Ernest Hardy

It's a dud. To be fair, the source material (to which the film is unfortunately faithful) is itself a wan assemblage of creaky one-liners, overly familiar gay ghetto types and sitcom-inspired shenanigans.

Reyes' fast-paced tale soars on the pedigree of its cast, all of whom are clearly having a ball -- Both poignant and wickedly amusing, Empire sets high standards for a subgenre that's rarely had any.

Beautifully filmed but written without the psychological depth or sleight of hand of the best thrillers.

The cast is engaging, and there are a few light-chuckle moments, but the script needed another rewrite, and the film itself needed to be guided by a thornier sensibility than Fuller's.

This hypersleek film is surprisingly lax for its first half... The ending is dumb.

The script plays like something by an English major overstuffed with knowledge of lit but whose real-life experience is drawn largely from movies -- and whose simplistic views on race and class are straight out of the white liberal's "But I mean well..." handbook.

A stunningly lethargic, uninvolving piece of crap.

Quite unintentionally, director Luis Llosa and screenwriters Hans Bauer, Jim Cash and Jack Epps Jr. have crafted a howler; Anaconda, meant to be a nail-biting thriller, is a laugh-out-loud comedy.

Remains short on charm, purpose or laughs.

While moderately entertaining, the film also captures another old dynamic: The “ew” factor dissolves into the yawn factor with surprising quickness.

Hinges almost completely on the taut body and delectable beauty of Jessica Alba, but is otherwise so riddled with limp clichés that it doesn't even qualify as a guilty pleasure.

Dazzles with rare performance footage.

Trite dialogue, stock characters, and bad-to-middling special effects make Stranded more tedious than scary or nerve-wracking.

Orlando Jones, buff and commanding, steals the film as Soul Train, a lawyer-biker, while Lisa Bonet, a sexy, enigmatic earth mother, is stranded in a movie that has no idea what to do with her.

The film needs strong characters and snappy dialogue to carry it through. It has neither.

A Man Apart isn't awful, but it is almost reflexively rote, evoking countless other outlaw-cop films that are smarter, tighter and more fun.

It doesn't help that the level of acting in the film brings nothing but accidental humor to the mix.

The film staggers under its own didacticism. Too often we're told of men who were professionals back home and are here reduced to driving cabs, waiting tables or vending ice cream.

Lost its chance to be anything but an endurance test for the viewer.

There's really only one reason to see Party Monster, and that's Seth Green's scene-stealing performance as former (and somewhat reluctant) New York club kid James St. James, the boy who would be queen.

The film's power lies in the fact that the façade is crumbling on the actress even as she clings to it. That this is not a pathetic sight is due to the grit that we glimpse through the cracks. It's Barbie, becoming human.

Working from a preachy, clumsy script that's full of gaping holes in logic, plot and character development, director Zak Tucker is also handicapped by a cast filled with actors who seem to be in their first year of acting school.

Offers no perverse philosophical conundrums and no eye-popping visuals. It's a dull, lifeless bore.

As the characters mix and mingle, pouring out their tales of woe online and fumbling real-life connections, Weintrob leaves no cliché unturned in getting to root causes of behavior.

Walter's self-conscious efforts at quirkiness...and cartoonishly drawn characters...try too hard while falling far short of their marks.

A dark, biting comedy-- funny, smart and full of unpredictable twist and turns.

Director Raja Gosnell apparently doesn't even try to pump life into this wan film version of the beloved Saturday-morning cartoon.

A small revolution tucked inside clichés and willful artistic ineptitude.

What really hamstrings Sinner, though, is the hetero narcissism beneath its enlightened posturing.

When will Hollywood learn that a genre trend can last for years if itís nurtured with decent scripts? No time soon, apparently.

A substandard romantic comedy gussied up in Indian drag.

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.

Has a warm and intimate feel that helps push it a little deeper than its cable movie-of-the-week blueprint.

15 Minutes is simply a bad movie.

In trying to avoid moralizing or cheap sensationalizing, Didier sidestepped any energy force altogether and his film snoozes because of it.

There are a handful of laughs, but nothing to balance the onslaught of clichés.

The cutesy opening of writer-director David Moreton's Testosterone (co-written with Dennis Hensley) turns out to be a crippling miscalculation.

From concept to execution to tone, writer-director Liz W. Garcia's The Lifeguard is a lifeless misfire.

A feel-good, heartwarming film that all but drowns in saccharine.

Full of familiar tropes, exhausted rhythms, self-conscious references to genre forebears...Language of a Broken Heart, directed by Rocky Powell from a screenplay by Juddy Talt, is pure product.

What's meant to be a colorblind story, plays up age-old stereotypes.

It could have been a hoot in a bad-movie way if the laborious pacing and endless exposition had been tightened. As it is, only LaSalle's sizzling performance makes Crazy more than a by-the-numbers psycho-horror thriller.

Still, the vibrantly shot Lucky Star could have been a mildly entertaining bit of escapism, were it not for the fact that Sophie isn't naïve so much as infantile, a point driven home by her wardrobe.

It's hollow, forced and false.

By the time the final gotcha plot twist unfolds, it's not the intended tears but a yawn that is produced.

Intentionally blurs fiction and reality.

Pandering and tired, Down to Earth lurches from one dead gag to the other, in search of both comedic rhythm and a dramatic pulse. It finds neither.

This is a film at odds with itself, wanting to be a 99 percenter rallying cry but wallowing in and fetishizing 1 percenter accoutrement at every turn.

The obvious, cliché-ridden visual style of this probe into the life, work and legacy of Carlos Castaneda ends up working very much against its subject.

Not a very good movie; it's sentimental, pandering and psychologically anorexic.

The Painting is a sleekly crafted quilt of moldy racial insight and feel-good kumbaya-isms set against the backdrop of the civil rights era. The acting is competent, TV-movie-of-the-week quality (network, not cable), while every single character is a type you've seen a million times before.

The story is unnecessarily muddled and confusing in the telling, and the athletically gifted Yen is overshadowed by largely mediocre CGI effects. Revisit the original instead.

The whole point is nothing more than the revelation that the terrain of suburbia is populated with damaged people inflicting damage on others. This is still news?

Buried beneath Silent Hill’s hyper-stylized stupidity (the film looks like a collaboration between David Fincher, Trent Reznor and music video director Mark Romanek) is the hollow effort to bottle something of the zeitgeist unease surrounding religious fundamentalism.

Although it's grotesque to see pre-teens stomping in underground warehouse-battle settings, at least Battlefield America's racial politics are interesting.

A crap film that's steeped in liberal paranoia, but it's also so ludicrous that it falls under the guilty-pleasure category.

It's a mean-spirited exercise in stilted outrageousness.

Preposterous and tedious, Sonny is spiked with unintentional laughter that, unfortunately, occurs too infrequently to make the film even a guilty pleasure.

In the end, Some Fish Can Fly doesn't.

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.

The film is ultimately more labored than inspired. A cameo by James Brown is amusing, but it can't keep The Tuxedo from earning the distinction of being Chan's worst Hollywood film to date.

Superficiality and cliché mark the film's notions of family, dysfunction, and even survival.

If you're already a huge fan of any of these artists, this film will be a lovefest. For all others, it's a mild diversion at best.

There are also strong flickers here of a film that might have been.

The film offers no new insights into its people or into the dynamics of the Hollywood machine -- the whole affair, played for low-intensity laughs, is numbingly familiar.

What follows is one set piece after another in which the women make fools of themselves as the script herds them toward a happy ending of hugs and tears.

The biggest problem is that the character of Sabine is such a lame male fantasy of the enigmatic woman-child.

The Colony has modest rewards: It's decently acted, delivers some well-executed jolts, doesn't insult the viewer's intelligence, and is mercifully free of ironic distance.

It's little more than a loose assemblage of Hollywood action movie formulas: "Dirty Harry" and assorted cop/buddy flicks are the clear models for the movie.

Less forgivable is the fact that this is a film in which characters are flung out of character solely for cheap laughs and rarely actually listen or talk to one another.

The thread holding it all together is endless, repetitive, interminable fight scenes whose limp choreography is spiced up with Matrix-style slow motion -- in 2015. For all that -- fists flying, bullets dodged, gratuitous female nudity -- the film is oddly inert.

For a film that deals with adultery, racism, immigration and class struggle, Loco Love is a startlingly weightless work. It has the antiseptic look and feel of an Olsen Twins video.

The film isn't very good. The Million Dollar Hotel is an uneasy melding of Hollywood shtick and art-house sensibilities.

Doesn't even rise to the level of camp, of being so-bad-it's-good. It's just flat out bad.

Playing like the redundant child of The Wolf of Wall Street and Boiler Room, Americons has its heart and justifiably outraged politics in the right place; it just lacks artistry or real insight.

Welcome to the Jungle, directed by Rob Meltzer from a script by Jeff Kauffmann, is satanically bad.

Wrong Cops is a tedious exercise in self-consciously hip lowbrow comedy.

The fact that real-life deadly racial animus in America is often cartoonish in its manifestation doesn't excuse Deadline's cliché-ridden characterizations of bigotry. Worse, the film has no pulse and no dramatic tension, despite its subject matter. It's a slog to get to its big revelations.

Wants to be many things, but ends up being not much of anything.

It’s like watching an annoying young drag queen who flubs the quips she’s stolen, refuses to shut up and thinks attitude is wit.

But Walking, which is well-acted and fast-moving, takes a tumble from which it never fully recovers once Josh's diary is found, and the rest of the film is spent tending to spilled secrets and their collateral damage.

The film taps the same spiritual thirst and anxiety that has made cultural phenomena of "The Da Vinci Code" and the "Left Behind" series. And it’s just as cheesy.

Ross's on-the-nose script offers little subtext or nuance, and the film—for all the inherent drama of the situation—has very little real-life grit.

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.

A mean-spirited, hyperviolent, stupid movie.

The film, directed by Jesse Baget, aims to be a satiric look at racism but at every turn flaunts the laws of logic and believability.