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.

There is nothing in the history of movies to compare with Slap Shot for consistent, low-level obscenity of expression...Its problem is an ending that abruptly transports the audience from heightened realism to broad satire. It is a defect that Slap Shot shares with the current hit Network—a desire to present an editorial so corrosive that aesthetics, questions of form and proportion simply dissolve.

Director Adrian Lyne has encapsulated the cliches of three decades in a single dreadful and hysterical movie.

Braveheart is too much, too late.

Through it all, we’re supposed to relish the emotional complexity of the story, or maybe even just its dark humor. Amorality can be fun, but Marty Supreme has no emotional core—though it does try to grab us in its final minutes, when Marty is unrealistically redeemed in a moment of mawkish sentimentality.

Fumbles nearly every opportunity to be funny: the dialogue is flat, straining for wit it never achieves, and the pace is torpid when it should be bustling. But, the couture, darling, is hilariously divine.

A picture that registers between Abysmally Awful and Mildly Mediocre. Such a one would be When in Rome, which is possible to sit through without wanting to stick darts in your eyes or frag the screen. Call it medi-awful.

Shrill and charmless. I didn't believe a word of it. I wanted to spank it and banish it to its room.

The first Lynch film in which his motives -- to hang a haberdashery of bizarre incidents on the merest hook of plot -- are apparent... What's lacking is the old sense of delicious, disturbing mystery. [20 Aug 1990, p.63]

Take what pleasure you can from the two stars. They look great; it's just the state of romantic comedy that looks terminal.

A buddy movie that limps along, pausing for breath and pulse checks like a geriatric dutifully fulfilling doctor's orders to get some exercise.

Sanctum is a stinker, a horror movie without a visible monster.

Jennifer Jason Leigh's draggy performance as Parker is all studied accent (something vaguely mid- Atlantic but never before heard on Earth) and equally studied self-pity and it cannot sustain our sympathy, or our interest in this inept film.

Star Trek is, finally, nothing but a long day's journey into ennui.

Vapid, claustrophobic drama.

There are gaping holes in logic throughout this sloppy, cheap-looking mess from "Disturbia" director D.J. Caruso.

Mostly, The Kitchen flounders, taking one page from Quentin Tarantino here and another from Martin Scorsese there, without ever finding its own sense of authorship. Even the movie’s soundtrack — featuring Etta James, Heart and Fleetwood Mac, among others — feels like a desperate attempt to set a mood that never quite jells. There’s not enough heat in this Kitchen, but there’s nothing cool about it, either.

For a soul-sucking 83 minutes, you're trapped inside the film's tiny, ugly mind.

The screenwriters, Randall McCormick and Jeff Nathanson, and the director, Jan de Bont, have no interest in providing their actors with stuff to act.

For Colored Girls feels like the cinematic equivalent to putting a garish reproduction of the Sistine Chapel on the ceiling of your McMansion and calling it art.


It's a startling, exhausting spectacle - and, like the rest of Leigh's performance, very, very bad.

The film is basically a drag, and not helped by Christopher Cain's stand- around direction. And one's thirst for the clear, cool taste of traditional narrative -- motivated movement, defined antagonists, building suspense -- soon reaches maddening levels. A grownup could die in this wasteland. [5 Sept 1988, p.63]

Enemy is an arid parable, in which actors are neutered, zombified; they signify themes rather than occupying personalities.

An uninvolving muddle.

But this is a sloppy job, both in little goofs...and in the cast's gung-ho amateurism. It's like Shakespeare done by the "Fame" kids.

This movie makes being young look like the opposite of fun, a spell you’ve got to break out of. Maybe that’s the ultimate revelation of the story of Peter Pan—but it shouldn’t be drudgery to get there.

The mythology he tries to build in Glass is rushed and sloppy; the surprise twist at the end is really just more of a damp wrinkle. Shyamalan believes so strongly in the dramatic impact of this trilogy that he almost makes you believe in it too — that’s his secret superpower. But the illusion is fragile. You don’t need a sixth sense to know you’re in for a letdown. The five you’ve got should be plenty.

Some clever soul might have done something moderately effective with this idea, but Krampus is too dumb to be scary and too listless to be entertaining.

That imperishable affability, that eagerness to please his Hollywood bosses, allows Chan to elude many of the indignities thrown his way in The Spy Next Door. It may also be the reason he says yes to a junky movie like this.

There's neither intricacy nor surprise in the narrative, and these dopes are tedious, witless company. Mostly you find yourself thinking, "How long until dinner?"

What's lacking is the sense of emotional balance and urgency that the original Terminator, though just a B movie, was blessed with--the quality that earned it fans in the first place.

In the end, everything about this glum and self-important adaptation of Anne Tyler's upper-cute novel is dim. [26 Dec 1988, p.83]

Assassin’s Creed the movie is fairly innocuous. It’s also cheerless and dumb.

Nothing coheres. Movies usually try to come together at the end; this one falls apart. If that's Bay intention, then cinema has finally entered its Age of Extinction.

Studied and overworked, this Blithe Spirit trips over its own ectoplasmic feet. Somewhere, Coward is scowling.

Yet how can one possibly recommend The Salton Sea? If it could, this nasty film would make you smell the disgusting food on the table. And that says nothing about its casual sadism.

A bad movie that a lot of people will like... Though director Jerry Zucker wants his necrophiliac romance to be sensitive, he pumps up its feelings fortissimo so the dimmest viewer will get the point. [16 July 1990, p.86]

Running, or stumbling, only 90 minutes, After Earth may lack the neck-swiveling awfulness of Shyamalan’s "The Last Airbender," but it quickly sinks in its logorrheic solemnity. The movie makes "Oblivion" seem as jolly a romp as "Spaceballs," and gives neither Shyamalan nor Smith much to smile about.

If it weren't for him (Hemsworth), surely the Red Dawn remake would have gone straight to video; he's the only person worth watching in it (oh the pain of watching the wan Isabel Lucas hoist a rocket launcher).

Butler has the showier part, but his impersonation of the tragic hero is undercut by his weird resemblance to Soupy Sales. You start hoping that Shelton will kill somebody with a custard (or puffer-fish) pie to the face.

Okja takes the worst impulses of Walt Disney, Wes Anderson, Tim Burton and Michael Moore and rolls them into one movie.

I'm afraid the DeNiro of "The Godfather, Part II" and "Goodfellas" has mostly faded from my mind, replaced by the DeNiro of the Fockers - a grim-faced comedian who tends to make me sad.

This is a movie that repeatedly calls out a dead kid just to make its points. If that’s your idea of entertainment—or even just adequate message-based filmmaking—run, don’t walk, to see Dear Evan Hansen.

The movie’s top-flight cast is left in ridiculous positions.

Redford underacts, Gandolfini overacts, and this movie is directed with the same air of unreality, the same grim passion for cliches, both cinematic and emotional, that Lurie brought to his first film, "The Contender."

By our count, three of the core SEALs are maimed or dead by the end. A new baby is left without her loving father. The picture ends not with a parade but with a funeral. And that may be the toughest, most lasting image in this cockamamie, Pentagon-approved war adventure.

The tone is cloying, the running time bloated.

Under the Skin falls in love with its bleak monotony. It is a melodrama with all the thrills surgically excised.

It's mostly an ordeal--for actress and audience.

The shaky-cam as used in "Cloverfield" and the Paul Greengrass "Bourne" films, and in TV shows from "NYPD Blue" to "24" to "The Office," is worse than amateurism; it's fake amateurism, the visual equivalent of a comedian pretending to have Parkinson's.

There's a definite limit to the number of moron jokes we can absorb in 100 minutes, and their movie exceeds it.

Occasionally funny but mostly desperate, small-minded and uncompelling.

The movie's central problem: a lack of alternative suspects...How the screenwriter, Todd Komarnicki, and the director, James Foley, resolve this problem is a genre travesty and an affront to their star.

What aims at being terrifying is just loud and goofy.

The goofy hysteria of something like "A Summer Place" was infinitely more entertaining and emotionally authentic than the distant smugness of this failed clone. [7 April 1997, p. 76]

Never achieves more than feckless amiability.

CHIPS is just tiresomely stupid.

A scant hour and a half long, padded with clips from earlier Rocky pictures, adding nothing to his mythic, let alone human dimensions, it lacks even the primitive suspense and crude capacity to release underdog emotions that permitted its predecessors to conquer one's better judgment.