Wyatt Earp drones past its logical conclusion, which is, of course, the great shoot-out. Since Earp's life uninstructively limped along after that event, so must the movie, further abusing our overtaxed patience and undertaxed intelligence.

Erin Brockovich is slick, grating and false. We bet it makes a bundle.

Dorothy encounters a pumpkin with stick limbs, a tin soldier and something called a Gump, which looks suspiciously like your basic moosehead. They are all mechanical marvels, not actors, which means they can do anything except win an audience's heart. Still, it would defy the gifts of an Olivier to find interesting, amusing life in a context as charmless and joyless (and songless) as the one Murch and his design team have concocted. [1 July 1985, p.63]

This is potentially near tragic material, and playing it as an all-forgiving comedy is a waste of everyone's time.

Valmont arrives stiffened by the elegant, inert formalism of Forman's direction, and chilled by Carriere's all too sober respect for his source and by their mutual determination to apply modern psychological understanding to the behavior of the principal figures.

A lot of it's real pretty, the colors and creatures and all, but these days, you know, every movie is pretty pretty. I guess the only thing that kept me glued to my seat was the gum somebody'd stuck on the upholstery. [16 July 1984, p.71]

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.

My pregnancy lasted 41 weeks and five days, involved morning, afternoon and night sickness and culminated in 25 hours of labor capped off by an emergency C-section. Yet all that seems like a walk in the park compared with the 100 minutes I spent watching Jennifer Lopez mug her way through The Back-Up Plan.

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.

Hopelessly overwrought and deeply dopey movie.

After sitting through this fractious fairy tale, we feel as plucked as a Christmas goose.

Phoenix is acting so hard you can feel the desperation throbbing in his veins. He leaves you wanting to start him a GoFundMe, so he won’t have to pour so much sweat into his job again. But the aggressive terribleness of his performance isn’t completely his fault.

At once smug and lazy, qualities fatal to comedy.

Our natural sympathy for the Carmichaels is sabotaged by crude and careless moviemaking.

The result is a flat, dumbly brutal movie, full of overplotted complexity and empty of all emotional resonance, except that provided by the presence of Jane Greer (the original film's dark lady, here doing a supporting role) and Richard Widmark.

Every ambitious picturemaker should be allowed one wild misfire at no lasting cost to his reputation. Crowe (Jerry Maguire, Almost Famous) can now put this aside and go back to making good films.

Despite Jackson's typically bravura turn, this Valentine massacre marks a step backward for the gifted director of Eve's Bayou.

Maybe it was fun to bathe in decadence back then. But this is no time to wallow in that mire.

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

We're left with our stifled laughter and a very long movie.

It is likely to disappoint the book's acolytes and tax the patience of newcomers. [1 December 1997, p.84]

A ticket to Pretty Woman buys you mechanical titillation and predictable twists... Old-fashioned, assembly-line moviemaking without the old panache. [2 Apr 1990, p.70]

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.

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.

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

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]

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

The bad news for everyone else is that the colorfully named characters from Clue remain flat enough to be stored in a box, and that all three endings are unpersuasive. [23 Dec 1985, p.79]