Ernest Hardy

Conceptually, Underclassman is the stillborn spawn of "Beverly Hills Cop" and "21 Jump Street." Except its star, Nick Cannon, possesses neither the biting cool of young Eddie Murphy nor the sullen mystery of Johnny Depp. And the script, by David T. Wagner and Brent Goldberg, is breathtakingly bad.

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.

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.

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

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

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

The World Famous Kid Detective is a poorly written, acted, and directed kid flick with one cool idea: It's chock full of snippets from old detective noir flicks.

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

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

15 Minutes is simply a bad movie.

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.

No one ever turns into a real character, and none of the scenes have either dramatic or comedic resonance.

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.

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.

In keeping with the film’s giddy superficiality, what’s revealed is a series of sexy poses passed off as character depth. All the backstabbing, shifting alliances and dark motives are held together by adolescent, innuendo-laden dialogue and thick Sapphic overtones.

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.

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.

So what do the tea leaves say? They're hard to read through the over-the-top grossness and weak acting, but it's probably that gentrification is good, poor people and assorted lowlifes don't deserve prime real estate, and Sean Penn's baby girl needs a better agent.

The acting is community-theater-level, and the sets look phony, but there's unintentional humor in counting the clichés as they mount.

Far from the worst film this summer, but it also doesn't rate strong enough to be a future video rental.

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

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

Especially disappointing that Lemmons, who in "Eve's Bayou" gave us insightful glimpses into the emotional world of black adults, has lost her balance, elevating formula over revelation.

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.

Reiss guides the film with a firm hand, ratcheting up the tension and ably guiding his actors. It's his protagonists that undo the film, making it a chore to sit through.

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

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

The film, whose clumsy editing and dearth of establishing shots keep the viewer in an unintended state of confusion, is a corpse in its own right: It’s filled with the rotting ideas of far better movies.

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.

The film's deadly lulls outweigh its infrequent highs.

Almost unbearable.

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.

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.

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.

Painfully bereft of wit or cogent insight.

Flawed at its very core.

It's a movie by people who lifted almost all their ideas from much better movies, and lean too heavily on "based on a true story" to pave over their film's weaknesses.

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.

A stunningly lethargic, uninvolving piece of crap.

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

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

Horribly slapdash affair.

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

Guinzburg's retool is full of unintentional humor, high-school-theater level acting, and shoddy writing.

All the while, director Lorena David labors to keep implausibility and bad acting from sinking a ship that never should have left port.

Atrocious bit of by-the-numbers screen filler. And anyone who easily lapses into sugar comas is advised to stay far, far away.

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

A mean-spirited, hyperviolent, stupid movie.

What the film suffers from most, though, are its own low aspirations: stroking the libidos and funny bones of brain-dead 12-year-old boys immersed in the shallow end of hip-hop.