Ed Park

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.

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.

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

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

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.

Proves infertile in more ways than one.

Aware of its awfulness.

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.

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.

Based-on-a-true-story kitschfest.

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."

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.

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

Even if, per Wilde, all art is quite useless, it need not be quite as useless as this.

The only drama is in waiting to hear how John Malkovich's reedy consigliere will pronounce his next line.

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

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

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

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