Monkey Shines is just humdrum theater fodder that exploits the problems of quadriplegics for a cheap buzz of fear that it can't even deliver. This movie could make the apes sorry that we're related. [29 July 1988, p.9]

Doremus captures each insipid moment with hand-held camera urgency and clumsy jump cuts.

End of Watch is a repellent movie, first for its shaky-cam conceit rendering much of the action incomprehensible, and finally for seeking to entertain viewers through the thuggish execution of a police officer.

Quentin Tarantino's The Hateful Eight is vile art, bludgeoning viewers for three hours with indefensibly gratuitous race baiting and blood.

This is a soulless endeavor that would alarm if Ford devised it on his own. Instead, he shares blame with Austen Wright's novel Tony and Susan, adapted into parallel narratives; one empty, the other leaking blood.

Aggressively inane. [14 Apr 1989]

This tale of prehistoric cuteness (sort of a Clan Of The Care Bears) is mostly dreadfully slow when it is not being overbearingly cloying. Bluth has done much better work in the past and certainly will again. This isn't it. [18 Nov 1988, p.7]

Darkman is a spectacularly ill-conceived combination of Batman and The Phantom of the Opera. [24 Aug. 1990, p.6]

Carnahan didn't make a movie unfit for mankind but it certainly isn't worth mankind's money.

Back To The Beach, starring the early '60s most popular teen-agers, Frankie and Annette, combines the campiness of a college reunion, the corniness of a high school musical, and the values of Mister Rogers. The film's only redeeming quality is that it knows it … and manages to laugh at itself occasionally. [10 Aug 1987, p.1D]

The Boxtrolls is a visually repellent pile of stop-motion animation, populated by grotesques and filmed in the palette of an exhumed casket's interior. It can frighten small children and bore anyone, with its cracked, cackled British wit.

Project X is a predictable, sappy Save The Monkeys movie. [17 Apr 1987, p.1D]

An amoral mosaic of carnage and carnality.

Director Ted Demme (Jonathan's nephew, Who's the Man?) guides this predictable action with a leaden hand. It's as if he, like everyone else in The Ref, is holding back, awaiting Leary's next inspired, caustic riff. That's a lot of pressure for a cult-level comic in his first lead role. He doesn't always measure up. [11 Mar 1994, p.8]

If only one character in Stone reacted as someone in his position would to the preposterous situation at hand, the movie would be 15 minutes long.

Moving away from the gag-based comedy of his films with Chong, Marin has discovered a richer humor of character and circumstance, and although old habits surface long enough to permit unfortunate lapses in continuity and consistency, he proves surprisingly adept at his new mode. [24 Aug 1987, p.1D]

Underwood's film doesn't have a fraction of the insight or genuine comedy of City Slickers and it's a few years too late to be fresh material. Overall, Heart and Souls is an odd title for a movie that has a distinct, depressing lack of both qualities. [13 Aug 1993]

Save the money you might spend for a ticket to see For a Good Time, Call... and just read a dive bar's restroom wall for free. That's the sub-level of comedy here, with a litany of crude sexual euphemisms and phallic images passed off as jokes.

Cloud Atlas, surely the most incoherent waste of time and money on screen this year.

Mike Myers' first film excursion beyond Wayne's World feels like one of those boring, aimless Saturday Night Live sketches that typically ruin the final 10 minutes of each show. So I Married an Axe Murderer is a mess, from its cliched mistaken-identity premise to one-liners that sound "borrowed" from other comedians or school-yard jive sessions. Above all, this tedious comedy proves that, as a movie star, Myers should never be let out of that basement in Aurora, Ill., that he shares with Dana Carvey. [30 July 1993, p.11]

Rarely has a children's picture been so stagnant, so bereft of passion. [18 Dec 1987, p.8]

Niccol fashioned an uninspired and downright dull sci-fi gimmick and doesn't even explain how it happened.

Under Siege 2: Dark Territory is the sort of movie that would give sequels a bad name, if they didn't already have one. [16 July 1995, p.2B]

On the plus side, Scott's plagues are cool. But it's a long slog to crocodile rocking, pestilence and Proactiv-proof sores.

John Hillcoat's Triple 9 is doubly disappointing, wasting talent and our time with underworld cliches previously covered in other movies that ultimately didn't matter. This cynical slice of lowlife will join them soon enough.

What truly makes The Neon Demon frustrating is Refn's undeniable talent for arresting images. His color schemes and framing make each second fascinating to observe, even when the dialogue is stultifying.

Jack the Giant Slayer is merely cable TV fodder waiting to happen and not worth a hill of beans, magic or otherwise.

Valerian displays reckless imagination and zero personality.

It's an out-of-control movie from an out-of-touch director/screenwriter; too frenzied to make sense, and too awful to tear your eyes away. [01 Dec 1995, p.12]

Extreme Prejudice is an exceptionally bad movie, despite a powerful introduction in the tradition of Hill's bloodiest ventures, Southern Comfort, The Long Riders and 48 HRS. [24 Apr 1987, p.1D]

Ben Affleck is Agent Double-OCD in The Accountant, an effortlessly dumb thriller barely more entertaining than an audit.

As far as unnecessary movies go, Predators is a pip.

Nearly everything about Just Wright is just wrong.

Most annoying is John Carter's scarcity of action. This much buck should buy more bang.

Funny Farm is one of the dullest, most predictable movies in Chevy Chase's and director George Roy Hill's spotty careers. It's on par with Chase's Modern Problems and Hill's A Little Romance. This picture is not destined to be fondly remembered in their memoirs. [3 June 1988, p.8]

This Thing is purely for the gorehounds, and they aren't likely to leave impressed.

Ricochet isn't worthy of Lithgow's or Washington's talents. But having committed to the movie, these actors have gotten what they deserved. [05 Oct 1991, p.3D]

A disastrous follow-up to Peter Bogdanovich's The Last Picture Show, one of the seminal movies of a generation. [28 Sep 1990, p.7]

30 Minutes or Less merely puts together actors with only one funny talent each, making them do it over and over again.

For all their bantering about being losers on the verge of falling in love, there's very little chemistry between Ringwald and Downey. [21 Sept 1987, p.1D]

Moviegoers know exactly how these children feel awaiting the conclusion of The Baby Sitters Club, a dull, superficial adaptation of Ann Martin's popular book series that gives new meaning to the term "growing pains." [18 Aug 1995, p.8]

There's a lot of money in the sets, costumes, cinematography and soundtrack of The Big Town, but the movie has no soul. [29 Sep 1987, p.4D]

I'm Still Here is amateurishly shot and edited, as if ineptness equaled some higher level of veracity. Ironically, it's the only Joaquin Phoenix movie anyone has cared about in years.

A Cure for Wellness is a repellent curiosity, rich in atmosphere yet starved for dramatic morsels a sound plot might nourish.

A wheel-spinning homage gone terribly awry.

The word "sappy" comes to mind, constantly. So often that I wanted to make like a tree and leaf. Frankly I'm stumped, wondering exactly who the audience is for such a drab slab of saccharine uplift.

Wonder Wheel is one of Allen’s worst movies.

For their next act, the illusionist con artists from Now You See Me will make every ounce of goodwill that movie earned disappear.

The movie takes something primally appealing and attempts to explain it, fetishize it, turn it into something deeper and more dramatic than it is.

Beaches, adapted from novelist Iris Rainer Dart's hankie-wringer, is truly horrid. Its only redeeming qualities are heartfelt performances by Midler and Barbara Hershey, as pen-pal buddies since pre-adolescence. [13 Jan 1989, p.6]

Airheads is a rock 'n' roll radio comedy in which laughs come at a very low frequency. [5 Aug 1994, p.8]

The only memorable aspect of She's Out of My League is Eve's performance. Not that it's good, but it does possess the hypnotic quality of a flicker ring.

Dante's movie is so helter-skelter, that he can't generate the uncomfortable mood the moment requires. It's the balloon principle. The 'Burbs is so full of hot air it simply blows up in its own face. [17 Feb 1989, p.6]

The only thing Black or White adds to the discussion of race relations is another one-sided argument.

Breaking Dawn Part 1 confirms suspicions that all four books could've made a heck of a single movie.

Like many sudden heroes, these lifelong friends led unremarkable lives until fate stepped in. Eastwood is committed to depicting every single unremarkable step along the way.

She-Devil is insipid. It is a hustle-bustle comic fantasy that insists on shoveling forced humor down viewers' throats. The movie is devoid of charm. [8 Dec 1989, p.6]

The central mystery has been drastically altered to fit Julia Roberts, its most telling clue diluted, and a signature sequence that made soccer exciting now makes baseball duller.

The film, which follows homecoming queen Laura Palmer's last seven days before her murder, is dark, pointless and tortuously boring to watch. [1 Sept 1992, p.1D]

Country Strong is a country music melodrama, but I'm not sure which country.

Perhaps the NCAA should investigate how Necessary Roughness ever made it to the big screen. The movie-making team that fielded this fiasco would receive more sanctions than the universities of Florida, Oklahoma and Houston combined. [27 Sept 1991, p.13]

Last Man Standing can't live up to its Japanese and Italian predecessors or even its title. [20 Sep 1996, p.5]

Perhaps if I hadn't laughed so hard at a recent revival of Blazing Saddles, then Mel Brooks' new film, Robin Hood: Men in Tights, wouldn't be such a dismal disappointment. [28 July 1993, p.6B]

If the saccharine quality of movies could be translated into seismic activity, Welcome Home, Roxy Carmichael would level Los Angeles. [12 Oct 1990, p.13]

The Angry Birds Movie is simply a pointless swirl of color and motion to babysit small children on home video in a few months. Sadly, such movies aren't an endangered species.

Machine Gun Preacher comes alive only when Sam is pulling a trigger, which is most of the second hour. You can find the same thrill from watching a grindhouse descendant like "The Expendables" on cable TV.

Raising Cain is monumentally bad. It is De Palma's Howard the Duck. [07 Aug 1992, p.10]

Stargate is a time-warped implosion of baffling space mysticism, a costume budget gone mad, and too much sand for any movie short of Lawrence of Arabia. It's pretty, vacant and pointless; an interactive computer game with which we just don't feel like getting involved. [28 Oct 1994, p.10C]

Other than its campy title, not much about Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter is fun.

The saddest part of the film is that Hogan, after creating an entertaining character, chose to plug the character into a cheap formula whose hoped-for solution is, I suspect, a big chunk of the $300-million the first film was able to milk worldwide. I can see at least a few interesting movies using the Dundee character and Australia: Crocodile Dundee II is not one of them. [27 May 1988, p.6]

This movie never realizes how ridiculous anything it does truly is, right up to the last-second promise of another sequel.

Hardware runs more precisely, it crawls aimlessly as the robot, pieced together from household appliances, attempts to slice, dice, drill and saw Jill to death. There's no tension, no suspense, no climax. [14 Sep 1990, p.7]

Two flesh-and-blood performers stand out among the machinery. One is pop singer Rhianna, looking lovely as usual despite the military gear and quite comfortable with high-powered artillery. The other is Gregory D. Gadson, an Army veteran who lost his legs to a roadside bomb in Baghdad.

Hop is harmless, which is the worst best thing to be said for any movie. It never decides whether to be a kiddie flick or a grownup lark and winds up as neither. As Roger might say: "Puh-puh-puh-puhleeze, don't waste your time."

Metro is the kind of movie an actor makes when he's either coasting on a reputation or scrambling to recover one. The kind of movie that Murphy doesn't need to make after hitting big again with The Nutty Professor, and the kind we don't need to pay theater prices to see. [17 Jan 1997, p.9]

The sequel is merely crude for crudeness' sake, lazy as they come.

Final Analysis is overwrought, overwritten, overscored pseudo-Hitchcockian drivel. With more twists than Lombard Street has curves, this San Francisco-set psychological thriller is the biggest disappointment of the new year. [8 Feb 1992, p.3D]

The Comedian is a phony movie about funny people, starring a great actor understanding next to nothing about stand-up comedy.

Three Fugitives, which for all purposes is one extended chase, has a few chuckles, though nothing to justify its existence.[27 Jan 1989, p.11]

All Crowe's movie has going for it is casting, a lineup of favored actors wasted in a screenplay unsure of what it wants to be. Aloha is by turns a love quadrangle that never materializes, an ode to Hawaiian sovereignty, an opposites-attract cliche and an outer-space weapons caper, all of which is clumsily executed.

Pitch Perfect 3 totally eclipses the heart of a charming franchise, turning the scrappy Bellas a capella posse into needy Charlie’s Angels wannabes. It’s a movie taking popularity for granted, a finale saying goodbye with a "you’re welcome."

If this is the best filmmakers can do with the video game market, we'll sit the rest out until the planned film version of Doom. [04 Nov 1994, p.7]

Can we please get over the notion that every superhero in a skintight suit deserves a movie? Green Lantern is the latest wallet drainer emptying the comic book bench, more thudding than "Thor" and sorely incoherent.

The Change-Up is the "Human Centipede" of gag-me comedies.

Billed as an action comedy, The Green Hornet isn't funny, and the action is often too frenetic to make any impression.

A sitcom pilot idea stretched to feature length boredom.

If anyone could harness McCarthy's dynamo presence while protecting her from looking bad, it should be Falcone. Instead, Tammy suggests no one had the heart to tell this hot Hollywood couple that it wasn't working.

Move along, guys. Nothing to see in The Lucky One, unless you're in the doghouse at home and need to make nice.

Our Family Wedding should embarrass Whitaker and each of his co-stars, perhaps except Carlos Mencia, whose chief attribute as an actor is that he's a so-so standup comedian.

Yes, there is a hell, and this movie is showing at its local multiplex.

If the first 90 minutes of Girl Most Likely grate and disappoint, wait until the final 10 or so, when directors Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini try covering their maniacally depressive tracks like cats in a litter box.

The SEALs remain as elusive in the movie as they are in real life. They don't offer much information about the secret force, nor do they show us what it's like to be in it. The script sounds as if it has been declassified with all the juicy stuff taken out for security reasons...What it's left with is a series of explosive action scenes, music videos and scant dialogue tied loosely together around a weak plot. [20 July 1990, p.6]

In an era when racism appears to be on a violent comeback, Amos & Andrew is worse than offensive. It's a cinematic travesty. [05 Mar 1993, p.8]

In 2002, "My Big Fat Greek Wedding" was at least a unique cultural take on movie cliches typically reserved for Italian and Jewish squabbles and makeups. Now it's all stale baklava, made with love but past its prime. Opa? Nope-a.

It's amazing how much slobber $ 20-million will buy. [28 July 1989, p.6]

It's sad to see mercurial talent unused, and even more disheartening to see it completely wasted. Color of Night, the first film in 14 years from director Richard Rush, is a dreadful miscalculation of a comeback; a sexual thriller equally lewd and ludicrous. Rush has already disavowed the reworked version opening nationwide today, promising his original vision will be available later on video. [19 Aug 1994, p.7B]

Victor Frankenstein is misshapen as the bad doctor's creature itself, straining without wit or viscera to be a devilish horror romp.

The Art of Getting By is enough to drive a movie critic to drink. The next round's on the kid in the overcoat.