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.