Chris Kaltenbach

The most amazing fact about Supercross is that it took three people to write it. Two chimpanzees with a typewriter could have done just as good a job.

When Catch That Kid isn't careening from plot point to plot point, events turning on unseen dimes, it's trying to ingratiate itself with stunts and chases that its young audience have seen done better on Saturday-morning TV.

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

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.

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 listless, disjointed collegiate opposites-attract comedy.

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

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

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.

Painstakingly painful.

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.

Oh, this is all so terribly not good.

An awful film about an awful time.

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.

There's way too much blarney in Evelyn.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

A misfire in almost every direction.

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.