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.