Dennis Lim

Might as well be bad TV...Splendor is what happens when a director whose natural mode is subversion runs out of things to subvert.

The Machinist has no meat on its bones, and we've seen it all before.

Unduly smug about its flashy conceit and otherwise utterly empty, the film plays like lobotomized Kieslowski, less Blind Chance than dumb luck.

Groove is less a work of subcultural ethnography than a curiously dorky act of hipster sincerity, less party movie than cheesy valentine

Roughly splits the difference between "Six Days, Seven Nights" and "9 1/2 Weeks." Which is something like the nth-order derivative of an infinite regression.

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."

In his first major role, the Irish actor Farrell deflects the script's more dubious aspects through sheer magnetic presence.

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.

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 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."

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.

Lee's trickery is dazzling in flashes but also monotonously strenuous -- the derangement factor is high but there's little evidence of authentic lunacy.

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.

Airy, pseudo-folkloric gibberish at best.

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.

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

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

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.

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).

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.

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).