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

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

This movie leaves us with the stale whiff of fake nostalgia and something even more odoriferous: the smell of money.

All of its plot threads are equally dreadworthy.

Unfolds like the slow-motion dismantling of the world's most boring matryoshka.

The picture is an empty parlor trick, but it's carried out with a master's concentration.

It's enough to make you wish someone would make a movie about her.

Baywatch is surprisingly without sexism or condescension: It’s equal-opportunity stupid.

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!

The Hong Kong vet director, Ronny Yu, did a bang-up job in 1998 with "Bride of Chucky," but he can't do much for this one except keep it moving, light it scarily, and pump that plasma.

Travolta keeps you grooving even when the movie's motor runs down--although it has never revved too high to begin with.

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

The movie made me laugh a lot anyway. It has a big, inventive cast of loons and a great premise.

Domino seemed to me the end of the world for movies--a glimpse of a future so excruciating that I'd prefer to take my chances with Hitchcock's eye-gouging avians.

I really hope Evan Almighty doesn't become a surprise hit with a niche audience (Christian, environmentalist 8-year-olds?). Too much worldly success might tempt Steve Carell away from the righteous path of making movies as dark, weird, and funny as he is himself.

Natalie Portman may have the black swan and the white swan down, but she's still working on the gray.

Mad Men is a super-stylized, not particularly realist piece of work—that’s why it can feel as mannered as theater. Are You Here strives for a more grounded tone, but, what it gains in realism, it gives away in psychological acuity and emotional oomph.

The first hour is evocative and creepy...But once the trajectory is clear and the squeamish New York intellectual Quaid has to stand up and fight for his homestead, the boringness seeps into you like the damp.

Great(ish) ideas and terrible ones sit cheek by jowl, original notions and blatant thievery corralled together with no discernible logic. It’s a horror movie one moment, a comedy the next, as if Netflix were streaming several different titles at once.

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.

Bizarrely depressing.

In the hierarchy of things that creep into your house, the tooth fairy ranks somewhere beneath Santa Claus and above the Formosan termite.

Aeon Flux is not that terrible. It's certainly more fun than a lot of films that get lovingly showcased.

If you get caught between the moon and New York City--or even just between two movies at the multiplex--the best that you can do is skip this one.

Emminently skippable.

A New Legacy is much slicker and more appealing than the original Space Jam, in no small part because James is approximately 50 times the actor Jordan is. But it’s also because corporations handing a bag of unrelated IP and ordering screenwriters to come up with a story around them is the template for most studio filmmaking now, if not all of contemporary existence.

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

Half inspired and half eye-rollingly terrible.

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.

Sex Tape, conversely, is as timid, bland, and predictable as romantic comedies come — though it’s a hard movie to hate entirely.

I suppose you could say the film made me slightly more likely to play one of the games, but only because I’d do just about anything before I saw this movie again.

I will hold against him (Shyamalan) that Lady in the Water isn't scary, that its own inner logic breaks down at countless points along the way, and that its ending is disappointingly literal and just plain stupid. Lady in the Water is, however, funny at times, even intentionally so.

Probably the most horrifying stuff I've seen all week.

It underscores the gruesome legacy of Saturday Night Live in American movies...They haven't liberated screen comedy, they've left it neutered--or, should I say, Spade.

Unfathomably awful.

Duncan Jones must have believed there was an incredible movie in his head. If there was, it’s still in there.

Venom wants to be something different, an off-kilter dark comedy whose protagonist doesn’t need to be cleaned up so he can fight alongside Iron Man someday. But it’s also terrified to step out of line, and the stench of fear overwhelms whatever wisps of fresh air have sneaked through the cracks in the doorway.

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 reductio ad absurdum of a summer blockbuster. It is loud (boom!), long (two and a half hours!), incoherent (poorly explained intergalactic warfare!), leering (Megan Fox in short shorts!), racist (jive-talkin' robot twins!), and rife with product tie-ins (Chevy! Hasbro!).

The movie is OK for a January horror picture, but given the premise and the cast--it should wring you out emotionally as it's scaring you witless.

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.

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

It would be easier to forgive Identity Thief its overfamiliar comic setups and shameless gag-recycling if the movie’s second half didn’t make such an abrupt about-face from soliciting our revulsion to begging for our pity.

It's a mystery how such a hodgepodge, at once incoherent and overfamiliar, could have come together on screen.

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

That What's Your Number? is a bad movie is the least of the reasons to walk out of it feeling awful. Competing for the top spot are these two: the criminal misuse of Faris; and the casual endorsement of courtship practices as arcane and sadistic as Chinese foot-binding.

He does gorgeous work, but in Mission to Mars he's only going through the motions.

Dull-witted.

Using R.E.M.'s impassioned "Everybody Hurts"--written by Michael Stipe after the suicide of Kurt Cobain--to underscore shots of Kidman and Ferrell feeling blue about their inability to pair off is an aesthetic crime. The Ephrons should be fined and forced to do a few hundred hours of community service.

I wouldn't go so far as to recommend this movie, but if you were tied down and forced to watch it, you wouldn't necessarily have to chew off your own leg to get away.

The only question worth asking about an early January horror movie is if its inevitable badness is at all interesting.

Enjoyable in patches, but only because of the goodwill that most of us still have toward Sandra Bullock.

The old-school horror tricks (the fake scare followed by a real one, the safe haven that isn't) feel more like cribbing than homage, but they get the job done.

It all adds up to one of the most brazen pieces of blame-shifting in exploitation-picture history.

Watching Thunder Force, it’s baffling to remember that this is Falcone’s fifth film as a director. There’s a convenience store fight so ineptly staged I had to watch it three times to decipher what was happening, and running gags that aren’t funny the first time and grow worse with every repetition.

I have a certain affection for this movie, if only because of its conceptual simplicity.

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.

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

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.

What it lacks in charm, humor, and intelligence, it makes up for in sheer volume.

Elektra isn't half-bad--only maybe two-fifths.

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.

It's another dumb vengeance picture -- "In the Bedroom" for meatheads.

She's (Jolie) the most amazing special effect in movies. The best thing in Lara Croft: Tomb Raider is a bungee-jumping ballet that Lara performs late at night in her mansion, soaring high and low in Japanese silk pajamas and with her hair pulled tightly back.

I'm not sure if the movie's lack of momentum is the fault of the director, the screenwriter, or the star, Romano. But most likely, it represents the luckless convergence of three dismayingly low-watt talents.

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."

I'd like to tell you about the remake of The Amityville Horror (MGM), but I ankled after less than five minutes. It was something about the little girl holding the stuffed animal getting blown away with a shotgun at point-blank range.

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.

A comedy so noxious it seems the product of deliberate malignity. Surely the sour, vapid, miserable world of this movie can't reflect any real human being's notion of what love or humor or good storytelling is-not even a Hollywood screenwriter's.

In his defense, the kid is saddled with a task that even a more experienced actor might have trouble pulling off: He must carry an entire action movie on his slender shoulders, given little more to act opposite than a succession of green-screen predators. Even with his charismatic dad in his earpiece calling the shots, Jaden can’t turn himself into a movie star by sheer force of Will.

The preview—if that's truly what it is—has a beginning, a middle, and an end; a host of good lines; and so many goofy surprises that it's hard to believe that there's anything more to see in the picture itself. I mean … they wouldn't show you the entire movie in the coming attraction, would they?

Passable--just.

A decent-enough rambunctious Southern-drive-in sort of time-waster, missing only the bare boobs that would make it the perfect socially irresponsible sexist entertainment for rednecks and uptight liberal elites who'd like to live the country-boy dream for a few hours. (Howdy, y'all!)

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

Rock (is) arguably the best comedian in America, as well as a curiously important cultural figure. It does not, however, make him an actor. In fact, it makes him something like the opposite of an actor. He does not produce lifelike gestures and emotions.

The disaster sequences themselves — of which there are many, placed at regular intervals but disconnected from the story, like operatic arias — have a dreamlike and weirdly exhilarating quality that’s quite different from the plodding wham-bam destruction of the average action blockbuster.

It’s 80-year-old Ian McKellen who can best answer that last question, having the most fun of anyone as Gus the Theater Cat, lapping out of saucers and rubbing up against corners like the true thespian he is. And really, for all its flaws, what more could you possibly ask for from Cats?

Land of the Lost is an enjoyable regression to Saturday mornings gone by, as junky and sweet as a strawberry Pop-Tart.

By the third big climax the audience started to get impatient with the movie's pointless zigs and zags.

Size really is about all that this tedious, underpopulated beanbag of an epic has going for it.

A buddy cop movie that pretends to spoof buddy cop movies along with reality TV shows, Showtime is so lazy and artless that … that … it saps my will to come up with a good quip: Witless in itself, it is the source of witlessness in others.

You might actively root for their collective demise, if you could rouse yourself to care one way or the other. Go gallivanting in Chernobyl and you get what you pay for, nimrods.

There is something special about seeing a bawdy spectacle of feigned sex and quivering emotion test the boundaries of Hollywood’s rigid traditionalism, and their goofy thrall over audiences make for especially fun experiences in a theater. These movies are derivative, often ridiculous, and, in the case of Fifty Shades Freed, unquestionably hilarious, but they’re also the overheated comfort food I crave.

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.

A depressing comeback for Jane Fonda, but it's still nice to see her in movies again, and in something that isn't dripping with self-actualizing virtue like her last projects.

This mad prophet says it will die in a week.

As I've implied, this is a great midnight movie: I enjoyed every patchily edited, ham-fisted scene. But I don't like seeing the wonderful Kate Winslet look stupid, or the wonderful Laura Linney abase herself.

And you wait--and wait--for the magic of movies.

More entertaining than it needs to be.

The movie suffers from a constant lack, not of resources but of imagination, of inspiration—of, to put it simply, fun.

Denzel Washington is so powerfully earnest an actor that you never want to laugh at him -- even when you ought to be in stitches.

Impressively sets a new standard for time travel gone awry.

One of many burdensome tasks required of the viewer of this fish-out-of-water love story. The toughest of all: caring about any of the characters in this smug, check-off-the-boxes comedy.

This isn't a movie of hoary Sherwood Forest clichés. It manages, through sheer artistic force, to stoop below cliché--to seem both fresh and rotten at once.

The first 45 minutes or so is stupefying--flat, disjointed, missing all human connective tissue.

It has none of the minor virtues of Schumacher's other films. It looks bad: cluttered surfaces, production design reminiscent of overblown Broadway musicals, editing too fast for the eye to catch up, poor staging of fast action.

Just don't believe the anti-hype. There are lots of reasons to have a good cry these days -- here's a nice, warm place to get squeezed.