Despite its appealing stars, The Ugly Truth is a charmless romantic comedy.

No one put in any creative overtime on this Shift, the 16th Stephen King story made into a film. About as clever as it gets is calling the mill owner Bachman - King's pseudonym. [29 Oct 1990, p.4D]

In most cases, doggedly pursuing a dream is laudable. But if it does nothing else, The Astronaut Farmer demonstrates that not every dream is worth pursuing. At least not the belabored one of a narcissistic crackpot masquerading as an admirable dreamer.

A movie about a teen party gone horribly wrong, would be every parent's worst nightmare if it weren't so inane.

Hollywood, never one to let a retro idea die, has entrusted the premise to Carlo Carlei, a young Italian filmmaker whose stylistical flourishes in 1992's Flight of the Innocent seem doubly grotesque when employed toward such flea-laden material. [02 Jun 1995, p.2D]

Here's a late-August dog-days atrocity from the "aren't farts funny?" school of filmmaking.

The best acting in Mr. Magoo actually comes courtesy of his resourceful bulldog, Angus. As pooches go, he has a better pedigree than this dog of a flick. [23 Dec 1997, p.3D]

That a group of creative people chose to direct their energies on this repulsive spectacle simply provokes disgust.

The movie is raunchier than expected, and above all clichéd, formulaic and thoroughly sexist. Worst, it's just not very funny.

Murky, pretentious and torturously inert.

Worst of all, Marlon Wayans' performance as a cowardly thief would have seemed in bad taste a half-century ago.

A little soon for any movie this millennium to reunite overacting Matthew Lillard, underacting Freddie Prinze Jr., feigning mousy Linda Cardellini and the more obviously lip-glossy Sarah Michelle Gellar.

Even our bony host the Crypt Keeper, who never met a pun he didn't like, might declare Bordello just plain whore-ible. [16 Aug 1996, p.4D]

There are a lot of negative things to be said about Fifty Shades Darker. But it does impress in one sense: The erotica lite sequel somehow manages to be worse than the stupefyingly bad "Fifty Shades of Grey."

A car-chase clunker that can't escape its own noxious emissions.

Trapped in Paradise is the kind of dreadful holiday mush that often is declared Capra-esque. But if It's a Wonderful Life's George Bailey were forced to watch it, he might reconsider suicide. [02 Dec 1994, p.4D]

It tries hard to be sexy, mysterious and dangerous, but ends up laughably inscrutable.

Only a truly dreadful story could make 81 minutes seem like an eternity. And Space Chimps is just that leaden experience.

Icky and incompetent (special effects aside) in equal parts, this groaner makes 1994's "The Mask" look like something you'd study in a film graduate course at NYU.

The Canyons is billed as an erotic thriller, but the sexcapades of these empty-headed twentysomethings are far more likely to elicit yawns than titillation.

This is probably the year's worst romantic comedy -- and that's saying something in a year that includes "Ghosts of Girlfriends Past" and "Whatever Works."

In Point of No Return, a pointless remake of the slickly violent 1990 import La Femme Nikita, Fonda unconvincingly attempts to fill French actress Anne Parillaud's skyscraper pumps as a punkish cop killer turned government assassin. Draped in the proverbial little black dress, Fonda blows away her targets in a chi-chi Washington restaurant and makes her getaway through the kitchen's laundry chute with a volley of explosives at her heels. But as she daintily steps around the spilt blood and lettuce, the fair-of-face Fonda is more debutante of death than lethal weapon. [19 March 1993, p.8D]

Someone should have treated See Spot Run like a bone and buried it.

The premise is misbegotten, the chemistry non-existent and the dialogue leaden. Did we mention how tediously the plot unfolds?

Unfunny, sappy and massively predictable.

To say that New in Town is the worst movie of this fledgling year is to damn it with faint praise. It may be one of the worst movies of any year. Not content to be merely inane and predictable, it is downright insulting, humorlessly deriding those who choose to live in rural America, labor in factories or have a strong Christian faith.

Why would a distributor suddenly yank an animated family film from its intended wide December opening until mid-January? Could it be that the advance word of mouth wasn't very good-winked?

Hot Pursuit is this week's "Paul Blart." Which is to say, it's ill-conceived, not funny, overbearing and not in any way worth watching.