Desson Thomson

After introducing a provocative opening, the movie settles in for some pretty cheap scare effects, as well as by-the-numbers computer graphic imagery for the actual marauder.

There's only one problem with Betsy's Wedding. It's Alan Alda. But since he's the writer, the director and the father of the bride in the movie, that's a big problem.

But humans who live above ground, including horror fans, will find themselves only fitfully entertained and more consistently appalled.

Everything is tearful confessions, angry interrogations and breakups. But there's nothing underneath.

The actual movie is the cinematic equivalent of cheap Chinese egg rolls: all flour and cabbage shreds, maybe half a nibble of pork.

After 9/11, few of us look at terrorist acts casually. It's insulting to watch this grandiloquent pornography, using shock value and Hollywood cliche to evoke poignancy.

If you're going to make a gross-out comedy you can't just be gross. You've got to be to be funny as well, or the movie will be DOA. Which is why Eurotrip should be toe-tagged and shoved into the deepest and coldest of video vaults.

There's something secondhand about everything here. Hoge (this is his debut) seems to be mimicking the tone and fabric of other, better indie movies.

Has its moments. In fact, it has too many of them. At 2 hours and 20 minutes and with enough characters to take up a few floors at a big hotel, it feels about an act too long.

If ever there was a movie fit for permanent entombment, it's this sequel.

Maybe they should have called A Love Song for Bobby Long something more appropriately descriptive, such as "When Actors Imitating Southern Characters Go Bad."

As if aware that Congo is the least interesting adventure ever filmed, screenwriter John Patrick Shanley (who once wrote a funny movie called "Moonstruck") tries to inoculate the activities with humor.

It's difficult to concentrate on the story. Not that there's much to concentrate on anyway.

It's too manufactured and deliberate to be persuasive.

Newman's cuteness aside, this movie feels long-winded.

It's hard to imagine an audience that won't break up in laughter at this bewildering mixed message: Enjoy this movie, but you really shouldn't be watching it.

So taken with its own love of cinema, it forgets to lead you down the necessary dramaturgical path to make you fall in love, too.

Too long winded and dull.

Head-scratchingly ordinary, given Schwarzenegger's need to prove he's still a virile (i.e., non-aging) action hero.

The mawkishness is ultimately too formidable.

Uninspired baseball romance.

Stumbles mindlessly in all directions.

It's about as deep as electronic white noise.

McConaughey remains more buffed than compelling. He's not helped by a two-hour convolution of episodes that are too busy imitating other, better movies.

One-dimensional archetypes, too much predictability and not enough comedy.

Sometimes in horror movies, bad acting is effective, its very woodenness contributing to the sense of robotic horror. That ain't happening here. These guys are just bad actors.

No darn good.

Even by its own please-the-mob standards, this movie is lacking.

Laugh? I thought I'd never start.

Absolutely awesome in its relentless mediocrity.

By introducing silly elements into a serious endeavor, the filmmakers undercut their own movie. In the end, we're watching a somewhat exploitative movie about exploitation.

A special-effects extravaganza that uses the barest of excuses to bring these characters together.

The movie comes across as a political science course videotape rather than a movie to fully engage a general audience.

Like Nate, we are mere Notties. And we are supposed to feel oh-so privileged for getting to watch Paris through the glass.

At its worst (and this is where Made of Honor comes in), it can leave you with a bad taste, not just in your mouth but in your soul.

The gags are physical but rarely funny.

This ethnic family sitcom thing is rapidly turning into wearisome cliche, and American Chai doesn't hold a candle to either "Beckham" or "Greek Wedding."

This is a one-note deal, and it doesn't take long before you want to, well, just move out and leave these characters in their rent-controlled limbo.

Director Howard is so mesmerized by the flames, he squirts formulaic lighter fluid over everything. A conflagration of hyped-up movie cliches, courtesy of George Lucas's Industrial Light & Magic special effects shop, scalds your face.

We're really celebrating Hollywood's freedom to create biographies of anyone, no matter how high or low on the social ladder, and still come up with the same banal characteristics, messages and conclusions. In this sense, The People vs. Larry Flynt doesn't champion, so much as squander, freedom of speech.

Producer-for-Life George Lucas puts his awesome creative machinery to work in Willow, a would-be adventure of little people, big people, good guys and bad. But the fantasy wheels grind to a halt, bogged down in Lucas' flat, derivative story, and not helped in the least by director Ron Howard's clumsy steering.

The film degenerates into an overly simplistic satire -- with moon-worshiping, Guatemala-visiting, lesbian aborters on one side, and fetally obsessive, meat-eating, gun-toting Jesus worshipers on the other.

An overwrought gangster fable.

The story is more undead than all of these revenant shufflers. And the orgy of gore and home-engineered special effects doesn't make up for the shortfall.

Stallone is to humor what John Goodman is to ballet.

A secondhand action movie that retreads all the tired staples of the 1980s and '90s.

It's a glossified, cluttered parody of itself. Almodovar is no longer a burlesque auteur. He's a repeat offender.

It's gotten to the point where Gooding's presence on a marquee practically guarantees we'll be bashing our heads against the seat in front of us. Bonk, bonk, bonk.

Should we really be so moved and uplifted that a horny, ignorant young man begins to join the human race? Not when our voice of conscience is an off-screen filmmaker issuing pseudo-profound, and ultimately banal, pronouncements about the true nature of love and seduction.

Unfortunately, The Man makes the mistake of assuming casting is all it takes to make a good comedy.

This movie is a predictable, gruesome piece of business.

The story, which features an apparently lobotomized Guy Pearce as an opportunistic explorer and hunter who learns the errors of his ways, is deeply dull.

Sadly, this movie is a far cry from the atmospheric, even thoughtfully crafted original, which made you truly scared for the unkempt, everyman victims. But this latest version, though just as grisly, is literally hackwork, and stars a forgettable, airbrushed cast of slaughterees.

The film's moral commentary is De Palma redux: same old Brian enjoying the peeping, bringing us into the guilt zone, then saying shame on all of us.

Weitz co-directed the wonderful "About a Boy" in 2002, but in "Dreamz" -- a tediously facile satire -- his comic instincts fail him.

Much of the movie -- which Murphy wrote with a small posse of collaborators -- is taken up with the torturously dull, not to mention unbelievable, romance between Norbit and Kate (a disappointingly lackluster Newton) and the tedious agenda of Cuba Gooding Jr. as a schemer-manipulator.

Could have been a sensation if a director with a smidgen of moviemaking instinct had taken the helm.

Angel-A is counterfeit art-house chic writ large -- a French film that fails to produce the ineffable charms of the yesteryear movies it brazenly imitates.

If it weren't for Sharif's extraordinary presence, there wouldn't be a cherishable moment in the movie.

These storied 13 days feel like the Hundred Years War.

In their desire to humanize the big story, director John Boorman and screenwriter Ann Peacock ... have resorted to groan-inducing cliches and clunky narrative.

Seidelman, Strugatz and Burns are so busy systematically constructing Barr's revenge and keeping her smugly vindicated, they fail to realize they've bulldozed all comical landmarks in sight. So it ultimately doesn't matter whether or not Streep is redeemed, Barr is vindicated, Begley is punished -- or whether or not they all go to hell in a handbasket. They're all buried under the rubble.

A disappointingly dull thud of a fantasy.

It's almost too dull to pan.

About as funny as digging your own grave in an unmarked part of New Jersey.

It's so laden with foreboding, you want to get out from under it and gasp for air.

It's an eroticism of nastiness -- triple-X fare for dirty old men in raincoats. If you resist this sleazy gorefest, you'll be right to feel proud of yourself.

If only The Reaping had the decency to be coherent.

There's something hideously pretentious about the whole thing.

If there's anything good to be said about Heights, it's Glenn Close's strutty, booming performance.

All dancing and hugging and no good.

Deception is another example of when genre-fication (the forcing of otherwise intriguing stories into the straitjackets of horror, thriller or other genres) reduces our entertainment to head-shaking banality.

A lifeless pop vision of the future that tries too self-consciously to be irreverent, hip and cutting edge.

Yields the same sort of archetype and the usual results: De Niro's workmanlike in a dismayingly familiar role.

For the most part, the film's a bewildering disappointment.

Surprisingly uninvolving, the least effective of Neufeld's Clancy-based movies. Surely he was not looking for this kind of film: one that bombs literally and figuratively.

With conceptual misfires like this, Lee's best work recedes even more swiftly into the past.

There's nothing authentic about this London lad ... Nothing particularly likable either.

Hampered by Niall Johnson's script, which is often confusing, muddy and ultimately cliche-ridden.

Date Movie, alas, is here to remind us that slapstick can be just plain bad. These are sight gags best appreciated with a blindfold.

Roos and director Herbert Ross pave the long and grinding road to self-fulfillment with miles and miles of counterfeit poignancy.

There's more bathroom and slapstick humor than a sixth-grader could stand, and a veritable flood of drool, blood and less mentionable effluvia, most of it courtesy of Mr. Wayans as he tries to be – you know – funny.

In a movie whose texture is supposed to be hard-edged realism, the characterization seems a little too pat and jaunty.

Perhaps they should have called this "Bore-a, Bore-a, Bore-a."

This vainglorious biopic about Bobby Darin is really about what the '60s pop singer and actor means to Kevin Spacey.

Ostensibly about the banality of youthful evil, Kids is simply about its own banality. At best, it's a misplaced aesthetic experiment. At worst, it's glossy exploitation—with enough controversy to launch a thousand trite radio and television talk shows.

I'd recommend you actively or passively forget this one.

Like the turtleneck cashmere sweaters and girdles that tie down these promising women, the movie is trite and trussed.

This adaptation of the underground comic strip is mostly unfabulous.

There doesn't seem to be much purpose to it except a half-baked notion that the histrionics of the mentally insane (or a moviemaker's idea therein) are eminently cinematic. They aren't.

This unusual convergence of stars doesn't amount to much.

A crashing letdown.

Even the staunchest of golfheads must know they're watching a cut-and-trite accounting.

It doesn't help matters that The Libertine seems to unload every olde English cliche on file.

Francis Veber's Three Fugitives, a heist caper, starts off with comic promise then limps all the way from the bank.

A pretty woeful affair...a sitcom disguised as a movie.

This saved-by-an-angel story is redeemed mostly by Smith's comic instincts.

There are several requirements for you to enjoy Sister Act. Your love of Whoopi Goldberg must be infinite. The thought of her in nun's habit must be an automatic scream. Finally, your ability to forgive bad comedy needs to be celestial.

A longwinded, predictable scenario.

An irredeemably transparent... DIRECT RIPPING OFF OF "SPEED."

Kids who love Pokemon movies are no doubt going to see this movie, and they'll have a blast watching it. Very soon they will become older and more sensible and understand how terrible these movies are.

That sense of fun is jackhammered into our skulls. The tongue that was so firmly in cheek last time has punctured through muscle and bone.

It's just too lost in its own presumed self-enchantment.

Another day, another inept homage to "Vertigo."

The only reason to watch this movie is for stargazing, nice shots of the sea and to revel in a world where false promises, lies and empty posturing are actively encouraged.

Stumbles and screeches on for an interminable two hours.

If only Shadowboxer had gone for more than an unwavering commitment to imitate better movies, it might have been one for the cult shelves at the video store. Right now, you'll be lucky if you find it in the giveaway bin.

Cut-and-dried sci-fi thriller.

The story, a half-baked one about treachery and greed, meanders to an unsatisfactory ending with a punch line that, well, doesn't punch very hard.

It's too bad Chan's imagination and delicacy were wasted in this movie.

Overdresses and ultimately abandons what drew us to its 1998 predecessor in the first place: an intimate embrace with history.

It goes down (and comes back up) like a hairball.

Although this script starts off with great zest, it's ultimately a disappointment.

The muddy, convoluted story revolves around the star's cool-guy poses and one-liners.

A loud, standard-issue sci-fi action film that has a confusing mission.

For all his patient, accumulative storytelling, Sayles yields little that doesn't feel trite or overly schematic.

You can boost mediocrity a little, but you cannot raise it from the dead.

The sequel's plot is laughably thin.

The dialogue and acting are flatter than a punctured ball.

Why did director Barry Sonnenfeld take on this project? Just to sully a fine comedic resume that includes "The Addams Family" and "Get Shorty"? And one last one: Which one of these levers do you push to send the RV careering off the mountain for good?

In a movie as unrewarding as this, there's really only one burning question: When does the spanking begin?

A snooze, despite all the sex and other gunplay.

Where there was effortless cool in the first movie, there is nothing but manufactured posing here.

The story behind Hercules, Walt Disney’s insipid, lifeless, animated feature, is hardly the stuff of children’s entertainment.

Just a few guilty laughs, a predictable resolution and repeated close-ups of that dog jerking its head to one side, doing the cute thing.

It's funny for young kids, extremely non-critical moviegoers and possibly people with a catatonic medical condition. But it's painfully idiotic for anyone else.

An ambitious, experimental mess of a movie in search of something more profound.

The movie automatically pegs itself for the straight-to-video sci-fi rental shelf.

Very young children, it should be said, probably won't have any problem with the movie. It's bright and perky on the surface. But for anyone mature enough to pay closer attention, it's going to fall short of expectations.

But by the end of the movie -- which seems to last longer than the Crusades -- all the good stuff has dissipated.

Love or Money isn't a movie. It's the director's cut of the promotion trailer. Fox seems to be shrinking -- if not dying -- in his regular, perky-capitalist role. It's time to look into the mirror and realize that Alex Keaton is turning into Dorian Gray.

The movie feels forced, cliched and derivative.

Although the acting is committed and sometimes stirring, most of the characters are about as one-note as the biblical archetypes Martin wants to get away from in the first place. "The Name of the Rose" this ain't.

It's just sort of trying.

Memoirs of an Invisible Man isn't a movie. It's an identity crisis. The previews would have you believe it's a zany comedy. But the jokes are too far and few between. And if it's a comedy, why is John Carpenter directing it?

Its long-winded denouement, in which Grazia runs away rather than be sent to an institution, doesn't bring the story full circle. It just extends it.

The fight between good and evil feels fixed in favor of Hollywood redemption.

There's something about Orchid that's appealing, at least for the so-bad-it's-good aficionados. It inspires a guilty combination of howling amusement and rubbernecky fascination, aided by the overpowering, Brazil-meets-lounge music, the sultry images supplied by cinematographer Gale Tattersall and the life's-a-decadent-dinner-party sets of art director Carlos Conti.

Honey's a little too darling for reality but, obviously, that's not what this candy-cane vehicle of a movie is all about. It's about the way Alba moves and how good she looks when she's backlighted and smiling.

With a premise as cavalier as this, perhaps director and co-writer James Wong could have found a tone more original than post-Wes Craven cynicism. Instead, he panders to viewers, allowing them to take gleeful comfort in the destruction of the stupid and doomed.

As it stands, this movie seems to have conflicting desires: to endear itself to the audience and then repel it.

The outcome is deeply unsatisfying. And there's a rather unpalatable message that crime really does pay, and that irresponsible, woman-hopping egomaniac sports figures do finish first. This isn't basketball, it's more like a series of unnecessary timeouts, ending with the creative equivalent of an air ball.

Suffers from melodramatic overkill.

Lionel Chetwynd has achieved the impossible -- making a Vietnam prison torture movie dull. And although his sympathy for Americans missing in action seems genuine and laudable, the film liberal-bashes so heavyhandedly it's enough to make Nixon cry "Fonda."

Even by the low-low standards of cheap action flicks, this one's bad, boys.

Taking Lives would have to work nights to reach mediocrity.

Here was my question for most of this movie: Wha-? I was clueless. Did not understand. Count me among the stupid.

There's a deep, touching tale to relate about the man who went from Apache chieftain to circus has-been, selling his autographs for money. But don't look for stirring, touching or anything in "Geronimo: An American Legend." Look for the exit sign.

Dramatically lackluster.

Needs more than happy thoughts to get off the ground.

There seem to be about a half-dozen spiraling subplots that go nowhere in particular. But it's oh so hiply done -- at least, that's the idea.

This is comic-book coverage. If the strength of the novel was the interplay between Wolfe's dry-white reportage and the sensational, tabloid-tacky humorous events he wrote about, "Vanities"-the-movie just goes for the tacky jugular.

Tough guys snarl at each other or dive out of the way before some explosion reduces their biceps to gymboy tuna. Van Damme still talks like a Belgian choirboy. But he’s physically awesome, of course. He can do things with his body that it hurts to even contemplate. If nature intended for men to do the splits or high kicks, boxer shorts would not have been invented. As for Rourke, I am convinced he’s made entirely of leather. He is essentially a boxing glove with a heartbeat.

Too infuriatingly quirky and taken with its own style to get down to telling a story.

First-time filmmaker Jordan Roberts worked on this project for years, but merely ended up with dreary cliche.

This movie is so wearying in its mediocrity, the inappropriate Ronica almost registers as dramatic relief.

From the get-go, the story remains bogged down in its rather limited morass.

The result: an empty comedy that takes hackneyed potshots at consumerism.

We're talking a thriller about property ownership. This is a yuppie conceit; this is not interesting to human beings. What's the moral behind "Pacific," anyway? Always Check Your References?

The ultimate verdict on "City Hall" is easy: It's no good. The movie, a corruption-in-the-city saga starring Al Pacino, John Cusack and Bridget Fonda, ends on such a false, unsatisfying note, any faith you had built up in the movie is dashed. But that there's faith to lose in the first place is something of an achievement.

I would rather have a more interesting group of desperate people to spend my post-apocalyptic time with.

A brightly wrapped, ketchup-drenched mush-burger, it slides down the Zeitgeist esophagus like a slippery McPelican. You pay, you swallow, you drive home. You're left with nothing except, possibly, heartburn.

The Wachowski brothers have rendered their chronicles into banality, as if trying to imitate the qualitative tailspin of the "Star Wars" series.

Never better than fair to middling pleasant.

Far too slick and manufactured to claim street credibility.

You want to know if The Running Man is a good-time macho show, right? Stay at home and watch professional wrestling. Or Miami Vice (same director -- Paul Michael Glaser). Sure there's blood spattering and bullets riddling and Big Boys Banging Biceps. But through the dry-ice haze, Running Man is surprisingly boring.

The firefighting equivalent of an Army recruitment commercial.

Doesn't anyone get sick of this same old routine?

It tries unsuccessfully to make a wry gumshoe noir out of an overarching, cross-sectional political diagram.

The Jacket is doing nothing but sampling elements of "Jacob's Ladder," "The Silence of the Lambs" and "Memento" without offering more than hackneyed solutions, including a rather cheesy conclusion.

Its heart is vaguely in the right place.

A good-natured but failed experiment in meeting cute -- indie-movie style.

One mediocre, ploddingly predictable film, loaded down with cheesy Hollywood tactics.

Though Hard Candy clearly believes pedophiles should be chopped into little pieces and buried in an unmarked grave, its only purpose is exploitative. Sure, it's a cautionary tale for all those sicko wolves out there, but it's nothing more than an unabashed lurk-and-dread fest.

They go about scaring you, but only in the most hackneyed and cheap-shock manner.

The movie wants to trade on atmosphere more than plot, but even the atmosphere rings false.

The movie's one-note broadness seems suited more to cable. And the story takes the wrong routes -- leaving Crystal's Larry nothing more than likable, and capitalizing callously on the irregular facial features of Anne Ramsey as the villainous Momma.

It's uninspired and insipid all the way.

This movie may appeal to the youthful, midnight-madness crowd, but there isn't enough in it to bestow it with classic B-movie glory.

Martin Lawrence is all there is to National Security. And that's about two or three points out of a possible 10

It's as pretentious and wispy as its title.

Between them, Clooney and Kidman would still need a third party to work up a personality. In fairness to both, they aren't given much to work with.

Aside from the obviously Australian flavor to everything -- which can be entertaining at times -- there's no X factor to justify the whole exercise.

Despite its intelligent agenda, swollen heart and fabulously epic surface, amounts to a didactic banality: a white guy's politically correct lesson abroad.

A picture-book French film that's pretty and trite, rather than edgy and moving.

So single-minded in its reach for fantasy, it becomes the genre's evil opposite: banality.

Nicotina skitters between dull and forced, this despite the use of split screens, jaunty music and the personable Luna.

Instead of offering a perspective that, at the very least, laments a world where the flow of money hurts otherwise good people, Allen simply pushes the movie into an uncertain sinkhole between morality play and black comedy.

Well, it could have been good. But this goofy homage to Kiss fans gets dry mouth pretty fast.

There's not much zest here, even with Mike Myers's energetic attempts to steal the movie as a cross-eyed flight instructor.

More sluggish than a funeral barge, cheaper than a sale at K mart, it's a nerd, it's a shame, it's Superman IV.

It takes a two-hour act of will to keep facing the screen during this moribund movie. Every cliffhanger is enough to make you a cliff jumper. Davis and Modine are almost transcendentally unappealing, as they weather dull sword fights, ship-to-ship exchanges and other action-movie banalities.

This doggy flick, starring Matthew Modine, Nancy Travis, Eric Stoltz and Max Pomeranc, is one of the weirdest, most depressing family films ever made.

Ed...is thrown together with such little concern for originality or its audience, it's appalling.

Even in this conglomerate era of marketed, predigested mediocrity, this Disney movie slips instantly into the humdrum.

There's one thing worse than a movie with two Jean-Claudes: A movie with two Jean-Claudes and bad fighting.

Like the opium dreams that its eponymous hero becomes addicted to, this fragmented, trigger-happy account of Wild Bill Hickok's final years feels like a bad trip through every cheap western knockoff you ever had to sit through.

Add Big Town's collection of spotty characters (with motives murkier than the cinematography), cliche'-laden dialogue (from We gotta get out of here to I can change, I can change), abruptly ended scenes, no exposition when you need it, poor sense of drama (a deep breath), and you have something that should be pitched out into the alley behind the dingiest bar in town.

A bad, unimaginative story posing pretentiously as the very opposite.

Sitting through this is groan-inducing enough, but it's spiritually depressing to watch Djimon Hounsou, who deserves better.

How much you enjoy this movie depends on how funny you find Sandler talking out the side of his mouth with a gravelly squawk -- for the entire movie.

In Hollywood, imitation is the most profitable form of flattery. That is the only plausible explanation for 101 Dalmatians, Walt Disney's disappointing live-action remake of its own 1961 classic.

I'd rather sit in bumper-to-bumper hell on I-495 for two hours than get caught in Traffic again.

Devolves into such utter ludicrousness, the best response (other than avoiding the thing in the first place) is to laugh.

It doesn't seem like overstating things to say that Eros becomes steadily worse as it goes along.

The problem with this movie is the problem with most Renny Harlin movies: There's an excessive amount of excess -- a mind-numbing plurality of firearm battles, vehicular explosions and brutally frank sexual talk.

This isn't real life. It isn't even a movie. It's an extended sitcom. And for the first time in your life, you'll actually beg for commercials.

David Gale deserves the chair for its brutal assault on subtlety.

Tedious.

I'd give this movie about half a miracle.

You won't feel enlightened, just let down

This David Spade comedy breaks an ankle, ruptures several knee ligaments and hits the dirt harder than a felled linebacker. Best thing you can do for this movie? Leave it writhing in the throes of forced humor.

Lacks the spirit of the previous two, and makes all those jokes about hos and even more unmentionable subjects seem like mere splashing around in the muck.

Unromantic, nonsexual and hellaciously dull.

There's little here to offend anyone, and even less here to excite anyone.

The most screamingly obvious reaction to Gerry is: what a load of pseudo-arty you-know-what.

It's sheer agony to sit through, and not for the reasons Lee would relish. It's just bad.

A bewildering, boring assembly of rock-video-surreal nightmare sequences with more repetitive episodes than Groundhog Day.

Let's accentuate the positive: Saving Silverman really stinks. No, really. It's bad. Awful.

An intriguing idea for about two seconds.

Reprises all the tedium of slasher flicks.

Feels patently inauthentic.

Dismal. Lame. Not funny.

Director McGrath retains the novel's highlights, but he slices everything to ribbons.

Heaven forbid a Hollywood romantic movie have any narrative surprises.

Feels razor thin. None of the characters is particularly noteworthy. And the revelations of deep-seated conspiracy in the usual privileged, closed circles are hackneyed and tired.

At no point should anyone mistake this for an actual movie. This is an extended beach video that will leave no one swept away.

Never was this funny a comedian in this horrible a movie.

We're only a little spooked, only a little amused and, by extension, only a little entertained.

If this sounds like "Tootsie" with a ball, well, it is. Screenwriter Bradley Allenstein should be hauled up in writer's court for his shameless cribbing of that far superior comedy. Someone call a foul.

It's hard to believe the creative mind that gave us "Almost Famous," "Jerry Maguire," "Say Anything" and "Fast Times at Ridgemont High" looked up with satisfaction after typing 117 pages of this.

Pitiful.

Guys, I'm telling you: Don't go to this movie! It's "Chasing Amy" with guns! You're walking into a trap! This is for fans of the holy couple, but they already know that.

A galactic slump of a movie that stuffs its travel bag with special effects but forgets to pack the charm.

If there's one piece of wisdom to be culled from this botched project, it's this: No one gets Carter.

Abomination of a movie.

You can laugh with or without irony. Or you can simply stay away.

Proof of Life isn't a movie. It's an overpriced scrapbook.

Only reason to watch this: the grisly reward Irving receives for being in this picture.

Watching this movie, you also have to ask yourself: Just how many acts of self-inflicted finger amputations do I really want to see?

An insipid potboiler set against the far more enticing surf and sand of Oahu's North Shore.

They (De Niro, Burns) look good together. But what a staggering pity they chose such a nasty, hackneyed movie to demonstrate their chemistry.

Shallow Hal makes the case for restricting the Farrellys to mere gross-out movies.

It needs a wooden stake AND a silver bullet through its script.

Tries to combine humor with ghostly horror but excels at neither.

This 110-minute movie never seems to end, even after the various, idiotic storylines are finally resolved. After plying the audience with formulaic predictability, Getting Even doesn't even have the decency to end quickly.

If ever there was a case for quitting while you're behind, this "Blade" is it -- ready to be buried in a vat of garlic.

The movie that Disney uses to explore this premise drips with so much corporate good-neighbor syrup, you might want to wear something waterproof. And Penn's performance is, at best, ripe for discussion.

A disaster of a drama, saved only by its winged assailants. You know a picture's in trouble when you find yourself rooting for humankind to lose.

There's something so familiar and commonplace about this story and its characters...it's hard to get particularly thrilled.

Evolution is bad. How bad? Who cares? Do you ask how hot the fire is before running out of a burning building? No, you just run for safety.

Possibly the worst thug-life flick to be released in the past 72 hours, this movie sags under the weight of the bling-bling cliches strung around its headless neck.

A fast-paced, twisty-turny, high-fiving, but ultimately spiraling disaster of a movie about air traffic controllers, gets lost in this hyperbolic cloud cover, never to be found again.

Drowning in uncharted waters and way off-center in any world.

Stumbles right out of the gate and never regains its footing. It's sad to see a gifted comedian like Janeane Garofalo trying, but failing, to anchor this mediocre affair.

The story moves so slowly and obviously, you don't even need to be in the theater very much (or your living room when the video comes out) to follow it.

Intentionally defies categorization and explication.

Nothing more, or less, than a cheap, dirty grab at our Christmas spirit.

It's a diatribe from beginning to end.

Luckily, life (just like the SAT) has its multiple-choice options. You don't actually have to watch this.

Pfarrer's screenplay feels older than the Martian hills.

Essentially an extended cutesy session.

A rambling disappointment.