Chris Kaltenbach

Tedious almost beyond endurance.

Look, I love dogs. But this film tried my patience almost beyond endurance.

Hands-down, the best James Brolin-in-an-Italian-accent movie ever.

Its pleasures are slight and fleeting, and so many movies have done what it does, and done it much better, that there's nothing to get even remotely excited about - much less to draw audiences into theaters.

A ham-fisted cautionary tale of religious fanaticism that would have been hooted out of even 19th-century theaters as melodrama of the most lurid kind.

Lame.

The only question is how many levels of meaning can be plumbed from the phrase "Let's party!"

Manages to pretty much ignore all the strengths of the earlier film while exacerbating all its faults.

There's way too much blarney in Evelyn.

A story about unmotivated characters trapped in an ill-conceived plot.

Malkovich acts as if he's doing Shakespeare, pontificating, enunciating and generally overreaching.

About as clunky as a movie gets. It lurches from scene to scene with no sense of narrative grace, gives its roster of prominent actors nothing to work with and screeches to a halt with all the grace of a sprinter whose shoelaces have been tied together.

Method Man and Redman just don't have the comic timing to pull off 90 minutes at front-and-center.

Torque isn't a movie, it's an 81-minute soda commercial.

So, here's the problem with The Butterfly Effect: It's silly.

What it is not is funny.

It's supposed to be funny watching these two characters and wondering who'll be the first to start acting her age, but it's really just pitiful, watching two talented actresses...given so little to work with.

Formulaic 'Chuck & Larry' is a crass, unfulfilling effort.

So what do we have here? Lots of cars going very fast.

Just plain bad.

If you do insist on seeing this film, don't arrive late: the clever, animated opening credits are a stitch, suggesting a sprightliness of touch and winsome wickedness of tone that's missing from the rest of the movie.

A mess.

At least The Honeymooners is not one of those remakes that looks bad compared to the original. It's just bad, period.

There's a funny movie struggling inside of Dickie Roberts: Former Child Star. Too bad it never gets out.

Formless, feckless, mindless, directionless and at times stunningly humorless.

There's little that's special about Underclassman, certainly nothing that Murphy and Eddie Griffin haven't done better in movies far funnier than this.

A mess, but it means well.

There's nothing about The Wedding Date that isn't forced or labored; there's only a stubborn determination to embrace every cliche and make sure the stars photograph well.

What we have here is a film where the first 20 minutes are repeated again and again until everything comes to an absolutely predictable end.

Garfield the comic strip stopped being funny about 10 years ago. Garfield the Movie makes it to about the 10-minute mark before tedium sets in.

Most of the humor is both determinedly puerile and unfunny, performed by a generic cast.

This sophomoric film has little to do with Elvis, and everything to do with putting as much carnage as possible on screen under the guise of art, poetry, choreography, taxidermy.

A very funny movie ... in some alternate universe, maybe.

Director John Stockwell ("Blue Crush") and screenwriter Michael Ross have only two things in mind: titillation and giving young audiences something gross to whisper about in school the next day. On that limited basis, Turistas may well succeed. But that's nothing to brag about.

Alone in the Dark will be the worst movie of 2005. The idea that anything could be worse is the only genuine scare the movie has to offer.

To be fair, Friedkin does amp up the tension when called for. If only it were all for some purpose, or in service to a story that actually went somewhere.

The animals in Road Trip are pretty hilarious; as a five-minute short on cable TV's "Animal Planet," this film would be a stitch.

What can you say about a film where Carmen Electra's performance is one of the high points?

The astonishing brio and verve of street dancing deserves better than this.

It's hard to go wrong with a movie full of talking dogs. But the makers of Beverly Hills Chihuahua sure try.

Heaven knows what the suits at Disney were thinking, for what they ended up with was a bland Jackie Chan movie and a lifeless travelogue.

Oh, this is all so terribly not good.

Tries to be both poignant and wicked, and succeeds at neither.

No visual style, amateur effects.

Painstakingly painful.

Simply go out and rent the original. In the thin ranks of killer-power-tool flicks, it's still the standard to beat.

Congratulations, Renny Harlin. You've successfully exorcised all the horror out of The Exorcist.

Bottom line: Juwanna Mann is a drag - in every sense of the word.

Here's hoping your own dreams of Africa are more interesting -- and better acted -- than this movie.

It's hard to figure who this picture is supposed to be for. Although a cartoon, it's way too mean-spirited and crass for young kids (parents, be forewarned!). And the idea that any substantial number of adults would find this sort of thing entertaining ... let's pray civilization hasn't come to that.

The Dukes of Hazzard may mark some sort of nadir when it comes to movies made from TV shows. It's an overlong, under-thought and numbingly one-dimensional extrapolation of a TV show whose pleasures were, at best, marginal. See it at your own peril.

As each male-female relationship works itself out in ways either contrived or predictable, here's betting you wind up more disappointed than enlightened.

An underlit, overlong, underwritten and overloud albatross of a movie.

Strings of four-letter words are a poor substitute for dialogue, and it's not until the movie is almost over that someone realizes there's no reason, other than assumed macho posturing, for Cube's character to go after these bad guys so hard.

A violent, dumb, offensive mess.

It's hard, bordering on impossible, to evaluate this movie without stepping on people's beliefs.

I know Empire is supposed to be a movie, but for a while, I thought I was listening to one of those talking books.

All this is out of the Haunted House 101 textbook.

Regrettably, Bones is what passes for horror these days: Throw a lot of graphic, gore-filled, darkly lit stuff on the screen, and see what sticks. Discerning moviegoers should pass on the opportunity.

Kids will get antsy, wondering why their favorite characters disappear for long stretches of the film, while adults will wonder just when this scattershot approach to storytelling will congeal into something resembling coherence.

Nothing in this film -- even Robin Williams, alas -- is funny.

An awful film about an awful time.

Taxi's only saving grace is an inexplicable, though delightful, turn by Ann-Margret as Andy's ever-tipsy mom. She's a stitch, and about 100 times better than her surrounding material.

This is a movie for genre fans only; there's not an aspect to it that should appeal to the rest of the world. It's neither original nor inventive, and while its young cast works hard, there's not even a standout performance worth recommending.

Ghost Ship would have been so much better if they'd just let the ship do more of the acting.

Disney is creatively bankrupt and bereft of ingenuity -- especially in its live-action films. [25 Dec 1998, p.8F]

Whatever spark the newer Precinct 13 has comes from its supporting players.

A hollow, relentless mess.

Christmas with the Kranks is so calculated that it's pathetic, a warm-hearted holiday greeting card with not one scintilla of honest emotion inside.

Greenaway's film is about making people's jaws drop.

A film that really has no idea what it wants to be, so it tries a little of everything, and does nothing very well.

An odd little movie. And not in a good way.

A return to form -- bad form. Lifeless, unimaginative and almost determinedly uninspired, it's paint-by-numbers filmmaking at its dreariest.

Stupid. Illogical. Simplistic. Pandering. And those are its good points.

But The Ugly Truth can't escape its own ugly truth, that the central characters are written to extremes both ludicrous and tiring.

The vocal canines appear for about 30 humorous seconds, in a dream sequence, and are then never seen again. Unfortunately, the same can't be said about the rest of the film, which runs an additional 98.5 excruciating minutes.

The material has a definite "haven't-we-been over-this-before?" feel.

The residents of Beauty Shop never quite gel. Instead of camaraderie, the feeling is one of bare tolerance.

Lackluster in narrative and in no way original or innovative, the movie is pretty much generic Disney, a film about universal brotherhood stitched together from parts that worked better in other films.

Kids, except for the very youngest, are going to be bored.

Crush is the kind of movie that gives friendship a bad name.

Go see Crossroads if you want to hear Britney sing or see her wear next-to-nothing. But otherwise, avoid this train wreck at all costs.

Catwoman is a mess, there's really no other way to describe it... It doesn't work as high art, and it's too ponderous to be truly high camp. As a fashion shoot for the pin-up crowd, however, it's the cat's meow.

Doing a sequel to "The Mask" without Jim Carrey sounds like a really bad idea. As Son of the Mask proves, it is.

The latest failed Hollywood attempt to make a movie from a video game.

A misfire in almost every direction.

Two of the most insistently unlikable movie creations to afflict audiences in some time, a pair of self-obsessed anti-romanticists who spend some two decades doing stupid things at each other's behest. They also whine a lot.

The story is without an original thought, the characters little more than caricatures (unappealing ones, at that) and the filmmaking so uninspired that it's hard to imagine anyone embracing it with anything more than a shrug and a wonder why they didn't wait to catch it on TV.

A pastiche of sadistic horror-movie cliches with minor traces of wit but major overflows of perversity.

17 Again errs not only by covering such well-trod ground, but also by doing so through a main character - played by a game but ill-served Zac Efron - who's about as dense as they come.

Watching this movie, with Diane Keaton cast as the ne plus ultra of irritating, overbearing mothers, is roughly the equivalent of listening to fingernails on a chalkboard for nearly two hours.

Misfires on nearly every possible level.

It's relentlessly dumb and relentlessly humorous, and those aren't the adverbs it was after.

This movie doesn't play; it just lies there, waiting to be kicked around by anyone unfortunate enough to have shelled out good money to see it.

At least "White Chicks" had a point behind the humor.

Sttrictly movie-of-the-week stuff. And not very good stuff, at that.

If John Witherspoon is among the funniest men in America, as many of his fellow comics say, why is he so painful to watch here?

The best thing about Black Knight is when it finally says goodnight.