Aaron Hillis

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.

This terminally ill, terminally awful dramedy marks a sad cinematic milestone: The Bucket List is the first film in history to feature a truly wretched Nicholson performance -- and we're not talking about the character he plays.

This one's been sitting on shelves for two years -- never good news -- and you can almost see the dollar signs in the cast's eyes.

It’s terrible enough to torture the damned.

Not even within earshot of a masterpiece, Man on Fire, based on its ratio of production costs to quality alone, may prove to be the worst movie of 2004.

Fails in what amounts to its only distinct purpose: to smugly push the envelope of depravity farther than anyone else.

A clumsy, dreadfully preposterous and pedestrian thriller that seems to believe loud noises are the same as good frights.

Not to chastise the movie for simply being rude or crude -- since "The Wedding Crashers" proved that hormone-raging '80s throwbacks can still be harmless fun -- but this contemptible sex-com redux should be taken to task for how its infantilized yucks give license to entertaining closed-minded acceptances of very real human ugliness.