The photography is excellent! the music is striking! the movie is a stinker!

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

Like Ari Aster’s Eddington earlier this year, Bugonia invites us inside the internet-poisoned imagination of a lonely male protagonist who has “done his own research”—and, as with Eddington, the result is an allegory about contemporary life that’s as nauseatingly gory as it is thuddingly obvious.

An affectless piece of moviemaking.

It's a schlock melodrama dolled up in arty frontier vestments.

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.

The acting in this movie is unusually bad--atrocious, even.

A thesis movie, almost a manifesto for despair, and certainly worthy of the aforementioned NR-DS rating. Except that its bad vibes don't linger. Have dinner and smart conversation with friends, hug a child, pick up a good book--and poof, life returns with a happy vengeance.

The greatest disappointment is how much of the script seems to have been assembled from a kit by someone afraid to deviate from the instructions. In a sequel to "The Lego Movie," that’s not just a letdown, it’s a betrayal.

The film that Nicholas Hytner has directed (from a screenplay by the playwright Wendy Wasserstein) is slick, sweet, and disastrously unmoving -- even people who live to cry at the movies will find themselves depressingly dry-eyed.

Jokes from Scary Movie 3 are recycled ad nauseam.

The remarkable feat of churning out a whole new set of clichés and setting a new level of degradation. That’s Miles Ahead, Don Cheadle’s biopic about Miles Davis.

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

There's no dramatic trajectory here at all.

Smith, to his credit, comes closest to selling the screenplay’s grandiose nonsense — that is, after all, a movie star’s job, and the movie works best, to the extent it works at all, as a reflection on his 30-year career.

I wonder if anything could have made this misfire work.

There’s a hint of a fugue state about it too, as if Rambo, and whatever audience for his movies remained, is trapped in an endless loop, savoring past traumas as a way to avoid facing the present.

His (Lee) Oldboy is relentlessly unpleasant and difficult to watch, without offering audiences much moral or aesthetic payoff for its hour and 40 minutes of graphic violence and abject degradation. Oldboy is both original and uncompromising, I’ll give it that—it just doesn’t happen to be any good.

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.

I walked out of Choke feeling hustled, which is appropriate enough, I guess, for a movie that's a portrait of a compulsive hustler.

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).