Dennis Lim

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.

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.

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).

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

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

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

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.

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).

The year's most repugnant movie.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

At once laboriously expository and defiantly incomprehensible.

Mad Songs saves its most memorable image for its hard-earned climax, which molds the ambiguous, hallucinatory spectacle of a combusting effigy into a viewer-implicating demonstration of crowd psychology and a harrowing cri de coeur.

Culminates in a pilgrimage to Genet's tomb--a sweetly respectful gravestomp, to be sure, though one suspects the almost apologetic demureness of the central relationship would have irked him to no end.