The inert License to Wed shambles along one lame scene after another.

As the Roses start to become increasingly hostile to each other in front of others, the tone is meant to be hilariously nasty. Instead it’s merely monotonously vulgar, as a long string of one-liners relies more on the supposed shock value of profanity than on wit.

What’s missing is nuance (the idea of Mr. Nighy’s performance, like others in the film, is wittier than what’s actually on screen); connective tissue (the story is semicoherent at best, a jumble of characters rushing to and fro); and depth of feeling.

What was once thrilling, inventive and funny is now desiccated and limp. The pertinent question, it turns out, is not “Who you gonna call?” but “Why did they bother?”

This film is what it is, a particularly generic genre piece that the bean counters at a once-great studio must have had reason to believe would turn a profit, mostly in the foreign market. Very possibly it will.

As the runtime lumbers on to the two-hour mark, with one scene after another fizzling out, its warm nimbus of niceness seems to be the sole reason for its existence.

What a peculiar production this is. Up to a certain point, it really does promise to be romantic.

This is one of those overworked and generally airless comedies with a sitcom premise that can't sustain life.

The entire film feels like an exceedingly stale stand-up comedy routine, which is to say it’s exactly like one of Mr. Maniscalco’s stand-up comedy routines.

Palindromes finds him (Solondz) stuck with his single theme inside a sealed dollhouse of his own construction. He has gifts to give a larger audience, if ever he breaks out.

Perhaps some of the goofiness was intentional — you can’t always tell from this production’s wavering tone — but Spectre is full of not-good things, and some oppressively bad things that may come to feel like drill bits twirling in your skull.

Not since the thunderous digital onslaughts of "Jumanji" has the big screen seen such too-muchness.

The director’s trying-too-hard approach to everything, meant to make the film exciting, instead makes it so frenetic that it’s a slog, and the script by Marco van Belle falls short of the standard that you would expect to draw a star of Mr. Pratt’s magnitude.

Goes down fighting, but it goes down just the same.

Rather than the laugh a minute promised by old comedies, Get Smart generates approximately one laugh per hour, and I can't remember either one.

The failures of White Squall are dismaying as well as perplexing. Director Ridley Scott serves up some ravishing images along the way: the stark geometry of the ship's riggings against an azure sky, crew kids scampering along a verdant ridge toward a volcano's silvery crater lake. But the script is a shambles. [06 Feb 1996]

The larger problem, transcending all realms, is that this action-adventure sequel from Marvel soon turns so dumb and 3-D-murky that it hurts.

Unforeseeably bad things can happen to good performers.

They can give the film’s characters physics-defying acrobatic skills. But they can’t provide anyone much motivation.

The blithely dishonest script would have us believe that the real Napoleon can't prove his identity when the fake Napoleon refuses to come clean. Not only is that patent nonsense, it's cockeyed dramaturgy.

The crucial evidence has to do with rigor mortis. The movie's a stiff too.

N'ever was an apostrophe so misplaced, n'ever was the prospect of good cheer so perversely defeated.

The several mediocre songs seem like filler intended to pad out the running time to 90 minutes, but then again, everything else seems like padding too.

300 presents a dual clash of civilizations. An action adventure that pits thousands of Persians against 300 brave Spartans at the Battle of Thermopylae, it also pits millions of fans of brainless violence against a gallant band, or so I choose to think of us, who still expect movies to contain detectable traces of humanity.

For all its video-game bedazzlements, Attack of the Clones suffers from severe digital glut, periodically relieved, if you can call it that, by amateur theatrics.

So tightly constructed of clichés, stereotypes and chick-lit tropes that it's inert; no fresh air can blow in.

While “Kraven,” like “Venom,” is refreshingly Earth-bound relative to the soporific celestial bombast of the Marvel films, it’s still low on real liveliness.

Some movies are toxically misconceived, and “The Drama” is among them. It wants to be wicked and outrageous but it’s really just dismal and depressing.

It’s overstuffed, and essentially empty.

Ethan Hawke is appealing as a polysyllabic coward of some complexity, but Mr. Washington has been stripped of his usual verve and grace. Sometimes you can catch him going slack, like a man looking for the exit.

What's missing is an emotional center. This Sinbad, with its flying ship and becalmed script, seems destined to be DreamWorks's version of Disney's "Treasure Planet."

Despite all the nervous tension, the central drama is flawed - Jonathan isn't trying to find a killer. He is the killer. Something is lacking in the dramatic equation.

Mr. Samuell's stylistic revelries are meant as comments on the conventions and excesses of movie romance, but his approach is glib and self-congratulatory. No feelings dwell beneath the layers upon layers of faux-naïve artifice. I dare you to sit through this movie and not wish you were somewhere else.

Hiring France’s Louis Leterrier to direct was a bit like managing the pandemonium at a toddler’s birthday party by bringing in a soda machine.

The only reason to see this dreary parade of deception and venality is Mark Wahlberg's performance as a disgraced ex-cop caught up in the thick of menacing events he can't understand. It's striking how this tightly focused actor can find his own firmly grounded reality in the falsest of surroundings.

Director Luca Guadagnino and screenwriter Justin Kuritzkes tell the story out of order, jumping around in time so often that it becomes tiresome, especially since there is so little forward-moving plot.

It's dispiriting to see how little attention the filmmakers have paid to the dramatic - read human - possibilities of the original, or how much they've been overwhelmed by technology's demands. It's as though rogue programs took over the production.

You could call it, more accurately, a middling notion that flies off the rails.

The intricately choreographed fight scenes are amusing enough, not that they have a lot of impact given the overbearingly silly musical score and the lurching, chaotic plot.

Cherry is a film for the age of information overload. It shows us more than we need to know, and leaves us feeling little or nothing about it.

Dud notions abound. So do belabored situations, misguided performances and ritual salutes to other films. Even the cinematography is ill-advised, since it’s literally off-color; warm tones meant to evoke romantic feelings come off as a jaundiced homage to Woody Allen, from whom many of this film’s tropes have been not-so-piquantly purloined.

Knows that it's junk and tries feebly to rejoice in its junkiness.

The story plays out on two planets, Mars and Earth, while the production follows its own orbit in a state of zero gravity, zero nuance and subzero sense.

What’s increasingly bewildering and perversely curious is how unpleasant Spinster is, in almost every regard: The lighting is atrocious, the framing is erratic and Ms. Peretti’s comedy, which is generally about demolishing the banalities that constitute most human interaction, may well have the audience saying, “Well, of course Gaby’s alone. She’s intolerable.”

Nobody doesn't like Tina Fey, and anyone aware of her starring role in Admission will be wishing her well. But wishing won't make this dramedy any less dreary than it is.

Even the pleasurable sight of Michael Gandolfini —son of the late James Gandolfini, who played Tony in that series—as young Tony was never going to make up for the complete absence, in this film, of anything remotely reflective of the tone and color of “The Sopranos.”’ Or of anything resembling a credible character or plot line.

Almost the entire movie is lifted from other sources, and then edited in a way that makes his enemies (do they know they’re his enemies?) look as foolish as possible. The punditry is trite. The snark is boring.

Adolescent is the ruling adjective here; this is an increasingly tiresome and almost wholly senseless feature.

Why is she (Bullock) demeaning herself with such shoddy goods? She’s a talented woman with a faithful following. She has made formula films of varying quality before, and her fans may well swallow this one, but it’s a formula for disappointment laced with dismay.

Mr. Hausmann-Stokes hopes to keep the movie darkly comic until pivoting to a final, emotional payoff, but the mawkish late scenes are even more inept than the supposedly funny ones, as the director stages tearful hugs accompanied by soapy attempts at emotional dialogue.

The fur flies, the claws come out and the bad jokes hit the fan.

The film is painfully slow from the beginning, then really starts to drag as it reveals that it essentially has no plot. A late turn to drama makes a bad film even worse. May Mr. Brown and Ms. Hall quickly move on to more rewarding roles. The way this movie squanders their talents is a sin.

The movie takes on the shape of a video game, with the heroes swaggering confidently from one blowout action sequence to the next with hardly any thought given to making us care about the characters or establishing the film’s heart.

The stupidity lacks smarts in the script department, and the joke, such as it is, wears thin, then turns sour.

There's nothing to be said in favor of sitting through garbage, and this movie is awash in the stuff, both figuratively and literally: One of its main locales is a vast garbage dump.

A grim disappointment for grown-ups, and far too violent for young kids. I found it to be clumsy, misanthropic and intractably lifeless.

Mr. Tipping ditches reasonable motivation to deliver a satirical haymaker aimed at those whose religion is football. Like many failed satires, the conclusion is more vehement than amusing.

It ought to be a treat to see such charismatic talents falling in love, but the only overwhelming and unstoppable force in the movie is its love for cutesy and cloying gimmicks. It’s a cinematic crime to waste these two stars: I charge “A Big Bold Beautiful Journey” with unconscionably aggravated whimsy in the third degree.

If the principal actors weren’t so watchable, the movie would be an outright bore.

The story line, a sequence of very loosely connected events, sustains a state of almost pure brainlessness with its indifference to dramatic development and the dictates of logic, even the fantasy logic of cartoons. It’s as if most of the script had been generated by algorithms.

Its tone is unquenchably pretentious, and its scale is overblown.

A few clumps of very funny stuff (including a quick tonsorial reference to "Mary") can't hide all the spots that are bald instead of bold.

This is little more than a big-budget sitcom, with a guest appearance by Mike Ditka, who plays an unfunny version of himself as Phil's assistant coach.

Mr. Forster’s affinity for flat dialogue, cartoonish characters, hokey contrivance and dull inspirational messages continue to be his hallmark, and the Hallmark Channel seems like an ideal place for his future work.

When it comes to taking this premise in interesting directions, however, Ms. Park proves inept.

There's no maybe about its standing as romantic comedy -- definitely bad.

Ms. Weisz is always a strong presence, but her talents are wasted here on a naive heroine - the fictional Kathy is exceedingly slow to grasp the extent of the corruption - and a narrative style that turns the horror of the prostitutes' plight into harrowing melodrama.

The plot beats are so dull, contrived and poorly engineered (for a few minutes the wolves must pretend to be rivals who don’t know each other) that the movie becomes an onerous chore comparable to the one that launches the action. Who can I call to make this dead movie disappear?

For all the preposterous clichés of the plot, which clanks as loudly as Laz's chain, and for all the inertness of Justin Timberlake's performance as Rae's brooding squeeze, Black Snake Moan finds unchained energy in its foolishness, and gives Mr. Jackson a chance to pluck a guitar and sing. He's really good at it, too. The music almost redeems the movie.

What's intractably wrong with the film is that there's no reality to heighten; it's a spectacle in search of a soul.

A bad movie with a good title.

The result is a queasy combination of speculation and dramatic invention with the ring of half-truth, though the co-stars, Ryan Gosling and Kirsten Dunst, add as much color as they can - not much - to a monochromatic script.

Even an audience expecting very little would be underwhelmed by this meandering, snowy dud, which, for all its extravagance, at a reported $120 million budget, combines insipid messaging with witless comedy and a weak plot that gets resolved in a silly way.

Infinite was directed by Antoine Fuqua, who like this film is always very busy without any particular destination.

Far from rising to the level of truthiness, let alone truth, True Story rings false from start to finish.

Instead of soft core, Sex Tape offers no core. No narrative core, just a not-bad notion executed execrably; no core of conviction, just two stars trudging joylessly through swamps of mediocrity.

Even a day later, contemplating this willfully nauseating work carries much the same sensation as having ingested a plate of bad clams.

Putting a bona-fide imbecile at the center of all this leads, inevitably, to far-too-predictable situations in which he will do the wrong thing, say the wrong thing, sob uncontrollably, and generate no sympathy at all.

Shakespeare has been quoted many, many times over the past 400 or so years, but never to such empty purpose as in the inchoate, self-indulgent musical drama Idlewild, a star vehicle for the wildly popular hip-hop duo OutKast.

Never mind the awfulness of the three madwomen being relentlessly mad, or the silliness of their journey’s logistics; not for a moment do you believe that this grievously afflicted trio actually inhabits what amounts to a small, rickety and unadorned paddy wagon. What’s definitively awful is the spectacle of unrestrained vanity.

Long on cutlery and décor (including, of course, the marvelously decorative Ms. Garner, of the TV series "Alias") and woefully short on narrative.

There’s no sense to almost every element in the movie, and its sensibility is this: that dull dialogue is bound to sound witty if delivered in an English accent. It doesn’t. At least the costumes are pretty.

There are a few charming moments between Ms. Lopez and Mr. Wilson that prove beyond doubt that their characters are too intelligent to be in this movie. And yet, here we are.

The result is a movie groping for a comic tone while its FX machinery spews vast clouds of visual gibberish.

Mr. Emmerich, who has often conjured with cosmic themes, sometimes wittily, achieves something new this time around — a level of indifference to the genre and its fans that amounts to a cosmic shrug. What does it matter if the absurdity is slovenly, the whimsy leaden, the extravagance squalid?

Think of Joker as both dental drill and Novocain. This origin story of the famously depraved smiler deals in pain from start to finish — pain that the hero, Arthur Fleck, first suffers, then inflicts — and Joaquin Phoenix plays the title role with piercing intensity. Yet the film, directed by Todd Phillips, leaves you numb. And glum. Days after the screening I was still under its stultifying spell.

Bleak, remarkably turgid, tediously violent, devoid of drama, deprived of magic, stripped of romance and, except for one of the oddest boy-meets-girl scenes in movie history, a befuddled and befuddling excuse for entertainment.

The lesson here is simple: In the digital realm, the bigger the worse. What looks distinctive and believable in short takes and small doses can turn blatantly phony and deadly familiar when the scale is pumped up. Prince of Persia pumps itself up to the bursting point, and bursts.

Mr. Kormákur somehow elicits a shoddy performance from the sturdy English actor Idris Elba, whom I’d never seen flail like this.

Green Lantern was meant to be a sci-fi adventure, but it proves to be a genuine mystery. How could its megamoola budget have yielded a production that looks almost as tacky as "Flash Gordon" (which had the good grace to deprecate itself at every turn)?

Mannered acting, dismal cinematography, clunky attempts to enhance excitement via gimmicks such as slow motion, and a musical score like a fountain of goo all serve as flashbacks to Reagan-era network schlock.

Before Firewall crumbles into foolishness, Harrison Ford and Paul Bettany make an oft-recycled plot look like a stylish model that just rolled out of a showroom.

The calculation couldn’t be clearer. Put two superb performers together — they don’t get superber than Helen Mirren and Ian McKellen — and you’re on your way to making an exceptional movie. Not so fast, though. The Good Liar is calculation from arch start to hollow finish.

The best thing to be said for this lumbering comedy is that it offers a chance to see Vanessa Paradis, the singularly alluring French singer, actress and model, play Avigal, a melancholy Hasidic widow in Brooklyn, N.Y., and play the role with exceptional delicacy. Otherwise, arrgh!

Brought down by repeated bursts of high absurdity.

The fault is not in the co-stars; they've been brilliant before and will be brilliant again. It's in the laggardly pace, pedestrian writing and murky viewpoint of Ned Benson's feature.

The movie as a whole is nonsensical. And long. And slow. And head-poundingly loud as it culminates in slavering horror.

"Dial of Destiny” is, if anything, even more breathless and filled with stunts than “Raiders,” but everyone’s feats look like insipid fakery.