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.

Updating a classic is one thing; deliberately obscuring or burlesquing its points is another.

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

Suburbicon is not only unfunny, a bad sign for a black comedy, but deep-dyed dislikable.

The makers of Return to Oz say that their rather bleak, nonmusical fantasy is more faithful to Mr. Baum's vision than "The Wizard of Oz" was. What's appropriate, however, isn't always what's right. All Ms. Balk can do is look earnest and young; Ms. Garland opened her mouth and out came Dorothy's soul.

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

The island locale rings with reggae music regardless of its proximity to Jamaica, and any action sequence is rendered in painfully deliberate slo-mo.

If the movie gets by, as it surely will during the current entertainment drought, most of the credit should go to a couple of performers (Latifah/Keaton) who come from different traditions, yet share a gift for breathing life into moribund material.

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.

I won't pretend that I had a great time watching G.I. Joe: Retaliation.

Like "Transformers," which it rivals in relentlessness, Battleship comes with its own force field, a furious energy that renders criticism irrelevant.

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

It's long on Viagra jokes and whorehouse scenes, and comes up short on plausibility.

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

As Tiberius, who seems not to have been based on any Tiberius of history, Mr. Brody brings to the film a combination of heroin-chic and Basil Rathbone. Also, an extraordinary level of sadistic cruelty. People are burned alive, crushed like insects, hurled from rooftops. They may not deserve all this. But neither do we.

It's going to be a hit with libidinous boys, and their parents could do worse (see first review) than to watch the lavish, James Bondish gadgetry and cheerful anarchy of an action-adventure that's been made with all the finesse it needs, though not a jot more.

Does Meet the Fockers make you laugh? Sure it does, from time to time. Just lower your expectations to the altitude of the gag that's showcased in the trailer, the one in which Jinx the cat flushes a little dog named Moses down a toilet.

The film is less like a full-fledged story than a series of notifications you might get on your phone, most of them couched in language that could have been generated by a buggy AI program.

Olympus Has Fallen is no fun at all. To the contrary, it soon grows tedious, odious and oppressive.

Ladies First invites pointed as well as pungent jokes, and the opportunities are fully exploited, sometimes with enormous wit.

Jim Jarmusch's Dada meander, shot by Christopher Doyle, is empty and excruciating -- that's really all you need to know.

The most annoying tactic in the script is its repeated, strenuous attempts to convince us that we’re in the rarefied air of serious literary discussion.

The whole movie prompts a sense of wonderment: at how boring, dumb and vacant it is; how it fails to give its co-stars enough to do; how the tone changes from one moment to the next; how presumably hard-headed businessmen could have sunk so much money into such a feeble script (the production values are impressive, albeit antiseptic); and, most importantly, how the script raises a crucial question of ethics, then comes up with the wrong answer.

This critic is a sucker for Ms. Knightley, so please disregard anything here that sounds remotely positive. Because it really is a ludicrous exercise, the kind one hopes was fun for the actors because the results are so wacky, and the cast so prestigious.

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.

Rowan Joffe directed from his own adaptation of a novel by S.J. Watson. If you’re thinking of seeing this turgid turkey, forget it.

Like the high desert that provides its main setting, William Monahan’s Mojave is dry, often windy and full of hot air.

The technology is seamless, the movements are eloquent and the problem may be my own misprogramming, but the robot still looked to me like a man in a robot suit.