Crude gags mingle with squishy, underdeveloped messages about family and belonging and empowerment. And while self-abasement is part of the comedian’s toolbox, there’s something depressing about watching as a chortling Michelle airs her unmentionable area while spraying herself with self-tanner. McCarthy deserves better than this. She can aim higher.

Jumper is so lame -- undernourished in its characterizations, stillborn in its action scenes -- that it inevitably leads the idled mind to wondering how this movie got past the pitch stage.

Everything that made the original picture so sly, funny, and affecting is gone. Musical numbers spell out the obvious, and loudly.

So muted it disappears from your view even before it recedes from your memory.

Old-school Bill Murray, deadpan and gonzo, spices up the amiable mess that is Rock the Kasbah. That’s both a saving grace and a curse. Because while Murray and his laid-back riffs anchor this oil spill of a story, he needs a more tangible movie to latch onto, and all he gets is a mirage.

Though the freckle-faced Reno and Mickey Rooney (as the horse's crafty old trainer) are well cast, their scenes together are perfunctory and impersonal. Emotions are provided in stead by a busy and overbearing musical score. The film's story begins to move in fits and starts.

So creaky and out of touch it inspires pity. Its opening sequences are a near marvel of confusion, mayhem and embarrassments for its actors. If it was a person, you'd worry it had dementia.

This one is bad — a little comedy that flops in big ways.

Babylon isn’t a film made with love, or even with any degree of exactitude; it pretends to be a movie about “loving movies,” but more than anything else, it seeks to reflect glory on its creator. It advertises its alleged extravagance and glamour, loud and hard, but only comes off looking tinny and cheap.

His is a dispassionate sensibility, and he is not a strong enough actor - nor has he a strong enough intelligence - to fight his way out of the false analogy he has drawn between moviemaking and tragic history in the making.

Nothing makes a moviegoer feel more isolated than sitting stony-faced through a comedy that makes the rest of the audience laugh and cheer. Am I blind? Or are they seeing things?

The problem is that the high-pitched whine of Allie's character finally vitiates not merely the viewer's sympathy for him, but sympathy for the movie he dominates, despite the care and courage that went into its making.

This is not necessarily an improvement, but it's not a total disaster either.

Blow works for a scene or two, then stalls.

There’s only one reason to see The Huntsman: Winter’s War: Gowns! Insane, off-the-hook gowns.

So Broken City stokes a lot of hopes. Too bad for all of us, the makers and the watchers alike, that it's a grimy botch.

Sluggish, formulaic.

If you consider what the exalted quartet of Branagh, Pinter, Caine and Law might have done with the project, and what they did to it, Sleuth has to be the worst prestige movie of the year.

Either the Coens failed, or I didn't figure out what they're attempting. I must be like Harry or Osborne, pretending to a sophistication I lack. Burn After Reading is a movie about stupidity that left me feeling stupid.

As drama and as cinema, Cleopatra is raddled with flaws. It lacks style both in image and in action. Never for an instant does it whirl along on wings of epic elan; generally it just bumps from scene to ponderous scene on the square wheels of exposition.

A triumph of bravado over self-regard, Brody's performance won't earn him a Oscar to place next to the one he earned for "The Pianist" nine years ago, but it's the only thing that makes High School marginally worth catching.

Rarely have so many gifted women labored so tastefully to bring forth such a wee, lockjawed mouse.

With the trillions of entertainment options available today, we can all afford to be a little more discriminating in how low we’re willing to stoop, and Me Time sets the bar around ankle height.

There are, of course, low cunning, high explosives and much running around without a shirt, punctuated with other familiar gambits: torture scenes; the self-cauterization of, and instant recovery from, a wound large enough to stop an elephant; and a grimly preposterous two-man stand against a tank-led army. What few are likely to find amusing is Rambo III's story line. [30 May 1988, p.64]

By the time Scenarist Allen and Director Fosse have wrung them out, what's left - with one exception - is mostly slack and sour.

It’s the lamest and most vacant of the quintet — though if you mistakenly think you’re buying a ticket to a demolition derby instead of a night at the movies, you’ll feel right at home.

What it doesn't have is a central figure you can give a hoot about.

Edwards’ Godzilla dawdles toward its Doomsday climax; the movie could win a prize for Least Stuff Happening in the First Two-Thirds of an Action Film... It’s a concept lacking a magnetic story, a package without a product.

This is soft-gore porn, obvious in its strategies, witless in the play of its ideas, absurdist only in its pretense to seriousness.

Intentions don’t equal fully fledged works, and Folie à Deux stumbles on nearly all fronts. Even if the movie’s ambitions are admirable, you might end up too bored to care.

Hith her flat little voice and her skinny emotional range, one has to wonder: Is Brooke Shields truly obsession worthy? And can she carry, commercially, another movie about another kind of obsession? The answer is no.

In this film we learn that it takes 8,000 lbs. of pressure to crush a car but only one credited screenwriter (Scott Rosenberg) to pound out such a lame script.

The movie is like a car wreck in which no one is injured but the onlookers.

Why did these talented folks decide to take on Carrie when they had nothing innovative to bring to it and, by refrying the same blood sausage, risked invidious comparison to the original? To put it another way: If the most modest expectations cannot be met, indeed must be crushed, then What Is Life?

This solemn, incoherent, brown film is set in New York and Pennsylvania in 1776-81, but it often looks determined to analogize, one more time, the Viet Nam War.

There's evocative atmosphere in the period detail and perky faux-'60s tunes. A pity these are wasted in a movie that, like many a pop tune, has a cute idea but a simpleminded lyric.

This is moviemaking for people who don't much like movies unless they are -- you know -- "serious." It is visually inert. It appears to be taking up small-scaled, yet emotionally resonant issues, but does not actually define them sharply or bring them to firm conclusions.

Dicks is so in love with itself and its own overworked kooky world that it treats the audience like the outsider in a threesome. Sometimes the self is the least interesting part of self-expression.

Agresti's just out to give us a sentimental good time. Which some people, heaven help us, will have -- while the rest of us choke on the cutesiness.

McKay’s style here is the equivalent of a knowing cackle; the whole enterprise, elaborate as it is, comes off as lacking in passion. The Big Short had an exhilarating kick, but it also left you feeling queasy over the destructive misdeeds you’d just witnessed. Vice just leaves you feeling sapped, advertising its cleverness without actually being clever.

All its desperate plot maneuvers (Ben and Sandra making like Tarzan on a train roof) can't give the film wit; all the slo-mo sleet, rain and confetti can't give it style. [March 22, 1999]

George Clooney’s statement-making black comedy Suburbicon, playing in competition here at the Venice Film Festival, is a misfire on nearly all counts.

Another dreadful entry in the festering form of romantic comedy: the forced intimacy of two people who have nothing in common but hatred for each other.

Alas, The Outsiders is not quite a good one. Because it falls in with the undulating rhythm of the life of its heroes, for whom a fatal fight and a quiet night have almost equal importance, the picture never manages to reach the peaks of satisfying Hollywood melodrama.

Tedium overwhelms caring well before this endless film finally concludes.

The Coens have deliberately cut themselves off from their best subject. Try as they will to create a vision of corporate (and urban) hellishness through sheer stylishness, theirs is a truly abstract expressionism, at once heavy, lifeless and dry.

The collision of violent spasms and art-film ennui leave the viewer’s brain bloody but unfilled.

When the filmmakers grow tired of fowl puns -- about an hour after the audience does -- they switch to space opera, and Howard battles a scientist (Jeffrey Jones, funny against all odds) whose body is invaded by a giant lobster-scorpion space troll.

It's pretty awful.

I didn't believe a word of the film and found myself feeling nothing but (I'm sure this wasn't Kaye's point) detachment.

Maybe kids will like the movie; their lust for dinolore appears to be insatiable. But the rest of us will yearn for Robin Williams' giddy goofing in "Aladdin."

Sometimes a dumb action comedy can work perfectly well as a one-off, particularly if its writers and director can pull off the illusion that they didn’t have to work hard to earn our laughs. But The Hitman’s Wife’s Bodyguard is all work and no payday. Even in the service of airheaded entertainment, no one should feel compelled to take a bullet for it. It’s OK to let a franchise die.

Gatsby's sad and curious history has resulted in a dull, dreadful movie. The film is faithful to the letter of F. Scott Fitzgerald's novel but entirely misses its spirit.

Pretty lame. Sharkboy has an especially frantic, amateur atmosphere, with a mostly maladroit cast.

Director Arthur Penn have elected to tell their tale of bullets and blood in a strange and purposeless mingling of fact and claptrap that teeters uneasily on the brink of burlesque. Like Bonnie and Clyde themselves, the film rides off'in all directions and ends up full of holes...The real fault with Bonnie and Clyde is its sheer, tasteless aimlessness.

As rigged as a casino slot machine, preying on people's hopes but paying off only for the house.

Landis seems no surer of his visual style than he does of his movie's tone, so he tries everything: shots angled from a dog's-or a god's-eye view, eerily lighted special effects, more dancers, more extras, more noise, more cars and car crashes. Alas, more is less, and The Blues Brothers ends up totaling itself.

That rare event, a Disney failure...The movie as a whole presents the unhappy spectacle of a brilliant artist screaming his lungs out in an effort to make up for the fact that he has, for the moment, nothing to say.

Did anyone have a good time making this movie? The actors seem to be reading their lines at gunpoint, in an enterprise whose mood is less summer camp than internment camp.

The canniest moments in the three-plus hours of Nixon, Oliver Stone's dense, ultimately disappointing biopic, capture Nixon at his most pathetically endearing--the Commander in Chief as klutz.

Like Saturday Night Fever and, for that matter, the Rocky films, Flashdance has made it big by taking experiences of black youths and playing them in whiteface. But unlike its grittily romantic predecessors, Flashdance is pure glitz.

Mostly awful.

Except for Angelina Jolie, exemplary as the fairy badmother who laid a narcotic curse on an infant princess, this pricey live-action drama is a dismaying botch.

Deep Water comes dressed up as an ‘80s-style erotic thriller, a genre that I, for one, would love to see revived. But it’s so tepid, so lacking in heat or even a pulse, that it’s about as sexy as a clogged artery.

It's a brilliant idea, for about 10 minutes. Then the bare set is elbowed out of a viewer's mind by the threadbare plot and characterizations.

For every moment of raw, affecting insight there are zillions of milliseconds of Kaufman’s proving what a tortured smartie he is. I’m Thinking of Ending Things must have been arduous to make, and it’s excruciatingly tedious to watch.

The Devil All the Time is just a pileup of awful people doing terrible things, for no reason other than to prove how wretched humans can be. The template is pure Southern Gothic, but without the subtlety of top-drawer practitioners of the genre, like Flannery O’Connor and William Faulkner.

The Counsellor is neither an outright disaster nor misunderstood masterpiece: it’s just a very bad idea for a film, proficiently executed.

The Golden Glove is, in the most basic sense, well constructed. It’s also the kind of movie you may end up wishing you’d never seen. Even hardcore Akin devotees should proceed with caution, and be ready for disillusionment. The craftsmanship is there. But Akin’s judgment has gone AWOL, and with it, his heart.

"Trash Humpers" at least had the artistic courage of its own lunatic convictions, but Spring Breakers is all surface and sham; it’s trash about humpers.

In his first big Hollywood film, French superstar Gerard Depardieu cheerfully goes slumming with sex, lies, and videotape's Andie MacDowell. Peter Weir's comedy offers a little charm, less story and virtually no movie.

Crowe has made a meretricious weepie that rouges the facts and defeats the attempts of Matt Damon, with his considerable charm and skill, to breathe some emotional truth into it. There's a word for the strenuous, shameless plucking of an audience's emotions that this movie traffics in: cornography.

Red Lights reaches for a "The Sixth Sense"-style twist and whiffs it completely.

May leave viewers emotionally disconnected from this distinctly unchipper Mr. Chips.

It’s just a movie, with a dramatic arc that’s supposed to make all that mean stuff drift away into the ether as friendship is born, but it’s that look that hangs around like a bad smell.

The only collateral damage is in the audience, where, as you sit through the movie, you can feel your IQ drop minute by minute.

We [Farrellys'] mock, they say, because we care. But that doesn't make the film elevating or amusing.

The result is a grim and predictable adventure saga that is not nimble but leaden. Dystopia has rarely been so dysto-pointing.

Harley Quinn’s entrance is the best moment in Suicide Squad. After that, you can leave. Robbie is a criminally appealing actress, likable in just about every way, but that intro aside, Suicide Squad doesn’t serve her well. It serves no one well, least of all its audience.

Though it has moments where it rises to fun-awful status, with a hideous giddiness that turns moviegoers into rubbernecking motorists at a crash site, it's mostly just awful.

Crude and inept.

The awfulness of What to Expect When You're Expecting, an ugly brew of guide book, reality television and romantic comedy, is of course, entirely to be expected.

It’s nearly impossible to care about any of the humans. For a guy with a job that almost no one on the planet has, Denny is shockingly dull, and Ventimiglia fails to vest him with even an iota of personality. The generally charming Seyfried is saddled with a bum role that mostly requires her to suffer beatifically, and Donovan and Baker, both marvelously subtle actors, are badly suited to playing monsters-in-law.

Many of D’Souza’s charges in his movie are either piffling (Obama returned a bust of Winston Churchill to the British Embassy), wrong (the U.S. is drilling for at least as much oil now as in the George W. Bush) or murky.

You will simply want to shoot yourself by the third inning.

It's great to have the Moose back, but it would be greater still to see him in a humorous context fully worth of him.

Writer-director Shainberg seems to be aiming for a dark comedy, but mostly his movie is coy without being funny, ugly without being truly transgressive, stupid when it needs to be smart.

Ruth Prawer Jhabvala's screenplay is less a response to its source than a careful college outline of it.

His point here seems to be that voyeurism can induce a trancelike emotional paralysis—a message feminists could appreciate if Body Double took less pleasure in the mechanics of mutilation, and that ordinary moviegoers could ponder if the characters' motivations were not so numbingly nitwit. Upscale sleaze—so what else is new?

It could be a distillation of some unaired black soap opera, so predictable are the plot contrivances--adultery, pregnancy, illness, missing money--and so cartoonishly are the characters drawn.

Snitch wasn’t going to be good no matter what Johnson did; it is so poorly directed that even Academy Award winner Susan Sarandon, playing a shrewish federal prosecutor, comes off as a hack straight off a soap opera.

The 70-minute movie -- which was co-written by the British-Pakistani commentator Tariq Ali, author of the 2006 study "Pirates of the Caribbean: Axis of Hope," and photographed in part by docu-doyen Albert Maysles -- is amateur night as cinema, as lopsided and cheerleadery as its worldview.

The result is a mess. Kym, in Hathaway's unsympathetic performance, is an annoyingly sour observer of the proceedings, a time bomb everyone hopes will not explode before the marriage is completed.

This is, or was, a true story, but invested as it is with relentlessly cliched emotions, it plays like cheap fiction.

Casa de mi Padre is flawed in that it wouldn't be particularly enticing in any language.

Roger Michell's movie is, pretty consistently, dreadful.

The Bond women are pallid mannequins, and so is the misused Dalton -- a moving target in a Savile Row suit. For every plausible reason, he looks as bored in his second Bond film as Sean Connery did in his sixth.

A grim and draggy romance in which even the clothes and sets are dismal.