Ed Park

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.

Hardly a nuanced portrait of a young woman's breakdown, the film nevertheless works up a few scares, particularly a tense call-number hunt in the library stacks.

A shamelessly recycled vision of decrepit high tech.

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

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

Stateside's real-life frame allows the complexities of mental illness and military service to lose dramatic tension, resulting in a desultory home stretch of group therapy, tears, and reconciliation.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

Efficient, suitably anonymous chiller.

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

White Noise vigorously pushes the supernatural line throughout, but unfortunately its final movement is so incoherent that the whole thing collapses.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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."

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

At least Sean Astin, as a scene-chewing prima donna, seems to be having a good time--and mom Patty Duke gets to call him a "turd."

A pleasurably intense burst of anarchy with no moral in sight, thank God.