Dennis Lim

With a few exceptions, most of the laughs in Stardom are cheap...and worse, the ideas beyond platitudinous.

You have to, if not love, at least not mind a movie in which the very act of Ashton Kutcher reading is enough of a cosmic trauma to rip a hole in the fabric of space-time.

The wall-to-wall rap score is as kinetic as the acrobatic fight choreography, and nothing else matters.

Open Water is simply a stunt--hopelessly literal-minded and cheap in every sense.

If it's remembered at all, it will be as a time capsule of early-21st-century blockbuster cowardice and redundancy.

After simmering for an eternity, it derails, with spectacular, psychotic force, bulldozing its way toward an almost unwatchable theater of cruelty.

Superhumanly awful BBC bottom-feeder Love, Honour and Obey, which, paramount among its many faults, is not recognizably a film.

The year's most repugnant movie.

An out-of-body experience for its viewers as well as its heroine.

It's been smoothed over plenty, but this is one creaky, rigged contraption.

Stein's script is slack and tin-eared, too feeble to pass for satire, and inadequate even by lazy-pastiche standards.

Amid numerous identical skirmishes with leapfrogging arachnids, trace elements of black comedy and intentional camp are discernible but utterly extraneous.

A more intuitive writer-director could have extracted a credible study of time-warped bereavement from Jennifer Egan's extensively praised novel, but Adam Brooks's turgid adaptation merely emphasizes the book's stiff contrivances and wobbly characterizations.

Going through the motions of a liberal-Hollywood polemic with the sweaty, mounting hysteria of a bad liar, The Life of David Gale is foremost an overheating gotcha machine, scripted by first-timer Charles Randolph with seams showing and red herrings stinking up the joint.

The "Humanite" director's Death Valley void is the real "Lost in Translation."

Doesn't just look and sound like a car commercial. It is a car commercial.

Not content simply to examine the relationship between sex and death, BI2 ponderously blurs the boundaries between art and life, and the plot, already mired in nonsensical backstory, collapses with the late-inning introduction of a tired metafictional device (not to mention a wildly lunging "Usual Suspects" twist).

Suggestive of nothing so much as Saturday-morning TV.

Steals every trick in the gaysploitation book down to the Alexis Arquette glorified cameo, but the end result -- compulsively horrible and full of unintentional poignant hilarity -- is its own mutant creature.

The characters exist in single dimensions (trapped in a noxiously misogynist role, even the fearless Richard stands no chance), and in an effort to keep the plates spinning, the movie quickly devolves from risqué to risible.

The viewer is left to ponder the number of levels on which this counts as a pointless exercise -- a parody of parodic movies, a deconstruction of transparent genres, a self-negatingly knowing example of camp.

The movie's idiotic fascination with the senselessness of its central act is scarily close to a fetish.

It's never clear, by the way, why any of this is supposed to be even remotely funny...This is the kind of movie asinine enough to believe that the mere juxtaposition of sadistic violence and a jaunty tune on the soundtrack is, in itself, clever.

Plunging headfirst into mush at every opportunity, Marshall brings out the worst in his actors.

No amount of fidgety editing and anxious soundtrack atonality can distract from the creakingly implausible scenario (Marsden's Dan is an almost comic exemplar of uncharacteristic hostage behavior).

Boorish and flatulent.

Watching the film is like reading a Times Portrait of Grief that keeps shifting focus to the journalist who wrote it.

A numb, oddly dispassionate trudge toward predestined doom, inevitable in all the wrong ways.

The journey is a yawn -- an outpouring of backstory, punctuated by cute episodic diversions and ill-advised running gags.

Dreary adventure. Parents, be forewarned: No talking equines means more songs, and the viselike soundtrack might be someone's idea of a cruel joke: hoarse whisperer Bryan Adams.

An overflowing septic tank of chicken-soupy sanctimony that proceeds from casually offensive hypocrisy to wretchedly inapt religiosity.

A nasty piece of work, and it's nasty in a particularly ostentatious and sophomoric way.

While Strand's gay-shorts series took a tentative step toward maturity with 2000's “Boys Life 3,” this fourth anthology represents a full-blown regression.

By the end of this wholly disorienting experience (this must be what it's like to be held captive in a Long Island supper club and force-fed hallucinogens), there's only one thing we damn well know, and it's that Kevin Spacey sure as hell believes he was born to play Bobby Darin.

The film slips into a coma early on and never awakens.

Hudson keeps the movie rambling and episodic, deferring to the imposing backdrop whenever possible.

The flavor is textbook '90s indie -- self-regarding quirk with an occasional spasm of Solondzian incorrectness.

Oblivious to its own towering obsolescence.

The title's pointedly incorrect pronoun is typical of the film's obtuse childishness.

The filmmakers at once coarsen and dilute a fascinating life into a lumpy puddle of punishing inspirational hokum.

Thomas's fleet-footed approach suggests the anxious embarrassment of a director in an awful hurry to get it over with.

The movie improves immeasurably if you visualize a looming iceberg in the corner of the frame.

A vanity project -- hell-bent on playing barely human characters as themselves, they've created something quitebewilderingly ugly in the process.

As this clueless, bulimic debacle madly regurgitates ideas and iconography from Lang to the brothers Wachowski, Leni Riefenstahl to L. Ron Hubbard, Ray Bradbury to Susan Faludi, it's not just Bale who has a hard time keeping a straight face.

Denying Reality, more like. John Keitel's first feature is impossibly naive, even as smoothed-over coming-out tales go.

A creakily mechanical B-noir.

In its own dimly reckless way, the film is riveting -- not unlike watching a tightrope walker with a bad case of vertigo.

Apparently fallen victim to the transparent damage-control tactics of studios in possession of perceived stinkers.

Bloated loquaciousness, damp self-absorption, and defensive reflexiveness on display here.

Grows increasingly slack and silly.

Time and again words fail Weber. He's a loquacious but unilluminating host.

Another mystery that gives up its secrets all too quickly, Till Human Voices Wake Us is named for a T.S. Eliot line -- and it proves a woefully evocative title for this snoozy supernatural pastoral.

It's hard to say if this devastating, nakedly exploitative work has a larger point beyond the evocation and infliction of trauma. A repeat viewing might clear that up, but it's an experience I'd rather not relive -- and one that I cannot in good faith recommend to anyone.

At once laboriously expository and defiantly incomprehensible.

The ultimate cliché of plot-twist implausibility, the crucial revelation is so outlandishly fatuous it might have given Donald Kaufman pause.

The deeply ridiculous 8 1/2 Women could have been made only by a cranky dotard.

It lacks the coherent internal logic that distinguishes the best mockumentaries.

Indifferently written, passably acted, resourcefully shot in video with enlivening splashes of local color.

Strangely, there's no thrust and parry to this potentially heavyweight mind game. The effect is more like a tennis match in which every feebly contested point ends with an unforced error.

This monumentally ridiculous film doesn't stop at subverting stereotypes; it discombobulates narrative logic and the basic laws of human behavior. Still, there's a certain pleasure to be derived from watching the actors attempt to dig out from under the rubble that William Lipz's screenplay repeatedly dumps on their heads.

A ponderous, almost wordless sliver of grotesquerie.

Pressing on in grimly introverted "One Hour Photo" mode, Williams only stirs nostalgia for his slapstick days (ghastly '90s roles notwithstanding)--he's such a natural-born ham he manages to overdo understatement.

It is not, the filmmakers stress, a sequel to "Four Weddings and a Funeral" (which writer Richard Curtis was also responsible for), but it fits the latter-day Hollywood definition of the term -- same movie, only worse.

The only flicker of thematic interest -- AM radio obsession as psychopathology -- is duly subsumed into a sea of desperate soundtrack come-ons.

Peaks early with a vertiginous dogfight; thereafter, spotty CGI and a bamboozling plot conspire toward a colossal anticlimax.

A pale, patchy amalgam of the year's two unfairly reviled interplanetary adventures, "Supernova" and "Mission to Mars," the lunkheaded Red Planet distinguishes itself with a touching pretense of scientific veracity.

The finale is a near-abstract mess (decapitation, impalation, "Alien" birth) -- in an empathic gesture, the filmmakers end it all with a few sticks of TNT.

Even from deep in a K-hole, you'd need about 10 seconds to figure out the remaining plot twists in this jaded muscle-queen morality tale.

Manipulative and cloying, Pieces of April turns into something altogether creepier, even pathological, whenever first-time filmmaker Peter Hedges (screenwriter of "What's Eating Gilbert Grape" and "About a Boy") brings up race.

Apparently reassembled from the cutting-room floor of any given daytime soap.

Yet another black comedy that misunderstands and misrepresents the genre.

The Wayans brothers' new bottom-feeder signals its utter exhaustion -- and barely veiled contempt for the audience.

"The only thing that matters is the ending," Mort declares in the closing seconds, just as the director is serving up a colossal (and literally corny) stinker. But for Depp, it's yet another daunting mission accomplished with wit and ingenuity.

Made with no discernible craft and monstrously sanctimonious in dealing with childhood loss, it might as well be called "Pray It Forward."

Limps into theaters at long last, practically begging, with every arthritic pratfall, to be put out of its misery.

The shabby metaphysics and complete absence of internal logic are perhaps meant to charm, but only add to the eye-gouging irritant factor.

Swaddled in the posh vulgarity that passes for awards-season elegance, Memoirs is deluxe orientalist kitsch, a would-be cross between "Showgirls" and "Raise the Red Lantern," too dumb to cause offense though falling short of the oblivious abandon that could have vaulted it into high camp.

The scenario eventually becomes so coincidence-choked that the filmmakers have no choice but to play it for mild snickers.

Unable to capture either its wit, psychological acuity, or formal rigor, the movie essentially reduces the schematic, seesaw narrative to doomy clichés.

A road movie, though there's a decided lack of forward motion.

Just when you think it can't get any worse, Maze rams home a body blow -- equating the involuntary spasms of Tourette's with the ungovernable impulses of the heart.

Hovers between mythic poetry and earthbound grit; the result is an inert, drably florid spectacle.

The film isn't short on ideas, it's just that those ideas are dumbfoundingly pretentious and trite.

So seamlessly and comprehensively dreadful that its very existence (let alone its appearance in theaters) beggars belief.

One of the cruddiest-looking movies ever made.

Sputters to a dead halt right out of the gate. One labored scenario follows another.

Jordan and Kirsten Russell, as the deadbeat-hooker love interest, bring the film to intermittent life, suggesting several more dimensions than the stale, futile scenario ever allows them.

Devoid of originality, Gasoline is at least a model of modesty -- a road movie that goes nowhere slowly, and ends up where it began.

The film, meanwhile, goes for that choppy, air-pocket sensation, veteran helmer Bruno Barreto directing like he's never made a movie before, and never wants to again.

Endearing but pointless, at once cluttered and tinny, this film-dork fantasia suggests a shopping spree at a high-end vintage emporium underwritten by Daddy's blank check.

A stifling chamber piece laced with Repulsion-style foreboding and an undercurrent of kink.