Jack Mathews

But for that one bright, incongruous yuk-fest in the classroom, Luther is deadly material, full of self-righteousness and devoid of balance.

A long and uneventful snooze.

Hard to take stone-cold sober.

It's as if two-thirds of the book have been reduced to one-word chapter headings.

As with all ensemble horror movies, your first challenge is to guess which of the Carter kin will survive to destroy the creatures killing them, and in what order the family members (and their pets) will fall.

Beware of movies whose creators boast of the little effort involved. Little reward is what you're likely to get.

The occasionally amusing, generally fatuous romantic comedy about a dazzling divorcee, a smitten Jewish boy and a controlling Jewish mom who also happens to be the divorcee's psychotherapist, is a high-concept movie with a Yiddish accent.

This plodding British revenge thriller has less energy than a pint of Bass that has sat out overnight.

Trapped does have a fine ensemble of actors and, except for what may be the most outrageously idiotic and improbable ending in a few years, is not that bad a movie.

Barely qualifies as a documentary. It's the personal journey of a man hoping to claim a million-dollar literary prize by proving that Marlowe wrote Shakespeare.

Lady, like all of Shyamalan's movies, is a slick production with consistently interesting visuals... But the story is so convoluted and ultimately preposterous that you're almost embarrassed by the earnestness of the actors trying to carry it off.

Every potentially worthwhile or amusing moment in writer-director Brad Silberling's 10 Items or Less could be told in 10 minutes or less, with credits included.

The jokes are so sketchy and silly it quickly passes the point of wretched excess.

The result is an angry, violent mess of a movie with a central character threatening to implode right on the screen.

Overwrought comedy-drama.

A brutally claustrophobic battle of wits and will, whose cruel nature ultimately seems to turn on the audience.

Judd has genuine movie star magnetism -- beauty, intelligence, presence and talent to spare. In the old studio days, she'd be Ingrid Bergman by now.

I may be wrong, but I think Guy Pearce is wearing Nicole Kidman's false nose in The Hard Word. Whatever it is that's on his face, it looks like a dead cod and won't win him an Oscar.

If I were in the sign business, I'd produce a bumper sticker that reads "Even smart people make dumb movies" -- and give the first one to David Mamet.

On stage, the attractive 34-year-old Silverman is very funny. She's too blue for Comedy Central, and too slow-paced for an HBO hour, but she'd come off better in either of those formats than she does in this mishmash.

The intimate love story is overwhelmed by the carnage. It may be an accurate picture of life in Medellin, but it's not convincing.

A grab bag of sitcom jokes that work about 20% of the time.

Feels like a college knockoff of Billy Wilder's "The Apartment."

There aren't many better examples of how commercial intuition sabotages story integrity in today's Hollywood.

The laugh ratio in this run-on of skits is pretty low, at least to the unaltered mind of one who's seen enough of these films and eaten enough White Castle burgers to last a lifetime.

The movie feels like a rush job and at times its tactics are as suspect as those attributed to its subject. But when it comes to political strategy trumping policy in the Bush White House, it makes its case.

In what is more a cry of regret than a coherent story, Shepard's character mopes his way through meetings with an old girlfriend (Jessica Lange) and the grown children he sired, the only apparent lesson being that bad behavior has a way of circling back on you.

Danes' smart, fun, radiant and very attractive Mirabelle actually undermines the premise of the book

The play within the movie is much more entertaining.

Has all the appeal of a video game without the joystick. All you can do is watch. It's noisy and moves fast, but if you can't play, why pay?

With each succeeding picture, Linklater seemed to grow as a filmmaker, just as his characters became more defined and developed. But with his fourth picture, subUrbia, he takes two giant steps backward.

My Fellow Americans is a gang-written comedy that doesn't have a political bone in its body, or much evidence of a funny one, either.

A film of epically hollow sentimentality, a movie that tells you how to feel every step of the way and ends on a symphony of false notes. The moment when we learn what Mr. Holland's Opus really means makes the ending of It's a Wonderful Life look like an exercise in restraint.

Oddly, it’s the bawdy silliness of “Dangerous Beauty,” and its jaw-dropping presumptions of Veronica’s liberated lifestyle, that makes the film occasionally entertaining. But it’s a movie without a consistent tone or creative vision.

There are funny sight gags strewn throughout, but because so many scenes and confrontations are repeated from the original, there’s a staleness and sense of melancholy to the whole affair.

For a much better film about a similar story, rent "The World's Fastest Indian," with Anthony Hopkins on a motorcycle.

Larry offers enough scatological humor to fertilize the wheat fields in the star's home state of Nebraska.

A record number of movie cliches are strung together for the otherwise forgettable boot-camp drama Annapolis.

Possibly the worst idea for a movie this century.

September Dawn, written by an evangelical Christian, may be the worst historical drama ever made.

More than a bad movie, it's an anti-movie.

This is a "What were they thinking?"-size disaster, with the wrong actors in the wrong roles in a project that had no reason to be remade in the USA.

A ponderously slow experience.

Typical of road comedies, it's a pastiche of sketches.

The result, at best, is a sweet failure.

Eric Steel's documentary has more than a whiff of exploitation about it.

Fonda's performance is a perfect storm of histrionics, and she leaves nothing and no one standing.

Frankly, after watching writer-director Timur Bekmambetov's grim fantasy - the first leg of a trilogy adapted from the sci-fi novels of Sergei Lukyanenko - I'm still a little confused.

The worst performance in a film that diminishes even the talented Stockard Channing is given by Allen. He's never written a more unpleasant, vapid or irredeemable character for himself, and he makes it worse by overplaying.

Wells' vision of the distant future is cartoonishly simplistic without the subtext of British class consciousness that informed the novel.

The second half of Antoine de Caunes' Monsieur N., about the post-exile life and death of Napoleon, plays less like a movie than a suggestion for one. This is a great disappointment because the first half is very cinematic and very compelling.

The result is a performance that is neither funny nor empathetic, and the romance that develops between the dentist and the junkie patient is not strong enough to support the mystery.

Having these characters interact is both the joke and raison d'etre of "League." Its story is beyond banal.

Drifts from goofy situation comedy to pop culture parody to a last-act load of sentiment that would sink a trash barge.

Surely, Vinterberg was high on some inert gas when he embarked on it.

It doesn't strike a single note of authentic emotion.

If there is a casting agent in hell, ­Martin Lawrence and Tyler Perry will soon put on their fat suits as Big Momma and Madea Simmons and show up as a tag team in a big-screen ­Wrestlemania.

Neither can I imagine many sane adults wanting to put themselves through this movie.

May be free of gay stereotypes, but it's absolutely riddled with romantic cliches. It's hard to see the progress in that.

Frenzied, gothic nonsense.

If "The Sixth Sense" was a bad movie redeemed by its surprise ending, Marc Forster's Stay is a seemingly good movie leading to a devastating letdown.

Jovovich, Besson's 24-year-old ex-wife, hasn't a clue how to project shadings, interior emotions, character or personality. Everything's in a full screech.

The film is lovely to look at, but makes not a lick of sense.

Chevy Chase looks tired, Pam Grier looks embarrassed, and pop star Iggy Pop gives a performance that -- if you can believe it -- is even sillier than his name.

A lump of coal, sculpted from the kind of high-concept idea screenwriters find scribbled on bar napkins after nights of heavy drinking.

Really, women drag their husbands and boyfriends to films like writer-director Susannah Grant's emotionally bogus Catch and Release and I feel their pain. They should get a free Boys Night Out pass every time they make the sacrifice.

Not to be cruel, but the aspirations of the movie and its principals are so far beyond their reach" not to mention budget"that it arrives in theaters dependent on the kindness of strangers.

As much as I love swing, all I got out of Martin Guigui's murky, incomprehensible grade B romantic fantasy was a few twitches of nostalgia for the music.

Toback is a smart guy with kinky tastes who has nothing left but to tempt actors into performing in his sex fantasies.

Creates a hellishly evil portrait of a police department in which every white cop is either a racist thug or an enabler, and every black cop a disgusted observer or crusading hero.

First-time writer-director Hunter Richards? London is even worse torture than it sounds. It includes flashbacks that actually demonstrate just how miserable a jerk the main character is.

Drop Dead Ugly is more like it.

Dreadfully unfunny.

Stevens, an actor taking charge from the other side of the camera, and writer and co-star Breen are going for a romantic black farce, a darkly noble idea, but one that requires far more empathetic characters and funnier situations than they've created.

It's an interesting profile in self-destruction until the script becomes unhinged itself and has Laura doing things that are not so much outrageous as hilariously stupid.

The salvaging operations, and the scavenging of B-52 parts for retail recycling and junk art that seem to consume most of the film take it to tedium, and beyond.

By the time the credits roll and a disclaimer informs us that there may, in fact, be a lost gospel of Jesus and that it is being suppressed by the Church, all we can think to say is, "Ah, shaudup!"

Showcased in 3,000 Miles are two of the longest, noisiest, bloodiest and most ludicrous shootouts ever staged.

"Quantum Bull-Bleep" would be a more apt title for the conclusions that the movie draws, but one concept was a revelation to me. One of the scientists said it's a fact that a single object can be in two places at the same time. I guess that explains O.J.'s alibi.

The Cave looks pretty cool - if you're into stalagmites, stalactites and that sort of thing -and the action is nonstop once they're in the hole. Unfortunately, there are no reference points in the dark to let us know where everyone is in relation to each other and to the monsters, and, therefore, there's little suspense.

I hated it, but I grant that it does tap into a vein of technological horror - the fear of the VCR! - that will have young videophiles chatting it up for weeks

History as filtered through the faux-liberal prism of Hollywood's dream factory, and an insult, I believe, to the people who actually carried the fight and endured the pain for civil rights.

One of the ugliest movies I've ever seen. Even though it occurs mostly in the dark, the open flesh wounds are both graphic and implausible.

The movie is dismally organized, his (Keys) interviews are shallow and uninformative, and the project has a whole lacks a strong point of view.

A bad Altman impression of the L.A. rock scene.

The confusing time line of Pascal Arnold and Jean-Marc Barr's bizarre tale of sibling romance, murder and obsession is just one of its problems. The others are the romance, the murder and the obsession.

There's a reason filmmaking is considered a craft, and Hoge, a former teacher in a juvenile prison, cannot pull off what would be a tricky proposition for a skilled veteran.

Gere, who's credited with keeping the project alive for years, has never thrown himself quite so fully into a role, and Pellington tells the story without a hint of skepticism. I suppose he had no choice. If you're going to treat poppycock as history, you had better believe it.

With the exception of one masterfully choreographed - and improbably bloodless - martial-arts gang fight, the new version of Jules Verne's Around the World in 80 Days is one of the lamest remakes of a classic film I've ever seen.

Del Toro ("Cronos") is a stylish horrormeister, and he has created an evocative, foreboding atmosphere. But only a fan of this kind of mayhem could find a way into the story.

It's a romantic comedy, though neither funny nor romantic. It's a ghost story, though not scary. It's a satire about publishing, but without teeth.

The upbeat brothers are full of sweetness and love, but the script is made of taffy, and if you can chew and laugh at the same time, you're welcome to it.

Ken Liotti's script barely earns a C+.

A fascinating contrast in lifestyles.

Ron Shelton's boxing pic is long on road work but strictly a flyweight.

Of this much I'm sure: It's an awful movie.

Takes the worst and most annoying elements of the first film and treats them like grand assets.

Dreamcatcher has no business being this bad.

By the end of Francois Gerard's plodding, uninvolving melodrama, his boredom will have nothing on yours.

A tormented dramatization of the exact same events, and it's as bad as the earlier film ("Dogtown and Z-Boys") was good.

The characters are boring, the violence generic, the suspense nonexistent.

On paper, the "rising stars" of Meiert Avis' low-flying romantic comedy Undiscovered are Steven Strait and Pell James, but the real star is Tyson the Skateboarding Dog.

Crowe was going for something magical in all this, but the film is so affected and mannered, so preciously in love with itself, that it's painful to watch. Scenes go on and on, and when you think the movie's over, it goes on and on some more.

Both a madcap comedy and a cautionary tale about the dangers of drug abuse. But it's not funny or smart enough to work as either one, let alone to strike a balance.

A Christmas headache looking for an audience.

Kline will break your heart, while the rest of the movie will just make you sick.

Trudy is really the only character with the "Barrytown" zest, and Montgomery throws herself into the role with unselfconscious abandon. She makes the screen crackle with energy.

A ticket to this movie is a season's pass on that train - and you must complete every ride.

A weak documentary. There's very little here to demonstrate the personality and leadership qualities that made Massoud both a legend and a martyr. Raw, sloppily edited, unfocused and without any sense of scale, it's personal journalism with its heart in the right place, and that's about it.

Unremittingly bleak and hopelessly outdated parable of American race relations.

Convoluted and unsatisfying psychological drama.

Perhaps this is just a bad performance by Bana; he's not shown me anything yet. But there's a more basic problem. If money is just a way of keeping score, and Huck doesn't care whether he's flush or busted, why should we?

Dark, grim, and cliched Orwellian satire.

Save your breath, and your money.

Stole so many details from the earlier film, "The Hustler," that you have to think of it as either a bad parody or an unfortunate homage.

We wish other directors would keep Edward Burns busy acting so he wouldn't have time to make his own movies. This is his fourth since "The Brothers McMullen" and they get more tedious each time out.

It's an old maxim that you can't make a good movie from a bad script. But with the suspense thriller Twisted, Philip Kaufman shows that you can make one that looks like it should be good.

The low-tech film looks like a kid's crude drawing, plays like entry-level Game Boy, and is about as nourishing as a Tootsie Pop.

The real trouble is at its core, with an over-the-top performance from Sedgwick that borders on Baby Jane campiness.

A screamingly bad melodrama whose message seems to be that people who think they're talking to a deaf person admit things they wouldn't admit to themselves. Silence, please.

There is just no tension built prior to the murders.

The movie - with some gamy sexual references, a one-night stand and a long look at a stud muffin's naked buns - targets an older female audience. They may see it as unbearably cute, filled with ridiculous coincidences and laced with performances that - like the obnoxious soundtrack music - overstate the mood.

This is clearly the Worst Performance by an Actress in a Death Scene since Sofia Coppola took a bullet for her dad in "The Godfather: Part III."

Offers traditional cinematic gab about marital status, sexual orientation, nationality and degree of fulfillment.

Their (Murphy/Wilson) exchanges and interplay are so campy and over the top that I kept expecting them to pull out frying pans and start bopping each other over the head with them. I Spy is one just Stooge short of homage.

Though its PG-13 rating allows for much cruder sex humor, the movie version of "Dukes" is nearly identical to the TV series in its corniness, in its incessant car chases and in its ogling of the posterior of cousin Daisy Duke.

Gets too caught up in its escalating violence and strained-to-bursting moral subtexts. It's the blood of souls drenching the screen, and it's a hideous sight to behold.

Ill-timed "Hands" has a very limited grasp of comedy.

Desperate for a slice of Spanish soap opera? You might try this misguided romantic melodrama.

There's no story to speak of - three cohabiting bachelors are dragged into adulthood by the simultaneous pregnancies of their girlfriends - but Anderson, Imperioli and Eddie Griffin are amiable company and there's an earned laugh here and there.

A personal documentary on a family member. The question is, who -- outside of friends and family -- would want to watch it? The answer...is ... beyond me.

Clumsily merges fiction and reality, biography and musical fantasy, and breaks the fourth wall in a way that allows Spacey to lamely address his own miscasting.

Though there are giggles here and there, the film is inexcusably unfunny.

Wretch of a B movie.

Brody does have a mesmerizing presence and is the only reason to see a film that likely would have gone straight to video if he hadn't won that Oscar for "The Pianist."

Has a lot of nerve making fun of Olivia Newton-John's "I Honestly Love You," as the choice of newlyweds fated for divorce in 12 to 14 months. The Wedding Planner should have such a shelf life.

For die-hard Ferrell fans, this could be the ultimate test. He has been playing variations of "Elf" for five years, and his antics have grown as stale as Jackie's socks.

You'd have to go back to Blake Edwards' "10" and Bo Derek to find a mainstream movie that spends more time gawking at a star's body - or a more cooperative and alluring subject.

What's here is a glimpse not into how far people will go to win a reality TV show, but how far greedy writers and producers will go to degrade, debouch and enrich themselves.

Completely false, manipulative, exploitative and insulting.

I love golf, history and good stories, and I found this to be among the most boring, flat and cliched sports movies I've ever seen.

Not since Philip Kaufman's 2000 "Quills," the story of the Marquis de Sade, have we had so debauched a literary and movie hero, and Johnny Depp plays him with the relish of an actor who has made odd-ball characters his specialty.

Travolta is the least of the film's problems. With a script by James Vanderbilt, whose first credit was for a movie about the tooth fairy ("Darkness Falls"), and directed by John McTiernan, last seen struggling with "Rollerball," Basic is a fundamental failure.

The story, adapted by Dean Georgaris, doesn't come within a light year of science-fiction plausibility, and after a while Woo gives up trying to sell it and reverts to the action choreography that made him a master of Hong Kong martial-arts movies.

I have not read the Anne Tyler novella from which the movie is adapted, but it is clear from the earliest scenes that Evie and Drumstrings are of a different generation from 37-year-old Taylor and 36-year-old Pearce.

Unfortunately, what you'll remember most about the movie is its banal script and dialogue so ripe it almost laughs at itself.

A movie about healing that makes us want to scream out, ""Hollywood, heal thyself!"

If there's anything more tiresome in film today than hip irony, it is forced irony, and here comes a boatload with Wes Anderson's The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou.

Among cautionary tales of gloom-and-doom, it may out-gore Gore, but it doesn't entertain.

Only sharp dialogue and a suspenseful buglary might have given this lame, quasi morality play some energy. It has neither.

Only Stanley Tucci seems aware of the drop-dead stupidity of the plot, and acts up a storm of high camp as the narcissistic scientist.

It took one novelist, one screenwriter and two directors - Scott McGehee and David Siegel - to cobble together this earnest nonsense, and if it weren't for 12-year-old novice Flora Cross, who plays its central character, all would be lost.

As the story of a romantic office lump, Janice Beard resembles last year's "Bridget Jones's Diary." But it is a far, far lesser thing.

Atoothless morality play.

Not just unromantic, it's unfunny, too.

There comes a time when the future looks old, and that's where "Star Trek" finds itself on the time-space continuum.

The whole movie is some kind of joke, a sick one to be savored by a certain segment of the movie audience. You know who you are.

Much talking, much sex, much to-do about nothing.

What the filmmakers missed in assuming the mask from the earlier film is that it was Carrey's astonishing physical comedy that made that film a hit, not the animation.

Out of place, out of time and out of its own cultural context.

There's still time, but for now, Fogler gets my vote for the worst performance of the year.

Father Amaro comes off as another pedophile in a frock. You'd have to hose this guy down if he were driving a school bus.

The question is, can a Slovakian lawsuit against the filmmaker be far behind?

Whether Jawed Wassel could have made more of it with further editing we'll never know, but it's a clunky bit of storytelling.

The stars have little opportunity to engage their characters. The gang-written screenplay and Chris Koch's artless direction turn their scenes into a series of broad, overplayed comic sketches.

Director-writer Richard Ledes shows better command of 1950s period atmosphere than he does of either his subject or his cast.

A teen comedy so stupid that a long nose -- perhaps with a red bulb on it -- actually would have helped.

The title doesn't hint at the unsavory mess the film actually is.

So badly conceived and executed, its good intentions don't help.

The Intended is well-intended, but it is also the dreariest, most uninvolving movie I've seen this year.

"Filthy" may have been a better title for Dirty. The rough language is not just pervasive, as the MPAA's R rating describes it, it's assaultive. The violence is not merely "strong," it's incessant, sadistic and broadly unbelievable.

The last act, when the movie falls apart like a cheap toy, is both a deus ex machina and an anticlimax.

The movie's really about the impressions of the original performances by newcomers Eric Christian Olsen and Derek Richardson. Olsen does an uncanny Carrey, and Richardson vaguely resembles Daniels.

The latest - and really last-minute - documentary hoping to affect the presidential election is a deceptively partisan view of the Iraq War.

Like a fragile Provence wine left too long in the sun, Ridley Scott's romantic comedy A Good Year spoiled somewhere between the publication of Peter Mayle's novel and this cockamamie adaptation.

If the 10th "Friday" sounds like the first "Alien," it's strictly intentional. Todd Farmer's script rips off that classic sci-fi horror film, replaces the acid-based monster with the hockey-masked Jason, adopts the self-mocking attitude of "Scream" and lets the heads, arms, legs and torsos fall where they may.

These are three characters in search of a moral pulse.

As an allegory of religious conflict, the '73 film is brilliantly constructed and ends with a punctuation mark that was shocking in its day. LaBute's movie attempts to shock, as well, and does: Given the names involved and the casting of Cage, it is shockingly bad.

To be avoided by anyone considering a vacation to anything wilder than a zoo.

Shot with an annoyingly jerky hand-held camera, Virgin is a test to stick with, and despite the best efforts of Moss, it wore me out.

Who knew that Juliette Binoche and Jean Reno could be unlikable? And yet, there they are, grating on each other's nerves (and ours) as strandees at Charles De Gaulle airport.

South Korean director Kim Ki-duk does a bizarre riff on the twisted macho ethos of abusing women until they learn to love you.

You never know what these people are going to say or do, but you're pretty sure it will be whatever they want to.

An awkwardly executed, tedious and -- a near impossibility for a Holocaust movie -- emotionally uninvolving bore.

A hackneyed movie of zero social, political or dramatic consequence.

The film's pace is just plain wacky, moving with the haste of a receding glacier most of the time, but then jumping ahead as if Hartley hit the gas on a time machine.

Why Travolta is slumming in B movies is anybody's guess. (I'll take a wild flier: "Battlefield Earth"?)

Obliterating the original structure and intent of "Body Snatchers" is cinema-lit blasphemy.

Though Morrow and Forlani are fine actors, they can't even fake a physical attraction between their characters, let alone orgasms.

Earnestness is the primary appeal of Meng Ong's clumsy melodrama.

The result is a movie that talks big, even walks big, but has no scale whatsoever.

I don't know why Redford and the white-hot Gandolfini signed on for this fiasco, but the give-and-take between them is the film's sole pleasure.

Nearly devoid of both dialogue and narrative cohesion, Yongman Kim's first feature - Part 1 of a planned trilogy inspired by Dante's "Inferno" - suggests that the founder of the popular downtown Kim's Video store should not give up his day job.

Back to Wisteria Lane, Eva, and stay there until we call you.

It needed a star like Clooney at its center, and a character actor like Alan Rickman as Dr. Doom. You don't expect realism from a comic-book movie, but you do want the characters to seem larger than life.

Eddie Murphy's latest comedy, The Adventures of Pluto Nash, takes place in the year 2087, which is about the earliest he can hope to be forgiven.

Not all cartoon violence; there's cartoon nudity, too. Berry was paid a well-publicized $500,000 bonus to bare her breasts in the movie.

But look up the word "slight" in the dictionary and you could find a still from this film.

If it weren't for retro-gartered Milla Jovovich, I don't know why anyone would want to survive the virus that is turning humans into zombies and destroying the Earth in Resident Evil: Extinction.

Mattei's script was written in 1998, and the absence of any sense of the impact of 9/11 on New Yorkers is palpable. While watching "Love," I was thinking what great potential there was - still is - for a Manhattan "La Ronde" set in the days following 9/11, when strangers sought comfort from each other in spontaneous sexual alliances.

This is the worst performance by a pop star in a dramatic role since Madonna suited up for "Shanghai Surprise."

Beyond the cliches, there's something deeply offensive about the way Hostage exploits our empathy for children in peril.

Something's wrong with the math here -- the inheritance of the story's small-town hero is enlarged from $20 million to $40 billion, yet the new movie isn't worth the price of a Depression-era ticket.

Deep into Hollywood's Dumb Season comes one of its dumbest offerings.

An absolute mess with no coherent tone, story or point of view.

Whatever it was in Romanian philosopher Mircea Eliade's novella Youth Without Youth that drew Francis Coppola out of a 10-year retirement to make a movie, the result is the year's most bizarre novelty item.

Unlike pop rival Britney Spears, Moore does project star quality on the screen, but she gives Halley an edge of nastiness that makes her harder to empathize with than she should be.

There is not a frame of "Cheaper" that doesn't feel contrived. It fails the most fundamental test of movie logic.

French director Mathieu Kassovitz Frenches this flimsy tale to death. No scene goes underplayed, no performance (save one, from Robert Downey Jr.) lacks volume, no horror cliche is forgotten.

It might have been a marketing nightmare, but if Lopez and Tyler had switched roles, it would have been a better movie.

It's just a setup for another bad sight gag that ends up where the script itself belongs, in the trash.

Underdeveloped and badly diluted by overlong -- and overly stylized -- forays into the drug use, street hustling and cultural alienation that mostly affects the boys' friends.

Doesn't play on the screen. P.S. Your Cat is Dead is a stage-locked, two-character play on a static set, and though Guttenberg takes it outside for a couple of scenes, it remains that on film.

It's described as a black comedy, but you can forget the comedy part. There wasn't so much as a snicker at the screening I attended, though I may have heard a snore or two.

Nothing in the movie rings true, least of all its depiction of gambling, both in casinos and in the bookie world that ultimately drives the story.

[A] straight-to-video-quality mess.

Campion has made something that's almost unbearably pretentious.

So riddled with plot holes and implausible actions, you can't help feeling insulted by it.

This vapid '80 punk party reeks of 200 Cigarettes.

This is the kind of misfire that can take everyone down with it. It's not just bad, it's mean-bad.

Sadly, a film about betrayal is ultimately betrayed by the film maker's own lack of conviction.

Nightwatch is a seriously overcast B-movie with rote performances from everyone but Brolin, who gives James an edge of danger that says that if he isn't a killer, he will be.

The latest in a numbing series begun in 1978 by John Carpenter, and repeated five times since, with only a few plot and casting changes to detract from the brilliant slice-and-dice work of its masked hero. Mike may be getting older, but he can still sling a knife around like a chef at Benihana. [2 Oct 1995, p.F8]

Davis choreographed another rash of spectacular action sequences, but Chain Reaction is doomed by a premise so simple and so absurd, it's easier to sympathize with star Keanu Reeves (poor guy, his career was going so well) than with his character. [2 Aug 1996, p.F8]

Something bad happened on the way from the book to the movie. [15Dec1995 Pg. F.01]

Turner's guileless amateurism stands in refreshing contrast to the rest of the performances -- stilted, self-conscious and sleep-inducing -- that fill this tedious 3-1/2-hour marathon, the Civil War in real time.

We're left with virtually no insight into the appeal of a movement that lasted 30 years.

This, the 10th and worst-written entry in the series, would have been better if it had followed Dreyfuss instead of Clouseau, or if Kline had been cast as Clouseau instead of Martin.

Ishii instills this unpleasantness with some Hitchcockian black humor.

The individual scenes are just random, uninspired riffs by Carvey or awkwardly flat cameos by the likes of Jesse Ventura and Olympic sprinter Michael Johnson.

This particular script is deplorable. It's a pure cribbing of Ron Bass' screenplay for "Sleeping With the Enemy," which was no prize itself.

If you approach this movie in the right frame of mind -- that is, with total contempt -- you can still enjoy it as a comedy.

A mindless, cliche-riddled action-cartoon, a blur of metal and fire and screeching tires, with bad dialogue, cardboard characters and a volume set so high, it makes the Indianapolis 500 sound like chamber music.

While there is a great deal of laughter among the quartet, there's scarcely a giggle in it for the audience.

At the half-hour mark, Godsend falls off the edge of reason, veering wildly away from what seems the promising beginning of a drama about the ethics of human cloning and instead becomes the cheesiest of hallucinatory horror movies.

I have an idea for a Mars movie. When our first astronauts step onto the Red Planet, they discover that Martians not only exist but that they've hired Johnnie Cochran to represent them in a massive defamation suit against American filmmakers.

Critics are inclined to describe the action in films like "XXX" and Lee Tamahori's sequel, XXX: State of the Union, as "cartoon violence." I'll resist doing that out of respect for cartoons.

A one-joke idea...wears itself out almost instantly.

It's nonsense. Even when its big secret is revealed in the final moments, it adds up to nothing more than a dizzy, dark, hysterical waste of time.

Blakeney's script contains more hackneyed dialogue and misfired jokes per minute than would seem possible, and the result embarrasses every actor in it.

This documentary doesn't probe too deeply, and it presupposes that there is a general interest in Jeremy commensurate with his Q rating among the porn-renting public.

In these movies, it's always easy to figure out who's going to survive and make the killers cough up their own blood, but you still hope that the victims will go in the order of their performances -- worst actor first, etc. No such luck.

Bacon's performance in "Saw" creator James Wan's laughably extreme revenge thriller Death Sentence is six degrees of ham.

Isn't a movie as much as it is a feature-length screen test.

About the only plausible element in the entire movie is bratty Vanessa's loathing of "Aunt" Mona, whom she sees as a vacuous over-reacher.

Dalton, using a Scottish brogue coarse enough to take his tongue with it, is hootably bad, and Kathy Bates, playing Ma James, is pure ham.

No better than whatever you might pick up while wearing a blindfold at Blockbuster, even if you happen to reach into a trash can.

Exploits and trivializes public anxiety for entertainment and commercial gain. They've been doing it for years. But this little piggie didn't get to the market in time.

This is an execrable movie depicting the improbable events in the life of a young boy being intermittently raised by his crackhead, highway-hookin' mom (actress-director Asia Argento, with a face that makes Courtney Love's mug shot look glamorous), her plumb-nuts evangelical parents and a cartoonishly incompetent West Virginia social system.

Greenebaum's tedious, film-school level exercise in self-indulgence and exploitation.

Insipid, self-indulgent bit of art-house macabre.

Truly depressing commentary.

You won't hear a better soundtrack on a bad movie this year.

The question is, how did the producers get the amiable, talented Jason Lee to Boogie Board down the toilet with (Green)?

A shell of a romantic fantasy festooned with characters inspired by and resembling those in the bar scene in "Star Wars," the waiting room in "Beetlejuice" and the circus in "A Bug's Life."

Less a movie than an 80-minute promo for a self-help program for the seriously desperate.

Earnest but practically unwatchable movie. I haven't spent an hour and a half with worse company since high school detention.

A postseason basketball comedy that shoots and misses at a rate that would embarrass even the Los Angeles Clippers.

A deadly script.

Ultraviolet, unscreened for critics, is unfit for consumption.

A stinker of epic proportions.

Derivative to the point of distraction.

Apparently, the show’s appeal is due to the good-heartedness of its undereducated anti-heroes, but their kind of dumb grows old fast.

Bad as he is, Fallon cannot claim Taxi's worst moment. That belongs to Ann-Margret.