense that a sucker-punch impresses itself on your skull.

Beckinsale is an elegant woman—before she was the Emma Peel of the undead, she was Jane Austen's Emma, and before she was Emma, she was passing A levels in German, French, and Russian literature—and all her stalking and seething keep the movie from being totally unwatchable.

For Alvarez, Lisbeth Salander is an icon first and last, which is to say she never feels like an actual person. Here, she’s just a Goth version of James Bond, and if this is Alvarez’s audition for the next Bond movie, then give him the job — he’s exactly the kind of director with style to burn and not too many ideas who you wouldn’t mind seeing donate two years of his career to an aging franchise.

In terms of character development, wit, and simple curiosity, it's dumber than a Neanderthal.

Slow-acting poison. For the first third of the movie, you'll experience a not-unpleasant tingling in the extremities, giving way to an encroaching torpor. An hour in, your pupils will have shrunk to pinholes, and by the time the closing credits roll, you'll be capable only of a dim longing for the defibrillation paddles. Who would have thought a movie about a beautiful, frequently naked female Nazi could be so dull?

The movie is one dead, overcomposed scene after another.

Joker is a bad movie, yes: It’s predictable, clichéd, deeply derivative of other, better movies, and overwritten to the point of self-parody. (If a feature-length sendup of Joker was made, it’s hard to imagine in what details it would differ from Joker itself.) The experience of sitting through it is highly unpleasant, but that unpleasantness has less to do with graphic violence — there are only one or two scenes that go hard, gore-wise — than with claustrophobia and boredom.

A sickeningly manipulative, by-the-numbers revenge movie.

Profoundly unnecessary -- cluttered, padded even at 90 minutes, indifferently narrated by Anthony Hopkins, and consistently misdirected by Ron Howard.

Even by the standards of the current run of mediocre comic-book movies, this one stands out for its egregious shoddiness.

DiVito turns actors like Robin Williams, Edward Norton, and Catherine Keener into nothing less horrific than giant Danny DeVitos.

It used to be that Midler was a life force, but whenever she tries to play one, she looks like she's floating in formaldehyde.

Congratulations to Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald for being the first flat-out terrible product of the Harry Potter expanded universe. The first two movies were not good movies, but no matter how sludgy and overlong Chris Columbus made them, they were salvaged by the truly magical origin stories they told.

All of its plot threads are equally dreadworthy.

The movie is a big, noisy mess, with a howler at its center: Overrouged psychiatrist Michael Douglas.

It’s just a deeply misguided mode of franchise-building.

ark delivers an abstract exercise in style, a movie so dissociated from any recognizable human emotion or behavior that its actors come to seem like animatronics... I’m bored writing about it.

There are no real people in The Producers --only actors laboring to dispel whatever magic they once were thought to possess. The director, Susan Stroman, has brought the Broadway smash to the screen (where it began, almost 40 years ago) with cataclysmic results.

Let's just say that in spite of its malignant sun-scorched palette, absurdist visions, and narrative loop the loops, the picture looks in hindsight like the same old vigilante crap.

The commitment of its all-star cast — which includes Oscar Isaac, Annette Bening, Mandy Patinkin, Antonio Banderas, Olivia Wilde, Olivia Cooke, and Samuel L. Jackson — can’t divert from the fact that its quills droop and sag, where they haven’t fallen off altogether. Behold the other North American flightless turkey.

I found the film -- excruciatingly flat-footed, with one of the most exasperating scores (by Philip Glass) ever written. The most fascinating thing in the movie is a nose.

Here is a movie that encourages you to give it the benefit of the doubt at every possible turn but has no interest in offering anything in return. If you liked the original, you’ll like this one less. If you loathed the original, may God be with you. Opa!

To call The Change-Up misogynistic would be to shortchange the equal-opportunity disgust this anal-regressive film demonstrates toward men, babies, old people, and corporeal existence in general.

It's not so much the nonsensical nature of the plot that rankles; it's the movie's wrongheaded approach to the material.

Fifty Shades Darker is very faithful to its predecessor’s vision. That is to say, it is another terrible movie with just the slightest whiff of self-awareness about how terrible it is.

Turns into a moronic, psycho-on-the-loose picture pretty quickly.

Clash seems to be deliberately steering clear of camp, when in fact it should have steered straight into camp and stepped on the gas.

And it's true that this movie's absolute tone-deafness, its complete disconnection from our current economic and geopolitical reality, by moments achieves a perverse Warholian profundity.

Cruise seems weariest of all, flogging outdated merchandise he can’t even pretend to believe in. It’s not Cruise that feels ancient; it’s The Mummy.

Turns into a pea-brained hodgepodge of "The Omen" (1976), "The Sixth Sense" (1999), and about 30 Grade-Z Bela Lugosi mad-scientist movies.

Russell is a manically inventive writer-director--maybe the most fearless talent of his generation. It's not a contradiction to say that I admire him more than ever while pronouncing Huckabees an unmitigated disaster.

There's not a single thing about Air Force One to recommend, except perhaps the controlled performance of Glenn Close, who does remarkably well as the recipient of several phone calls from the sky.

To put it delicately, this comics fan hated Batman v Superman with the fury of a thousand red-dwarf suns. Blunt, humorless, and baffling, it collides the brutish directorial stamp of its director (he of 300 and Watchmen fame) with the most shameless instincts of our latter-day superhero franchise bubble.