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?

Mr. Smith's latest film is about nothing less than life and death, sin and atonement, and it takes the soggy cake for multiple layers of sentimentality topped by indigestible grandiosity.

It's a bad idea done disastrously.

Doc says: "I can't believe this is happening." …That sentence may be the only one uttered in the entire film that contains an ounce of true feeling. Certainly that was the thought on my mind as I watched this depressing rehash of material that seemed original just five years ago, when it was. And "I can't believe this is happening" seemed to be what most of the actors were thinking as they gamely trudged through their paces yet again. [31 May 1990, p.A12]

Hitchcock rings false from start to finish.

A symphony for tin ears, a sniggering assessment of human nature delivered with the faux-lofty tone of a Lexus commercial.

The two human leads, Nani and Lilo, don’t have nearly enough charm to make up for the deficiencies around them, which leaves the entire movie essentially in Stitch’s claws. Yet even his demented-toddler-on-three-espressos energy isn’t funny, perhaps because the digital animation is so dismal.

Given the importance of that subject, the real mystery of Mr. Lee's movie is why it's so diffuse, dispirited, emotionally distanced and dramatically inert.

What's never explained is why anyone would do such a dumb remake of Robert Wise's 1951 sci-fi classic.

What could anyone have said of the finished film except that it was finished? Terminator Genisys plays like the worst of all outcomes.

Whatever one may think of the overall style--I think it's ludicrous--Mr. Fuqua clearly wanted his film to be operatic, and so it is, in a tone-deaf way.