Aaron Hillis

Unstylized, inconsistent, unconvincing, and familiar to a fault.

With its cheap scares, its defiant lack of special effects, and the most blatant usage of a red coat as a stand-out prop since Schindler’s List, Godsend is as much an experiment-gone-wrong as its Frankensteinesque plot.

Despite the attempts of the Academy Award-winning makeup artist behind Mrs. Doubtfire, these doubtful misfires can't pass as white or as chicks.

Flashy, forgettable fluff.

What once was a gifted comic's fluid improvisation is now a doddering old man so embarrassing he's uncomfortable to watch, and the surrogate father-daughter needling he has with Johansson is creepy when you realize Woody the director is shooting her seductively in that skintight bathing suit.

What little anti-war critique Peirce presents -- and she has it in her, which makes it all the more dubious -- gets trampled over by jingoistic Rambo porn.

Paycheck is a bogus journey.

The story is a vapid "Casablanca"-lite.

From an audience perspective, the title’s fairly apt as well.

Blunderingly out-of-touch, star-studded embarrassment of a sequel.

Chan still sounds silly talkin' jive, the action sequences are peppy if not exactly memorable, and the gags have been sitting out long enough to make penicillin.

Paths collide and allegiances form between the good, bad, and ugly, but under the incoherent direction of Chalerm Wongpim, a clunky dullness sets in whenever the action subsides.

A thin sprinkling of exuberance and a couple of choice cameos, that's about all this underwritten and overly choreographed spectacle has to tease us with.

What begins as a pleasantly utilitarian thriller gradually decays into a mediocre suspense drama and ends as an irritatingly feeble love story.

Since the conversation is unfocused and there's no real thesis, we get a girl and a gun but not really a movie.

Between the generic shadowy cinematography and a gothic score that manages to telegraph even the film's jump-scares, there's no tangible tension by which to build an effective climax.

Shallow, witless but pretty enough French ode to Woody Allen.

Self-taught Kurdish-American filmmaker Jano Rosebiani's mostly English-language drama...is deadened by milquetoast characters, uninspired landscape photography, and no perceptible stakes.

There's very little to distinguish this from every other characterless rom-com with a demographically marketable hook.

Overlong and slack in suspense, the film is most noteworthy for its patchy accents and the late Ellen Albertini Dow (the "rapping granny" from The Wedding Singer).

There's no bite to the criminality, the motives, the acting, or filmmaking to make us care.

There's no drama illustrating the thanklessness of their jobs, and potential wisdom about fiscal instability, animal welfare, or GMOs waft by without much argument.

No bodices were harmed in veteran French filmmaker Patrice Leconte's chaste and bloodless English-language debut.

It’s all rather implausible, as is how all those cinema luminaries Barenholtz once nurtured seem to have no impact on his style-free storytelling.

The filmmakers blend tones like a child mixing fountain drinks into one unidentifiable flavor.

Filmed in 2005, the first of two Cusack widower flicks this season (the weepier and more indie "Grace is Gone" hits theaters in December) Martian Child is also a Franken-schmaltz monster of cobbled-together Cusack movie parts.

A sadistically bland entertainment that oversells its reveals and lets its suspense drip so long that it would be nice if something (anything!) happened.

So go on, pay your ten bucks and get your hate on.