I do wish Mr. Robbins's one-note co-stars had been worthy of his performance, and that some of the melodramatics hadn't been quite so slapdash.

How bad can a movie be? Hellboy expands the possibilities. It’s brain-numbing and head-splitting.

I have no idea how such shameless prattle found its way to the screen.

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

Every now and then, though, a movie comes up with a scene of surpassing stupidity, and then builds from that defining moment to a climax of perfect ineptitude. Life or Something Like It is such an achievement.

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.

Watching this film is like being trapped inside a snow globe — no air, no warmth, no life — while the death of drama unfolds.

Hot Pursuit is about two women finding sisterly common ground despite ethnic, religious, philosophical, temperamental and/or phonetic differences. It also seems an inevitable stop on Hollywood’s perpetual recycling drive, which caters to an audience perfectly content with the creaky and familiar.

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

Unlike "Dead Man Walking" and many honorable dramas before it, "David Gale" has nothing coherent to say about capital punishment, or anything else. It's a dead film lurching.

Mr. Goldsman, a first-time director though a veteran screenwriter, has been done in by the source material. Either he climbed aboard a horse that was too much for him, or the universe gave him a bum steer.

Though Mr. Skarsgård (who played the terrifying Pennywise in “It”) is gravely charismatic and FKA twigs is touching, the dour, depressing dankness of Mr. Sanders’s vision makes The Crow a turkey.

It neglects, for one thing, to make any sense.

It’s a daring movie in its way—suicide is often inexplicable, and Phil treats it exactly that way. But Mr. Kinnear might have had more confidence in his audience, and maybe in himself.

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.

Succeeds the same way the original comic books did: by making the conflicts and dilemmas basic enough for a five-year-old, while giving the heroes and villains glamorous outfits and layers of complexity, to thicken the broth.

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

Ms. Leo is in the kind of role that befits her particular gifts—a character overwhelmed by her own emotions, who sucks the air out of whatever room she finds herself in. But Measure of Revenge moves with too much trepidation—or too much style, one might say—for a convincing urban thriller.

Every so often a movie transcends stupidity and soars into the empyrean of true idiocy. John Q. is such a movie.

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

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.

It's too much for a feature film, and too little, but it certainly isn't dull.

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

Pay real money to see this feeble fiasco only if you're in the mood for "Groundhog Day" without the laughs.

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

It's unfunny at best and borderline-amateur at worst, notwithstanding the desperate efforts of Renée Zellweger.

Timeline has negative energy to burn. There's even less of it by the end than at the beginning.

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 tedious retelling of the venerable fairy tale-"Twilight" with Oedipal kinks-takes place in a medieval village that is plagued by a werewolf, and that looks like a shtetl settled by California actors.

No one doesn’t love Bill Murray, but his melancholy torpor can wear thin in the best of circumstances, and these circumstances are pretty close to the worst. The cast includes Bruce Willis, Kate Hudson, Danny McBride and Scott Caan. No one escapes unscathed.

Snow Dogs isn't subtle, to say the least, but it's a serviceable city-slicker-in-the-frozen-sticks comedy for kids and undemanding adults.

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.

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.

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

For anyone who remembers the "Die Hard" adventures at their vital and exciting best, this film feels like a near-death experience.

Even in the month of January, traditionally a time for movie lovers to expect the worst, this cheapo feature, directed by Shawn Levy, takes the stale cake for witlessness.

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

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.

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

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

Jiu Jitsu is an ambitious undertaking in its way, one that will probably tickle hardcore martial-arts and samurai movie fans, although the attraction may be more academic than adrenaline-fueled.

Sara is supposed to be an adorable screwball with a fatal disease. Ms. Theron certainly gets the adorable right. With a comic style that's close to unerring, she not only deserves better than this junk but the very best.

It is shabby, as well as disjointed, superficial and just plain dull, a dislikable rendering of a tumultuous life.

It has its moments, several of which are provided by Ms. Rudolph, putting a spin on the girl-friday role. She has one scene of utter hilarity that shouldn’t be spoiled, and can’t be printed anyway, but may lead to “pilafing” becoming the word of the year on Urban Dictionary.

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.

Designed as a disposable commodity, it's a film I'd dispose of with no further ado, except for what it says about minimum standards in a certain tacky niche of the movie business, as well as for what it suggests, in its lunkheaded way, about the perils that marriage may pose.

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

Qualifies as top-grade catnip for connoisseurs of trashy camp.

Blacklight isn’t much of a title. At the very least, though, it provides a useful hint that the movie isn’t much either. One could even argue that it’s not a movie at all, only a rusted-out recycling bin of ill-fitting themes, notions, poses, conventions, affectations, tropes, tropelets and inert snippets of dialogue from other movies.

Wild Hogs, which includes a cameo by a live revenant from "Easy Rider," gives a bad name to carpe diem, but could have been worse; the trip might have started from Bangor.

A brilliant but completely muddled concoction about the relationship between fantasy and reality. [16 Jul 1992]

I haven't seen the original, but I can vouch for the clumsiness of the new version. As usual, though, Queen Latifah is an indomitable, if sometimes undirectable, comic force.

All the same, it's a feat to find the lowest common denominator at 40,000 feet; View From the Top would be perfect as the first in-flight offering of the new Hooters airline.

This film bespeaks a truly startling mistrust of the movie audience, and, what's more, a disrespect for the feature film medium. Yes, of course it was conceived as an unpretentious entertainment pitched mainly to girls and young women. Yet that doesn't explain the nightmarish quality of the finished product.

Too much tumult and chaos, not enough dramatic focus; too many animals with clever names spouting glib one-liners, not enough simple human — or for that matter nonhuman — feeling. What a waste!

Even though it starts out likable, it gets sillier as it goes along and winds up as camp.

Basic Instinct 2 is pretty awful. Rarely has a meaningless thriller had so many meaningful glances, or such arch acting by good actors who know better.

Certain words should be reserved for special occasions. "Abysmal" is one of them, and Georgia Rule is as special as such occasions get.

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

Costner has never been further from the lively, engaging actor he can be, or at least once was.

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

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.

No cues are needed to understand the plot, which feels computer-generated and barely serves to sustain an hour and a half running time.

Beyond being entertained, I was delighted by the movie's outpouring of slapstick invention (one crazed sequence in a pet store has all the pawmarks of a classic), and the genial energy of its star, David Arquette.

The road taken by The Love Guru could hardly be lower, and leads nowhere.

A movie that means to be uplifting but turns out to be insufferable.

An appallingly tedious Hanukkah comedy that must have bubbled up from the Porta Potti of his subconscious.

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.

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.

It's basically a cheerful slob job, one of those slapped-together features so often embraced by teenagers with more disposable income than discernible taste.

Mayhem is the point. And on that, at least, the movie certainly delivers.

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

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

Daisy was written without irony, wit or any grounding in reality. She's a barefooted flower child in a flatfooted fiasco.

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.

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

The filmmaker has delivered yet another iteration of what has become a classic M. Night Shyamalan film, only much bigger than before, and, as a consequence, mind-bendingly turgid.

Redefines the notion of a feature film another notch downward.

As the hilariously foul-mouthed, sweet-souled Dr. S, he (Wayans) slaps Marci X to life every time he's on screen.

An abomination, impure and simple.

The worst movie -- all right, the worst allegedly major movie -- of our admittedly young century. More stupefying follies may come, but it's impossible to imagine how they'll beat this one for staggering idiocy, fatuousness or pretension.

One can understand the draw of The Fanatic for someone like Mr. Travolta: It calls for full immersion, mentally and physically. And he pulls it off.

This comedy is harmless, too, when measured against the vast array of harms that the world has to offer. It's also stupid, strident, witless, pitifully inept and bad for what ails you.

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.

Despite all of its failures of wit, sense, and pace, the film does most effectively flaunt the millions spent on it. The inane action takes place in splendiferous settings. [23 May 1991]

A head-banging excuse for a comedy.

For the most part, the movie serves up an incomprehensible collage of high-tech voyeurism sprinkled with every hackneyed creep-out trick in the book -- from eerie little ghost girls to melting walls and scurrying cockroaches.

Moronic. idiotic. Insulting. Pathetic. But enough with the sweet talk.

The oddballs of Mixed Nuts are oddly lackluster -- starting with Mr. Martin, who ambles through the movie with a stunned look on his face. [22 Dec 1994, p.A12]

How could a major studio -- in this case 20th Century Fox -- put its name on a production with a dim-bulb, tone-deaf script that piles howler on howler? Why couldn't someone save poor Ms. Carey from herself?

This one could bring back Prohibition.

Unspeakably ghastly sequel to the merely ghastly original.

This is a film with a positive message that's delivered eloquently, and who's to say that joyous purpose doesn't have its place?

I’ve long been a fan of IMAX nature documentaries, but Humpback Whales, directed by Greg MacGillivray, is something special.

Mr. Von Einsiedel is convinced that his subjects are “true heroes.” Viewers will be convinced of the same.

Ms. McGowan has a wonderful face, and director Jenna Mattison spends a lot of time there. But the effectiveness of The Sound really comes from its atmospherics, which are rich and disturbing and a credit not just to the director but to composer Aaron Gilhuis and the people at Urban Post Production in Toronto.

Joy may not be sweeping the nation portrayed in Our Towns, exactly. But a certain amount of happiness abounds.

Lucy the Human Chimp is a creative assemblage of sundry parts: The archival footage, of which there is a wealth; the news coverage given Lucy when she was a celebrity; and extensive restagings and re-enactments, a device that in many documentaries is either stiff or profoundly unreal but under Alex Parkinson’s direction—and with Lorna Nickson Brown in the role of Janis Carter—rings true.