Jami Bernard

Juices up the visuals with fancy camerawork and split screens, but it can't distract enough from the vulgarity of the material.

An unimaginative schoolyard-bully comedy.

The production is as gaily colored as the margaritas, but the overall result is wan.

You may not realize just how much it takes to make a great mockumentar like "Waiting for Guffman" until you see Never Been Thawed.

A gangsta rapper without fire in the belly isn't terribly interesting, cinematically or musically.

The wordless six-minute animé shorts - at the end of which our double-jointed heroine would always die - don't lend themselves to a 95-minute action movie where viewers might rightfully expect something to make sense.

It tries to be more existential than gumshoe but falls way short.

It's hard to care what really happened on Wonderland Ave. when the audience hates the neighborhood.

Cedric is certainly the bright spot in this movie - personable, silly and lovable, with just enough of Gleason's girth, timing and humanity to make you wish he'd driven Ralph Kramden's bus onto the lot of a different movie.

Crudup gives it his best, but his character is so economically drawn, there's hardly anything there -- certainly nothing likable.

Lacks the charismatic presence of Vin Diesel, who has priced himself right out of the franchise. Without Diesel, there's not much gas, at least not from the nonvehicular elements.

A preposterous action movie in which a Navy SEAL makes the world safe for democracy one continent at a time.

As in "The Edge," in which Alec Baldwin and Anthony Hopkins were stranded in the wilds, you can earn a wildernesssurvival merit badge just from watching.

Never gives us what it promised: a glorious, totally new sense of horror.

Dysfunction seeps from every pore of this family, and the anger and ugliness of the characters overwhelm not just the story but the movie's stunning National Geographic location.

About as many characters, dragons and force fields as "Pokémon" has pocket monsters, so it may be difficult for the uninitiated to keep track.

A waterlogged bagel, hardly the valentine to New York it imagines itself to be.

The story has a definite ick factor that detracts from even the small pleasures the movie might offer its teen audience.

The movie creaks and groans, weighed down by clichés.

Shows that there's a limit to how much mileage one can get from offbeat, creepy and symbiotic.

There are some nicely gory touches for genre connoisseurs...But JC2 lacks the all-important character development we got in the first installment.

The picture's a dud... Instead of Chow's gravitas rubbing off on the kid, Scott's dude-ness dilutes Chow's authority.

The humor is supposed to stem from the clash of kids who have been raised so differently and of partners with opposing views of child care. But there are just so many jokes you can make about who gets to use the bathroom when.

If you think you're tough enough, go ahead and sit through the endurance test that is Bad Boys 2, a brutal, 2 1/2-hour display of production overkill.

The screenplay has no idea how to modulate the banter between the movie's talented stars so that it approximates affectionate and playful sparring.

The award for hardest-to-watch movie of the year.

Falls short of the mark, content to shoot fish in a barrel.

A perfect example of an "art" movie that is so lugubrious and soul-sucking that it's hell to sit through.