Butler has the showier part, but his impersonation of the tragic hero is undercut by his weird resemblance to Soupy Sales. You start hoping that Shelton will kill somebody with a custard (or puffer-fish) pie to the face.

That imperishable affability, that eagerness to please his Hollywood bosses, allows Chan to elude many of the indignities thrown his way in The Spy Next Door. It may also be the reason he says yes to a junky movie like this.

Mostly awful.

A picture that registers between Abysmally Awful and Mildly Mediocre. Such a one would be When in Rome, which is possible to sit through without wanting to stick darts in your eyes or frag the screen. Call it medi-awful.

Sluggish, formulaic.

Take what pleasure you can from the two stars. They look great; it's just the state of romantic comedy that looks terminal.

The 70-minute movie -- which was co-written by the British-Pakistani commentator Tariq Ali, author of the 2006 study "Pirates of the Caribbean: Axis of Hope," and photographed in part by docu-doyen Albert Maysles -- is amateur night as cinema, as lopsided and cheerleadery as its worldview.

Another dreadful entry in the festering form of romantic comedy: the forced intimacy of two people who have nothing in common but hatred for each other.

For Colored Girls feels like the cinematic equivalent to putting a garish reproduction of the Sistine Chapel on the ceiling of your McMansion and calling it art.


I'm afraid the DeNiro of "The Godfather, Part II" and "Goodfellas" has mostly faded from my mind, replaced by the DeNiro of the Fockers - a grim-faced comedian who tends to make me sad.

Sanctum is a stinker, a horror movie without a visible monster.

There are gaping holes in logic throughout this sloppy, cheap-looking mess from "Disturbia" director D.J. Caruso.

Sucker Punch has vast empty patches, deserts of dead air.

The movie is like a car wreck in which no one is injured but the onlookers.

Shrill and charmless. I didn't believe a word of it. I wanted to spank it and banish it to its room.

For a soul-sucking 83 minutes, you're trapped inside the film's tiny, ugly mind.

Crowe has made a meretricious weepie that rouges the facts and defeats the attempts of Matt Damon, with his considerable charm and skill, to breathe some emotional truth into it. There's a word for the strenuous, shameless plucking of an audience's emotions that this movie traffics in: cornography.

By our count, three of the core SEALs are maimed or dead by the end. A new baby is left without her loving father. The picture ends not with a parade but with a funeral. And that may be the toughest, most lasting image in this cockamamie, Pentagon-approved war adventure.

Casa de mi Padre is flawed in that it wouldn't be particularly enticing in any language.

I didn't believe a word of the film and found myself feeling nothing but (I'm sure this wasn't Kaye's point) detachment.

Fumbles nearly every opportunity to be funny: the dialogue is flat, straining for wit it never achieves, and the pace is torpid when it should be bustling. But, the couture, darling, is hilariously divine.

The awfulness of What to Expect When You're Expecting, an ugly brew of guide book, reality television and romantic comedy, is of course, entirely to be expected.

So creaky and out of touch it inspires pity. Its opening sequences are a near marvel of confusion, mayhem and embarrassments for its actors. If it was a person, you'd worry it had dementia.

A triumph of bravado over self-regard, Brody's performance won't earn him a Oscar to place next to the one he earned for "The Pianist" nine years ago, but it's the only thing that makes High School marginally worth catching.

Though it has moments where it rises to fun-awful status, with a hideous giddiness that turns moviegoers into rubbernecking motorists at a crash site, it's mostly just awful.

Red Lights reaches for a "The Sixth Sense"-style twist and whiffs it completely.

Vapid, claustrophobic drama.

Roger Michell's movie is, pretty consistently, dreadful.

If it weren't for him (Hemsworth), surely the Red Dawn remake would have gone straight to video; he's the only person worth watching in it (oh the pain of watching the wan Isabel Lucas hoist a rocket launcher).

So Broken City stokes a lot of hopes. Too bad for all of us, the makers and the watchers alike, that it's a grimy botch.

A buddy movie that limps along, pausing for breath and pulse checks like a geriatric dutifully fulfilling doctor's orders to get some exercise.

It’s just a movie, with a dramatic arc that’s supposed to make all that mean stuff drift away into the ether as friendship is born, but it’s that look that hangs around like a bad smell.

It’s the lamest and most vacant of the quintet — though if you mistakenly think you’re buying a ticket to a demolition derby instead of a night at the movies, you’ll feel right at home.

"Trash Humpers" at least had the artistic courage of its own lunatic convictions, but Spring Breakers is all surface and sham; it’s trash about humpers.

Snitch wasn’t going to be good no matter what Johnson did; it is so poorly directed that even Academy Award winner Susan Sarandon, playing a shrewish federal prosecutor, comes off as a hack straight off a soap opera.

Star Trek is, finally, nothing but a long day's journey into ennui.

Gatsby's sad and curious history has resulted in a dull, dreadful movie. The film is faithful to the letter of F. Scott Fitzgerald's novel but entirely misses its spirit.

What aims at being terrifying is just loud and goofy.

Erin Brockovich is slick, grating and false. We bet it makes a bundle.

This is potentially near tragic material, and playing it as an all-forgiving comedy is a waste of everyone's time.

Despite Jackson's typically bravura turn, this Valentine massacre marks a step backward for the gifted director of Eve's Bayou.

It's mostly an ordeal--for actress and audience.

Occasionally funny but mostly desperate, small-minded and uncompelling.

Never achieves more than feckless amiability.

At once smug and lazy, qualities fatal to comedy.

Hopelessly overwrought and deeply dopey movie.

A ticket to Pretty Woman buys you mechanical titillation and predictable twists... Old-fashioned, assembly-line moviemaking without the old panache. [2 Apr 1990, p.70]

This Ed Wood is dead wood.

There's a definite limit to the number of moron jokes we can absorb in 100 minutes, and their movie exceeds it.

After an agonizing first half-hour designed to empty the theater, Lynch unleashes his patented perfervid style, puts the familiar dwarfs and feebs on display and elicits a nicely horrifying turn from Lee. [7 Sept 1992]

In this climate, turning even a small corner of this century's central horror into feel-good popular entertainment is abhorrent.

Half comedy, half action piece, the movie runs sputteringly on the not inconsiderable charm of its stars. But basically it is languid, indeterminate and uninvolving.

Every ambitious picturemaker should be allowed one wild misfire at no lasting cost to his reputation. Crowe (Jerry Maguire, Almost Famous) can now put this aside and go back to making good films.

It is likely to disappoint the book's acolytes and tax the patience of newcomers. [1 December 1997, p.84]

The goofy hysteria of something like "A Summer Place" was infinitely more entertaining and emotionally authentic than the distant smugness of this failed clone. [7 April 1997, p. 76]

The only thing Schumacher and his scrupulous craftsfolk forgot to give the movie was life -- the energizing spirit of wit and passion that makes scenes work and characters breathe.

The movie's central problem: a lack of alternative suspects...How the screenwriter, Todd Komarnicki, and the director, James Foley, resolve this problem is a genre travesty and an affront to their star.

I Love You to Death lacks the precision, ferocity and guts needed for black farce.

Valmont arrives stiffened by the elegant, inert formalism of Forman's direction, and chilled by Carriere's all too sober respect for his source and by their mutual determination to apply modern psychological understanding to the behavior of the principal figures.

The result is a flat, dumbly brutal movie, full of overplotted complexity and empty of all emotional resonance, except that provided by the presence of Jane Greer (the original film's dark lady, here doing a supporting role) and Richard Widmark.

One is left wondering why Williams has granted early retirement to his inner anarchist, what dark need compels a great clown to become a sad, fuzzy one in movies only Bob Dole - faking it -could love.

Adrian Lyne, late of Flashdance, directed this silliness, and three writers watched their script fall victim to the death of a thousand cuts.

Wyatt Earp drones past its logical conclusion, which is, of course, the great shoot-out. Since Earp's life uninstructively limped along after that event, so must the movie, further abusing our overtaxed patience and undertaxed intelligence.

Our natural sympathy for the Carmichaels is sabotaged by crude and careless moviemaking.

Director Fran Rubel Kuzui's frenzied mistrust of her material is almost total. Somebody should have given her a garlic necklace -- or a Miltown -- and told her to chill out.

De Niro's performance begins to seem more a matter of well-practiced gestures than real conviction, and the long, silly finale more an exercise in empty panache by director Tony Scott than a truly gripping suspense piece involving people we care about. [26 August 1996, p.61]

There is none of the affectionate respect for working-class life and values that marked the similar, and far superior, "Norma Rae," nor any of that film's sense of felt reality either.

Maybe it was fun to bathe in decadence back then. But this is no time to wallow in that mire.

Dorothy encounters a pumpkin with stick limbs, a tin soldier and something called a Gump, which looks suspiciously like your basic moosehead. They are all mechanical marvels, not actors, which means they can do anything except win an audience's heart. Still, it would defy the gifts of an Olivier to find interesting, amusing life in a context as charmless and joyless (and songless) as the one Murch and his design team have concocted. [1 July 1985, p.63]

A lot of it's real pretty, the colors and creatures and all, but these days, you know, every movie is pretty pretty. I guess the only thing that kept me glued to my seat was the gum somebody'd stuck on the upholstery. [16 July 1984, p.71]

We're left with our stifled laughter and a very long movie.

And now we have this ill wind, this feeble gust of an environmental horror story. The writer-director's disintegration from robust artistic health to narrative incoherence, from hitmaker to box-office loser, has an almost tragic trajectory. It's a saga worthy of being told by the young M. Night Shyamalan.

After sitting through this fractious fairy tale, we feel as plucked as a Christmas goose.

In its wan attempt to be raunchy, the picture fails where Judd Apatow has usually succeeded; written by three women, this is a girl's mistaken idea of an R-rated comedy.

My pregnancy lasted 41 weeks and five days, involved morning, afternoon and night sickness and culminated in 25 hours of labor capped off by an emergency C-section. Yet all that seems like a walk in the park compared with the 100 minutes I spent watching Jennifer Lopez mug her way through The Back-Up Plan.

The shaky-cam as used in "Cloverfield" and the Paul Greengrass "Bourne" films, and in TV shows from "NYPD Blue" to "24" to "The Office," is worse than amateurism; it's fake amateurism, the visual equivalent of a comedian pretending to have Parkinson's.

The proceedings get so slow and saccharine that viewers will relishes the film's moments of redeeming idiocy. In one of them, Marlena whispers to Jacob, "Bring Rosie to my tent and don't tell anyone" - as if the roustabouts wouldn't notice a 12-ft.-tall, 10,000-lb. creature striding down the midway.

Courteney Cox is good as a sexy, hard-pressed single mom, but she alone can't redeem the prevailing stupidity.

If this retro crime comedy had been a Broadway play, it would have closed out of town.

Too many special effects, many of them stomach churning; too much pornographically arranged death.

One of the worst messes in years.

Few movies have spread their fibs or facts as clumsily as this one. There's not an emotionally plausible moment in the picture.

An intellectual and a sensualist, Cronenberg graces Crash with philosophical musings, acres of pretty flesh and even more penis talk than on some 8 o'clock sitcoms. For all that, Crash doesn't work.

Director Joe Johnston's elaborately dressed kids' movie--about a board game that sucks its players into a perilous jungle overrun by lions, rhinos, monkeys, crocodiles and spiders--spends so much time on the how of special effects that it neglects the why of characterization.

What must be said is that the new movie is simply awful: poorly structured, vulgarly written, insipidly directed, monotonously performed.

Conan is a sort of psychopathic Star Wars, stupid and stupefying.

Beverly Hills Cop III is just going through the motions, without comic conviction, surprises or suspense. [6 June 1994, p.66]

Judged purely by what director Walter Hill has put on the screen, Another 48 Hrs. is a movie mainly about the several pretty ways that glass shatters when bullets or bodies are propelled through it. [25 June 1990, p.77]

Every character, every scene, is marred by the film's double view, which oscillates between sympathy and farce.

Coming to America seems to be more career move than movie. After the raucousness of Beverly Hills Cop II and the raunchiness of Eddie Murphy Raw, the star apparently wants to assert his claim on the currently vacant title of America's Sweetheart. His aspirations must be bigger and badder than that. We want -- may actually need -- something more from this gifted man than Eddie Murphy Tame. [4 July 1988 p.66]

The movie veers uneasily from not-funny comedy to not-persuasive melodrama. Murphy forgets that the dialogue in old-fashioned crime pictures was as highly stylized as the settings. In place of sharply polished wisecracks, he gives us the steady mutter of the witless, unfelt obscenities that are the argot of our modern mean streets. [27 Nov 1989, p.88]

This movie could induce terminal boredom in adults and rot the minds of the young. [26 August 1985, p.64]

The bad news for everyone else is that the colorfully named characters from Clue remain flat enough to be stored in a box, and that all three endings are unpersuasive. [23 Dec 1985, p.79]

Director John Huston offers production numbers full of empty extravagance, a host of familiar characters (like Punjab and the Asp) with little to do - and a chorus of baby Mormans knowingly strutting their stuff, breaking the sound and charm barriers.

Worst-in-breed not only for this year, but very likely in living memory.

Suffice it to say that these morons have, quite simply, turned The Day the Earth Stood Still on its head and what's falling out of its pockets in that upended state is a stream of junk.

Was Red Riding Hood masterminded by a cadre of particularly silly 11-year-olds undergoing withdrawal from Twilight? That's the only excuse for a movie this dopey.

Occasionally curious moviegoers will discover an especially rotten specimen of the genus Cinema stinkibus... a work of ur-awfulness, counterbrilliance and antigenius. Your Highness, the new medieval-fantasy farce starring and co-written by Danny McBride, is such a movie.

New Year's Eve may be the ugliest movie of the year, from the garish lighting to the heavy make up and bad costumes.

The worst movie in living memory.

Obscene level of incompetence, excessive inanity in the story line, gross negligence of the viewer's intelligence, a prurient interest in the quick buck. [2 Oct 1995]

One of the most execrable movies ever made. [6 March 1995, p.100]

Wearying, stupefying, dumber than dumb, When Nature Calls would be a career ender for Carrey--except that a zillion people have seen it. Stop this, folks. It'll only encourage him.

A stupefying shambles, Two of a Kind just noses out "Staying Alive" for Worst Picture of the Year.

Talk about off-casting: brittle-romantic Nora Ephron writing a high-concept comedy about a Mafioso's troubles when the Federal Witness Security Program plunks him down in white-bread suburbia; humorless Herbert Ross directing it; Steve Martin playing the gangster. Talk about miscalculation. [3 Sept 1990, p.72]

Cocktail, has no reason for being other than to market the Cruise charm like a cheap celebrity perfume. It is a bottle of rotgut in a Dom Perignon box. [8 August 1988, p.68]

Untraceable really is disgraceable. It's bad enough when a movie offers up atrocity scenes that would make the Nanking soldiers seem like Hannah Montana; it's repellent when the movie dresses up the sadism in a moral message that condemns the very weakness it is exploiting.

One of the worst movies I've ever seen.

Surely the worst botch of a fantasy epic.

More than 24 hours has passed since I watched the new Adam Sandler movie Jack and Jill and I am still dead inside. It made me feel as if comedy itself were a dirty thing.