But clever casting, and inspirational dieting, can't make up for this poor little rich girl's shortcomings as a comedienne. Under Mr. Benjamin's vulgar tutelage, she portrays Connie's coarseness coarsely, with an accent that seems to have come from Ida Lupino by way of Madonna. [19 Apr 1996, p.A11]

A bizarre, overcooked broth that combines a broad sitcom style (the banter goes rat-tat-tat like a steam drill) with a preposterous succession of plot complications, plus solemn questions of identity, adoption and the nature of happiness.

What can’t they do? Properly craft a shot, for one thing.

If claustrophobia's your style, The Jacket is a perfect fit.

This movie seems proud, even smug, about recycling scraps from other fairy tales.

Has many more downs than ups, but this ragged action comedy, with Martin Lawrence and Steve Zahn as mismatched buddies, rings some outrageously funny changes on a deadly serious genre of amateur video that began with Rodney King.

The movie is juvenile on many levels, and it's downright creepy to watch an hour and a half of dramatized neoteny -- a state defined by American Heritage as "the attainment of sexual maturity by an organism still in its larval stage."

This latest retelling of the ancient Arthurian myth is a stinker for the ages.

No catharsis redeems the horrors we’ve witnessed; no useful lesson is learned; there isn’t even so much as a sociological observation. One leaves the theater with an unpleasant feeling, equal parts depleted and cheated.

The Shaggy Dog is paint, or more appropriately here, pant by the numbers. It also manages a one-two punch -- it will upset small children and bore their parents. There's just no other way to say this: Disney, that movie of yours is a dog.

You'd have to be made of granite to resist all the charms of a free-spirited, 100-pound Lab. Yet the production manages, against heavy odds, to make its canine star an incorrigible bore.

The film proves to be as smug and shallow as the plutocrats it lampoons.

The psychodynamics may well be sound, but the problem is that Léa and François, whether in or out of bed, are much more appealing than Roland and Vanessa. The camera is in the wrong room.

A star once beloved for his buoyant spirit has taken another bad turn in his career, and that’s painful to behold.

The movie itself is grotesque, and may drive you nuts as it makes you laugh, mostly at the stupidity of the thing.

A bizarre conflation of chick flick and "A Christmas Carol."

The book’s subtitle was “A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon,” and the film gets that part wrong. It’s deadly dull and conspicuously short on obsessiveness.

These people -- the filmmakers as well as the cast -- have brought a rare sense of camaraderie to their work. Unfortunately, they forgot to bring a script. They even forgot, in the midst of their joyous self-involvement, to take good pictures of the places they visited.

Why is the movie such a mess? Will Ferrell plays a washed-up actor who's supposed to be a hopeless mess, but even his character makes little sense. Is it all supposed to be postmodern? No, it's post-postmortem, the dead spirit of a dearly departed show.

What's wrong with this sad fiasco goes far beyond its visual deficits.

You can survive this comedy, which was directed by Garry Marshall and written by too many people to shame by naming, but only if you’re immune to febrile calculation complicated by chronic ineptitude.

Basically a theme-park version of a tawdry tradition.

Even as a visual aid, though, The Da Vinci Code is a deep-dyed disappointment. Paris by night never looked murkier.

Funny bits come along every now and then, and the co-stars work desperately hard for their salaries. But the spectacle is depressing for what it says of mainstream studio standards. Grinding on with dim humor and grim purpose, Get Hard gets ever harder to take.

What's missing is dramatic subtext and surprise, as well as any playfulness that might have kept us guessing about the plot.

After missing the film on the small screen the first time around, I recently watched it on video, and can only conclude that my screen wasn't small enough.

In a truly terrible action adventure called The Tuxedo, a high-tech monkey suit turns Jackie Chan into an all-powerful cyborg, and will turn you into a boredborg.

A limited movie that can't animate its subject amid all the tricks and glitz. De-Lovely is devoid of life.

Disney's National Treasure is supposed to be family-friendly, a PG-rated action adventure free of hard violence and bad language. That's admirable, to be sure, but with a friend like this a family doesn't need sleeping pills.

By the end I could have used a Bulleit to the mouth.

The director's apparent blindness to the epic banality of her subjects suggests that the whole project is one royally misguided mess.

There’s nothing wrong with making movies for 5-year-olds. But, as directed by Aaron Horvath and Michael Jelenic and written by Matthew Fogel, “Galaxy” seems very much like a movie made by 5-year-olds.

It's not a good sign when a movie is called The Break-Up and you can't wait for the couple to split so they'll get some relief from one another, and give the audience some relief from them.

Watching a bad movie can be fun for reasons that have less to do with its essence than with its trappings. I enjoyed some of the characters’ cardboard and/or plastic names.

A gothic thriller called Cold Creek Manor extrudes an 80-minute idea -- I may be overgenerous here -- into 118 minutes that feel like an eternity.

This sad excuse for family entertainment tries to enshrine a classic while defacing it.

This time he (Martin) goes through the motions.

Most of all, though, I wondered how much longer people will pay to see a walking, running, driving, diving, punning, smirking, swimming, skiing, shooting, parachuting corpse.

Productions can go wrong. Certain elements can fail to ignite or cohere. Bad stuff happens all the time, especially in industrial enterprises of this magnitude, but usually there’s some good stuff to dilute the debacle. Not here, though.

There is a difference between gleefully bonkers and tragically inept, and I’m afraid this omnishambles has earned a place in the anti-pantheon of the worst films ever made by a great director.

Well, incredibly stupid is certainly what is delivered to audiences.

Sometime around what I guessed to be the one-hour mark in The Five-Year Engagement, I checked my watch and honestly thought the battery had given out. Five years doesn't begin to tell the interminable tale.

Relevance can't rescue this would-be epic from the swamps of inertia, absurdity and sentimentality.

We are meant to think they are all delightfully and amusingly eccentric (characters). Actually, they're just creepy

Instead of biting wit, though, the movie settles for sketch humor, standard-brand raunch and toothless slapstick that trivializes everything it touches.

A sudsless soap opera with human misery as a backdrop for romantic banality.

Ride Along, set in Atlanta, gives shoddiness a bad name.

Spasms of highfalutin philosophy, and howlingly pretentious dream sequences, serve only as the thinnest of veneers for incessant action in one of the most assaultive movies ever made.

Extraordinary Measures requires extraordinary tolerance for bathos, bombast and plain old unpleasantness.

Gets to be dislikable in its glib feelgoodness. The movie's many excellent actors do too much acting with too little conviction in scenes that rush through perfunctory setups to deliver pat payoffs.

Do not attempt to see this film, derived loosely from the videogame of the same name, unless you're prepared for wobbly writing, lead-footed direction and acting that must have been boosted by nitrous-oxide injectors, plus a starring performance that could have used a boost and didn't get one.

Most of the prime goofiness is given over to Vassili and Konig sharpshooting at each other while the battle rages. The movie's a red elephant.

Much of this roams pretty far from Orwell’s vision, but that’s not the reason the film fails. It fails because it’s obvious, witless and dull. The animation is charmless and bland.

You could make a case for this as a feature-film version of the FCC's fairness doctrine, but it feels more like a blandness doctrine, a pulling and hauling of the tone-deaf script, which is credited to Matthew Michael Carnahan, to the point of perfect vacuousness.

Don't bother to see this film unless you expect to be tested in film class about the Coens' serial dissertation on American cinema. [10 Mar 1994, p.A16]

Calling Joe Carnahan's movie heartless implies that this auteur of affectless anarchy might have meant to invest it with detectable human feelings, and failed. Better to call it heart-free.

It's a fascinating story, but Mr. Nichols and his actors never stop reminding us how fascinating it is. With the exception of Mr. Hoffman, a master of understatement, everyone acts up a storm, yet context is lacking.

Only Le Carre fans with tin ears and clouded eyes will fail to note the film's sour tone, crude performances and drab look.

The computer-generated monsters, like the film as a whole, are numbingly repetitive, and devoid of any power to move, scare or stir us.

As juxtapositions go, regressed Goth rock star and Holocaust could hardly be more bizarre, and bizarre can be good when it's done deftly. In this case, however, it's done ponderously and sententiously.

Sorry excuse for political satire.

Swamping the audience with Michael Giacchino’s oceans-of-syrup score, IF expects viewers to cry at the end, but if so it’ll be due to regret at wasted time, or possibly from hyperglycemia.

Horns is uncertain in tone — most of its attempts at humor fall flat — and amateurish at best.

Maybe the worst part (there's so much to choose from) is the sight of a good actor like Edward Herrmann parading around looking like a demented quarterback, the shoulders of his suit jacket grotesquely padded. Mr. Schumacher has dressed the adorable Corey Haim in even weirder getups, jackets with pastel stripes and little outfits that resemble dresses. The vampires aren't nearly as creepy as those clothes. [6 Aug 1987, p.1]

Everything that was modest, soundly grounded and therefore horrifying about the 1971 rodentarama that starred Bruce Davison is now insistent, Grand-Guignol-intense and therefore shrug-offable when it isn't downright awful.

Ella McCay is not quotable. It is not believable. It is not likable. It’s not even digestible. For an ordinary filmmaker, it would be merely a disaster. For James L. Brooks, it’s more like a tragedy.

Adam Sandler's 50 First Dates isn't just slovenly and smarmy but creepy.

Might have qualified as dumb fun if they hadn't left out the fun.

The crude, sophomoric Sex and Death 101 is neither particularly dark nor even remotely funny.

How do I count the ways this movie goes wrong?

The current cast is cursed with the director’s lust for gravitas. Searching for emotional truth in Agatha Christie, Mr. Branagh succeeds only in killing her playfulness.

I wish I'd brought a pair of peas to the screening. Then I could have taken in the glorious scenery without the dumb dialogue, which is delivered in a jangle of accents that makes a mockery of ethnicity.

The battles to save the world are generic/titanic; the villain is a bloodless bore with a boom-box roar; and the screen, like the ragged story, is chockablock with such underdeveloped overachievers as Batman, Wonder Woman, Aquaman, Cyborg and the Flash.

J. Edgar, with Leonardo DiCaprio in the title role, is at war with itself, and everyone loses...Mr. Eastwood's ponderous direction, a clumsy script by Dustin Lance Black and ghastly slatherings of old-age makeup all conspire to put the story at an emotional and historical distance. It's a partially animated waxworks.

The best thing about a movie as silly as this is that it makes such modest demands on your attention. As the story unfolded with all the energy of California in a Stage 3 alert, I staved off brain death by trying to imagine an alternate version.

The narrative core suffers a conspicuous meltdown, though not before Mr. Mann gets to stage a few impressive action sequences, the best and loudest of which concerns a shootout in a curvilinear tunnel. As for the climax, set against a massive torchlight parade through the streets of Jakarta, it’s very elaborate, and terribly dumb.

The movie will surely find an audience, since it speaks to young people's anxieties about marriage and parenting. But what are two particularly engaging performers doing in a dump of a comedy like this?

This satire, directed by David Gordon Green from a screenplay by Peter Straughan, suffers from deficits of wit, wisdom, focus, filmmaking expertise and appropriate tone. It’s a case study, if nothing else, of starting with a dubious idea and making it downright awful.

Much forced joshing about the conventions of the genre undercuts the impact of the film’s action, which is also severely limited by the smash-em-up frenzy of the special-effects department. Not for the first time in a comic-book epic, the CGI cart comes before the storytelling horse and leads it off a cliff.

A deeply dreadful movie -- no, a shallowly dreadful movie -- that's too unpleasant and repetitive to be entertaining, even as camp.

At no point does anything shocking, or even interesting, happen.

After seeing The Shack — after enduring, that is, its 132 minutes of blissed-out New Age religiosity — I’ve become a believer. I believe there is no role Octavia Spencer can’t play with convincing feeling and an impeccably straight face.

This one, a debut feature, is awfully inept, whereas the short isn’t long enough for ineptitude to take hold, or for a story to develop.

Mostly, Cats is a confusing litter box of intentions, from its crushed-velour aesthetic to its strip-bar sensuality to its musical cluelessness.

If I could find some facet to praise, I'd be glad to do so, but the production's mediocrity is all-pervasive -- story, character, graphic design, even music -- and it all points to a failure of corporate imagination, or maybe just nerve.

The plot makes no sense — time travel as multiverse Dada. Worse still, it renders meaningless the struggles that gave the first two films of the franchise an epic dimension.

Breakfast on Pluto, with an impressive cast that includes Liam Neeson and Brendan Gleeson, deploys its whimsy in many ways, all of them cloying.

The whole thing devolves into such highfalutin silliness that it’s impossible to care what happens to whom. In Mr. Guadagnino’s previous film, “Call Me By Your Name,” the tone was romantic, and sustained to the very end. In Suspiria, style stomps fun into submission.

The movie drills itself into our skulls, which are all too vulnerable to such an assault, though I must say my brain glazed over and my heart turned adamantine while the stupidities of this action thriller played themselves out.

Mr. Scott's idea of making movies is to bludgeon or deafen his audience with every scene. In another line of work he'd be certifiable. [16 Aug 1996, p.A8]

The writers haven’t given her the nuance needed to differentiate confident from crazy, and the directors, who are two and the same, haven’t given the production as a whole consistent verve; the pace drags when it isn’t frenetic.

A movie's script is its fate, which means this one is doomed.

Amelia Earhart is still missing.

Mr. Pratt’s charm is no match for the crude filmmaking or the stupid plot that keeps him running around in a constant state of artificial animation.

It's bad enough to make parable a four-letter word.

This new film, though, is mainly appalling, and not instructively so. It’s all over the place, to the point of inducing numbness or suffocation. In the end it comes out in favor of love, which is good, but getting there may leave you glassy-eyed, unless you’re deeply into bling porn.

The distance between tawdry and tedious can be amazingly short. It is traveled with Concorde speed in the arch Party Monster.

The last thing we need is entertainment that evokes the horror and then trivializes it with cheesy heroics. Never has a movie taken on a subject of greater immediacy, or handled it more ineptly.