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.