Ernest Hardy

Death of a Tree, written and directed by John Martoccia, is filled with so much unintentional humor that it quickly slips into the realm of parody — and stays there.

Singleton has neither the emotional nor intellectual depth to do justice to his thesis. He is too in awe of the stereotypical hood lifestyles and macho posturings that he's trying to critique.

The film isn't as smart as it thinks it is, and its characters are painfully generic.

As Bomb snakes its way toward tragedy, it grates rather than entices. The actors come off more as poseurs than as characters, and the film's political and cultural insights are superficial and old hat.

It is impossible to overstate how grating Nia Vardalos is as the title character in Helicopter Mom. Throughout her career, her default setting has been something like "Jack Russell terrier after an amphetamine bender." No surprise that she's exhausting here.

The execution is actually worse than the premise. Nonstop racial, sexual and cultural stereotypes parade across the screen with little wit or real humor to guide them.

Hopefully, the next time around, Chadha's imagination will be in the service of not just excellent casting and directing, but a script to match those other cinematic components.

15 Minutes is simply a bad movie.

The script is often ludicrous (gratuitous digs at feminism; muddled commentary on war and the military), the sets look like sets, and the acting-aside from Helsham and Plunkett-doesn't even rise to the level of student films.

Too self-consciously dark, too aware of its long, murky, art-designed descent into the underbelly of America's addictive personality.

In the end, Butterfly is an infuriating film because it's so very contrived, so annoyingly phony.

Just about the only good thing you can say about Spike Lee's pointless, didactic The 25th Hour is that it's filled with strong performances, albeit of stock characters.

The drama is unintentionally humorous, the humor incredibly labored and the acting rarely better than one might find in a Chi Chi LaRue XXX production.

It all collapses under an atrocious performance by Pacino, whose laughably bad accent and scene-chewing delivery serve up thick slabs of that rarest of delicacies: Jewish ham. There may be grounds here for a class-action lawsuit.

Loud, chaotic and largely unfunny (veteran actors John Witherspoon and Anna Maria Horsford seem at best indifferent to the material), Friday After Next is the graceless sodomizing of a cult classic.

Appalling because it never transcends its adolescent-boy glee at being allowed entry to the highly sexualized arena of prostitution.

What really makes the film fall dead (although the preview audience I saw it with howled from beginning to end) are the actors and the way the characters have been scripted.

An often gorgeous, dizzying assault of ideas and visual flourishes...it's just not very good.

Derivative, cliché-ridden and old hat.

The script is painfully underbaked, and director Bille Woodruff (Honey) continues to raise a question: How can someone from a music-video background have absolutely no sense of rhythm, timing or pacing?

A tedious exercise in filling in historical blanks through exhausted tropes.

A lobotomized updating of "A Midsummer Night's Dream."

Lazily directed by Charles Stone III (the man behind Budweiser's "Whassup?!" campaign) from a leaden script by Matthew Cirulnick and novelist Thulani Davis.

Manipulative, feel-good drivel wrapped around a cloying performance by Kevin Spacey.

Patterson seems more concerned with getting the surfaces right (costume design, production design) than tapping any of the adrenaline that should be pumping through bank robberies, love scenes, and confrontations with barking loan sharks — adrenaline we should feel even if the protagonist is meant to be cucumber-cool.

The best parts of the movie occur during the outtakes, which are genuinely funny. The movie proper is insufferable.

That crack in Vitale's storytelling foundation would be forgivable if the writing, acting and character epiphanies . . . well, existed. As it is, not even Scotti's formidable lips can blow life into this stillborn flick.

Crushingly airless film -- Food chokes on its own depiction of upper-crust decorum.