Ed Park

The only possible surprise in The Tuxedo would be an extended demonstration of what was once Chan's trademark, the daffily choreographed kineticism forbidden of late by either his own age or the scruples of story editors.

A flatland of lowest-common-denominated retro-collegiate wackiness.

Preachy and humorless, Eban and Charley shocks only by the quality of its numbing solipsism.

Syd's (Chris Evans) emotional tailspin is embarrassingly banal, and his assertion that "everybody here hates me" quickly applies to the audience as well.

Posner's dishearteningly unsophisticated treatment itself rings false.

Affleck and impressively amazonian Alias star Jennifer Garner (as the ninjitsu-savvy daughter of a wealthy tycoon) are lankier than "Spider-Man's" Maguire and Dunst, which is good if you like lanky, but their relationship substitutes cliché for chemistry.

Less effective in dramatizing the choices facing second-generation Indian Americans than as a showcase for Sheetal Sheth's terrific hair.

It's about following your dreams, no matter what your parents think. Socrates motions for hemlock.

At least Macht emerges relatively unscathed from the mess, content to brood and mutter self-loathing observations while Johansson and (most painfully) Travolta spoon their Southern accents out of a jar and spread it all over the humid scenery.

CCM's dissipated endgame borrows soggily from "The Ring," resulting in something that wouldn't make it past the first script meeting for Scary Movie 4.

Washington is in default dignified mode here. He capably embodies the hero's transformation from doughy dad to man of action, amid the movie's shameless button-pushing and cheap religious overlay.

If The Last Man were the last movie left on earth, there would be a toss-up between presiding over the end of cinema as we know it and another night of delightful hand shadows.

The story has too many characters, about whom we know too little.

As earnest as a community-college advertisement, American Chai is enough to make you put away the guitar, sell the amp, and apply to medical school.

This mockumentary in which a group of failed Brooklyn rappers switch gears after listening to the Beatles wears out its welcome quicker than the shortest track on "The Grey Album."

Dog Run mistakes milieu for meaning; its succinct title's at least a word too long.

Most of the action is tedious, and the less you pay attention to the dialogue, the less you'll feel your hand inadvertently twitching as if with joystick.

In Van Helsing, the orgy of morphing, shrieking, lightning-cracking, and habitual rope-swinging quickly turns oppressive.

Scenes end abruptly, laughs are as rare as yetis, and the overarching question seems to be: Can we turn this into a franchise?

Director Chuck Russell lacks the visual panache, the comic touch, and perhaps the budget of Sommers's title-bout features, which refined a historically grounded B-movie sensibility into pure, gasp-inducing entertainment.

Based-on-a-true-story kitschfest.

Though ample time is spent mingling Murphy's jabberjaw locutions and Wilson's curveball spaciness, the film leaves only the bitter reek of a botched chemistry experiment.

Why not travel back in time and not make this movie?

In The One the maze of death leads only to exhaustion -- a solipsistic extension of Bruce Lee pacing the room of mirrors at the end of "Enter the Dragon."

"X is to Y, as this shit is to boring."

So busy rehashing rom-com clichés that it shirks the genitive, prelude to other flaws.

Such confusion makes the script-flipping finale something of a respite, as it gives one an excuse to forget everything that's happened.

The acting is deliberately bad, directed to an ostensibly dreamlike flatness; and it's also just plain bad.

Too stupid to be satire, too obviously hateful to be classified otherwise, Frank Novak's irritating slice of lumpen life is as reliably soul-killing as its title is nearly meaningless. ("Good Housekeeping" magazine's legal muscle forced a last-minute change.)

Though it's high time for a probing drama that illuminates the labyrinth of America's immigration system, those responsible for Green Card Fever should have their artistic licenses revoked.

Though The Sea (and the sea) wants to capture some elemental, unruly truths, it's ultimately an over-lacquered jidai-geki curio, something for the appendix of the next book on Kurosawa.

A shamelessly recycled vision of decrepit high tech.

Marred by a rambling voice-over at one end and a pat therapeutic resolution on the other, the film has a nice half-hour patch somewhere in the middle.

If you doubt whether Honey can scrape together the dough, this is probably the movie for you.

As genre comeuppance, this might have been nasty fun, but the movie barely makes sense, with its unbelievable naïveté and arbitrary flashbacks.

Proves infertile in more ways than one.

Aware of its awfulness.

Contains exactly three decent jokes, all stuffed in the last 15 minutes.