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.