A pox upon history and an insult to the 16th president of the United States. It's that, of course - actually, that's the point - but this joyless, deafening cinematic headache commits a different crime. It's a sin against entertainment.

The movie has elements of road picture, social satire, and odd-couple romance, but mostly it's about lack of pacing and tone. Somewhere very (very) deep in here is a whiff of "Citizen Ruth," and who knows what Alexander Payne might have done with this material. Instead we know what writer-director Robbie Pickering has done with it, and that ain't much.

The squirminess stands out here because there's so little going on the rest of the time.

Well, fair's fair. George W. Bush got Michael Moore and "Fahrenheit 9/11." Now Barack Obama gets Dinesh D'Souza and 2016: Obama's America. Both films are wildly partisan attack documentaries made by wildly partisan and generally annoying polemicists (D'Souza is more personable, actually, than Moore).

Will your preschoolers enjoy it? Perhaps. Is it worth 88 minutes of their lives, or yours? Not in a world where "Sesame Street" is on TV every day. Not even in a world where "Sesame Street" didn't exist.

What is offensive is how the masquerade punks these other people - and to no seeming purpose, other than to provide Gandhi with footage for this documentary.

This is a terrible little movie even by the standards of the genre.

It's always raining or snowing or misting. This makes for a nice visual, but it also makes the scenes look interchangeable. This is even more of a problem because the writer-director, Michael J. Bassett, imparts no shape to the story. Many movies suffer from worse problems, but not many waste the talents of Max von Sydow, as Solomon's father, or Pete Postlethwaite.

The best we get here are modest action diversions.

Unfunny, predictable, and vulgar, it’s the generic equivalent of a Judd Apatow movie. As always, you get what you pay for.

Back to the Future III has no future. The reason is that it never works up much of a past as it sends its gull-winged DeLorean time machine back to the Old West. In effect, it goes back to the Age of Steam and runs out of gas. [25 May 1990, p.45]

The film’s zippy graphics are a treat, but its zippy arguments are slipshod.

Not that there’s all manner of comedy craftsmanship demanding study here, but the movie does seem to be a funny jumble of contradictory impulses.

Pain & Gain, a jokey but fatally tone-deaf true-crime caper, plays like “Fargo” for idiots.

Quaint and crass get together — or would that be “bump uglies”? — with awkward, thoroughly flat results in The Big Wedding, an ensemble comedy with a tonal cluelessness as surprising as the name cast that signed on for it anyway.

Cosmic slop.

The major problem with this alleged comic thriller is it is neither funny nor thrilling. Neither the heavies nor the good guys are believable.

Who on earth is this embarrassment -- easily the worst film of the year to date -- aimed at?

A stupendous bore.

Clueless and sad.

The only chills to be found are courtesy of your theater's central air, and the suspense will come from the wait to see which disappointed kid in a hockey mask will be the first to slash the screen.

Banderas slums through this dollar-bin action flick wearing the same look of wiped-out exasperation that Danny Glover's Sergeant Murtaugh sports in each installment of ''Lethal Weapon.'' And like Murtaugh, Banderas might be too old for this, too.

Yes, I've seen Dumb and Dumberer, so you don't have to. As good deeds go, this is about as significant as getting a cat out of a tree, but believe me, you're better off at home, alphabetizing your old comic books, talking to your parents, or watching paint dry.

At some point, I just tired of looking at all the nicely composed shots unworthy of the stock they're printed on. Lives are at stake here, and I don't mean Julia's and her annoying pals'. I mean the lives of you and me, the only pronouns that really matter here.

If the producers had dug up Ted Geisel's body and hung it from a tree, they couldn't have desecrated the man more.

Every ounce of the film feels artificially upbeat.

Man on Fire is ponderous and bloated, dragging the Bible and Giannini into its swirling cesspool. Scott can't give the movie any real emotional weight. And Washington gives his first lifeless performance.

A weirdly airless disaster, a turkey so insistently DOA that the dialogue serves as its own epitaph.

Godsend makes swill of religion, science, family, and morality. It has the sensitivity of a cactus, the ingenuity of a square wheel, and the integrity of a CEO.

This prequel has something to appall everybody.

Like so many movies with a keypad for a brain, Resident Evil: Apocalypse is another exercise in making us feel the irritation associated with having to stand behind some game hack for our turn to play.

Most atrocious movies build into their badness, as lacks of talent, ideas, self-confidence, or a total hatred of an audience, are revealed. This one gets it out of the way up front and never looks back.

It's the sort of stupid swill that gets spewed out by a studio committee, slapped together without a brain, a heart, or a good idea about where to put a camera or when to cut a scene.

There's no real journalism here, just the sort of appalling revisionism that can turn a bloodbath into a beach party.

Kranks is a feel-good movie in which every character is hateful (except, sigh, the cancer lady), and a Christmas movie too chickenhearted to mention Jesus.

A moronic exercise in supernatural claptrap.

Think of the lamest horror movie you've ever seen. Now think of Tara Reid in the lamest horror movie you've ever seen. See how much worse it could have been?

I'm afraid this is one of THOSE movies, one where ''plot" is another word for ''gratuitous sex scene."

A horror film whose only scare is that it was made at all... As with so many stupid horror movies in these post-''Scream" times, this one is at such a creative loss that all it can do is make its audience feel duped for having purchased a ticket.

At its least intolerable, the movie is a fatherhood freak-out.

It's not as bad as the average Hollywood movie, it's stupendously worse.

The result is a unique time at the art house: a work whose badness becomes guiltily pleasurable, like a Harlequin romance novel masquerading as a dissertation.

For a movie to pretend, in the face of the deaths of tens of thousands of Iraqi men, women, and children directly or indirectly caused by our presence there, that we can wage war without anyone really getting hurt isn't naive, or wishful thinking, or a jim-dandy way to spend a Saturday night at the movies. It's an obscenity.

If all the first "Deuce" had going for it was a regular-guy approach to over-the-top humor, that's completely absent in this follow-up.

The movie fails to conjure the wonder of the Ray Bradbury short story that inspired it.

Saved from total puff only by the obnoxiousness of its star, who seems to be laboring under the delusion that he's the next Eddie Murphy.

The product of immaturity. It approaches suffering with a meaninglessness that must be a luxury for anyone who has never lost anyone, or is incapable of empathizing with someone who has.

Even by the lowest standards, this is a frightless, cynically made movie.

The Heart Is Deceitful wants to cauterize us into feeling something -- anything -- but it's far too heartless to know what.

Tens of millions of dollars were spent to tell us what we should have known going in: that the makers of the movie you're slogging through will spare no expense to demonstrate how much they hate us. Do us a favor. Tell them the feeling is mutual.

An American Haunting sets the bar at a new low: It makes ''The Blair Witch Project" look like a masterpiece of world cinema.

It's a remarkably laugh-free comedy that takes on a dark subject and skitters along its surface.

The willful sloppiness and retrograde gags make Epic Movie, which was not shown to critics, an inevitable byproduct of our Internet video era. It seems downloaded and projected onto the screen, a failing online-film-school project paid for and put out by a Hollywood movie studio. That said, very little on YouTube is this unentertaining.

Long-delayed, pitiful excuse for a horror film.

Just watch Austin on "WrestleMania" instead, avoiding the shower this movie leaves you wanting.

The buzz was that Fair Game reshot its ending. They should have reshot its painfully fabricated beginning and middle, too. [03 Nov 1995]

For proof that some actresses can take on a misconceived role and get out alive, there's Huffman as Lilly.

Rambo III is just another of Stallone's exercises in narcissism and jingoism, death and glory wrapped up in one tidy package. [25 May 1988, p.75]

The original tv series was sometimes frightening, sometimes enlightening, and sometimes a bit too allegorical, but it was almost always entertaining. Serling gave us more in 25 minutes than Spielberg & Co. give us in nearly two hours. [24 Jun 1983, p.1]

Clue the movie, not the board game, isn't so much a drama as it is a marketing gimmick. Presumably, Paramount Pictures believed that an audience was clamoring to see actors play one-dimensional figures from a game. [13 Dec 1985, p.57]

As it develops, Who's Your Caddy? just becomes depressing. You want to alert the United Negro College Fund: A mind has terribly gone to waste.

Getting to the true root of his evil may necessitate "Saw LX."

You want to make lemonade from this, but even the lemons stink.

The problem with the "Alien vs. Predator" series is that the humans keep getting in the way.

One Missed Call was originally a so-so Takashi Miike freak-out. Now it's a worse-worse American eyesore.

Over Her Dead Body is to romantic comedy what Spam is to meat. But at least with Spam, you get cool packaging.

When Jamie Lee Curtis ran from a killer in 1980's "Prom Night," she was 22 and had a unique gift for belting out fear. She was the Beverly Sills of slasher flicks. That "Prom Night" was dumb, but it wasn't insulting in the way this remake is.

A horror film with a moral. No matter how nasty a gang of murderers is, the moviemaker calling the shots is ultimately worse.

Finding Amanda, unfortunately, is one vast, irritating surface.

The filmmakers are idiots.

The grime, filth, slop, vomit, and crotch-nibbling pigs double all too easily as a recipe for this movie's failure. It hasn't been made so much as excreted.

Like "Blair Witch," Quarantine uses the conceit of a movie-within-a-movie to give documentary immediacy to its assorted grotesqueries.

Bangkok Dangerous is bad without lifting a finger toward interesting. The trouble with it is that the people who've made it don't appear to understand life enough to allow any of it into their movie. This is an airless affair.

Oh, Jigsaw. Here we go again. You kill. I doze off. Someone at the studio goes "ka-ching!"

The Unborn joins a growing glut of Holocaust- and Nazi-themed material -- "Valkyrie," "Defiance" - that are long on posturing, suppositions, and righteousness, yet short on moral complexity. Nazism and its crimes have lately inspired theme parks more than actual movies. Too many rides on that roller coaster and I feel sick.

Looks like something stubbed out in an ashtray.

The writers don’t write, the director doesn’t really direct, and the actors don’t exactly act. They wait for the movie’s contraptions to impale them.

Another helping of egregious slicing and slashing.

It wouldn’t be Thanksgiving without a turkey, and in Old Dogs, we have the season’s blue-ribbon gobbler.

Lowbrow vampire spoof.

The movie crassly repurposes tragedy to excuse its cliches.

Vengeance has the odor of court-ordered community service. The jokes never rise above the groin. The trees look plastic, the characters more so.

We’ve just been treated like a fire hydrant.

This low-budget film from writer-director Stewart Raffill (“Across the Great Divide,’’ “Mac and Me’’) is processed cheese molded into a series of loosely related, sloppily choreographed, and inexplicably auto-tuned dance numbers.

It's more like "Porky's for Dummies," a thoroughly depressing teen farce in which Internet voyeurism has replaced human intimacy and where privacy is SO 20th century.

This is another miserable movie about women at war over nonsense.

The dismemberment and torture are now shtick. The filmmakers - "Saw" veterans - struggle to imbue this movie with the usual righteousness.

The most painful movie so far in a year that's already scraping the bottom of the barrel, Your Highness is a tedious, dung-colored misfire that sullies the genre of "Monty Python and the Holy Grail" and "The Princess Bride."

The movie is terrible partly because it's badly written, directed, and conceived and partly because it lacks the necessarily thematic coherence to accomplish proselytism of any kind.

It's a crude, queasy, ugly remake of a crude, queasy, ugly, yet artistically superior 40-year-old Sam Peckinpah movie.

People do stupid things all the time. My friend and I sat through Compliance, didn't we? But there is a level of stupidity displayed by the people in this movie that beggars belief. Their behavior is to stupidity as the Death Star is to a doughnut.

If nothing else, The Inbetweeners Movie earns itself a footnote in any comprehensive history of local movie exhibition. This has got to be the first time a wedgie has been inflicted onscreen at the Kendall.

The problem with this numbskull travesty isn't that it's fatuous and smug (which it is). It's that it's slack and dull.

All the makers of Texas Chainsaw 3D cared about was getting your $16.

Plummets into the realm of ludicrous failure.

They have the chemistry of step-siblings, so a movie that has them make out is, as the one of the few girls in the theater exclaimed, "so gross."

An overlong, joyless, and inconsequential affair, full of dead air, and possessing only a few moments of jaw-dropping bad taste. It's a dull disaster.

Unfortunately, except for one raucous routine, this "Animal House" clone is an overblown, over-publicized, overwrought exploitation flick that's about as funny as the first dirty joke my father told me. [09 Apr 1982]

With Ted Kotcheff's hackneyed direction and Joe Gayton's cliche-ridden script, this version of "Missing" for the soldier of fortune set is one of the most reprehensible exploitation films of the year.

There isn't a scene in Cocktail that isn't cheap and dumb, and whether its camp entertainment value compensates for its contempt for women is a question. Cocktail makes beer commercials look deep, makes "Top Gun" look like "Hamlet." [29 Jul 1988, p.21]

A live-action film based on a line of dolls, it's pure marketing chum for tweeners: a proudly shallow, purposefully bland ode to girly-girl narcissism. I could actually feel my brain stem shrivel up as I watched it.

Amid the dumbness and disgust for paying customers, the movie does manage to cough up something I didn't expect: a performance so terrible you can't quite believe it's happening: Bentley's.

Easily the worst movie of the week, month, year, and Bullock’s entire career. It is to comedy what leprosy once was to the island of Molokai: a plague best contemplated from many miles away.

In 10 years, this movie could easily take its place among cult classics like “The Room.’’ For now, it’s better left in the bowels of a Turkish cave.

This is first-degree cultural homicide.

Really, all Six is going for, with the generous application of both hardware supplies to the skin and feces to the camera, is a tired commentary on his shallow talents: They're excremental.