In the Cut is a disaster. Familiar to the bone, arty on the surface, it could serve as the doomed pilot for a nightmare TV spinoff: Law & Order: Literary Victims Unit.

The film itself is an exercise in frustration.

Dr. Seuss' The Cat in the Hat is gorged with shtick and gadgetry. When it comes to highlighting everything better left in the dark, it makes even the Matrix sequels look like works of genius.

Timeline lacks potency, drive, wit and personality -- all the things that make escapism worthwhile.

It's relentlessly dumb and relentlessly humorous, and those aren't the adverbs it was after.

When Catch That Kid isn't careening from plot point to plot point, events turning on unseen dimes, it's trying to ingratiate itself with stunts and chases that its young audience have seen done better on Saturday-morning TV.

Most of the humor is both determinedly puerile and unfunny, performed by a generic cast.

Most of the film simply wallows in gangsta hyperbole - it's all bling bling, bang bang.

Taxi's only saving grace is an inexplicable, though delightful, turn by Ann-Margret as Andy's ever-tipsy mom. She's a stitch, and about 100 times better than her surrounding material.

The movie is a monument to egomania - and I don't mean Alexander's.

It's the strangest comic misfire yet from Wes Anderson.

The best reason to see it is Kate Bosworth as Sandra Dee.

In Schumacher's relentlessly arrhythmic and tone-deaf film, Gerard Butler plays the title role as if he were just plucked out of Monty Python's lumberjack chorus.

The comedy of manners becomes strictly a comedy of bad manners.

The problem with Allen's latest, The Curse of the Jade Scorpion, is "Not enough Double Indemnity."

The animals in Road Trip are pretty hilarious; as a five-minute short on cable TV's "Animal Planet," this film would be a stitch.

Unlike other movies about unpleasant characters, "In the Company of Men," for example, Chuck & Buck doesn't have that sharp observational edge.

A story about unmotivated characters trapped in an ill-conceived plot.

A hackneyed psycho-sexual thriller with enough awkwardly executed Hitchcock references to qualify as a bad DePalma knock-off.

If John Witherspoon is among the funniest men in America, as many of his fellow comics say, why is he so painful to watch here?

Dramatically, it's a ghoul's parade of grieving folk finding solace and then danger through a tenuous connection to the after-life.

Will have most audiences asking, "Can we leave now?"

Doing a sequel to "The Mask" without Jim Carrey sounds like a really bad idea. As Son of the Mask proves, it is.

Armed with few laughs, this clumsy sequel makes a sloppy mess of its plot ... and star Sandra Bullock.

"This Is Spinal Tap" was brilliantly funny. Death of a Dynasty? Well, the movie is just dead.

Barf-bag baroque.

Too bad the director ties everyone's laces together and they all go down in a jumble.

Jane Fonda coming back to the screen after a decade-and-a-half absence in Monster-in-Law is like Brando returning from the dead to star in a Police Academy movie.

A pastiche of sadistic horror-movie cliches with minor traces of wit but major overflows of perversity.

The Dukes of Hazzard may mark some sort of nadir when it comes to movies made from TV shows. It's an overlong, under-thought and numbingly one-dimensional extrapolation of a TV show whose pleasures were, at best, marginal. See it at your own peril.

The most amazing fact about Supercross is that it took three people to write it. Two chimpanzees with a typewriter could have done just as good a job.

What can you say about a film where Carmen Electra's performance is one of the high points?

This is a movie for genre fans only; there's not an aspect to it that should appeal to the rest of the world. It's neither original nor inventive, and while its young cast works hard, there's not even a standout performance worth recommending.

Gory overkill.

The result is an out-of-control, lost-in-the-funhouse experience.

If this version had been called The Poseidon Adventure, audiences could have sued for truth in packaging.

Peaceful Warrior fails pitifully at being transcendent. This New Age movie about living in the moment gets you looking at your watch and squirming in your seat.

The movie is a premise in search of a comedy. Rather than flesh it out, the filmmakers put familiar glad rags on the skull and bones.

You have to identify pretty strongly with suffering artistes to find anything to root for in The Science of Sleep.

About as clunky as a movie gets. It lurches from scene to scene with no sense of narrative grace, gives its roster of prominent actors nothing to work with and screeches to a halt with all the grace of a sprinter whose shoelaces have been tied together.

Perfume offers eau de crud.

Watching this movie, with Diane Keaton cast as the ne plus ultra of irritating, overbearing mothers, is roughly the equivalent of listening to fingernails on a chalkboard for nearly two hours.

Try as I might, I could not love it, because as a piece of cinema, Into Great Silence would try the patience of a saint.

It's last in laughs, last in drama but first in Murphy ego, as he gives a performance that everybody has seen before, only louder. [04 Dec 1992]

The movie is a corpse. It's a fish that stinks from the head. They ought to bury it in the Jersey Meadowlands. [25 Dec 1992]

Newsies is a live-action musical, but it's only barely alive. Call it "Snoozies." [10 Apr 1992]

The whole thing is too preciously conceived. [05 Feb 1993]

It never seriously establishes the ground rules of the principle of transference or the relationship between the two of them, and so what follows is gibberish. [14 Jul 1992]

Nothing in this film -- even Robin Williams, alas -- is funny.

A hopeless pastiche of timeworn plotlines, hackneyed dialogue and stultifying direction; to call it amateurish is a slap in the face to amateurs everywhere.

Reprehensible.

Bomback's script is the worst thing a thriller can be - a flip-flopper, using quick character changes for plot twists. And Langenegger's direction rarely sustains a mood or tone, only a sleek veneer of luxury and knowingness.

The one actor I wanted more of was Williams, who imbues Jack's dad with a robust, sometimes domineering wiliness that suggests a real person. Of course, these silly, inept filmmakers probably cast him because he plays a good guy and his first name is Treat.

Smith appears to have poured his creative energy into the cheerful come-on of the title and left nothing in reserve for the movie. He fails to wring any memorable comedy from shoestring porno filmmakers because his own filmmaking is just as amateurish and slovenly.

The whole narrative is too hollow and rickety as well as gimmicky for Muccino to breathe much life into it.

Kids will get antsy, wondering why their favorite characters disappear for long stretches of the film, while adults will wonder just when this scattershot approach to storytelling will congeal into something resembling coherence.

Bride Wars has possibly the worst comedy idea since "Springtime for Hitler," with almost no room for redeeming camp.

As a comic fable for hard times, New in Town is irredeemably moronic.

Even the great Lily Tomlin can't muster a funny reaction to a Polish joke. It's an everything-including-the kitchen-sink comedy -- and the sink has rusty pipes.

This film isn't the most awful comedy of the year (that would be Bride Wars or New in Town), but it may have the grossest antihero.

An awful film about an awful time.

The whirl, bang and general bother of crashing gears and gnashing metal ends up suffocating the senses.

The film saddles Craig T. Nelson with the generally thankless role of Paxton's cold, distant dad. But when he feels like the only person who doesn't understand what's going on with Tate and his son, you feel like saying, "No, me too."

"Hello, I Must Be Going," sings Groucho Marx in a clip from "Animal Crackers" at the start of the film. If I'd known what followed, I would have followed his advice.

Finds it as impossible to locate a laugh in glittering Bora Bora as it was for Operation Enduring Freedom to nail Osama bin Laden in gritty Tora Bora.

It might sound intriguing to root the saying, "Physician, heal thyself," in the plight of a hypocritical self-help guru, but the romantic drama Love Happens suffers from acute irony deficiency.

Bullock does her damndest to be nerdy and instead becomes excruciatingly artificial - a malfunctioning verbal fun machine.

Gummo is one of the most repellent cinematic efforts in recent memory. Whatever small audiences it attracts -- and they will be drawn mostly by the prospect of watching something "shocking" -- will wind up leaving the theater in a state of disgust. [21 Nov. 1997, p.5E]

Funny Games condescends to its audience like a pretentious, preachifying graduate student in post-modernism. It would help us out of the cultural quagmire we're drowning in, if only we could understand its highly convoluted and exclusive language. [29 May 1998, p.1E]

Tedious almost beyond endurance.

Director John Stockwell ("Blue Crush") and screenwriter Michael Ross have only two things in mind: titillation and giving young audiences something gross to whisper about in school the next day. On that limited basis, Turistas may well succeed. But that's nothing to brag about.

Jane Fonda does an about-face on her persona and her talent, playing a teetotaler and, what's worse, a pious bore.

A colossal dud.

The filmmakers lack any visual sense of humor and any talent for sustaining long-form comedy; the stunts have less wallop than a TV bloopers show and the Oedipal family slapstick goes around in circles, in more ways than one.

Has the feeling of something done many times before.

Just plain bad.

Even with help from a pathetic Kid Rock and a boost from always-on Christopher Walken, Spade can't pull this off.

Liam's deck is stacked. It's too bleak and filled with abrasive characters who don't deserve our sympathy to reveal much new about the human condition.

Glitter does no one any favors.

Alone in the Dark will be the worst movie of 2005. The idea that anything could be worse is the only genuine scare the movie has to offer.

Brand's script is a puzzle without a satisfying solution. Even at its supposedly heartfelt conclusion, it's more ironic than emotional, more of an art thing than a suspense movie.

Go see Crossroads if you want to hear Britney sing or see her wear next-to-nothing. But otherwise, avoid this train wreck at all costs.

Idiotic, ugly and ridiculous.

Be Cool proves that when "cool" evaporates all it leaves are embarrassing little puddles.

The movie is a model of multinational incompetence.

Venom isn't worth a critic's venom, but a brief condemnation is in order.

It's about as much fun for the viewer as being dropped into a virtual-reality version of a highway-safety crash film. Hall writes and directs with the finesse of a rusty hatchet.

There isn't an earned moment of uplift or laughter in the movie. Everything in it is prefab.

Here's my nomination for future grindhouse double-bill from hell: Pathfinder and "Apocalypto."

It's stupefying in its dullness and vulgarity.

Margot at the Wedding is a Christmas gift for high-class depressives: a compendium of malaise fit for an L.L. Bean catalog.

You leave this movie feeling mugged.

All it offers is sadism, impure and simple.

Here's hoping Allen's static Hennessey is due to an extreme acting choice and not plastic surgery. It would be tragic to lose a natural smile to star in garbage like Death Race.

All Alexander proves in Punisher: War Movie is that a martial-arts-trained woman can make a film just as stupid, coarse and numbing as any muscle man.

It's a gore sundae with an S&M cherry on top.

Ghosts of Girlfriends Past displays nary a wisp of life, let alone an afterlife.