Dennis Lim

Suggestive of nothing so much as Saturday-morning TV.

Boorish and flatulent.

Earnest and misguided in equal measure, The Theory of Flightis ostensibly a bold and rare attempt at depicting disabled people as sexual beings, but the notion is couched in such spurious and schematic terms that the film never really stands a chance.

The beauty of Sandler's performance -- a superbly modulated suite of crestfallen groans and grimaces -- is he often seems to be reacting not just to his crazy wife but also to the dismal movie he's stuck in.

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.

The plot is muddy and quite beside the point. The almost meditative mood takes center stage.

A blitz of anti-authoritarian poses so feel-good you'd think someone was selling you sneakers.

Needless to say, the movie fails as a cautionary tale. But it fulfills its summer air-conditioning duties with flippant ease, and its enjoyably cloddish attempts at political relevance add a fascinating layer of incongruity.

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 title is, to say the least, an understatement. Witchcraft has rarely looked more prosaic and less sexy than it does in Griffin Dunne's Practical Magic.

The viewer, though unavoidably alert, is before long too numb to care.

For those so inclined, this lulling, banal, and rather pleasant film cultivates a mood of zone-out voyeurism. In the absence of a larger purpose, Morel is content to ogle, perhaps rightly assuming that his viewers will be too.

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.

Stevenson's performance is at once clueless and fiercely committed, a volatile combination that pays off in the best scene: the mother of all PFLAG meetings.

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

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.

Oblivious to its own towering obsolescence.

"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.

Live by the meta-movie rules, die by the meta-movie rules: Rhinoceros Eyes is a parable on cine-enchantment that itself fails to enchant.

A feel-good, fatalist placebo.

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

French director David Fourier's six-minute mock-instructional free association, "Majorettes in Space," is alone almost worth the price of admission.

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

A disappointing nosedive into the mainstream for John Maybury, the Derek Jarman acolyte who transitioned successfully from experimental work to features with 1998's hallucinatory Francis Bacon biopic "Love Is the Devil."

Good-natured but labored, the film clings to its lone gimmick with increasing desperation.

Largely innocuous and forgettable, Polly lacks "Mary's" romantic pathos and psychosexual anxiety and is a few squirmy set pieces shy of "Meet the Parents."

A bottomless trough of mystic swill, is too confused to even fulfill the paradigm's most basic requirements.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

Luis Mandoki's brisk hack job pushes no more buttons than Connie Chung Tonight -- though, for better or worse, it's perverse enough to stage the traumatic event as a spouse swap.

A disingenuous and colossally daft whiplash twist (presumably Patterson's) that only further perforates an already ragged plot.

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

A creakily mechanical B-noir.

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

For a Ben Stiller rom-com, there's remarkably little pain and humiliation. Which, for the most part, is not a good thing.

Nowhere Man, despite a tossed-off ending, is a compulsive bit of meta-exploitation.

At best, plays like an attenuated "Seinfeld" episode.

There's a certain satisfaction in recognizing that Harold -- even when he inevitably starts to feel, just like a human -- remains something of an a--hole.

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.

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

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

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.

Relying on rote culture-clash pratfalls, Gilfillan belabors the symmetries.

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

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.

The cheerful how-to aspect ("cut and file your nails!") adds to the sense that the whole thing seems to have drifted in from some late-night infomercial netherland.

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.

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

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

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

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

More exciting and truthful than most better-looking films dare to be.

Yet another black comedy that misunderstands and misrepresents the genre.

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

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.

There are worse crimes being perpetrated in Hollywood than The Real Cancún--an exploitation fantasy no more booby-besotted than a "Porky's" or "American Pie" installment, and certainly no more unreal.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

One of the cruddiest-looking movies ever made.