A bad movie -- really a terrible movie -- with a daring idea behind it. And it's had the sort of crummy luck that, no matter what you think of it, can get you steamed.

I can't remember ever feeling so glad that a movie was finally over. Lucas may have held my imagination hostage for two hours, but reclaiming it afterward wasn't hard at all.

It is a testament to our national determination that Nathan is not stymied by his almost complete lack of talent, his slipshod timing or his crude comic sensibility.

Seems best suited to all the couch-potato swinging dicks who get off watching the police on "Cops" keep the public safe from people in possession of marijuana.

An excruciatingly amateurish production.

The entire movie looks as if it were processed in the toilet of a Tijuana jail cell. Shot by Dariusz Wolski in colors that are bleached out, over bright and flat, The Mexican is the ugliest-looking major studio release in recent memory.

Long before Serving Sara drags its butt to the finish line, you wish you were watching a different race.

Such a blatant imitation of Adrian Lyne's Reaganite thriller that the only thing you can be grateful for is that it's far too clumsy to get people arguing about it or taking it seriously.

It's not just our emotions that are being played on here, it's not just our intelligence being insulted because of Ron Howard and Akiva Goldsman's presumption that we won't have any interest in a character whom it's not always possible to like. It's John Nash's life, being turned into an Oscar machine and an easy way to jerk tears.

It takes a very clever schoolboy to make a movie as elaborately empty as Guy Ritchie's Snatch.

Doesn't seem geared to kids at all: It's so adult that it's massively boring.

Such weak medicine. Sure enough, it goes down. Keeping it down is another matter.

Shows about a third less craft than its all-too-lame predecessor, and it's only half as funny. If those are figures you can deal with, enter the theater at your own peril.

A thoroughly inept piece of moviemaking. You're more likely to find a ham sandwich at a Passover seder than to find a laugh in this picture.

Ben Affleck provides a charismatic star turn, but John Frankenheimer's out-of-season heist thriller is dead on arrival.

If The Cell were six minutes long it would blow your mind. At two hours, it's a disordered muddle of hellacious highs and pedestrian lows.

This premise could, just maybe, make for a decent thriller, but everything about Murder by Numbers is so flavorless and rote, so devoid of real suspense and human interest, that you never suspect for a moment that the answers are likely to be engaging.

The fact that its sound and photography are gracefully crafted, or that fragments of a tolerable film are visible here and there, only makes its dumb-ass, romance-novel version of tragedy worse. This is one of the most badly botched mainstream movies I've seen in years.

Despite all their seamed stockings and Wonder Bras, the Reagan High girls are as far removed from their sexuality as Jawbreaker is from comedy.

Who would have thought that Cameron Crowe had a movie as bad as Vanilla Sky in him? It's a punishing picture, a betrayal of everything that Crowe has proved he knows how to do right.

The movie is crass and vulgar almost beyond belief.

It's like receiving a box of Valentine's chocolates in which someone has deliberately hidden ground glass. Flee.

The embodiment of every conservative paranoid's slathering fantasies about Paula Jones, Vince Foster and Whitewater.

Jolie is far too good for this tripe but she does give the film its only believable moments, and for the first half, her concentration makes you watch her intently.

Anti-Americanism is a small matter when a movie is anti-human. Dogville is as total a misanthropic vision as anything control freak Stanley Kubrick ever turned out.

The Negotiator slogs on for two hours and 20 minutes, and there's hardly a real laugh or a genuine thrill in it.

The movie not only approaches a level of shamelessness you have to see to disbelieve, it does it in a manner that's both inept and crass.

Punishingly dull.

A compendium of every cliché from every bad boxing melodrama ever made, Million Dollar Baby tries to transcend its cornball overfamiliarity with the qualities that have long characterized Eastwood's direction -- it's solemn, inflated and dull.

The most gutless and naive political drama of recent memory.

It's hard to remember a movie that has asked us to care, without giving us reason to, about a character who is so thoroughly and relentlessly a prick.

It stinks pretty bad, but not so bad you'd go out of your way to avoid it.

Portman and Judd aren't responsible for the mendacious and finally repulsive sentimentality of Where the Heart Is, but by the end their wholesome glow seemed contaminated by it, and that's a shame.

Martin Lawrence, no Eddie Murphy, takes a reheated cross-dressing shtick and turns it into something to elate your inner fourth-grader.

I've never seen anything crazier than Palindromes. You can read that as praise if you're that sort of person, but I don't mean it that way.

Extravagant in movie terms but stingy in emotional ones, it embodies all of Spielberg's bad impulses and almost none of his good ones: It's a grand display of how well he knows how to work us over, and yet the desperation with which he tries to get to us is repulsive.

It's ostensibly about adults, but there's nothing remotely adult about it.

There's nothing offhand or spontaneous-feeling about Nanny McPhee; it's a highly mechanical piece of work, and its potentially delightful details are wasted.

It's lower on the food chain than a mere exploitation picture because it clings so desperately to the notion that it's a serious movie about violence; it doesn't even have enough integrity to serve up cheap, sick thrills for their own sake.

Both the performance and the movie around it are virtually incomprehensible.

It's tempting to write off Because I Said So as just another dumb, bad comedy, made yesterday and forgotten tomorrow. But no matter how negligible this particular picture is, it's time to look a little deeper. If these are the only kinds of roles we can conceive for actresses who have grown into their faces, as Keaton has, it's no wonder so many younger performers are seeking the knife.

The picture is just a catalog of strained camera moves and preprogrammed gags, with no wit or style.

Any moron can make a bad movie. But it takes a special breed of schemer to make a picture as shameless as The Bucket List.

Watching Streep and her two BFFs, played by Christine Baranski and Julie Walters, grinning and giggling their way through Mamma Mia! I felt I was being thoroughly, and unenjoyably, punished.

It's impossible to tell what's going on at any given moment in Tomb of the Dragon Emperor; it's even harder to care about being able to tell.

The whole vibe is so shrill and frantic that the truly accomplished actresses, like Bening and Bergen, are left to flounder. The less nuanced ones -- that would be you, Debra Messing -- are, to use the idiom of the movie, as pleasant to watch as a bikini wax is to feel.

A jumble of spare parts and leftover dialogue, as if it had been assembled out of unused bits of every movie where an unknown whatzit threatens our way of life and the government goes into full institutional pants-crapping panic mode.

It's both slack and bloated; I've been to Catholic wedding masses that had more zip. I think it clocked in at fewer than 90 minutes, but it seemed to last longer than most marriages do.

Disposable crap.

Neither funny nor honest. The exact opposite of a retreat, it's merely exhausting.

It's a limp romantic drama that occasionally lifts its drowsy head to attempt a wan smile, a picture that starts out being harmlessly dull and ends, somehow, in a place that feels insultingly manipulative.

So contemptuous toward its own characters, and its audience, that it chokes off any visceral thrills it might have offered. The movie substitutes calculation for brains, and the filmmakers seem to think we'll all be too stupid to notice.

A perfect storm of a movie disaster: You've got good actors fighting a poorly conceived script, under the guidance of a director who can no longer make the distinction between imaginativeness and computer-generated effects. The result is an expensive-looking mess that fails to capture the mood, and the poetry, of its source material.

Just when you think your jaw can't drop any lower in appalled amazement, comes a romantic comedy so lunkheaded and ill-conceived that it makes your average, idiotic Kate Hudson-Matthew McConaughey outing look like the reincarnation of Hepburn and Grant.

Both mean-spirited and self-conscious. It's all style and no soul, which wouldn't be a problem if its style at least gave us something to look at, or to laugh at. But From Paris With Love, filmed on location in Paris, has a raggedy, greasy, dingy look: It's the movie equivalent of an unbathed, unshaven French boyfriend (the bad kind). It thinks it's suave, but it just smells bad.

A Garry Marshall movie has to be funny in order to be anything at all, and this one is so deeply involved with its pseudo-meaningful roundelay of beautiful but inexplicably lovelorn people as to be teeth-grindingly, mind-warpingly boring.

A comedy of remarriage that makes divorce look like a state of grace.

Maybe I'm expecting too much of Cyrus. But The Last Song rests heavily on her alleged appeal, and I can't remember the last time I came across such a singularly charmless teenage performer. I hesitate to even use the word "actress."

The guys abuse each other in what's meant to be fraternal affection but feels more like the discomfort of being stuck together in a terrible movie.

Saw 3-D is in 3-D. Really, really bad 3-D.

That's the culture we live in, where the once-proscribed Pleasure Principle has become iron law and where the recycled, bloated, fish-belly emptiness of something like TRON: Legacy carries boredom to extravagant new heights.

It was boring and silly but not atrociously bad. No, that's much too glowing; allow me to back up and rephrase. It is atrociously bad, basically.

Can someone explain what Nicolas Cage and Nicole Kidman are doing in a chaotic and sadistic home-invasion thriller, shot in digital colors so radioactive they appear to have leaked out of the Fukushima nuclear plant?

J. Edgar turns out to be one of the worst ideas anybody's ever had, a mendacious, muddled, sub-mediocre mess that turns some of the most explosive episodes of the 20th century into bad domestic melodrama and refuses to take any clear position on one of American history's most controversial figures.

A moment of silence, please, for Kate Hudson's career.

One could and perhaps should use scare quotes around "intellectual" when it comes to someone who would crank out a piece of campaign-season partisan hackwork this crude and sloppy. (By this standard, James Carville looks like Immanuel Kant.)

Seriously, this is one of the strangest and most painful films in recent memory.

Pretty much three well-staged action sequences strung together with the dumbest imaginable connective tissue.

It's a movie barely fit for a cretin, much less a King. If you hear a door slam in the theater, you'll know that Elvis has left the building -- in disgust.

Sandler deserves to be damned to the pits of hell for this witless masturbatory comedy.

The directorial debut of the writer of "The Usual Suspects" keeps tossing the genre hand grenades one might expect, but they all wind up duds.

Startlingly inept from start to finish -- it's atrociously written, poorly shot and edited and fatally unfocused.

It's so uncomplicated you could go out for spaghetti after the first 10 minutes and slip back into your seat just in time for the last 10, and you wouldn't feel you'd missed a thing, save a rumble or two.

There isn't a frame of The Musketeer that's believable even as a Hollywood re-creation of a fantasy world. It's conventionally picturesque, except in the nighttime and interior scenes, which are dark to the point of glaucoma.

This awkward fable of ghetto redemption mixes painfully earnest message-delivery with occasional scenes of brutal violence.

Classic Rudolph: a tone of sweet-edged, slightly kooky melancholy, a terrific cast mostly left to its own devices and a few intriguing moments. Not, I'm sorry to say, a movie.

Doesn't quite have the goods.

One of those strained caper movies that's hardly any fun to watch and begins to vaporize from your memory minutes after it ends.

The film flails incoherently from set to set, trying to be kicky and madcap and pop, but with no sense of the show's casual acceptance of the absurd.

This one's a pile of crap that won't start.

Let's be real clear about this: You've got to be suffering from some major trash-culture brain damage to enjoy a movie like Ready to Rumble.

Unwatchable.

A lugubrious sub-"Exorcist" demonic possession film that's absolutely no fun at all.

A stupid, brutal and nonsensical picture.

It should have been sent straight to video. As a courtroom drama, it stumbles from one ludicrous howler to another. Were the movie's "legal technical advisers" on another planet while the rest of the world was learning about legal procedure courtesy of the O.J. trial?

A dumb and sloppy movie.

The disgrace of Steal This Movie isn't just that it fails to do justice to its subject, but that, as a movie, it's barely competent.

Isn't dubbed. But it sure feels like it. The characters open their mouths and their lips don't seem to be shaping the right words -- you can't believe any human beings would ever utter such ludicrous dialogue, with so little conviction.

Mildly grisly, assaultively noisy and tremendously boring.

All Only the Strong Survive has to offer are scraps, and it's a sad thing to sit through a movie billed as a tribute to a group of terrific performers and to come away with nothing more than scraps.

Not even court-ordered rehab could save this stumbling drunk of a picture.

There's a vacancy in The Million Dollar Hotel, and it's between Wim Wenders' ears.

I desperately wanted Glitter to be trashy and over-the-top, to be so courageously awful. As it is, it isn't nearly bad enough to be that kind of good. It's simply there, all dressed up with no place to go, and that's the most damning thing you could say about it.

The point, I think, is the sheer callous inappropriateness of comedy existing within the physical reality of the camps -- even the imagined reality of a movie.

This fantasy crap, fake-o effects and all, betrays princes of dice, masters of graph and wielders of bong.

Leaves you feeling as if you've been alternately milked and bitch-slapped. Its manipulation is so clumsy and obvious -- and, ultimately, it goes so far astray from its original guiding principles -- that it leaves you feeling dangled and dazed.

It's an A-list movie for the most brain-dead elements of the action-movie crowd.

Who cares about old guys and young girls? This handsome romantic slop finds other problems.

One of those movies that makes you feel as if the national IQ was dropping while you're watching it. It's the return of all the homiletic clichés about an America that never existed.

This clunky TV remake is stiffer than an iron curtain.

I understand how hard it is for parents to find movies to take their kids to, but the thought of them or their children getting stuck at this stinker galls me. Summer vacation feels short enough as it is.

Takes so many wrong turns it's barely an also-ran. It isn't the next best thing at all. Not even close.

It's a terrible movie, stuck in plot idiocies and big, noisy set pieces like a tire mired in mud.

It's a performance that screams "Look at me!" louder and bigger than an elephant dick. And every bit as subtle.

For sheer ineptitude, crassness and unwatchability, American Wedding takes the cake.

Not 10 minutes into the smeary mess that is The Man in the Iron Mask, the only sensible question to ask yourself is, "What am I doing here?"

It's dispiriting to see good actors doing smart, solid work with so much unadulterated garbage swirling around them. Scott's art is also death, and we, the audience, are the ones he's jabbing at with his ruthless paintbrush. It's about time someone told him where to stick it.

There may be filmmakers whose own vision is vast enough to take on Thackeray's, but Mira Nair isn't one of them. Her new film of Vanity Fair is a disaster. Scene by scene and moment to moment, it's a woeful misreading of the book.

Toback has hit a new low. The candor and shrugging good humor Toback, at his best, used to show has been replaced by a repellent slurpiness: The whole picture seems coated with a slimy sheen of drool.

There's nothing scarier than a group of hormone-crazed 20-somethings, but this sequel isn't much more than a footnote of a footnote.

As you sit through the interminable two-hours-plus that constitute The Fifth Element -- a colossally stupid, overbearingly pompous new movie by Luc Besson -- you can expect to become acquainted with boredom on the most elemental level.

The movie is terrible, but made with verve and sincerity, all of it pointed in the wrong direction.

The misanthropic nadir of the director's crash-and-burn career.

Offensive to Hindus. Never mind the Hindus; The Love Guru is offensive to pretty much anyone with a brain.

With Yes Man, Carrey has bled the well dry, doing everything he knows how to do, over and over again, just to prove that he still knows how to do it. It's exhilarating to see brilliance in a comic; but by the time you start smelling it, the game is over.

Overall Seven Pounds is too heavy-handed and maudlin to be comprehensible, let alone moving. The real shocker is that not even Smith can rescue it.

One of the most dreadfully unnecessary movies in recent memory.

Until that final, inevitable kiss, we have to listen to them, and the clatter of their crude, brainless exchanges is unbearable.

It's possible Hill has a style, of sorts. But he doesn't work from the heart, or from the gut, as a good comedy director generally needs to. He operates from one guiding question: "How disturbing can we make this sh**?"

Indeed, this movie's offensive on many levels, but Arabs and Muslims don't get to feel special. It relies on stupid stereotypes because it's a stupid movie that's offensive to virtually everyone.

They kill me, these guys. No, seriously. If they make any more of these movies, they might as well kill me.

Inside of five minutes I felt an urgent, blinding hatred for almost all its grotesquely overprivileged characters.

Gingival surgery would be more fun than watching this brain-draining, spirit-sucking attempt at a stoner spoof, which combines the cutting edge of frat-boy wit, the excitement of a mid-'80s made-for-TV action flick and the authenticity of a Renaissance Faire held in an abandoned field behind a Courtyard by Marriott.

It's a dumb, ugly and, most of all, painfully unfunny movie.

A fourth-rate Hollywood thriller that bungles a lot of thievery from better movies, is entirely bereft of suspense or excitement and features a leading man who absolutely, positively cannot act.

As stupefyng as Idle Hands is while the title appendage is still attached to Anton, it goes into a whole other realm of godawfulness when the demon digits take off on their own.

The worst movie of the new millennium.

The most depressing movie I've seen all year; in fact, I'm hard-pressed to name a movie aimed specifically at women that has ever made me feel as insulted and disgusted.

One of the worst movies you'll ever see -- but it's still not worth seeing.

I would rather feed Jesse Helms a rancid peanut butter sandwich, and then have him slowly lick my face off, than sit through House on Haunted Hill again.

Summer's most shameless piece of trash since "Wild Things."

Almost as degrading as any unmarked video you can buy in the back alleys of Manila, and, in its pseudo-significance and arty pretension, it's a lot less honest. I'm heartily sorry I had to poison an entire evening with it.

I think you'd have to be comatose or mentally incompetent not to find Enough ludicrous.

Penn's portrayal strikes me as equally insensitive. It's the nightmare performance of 2001.

I haven't had a worse time at the movies this summer.

Hannibal, which is very likely the worst film of this year and quite possibly the next, achieves what no movie I can recall ever even attempting: It somehow manages to be both repugnant and boring.

If you've ever sat in a jet waiting on the runway, feeling it lumbering along in place and then bucking and shaking when it's cleared for take-off, you know what it's like to sit through Air Force One.

As a symbol of what some filmmakers and some studios think the public will buy, it's a horrific piece of work. How dare anyone put this piece of c--- in front of me. How dare anyone put it in front of YOU.

Trying to figure out just what went wrong in the creation of a movie as dreadful as this may ultimately be as futile as trying to ascertain what might lie on the "other side" of a black hole.

The special effects look model-shop cheesy, as if they'd been created using a handful of action figures and MacPaint, and the rest of the picture has the flat visual finish and phoned-in performances of a TV movie.

Speed 2 is such an inept piece of direction that it's anybody's guess whether De Bont understands how to convey where two characters are in spatial relation to each other or in relation to the action.

One unbelievably crappy movie.

It's merely nutty, a picture that appears to have been made by an individual who has fallen off the edge of reason. Watching it was misery.

May be the worst romantic comedy I've ever seen, although I hesitate to make such a resolute pronouncement about a movie that's so barely even THERE.

This isn't a picture filled with wonder and a sense of fun; it's so jaded and crass that I almost wonder if it's a highly unscientific experiment designed to gauge how little audiences will settle for these days. Manic and multicolored, Speed Racer is an excess of nothingness.

It's time to start recognizing that not all escapist entertainment is created equal. And that some of it isn't even entertainment. Miss March is, to use the vernacular of the escapist moviegoer, the biggest pile of crap I've seen in ages.

"Morgans" does bear the distinction of boasting the sourest cast ever assembled outside of a Lars Von Trier production.

What's really depressing is that some viewers may be deluded into thinking there's something of substance in "Centipede II," when it's more like a DC Comics version of Pier Paolo Pasolini's notorious "Salò, or The 120 Days of Sodom," with the sweeping condemnation of Western culture stripped out and the mean-spiritedness cranked to 11. If you want to check this out for a stomach-turning giggle, don't let me stop you. But please, let's not pretend it means more than that.