Not quite repellent enough to avoid tedium, Hannibal Rising is both too familiar in portraying Hannibal as a Dracula-like aristocrat monster, and crud in its exploitation of wartime atrocities.

The film moves from cliché to cliché and hemorrhages blood and logic at an alarming rate.

Being risibly bad, The Happening is at least worth a laugh. Exactly one laugh, by my reckoning, and completely unintended but no less full-throated for that.

It is not simply that this film is utterly unrealistic – perhaps that can be overlooked; it’s a fable of sorts, set in a scrupulously neutral pan-European setting. What is unforgiveable is that Langseth’s approach to complex emotional issues is unsubtle at best and untruthful at worst.

The film is basically a compendium of possessed-child clichés.

God forgive me, but I worship the Bad Dialogue Fairy -- he gets me through these endless nights.

Five Feet Apart is an infuriating and unenjoyable take on first love.

Torching “witches” is the one part of the story that has some historical basis, and adds an uncomfortable edge of misogyny to this otherwise empty fantasy.

David Bowie, flaunting a Marianne Faithfull hairdo, stars in Jim Henson's latest puppety film, the flagrantly unoriginal Labyrinth. [1 Jul 1986, p.A1]

Lame and disrespectful sequel.

It's a con, a movie that tries to lure unsuspecting teen-age audiences into the theatres with the promise of offensiveness, stupidity and puerility - which, after all, are almost traditions in summer teen entertainment - and then ambushes them with a clumsy, unfunny movie that, rather than revel in its own potential for bad taste, attempts to cram messages about growing up and being responsible down the teenage gullet.

Damned if those dual spoilsports, the gladiatorial director Ridley Scott reteamed with his portly star Russell Crowe, haven't drained every drop of merriment right out of the myth.

The problem with the Purge films is they feel like they’re made for people who would actually take part in the purge.

There is no harm in allowing Clooney to further stretch his directorial muscles – "Good Night, and Good Luck" is not bad – but there ought to be a law against wasting such talents as Matt Damon, Julianne Moore and poor ol' Oscar Isaac in this hollow exercise.

Okay, one kind word: Bill Nighy is clearly enjoying himself playing a New York businessman whose caviar restaurant improbably becomes a beacon for a host of impoverished ne’re-do-wells. But that is the only nicety I can muster for this otherwise cartoonish treacle.

How Besson drags this premise into 90 minutes of screen time should be of interest to the perverse among you – or anybody teaching a how-not-to-make-a-movie summer course.

Hotel Transylvania 2 is what you might call frivolously scary: scary by mistake, or scary for no reason.

Fewer heads in the film and more evidence of one on the director's shoulders might have squeezed a legitimate laugh or two out of this contrived juvenile carnage.

Brings on a wave of nostalgia accompanied, unfortunately, by a great big yawn that will surely be experienced by parents hoping for a spark of irreverence à la Pippi or the broad comic appeal found in most theatrical family fare these days.

Even at the abbreviated length of 70 minutes (less feature than featurette), material so maniacal wears very thin very fast. [5 Feb 1993]

Yeah, it’s not good. Writer/director Ricky Tollman has turned the true story of Rob Ford’s crack video into a fake cris du coeur for millennials.

Conan the Destroyer is in a class below its predecessor. Director Richard Fleischer (The Vikings, Mandingo) has indeed made a dumb, ridiculous movie. [29 June 1984]

I think that the perfect name for the chick in a chick flick is Rebecca Bloomwood. I know that if Charles Dickens had possessed the good sense to write chick flicks, he could not have done better than Rebecca Bloomwood.

Compared to Al Gore's new global-warming documentary, "An Inconvenient Truth," The Omen makes the Apocalypse look comforting and child-friendly.

This is a movie that was made not because the director had anything to say, but because she wanted to get a movie made. Even at that, the script is slapdash. Only one character has any dimension (Frances O'Connor's Mia), the plotting is the usual sub-screwball comedy with obligatory pranks and misunderstandings, and the overall tone is bland, smug and connivingly cute. [11 Apr 1997, p.C6]

The performances, the writing, the direction, Segel’s D.F.W. impression, everything is just fine. But The End of the Tour is disgraceful. It feels like it’s towing out the real Wallace’s ghost to perform some soppy parody of himself.

Packed with stilted performances and hackneyed jokes from the road-movie playbook, it doesn’t work unless you’ve never seen another film in your life.

Deja vu's too kind a term to describe what happens in the latest chapter in the lives of the characters created so long ago in print by Peter Benchley and brought to life - and, eventually, to death - on screen by Steven Spielberg. [22 July 1987]

Using a kidnapping plot to call up some old-fashioned suspense, it doesn't even get a dial tone.

Mainly, you have to wonder why Allyson doesn’t just hire a nanny, find a job and get out of the house. Ah, but this is a Christian movie, and once it stops pelting an audience with comic incident, it begins preaching.

It is, from beginning to end, a paint-by-numbers movie. There's a mildly entertaining climax, but most of Showtime is a layering of tired pop-culture tropes by actors who are not especially interested in what they're doing.

There must be a musical somewhere in the musty vaults of movie history as bad as The Pirate Movie, but I'm at a loss to recall it - speaking comparatively, this unclean thing imparts to Can't Stop the Music and Xanadu the delicacy and charm of a moment with Fred Astaire. It makes you long for The Blue Lagoon. It encourages you to baste yourself in that masterpiece of oily ennui, Summer Lovers. It makes an evening with Kate Smith look good; hell, it makes an evening with Margaret Trudeau look good. [9 Aug 1982]

You may think I’m being too hard on this film. It’s possible I saw it on the wrong night, in the wrong mood. But I’m fed up with the cheap laziness of this strain of comedy. When I was eight, I found it side-splitting that Ken’s doll hand was moulded in a curve that fit perfectly over Barbie’s breast. But then I grew up.

Whether madcap parody – the "American Psycho" of G-man flicks – or walk on the wild side of Lynch's obsessions, the film's a failure.

Writer/director Gus Van Sant, who's built his reputation on the romantic decadence of "Drugstore Cowboy" and "My Own Private Idaho," completely misses the poetry and the irony of the book. [20 May 1994]

Willis has a gift for turning formulaic action flicks -- Die Hard, even Hudson Hawk -- into something with an identifiable personality, but much of Mercury Rising challenges even his charms. [3 Apr 1998, p.C5]

The movie pretty much blows.

Ready To Wear is certainly a disappointment, if not an outright flop. [27 Dec 1994]

Unfortunately, nobody had the good sense to call the comedy authorities and shut this Zookeeper down.

An incoherent mess of a movie with a neat boat chase near the end. [21 Sept 1993]

In Drowning by Numbers, there is a strange character called Smut, a precocious boy genius fascinated by sex and obsessed with death: his avocation is the compulsive cataloguing of dead animals. The Cook, The Thief, His Wife & Her Lover feels as if it could been made by that child. [31 March 1990]

Blind Date is a screwball comedy bereft of both a brain and a heart. Instead, it's all muscle and reflex, the conditioned kind good only for simple movements made in slapstick fashion, over and over and over and out. [27 Mar 1987]

It's so much like Home Alone, it's the unofficial sequel, Home Alone II: Out on His Own. Career Opportunities shows us what happens when the Macaulay Culkin character grows up. It's not a pretty sight. [1 Apr 1991]

Above The Law is beneath contempt, a movie whose esthetic politics stand somewhere to the right of tyrannosaurus rex. You know the type. Take your standard-issue Vietnam vet, martial-arts-mastering, renegade cop and turn him loose on the mean streets of any photogenic city (Chicago and its El, in this neon-and-sleaze case). [26 Apr 1988]

Meant to be a nodding aside to the film buff, with plenty of in-jokes for the cognoscenti, Crimewave ends up as a random list in dire need of a good file-clerk. [3 July 1987]

Dumb, dumber, dumbest.

Like Jerry Springer, it's loaded with class bias, offering a condescending fantasy that sees the poor as exotically grotesque, promiscuous, violent, and spiritually doomed. [17 Oct. 1997, p.D9]

What doesn’t go in Skyscraper is watching Sawyer and his family face staggering calamity and danger with barely a concern raised or a sweat broken. As for the actors portraying them, they’re the brave ones. And if they were scared, they didn’t show it.

The film suffers from a syndrome I'll call the Pop Princess's New Clothes. Hilary can't really sing, and neither can Terri, so you can't help but wonder, what's the big whoop?

Gomez, who turns 20 next year, looks much younger than her age and has the thankless task of playing three roles...It feels like a struggle and the screenplay doesn't help.

Everything about Are You Here feels like a bottom-drawer script idea that was put together too casually and carelessly.

There are some tense moments, and Moore and Holt’s performances are about as good as could be hoped for considering they are behind scuba masks most of the time. But even at 89 minutes, you can feel the oxygen running out of this movie.

Anna relies on a time-shifting structure that is laughably exhausting.

It's outstandingly obnoxious.

Unfortunately, Hysteria is much closer in its effects to a more significant and much larger 19th-century invention. Like the locomotive, this costume drama proceeds noisily and methodically toward a destination that is agreed upon from the outset. Good orgasms and good movies generally offer surprises; good trains do not.

Listlessly directed by Julie Anne Robinson (Miley Cyrus's The Last Song) from a script written by a trio of writers (Stacy Sherman, Karen Ray and Liz Brixius), One for the Money is tepidly glib throughout.

Only adults with 'Smurf-holm syndrome' could love this film.

Frankly, about 20 minutes into this dud, I was rooting for the alien beasties -- their diagnosis seemed dead-on.

And yes, the super effects are fantastic. But overall, Ra.One fails to impress.

Essentially a slapstick movie with no plot or -- as my boyfriend called it after recovering from 1½ hours of side-splitting laughter -- "the ultimate big-screen TV experience."

A rip-off and a rerun.

Every character is like the hyperactive rat-squirrel Scrat, and the audience is bounced around like his elusive acorn.

From its lazy title down to its yes-we-all-saw-that-coming third-act twist, Dangerous Lies offers a particularly boring kind of last-resort viewing.

The second film, in which one teen- ager is possessed by the spirit of a murderer - this is a supernatural Jekyll and Hyde - sets horror film fans to laughing and eventually to booing.[20 Nov 1985]

2 Days in New York plays like 2 years in Attica. You don't watch this movie so much as serve it out, a light comedy doled out as a heavy sentence.

Tedious, baffling and ultimately laughable.

Overriding everything is a profound sense of laziness. Jokes do not land here so much as they ooze forth, slow and noxious.

A slow and visually hideous crawl to an underwhelming brawl.

Would-be horror film has little upstairs. Warped and wilted in the attic. [25 Nov 1987]

Any hope that the clever concept behind Risen might produce a clever movie is thrown to the ground, where it lies quivering for the next hour or so, before expiring noisily in the film’s second half.

If someone somehow convinced somebody somewhere to turn the screenplay for Gringo into a real-life motion picture with real-deal actors, then, hell, it could happen to anyone.

Unless you are a Connery fan - or a special effects fan, or perhaps a broadsword-fighting fan - the profoundly silly plot sinks this film beyond redemption. [04 Nov 1991]

The film can't be accused of taking itself seriously. Shot in 3-D, with lots of choppy action, a rudimentary plot, and plenty of CGI-shape-shifting, it comes in at a brisk, disposable 88 minutes.

Underneath all this mess there is some idea about the conflict between private love and public duty, between personal interests and those of the state, but the characters are so marginally observed by both the actors and the script there is no tension in the themes.

THERE'S NO excuse for Her Alibi. A hyphenated hybrid like this - romance- comedy-thriller - demands a lot of stirring; if nothing else (and there rarely is much else), it must at least be smooth, colorful and easy on the palate. Instead, the stuff here goes down like lumpy porridge on a grey morning.[3 Feb 1989]

After 90 minutes of diligently searching the premises of ACB2, no evidence of mass entertainment can be found. Recommend cancellation of all future similar missions.

Classic style over substance, with some gruesome-looking creatures and settings and non-stop shooting and biting (both the vampires and werewolves get their teeth into it). But, alas, at almost two hours, it is much ado about nothing.

Within this bloated fantasy hodgepodge, there are few grace notes: In the role of the creepy fortune teller, Madame Dorothea, CCH Pounder is evil fun. And a few special effects, including a Rottweiller who turns into a skinned hellhound, leave an impression. Otherwise, Mortal Instruments manages to occupy 130 minutes of frantic, numbing, activity.

The movie is pallid, bloated and light enough to evaporate from the mind 10 minutes after you leave the theatre. [26 May 1995]

A pointless thriller.

It is sincerely, painstakingly and astonishingly awful.

Blowing up bad guys, swearing, and lots of cliches makes the The Last Boy Scout a must to miss. [16 Dec 1991]

ALAN J. Pakula's name may seldom be associated with movies of dazzling brilliance, but you can generally rely on him for entertaining, first-rate work, like All the President's Men, Sophie's Choice and Presumed Innocent. He's let us down badly with Consenting Adults. [20 Oct 1992]

An achingly sincere but often staggeringly inept attempt to introduce Walsch's message to movie audiences.

Because the society in Menace II Society is boxed in sociologically, the picture (for all its strengths) is boxed in esthetically. Already, this genre is beginning to seem as much a victim as the victims it portrays.

Not much happens of comic consequence. [01 Nov 1996, p.D5]

A film like Endless Love comes about as close to reality as a Hobbit sequel, only without a single dragon to remind impressionable viewers that they might not want to take it literally.

The best part of Jonah Hex is Josh Brolin on a horse. Especially when he's not saying anything, just moseying into or out of town. Too had he never moseys into a better movie.

If plots were people, this obese thing would be cuing up for liposuction. Mr. Brooks may well boast the greediest yarn in the annals of filmdom. One serial killer just doesn't cut it – no fewer than four, actual and potential, pack these frames.

An unholy mess.

One of those non-stop jabbering cartoons in which most of the lines sound like the spontaneous riffs from a couple of comics sitting around a diner.

Ironically, the only good thing about Never Die Alone is its rap-retro soundtrack (God bless Curtis Mayfield!). Otherwise the film is so full of crap they should name a Port-a-San after it.

This is a film whose sunny and insipid storytelling style is at odds with its material.

The refined taste insists on risibly bad, on hysterically bad, on poke-your-seatmate-in-the-ribs bad, and this falls well short of that hallowed mark -- it's just routinely bad.

The whole thing feels like a late-night, dorm-room gab fest, except that the four women in question are well over 60, which is the gag.

Will she give up? Or will she fight? Ah, who cares. Sharknado isn’t Shakespeare and The Shallows isn’t deep. School’s out, schlock’s in – no lessons here.

By far the most horrifying moment in the horror film Bride of Chucky comes at the end, when you look at your watch and realize you're 90 minutes older than when the movie began. Beyond that, it's pretty much what you'd expect of a film about two killer dolls on the lam, racing from Niagara Falls to New Jersey with carnage, voodoo and Martha Stewart on their minds. [19 Oct 1998]

The only pressing burden in this deep interior world is the question: What in or on Earth is a cast this good doing in a movie this ridiculous?