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

Hayward is the very best thing about Cats, a movie that, like cats themselves, is otherwise filled with contradictions. Cats is terrible, but it’s also kind of great. And, to cat-burgle a phrase from Eliot himself, there’s nothing at all to be done about that.

Ferrell's latest excursion into delusions of manhood is director Brad Silberling's Land of the Lost, an action comedy with the sloppy construction and saving grace notes of the star's other movies.

One of those shaggy-dog stories that you keep hoping will get sharper, smarter, cooler, more worthy of its star. Buscemi may not be exactly celestial, but he still deserves better.

Untraceable really is disgraceable. It's bad enough when a movie offers up atrocity scenes that would make the Nanking soldiers seem like Hannah Montana; it's repellent when the movie dresses up the sadism in a moral message that condemns the very weakness it is exploiting.

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.

At least in a video game the player decides who needs to be killed, and what trail to take in the labyrinth. The Max Payne moviegoers are passive hostages on a long ride they've taken so many times before.

Johnson has a sense of Anastasia not just as part of a pristinely arranged tableau but also as a sensualist, with all the attendant nerve endings and complex emotions that that implies. Johnson is fearless about stripping bare, but her bold flirtiness is inextricable from her dignity: the sauciness of her mother Melanie Griffith and the marble-cool poise of her grandmother, Hitchcock blonde Tippi Hedren, merge in her.

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.

Occasionally curious moviegoers will discover an especially rotten specimen of the genus Cinema stinkibus... a work of ur-awfulness, counterbrilliance and antigenius. Your Highness, the new medieval-fantasy farce starring and co-written by Danny McBride, is such a movie.

Technically, movies don't give off a scent, but This Means War is so smarmy that it seems to reek of cheap cologne.

I did laugh. The movie is so disgusting it is worthy of the Farrelly brothers.

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.

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).

Sluggish, formulaic.

This Mummy movie is really two movies: a good adventure epic, with all the Chinese people, and a wan one, with O'Connells and the other the Westerners.

One is left wondering why Williams has granted early retirement to his inner anarchist, what dark need compels a great clown to become a sad, fuzzy one in movies only Bob Dole - faking it -could love.

Where Freeman was warm but enigmatic, Perry is warm but empty.

The Hangover Part III gives off such a stench of creative decay that it hardly seems possible that even Phillips or his co-writers have any use for the movie themselves. If a movie can be self-loathing and self-destructive, it’s this one.

Ambitious of vision and swooping of camera, I, Frankenstein is no "I, Robot," let alone "I, Claudius," but it’s definitely watchable on a cold Jan. evening or, a few months from now, on your I, Pad.

Big Gold Brick may be a bit too enamored with its own quirkiness, but everything Garcia does, no matter how outlandish, feels perfectly natural.

It's all mildly deplorable and instantly forgettable. Kevin James remains a potentially appealing movie star - if only he didn't have to be in Kevin James movies.

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.

Was Red Riding Hood masterminded by a cadre of particularly silly 11-year-olds undergoing withdrawal from Twilight? That's the only excuse for a movie this dopey.

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.

As the director of this noble weepie, Nelson so overuses visual tricks -- zooms, zip pans and multiple perspectives on a simple scene -- that she turns the viewer into an exasperated parent; this is a directorial style in need of a spanking.

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.

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.

CHIPS is just tiresomely stupid.

All this eye candy is ultimately only about as engaging as watching kids at play, which is what Sheen and Schwartzman seem to be doing. I can’t argue that this isn’t an accurate glimpse inside some man’s mind — perhaps Austin Powers?

In its wan attempt to be raunchy, the picture fails where Judd Apatow has usually succeeded; written by three women, this is a girl's mistaken idea of an R-rated comedy.

This eighth Madea movie is pretty lame even by Perry’s slapdash standards.

A movie gaudy enough to make Dancing with the Stars seem dignified.

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

The story has to carry way too much weight, as war remorse battles McCarthyism. The Majestic's makers don't get what made Capra movies invigorating.

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.

One of the worst movies I've ever seen.

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.

If this retro crime comedy had been a Broadway play, it would have closed out of town.

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

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.

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

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.

Less a bad movie than simply not a movie, R.I.P.D. gives every indication of having been a sloppy first-draft script.

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.

Obscene level of incompetence, excessive inanity in the story line, gross negligence of the viewer's intelligence, a prurient interest in the quick buck. [2 Oct 1995]

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

Too many special effects, many of them stomach churning; too much pornographically arranged death.

The Love Guru is a shambling, hit-or-miss thing, like an old Laurel and Hardy two-reeler. And like the situations those comics often got into, this movie is a fine mess.

To get serious about Alvin for a moment, there are worse things for your kid to be into.

Judged purely by what director Walter Hill has put on the screen, Another 48 Hrs. is a movie mainly about the several pretty ways that glass shatters when bullets or bodies are propelled through it. [25 June 1990, p.77]

Every so often there comes a movie so tasteless, so nakedly pandering, so bodaciously ill conceived that you’ve got to see it to believe it. This year, that movie is Collateral Beauty.

More than 24 hours has passed since I watched the new Adam Sandler movie Jack and Jill and I am still dead inside. It made me feel as if comedy itself were a dirty thing.

You don't quite believe that a smart woman would spend so much time on such a dumb mission.

The blend of fairy-tale sentiment and knowing irony worked exactly once, in "The Princess Bride," and fails here. But there's enough visual ingenuity - eye candy, if you will - to make this Hansel & Gretel an intermittently tasty temptation.

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.

New Year's Eve may be the ugliest movie of the year, from the garish lighting to the heavy make up and bad costumes.

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

What hurts the most is the wholehearted dedication each of these actors brings to such truly horrendous material: they make Life Itself almost watchable – almost –but there’s no effective cure for this kidney stone of a movie. Please, please, just let it pass.

Courteney Cox is good as a sexy, hard-pressed single mom, but she alone can't redeem the prevailing stupidity.

Surely the worst botch of a fantasy epic.

But if you can see past the thicket of dollar signs surrounding Hudson Hawk, you may discern quite a funny movie -- sort of an "Indiana Jones" send-up with a hip undertone all its own. [10 June 1991]

One of the most execrable movies ever made. [6 March 1995, p.100]

Beverly Hills Cop III is just going through the motions, without comic conviction, surprises or suspense. [6 June 1994, p.66]

The movie veers uneasily from not-funny comedy to not-persuasive melodrama. Murphy forgets that the dialogue in old-fashioned crime pictures was as highly stylized as the settings. In place of sharply polished wisecracks, he gives us the steady mutter of the witless, unfelt obscenities that are the argot of our modern mean streets. [27 Nov 1989, p.88]

Few movies have spread their fibs or facts as clumsily as this one. There's not an emotionally plausible moment in the picture.

Given its budget, the quality of its writing, acting and production is remarkably high--about miniseries level.

Cocktail, has no reason for being other than to market the Cruise charm like a cheap celebrity perfume. It is a bottle of rotgut in a Dom Perignon box. [8 August 1988, p.68]

The worst movie in living memory.

A stupefying shambles, Two of a Kind just noses out "Staying Alive" for Worst Picture of the Year.