Dana Stevens

Feels more like a thought experiment than a fully developed story.

Chandler's script has, by my count, exactly one sort-of-funny line and not a single scene whose comic possibilities are successfully exploited.

Completed before the release of "American Beauty," this contrived, puffed up little picture nonetheless seems like a ripoff, perhaps because it mines the same tired assumptions and unexamined stereotypes about suburban family life.

The visual intensity and the relentless degradation visited on the characters begins to feel prurient and dishonest.

Plays every convention twice, once as parody and once by the book, but the movie, trying to be two things at once, fails at both.

You might actively root for their collective demise, if you could rouse yourself to care one way or the other. Go gallivanting in Chernobyl and you get what you pay for, nimrods.

Superfluous though it may be, The Honeymooners is not so bad.

It's not bad enough to make you curse, but you are likely to laugh when you should scream, and to roll your eyes when you are meant to laugh.

Sensation, not sense, is the point of this exercise, and what it lacks in originality it makes up for in effective if cheap moments of fright and dread.

The resulting film is an unruly, riveting assemblage of anecdotes and impressions. The larger political and military questions about the war in Iraq are kept deliberately in the background, which some viewers may find frustrating.

The plot of Antitrust is intricate and uneven, overloaded with twists and not very jolting surprises.

The relentless upbeatness of Life or Something Like It wrecks the possibility of either real laughter or genuine pathos.

Emotionally incoherent.

Lacks the wit to do anything new and instead recycles tired jokes and attitudes.

A listless and desultory affair.

This violent meatball western deserves to be forgotten quickly.

Jettisoning any ambition toward thrillerhood, Domestic Disturbance becomes a plodding, obvious angry-dad melodrama, ambling toward the final, fatal showdown between parent and usurper.

Feels more like a grueling road trip in search of a family comedy.

Before Civil Brand erupts into over-the-top melodrama (which is pretty early), it shows some interest in its characters, and in its less screechy moments the dialogue has the rough, bantering ring of actual speech.

Even fans of open-wheel racing, the high-speed, high-stress pastime that is the subject of Renny Harlin's hectic new film, may walk away from it more logy than exhilarated.

The best thing that can be said about Boys and Girls is that it is studiously inoffensive.

Just My Luck is a bit of lukewarm cappuccino froth confected to float Ms. Lohan to the next stage of her career.

Snow Dogs is, even by the standards of a tradition that includes "Son of Flubber" and "The Shaggy D.A.," remarkably inept.

The problem, as it is so often in well-intentioned movies of this kind, is that rather than illuminate the enormity of Nazism, The Aryan Couple trades upon our knowledge of it for emotional impact.

A dreamy, impressionistic inquiry into the legacy of the 1960's, but it's less concerned with history than with mood.

Not a bad movie, and its intentions are unimpeachable. But its sentimentality is so relentless and its narrative so predictable that the life is very nearly squeezed out of it.

The absence of a single noteworthy villain is perhaps this movie’s most salient flaw (along with the jumbled, barely coherent editing of a seemingly endless chase through a Moscow traffic jam).

Shot in smeary video, it sports the static, by-the-book camera work of a daytime soap-opera.

Anyway, you will be glad that they have found each other, and eager to wish them a long and happy life together -- somewhere else, as 95 minutes in their company is plenty.

Exists in a realm beyond sense, and induces in the viewer a trancelike state, leaving the mind free to ponder the mysteries of the universe.

The film's last half-hour -- or do I mean its final two weeks? -- is meant to keep the audience sniffling and sobbing uncontrollably, but the only thing likely to elicit tears is the sight of Mr. Reeves dressed in a white dinner jacket crooning "Time After Time."

That Garfield speaks in the supercilious, world-weary drawl of Bill Murray is some small consolation, as are a few of the animal tricks.

And it's true that this movie's absolute tone-deafness, its complete disconnection from our current economic and geopolitical reality, by moments achieves a perverse Warholian profundity.

A howlingly silly, moderately diverting exercise in high, pointless style.

The director has fallen into the common first-timer's trap of biting off more than he can chew, stitching together an unwieldy, disorganized story out of subplots and flashbacks, without paying enough attention to the basic requirements of character and narrative.

Laborious and nonsensical psychological thriller, a mediocre piece of studio hackwork unredeemed by a first-rate director.

It might have been a satisfying if not terribly original piece of historical melodrama, but its clumsiness turns it, against its best intentions, into half-baked operatic kitsch.

A film that even a rabid lowbrow like Homer Simpson (or, when the mood strikes, this critic) would find beneath his dignity.

Together, Mr. Lee and Mr. Green have a daft comic energy, and they are assisted by game performances from the rest of the cast.

With its low-stakes chase scenes, obvious-from-the-get-go villains and nonsensical plotting, this feels more like a 96-minute-long episode of Scooby-Doo that's been laboriously translated into another language and then back into English.

As the movie dragged on, I thought I heard a mysterious voice, and felt myself powerfully drawn toward the light -- the light of the exit sign. I have returned from the beyond to warn you: this movie is 90 minutes long, and life is too short.

This picture achieves a level of badness that is its own form of sublimity. You almost - please note that I said almost - have to see it to believe it.

But even though, most of the time, you know exactly what will happen next -- you don't much mind. Nor do the many plot holes and improbabilities -- undermine its silly, raucous spirit.

Endure the long, slow, unraveling of this movie, which can't even muster the intelligence to be pretentious or the bravado to be amusingly bad.

Having established its premise and set in motion an overloaded plot, the picture lurches this way and that, evoking more restlessness than laughter and more boredom than pathos.

A witless, gruesome barrage of jokey violence and lame trans-Atlantic humor, kept moving by the pointless, derivative kineticism of Mr. Yu's hyperactive cuts and splices.

Vacillates between cutesy Disney-style anthropomorphism and "Born Free" exoticism.

Has some funny, dirty-minded jokes, a few amusing cameos (including Julianne Moore in clown makeup) and a soundtrack loaded with juicy cuts of mid-70's vintage soul and funk.

Does occasionally rise out of the sewer of its self-imposed idiocy, ascending in brief moments from utter witlessness to half-witlessness, mostly thanks to the loose comic byplay between Mr. Black and Mr. Zahn.

By the end of The Watcher you'll need your own prescription.

By the end, even the irrepressible Mr. Foxx seems tired and defeated, and we can only hope he perks up in time for his next movie.

The whole business has a breathless, determined, student-film quality that makes it especially hard to watch. Mr. Cunningham and his cast are clearly trying to do something they feel is important, and there is no pleasure in watching them do it so ineptly.

Suffers from a fatal lack of modulation. It paints a picture of inner-city life as an endless sequence of beatings and shouting matches, and in its glum cartoonishness insults the people whose strivings it means to honor.

A vulgar, uninspired lump of poisoned eye candy.

The latest bit of damaged goods offered up in the Miramax clearance sale, Underclassman plays like the longest episode of "21 Jump Street" ever made.

Buried in the slow, talky, inanities that the two stars exchange are some potentially interesting ideas about female sexual self-assertion and male surrender, but neither the actors nor the filmmakers have any notion about how to explore them.

There is no credible feeling here, no comedy, no eroticism.

This non-balletic adaptation by the Russian director Andrei Konchalovsky is something gnarled and stunted and wrong, something that should never have been allowed to see the light of day. How's that for a holiday-ad pullquote?

What better to do with such a quiet, majestic landscape than to liven it up with the noise and vulgarity of lowest-common-denominator American pop culture?

The story is so crowded with incident and implication as to be both nonsensical and impossible to act, so the actors, when they are not bursting into fits of temper, smile mysteriously.

So poorly written, badly acted and ineptly directed that it denies you even the modest pleasure of making fun of it.

Take this as a warning: it's not much fun.

Extremely good-looking people tend to be shallow, self-involved and not very bright. Let's call this statement what it is: a form of prejudice, a stereotype. It is, sadly, a stereotype that Down to You does everything in its power to promote.

At the end the picture seems to acknowledge its own ludicrousness, but by then it, like Beans, is beyond rescue.

The mostly unprofessional cast does a lot of shouting and swearing, and Mr. Henry's face has a haunting impassivity, but the film does not offer much in the way of social insight or credible emotion.

The faces of the stars glow with life, which makes you all the more grateful that this, their only film together, has come back.