It was probably hopeless from the start: The Warhol cosmos is too weird and complicated to lend itself to a conventional Hollywood biopic, and this one is conventional down to Warhol's first glimpse of his future "superstar" bouncing up and down vivaciously in tacky slow motion.

The Situation is, to put it kindly, a spotty piece of work. The script is by Wendell Steavenson, a reporter who seems to know everything about Iraq and next to nothing about screenwriting. The dialogue is flat, and the actors almost never rise above it.

Hannibal Rising is basically a Steven Seagal vigilante movie with a hero who eats the people he kills. At least it's ecofriendly.

If the movie were just these two (Costner/Hurt), bopping around arguing and offing people, it would have been better than the unholy mess it turns into.

Evan Almighty runs out of comic invention early, and the filmmakers fall back on what real politicians do when they exhaust their small stash of ideas: brainless piety.

The Camden 28 is slapdash: more talking heads, reunion footage with the mother reading from her own testimony, newscasts of the day. But the editing supplies some urgency, and the subjects remain radiant yet down-to-earth--too good-humored to be beatific.

As you watch the nannies mistreated and the children left to cry themselves to sleep, the only surprise is that there are no surprises. It’s zombie-land.

Foster’s feminist victimization complex seems to be looping around to meet Nixon and Agnew. Next she’ll be hunting Commies for the FBI.

An unholy mixture of the banal and the bombastic.

The film will be huge. It’s busy. It’s kinetic. It’s a treat for kids. But like much of Seinfeld’s work outside his TV show, it’s impersonal. It doesn’t come from anywhere interesting.

Robert Redford’s Lions for Lambs is the clunkiest, windiest, and roughest of the lot. Most of it is dead on the screen. But its earnestness is so naked that it exerts a strange pull. You have to admire a director who works so diligently to help us rise above all the bad karma.

A derivative horror picture that somehow rises to the level of a primal scream. The premise is simple, by which I mean both easy to understand and feeble-minded.

It was undoubtedly a great experience for everyone involved, and the show itself might have been a romp. But as a movie, Vince Vaughn’s Wild West Comedy Show makes you think of the days in which troupes that didn’t deliver were run out of town, bullets pinging off their heels.

Such a clunkerama that it made me rethink all the nice things I wrote about its predecessor, "The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe." Could the same people have made both films?

It's empty and formulaic, with plotting that's lazy even by stoner-comedy standards. Without all the yuck-o sight gags, it would be a huge bummer.

Seyfried (of Big Love and Mean Girls) is a radiant object and can sing, but I'd like to forget the others--especially Brosnan, whose singing is the best imitation I've heard of a water buffalo.

With McG's migraine-inducing jerky-cam and monochromatic palette (livened only by splotches of rust), Terminator Salvation puts the numb in numskull.

W. isn't gripping enough as drama or witty enough as satire. It's neutered.

It's heartbreaking how rich this failed project is, with enough poetry for several great movies, but not enough push for one.

It's written and directed by Kevin Smith--and hats off to him for being savvy enough to go for a piece of the Apatow action! Too bad he doesn't rise to the occasion.

It appears that the filmmakers have taken Hannah Arendt's notion of the "banality of evil" way too literally.

As a film, it's overly tidy, and the surreal concentration-camp climax gave at least one viewer an inappropriate fit of giggles.

This director is too calculating to hold our trust for long, and skepticism will kill transcendence every time.

A shapely, stylish, white-knuckle horror-thriller that hits its marks with blood and thunder. It stinks to heaven, too, but it isn't lame. The streets of Rome haven't run this red since the Inquisition.

What I can't accept is that the stringy, insipidly earnest teen idol Zac Efron would grow up to be the defensively ironic, twisty-faced Matthew Perry.

Most of the dialogue is listless, and no matter how much Soderbergh snips and stitches, the movie is a corpse with twitching limbs.

Travel--finding the self by escaping the self--is central to the novels of Eggers and Vida, but Mendes knows where he's going before he gets there. And so the subject of Away We Go turns out to be not travel but child-rearing, which is at best well-meaning and anguished and at worst downright monstrous.

For all the Saturday-matinee heroics, the movie is dreary and monotonous, the vision junky in more ways than one.

Michelle Pfeiffer is brittle in a way that's not especially French, but she's poignant and very lovely. Rupert Friend, on the other hand, is difficult to warm up to, especially with his features hidden behind all that hair. It's not a good sign when you have to take the movie's word for it that the lovers at its center are really, really into each other.

This is yet another of Soderbergh’s “exercises in style,” which means he has one big idea and sticks to it. He makes the space shallow and ugly (faces are bathed in orange) and adds groovy sixties titles and Marvin Hamlisch music.

The elements of Precious are powerful and shocking, but the movie is programmed. It is its own study guide.

Weitz’s pacing is so limp you’re going to need the electricity generated by a live audience to keep from yelling, “Hurry it up!”

It's also rather tawdry. The climax is as ludicrous as any Jack Bauer adventure, and Greengrass is always on shaky ground. Literally.

The film turns into one of those indie parades of eccentrics that are hit-and-miss but mostly miss.

Inception manages to be clunky and confusing on four separate levels of reality.

In the golden turd that is Eat Pray Love, everyone helps Julia Roberts find herself so she can then experience true love.

The sequel to an influential eighties motion picture is so loaded with characters and crosscurrents that we wonder why it isn't a thirteen-hour cable mini-series instead of an impacted two-hour mess. The film is like my portfolio: full of promise, with minuscule returns.

With a million times more computing power at its disposal than its 1982 predecessor, Tron: Legacy still looks like Disco Night at the jai alai fronton.

Love & Other Drugs is crazily uneven, jumping back and forth between jerk-off jokes and Parkinson's sufferers sharing their stories of hope. It's the sort of movie in which half the audience will be drying their eyes and the other half rolling them.

Perhaps the late Blake Edwards could have found a balance between slapstick and psychodrama, but Ron Howard can't get the pacing right, and Allan Loeb's script is even wordier than the one he wrote for "Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps."

The doughy Damon and aristocratic Blunt don't match up physically, and they never get any Hepburn-Tracy rhythms going that might create some current.

An agreeable time-killer, but I'll bet a couple of clever kids could make a livelier movie with a Woody puppet and a Predator doll.

Luc Besson's Jumping Frog Action Factory looks mighty lame in Colombiana.

Every bit as dumb as August's "Conan the Barbarian" but awash in neon-lit nightscapes and existential dread, with killings so graphic that you can't entirely believe what you're gagging at.

This is the first bad movie that has ever made me call for a sequel - to get it all right.

It's tempting to praise The Ides of March as a realistic depiction of how low we've sunk. But that would mean accepting the second-rate writing and third-rate melodrama and incredible shrinking characters.

It's too bad J. Edgar is so shapeless and turgid and ham-handed, so rich in bad lines and worse readings. Not DiCaprio, though.

The only reason to put yourself through Guy Ritchie's overblown, inelegant Sherlock Holmes: Game of Shadows is to see Jared Harris, who plays Professor Moriarty, in a chilling low key.

For all the occasional grace of its high-flying derring-do, Red Tails barely feels like a movie. It's an uncertain hodgepodge of impulses and desires that never coheres enough to even crash and burn.

Wrath at least has the good sense to try to have a little fun with its mince-myth premise. It's better than Clash, but it's still not particularly good.

The screenplay by Seth Grahame-Smith is witless and meandering, though the witlessness wouldn't matter so much if it moved, or the meandering if it were droll.

For a movie that deals with rape, criminality, and even racks up a real body count, Hick is whisper-thin and instantly forgettable.

Unfortunately, there's also a certain artificiality to the whole film, both visually and narratively.

There isn't anything in this Total Recall to match the immortal Arnold Schwarzenegger send-offs, "See you at the pah-ty" and everyone's favorite alimony killer, "Consider this a divorce."

How odd then that a film all about human connections manages to make none of its own.

For all its feints at sensitivity, this isn't a movie, it's a machine, and it's hard not to be impressed - perhaps even awed - by the sheer ruthlessness with which it jerks the tears from your eyes. If anything, a real movie might just have gotten in the way.

It's a shame, though, that so many of The Possession's later scenes, particularly the exorcism stuff at the end, is mostly a grab bag of tired old scares. You might have convinced yourself, for a while at least, that this one was going to rise above the crowd.

The screenwriters go out of their way to prepare you for Taken 3: Serbedzija has more sons, and Kim's virginity is getting harder and harder to preserve.

But the real problem behind Paranormal Activity 4 is that its entire raison d'être has gotten old; producer Oren Peli, who directed the first one, even included some gentle digs at the found-footage genre in his superior "Chernobyl Diaries," released earlier this year.

The cast comes off like a third-rate stock company on the matinee after the night on which everyone got bombed on mescal (and possibly mescaline).

It's a perfect fortune cookie of a movie, full of bland life lessons for everybody; would that there were some drama or style in it somewhere along the way.

Every unhappy movie is unhappy in its own way, and Joe Wright's Anna Karenina is as boldly original a miscalculation as any you're likely to see.

The movie's a smorgasbord of horror, and, ironically, that takes the teeth out of it. We're not really in this villain's world, because we don't know what his world is, or what he is, or what he's trying to even do. It's like a nightmare designed by someone who's heard a lot about nightmares but has never actually had one.

It collapses on all fronts, delivering hot-button platitudes and just-add-water character development.

The climax of Texas Chainsaw 3D is a bit more interesting and unpredictable than the usual horror-movie third act. But it feels like it's bred more out of desperation than anything organic; you can sense the gears turning in the screenwriters' heads as they try to figure out a way to breathe some fresh life into this franchise.

The period thriller Gangster Squad plays like an untalented 12-year-old's imitation of Brian DePalma's "The Untouchables."

As the film progresses, the actor fails to progress with it: As Charles Swan seems to become more aware of his loneliness, Charlie Sheen seems to become more protective of his Charlie Sheen–ness.

The movie’s not all bad. There’s palpable chemistry between Duhamel and Hough. The former particularly seems well-suited to this sort of thing: He has just the right amount of grizzled charm to be one of those wounded hunks Sparks likes so much.

Wasikowska drabs herself down. Her body is undefined in dowdy clothes, her hair hangs limply. But her eyes usher you into her inner world, with its battle between girlish longing and the impatience to move on and be what she really is — whatever that might be. It’s a richer performance than the movie deserves.

In the end, 21 and Over is more exhausting — and exhausted — than funny or wild.

Aside from a trio of witches that can hold its own with Eastwick’s in the dishiness department, Oz the Great and Powerful is a peculiarly joyless occasion.

That first half of Admission is a lot for an actress to overcome. It’s not just very bad, it’s very fast, as if someone had overwound the metronome. Fairly naturalistic lines are delivered at the pace of screwball zingers — which stubbornly refuse to zing.

Spring Breakers strikes me as another of Korine’s calculated punk outrages, a sploog in Disney’s direction.

That G.I. Joe silliness the first film embraced has been steamrolled into tentpole flatness this time around. It’s not stoopid anymore, but just plain stupid.

As a piece of suspense, it ain’t exactly "North by Northwest," or even "Three Days of the Condor"; the awkward attempts at chase scenes make it clear that Redford the actor, who has always given off a slightly lugubrious air, has lost a step or two physically.

The Lords of Salem is gloomy, lacks variety, and is not without its flat patches. Heidi is an increasingly dullish heroine, and in the first 15 minutes you’ll know what’s going to happen in the next 80.

Oblivion is like that movie-within-a-movie: Everything in it feels 100 percent inauthentic. That vibe, as it happens, turns out to be intentional. But when the humans arrive, it’s still a narcotic.

The Big Wedding isn’t terrible. De Niro is actually pretty good here — the script gives him plenty of raunchy one-liners, and, while they’re mostly lame, he delivers with conviction, which counts for something nowadays.

The result: Characters we genuinely care about are lost in a movie that almost dissipates before our very eyes.

Vehicle 19 sets up a fascinating conceit for itself, and then loses interest in delivering on it. It just wants to get to the cool car chase, but by the time it does, we’ve stopped caring.

The only reason to check out Big Bad Love is Debra Winger, last seen onscreen in 1995.

From the look of this film, its prime appreciators will be heavy-metal futurist dweebs.

Spacey is turning into another Robin Williams: Between this film and "Pay It Forward" he cops the prize for the Sappiest Performances by an Actor Previously Known to Have Great Talent.

A stinker.

The film's Russians are all played by French and Australian actors. Too bad Butterworth didn't find a Russian to play the Brit. That would have made the inauthenticity complete.

It's as if an obsessed movie nut had decided to collect every bad war-movie convention on one computer and program it to spit out a script.

There's less here than meets the eye or ear: We're a long way from Jonathan Swift, and any old episode of "Cops" is bound to be more engrossing, not to mention "real."

Gets points for oddness. Excellence is another matter.

The dance he (Wang) ended up with is on the wrong lap.

Sandler being Chaplinesque isn't pretty; he's just doing his smart-aleck slacker shtick with a moister eye.

It's a doomy dirge of a movie, in which the protagonists, or at least the actors who play them, aren't equipped to handle their outsize passions.

The only note of authenticity in the movie comes from Ian Holm, playing the royal physician. What is this nuanced performance -- at least until the final fireworks -- doing in this twaddle?

Movie has been upstaged by the sum of our fears. The staunch heroics, frantic presidential huddles, and hairbreadth rescues all seem tinny and escapist, too Cold Warrior–ish, for what's really going on now.

I've never been sold on this anti-TV thesis. It's snooty. It assumes we in the audience have seen the light denied the lower orders. Invariably, the people in these movies who are rendered blotto by the tube are dingbat common folk. EDtv takes this notion to a new low.

The best way to kill the spirit of the sixties is to sanitize it with preachiness, which is what happens here. That rock-cock collection might as well be a box of baseball cards.

The general insensitivity of the atmosphere gets one down after a while. None of these people go together: Friends don't seem like friends, lovers don't seem like lovers. In brief, it's not enough just to have bad taste. You have to have talent, too.

You would have to have been born yesterday to miss the switcheroos and reeking red herrings planted in this pulp.

Sordid Thelma & Louise-ish spree, which also has certain affinities with Breathless but would be better termed Affectless.

Based on an interminable 1994 international bestseller by Louis de Bernières that I found impossible to make my way through. The movie duplicates exactly my experience with the book, although I must say I was thankful to be spared serial outbreaks of hearty Greek dancing.

The role plays all too easily into De Niro's worst current habits. He's dulled himself out in the service of a phony kitchen-sink pseudo-realism. For De Niro, less has become less.

I Am Sam is about as connected to the real world as Dr. Seuss's Green Eggs and Ham, from which its title is derived -- in fact, in the realism department, Seuss may have the edge.

He (Gibson) ramrods his way through the bugged-out hysterics as if he were appearing in a movie that actually made sense. What a brave heart.

He's (Gandolfini) the true star of the film, and his stardom is achieved in the most honest of ways, through the sheer brute force of his talent.

Since this is a coming-of-age movie about a poor rural kid who grapples with the big city, it would be nice if its protagonist weren’t such a lummox.

An exuberantly garish French movie.

The Grisham-esque murder-mystery plot got so scrambled that, finally, it’s anybody’s guess what the filmmakers intended.

Eddie Murphy and Robert De Niro have made any number of lame movies on their own, but there's a special wastefulness connected to their first co-starring vehicle, Showtime: It's lameness times two, and then some.

Probably the most garishly masochistic star turn since Mel Gibson's "The Man Without a Face." It could also be the most baroque chick flick ever made, the freakazoid spawn of "An Affair to Remember" and "The Matrix."

Being a cultural icon is a time-limited occupation; after a while, the culture moves on, and if you don't move with it, you end up with a movie like Anything Else.

I was looking forward to something a tad more satirical than this Hallmark card of a movie, which plugs innocence and goodness like they’re going out of style.

It’s forceful, to be sure, but in a lurid way that suggests a telenovela that’s been baking in the sun too long.

Ends with a bunch of goofy outtakes--which are as dismal as the rest of the movie. How do you decide what to leave out when there's nothing worth keeping in?

If the woman’s love is obsessive and needy, the story becomes stupid and painful, and that is what happens in The Object of My Affection, the Stephen McCauley novel that has been adapted for the movies with disastrous panache by playwright Wendy Wasserstein and director Nicholas Hytner.

Wild Things, which was written by Stephen Peters and directed by John McNaughton, lacks fantasy and flamboyance, that it lacks, precisely, wild things, and that most of it is just flat.

The new film stars The Rock, but The Wood might be a better description of his performance.

The catastrophe is so pulped and exaggerated that uninformed audiences will safely assume that global warming is just a Democratic scare tactic.

At the end of Sphere, the three principals -- Dustin Hoffman, Samuel L. Jackson, and Sharon Stone -- agree, for the good of humanity, to forget everything that has happened to them in the movie up to that point. This is a pact I can only rush to join, and with exactly the same motive.

Stupidity is also an issue in the independent film The Real Blonde, in which everyone seems to have suffered an IQ slippage of some 40 points.

Gunner Palace too often makes the grunts look like mean slackers -- precisely the opposite, one presumes, of what was intended.

Mostly stiff acting and intentionally flat, banal dialogue.

Kidman is stuck in this pomo movie about the making of a TV-show remake. It’s "Being John Malkovich for Morons."

No matter where he (Von Trier) begins, his dramatic compass drifts toward the same pole: the sexual humiliation of his heroine (How could Daddy let you do this, Bryce?). But it's hard to get too worked up over racial injustice when a director has the temperament of a Klansman.

This is a wan, shapeless, and amazingly conventional piece of work .

If there's anything to be learned from this dud, it's that when you decide to adapt an explosive property like The Da Vinci Code, playing it safe isn't safe: Either swallow hard and make the damnable thing or give it to someone with more guts and/or less to lose. Here is a saga that bombards the very foundations of Western religion. But onscreen, there seems to be absolutely nothing at stake.

Zwigoff doesn't get the tone right, and the picture goes from reasonably amusing (if crude) to puzzling to boring to (when a campus strangler enters the picture) hateful.

Is Death of a President plausible? As political prognostication, perhaps. As a TV documentary, no way in hell. What's missing is shapeliness, suspense, narrative cunning, visual flair--in short, art. Are we really to believe that a network of the future would broadcast such a barbiturate?

Exterminating Angels is meant as an autocritique--and yet the director can't get past his notion of himself as a fearlessly transgressive artist-hero, a martyr to the limitations of male gaze.

The movie is endless even at less than 90 minutes. You could use it, "A Clockwork Orange" style, as aversion therapy for seemingly incorrigible con artists.

Jumper is so in sync with the language of modern action movies that it’s possible to look past its soullessness and go with the quantum flow.

Boarding Gate was evidently made quickly and cheaply, and parts of it are fun. It’s too bad there’s no real viewer equivalent--that you can’t WATCH a film quickly and cheaply.

Forget Pacino; it’s all those red herrings that reek.

A high-toned revenge-of-nature horror picture, it's a little depressed, with only gross-out shocks (gushing jugulars, bodies run over by lawnmowers) to relieve the torpor.

This kind of reverence kills what it seeks to preserve. The movie is embalmed.

When Lee isn't doing cinematic somersaults or mining for injustice, he doesn't seem to know where to put the camera. The logistics of the plot make no sense, and he has nothing to sell but the theme of our common humanity--in which, on the evidence, I don't think he believes.

Sam Rockwell strips himself down to pure appetite and has a buoyant spirit. But the film sure doesn't. It's bizarrely flat--it has no affect.

It would be a horrific story even if underplayed, but Eastwood shoots it like a horror movie.

There are a bunch of other clunky immigrant subplots (the Jews get a comic one, the Turks a scary one), but it isn't until the massacre–cum–civics tutorial in the liquor store that Crossing Over crosses into the mythic realm of camp. What a waste. I still say it's better than "Crash," though.

Klaatu is a dream role for the beautifully blank Reeves, since he doesn’t even have to pretend to emote.

If the movie didn't pander so madly to the audience for "Sex and the City" and "Legally Blonde," it might have been a comedy touchstone instead of a cringeworthy footnote.

The documentary has its roots in a monologue in which the "guest of Cindy Sherman" (what H-O's place-card read at a gala) stood up for his personhood and made himself the center of the story—only there's NO STORY, not even insight into what made this unlikely couple click. Remove the boldface names and there's no movie; that center does not hold.

It’s all so glancing and superficial that the movie doesn’t seem to have a present tense. It goes by like coming attractions. It is, however, a treasury of bad biopic dialogue.

Von Trier has said he wanted to make a genre horror picture, but he couldn’t even come up with a decent metaphor: The climax is out of a Grade C hack-’em-up with people chasing each other through the woods with axes and knives.

Chill to the core, Haneke presents human cruelty not to make us empathize with the victims or understand the oppressors but to rub our noses in the crimes of our species. He thinks he’s held on to the subversive ideals of punk, but all I smell is skunk.

It isn’t a train wreck--a train wreck would be memorable. What’s wrong is wrong by design.

The most depressing thing about Sex and the City 2 is that it seems to justify every nasty thing said and written about the series and first feature film.

No Strings Attached is so palpably calculated that you know if the camera had pulled back a foot from the bed in which Portman and Kutcher were pretending to have sex, you'd have seen their agents standing by beaming: proud parents, proud pimps.

Amusing and annoying in the wrong ratio, maybe 30/70.

I've never seen a film in which what was actually onscreen seemed so irrelevant.

A well-polished cowpat that will confuse and bore those who know nothing about Shakespeare and incense those who know almost anything.

The Rum Diary has no mighty gonzo wind. Even with a push from its Thompson-worshipping star, Johnny Depp, it leaves our freak flag limp.

The movie spreads bad vibes like a virus.

It has been a long time since I've heard people - many people - distinctly yell, "Boo!" Usually they just growl or moan or hiss. They don't bother actually to articulate the word "Boo!" I second their statement. The ending reeks.

Believe it or not, the delicate-featured, whisper-thin actress manages to (mostly) pull it off, but the abysmal movie around her lets her down.

His performance feels so disingenuous, so forced, that an otherwise perfectly acceptable high-concept comedy comes crashing down around him.

Somehow both annoyingly overstuffed and depressingly thin.

Rock of Ages withholds nothing and makes miracles seem cheap.

The movie, written and directed by Brian Klugman and Lee Sternthal, is desultory when it's not inept, but the set-up is so good that you can't help sticking it out to the (unforgivable) end.

What a whorish film this is: Even the serial killer lectures the detective.

If anything, this series has gotten dumber and more inert as it has progressed, with this last one finally reaching over into an extended wallow in camp.

If the similarly situated "Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter" took itself too seriously, the problem with Hansel & Gretel is that it doesn't quite take itself seriously enough - which sounds insane, but it's not too much to ask that the movie go beyond its one and only joke. Instead, amid all the fake Sturm und Drang, all we hear is the movie giggling to itself.

For all of R’s allegedly humorous observations about the wasteland of the undead through which he walks, they feel tacked on — like somebody decided to turn this thing into a comedy at the last second.

Olympus Has Fallen is a disgusting piece of work, but it certainly hits its marks — it makes you sick with suspense.

If all this sounds outrageous, and extreme … don’t worry, it’s not. Provocation coupled with ineptitude doesn’t reveal the ugliness of humanity; it simply reveals the ugliness of the filmmakers themselves.

For all its attempts at wonder and spectacle and play, Epic is mostly a slog.

Were Shyamalan and Smith deliberately invoking the terror — now omnipresent in urban African-American communities — of lethal asthma attacks in children? I’m not sure how I feel about something so real and so wrenching in the context of a Grade D (unfit for human habitation) sci-fi picture like After Earth.

The people who made this movie have either seen too much mayhem -- or they haven't seen any.

Don't go to this movie on a full stomach. Better yet, don't go.

Most movies take a while to slip you into a stupor. All the Pretty Horses makes you groggy right away. Set in 1949, it's a lackadaisical series of vignettes apparently culled from a much longer movie that never made it to the screen. Be thankful for that.

Writer-director Billy Morrissette doesn't have much feeling for satire -- or for Shakespeare. This is a comedy for people who couldn't make it through the CliffsNotes.

Plays out like "Cool Hand Luke" meets "Attica," and it's quite the silliest thing.

If Rock ever comes to his senses, he can host Saturday Night Live and skewer this damp, gag-riddled civics lesson of a movie.

Fred Schepisi, the great Australian director, had the thankless task of trying to turn Jesse Wigutow’s screenplay into something with a pulse, but his finesse is wasted on this steaming heap of dysfunctionalism.

Hollywood movies are once again taking on the job that Andy Griffith–era TV sitcoms used to fill, touting homespun values in Never Land.

John Herzfeld, the writer-director, attacks America's lust for voyeuristic sensationalism by aping the very tactics he decries.

What is the great Gene Hackman doing in the dingbat con-artist comedy Heartbreakers.

Began life as a standard sci-fi horror script before mutating into the unfunny mess it now is.

A heavy dose of movie-colony narcissism posing as warts-and-all honesty.

Stupefyingly lackluster.

There's only one surgery scene, but it's the heart (and kidneys) of Turistas. The rest -- especially the incoherent action -- falls well below the mark set by the last Americans Abroad torture-porn picture, "Hostel."

In a vile-movie competition between Michael Haneke’s "Funny Games" and Vadim Perelman’s The Life Before Her Eyes, Haneke’s film would win--but only because he’s working so much harder to be noxious.

Orgy, hell: The film is like a nightmare in which you're trapped in an arcade with screens on all sides and no eyelids. Based on an elemental but happily streamlined Japanese cartoon (an anime precursor), it's an eyesore, a shambles, with incoherent action and ear-buckling dialogue.

You really have to screw it up to dishonor the memory of a movie as shitty as the original "Friday the 13th." Heads should roll.

Ridley Scott’s Robin Hood is a pompous, interminable hash.

He (Perry) has taken Shange's landmark poem cycle for seven African-American actresses, cut it up, and sewn its bloody entrails into a tawdry, masochistic soap opera that exponentially ups the "Precious" ante.

Dr. Seuss's The Lorax [sic] isn't Seussian in spirit. It's shrill and campy and stuffed with superfluous characters.

Veering between tonal and narrative extremes, it's the kind of film that makes you long for the grim pomposity of something like "Signs."

Butter essentially eats its own premise, then proceeds to bludgeon us with unfunny, unoriginal political satire.

It offers a deranged hodgepodge of tones and acting styles and strange mannerisms and affectations and narrative dead ends that feels like it was assembled by a committee of bipolar extraterrestrials.

Sinister did something I thought would be impossible: It made this lifelong horror freak abhor horror movies.

A Good Day to Die Hard is the opposite of a labor of love. It has no good lines, no crackerjack fights, and only one mildly orgasmic revenge killing. It will satisfy no one — high-, low-, or middlebrow. Die Hard is finally in its death throes.

Turgid, unfunny catastrophe.

The film is filled with actors you want to see -- just not in this thing.

Here’s a good rule of thumb: Any movie featuring a quote in its ad from the poet laureate of Great Britain—“Deeply engaging!” -- is in trouble.

Wallows in its own muck.

If you were expecting Ritchie to discover something in Madonna that no one else has, something like, say, acting talent, forget it.

Has a terrific premise that shatters almost upon arrival; no bad-boy legend trashing a hotel room could have done a more complete job.

Is it possible none of these actors read the script before they signed on? Were New Line executives perhaps too hung up on hobbits to notice how whacked out this movie is?

Isn't scary, funny-scary, or even just plain funny.

Again and again the killers linger sadistically over the dead or dying bodies of the people they've dispatched. Did Carnahan think these sickening scenes would give Smokin' Aces a moral complexity that's generally absent from this genre? I think they make the picture seem even more morally bankrupt.

What I experienced was a lot of fetid experimental-film folderol perfumed by Chopin nocturnes on the soundtrack.

Even if the film were well done, it would still be a travesty.

Apollo 18, isn't egregiously inept. It just never lives. It's 80 minutes of dead air.

Love it or hate it, Milius's original Red Dawn looks like an Akira Kurosawa masterpiece next to this latest iteration, directed by Dan Bradley.

Clumsy, obvious, preposterous, the movie will likely set the cause of woman warriors back decades.

Spike Lee’s She Hate Me is his worst movie ever--even worse than "Bamboozled," his self-serving indictment of modern minstrelsy, which at least was worth arguing about.

The movie stinks to heaven.

In Arthur, the spectacularly grating remake of Steve Gordon's 1981 P. G. Wodehouse simulation (this time, Peter Baynham miswrote, Jason Winer misdirected), Russell Brand gives a career-killing performance.