Ella Taylor

Where else could this flabby excuse for a women's movie go? Straight to the Oxygen Channel, if it's lucky.

The movie has a script (by Paul Pender) made of wood, and it's relentlessly folksy, a procession of stagy set pieces stacked with binary oppositions.

The director is Christian Volckman, whose skills as an animator greatly exceed his grasp of an idea worth pursuing.

Basic Instinct 2 pushes diligently along in a murder-and-mayhem-stuffed effort to demonstrate that (a) a sillier and more hackneyed movie than "Basic Instinct" is possible and (b) that shrinks have ids too, by golly.

A disappointed meditation on the '60s.

Lacking energy and pace and enslaved by a ghastly score, this tepid movie left me longing alternately for David Lean's thrillingly grim 1948 masterpiece, and Carol Reed's chipper 1968 sing-along, with pretty tunes by Lionel Bart.

You'd have to be either an avid New Ager or willing to see Nick Nolte in absolutely anything to get fully onboard for this visually overexcited tale of salvation-by-gas-station-guru.

Our traumatized soldiers deserve better representation than this irretrievably ridiculous drama, which will do nothing to revive the flagging fortunes of the man whose career lay down and died after "The Exorcist" and "The French Connection."

The movie’s glib trafficking in illness, death and pinched little faces to jury-rig our emotional responses (Gibb was inspired by the equally likable, equally pandering Czech film "Kolya") lost me at hello.

Something there is about the '60s that undoes the most intelligent of filmmakers.

Too sensitive for this world or any other, this stifling portrait of a family stuck in bereavement offers the painful sight of at least two highly accomplished actors frozen for lack of direction from novice writer-director Josh Sternfeld.

Anemic.

Remember the Daze has the irony-free, instant-nostalgia earnestness of your high school yearbook, but watching it is not likely to conjure your own youthful emotions -- it’s more like flipping through the generic memories of a complete stranger.

Raising Helen is the kind of movie you watch on a plane while muttering “utter crap” under your breath -- and then burst into tears.

My own view is that, like me, the LAPD was defeated by the movie's incestuously proliferating plots. I've seen Dark Blue twice, and I still don't have a handle on all its comings and goings.

Under Peter Hewitt's phoned-in direction, Garfield chugs along like the slow train to Chattanooga, with only Jennifer Love Hewitt, as the local vet, twittering pertly in a desperate effort to raise Jon's feeble pulse.

The question is not how bad this excuse for a domestic comedy is (medium cringe), but how the gifted Fred Schepisi got suckered into directing a vanity project.

Mired in noir cliché, the movie manages to be simultaneously overwrought and undercooked, with the Bambi-eyed Akhtar giving such a relentlessly inscrutable performance, one wants to poke him with a stick.

Might have something interesting to say about cultural ambivalence by and toward the maternal impulse if only it had a spark of originality or verve.

Too long, too slow, too self-consciously chatty and too much at the mercy of a slim premise that doesn't wear well under endless repetition.

Cliché, or experiment with cliché? Really, it’s not worth sticking around to find out, since the action mostly involves the monotonous Romain Duris standing around in his underpants or sitting on the toilet banging on about why love has fled.

This suffocatingly pleasant cross between "Sliding Doors" and "Six Degrees of Separation" is barely rescued by one beautiful scene.

The setup and execution of this quietly histrionic tale of the distorting power of thwarted love are so patently ridiculous that the urge to laugh gets in the way.

A stripling of 24, Tierney has a very young man's immature passion for unrelieved misery, which borders at times on the tedious, at others on the downright comical.

If it were less prone to soap-opera histrionics, this screechy saga of an upscale family collapsing under the weight of its members' self-absorption might have something worth saying about domestic politics in post-fascist, post-communist, post-socialist Italy.

Unless your child has a close working knowledge of the role of homing pigeons in World War II British espionage, he or she is likely to be bamboozled for the duration.

Another drearily sadistic and pointless crime thriller.

The question for skittish distributors is not whether Looking for Comedy will play in Peshawar, but how long the movie will take to put Peoria to sleep.

A threadbare plot peeks through the shameless run of shopworn jokes about Viagra, stashed-away dildos, eager old dames delivering unsolicited casseroles to freshly widowed men.

Young's well-intentioned dramatic re-enactment of their encounters is burdened by sepia-period accessorizing, laborious flashbacks, spurious comparisons between the two men's domestic lives, and the downright bizarre casting of Franka Potente as Less's ailing wife and Stephen Fry as an Israeli pol who wants the case wrapped up in five minutes or less.

The movie is crudely jokey and, finally, a wimpy betrayal of its source.

The movie charts a journey from belief to despair with occasional touches of humor, but by the end I was so deadened by its minimalist style and method, I could barely summon the energy to ask why.

The whole seems disjointed, incoherent and lacking in the startling originality of the other two Edwards (Scissorhands and Wood) who, half a career back, poured from Burton's distended outsider imagination.

Thunderbirds is devoted to the principle that character and story are but rude interruptions to the real order of business, an endless display of profound vehicle fetish.

As [Roberts'] gay best friend, Rupert Everett is the only one with any backbone, any sense of humor or any decent lines.

Slovenly writing by Shondra Rimes doesn't help, and the movie bows out with an omigod-we-forgot-the-feminism twist — too little, too late to redeem this lumpish excuse for a contemporary fairy tale.

There’s nothing postmodern about this "family," unless postmodern means never having to grow up.

(Leder's) camera won't sit still long enough to complete a scene and tell a coherent story, skittering all over the map until you're dizzy from all the degrees of separation and spurious connection.

Milla Jovovich, as Steven's Yiddish-spouting punk-rocker friend, is so bad, she's downright entertaining.

Austenland, a clunky broadside aimed at the cult of Jane Austen, is worth seeing primarily for its end credits, a mix of pop oil and water so joyfully dippy it might have produced a stifled giggle even in Herself.

From the first soft piano that accompanies white geese flying toward a humongous orange sunset, The Notebook racks up the sugary clichés till you’re screaming for mercy.

This undeniably talented writer-director has been repeating himself with steadily decreasing potency ever since the wonderful "The Sixth Sense," and his latest excursion does nothing to buck the trend.

There's so much happening in the movie that it feels like nothing is happening at all. Which leaves you free to gaze, slack-jawed, on the true glory of Batman & Robin -- its fabulously color-coded set design.

Emerges a weakling comedy of manners.

A Michael Bay movie: bang bang, paper-thin characters, wooden screenplay.

Suggests that had young Adolf Hitler managed to get his art show, the Holocaust might never have happened. This seems absurd, not to say insensitive.

Essentially a TV movie souped up by the divinely skittish cinematography of Chris Menges, the film suffers from a screenplay full of labored attempts at wit by Steven Knight, and characters who barely make it off the page alive.

This is not comedy - it's mugging. And there's no excuse for making Bean cuddly; he only works with an evil edge.

Motherhood doesn't really need a recession to call attention to its flaws. The movie's a perfect dud on its own terms.

La Mujer lumbers along, trapped in a long-faced score that appears to have been borrowed from a thriller, and without a smidgen of the saving irony that might have made of it a decent screwball comedy.

Has spread itself so thin between plot, subplots and great scads of floppy pop-psych, it has nothing else to do but lie down and die of exhaustion.

Full of It abandons the de rigueur hot pastels of the average high school caper in favor of distressed browns and greens, but in the end, all the funky style masks little more than a Pinocchio retread for the adolescent grunge set.

Leven's tepid screenplay and the passionless self-control of Redford's direction make this bloodless movie a chore to sit through.

The movie becomes so cluttered with concept and design, it fails to get even a toehold on the humanistic subtext it's clearly reaching for. A pallid performance by Mira Sorvino, as Williams' girlfriend and advocate for the fully lived and recorded life, doesn't help.

Never lets up: A door can't shut without sounding like a bomb going off; mutilated bodies show up with clockwork punctuality, gratuitously underscored by a relentlessly overbearing soundtrack.

Looking tired and sallow and drained of her customary glow, Lindsay Lohan marches grimly through this mechanical tween comedy as if it were a particularly tedious homework assignment. Which it is.

Queasily parked between halfhearted satire and overcooked melodrama, this adaptation of a well-received 2003 novel by British writer Zoë Heller offers the unhappy spectacle of a raft of acting talent trying to do right by slimy material.

Domestic farce always has a potentially compelling dark side when it reveals the tenuousness of love and the fragility of all human relationships, but Belvaux seems far too busy orchestrating the copious action to pause for anything approaching insight.

Ordinarily it's kind of hard to screw up a Richard Price story, but the writer is his own worst enemy here, with a screenplay so filled with bromides and object lessons from God, you can't tell what he's trying to say.

Curiously flat and immobile.

The movie is prettily shot by Almodóvar collaborator Affonso Beato, but no amount of tastefully desaturated color or imaginary friends going whoo-whoo in the deserted apartment upstairs can save this lumbering echt-thriller from fatal tedium.

One expects neither subtlety nor surprise from a scenario boasting a household pet named Freud. If there's any reason at all to see Running With Scissors, it' Bening.

Undertow seems to be straining to say something at once tragic and heartwarming about fathers, sons and brothers, but I'm damned if I know what it is.

Myers is the movie's fatal flaw, squeezing out the other characters who fatten the plot, mostly with an eye to parents.

Ends up a flabby vehicle for the most banal of road-movie messages: The journey's the thing; the goal inevitably disappoints.

Under the charmless direction of Mark Rosman, the actors seem to be frozen at the rehearsal stage, with the blessed exception of a sublimely funny Jennifer Coolidge as the Botoxed horror of a stepmother.

The story is so flat and transparent in the telling, so empty of psychological mystery and depth, it skates dangerously close to condescension.

Bruni-Tedeschi is her usual radiantly libidinal presence, but channeling Bette Midler doesn't become her, and even she can't redeem all the redundant vaudeville carry-on.

The flabbiest of cop-outs. Moore gives a flat, spiritless performance, almost matched by that of Anthony Hopkins, who, notwithstanding the Armani threads, shuffles around like a pensioner in bedroom slippers.

Comes so freighted with tragedy and sensitivity that I left dreaming of converting the abject misery of one and all to everyday unhappiness with free drinks and a raucous sing-along down at the pub.

Juliette Binoche is the only reason to see Diane Kurys' florid, incoherent movie.

Sympathetic, if lackluster.

The pre-posterous plot is a far-fetched way to dis-cuss the power and meaning of the Consti-tution in the context of international terror-ism.

My own little critic-in-training laughed her head off. Lacks taste, must try harder.

There's no emotional weight to either character, or to this far-from-dangerous liaison. All you can do is watch the slight story sputter, and try to figure out whether Bèart's formidable lips were made by God or man.

Owen, perhaps for want of any definition to his character, turns in a performance at once so blank and so bloated with lugubrious bombast, one wants to chuck him under the chin and make him giggle.

Oh, Mr. Craven, give us a "Scream."

Slobbery wet kiss of a family movie.

In the studied excess of his Hong Kong action movies, Woo's swooning sentimentality plays like grand opera. With its dogged Hollywood naturalism and the inexorable passage of its characters toward sainthood, Windtalkers is nothing but a sticky-sweet soap.

Anchorman has one amusing character, a dumb weatherman played by Steve Carell, and a nicely observed set piece about what newscasters really say to one another when they're shuffling papers between segments. Otherwise it's a long string of heavy-footed sight and sound gags.

Like a date who's primped too long to arrive at dinner with something to talk about, Road to Perdition is beautifully groomed and a perfect drag to be with.

It takes a pristine gift for mediocrity to ruin Mary O'Hara’s muscular children's novel about a wild boy and his wild horse, but director Michael Mayer has brought off the massacre with aplomb.

De Niro is damned if he's going to make a standard thriller out of this view from within the CIA, which might be refreshing if his solemn moral parable weren't so lacking in any other kind of juice, and if its hero were less of a round-shouldered, whey-faced organization man.

The Ugly Truth serves up yet another tightly wound career woman, ripe for chopping up, tenderizing and ravishing by an alpha male who knows what's good for her.

This is less a coming-out tale than a showcase for late-middle-aged hysterical divas in flowing caftans to yell, scream and ride roughshod over the young homosexuals who are nominally the movie's center.

The pivotal secret of God's Sandbox is no secret minutes into the story, and director Doron Eran doesn't seem to know, or care much, whether he's making feminist agitprop or softcore porn. The two don't mix well.

If it's about anything at all, the lame new comedy All About Steve is mostly about Mary, a logorrheic crossword compiler with too much arcane information in her head -- and the social skills of an excitable 6-year-old boy.

By all current standards it's a startlingly ingenuous film.

A viscerally effective thriller ends up a repugnant exercise in moral relativism, delivered with the grandstanding swagger of the self-styled provocateur.

Heartless piece of ill will.

I'd take almost any colorful-character shtick over the gloomy gravitas that settles over All the King's Men early on and never leaves.

What a letdown that Vincent Ward, who gave us a fabulous gift with Map of the Hu-man Heart, has made this big old tub of schmaltz.

As a movie, it must stand or fall by intense chemistry between the lead characters. Sadly, as co-written by Campion and Moore, In the Cut suffers from a fatal emotional and erotic imbalance.

As reasoning, this is manipulative -- as filmmaking, it’s dull.

Directed by Swedish filmmaker Mikael Håfström, who's clearly new at the genre, this aptly named movie is riddled with obvious parallels, crude moral talking points, a script so awful it's practically avant-garde, and a vain attempt at comic relief by RZA.

Like so many movies of its kind, Dead Man's Shoes gets hopelessly lost in vicious process, and so loses all sight of anything you might optimistically call insight.

The best I can say for Smiling Fish is that it's capable and pleasant, which ought to sound a warning note louder than if I'd said it was awful.

Undisciplined and overstuffed with enough surplus plot twists to make your neck ache, The Mexican affects the tousled look of a self-conscious indie.

Both character and metaphor have gone to the dogs, leaving a slew of fart and burp jokes and laying bare Dreamcatcher's driving purpose, which is to make multiplexes full of little boys yuk it up, then gross them out, creep them out.

For all its strenuous feints at fair play, though, Won't Back Down is something less honorable - a propaganda piece with blame on its mind.

Doggedly refusing artifice as if cinematic beauty were a filthy capitalist plot, Yedaya drowns her characters in realist grit, a colorless screenplay and no score to speak of, rendering this open book of a movie alienating in all the wrong ways.

As dull to listen to as it is gorgeous to look at.

Anne Heche is just another neo-noir minx on the make, while Vince Vaughn, grinning and leering as Norman Bates, sinks the movie.

Overblown melodrama, as muddle-headed as it is palpably sincere.

A terrific premise is mangled to a pulp, then beaten to death in this forced mockumentary.

The director gives us not just a pop Holocaust but a prettified, palatable Holocaust.

Half a notch above a vanity project, this chipper little number by French director Steve Suissa offers a deadly combination of shamelessness, narcissism and schoolboy comedy.

Today's street-smart moviegoing kids don't need to be so shamelessly pandered to.

Bier's portrayal of the brothers' interplay holds few surprises, and the exploitation of the war between East and West is vulgar, contrived and borderline racist.

This rancidly exploitative movie is redeemed only by canny performances by both leads, as well as Sandra Oh in a supporting role as Phoebe’s friend.

Barely competent. The pacing never accelerates beyond sluggish, and Lesnick's script is an awkward pile of gag lines.

Lame comic-strip excuse for a biopic.

Branagh has cut, pasted and aggressively abridged Love's Labour's Lost, and piled it high with fancy visuals to make sure we get the drift.

Among its other sins, the disposable romantic comedy Music and Lyrics fluffs a golden opportunity to make hay with Grant's dark side.

Without serious political and ethical stakes, the story limps to a halt, shrouded in platitude and faux drama.

The wet blanket of undigested autobiography lies all over Rob Reiner's excruciating new opus about a marriage winding down into terminal atrophy.

The movie uses the mutt's disappearance as a frame on which to hang a well-worn package of fatally mild domestic disorder, then resolve it in what feels like real time. Let's just say that the dog gets the best lines.

Self-satisfied, incoherently busy farce.

So radiantly awful that, given the egghead credentials of the director and his screenwriter and star Sam Shepard, I initially took the charitable route and assumed I was in the presence of parody.

Squeak(s) by to make Loser justify the price of admission.

Paramount Pictures proudly informs us that the PG rating is for “mild, crude humor.” Too mild, too crude by far. If I were you, I’d take the wee ones and run for the vastly superior “Finding Nemo.”

If I were a grief-stricken Sarajevan I'd take offense.

Like its predecessor, SATC2--with a script that's basically a sack full of not very funny gag-lines wrapped in strung-together episodic mini-scenes--is not suited to be a movie.

A witless ninny of a movie about Italy, romantic disillusion, Shakespeare, history, more Italy and getting to "yes" in love and intimacy.

Parker has boiled An Ideal Husband into a thuddingly unimaginative costume drama laden with frocks, riding crops, servile butlers and very good actors desperately treading water.

An undercooked allusion to chaos theory -- gives every appearance of having been conceived, planned and executed out of a high school locker room.

It's hard to imagine a movie at once more pandering and insulting to adult women

Made with the slick, shorthand complacency of a TV movie, Beautiful is so overstuffed with contrivance, you can hardly breathe.

By the end of this mercifully short excuse for a horror movie, you'll be wishing the beast had chowed down on the entire ensemble.

A degraded and degrading film, of interest only because it's symptomatic of so much that's wrong with the drearily repetitive tabloid mentality that has infected not just the news media, but the whole culture industry.

The predicaments of this whiny, unprepossessing crew inspire about as much sympathy as a celebrity divorce.

How fortunate that the J. Lo bod, majestic butt and all, finds itself in excellent working order in Gigli: There is precious little other consolation in this formless windbag of a romantic comedy.

I can find nothing nice to note about this excruciatingly slow, overly tasteful piece of whimsy.

Director Shankman has diligently studied the forms and reproduced the moves of the screwball romances he so clearly loves, but he simply hasn't the chops to put together even a decent rip-off of those glittering jewels of the '30s and '40s, which depend on great writing, classy situation comedy and, above all, chemistry.

A movie bloated with character cliches and a bullying score that bludgeons us into whatever emotion composer Marc Shaiman thinks we should be experiencing.

Overproduced, psychologically muddled, and burdened with an enchantingly overheated screenplay.

That we are supposed to find something to admire in this callow crew is insufferable.

The skits are dreadful, the jokes suck.

A star ensemble is preposterously miscast.

Along with the rest of the movie's fine cast, Franco presumably believes he is in the presence of art. Me, I know a fire hose when I see one.

Vinterberg's execution is overstuffed, unoriginal and often downright incomprehensible. And what's Sean Penn doing dangling off airplanes -- pontificating, as usual, from a great height?

Replete with false dilemmas, assisted by a dreadfully stagy screenplay and directed with all the animation of a tableau vivant, Metroland is such a draggy bore.

If you get your jollies from watching women being shot, stabbed and humiliated, you’ll love video director David Dobkin’s pointlessly grisly, tediously derivative feature debut.

How this hopelessly muddled and tedious dirge got released -- unless it was through the clout of Mel Gibson, who's grafted on as an FBI agent in a neck brace, with no discernible connection to the action -- is the real mystery.

Anatomy of Hell offers one of the most hateful and mechanical representations of sexuality I've ever seen.

The animation is cheesy; the banter isn't funny; the score is noisy and grating; and the critters look like stuffed animals. The best that can be said for The Wild is that it's a most insincere form of flattery. The worst is that it's a sincere form of theft.

A schizoid monster slapped together by uneasy bedfellows.