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.