It's one thing for a romantic comedy to be predictable - they all end at the same destination, after all. But it's quite another thing to be predictable at every twist and turn of the story.

At first, The Oath looks as though it will be a study of the soul-corroding effects of twisted ideology, but it emerges as the reverse.

And give credit to Stallone: He just leaves the camera on Rourke, in the tightest of close-ups, cutting only once, to himself, for a one-second reaction shot, but keeping the focus on his actor. A great actor.

Though the film seems less like a theatrical release and more like something that might play on an obscure PBS station at 2 p.m. on a Sunday afternoon, it's reasonably interesting as a personality study.

Greed is boring.

It's marred by loaded language and a propagandistic tone that undercuts rather than promotes its purposes.

I Am Love casts no spell and creates no narrative urgency. It's as compelling as mildly interesting gossip about people you don't know.

Despite the title, Ismailos' documentary is not a study of what constitutes great direction. Rather it's a nicely arranged film in which a variety of filmmakers Ismailos likes discuss their inspirations and influences.

When compared with the ambition and achievement of recent animated films, such as "Coraline" and "Toy Story 3," Despicable Me hardly seems to have been worth making, and it's barely worth watching.

The movie's pleasures are acting pleasures, but the movie doesn't compel attention and never seems like more than the frame for a performance.

Sober and dispiriting, tense and morose.

The movie's flaw is impossible to ignore, turning on the most tired of romantic comedy conventions: Someone knows something, and all that person has to do is say it, and the movie is over and everything's great.

Patrik Age 1.5 has a single drawback that can't be overlooked, at least from the standpoint of an American viewer. It's predictable.

It's a meandering and rather aimless movie that would be considered trite if made by another filmmaker, and yet it has such a family resemblance to other, better Woody Allen movies that it's easy to stick with it and enjoy it.

The result is a film of passion and ambition, but one whose success is intermittent at best.

If this movie were a human being, it would be intelligent and sincere but so depressed as to be unable to get out of bed without a forklift.

The tone is both satiric and serious, zany but heartfelt, and for a while - maybe 20 minutes - all seems well.

127 Hours, about an unimaginably unbearable experience, is pretty much an unbearable experience of its own. And yet, it must be said, it's exceptionally well made.

Roger Michell directs it as though it were an uproarious comedy, but the laughs are light, and the story's real appeal lies in its behind-the-scenes look at the manners and politics of morning television.

If The Next Three Days were just a little more mindless, it might have been more joyful.

The film is engaging but also has a certain creaking familiarity.

Not a mediocre film. It is, by turns, a great and awful film.

Dunst is not the only person doing quality work in All Good Things, but she is the only one worth watching.

It's not bad. It's cute.

As a viewing experience, the film is by turns heartrending and stultifying, but mostly stultifying.

Sanctum is by no means a badly made movie, but it has the feel of one of those dramatic re-enactments made exclusively for Imax theaters.

Though Zack Snyder is known as an action director, he is a genuine artist and one of the most exciting and promising filmmakers to emerge in the past 10 years. His new movie, Sucker Punch - let's just say it - is a failure, but there's so much talent on that screen that the movie can't be dismissed as a waste of time.

The movie is just good enough to make us want more and to understand what's missing.

Nobody Else But You takes a novel concept and a willing leading lady and squanders both through drab, lifeless storytelling.

For the most part, it's fairly pleasant and interesting enough to be there.

Hall Pass attempts to take the Farrellys' harsh humor and bring it into harmony with what has become the modern comic style, which is to be coarse but not absurd, to be brutally honest but real.

The movie lacks joy. It has poignancy and intelligence, and it holds interest, but it never opens up into happiness and fantasy. Maybe it's the recession.

Still, those who meet the movie on its own terms and don't expect a masterpiece may appreciate the commitment of Wright and the actors. Blanchett goes out of her way, for example, to be repellent here.

The most notable thing about Hop is its technical perfection. It puts live action and animation into the same frame so seamlessly that the filmmakers might easily not get credit for it.

The movie is hampered throughout by little inconsistencies.

The story, a dystopian tale with heroes and villains and lots of triumphs and reversals, is so busy and so inherently interesting that the movie is entertaining until the finish - or the sort of finish. As only the first part of the story, Atlas Shrugged doesn't end, it stops.

Goodwin radiates probity and makes waiting almost look interesting, and so, for all the movie's awkwardness, it remains watchable.

Mars Needs Moms floats about 45 minutes' worth of story in an 88-minute ocean.

I had a migraine when I started watching Larry Crowne, and by the end, it went away. None of this quite adds up to a recommendation, but it's close. Very close.

As far as complete wastes of time go, Zookeeper is not especially offensive. Yet it is surprising that everything you might expect to be charming in it just isn't - namely all the bits involving animals.

30 Minutes or Less is a strange case. Either it goes for a particular tone and doesn't achieve it. Or it does achieve a tone that's not really worth striving for.

That the movie is leisurely and unconventional is all part of its charm, too - until it isn't anymore. The movie is a tale of corruption, but then it's not. It's a love story, but no, not quite. Later, it flirts with becoming a great journalism tale, or at least a whimsical journalism tale, but that vein leads nowhere, too. Nor is it much of anything else.

Instead we get Knightley, who juts her chin, quakes, shakes and bugs her eyes, but nothing about her pain calls out to us, because nothing in it seems real.

The result is a movie that's kinetic yet slow, whose joys are architectural more than spiritual.

It is not what could be fairly called a bad movie, but neither is it fine enough to be a good one, with its lineup of dull characters and a limp story that functions like a conveyor belt.

July also narrates the film, in voiceover, as the cat, and every time she does, it's a white-knuckle thing. You have to hold on until she stops.

If only Lars von Trier took into account that audiences might actually want to enjoy Melancholia, rather than endure it, or sift through it, or submit to the director's will, he might have made something extraordinary.

The story has its moments, and yet there is something about this tale of a serial killer's patterning his crimes on Poe's most gruesome works that doesn't completely satisfy.

Trespass never advances beyond being a grand manipulation.

Horrible Bosses has a handful of hilarious moments, but it's not exactly funny and not exactly serious, either.

Though the Jill problem is too insurmountable to ignore, almost everything else in this comedy succeeds.

Though the movie drips and aches with good intentions, I do wonder how lesbians may feel about seeing lesbianism presented as a mere traumatized distortion of female heterosexuality.

This latest adaptation of the Charlotte Brontë novel is careful, respectful and even enjoyable, and yet dry, singularly humorless and played without the lavishness of spirit that makes sense of Gothic melodrama.

Violent and nonsensical, with story elements in contradiction, it is lifted up by the efforts of the actors, who try to put a human face on the blockbuster machinery and almost succeed.

It's a slow-moving fable, with enough story and substance to make for one amazing Imax short. Instead the material is stretched beyond its limits into a long, repetitive and often stagnant 127-minute feature film.

The result is a movie that one watches with the sense of pushing it up a hill.

Most of the time Lockout is pleasant enough, not something to recommend to a friend, but enjoyable in the moment. Guy Pearce has a lot to do with that, as the most impervious action star imaginable.

Let's start by admitting three things: that Contraband is a ridiculous movie, that it wasn't meant to be a ridiculous movie, and that it's an enjoyable movie. One of the things that makes it enjoyable is that it's so ridiculous.

Henry's Crime has three charismatic actors - Reeves, Vera Farmiga and James Caan - in search of a decent script, and what they find, instead, are a handful of good scenes and lots of room to build their respective characters.

Try as it might, the movie is hardly profound, and the murky atmosphere and the leaden pace drag things down.

In terms of story and emotional power, Brave comes up short.

Moments are stretched. Every recollection must be illustrated by a flashback. Character motivations shift on a dime, and if you understand even half of what's going on - not generally, but specifically - you'll be doing better than most.

The pure mechanics of Here Comes the Boom land it in an enjoyable, if forgettable, space.

Cleverness won't carry it. Nothing less than overarching vision is required; otherwise, the audience will laugh for 10 minutes and then start to check out. And that pretty much states the problem of Mirror Mirror.

This is a movie in which whole sequences consist of nothing but guys fighting stiff computer images. Such scenes would be boring even were they done well, but these scenes aren't done well.

Though it's only 72 minutes, by the time it's over, you'll be ready for it to end. Still, as a glimpse of the Arab world right before the Arab Spring, this documentary may be of some lasting interest.

Alas, Gainsbourg: A Heroic Life loses steam and grows more perfunctory as it wears on.

All Upside Down has is its love story, which despite the undeniable appeal of Sturgess and Dunst, never ignites. So the movie is like a huge package, wrapped in gold leaf, but containing a 10-dollar toaster. Fine. It's a toaster. It works. It's not garbage. But who can pretend it's not a disappointment?

Structurally, this becomes a little monotonous because there's just no denying that some kids are more interesting than others.

In the end, What to Expect, isn't an inspired movie, but a manufactured one, but one with some laughs and some moments. Plus, it has Chris Rock, who gets to liven things up as the ringleader of a beleaguered fathers' group.

Take Shelter has a problem, the simplest of all problems but no less serious for its being simple. It's a film without suspense and with a slow-moving story that unfolds without surprise or embellishment.

As a movie, it's not much. But it's the best showcase for his charm that Butler has ever had.

Mighty Macs further distinguishes itself by, for once, giving a fair shake to nuns, who are treated with respect both in the performance of Ellen Burstyn, as the mother superior, and of Marley Shelton, who plays the assistant coach. It's about time.

It's watchable and reasonably entertaining, to be sure. Eastwood doesn't make movies that are hard to sit through. But something in the film's point of view is off, not at cross-purposes, not contradictory, but incomplete, irrelevant and ever-so-faintly ridiculous.

I lost patience with a widow who is grieving one month and then making out with a guy in a bar the next. This is an emotional recovery even Hamlet's mother might have found unseemly.

Is he a hero or a lunatic? He's possibly neither, or possibly a little of both, but this is the problem with making a movie about a real person.

Most of this huge-cast extravaganza is a botched farce. When that doesn't work, it turns sentimental. The presence of liked and familiar actors helps make it watchable, but there is no disguising that this is a weak, badly constructed comedy. At least it's short.

It's a far better thing to remember Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close than to watch it. Looking back, much of what is irritating, precious and tiresome about the movie recedes and drops away, while all the movie's virtues, which are considerable, rise to consciousness. There are good things here - just be prepared to blast for them.

There is no denying that every time Gyllenhaal steps into a frame she takes a sleeping movie and wakes it up.

Fans of Les Misérables wouldn't have minded if the movie were different, but better, or just as effective. The screen version demanded some reconception, some vision to make sense of its existence. Instead, we're left with a film that is conscientious in all its particulars and yet strangely and mysteriously dead.

Josh Brolin plays the leader of the gangster squad as a kind of dedicated dunce, which is appropriate considering their clumsy antics. Ryan Gosling has more nuance as his right-hand man, but Emma Stone is completely out of her element as a slinky film noir heroine, a walking anachronism.

So at the very least, audiences will come away from Chasing Mavericks with a deeper understanding of surfing and an appreciation for surfers.

Yet here's what's strange: As awful as To Rome With Love is - and the awfulness is unmistakable - it is, as an experience, not unpleasant. You will probably see several better movies this year that you will enjoy less. It's a mess, but it's Rome. It's a mess, but it's Woody Allen.

The first Russian musical in more than 50 years, Hipsters is appreciated best as a curiosity.

There's one really good idea at work in Warm Bodies, which is to take "Romeo and Juliet" and mash it up with a zombie movie.

It's never boring, but it lacks a cumulative impact.

It is probably unlike any movie you've ever seen, and in ways both bad and good. It is, by turns, inept and brilliant, shockingly amateurish and inspired. To see it is to sit there for long stretches amazed at how clumsy, fake and misguided it is. But then, five minutes later you might easily be riveted and moved by its awkward brilliance.

As a movie about mental illness, Silver Linings Playbook is more lightweight than lighthearted. But thanks to Lawrence, it does one good thing most movies don't do. It actually gets better as it goes along.

Once Upon a Time in Anatolia is boring, but not in the usual way of boring movies. It is colossally, memorably and audaciously boring.

The only way Bill Murray could seem less like Franklin D. Roosevelt in Hyde Park on Hudson is if the movie showed him winning a marathon.

There is one thing interesting about Alex Cross, and if you miss this, you've missed the whole movie. It's not the story - it's worse than mediocre. It's not the lead actor - nothing wrong with Tyler Perry, but as an action star he's no Vin Diesel. And it's not the dialogue, which has a clunker every other scene. It's the direction. Notice the direction. Alex Cross is a good example of what a seriously talented director can do with a heaping pile of garbage.

There is no diverting from strict chronology, no point the documentary wants to make that requires moving forward and back through time. It just inches ahead, one year to another, sometimes one day to another. By the middle, each time a year changes, it's a relief.

Easy Money takes its time telling us how all the fortunes of all three men intersect, and the movie's failing - or at least its significant imperfection - is that when the stories and lifelines do converge, the results just aren't satisfying.

To my eyes, the whole thing looks sad, like something people might cling to in the absence of religion - or a kind of religion in itself, minus dogma or salvation, but with lots of people standing around dressed like total goofballs.

The name of this documentary is Surviving Progress, but that's only because "The Sky Is Falling and We're All Gonna Die" wouldn't fit on a marquee.

Elles has about half of a story stretched to feature length, and it manages to end just as a good story might have been kicking in. But that is often the way with foreign cinema: The Europeans know how to do sex, but we know how to do stories.

Some of the elements in the film are inexplicable and some are undeveloped, but there are a handful of nicely crafted set pieces.

An average action film, made slightly better by Cruise, and more bizarre by Herzog, and more watchable by Pike, but still within the average range, a silk purse that still says oink.

What makes Middle of Nowhere a break-even proposition, rather than something to avoid, is that it deals with an aspect of life and with characters rarely seen in movies.

Lister is quite funny and engaging. It's just too bad that some of that screenwriting wit couldn't have been shared with the movie's protagonist.

Compared with other movies, Seven Psychopaths is clever and inventive enough to be considered a weak success or a modest failure, the kind of effort that usually gets damned with the faint praise of "not bad."

If it were just a middling effort, The Master would be a lot less frustrating. But the latest from writer-director Paul Thomas Anderson has greatness in it - two extraordinary performances, intuitive and revealing photography and scene setting, and a distinct directorial sensibility that hovers between sobriety and satire. Yet all those virtues are undermined by a narrative that goes all but dead for the last hour.

The resulting film has the integrity and the ugliness of the truth. It's not true because it's ugly; no, it's ugly because it's true.

There's not really a movie there, nothing that sustains itself from scene to scene and nothing that's worth watching from beginning to end.

This vaguely funny film is also the saddest and most depressing movie of 2013.

Little White Lies is never boring, always watchable, always reasonably rewarding. It's just that, when it's over, 2 1/2 hours seems too big an investment for just pretty good.

A movie whose main virtue was its honesty ultimately lands in a place that feels canned and unsatisfying. But on the way there, Backwards isn't so bad.

At its best, the film uses fishing as a window into the internment experience. At its worst, it uses the internment story as the backdrop for a documentary on trout fishing.

Not the usual action movie. It's too odd for that. Based on a true story, it has the weirdness of real life, which is good. But also like real life, it has that funny way of not making much sense or being all that enjoyable.

Everybody in Admission is funny - Tina Fey, Paul Rudd, Lily Tomlin, Wallace Shawn - but they're not funny in Admission.

The movie is achingly slow, and by the time it's over, the story is about where it should have been after about 45 minutes. Then it ends just as it gets good, or as it's starting to.

Is it a comedy if the audience laughs or is it a comedy if laughs were intended, irrespective of whether they're generated? Excuse Me for Living qualifies under the second definition.

The first half of My Worst Nightmare contains some of the best comedy and the biggest laughs of the season, and the second half ... eh.

Some of the best bits of the original movie are replayed here but lose their punch the second time around - the horse manure bit, the skate board sequence. Maybe people who never saw the first movie will get a big kick out of them. [22 Nov 1989, p.E1]

About one idea short of being an excellent teenage romance. As it stands it's a pleasing but routine effort.

Two things hold back Don't Stop Believin' as a documentary. The first is that it presents the world of Journey and the people in it through such a lens of love and light that it begins to seem like a publicity film...The second flaw is that it leaves out vital information. It doesn't, for example, answer the big question, "What happened to Steve?"

The movie has a certain integrity and creates an interesting atmosphere, largely thanks to the soundtrack, of all things, which gives most moments a dreamy undertone.

The film may be intended to launch the movie careers of Patrick Stewart and the gang from ''Star Trek: The Next Generation,'' but any vibrancy, any emotional power it has derives from William Shatner as Kirk. And it's not even his movie. [18 Nov. 1994, p.C1]

Where the movie goes wrong is that it sets itself up as a study of a pathological personality but never delivers.

With Kika Almodovar seems to be saying something about voyeurism, though what he is saying is never nailed down. [27 May 1994, p.C3]

For all Wong's energy and virtuosity, the relentless stylishness and whimsicality of Chungking Express become irritating. The cast is appealing -- particularly the forlorn young cops. But the velocity of Wong's attack seems out of proportion to the airy, lightweight quality of the stories.

Scorsese stuffs the film with heavy-handed art direction and piles on a ludicrously ominous soundtrack. The soundtrack is a constant reminder of the movie's importance and only highlights its unimportance.

Holes in the script, overwrought camera work, dialogue that's embarrassing, and a plot device that's obvious 10 minutes into the movie - all these are major problems.

The film ends up landing in a confused middle category. It's neither a coherent, discrete work nor a zany tribute to the late actor.

Take the worst things about independent movies - the wallowing in an unpleasantness, the narrative unsteadiness, the next-to-no story. Then combine those with a hefty dose of light comedy. The result: the big, fat tonal mess that is Happy Tears, a charmless film about two sisters who come together to care for their demented father.

John Lennon once said, "There's a great woman behind every idiot." This time, I'm counting seven of them.

Sometimes it's unpleasant, sometimes it's insincere, and for long stretches it's boring.

Moon is boring. Agonizingly, deadeningly, coma-inducingly, they-could-bury-you-alive-accidentally boring.

It's a gorefest, a borefest and a snorefest.

Saint John of Las Vegas was a bad script that somehow got made into a bad movie with good people in it.

Represents his (Smith) first act of cinematic cynicism, his first crime against his own talent. With this action comedy, he has given us 110 worthless minutes, a bad formula movie like every other bad formula movie.

When Christian Bale allowed himself to play Bruce Wayne in "Batman Begins," he was slumming - and to good effect. But with Terminator Salvation, this ostensibly serious actor takes up residence in the action ghetto, and it's not a good fit.

Director Edward Zwick tried to make a great movie, but somewhere in the process he forgot to make a good one.

The movie's excruciating length is without dramatic or thematic justification.

The result is that rare movie specimen, a completely intentional, expertly guided work of art that fails almost completely.

This isn't pleasant to watch. Neither is it amusing, intellectually engaging, whimsically fascinating, coldly satirical or painfully poignant, though at any given moment in this erratic film director Tom Tykwer might be trying for one of these conflicting tones.

More than confusing. It's opaque.

Has a gutsy premise, but no guts.

If Soderbergh's ambition was to make us feel just how dull it would be to a woods-dwelling communist guerrilla, he succeeded.

"Spider-Man 2" was a textbook example of how to make a sequel: Deepen it, make it funnier, give it more heart and come up with a strong villain and a good story. Spider Man 3, by contrast, shows how not to make a sequel.

The bad outweighs the good and the cringes outnumber the laughs in Brüno, a disappointment from Sacha Baron Cohen, whose "Borat" was one of the funniest movies of the decade.

Owen is a magnetic, sensitive presence at the center of a movie that doesn't deserve him and that barely deserves to be seen.

Another inert, soul-dead action drama that turns actors into zombies...It's garbage.

A thriller without thrills. It's also a thriller that cheats. The story is stretched to feature length only by having the film's incidents arranged in such a way as to reveal as little as possible.

The movie isn't hellish, because there's always hope of leaving it. It's more like purgatory, two whole hours of it.

A third-rate effort, with a weak script, cheap-looking effects and no genuine frights.

This is a half-hearted, derivative action film with not a single honest artistic impulse behind it.

Its story meanders and doesn't build, and the pace is deadly.

Perfunctory, thrill- free sequel.

An adventure in mediocrity that brings together some of the worst current techniques and trends.

It's dreadful, but it's a special kind of dreadful -- the kind designed to appeal to intelligent people on principle.

Not only not funny, it's unfunny. It kills humor. Sit in a room by yourself, look at a blank screen for 90 minutes, and you'll have more of a chance of laughing at your own thoughts than you will at this movie.

110 minutes of Euro silliness mitigated only by the presence of Huppert and the striking ability of the actors to keep a straight face throughout this mess.

The film is glossy, but awful. Frenetic, but awful. Expensive, but awful. ... And awful.

There's just the matter of facing it: that The Perfect Man is just something slapped together -- by people who don't care, for an audience they figure will care even less.

Mostly unbearable.

They take on special powers that the filmmakers are incapable of making interesting, partly because the characters are ciphers, and partly because the story is listless and uninventive.

It's astonishing what little impact even the most imaginatively choreographed and well-filmed aerial escapades can have when they're presented as neither an expression of a character's personality, nor in the context of a compelling mission.

It's the cinematic equivalent of an all-dessert meal: After the initial jolt, the lack of any real nourishment is apparent, and it becomes a struggle to stay awake.

Arrives in theaters today with a sheet over its head and a tag on its toe. So to speak. What we have here is a complete systemic failure, a comedy that's not funny, with action that's not thrilling.

Has no truth, wisdom or honesty, and it's barely entertaining.

Yet, it's watchable -- not remotely enjoyable, but watchable.

It's hard to sit all the way through Aeon Flux while fully awake.

On its own terms, the film is overlong, repetitive and lacks impact. Even if this were the first gorilla-in-love movie ever made, audiences would come away vaguely dissatisfied, suspecting there was an intriguing idea buried somewhere in here, but it didn't quite come off.

Bezucha made something perverse, a feel-bad holiday film about a repellent family, with a milquetoast dad and a smug, devious harpy of a mom.

In the important things, in all the ways that really count, Caché is a handsome fraud.

Everything connected with the lovers, who are the point of the movie, is either ordinary or unwittingly funny, and the laughs come early.

The film is obvious, weak and scattered and seems more like a practical joke than a work of genuine passion. It is without exaggeration one of the most blindingly boring films I've seen in years.

An attempt at a beautiful film about renewal -- about past love, love lost, longing and rediscovery -- but it has no emotional truth.

With Hard Candy, the innocent are tortured along with the guilty -- the innocent, in this case, being the audience.

A big disappointment.

RV is a horrible movie about horrible people, and just because they call it a comedy doesn't mean we have to play along.

The picture gives us two protagonists and sets up a situation in which only one of them can have a decent life. Then, having devised this sour souffle, the screenwriters find no adjustment to make it palatable. The resolution is flip, at best.

This is not one of the good Altmans. This isn't even one of the mediocre Altmans.

Lucas Black, who looks as much like a high school kid as George Bernard Shaw, speaks in a thick Southern accent that hasn't been heard on any leading man since the second act of "Our American Cousin."

More than the usual bad or even numbingly horrible movie. It's an amalgam of many of the modern cinema's worst tendencies and modern filmmaking's most unfortunate misconceptions.

Imagine the worst "Deadwood" episode ever, and you'll get an idea of the general tone of Beowulf & Grendel, which is full of anachronistic cursing, tortured syntax, dark humor and lots of hairy, homely, filthy-looking people.

It's just off, odd and joyless.

There's no satisfaction and no pleasure to be gained by sitting through it. The characters are ludicrous and, worse than that, boring. And this is despite all the lead actors doing the best they can.

It's just horsing around that comes to nothing. No, it's worse. It's horsing around designed to disguise nothing as something.

Coppola has no trouble convincing viewers that Marie Antoinette is an interesting historical subject, but there's a big distance between that and creating a fascinating personality or fashioning a compelling narrative.

Thus, we find ourselves watching an ice-cold movie about competition that contains not a shred of rooting interest.

Depictions of an aide talking about her hospital vigil and her words of comfort to a distraught Laura Bush are creepy and exploitative -- and borderline disgusting.

These people are so stupid that they make us think, well, wait a second: Maybe those livers and kidneys could be put to better use.

Blanchett's performance is Soderbergh's biggest mistake. He either encourages or permits her to play Lena as a Greta Garbo caricature, which is mildly amusing if you're interested in Garbo, but if you're interested in Lena and The Good German, you're out of luck.

It's a dreadful exercise, tin-eared and sincere, bereft of any truth or inspiration.

For all it does right, there's something seriously wrong.

The film is intended to be light and whimsical, but with a core of sincere emotion. But it's as if the thing were made by Martian anthropologists who assume that human audiences are as twisted as the people onscreen.

Has no narrative throughline, no emotional spine. It's a mess.

A limp, slow-moving and desperately unfunny comedy.

A whimsical but flat-footed attempt to account for several lost months in the life of Jean-Baptiste Poquelin, known to the world as Molière.

It takes a winning recipe and adds some distinctly Hollywood flavors...The result is a botched job.

There's something painful about watching Scarlett Johansson, who looks as if she never had an indecisive moment in her life, struggle to seem ineffectual.

A complete bust, but the ways in which it fails are interesting.

A frustrating movie, a work of immaturity from a director who should be past the empty gestures and self-protective distance of his early work.

It's off in many directions - false in its details, false in its relationships, false in its emotions - but probably the first and worst thing that needs to be said about it is that it's also overlong and dull.

This is just plain bad - and it's a surprise.

Anyone can make a bad movie, but it takes a good filmmaker to make one as bad as I'm Not There.

It gets worse and worse as it goes along and finally ends just as it's becoming unbearable.

A romantic comedy and an adventure story, but in this case that just means it bombs in two distinct ways.

Inside 10 minutes, at most 15, Be Kind Rewind reveals itself as an awful mess, and it only gets worse.

Vantage Point has nothing going on. There's no artistic, philosophical or even jolly entertainment reason for adopting this strategy. It's just arbitrary, a gimmick.

Another dreadful, not-funny Owen Wilson movie, in which Wilson is the best thing.

This is a story that should have been, at the absolute most, 20 minutes long.

If it happens to hit you right - that is, if you happen to catch its wavelength of tear-and-a-smile whimsicality - the movie will speak to you.

Exactly one minute longer than its predecessor, but it's a dragged-out exercise, with no epic scale and no spirit worth talking about.

Here's the tricky thing about The Strangers. Sure, it uses cinema to ends that are objectionable and vile ... but it does it well, with more than usual skill.

Serious intent may be lurking somewhere in there, but it's buried under layers of stupidity - not just stupid jokes, which is what you want from Sandler, but also stupid, shallow thinking.

Remaking Get Smart for the big screen might have sounded like a bad idea, but the movie shows it to have been something else: a REALLY bad idea.

Australia shows all the signs of having been a labor of love for director Baz Luhrmann. One problem: It's his love, and the audience's labor.

As for Fraser, his clumsy humanity is endearing, but by now, assuming he has invested wisely, he should have enough money saved so as to not have to waste his talent anymore.

The first and most honest thing to say about Miracle at St. Anna is that it's an awful mess.

With its flat story, numbed-out protagonist, and faux artistic lighting and set design - everything is dark or moody or darkishly moody or moodily dark - Max Payne seems a good half hour longer than its running time.

RocknRolla attempts to depict a world of ever-expanding chaos. But the chaos is only in the way the story is told. The actual vision Ritchie offers is pedestrian and tame.

A single 125-minute monstrosity of a cop movie.

A mess.

The comedy, to the extent there is any, consists mainly of Carrey's verbal asides and strained reactions to people. The script gives him very little to work with.

Witless banter might have won Ginger Rogers for Fred Astaire, but Thompson is too smart for that.

In its second half, Outlander falls apart completely, becoming nothing but a violent, mindless monster movie along the lines of "Alien vs. Predator."

Two awful things about Push are at least interesting: The first is the way in which the story is confused. The second is that the story makes no sense.

Credit the director for one thing. He could have stretched it to three hours, but he gets in and out of this mess in less than two.

Ill conceived and unworthy (and dull and ridiculous).

The most enjoyable way to watch Surveillance - "enjoyable," in the relative sense - is to take its awfulness for granted and pay attention to everything Bill Pullman does.

A cute movie, a little too cute and a little too aware of its own cuteness.

An empty exercise.

The production values are first rate. But you will wait in vain to hear a good reason for this movie's existence.

Setting out to make a cult movie is almost as strange as setting out to make a camp movie. Or setting out to make a movie that's so bad it's good. If you know you're doing it, you're not really doing it.

Serious Moonlight is a tonal disaster, distasteful and sentimental by turns. It was probably a mistake to have Hines try to walk that same delicate line that took Shelly her entire career to master.

It's a big disappointment.

The moments of action are interspersed with lengthy plot developments that are hard to follow.

A repellent, stupid film.

A sour misfire.

An overwrought drama.

Has a vacant, inept, why-oh-why feeling from its opening minutes and only gets worse.

Attempts to convey emotional dislocation and passion at the same time. All we get is distance.

Falls apart immediately, then limps on for 45 minutes more.

A stink bomb of a movie.

Spins an unconvincing, miscast noir tale.

The movie's most inexcusable failing is that, despite all the flashbacks, we never get a sense of what this relationship was like when it worked.

A disgrace to the talents of Robert De Niro and Eddie Murphy, but it's not enough just to say that. It's also a disgrace to the talents of Rene Russo and whoever drove the coffee truck to the set every day.

A disappointment, a precious and grotesque exercise reminiscent of Jean-Pierre Jeunet's "Delicatessen," only less amusing.

The film is like watching a very bad play as presented by a very bad director.

Has many grotesque sex scenes, interspersed with sights of Chong rambling in a dissociated way as she sits in her squalid apartment.

The result is a frustrating, boring mess.

There's a lot of bad hair and incoherent, drug-addled remarks, but inside a minute we get the joke, and it isn't much.

The movie suffers from two fatal ailments -- a dearth of vitality and a story that's shapeless and uninflected.

We all know how actors overact when they play Italians, and we all know how actors overact when they play brain-damaged characters, so just imagine Knight's performance as a brain-damaged Italian American.

Heartfelt but interminable movie.

About as weak a movie as can be made without actively trying.

While the plot is worthless and the battle scenes cheap-looking and unengrossing, Wing Commander has clearly defined characters and relationships. In other words, the film's young actors have nothing interesting to say, but they say it well.

Midway, Mondays in the Sun becomes as dull as a day with nothing to do.

Neither original nor presented in a convincing way.

It's hard to tell if Cage's performance is a grand stab at all-out, no-holds-barred comic acting or one of the worst dramatic performances in a film this year. [2 June 1989, Daily Datebook, p.E8]

The picture, for all its slickness and style, is empty, empty-headed and emotionally false… [It] has no more depth than "Pretty Woman" and occupies the same moral landscape. [5 Apr 1991, Daily Datebook, p.E11]

Just awful. But uniquely awful -- awful in a way that might just attract a cult audience. [3 Sept 1993]

Numbing and inert.

The satire is unfocused, while the story goes nowhere. Too bad. The material is ripe for satire.

Father-daughter relationship lacks impact.

It's a romantic comedy with insights into sex and relationships that are old and obvious.

One of those comedies in which almost everything good about it is extraneous. There are funny lines and quirky bits, but in terms of story and character, the movie is empty and pointless.

Friedkin is steeped in gore, like some cinematic Macbeth, and it's obscuring his artistic vision.

Williamson's script, which he also directed, is spiteful and shallow.

The audience has already checked out, long before the formulaic finish.

It tries to get by on charm. It doesn't.

It's as close to nothing as anything could be while still being something.

This is strictly formula stuff, made worse by an utterly careless depiction of the characters.

An overblown action monstrosity with no surprises, no exhilaration and no thrills.

It's two hours of your life wasted, time once spent that can never be regained. Don't go. Don't do it. [30 Mar 1988]

Aspires to the breezy esprit of a Richard Lester comedy from the '60s, but it's a deadly, leaden affair.

Ugly. ..and unpleasant -- and clueless on a grand scale.

In an attempt to be complex and fair-minded, a simple story becomes a jumble of confused motivations.

SWAT is better than "Gigli," but so is most outpatient surgery.

No longer fresh -- though that's to be expected in a sequel -- it contains none of the virtues that made the first one anarchic and original.

Going after one innocent man was bad enough. Going after another constitutes a pattern. This marshal isn't a hero. He's a menace.

Great to look at but not much fun to watch… An emotionally uncommitted picture that's smirky and mawkish, by turns, and at heart, empty. [14 Dec 1990, Daily Datebook, p.E1]

Mean-spirited and not remotely clever, though it strives for archness at every turn.

Convoluted.

Harmon proves that he can act stupid, and that's not enough to make the movie funny… You're supposed to like Freddy (Harmon), and you're supposed to like his brainless students… But you hate everybody. [24 July 1987]

The effect of the 2 1/2-hour film is deadening.

The movie is overplotted, a soulless maze of special effects and relentless action.

The overall premise, involving mental illness and suicide, isn't all that funny, at least not in practice, and the picture begins to seem labored and long.

A childish, empty effort.

Why was the sight of scrawny Woody Allen kissing pretty Diane Keaton never revolting, while scrawny David Spade kissing beautiful Sophie Marceau in Lost & Found is the creepiest cinematic sight of the year?

This seemingly good idea results in disaster. Allen has no insight into the current generation of young people, and his film is just a jumbled rehash of themes and motifs that he's explored elsewhere.

A noble attempt that doesn't hang together.

It provokes nothing but yawns, and the sex it explores is stuff everybody knows about and says, "So what?"

What a waste of a great comedian. What demented casting.

A dull film with unsympathetic characters brought together by a gimmicky premise that's handled with no imagination and a pristine fraudulence of emotion. Aside from that, it's great.

So desperate and silly that here and there, it's a lot of fun.

A ponderous and dreadful film.

It's one of those self-consciously cute pictures, about as hard to take as a person who stands in front of a mirror and preens all day. [23 Mar 1990, Daily Datebook, p.E1]

Dreary movie.

An utter debacle.

Goes nowhere.

What's completely baffling is that everyone in the film thinks Nomi is one heck of a dancer, even though her one move -- throwing her arms out stiffly -- is straight out of "Dr. Strangelove."

An awkward comedy made surprisingly bearable, most of the way, by one actress' ability to turn on the charm and sparkle.

Floats is corny and false, with a script by Steven Rogers that's almost 100 percent artificial sweetener.

A wretched comedy about middle-aged romance.