A discordant comedy that gives bad taste a bad name.

A sour romantic comedy that arrives in theaters just in time to spoil Valentine's Day. Its plot is a catalog of unpleasantness. Its characters are repellent.

A funny comedy for about 90 seconds. Then Bette Midler goes off a cliff.

A dreadful exercise, with a script full of contradictions and empty gestures and a leading lady who's such a novice it hurts to watch her.

One pities poor Molly Parker, a fine actress who was somehow persuaded to disrobe for this degrading and dispiriting Wayne Wang film.

Not surprisingly, only Samuel L. Jackson seems fully to understand that he's in a bad movie, and he makes a virtue of it, using it as an excuse to hang loose, overact and ride the scenes for wherever they might go.

This is an embarrassing film. It's a sex comedy that sets itself up as a satire of middle-class mores, except there's no truth behind any of its observations. LaBute tries to be shocking and manages only to be shockingly puerile -- tasteless in a high-school-boyish sort of way.

The strain and desperation are apparent from the first scene.

An action blockbuster that's one of the biggest misfires in its genre since "Godzilla."

It's a plodding, episodic film, reverent and sanctimonious, and its pro-Southern viewpoint -- a time-honored Hollywood tendency -- makes "Gone With the Wind" look like a Northern polemic.

Liotta's acting can't redeem senseless violence.

One could criticize A Night at the Roxbury for being a comedy that provides not a single laugh. That would be too easy.

It wimped out by blanding down the story and the characters to the point where she isn't really a shrew and he isn't really a maniac.

About as awful as a film can be without being the ultimate awful, which is boring.

In Godsend, we have the spectacle of three good actors tied to the mast of a sinking premise.

With most movies that fail, the fault can be ascribed to carelessness or lack or inspiration or cynicism. But Chelsea Walls, directed by actor Ethan Hawke, is clearly a labor of love.

Super- violent, super-serious and super-stupid.

It will bring joy in a way certainly not intended, as one of the most gloriously and unwittingly silly films ever devised by a major American filmmaker.

The film is neither fish nor fowl nor some arresting new entity, but a lumpish coagulation of conflicting impulses and unrealized gestures.

Has to go down as a failed comedy. It's just not enough of a comedy.

Nothing but a showcase for the inherent comedic gifts of Cameron Diaz. The problem is she doesn't have any.

At times, it actually hurts to watch.

What we have is the case of a movie with a straight man (Jason Lee) who really is funny, but with a comic (Tom Green) who sadly isn't.

There's no point complaining that Honey is a tired reworking of an old formula, because it's intended for a young audience that doesn't know the formula.

Why, if Chase is such a funny guy, does he make such unfunny movies?

All the movie's narrative gymnastics can't disguise the fact that it's inauthentic at its core and that its story just isn't worth telling.

Could hardly be called a success -- it's rather a likable disaster.

By the end A.I. exhibits all its creators' bad traits and none of the good. So we end up with the structureless, meandering, slow-motion endlessness of Kubrick combined with the fuzzy, cuddly mindlessness of Spielberg.

In King Arthur, everything goes wrong. The film combines the plodding sincerity of a Ph.D. dissertation with the brains of a high-concept Jerry Bruckheimer- produced blockbuster (which it is), and no one benefits.

Just awful… There is probably not one interrupted 60-second stretch in which a line of dialogue doesn't clunk, an action doesn't ring false or an irritating plot turn doesn't present itself. [25 May 1991]

A movie like this depends on clever bits and incidents, but there's little invention here to disguise the film's formulaic nature.

A film with no theatrical core and no integrity in the writing, acting or storytelling.

Promised to be the season's thoughtful action picture, turns out to have few thoughts and no thrills.

The film itself is wretched. A grueling, numbing black hole.

To call this effort misguided would be kind. The job this "prequel" does on the original Dumb and Dumber is the movie equivalent of surgery that removes all the vital organs and then gives the patient a prosthetic third arm. What's needed isn't there, and what's here we don't need.

The Village seems poised to become as cheesy in its effects as a low-budget horror film. Shyamalan's gracefulness keeps his movie just out of that abyss.

A whimsical modern fairy tale.

Neither funny nor outrageous nor horrifying nor conventionally affecting.

Behind Enemy Lines has a wretched script and a director (first-timer John Moore) who either has no taste or doesn't know what he's doing.

A long-winded indulgence in tear-and-a-smile whimsy, elevated above the merely irritating and saccharine by compelling art direction.

Showcasing three individuals whose spiritual and physical journeys are both repellent and mundane, the film is just a long and pointless slog.

It boggles the mind that after six years of silence, all Tarantino has to offer is this garbage.

Stone tries to make us like Alexander because he's good, when he should have made us want to watch Alexander because he's amazing.

Jaw-droppingly awful.

A great role becomes an unenviable chore, in which a superb comic actress finds herself trying to sell a series of unfunny comic situations by mugging and pushing with all her might. It's an unflattering spectacle for all concerned.

Just about everything in The Chronicles of Riddick is impenetrable, from the convoluted story to the dark and baroque art direction. It's an inane film rendered sometimes laughable by an atmosphere of dead-serious reverence.

Flat and uninspired.

In the same genre as the Farrellys' "There's Something About Mary" and "Dumb and Dumber," only lousy.

The movie's promise -- to provide a balanced argument -- goes unrealized, and all we're left with is the spectacle of an idiot bullying a genius.

Everything about it is manufactured -- the emotions are false, the sentiments are phony, and the story is a construction of mirthless silliness. It's a product, not a creative expression.

Surprisingly, the results are embarrassing. As puppetry, Team America is stilted. As satire, it's gutless and lazy. And as comedy, it barely delivers laughs.

Original enough to come up with new ways to go wrong. For one, the film is a blatant showcase to promote O'Neal as a rap artist.

It's the worst kind of convoluted thriller -- it can never unravel satisfactorily because there's nothing simple at its center, just more confusion.

Has that title going for it, which might annoy or provoke you. It makes me suspicious. It's the kind of flashy, meaningless title that's usually given to drab, pointless films.

The Chamber has nowhere to go and it goes there slowly, flirting in all directions.

Approximately the last hour of Dante's Peak is made up of action scenes, and how well one likes computer-generated destruction will determine how well one likes the movie.

Hoodlum is an overlong gangster movie, a bloated and often laughable attempt at an epic.

Almost every moment has flashes and explosions and a pulsing, relentless soundtrack. It's like being trapped inside a video game.

Nora Ephron directed it and had a hand in the screenplay, but without Travolta this film would have no reason for being.

But Congo leads to nothing but a fierce battle with the gray gorillas, a kind of guns vs. fangs scene; and a convenient and incongruous volcano eruption that looks as artificial as a video game.

An awkward hybrid of Asian and American film techniques. It's also an uninvolving story that casts Chan in the role of a fish out of water and gives him little opportunity to show his exuberant personality.

It's great to see cherished, longtime stars in big roles to which they can bring so much spontaneity and finesse; you wish only that this movie were sturdier and had aimed higher. Judging from the bloopers that unreel during Grumpier Old Men's end credits, the cast had lots of fun making this movie--more fun, it would seem, than it is to watch.

The picture, which marks the debut of Mexican film maker Guillermo del Toro, is a dull hybrid - a ponderous art film crossed with a vampire story. [06 May 1994]

Higher Learning says nothing new or challenging and is too naive to inspire controversy.

Bram Stoker's Dracula is a lovingly made, gorgeously realized, meticulously crafted failure. It has big names, a big budget, big sets, a big, thundering score and even big hair. But it doesn't do it. It doesn't excite or fascinate but just lies there on the screen. [13 Nov 1992, p. C1]

[Pedro Almodovar] gives it a nice try, but his approach turns out to be completely wrong for the material he's working with here. [25 May 1990]

Jack is a warm, heartfelt disaster that shows that life is fleeting but movies can be very long indeed.

This picture is disgusting. [15 Aug 1986]

It takes about 20 minutes to catch on that Friday is without narrative drive - and about as long to figure out that the film offers nothing better in place of it.

There's not a single moment here in which Nixon is admirable, decisive or appealing. Nixon doesn't work as a drama, but with a little push it might have been a great comedy.

Amateur gives the impression of a sloppy first draft. It begins with a splash, meanders until it reaches feature length, then ends abruptly.

Franco Zeffirelli's Hamlet, a senselessly adapted, ill-conceived, poorly acted mess of a film that's guaranteed to frustrate anyone who loves the play and to put everybody else to sleep. [18 Jan 1991]

It's a bomb - not the usual bomb, but a time bomb, despite a 20-minute stretch at the beginning that goes along nicely. [17 May 1991]

Unfortunately, Sucka falls apart after the first half-hour. The action sequences are confusing and senseless. The setups for the action scenes are long and pointless. You know where the movie is heading, and there are no surprises along the way. It's one joke, over and over. [17 Feb 1989, p.E7]

Cmera work can't do anything about the barrenness of the screenplay, nor the sense of fundamental insincerity at the core of the film. [03 Sep 1993]

The Adventures of Ford Fairlane, is a stiff, guaranteed to disappoint just about everybody, except those rooting against him. [11 Jul 1990, p.E1]

The presence of Washington lends the picture a much-needed dose of authenticity. But in the end Virtuosity is disconnected and uninvolving, despite -- or maybe because of -- a climax that comes in three distinct waves. One section seems to be a half-hour sound-and-light show.

Twenty minutes in, the movie is already operating at a deficit, and it never recovers.

Highly visual but cold. It's undeniably inventive, but also relentlessly fey and self-consciously zany and, in terms of story, it moves with audacious slowness.

The Losers is boring. It's predictable. It's so, so active, and yet so, so dead.

Maybe there's a metaphor here, but figuring it out wouldn't make Trouble Every Day any better.

The Ex isn't painful, horrible or despicable, but it is an amazing mess.

Trust never lives up to its snappy opening. Everything is tongue-in-cheek here - yet it's never remotely clear what the point is or what's getting satirized. [16 Aug 1991]

[Hartley] changes the script enough so that the integrity of his experiment goes out the window. But he doesn't change enough so that the narrative can have any suspense.

The film doesn't make a case for Lavoe as an important artist.

Just because it's a conscious commentary on other vile, useless, pointless cinematic exercises doesn't make it any less vile, useless and pointless.

The bottom line here is that Cyrus is ghastly in The Last Song, bad not just in one or two ways, but in all kinds of ways.

What we have in this film is a whole lot of nothing, and the little that's there is irritating.

It's a strange thing, this type of whimsy. Kari offers us ideas in place of characters, and yet he expects us to see through these ideas to the real-life conditions they represent - and then to respond to them in kind.

The worst kind of avant-garde film, one that hides its lack of commitment to the story, the characters and the genre under cover of being experimental. It mocks form and plays with form but offers nothing in its place, just boredom, emptiness and the oldest metaphor in captivity, about grass coming up through concrete.

Standing Ovation is an innovative film in the sense that every minute or so it comes up with a different way of being annoying. Moreover, it often goes for a layered effect, in which it's annoying in two or three ways simultaneously.

As vile, unredeeming and thoroughly unpleasant experiences go, I Spit on Your Grave at least has one thing interesting about it. It's a document of the most paranoid fantasies that urban, Northern people have about a rural Southern people.

The comedy never really takes off because it's phony.

There's nothing here but a concept and a marketing and merchandising strategy, at the center of which somebody - oh, no - had to come up with an actual movie.

It turns out to be just as bad as any routine French romantic comedy - illogical, inconsistent and sloppily written, a charmless, tasteless, witless waste of time.

Unfortunately, the characters are so programmatic, the premise so ridiculous and the situations so far-fetched even if you accept that premise that no energy can be built, and the little that's there can't be sustained. Red Dawn is a vigorous but pointless exercise.

Suffers from some of the deficiencies common to first features. It is sincere and earnest but the product of an assumption that the milieu itself is compelling enough to command an audience's attention.

There are all kinds of bad movies in the world, but it's really only stardom that can create the exact variety of cinematic abortion we find in The Tourist.

This isn't absurdity. This is nonsense - and it's as boring as nonsense.

A ghastly sequel to a charming animated film.

Everything about the idea of Mr. Popper's Penguins sounds lovely, and everything about the actual movie is ugly.

It's unpleasant where it should be pleasant, convoluted where it should be streamlined, anxiety provoking where it should be easy, and long, long, long - at least 20 minutes longer than it has a right to be.

Morgan Freeman's voice is heard as the narrator, which is in itself the stuff of parody. Then we listen and get lost within two sentences, because the narration is so poorly written that Freeman himself probably didn't know what he was talking about.

The movie's bereftness of invention can be measured by how no story element builds on another. Instead, Happy Feet Two is plotted so that a bunch of disparate things happen, until it's time to end the movie.

You can almost say it simulates an experience of brain injury in the audience: Nothing adheres, nothing connects. It's just nonstop cuteness, poses and emptiness - with nothing logically following from one moment to the next. It would be exaggerating to call it torture, and yet why split hairs?

Butter is a misfire. At 90 minutes it feels inflated, and though clearly intended as funny, it's difficult to locate, except in the most general terms, the focus of the movie's satire, and there's not a laugh to be had.

Innocuous and dull.

Suffers from a problem in its rhythm. It's not that its pace is too slow, but that it's too regular, and this lack of syncopation makes it feel slow.

Safe House is an idea for a movie. It's a few blustery gestures in the direction of a story, with five good actors doing their best, trying to hold up the barest frame of an idea, while investing the surrounding emptiness with all the truth they can muster.

The Bourne series ended with the last installment, and now comes a 135-minute death rattle called The Bourne Legacy. It's a peculiar movie, both over-plotted and under-plotted, encumbered by layers of detail and yet with no details invested in or developed.

The opening to John Carter is a dud, a battle between airships made of woven bamboo, bursting into computer-generated flame over a sandy terrain. There's nothing to see, nothing to think about, nothing to care about, and nothing to feel, just emptiness. The emptiness is never filled over the course of 132 long, barren minutes.

It's monumentally coarse and vulgar, aimed at the mentality of a 14-year-old locked inside his father's liquor cabinet, and nothing about it is funny, least of all Adam Sandler.

Wexler gets tired of his own movie near the end of it. The viewer will get tired in 15 minutes.

Hesher is about as awful as independent films get, a mix of ugliness and unearned sentiment, with a flat story, repellent and pathetic characters and dialogue that consists of lots of stammering and cursing.

This latest from director Wayne Wang, about the friendship of two young women, travels from 2011 to 1997 to 1829 to 1838, in search of a reason for the audience to keep watching and start caring. That reason is never found.

Martha Marcy May Marlene is a strange case, a drama that's disturbing and yet inert. Writer-director Sean Durkin builds an atmosphere of dread, which means that he persuades us to believe in the characters and in the central situation. But he doesn't build interest.

A mix of the powerful and the ridiculous, and eventually the ridiculous wins. The movie deals with a big subject that has received scant treatment in movies - the genocide in Bosnia in the 1990s - giving voice and testimony to what happened there. But the ill-conceived fictional elements take the picture right off the rails.

If you loved the earlier films, these are moments you will hold on to, but they're very few, and they're not enough.

Whatever else W.E. may be (lousy, a waste of time, tin-eared, sleep-inducing, occasionally laughable, etc.), it's sincere and ambitious.

The real problem with This Is 40 is its lack of truth, that Apatow wanted to express something about married life, and it eluded him. After all, no less than Kierkegaard once said that the actual dynamics of marriage are beyond the scope of art, and he was the best movie critic of the 19th century.

The movie equivalent of an idiot who, to avoid scorn, starts acting like an even bigger idiot, so as to get in on the joke, too...It takes everything and nothing seriously, depending on what the filmmakers think they can get away with at any given moment, and the result, while not painful to watch, is ridiculous.

It is a very good performance in a very bad movie.

As far as formulaic, empty and disappointing comedies go, The Watch is far from the worst. About every seven or eight minutes, perhaps a dozen times over the course of the picture, the movie generates a medium-size laugh. Not a big laugh.

With The Way, writer-director Emilio Estevez has made a respectable failure. What's respectable - and undeniable - is that this is a sincere effort to make a film of sensitivity and spiritual richness.

Here Balasko, best known as a comedian, is particularly satisfying. But the reward is too small on the investment, and the film's resolution is downright irritating - not just a waste of time, but a waste of time with attitude.

The movie is a mess.

Jaden is not ready for his solo spotlight, and the film is the same action over and over. Another bad movie from Shyamalan.

You know there is something seriously wrong with Anna Karenina when you start rooting for the train.

The bottom line with Andrea Arnold's Wuthering Heights is that the writer-director has taken Emily Brontë's tale of undying passion and rendered it passionless.

A handful of acting moments aside, Being Flynn is a drama without much in the way of rewards.

This remake of the 1981 horror classic starts well, but it soon degenerates into tiresome shock gore that overstays its welcome, despite the film's modest run time. Jane Levy as a heroin addict going through withdrawal is the one bright spot.

It has a weak story that provides no tension, feeling or interest. Its opening action sequence is just a long, drawn-out dud, filmed by director John Moore in the worst modern style of quick cuts and smeary, jittery photography.

It plays like a string of cliches linked together to form a movie with not a single moment of surprise or originality.

For about an hour of its running time, The Magic of Belle Isle seems like a tiresome, sentimental and slow-moving story about a grumpy old man redeemed by the sweet spirit of a rural town and by the nice family that lives next door. But no, it's even worse than that.

Identity Thief is not only not funny. It's negative funny. It's short on laughs, but it will disturb and annoy.

A useless film in every possible way.

In the long history of bad movies about bad illnesses, A Little Bit of Heaven just might be the worst.

If the first "Hangover" movie were this awful, there never would have been a Part Two. This is a joyless, unfunny mix of comedy and drama, a complete waste of time, with exactly one good joke in the entire movie. It comes in the first minute. After that, you can leave.

How many doubts can Lee possibly cram into one motion picture? Red Hook Summer has almost too many to count: moments that go clunk, followed by others that go clang; actors who talk as if reading their lines off cue cards or rehearsing them for the first time; and set pieces that lie there.

If For Greater Glory were a person, it would be wearing two different socks. It is a scattered mess, as earnest as a folk song, but like a folk song that goes on for two hours and 23 minutes. Not only does it never justify its epic length, it gets even the small things wrong.

So you get comments from the likes of Paul Rudd, Adam Carolla and Judd Apatow, all trying to be funny, but not one says anything remotely amusing or worth hearing.

The big disappointment of The Babymakers is that it doesn't come close to being worthy of its two stars, Paul Schneider and Olivia Munn.

The movie reveals itself as not merely dull, but pointless.

An agony of bad plotting and whimsical, lifeless scenes.

Worst of all, in promoting its hero's eccentric journey as a voyage of healing, the movie replaces emotional precision and intellectual honesty with syrupy sincerity and insistence. It turns boring and cute and begs us to love it.

That was probably writer-director Roman Coppola's main responsibility in "Charles Swan," to give the audience a character worth watching. Get that right, and everything else falls into place. Get that wrong, and the audience finds out just how long 84 minutes can be. The answer: really long.

Every single thing wrong with John Dies at the End might have been avoided had John died at the beginning, along with all the other characters, transforming an awful full-length movie into a harmless five-minute short.

There's only so much Soderbergh can do. Gray's Anatomy is made up mainly of Gray, and there's a whole lot of Gray going on. The story is unremarkable. Gray's observations, pedestrian.

The best thing in the movie is Peter MacNicol as Dana's boss at the museum, a slippery character with an incomprehensible accent. [16 Jun 1989, p. E1]

Take a wretched premise. Imagine the worst picture that could be made from it. Then imagine something even worse. That's Alien vs. Predator.

Four screenwriters are credited with this sloppy piece of work. Divide the embarrassment into quarters.

The most shocking thing about Harry and Max isn't the subject matter. The most shocking thing is just how tepid it is.

How bad does it get? How far past the basement can one elevator go?

In trouble from its first minutes.

In stiff competition for the lamest thing ever put on celluloid.

A graceless, embarrassing effort.

Only a complete idiot could think Epic Movie is remotely funny.

No more than a minute into this, and it becomes obvious that the next 98 are going to be trouble.

There's bad, there's awful and there's horrible, and then somewhere beyond that, in its own Kingdom of Lousy -- where all the milk curdles and the jokes aren't funny -- is License to Wed, the latest ghastly exercise starring Robin Williams.

Directed by Danny Boyle, it lacks even a single moment of charm or interest.

As plain awful as Untraceable is, possibly the worst thing about it is that it pretends to mean something.

Aside from being vile and repellent, it's mainly dull - old-fashioned in its shock tactics and culminating in a ho-hum climax.

Inert, incompetent and emotionally fraudulent.

Despite its actors, its lush photography and its obvious seriousness of purpose, is as close to a form of torture as any film ever devised. I can't think of any individuals I dislike so much as to force them to see this picture.

In slightly less than 1,000 years, the competition for worst film of the third millennium will be fierce. Yet the smart money may well be on the Korean art film Lies.

Movies don't get much worse.

The whole movie is like that: cute, dead and endless.

The race is on for worst film of the year honors. Among the top contenders: Men Cry Bullets.

One of the downsides of living in a free society is that every so often someone like Myles Berkowitz gets hold of a camera.

The equivalent of a full-course meal with no calories. It is a mirage of a movie, 100 minutes of nothing.

Remarkably empty, remarkably noisy, remarkably pleasureless. It's unwatchable.

Doesn't work at all. Even the structure is off.

That the movie becomes silly isn't necessarily a problem, but it also becomes tiresome, degenerating into a series of martial arts interludes -- everyone unaccountably leaves his guns at home.

Gerry is ragingly bad art that contributes to a definition of independent film as something no one would want to sit through.

It is possible to watch 90 minutes of this comedy without once cracking a smile. [12 Jan 1994]

Achingly long and pointless, "Runs" is a movie about family that's dishonest in its presentation of every relationship.

Truly awful.

It's so low it scrapes through the barrel and deep into the earth's core. It's the lowest piece of garbage to hit screens in months.

It's a dishonest satire that manages to be (disingenuously) contemptuous of white people and (unintentionally) condescending toward black people, without ever being funny.

An amazing film amazingly tasteless, tin-eared and awkward, but amazing all the same. Anyone with a predilection for bad movies might want to see it, if only in an inspecting-the-wreckage spirit, since because movies this misguided come but once or twice a year.

Desperately unfunny action comedy.

The most thoroughly joyless and inept film of the year, and one of the worst of the decade. We're talking about a disaster, and not of the fun "Showgirls" variety, either.

Proves that it's possible to make a movie so tasteless and so crude that audiences don't laugh. This is worthwhile information. It means there's a limit.

It's a completely botched effort -- botched in its direction, its writing and editing.

A sour story with a repellent lead character, deadly comic schtick and tin-eared direction to produce 90 minutes of sheer, plodding mirthlessness.

The film is a failure in just about every way, save for its acting, which is adequate.

Sommers film just lies there, weighted down by a complete lack of wit, artfulness and internal logic. So it's a disaster -- a big, loud, boring wreck.

Duller than first version.

If garbage could think, it would look down on 9 Dead Gay Guys as garbage.

Even camp status eludes this tepid and misguided picture.

Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez had their fun with From Dusk Till Dawn, and now they need to stay away from each other. For their own good. Forever.

This may be hard to believe, but there's not a single moment of drama or tension in any of the action sequences. And the film is made up almost entirely of action.

The best bits come in the first few minutes -- or maybe the jokes just seem fresher then.

The result is embarrassing: quick cuts and shaky, hand- held camera work, bad acting and lots of attitude.

With Lake at the center, something that could have been innocuous becomes painful, and a sure shot at mediocrity is transformed into one of the worst films of the year.

The script is weak and unrelenting. The stunts are unspectacular. The special effects are nothing you haven't seen before. But worst of all, there's the spectacle of Schwarzenegger glorying in the wonder of Schwarzenegger. [18 Jun 1993, p.C1]

Cocktail is unbelievable - a picture that sets itself up as a gritty, authentic character study but is laughable, false and stupid in all its details. The only connection to reality here is that there are actually such things as bartenders. [29 Jul 1988, p.E1]

In UHF we get 90 minutes of Al Yankovic, and that's 85 minutes too much. The problem isn't that he's weird, but that he isn't weird at all. The premises for his gags are commonplace and predictable, and his follow-throughs lack imagination. He seems incapable of spinning more than one tired joke from each set-up. [21 Jul 1989, p.E1]

Muddled and endless.

A dull, boring, poorly acted, limply written and thoroughly unappealing fantasy, featuring bland characters locked in a struggle of no interest.

It is a colossal bomb, an epic miscalculation, an excuse for actor self-indulgence and for what sounds very much like bad improvisation.

No matter how guilty our knucklehead-protagonist's victims supposedly are, it's difficult to maintain a rooting interest.

There's nothing here but wreckage. Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows is so ineptly made that the story is advanced solely through announcements.

An ugly, misguided exercise.

She's hopeless, he's hopeless, and this movie is just ghastly.

Attack the Block is the other alien-invasion movie opening today, the lousy one, the one from Britain. In Britain, it's probably just a regular bad movie, but here - with accents that are barely comprehensible and in-jokes about council flats, not to mention a swerving handheld camera and some of the cheapest effects since "Night of the Lepus" - it's surprising this thing ever got released.

It's just not enough to say that The Three Stooges is the death of comedy. Rather, it's the death, burial, putrefaction and decomposition of comedy. It is where comedy, once alive, ends up as dust blowing in the wind, like something out of a really bad Kansas song.