Rarely has a major motion picture -- and this one is major by virtue of its misplaced ambition as well as its budget -- been afflicted by such flagrant dissonance between subject and style.

Manages to make its live actors sound -- and even sometimes look -- computer generated. This wan, sluggish comedy wouldn't pass muster as a premium-cable original, but here it is on the big screen.

Choose to pass this one up.

The movie's smugness is insufferable.

The oddest thing about this very odd movie is that it doesn't seem to know what to make of itself.

To describe “Amsterdam” as an unfunny comedy would be unfair, because it’s so much more than that. It’s also a non-thrilling thriller and a not particularly mysterious mystery. As an allegory for our times it is vapid and irrelevant.

Bee Movie isn't a B movie, it's a Z movie, as in dizmal.

If the movie had even a moment of freshness or wit, one honest laugh. It doesn't--and that's the ugly truth.

Bad can't begin to describe Christmas With the Kranks. It's sub-humbug.

The only entertaining member of the cast is Terence Stamp.

Thin characterizations, bland acting and a surfeit of bubbly cuteness combine to make a throw-pillow of a movie: It’s soft and decorative without being particularly useful or interesting.

A deadly earnest and deadly dull psychological thriller.

Elegance isn't Zack Snyder's bag; a certain sort of impact is. Watchmen establishes him as Hollywood's reigning master of psychic suffocation.

A generally mirthless comedy of manners.

Motion is in copious supply -- a frenzied shootout at Manhattan's Guggenheim Museum grows interminable -- but the workings of the abstract plot are unfathomable, the characters are unpleasant and a couple of assassinations leave us as cold as the corpses.

For better or worse, Woody Allen turns out a movie every year. Last year's "Midnight in Paris" was better than better; that is to say, sublime. To Rome With Love is worse than worse, as inert as its predecessor was inspired.

A comedy afflicted with terminal unfunniness, Here Today, which is playing in theaters, may well be gone tomorrow.

What I don't understand is why this extended piece of idiocy chose to sink its stinky teeth into our 16th president. If an axe-wielding hero was required, George Washington would have been the better choice, with the Redcoats as bloodsuckers.

J.Lo should sue her handlers for damages.

Consider this more a consumer warning than a movie review: The Life Before Her Eyes will draw you in, then intrigue you, then bore you, then bewilder you, then make you crazy with its incessant flashbacks and flash forwards, and finally leave you feeling like the victim of a fraud.

It may be lulling to know, almost from the outset, where the plot is going, but thrilling -- or even psychological -- it is not.

What was weirdly but deliciously scary has grown ponderously out of scale, even for witches at their malign worst.

I wanted to give this movie a fair shake, though I can't pretend to be an admirer of Ayn Rand's writing. But the movie, the first installment of a projected trilogy, doesn't give the book a fair shake.

Like most other members of an excellent cast that includes James McAvoy, Kevin Kline and Tom Wilkinson, she (Robin Wright) has come under the deadening directorial hand of Robert Redford.

As entertainment, however, the film is calculation impure and simple. It’s a box-ticking exercise in female jeopardy, survival and empowerment, oppressively efficient in its relentless way but unrelieved by emotional resonance.

The Hateful Eight wears out its welcome well before the halfway point, leaving the equivalent of a whole other movie to sit — and suffer — through.

There isn't a milliliter of honest feeling from start to finish, and precious little comedy or romance.

This more than 2 1/2 hour film would rank as one of Hollywood’s sleepiest fantasy blockbusters of the century even without the pointless musical interludes, of which there are at least half a dozen.

Eye-blowing and mind-numbing.

“Rise of the Beasts” is shamelessly vapid filmmaking that stacks up poorly against several other entrants in the series.

Where to Invade Next is documentary filmmaking gone wrong, a churlish polemic that uses the tools of propaganda to construct its world view. The film itself is an invasive presence, wreaking havoc in the realm of truth.

Smith is only a rogue computer program, but this morbidly dispiriting movie makes him sound like a prophet.

The Navajos must have sent much more crucial messages at much higher levels during the war, but you'd never know it from this movie. Windtalkers is practically all action and no talk.

Talk about tin ears. Black or White comes off as the product of clouded eyes, sour stomachs and addled brains.

The Producers is nightmarish, in its febrile way, a head-bangingly primitive version of an overrated Broadway show that grew out of a clumsy 1968 movie with an inflated reputation.

The Loss of Sexual Innocence is a work of intransigent anger and barely relieved depression. [28 May 1999]

An ugly exercise in big-budget carnage.

It's unlikely that a dinosaur wrote the script — the Writers Guild of America makes no provision for Cambrian membership — but this animated feature is dimwitted all the same. The title should be "Trudging With Dinosaurs" (in 2.5-D, for all the grandeur the glasses confer), because the only semblance of a plot is provided by a long migration to winter grounds.

You need only watch the trailer to know that The Internship is a promo for Google; think Google for Dummies, as well as Summer Comedy for Dummies. It's as if the writers googled "how to write a script" and nothing came up, so they wrote this anyway.

Every element other than Mr. Grant is brain-scarringly awful—the flat characters, the dull acting, the rusted-battleax dialogue, and above all the action scenes, which are frenzied, chaotic, meaningless and vapid, overflowing with CGI that is no more awe-inspiring than the average TV commercial about lizards selling auto insurance.

The entire movie comes across as awkward, even flailing to hold our interest.

The kindest context in which to put Over Her Dead Body, which was written and directed by Jeff Lowell, is that of a training film, a public display of people trying to master their craft. The best way to see it is not at all.

Young audiences may welcome this movie, but girls, and boys, should want more.

The writing is semicoherent at best, and the buddies of this meandering road trip are not only mismatched but dislikable.

Mr. Coen and Ms. Cooke’s plot is such a muddle that they more or less expect us to dismiss it. The interstitial moments and incidental comedy are meant to be the chief attraction here. Minus Joel Coen, however, the jokes are thin and tired.

All of the roaring and thundering in “Dominion” carries roughly the dramatic impact of a robust sneeze, because Mr. Trevorrow has forgotten that what we human beings care about, despite our addiction to spectacle, are human beings.

The best news about this clangorous clunker is that it may well have vanquished the Mummy franchise.

Must be seen to be believed, though I'm not suggesting you actually see it.

Mr. Sayle's portrait is painfully unfunny, and the movie as a whole is a plodding polemic.

This is movie-making by and for dummies, a sappy little bible story, blissed out on its own ineptitude.

Not to put too fine a point on it, Surviving Picasso is merely the worst movie ever made about a painter; worse movies have been made on other subjects, though none comes immediately to mind. [20 Sep 1996]

Ambitious to a fault, this cautionary fantasy about artificial intelligence has so much on its muddled mind, and so little sense of dramatic grounding, that it grows ever more preposterous before lurching to a climax that's utterly unfathomable.

Built on such a goofy premise that your average soap-opera scriptwriter would laugh it out of a story meeting.

This ripoff, directed by Jerry Zucker, has a few funny moments, but it's a sad sad sad sad example of what Hollywood is currently serving up -- and what audiences are swallowing -- as summer entertainment.

The script is woefully inept, with plot twists that wouldn't pass muster in a high-school drama class.

The remake stumbles from a ragged start into a child's garden of worses -- worse than the original in more ways than you could imagine.

In the real world, a debate has been raging over what does and doesn’t constitute torture. In the movie world, there’s no debate; watching The Interview is torture from almost start to finish.

Only God Forgives would seem to be a parody of something or other — "Blue Velvet"? "Last Year At Marienbad"? — except that the film takes itself seriously to the point of suffocation in telling its lurid tale of slaughter and revenge.

Remarkably joyless, even though Ms. Jolie is a formidable presence with the potential for becoming a witty one.

Grotesque doesn't begin to describe Ms. McCarthy's new character. Scarily insane comes closer; repulsive occasionally applies. Mullins's insanity can be extremely funny from time to time, but her anger grows as punishing for the audience as it does for the victims of her unrestrained police work.

In all candor, and with all the amity I can muster, Divergent is as dauntingly dumb as it is dauntingly long.

Guess Who is, impurely and simply, a comic premise borrowed, turned around and dumbed down to the level of sketch or sub-sketch humor.

A head-banging excuse for a comedy.

Alan Arkin does the best trick, bringing a dollop of humanity to the role of Rance Holloway, the magician who was young Burt's inspiration. Apart from Rance, the whole production is slovenly nonsense, photographed on the cheap with blaring ghastliness. Yet it poses an intriguing mystery. Did the producers appeal to a denominator even lower than common by making their film as dumb as possible, or did it just turn out that way?

The Legend of Tarzan, for all its anticolonialist posturing and eminently attractive co-stars, has a dead soul.

Looks like the deformed spawn of a development process gone awry.

It's a terrible life, and a terrible movie.

Any kind of acting requires courage. Great acting requires formidable courage. Then there’s the dogged courage, spawned by devotion to duty, of wonderful actors like these, doing what they’re asked to do even though they must know that it’s no damned good.

Greta is petit Guignol trying to pass for Grand, a horror flick made by people who forgot to have fun. One of them, the director, Neil Jordan, made a memorable film called “The Crying Game” almost three decades ago. This is the groaning game, an inept tale of danger, entrapment and dismemberment.

Too labored to be romantic and too derivative to be funny.

Real feelings lurk just below the surface--Samantha's terror of growing old, Carrie's fear of eventual tedium in a childless marriage. Yet the surface is where the movie stays, like an old submarine with dead batteries.

How could a movie with such likable actors be so deeply dislikable?

In under two hours, the synthetic, insufferable I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry manages to insult gays, straights, men, women, children, African-Americans, Asians, pastors, mailmen, insurance adjusters, firemen, doctors -- and fans of show music. That's championship stuff.

What a botch. All the King's Men, a remake of Robert Rossen's classic 1949 film about the rise and fall of a Southern demagogue, has no center, no coherence, no soul and no shame.

Ms. Vikander has leapt into the void of a franchise reboot, based on a video-game reboot, that generates no joy, makes negligible sense, and seals its own tomb with a climax of perfect absurdity.

Mr. Garman’s showcase has very little to do with anything else, but he’s a pal of Mr. Smith’s and, at the very least, his performance is a filet of wit amid a heaping helping of comedic byproduct.

This time Rambo pulls off his superhuman Soviet-blasting stunts in Afghanistan, not quite as late on the scene as he was in Vietnam. Not very exciting; very noisy. [2 Jun 1988, p.1]

Mr. Cage's knight ends up playing second banana to a digital devil. Welcome to the January dead zone.

Nothing but miscalculation from clumsy start to chaotic finish, an action thriller with a cynical, shriveled soul.

The film doesn’t lack for audacity, or ultimate purpose — it’s against hate and in favor of love. But the adaptation isn’t funny enough to sustain the style, which owes an overt debt to Mel Brooks and amounts to Springtime for Hitler Youth.

Like Thor's hammer, this ersatz epic bludgeons its victims into submission. What's more, it requires them to stare at the source of their punishment through 3-D glasses.

Every now and then a movie's awfulness rises to the level of mystery.

Huckabees is godawful, a mirthless, bilious bore in which the vividly focused fury of "Three Kings" has become free-floating anger at the follies of human existence.

My Homo sapiens brain was boggled by the movie's clumsiness, while my heart was chilled by the chance that otherwise mature members of my species might mistake this disjointed botch for summer entertainment.

The whole movie is a sinkhole — not because it’s smutty or raw, but because it’s lazy, and demeaning to the talented people at its center.

How much do I loathe this film? A lottico is putting it mildico.

Certainly trashy, but, stripped of Mr. Diesel's services and directed by John Singleton, it's a no-go Yugo in muscle-car sheet metal.

Split reworks some of the themes Mr. Shyamalan developed in the 2000 “Unbreakable” — weakness and strength, unstoppable power, a sense of emergent destiny. The film contends that people are purified by suffering. Having suffered through the screening, I’m still waiting for my purer self to kick in.

A gross-out saga that sentient adults should avoid like the plague.

This shabby enterprise gets so many things so wrong that it freezes your face into a cringe.

The pace is deadly slow, the style old-fashioned and the acting devoid of spontaneity. These are skilled actors, but the writing is so threadbare — an important character from the novel has been eliminated — and the direction (by Thomas Bezucha, working from his own adaptation) is so lacking in nuance that genuine dramatic energy gets lost by the wayside during the road trip to North Dakota.

Ms. Stone. She alternates between two expressions here: sullen, and aghast. Then again, if you were listed on the credits as the co-producer of this violently dull piece of shlock, you'd look that way, too. [16 Feb 1995, p.A12]

The big news in Blade II is that there's something worse than vampires, but is there something worse than Blade II?

The worst would-be-big-and-Capraesque-but-actually-bloated-and-bloviating-beyond-belief movie of the year.

Adds up to one numbingly unfunny comedy.

Robert De Niro collects another stupendous paycheck for starring in another piece of exploitable junk.

In the 1980 movie “Urban Cowboy,” John Travolta rode a mechanical bull. In The Longest Ride, Scott Eastwood rides real bulls, but everything else is mechanical.

The Happening makes you wonder whether Mr. Shyamalan's own switch may have been flipped. How else to explain his film's befuddling infelicities, insistent banalities, shambling pace and pervasive ineptitude?