Chris Kaltenbach

Meandering, forgettable trifle.

The movie is so confused about itself that it comes across as toneless, a bunch of characters wandering around in a story no one is controlling.

Fans of anime probably will find Vampire Hunter D plenty thrilling. Non-fans, or those not familiar with the genre, will enjoy the film's gothic atmosphere, but may wonder what all the fuss is about.

Good intentions are no substitute for good filmmaking, and Spy Kids 3D is nothing more than a retread in flashier clothing.

Doesn't display a single deep thought, or even a middlingly profound one.

Will keep kids happy and parents mildly entertained.

The cast doesn't impress, the story doesn't compel and the characters are too bland to make people remember them.

Fitfully thrilling.

The whole cast is good. It's too bad all that good work isn't in service to a better, or certainly more original, script.

Paycheck is one of those movies in which all the ingenuity went into the original idea and none into its execution.

The Legend of Bagger Vance is nothing but "The Natural" with Will Smith playing the bat.

The movie's not nearly as cool as the setup.

Think you know where this film is going? You do, and the best thing about Must Love Dogs is that it takes only 88 minutes to get there - short enough to enjoy the film's modest, well-worn pleasures, but not so long that you feel your time could have been put to better use elsewhere.

The Banger Sisters stands as proof that no movie is so bad it can't be redeemed by a single stellar performance. That performance is by Susan Sarandon.

Eventually becomes cliched, predictable and crude. And that's a real sin.

Analyze That is no surprise, and pleasant is about the most you can say for it.

The Reader is ponderously self-important and smugly Socratic, brimming with unfinished sentences and pregnant pauses; if a single character would only say what he thinks, the movie would be over in 30 minutes

This depressing look at love isn't quite worth enduring.

Imagine a Three Stooges short with a feel-good ending, and you get the idea.

There's a wonderfully funny and relentlessly cute 45-minute cartoon within The Powerpuff Girls Movie; unfortunately, it's padded out with almost as much filler.

Based on Palindromes, it's easy to see what Solondz is railing against but almost impossible to tell what he's railing for.

It ain't art. But as a cinematic house of horrors, it more than fills the bill.

Conventional wisdom has it that the best Star Trek movies are the even-numbered ones. Nemesis may keep that streak alive, but barely.

Unlike Julia Roberts in "Pretty Woman," Lopez seems a little too comfortable in her new duds, which prevents the audience from rooting for her with passion, rather than just appreciation.

All the young talent in Hollywood is not enough to energize a movie that takes forever to get nowhere.

The Wild suffers from a breakneck pace that seems to exist only so that director Steve Williams can earn his nickname of "Spaz."

A film made by people with more heart than skill.

Forgive me for being underwhelmed.

Spending more time with Downey's character would have benefited this movie no end.

Standard-bore action stuff, in which a macho stud superstar blows away lots of bad guys while struggling to make the world a better place.

How much adorable can one person take?

Signs of fatigue are all over the film itself.

The movie is so determinedly lightweight that it floats above the fray, stopping only for the occasional mild chuckle.

Proves that marionettes can be as foul-mouthed and profane as their cartoon counterparts, but not nearly as clever.

There's no character to root for in this movie, no potential triumphs or resounding failures, just the sense of people going through the motions because they can't bother to think of anything better to do. And that's not a lot to hang your moviegoing hat on.

What makes the film work better than its nearly unbearable cuteness suggests is the casting of Christopher Walken as the son; the movie has yet to be invented that Walken can't improve simply by showing up.

Has its heart in the right place, and could have been an insightful rumination on corporate shortsightedness and mid-life obsolescence. Instead, it's another one of those Hollywood films whose feel for the workingman's life seems to come exclusively from other movies.

Too bad director Scott Hicks and screenwriter Carol Fuchs didn't look more closely at their source material, a 2001 German film called Mostly Martha. That film used the same basic premise but injected real conflict into the mix, in ways sexual, culinary, even ethnic. That film tried to do something, even while it was entertaining us.

There's a dollop of charm and a deluge of formula in Sleepover.

Unwisely bills itself as a comedy.

The movie includes a few good one-liners, but that's really all it is -- a forum for putdowns and sassy dialogues.

A feel-good us-against-them tale that panders mercilessly to its audience, yet displays a few moments of honest humor.

Especially discomfiting is the stream of kids in peril.

Watching a Pokemon movie is like drowning in a sea of cute.

There's enough kinetic energy in Jumper to light a thousand houses. Unfortunately, there's no one home in any of them.

This is a movie that falls short only because it insists on grabbing for so much.

Johnny English never builds any momentum, and Atkinson simply isn't a good enough actor to mine continued laughs from repetitive material.

Doesn't really go anywhere or amount to anything - a fatal flaw in a time-travel movie designed not only to keep you guessing, but to build genuine suspense as well.

When the film is not focused on Wilson, it's really not focused at all. This is a comedy ever holding itself in check, filled with plot threads and asides that seem as though they should be funny but almost always fall short of the mark.

Silly stuff, made all the more regrettable by the apparent skill with which the movie was made everywhere but in the screenplay department. The sheer lunkheadedness of Sebastian Gutierrez's script is impossible to ignore.

There's no clear plot, no memorable villains, no real logic. But there sure is action.

Unless you think "My Big Fat Greek Wedding" was the height of genius, there's little reason to sit though another version.

Allen's latest, his 42nd effort as a director, is the work of an artist devoid of ideas and energy. Perfunctorily staged and lazily written, it comes to life in only the briefest of spurts, usually when the ever-reliable Tom Wilkinson is on-screen.

It's turned Stone's Catherine Tramell from a warning sign for the dangers of wanton sex into the last thing you'd figure - a bore.

Looking for comedy in Albert Brooks' Looking for Comedy In the Muslim World is a fool's errand. There's hardly any there.

With all its cloying, tone-deaf attempts at genuine emotional warmth, all it really deserves is to be avoided.

If only it had some funny lines, a focused plot and an idea that stretched beyond the initial setup.

A sword-and-sorcery saga that desperately wants to be another "Lord of the Rings," Eragon succeeds in being only the palest of imitations.

The best thing that can be said about this Yours, Mine and Ours is that it's inoffensive.

It's possible that a smart, insightful, sharp-edged comedy could have been written around these characters, but Trust The Man isn't it.

If only La Mujer de mi Hermano had a dollop of humor and at least one character worth rooting for.

Painfully earnest, The Astronaut Farmer is, sad to say, a bunch of hooey. It's Frank Capra without the genuine heart, certainly without any sense of perspective.

An overly gimmicky and fatally repetitive terrorist thriller that quickly wears out its welcome.

If you expect anything more substantive from a movie - characters of more than one dimension, storylines that at the least play new riffs on old themes, plot developments that flow from the narrative - you'd best look elsewhere.

The Wicker Man is too loony to be a drama, too earnest to be a comedy, too predictable to be a horror film.

For the most part, it's uninspired, not much to look at and laugh-free.

The mystery is, how the filmmakers still managed to come up with a movie that will satisfy almost no one.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

Misfires on nearly every possible level.

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

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

Movie lite, a clueless, formulaic paint-by-numbers comedy.

All the characters are writ in broad strokes, making it impossible to sympathize with, much less relate to, anyone.

As shallow and manipulative a movie as any that come to mind.

A listless, disjointed collegiate opposites-attract comedy.

Meet the Fockers? Avoid them would be a better suggestion.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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?

Oh, this is all so terribly not good.

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.

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.

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]

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

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

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.

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

A misfire in almost every direction.

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

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.

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.

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?

A hopeless pastiche of timeworn plotlines, hackneyed dialogue and stultifying direction; to call it amateurish is a slap in the face to amateurs everywhere.

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.

Must be among the most blatantly manipulative movies ever made. It's cold, calculated and treats its audience like its robotic central character.

Tedious almost beyond endurance.

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.

Just plain bad.

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.

Glitter does no one any favors.