Crass and soulless.

Bataille was a serious philosopher as well as a sensation-seeking writer, but you'd never guess his provocative ideas from this updated version.

Breillat is a smart, serious observer of sexuality's often disruptive role in human life, but this existential drama is sadly pretentious.

Tennant's featherweight comedy is clearly pitched at the date-movie crowd, and couples may enjoy it if they can get past the picture's simplistic ethnic stereotypes and its willingness to wish away every real-life family problem the characters will surely face after the feel-good finale.

Some scenes paint a convincing portrait of Stern as a witty opponent of stuffiness, prudery, and hypocrisy. Others mix gross-out humor with nasty doses of racism, sexism, and homophobia that reveal a dark side to Stern's professional personality.

Sordid and sleazy, although the lead performances are hard to fault.

Falls flat, with more "sound design" than delicious music, more slick film editing than graceful ballroom gliding.

MESSAGE Nuclear blackmail is a horrible crime but can be defeated by vigilant and courageous authorities.

The story takes place in 2013, but you'd hardly know it from the age-old clichés Kevin Costner purloins to tell this overblown action yarn, which relies so heavily on ideas borrowed from John Ford westerns that the Hollywood giant should have been credited as codirector; too bad Costner can't invest them with Ford's kind of life and originality, though.

Alas, the movie is less clever than its characters.

Santa Claus's bag couldn't hold as many clichés as the screenplay dishes out.

It's astounding that the ingenious creator of "JFK" and "Wall Street" could make an epic on war and empire that's so utterly simplistic and unreflective.

Its main message is that everyone should believe and behave in exactly the same way. Groupthink wins again!

I hate to sound per-Snickety, but this lemon of a movie is a sadly unfortunate event.

De Niro and Hoffman almost give comic life to this brainless, vulgar farce.

This noisy, disorganized story is riddled with clichés, stereotypes, and self-indulgence from beginning to end.

The picture's real interest lies in detailing the villain's sadistic crimes, though, and this is rarely fun or edifying to watch.

Downright awful.

The plot is hamstrung by trite formulas, and there's too much violence and family tension for very young viewers. Shaquille O'Neal is likable as the title character, though.

Suffers from a lack of chemistry.

Barry Levinson's filmmaking style is often imaginative. The story contains horrific scenes of sexual torture as well as sadistic killings and other disturbing material, though.

Ron Shelton's romantic comedy has no more visual excitement than a televised golf tournament, but the climax is truly surprising, and there's solid acting by Don Johnson and Cheech Marin.

Cumming's antic acting is the only asset of this boisterous comedy.

Like a nincompoop version of "The Usual Suspects."

Adam Sandler's creative songs and silly expressions on "Saturday Night Live" may have turned him into a celebrity, but this movie based solely on his antics doesn't work.

Plenty of mad moviegoers will put this in their diaries as one of the worst pictures in ages.

The overlong comedy has few laughs and flirts far too much with racist, homophobic humor. A waste of a fine cast.

Sadly it's been botched. Guess Who serves up such flat dialogue and stilted situations that it's hard to sit through.

House of D, arrives in theaters this week, after debuting at the Tribeca Film Festival last year. I'm sorry to report it's the opposite of impressive.

What's the point of the picture, except to allow Kutcher fans occasional peeks at acting talent he usually keeps hidden?

Amiably bland actors can be fun to watch, as Tom Hanks has proved. Freeman is no Hanks, though, and The Hitchhiker's Guide won't boost anyone's career into hyperspace. Or give your mind a workout.

The comedy is shamelessly stupid and flagrantly vulgar by turns.

Luc Besson's screenplay is dumb, but has just enough weird touches to give occasional glimmers of interest.

The result is a quickly paced, slickly filmed entertainment that's also as crude and rude as the PG-13 rating will allow. It's mighty mean-spirited too, aiming "satirical jibes" at everyone from black illiterates to white rednecks, from breakers of the law to enforcers of the law, from society's elites to society's dregs.

The animation is deft but the screenplay is stilted, the voice-performances are unimaginative, and the whole project is surprisingly clumsy in its efforts to please young and old alike. A major disappointment.

The movie is a mish-mash of action-adventure clichés, book-ended with lame attempts at psychological interest. Written, directed, and acted with ham-fisted heaviness.

Serial killing and other insanity in the French countryside, with ineptly dubbed English dialogue.

Repetitious teen-targeted fluff.

Can a mild-mannered toxicologist and an eccentric Alcatraz veteran stop him before it's too late? Learning the answer means sitting through more than two hours of violence, vulgarity, and all-around excess, served up with high-tech trimmings by director Michael Bay.

David Cronenberg's movie is a chilly meditation on this theme, carrying some cinematic interest but surprisingly dull given the story's outrageous subject.

The dialogue is utterly inane, but the high-tech effects deliver the sort of thrills that disaster-film connoisseurs expect.

The acting ranges from adequate (Jared Leto, R. Lee Ermey) to awful (Lindsay Crouse and everyone else).

Mostly trite and tacky despite Robin Williams's strenuous acting.

Larry and Andy Wachowski directed this lurid, sexually explicit thriller.

The picture is effectively made, but viewers will want to erase the horrific violence that erupts in scene after scene, leading to an unusually mean-spirited finale.

Movie stars have tamed sassy kids in movies from "The Blackboard Jungle" to "Stand and Deliver," but it's hard to remember an example more patronizing or sentimentalized than this one.

One thing is certain: It's a bomb trying to be a hit, and at that it'll never succeed.

Youngsters may enjoy it. But the humor is generally of the genre heard in the boys' locker room at the high school gym.

When promising independent filmmakers decide to jump on the bandwagon and pump up the gore, the results are sure to be touted as visceral and unflinching. Don't be fooled. Kramer has even commented that the movie should be viewed as a modern-day Grimm's fairy tale. It's grim all right.

The suspense sequences are straight from the standard Hollywood blueprint, and the movie as a whole is so sloppily assembled that it's almost incoherent at times.

Weitz doesn't have the chops for satire, let alone black comedy.

This woozily uplifting saga is big on homilies and deficient in just about everything else.

Bacon lavishes his camera on her (Sedgwick) in various states of dress and undress, but the script, by Hannah Shakespeare - talk about having to live up to a name! - is a cheat. It rarely expands on the boy's crises in having to deal with such a mother.

I suspect audiences will see Shyamalan's portentous doodle for what it is - the height of arrogance and a bad night out at the movies.

Lange and Paltrow give it their all, but they can't save this one from plot holes, continuity mistakes, and heartlessness.

Borderline unwatchable, although, as is true of all Gilliam movies, it certainly is different.

I hope Keaton doesn't begin to make a specialty of these roles. They play into what is least attractive in her repertoire – the loosey-goosey, knockabout side of her that all too swiftly devolves into hysterics.

Some movies are so flagrantly awful that they achieve classic status. To this rarefied company we must now add The Astronaut Farmer.

Graham was good in films such as "Boogie Nights" and "Bowfinger" where her apparent innocence was a smoke screen for her lustful connivance. To be effective in the movies, she needs something to counteract her wholesomeness.

Maybe Jackson should avoid any more movies with "snake" in the title.

Philippe Rousselot's carefully shaded cinematography looks great, but the screenplay is pretentious and there's little to applaud in the top-heavy acting by John Malkovich and Julia Roberts.

The basic plot of Thomas Hardy's great novel "Jude the Obscure" comes through accurately enough, but its sublime irony and sardonic wit apparently got lost in the misty English countryside.

Shots of blood and naked bodies clash bizarrely with Coppola's more quaint and engaging notions; the result may be intended as a dialectical encounter, but seems more like a head-on collision.

Amanda Plummer is even more weirded-out than usual as a serial killer wandering through England with her sadly befuddled girlfriend. [10 May 1996, p.13]

Hal Hartley's innovative comedy-drama is more ambitious than successful, but it deserves credit for trying something genuinely unusual.

As a movie, it's mediocre.

Beverly Hills Cop III is perhaps the dumbest of the cop trio. There are no surprises, there's no real police work to unravel, and there are no mysteries. It's all very predictable with lots of gunplay, noise, and blood. [3 Jun 1994]

The rest of Franco Zeffirelli's latest Shakespearean outing is so eager to be cinematic, with its peripatetic camera and souped-up screenplay, that it forgets to make sense.

The story is too self-conscious about its offbeat qualities, becoming so cool that it practically freezes on the screen.

It's picaresque, all right, but full of ethnic stereotypes, and filmed much too blandly to compete with the superb ''Black Stallion'' of a few years ago.

Pokes and prods the viewer to watch the brutal, indiscriminate methods of Rio's SWAT-like cops and then demands only one conclusion: That cops in Rio's drug-infested slums must do what they do and if that means rampant point-blank executions, so be it.

Sometimes, dear reader, there's no place like home, and that's just where you should be when this gorefest opens at a theater near you.

After a powerful opening, when we see the first victim suddenly go blind while driving in traffic, the film devolves into a dystopian freak show and wastes many wonderful performers, including Mark Ruffalo and Julianne Moore.

With the mounting number of first-rate, even masterly foreign-language films locked out of movie theaters due to wary distributors, it's worth pondering why such laughable dreck as German actor-writer-director Vadim Glowna's House of the Sleeping Beauties actually made it through.

By comparison, Bride Wars makes "Sex and the City" seem like Jane Austen.

Don't be taken in by Taken.

The only point of interest in New in Town is sociological. In the current economic climate, this comedy about workers whose livelihood is rescued by a benevolent boss represents the ultimate wish-fulfillment fantasy. Don't spend your hard-earned discretionary cash on it.

The disjointedness of The Headless Woman might be the result of narrative complexity or of directorial ineptitude or (my favorite) of narrative complexity mangled by directorial ineptitude. If the residual fog ever clears, maybe I'll be able to tell you for sure.

Why are Steve Carell and Tina Fey wasting their time, and ours, by appearing in the miserable comedy Date Night?

The Last Airbender is like a Care Bears movie that got waylaid in the fourth dimension. It's insufferably silly.

It will be interesting to see whether audiences embrace Mr. Diesel's barely controlled vigilante as warmly as they embraced Clint Eastwood's swaggering "Dirty Harry" and Charles Bronson's nasty "Death Wish" characters a few decades ago.

A suggestion to screenwriters: Stop telling stalkers that their passion isn't misplaced and that the girl will come around in the end. It is, and she won't. Just give it up.

"The idea evolved and expanded," he (Snyder) says, "and took on a life of its own." Unfortunately, all of that life must have dribbled away as the project developed, because the resulting nonsense has none.

Full disclosure: I have to say I did laugh during Your Highness. Twice, I think.

Numbingly inane comedy.

It's a mash-up of blah buddy comedy and gross-out CGI monster splatter, with nary a laugh to be had.

An impossibly, incomprehensibly overlong and cacophonous bore.

It just may be the most boring movie ever made – period.

Monumentally unromantic.

They miss by a mile – or should I say, a light-year.

Caine acts dignified throughout, but there's no way to dignify dreck.

Arnold Schwarzenegger fights an outer-space monster in a third-world jungle. The monster never has a chance. Neither does the jungle. Neither does the audience. [19 June 1987, Arts & Leisure, p.23]

A dark comedy about a bachelor party gone awry, it is excessively violent, ghoulish, and gory. Very Bad Things is lack-of-taste taken to the extreme.

Frankly, it's excruciating to watch.

Paying homage to drug comedies of the '70s, Half Baked is high on getting high and low on laughs.

This romantic comedy is so awfully misjudged and ineptly executed in every department that, while it isn't quite a contender for the "so bad it's good" category, this critic was nonetheless dabbing tears of laughter from his eyes.

Pauly Shore is less a comedian than a class clown, and his dim-witted mugging makes Jim Carrey's antics seem creative triumphs by comparison. Vapid, vulgar, and more to the point, not funny.

The Griswalds drive to Las Vegas "because half the fun is getting there," but the fun never begins in this disappointing sequel to the Vacation slapstick comedies.

Numbingly violent action.

There's nothing fresh or off-beat in Final Destination 3, no talent that is struggling to get out. The only thing struggling to get out was me from the theater.

The subculture of weekend warrior bikers is such rich comic material that the ineptitude of Wild Hogs is doubly offensive.

Veteran comics like Steve Martin and Madeleine Kahn wrestle valiantly with the incoherent story and ham-fisted dialogue, but it's a losing battle all the way. [30 Dec 1994]

A sham.

Comedy that seems designed to be as bad as it can be.

It's the audience for this film that will require therapy.

At points, the film sinks below the level of competent.

A movie of such stupendous uninspiration that, watching it, I didn't know whether to be affronted or hornswoggled. Movies this monumentally dreadful, after all, don't come along every day.

Such a feeble excuse for an action comedy that it's already taken pride of place in my upcoming worst-movies-of-2011 list.