Jessica Winter

Smug with timely zingers like "The only thing the French should be allowed to host is an invasion," the movie's recommended strictly for Bush advisers.

The best that can be said about director Christine Lahti's feature debut is that it doesn't fall into any ready category.

Since the central odd couple have no rapport, their bond never seems to progress past mutual usury.

A show about nothing—its jokes based on stick-figure stereotypes, its lunges at humanism premised on imbecilic pity.

Ledger's deadpan baritone pumps wit into his tepid one-liners like collagen into a wilted starlet's kisser, and the clumsy staging might not grate so much if the tone weren't so self-congratulatory.

Too lazy to be a comedy, too conventional to be a head movie.

The Kid's denouement resembles the nightmare that would have transpired had execs foisted a toupee and a happy ending on "12 Monkeys."

An aura of dust and mothballs evidently leaves a capable cast feeling woozy.

Often succumbs to the craven hysteria perhaps inherent in its hoary premise.

The film has exhausted itself with fits of glib hysteria long before its truly stupefying final twist, a stunning betrayal of audience trust.

Some dogs can bark.

The high-concept scenario soon proves preposterous, the acting is robotically italicized, and truth-in-advertising hounds take note: There's very little hustling on view, though McCrudden does arrange for his lead gym rat to be shirtless as often as possible.

Somehow the U.K. film industry can always scrounge enough loose change from the cushions to foot the bill for a pre-chewed lump of sickly saltwater taffy like the mawkish Scottish-seaside postcard Dear Frankie.

A story that splits at the seams with plot holes and bloat.

The script, allegedly by "Donnie Darko's" Richard Kelly, throws together tangentially related plots like cats in a sack.

The visual subtleties don't come to bear on the storytelling, unfortunately -- the dialogue is cumbersome, the simpering soundtrack and editing more so.

A crystalline curio of dumbshit nihilism shot through with fleeting pathos, Koury's home movie often evokes "The Decline of Western Civilization Part III."

A confusingly edited music-video hodgepodge.

Whittled down from a series of 36 short films commissioned by a German television network between 1996 and 2000, Erotic Tales leaves you only to ponder the horror of the 33 that didn't make the cut.

Surpassing Dan Aykroyd's "Nothing but Trouble" as the most astoundingly atrocious walrus-flop of a directorial debut by a languishing actor ever contrived, Sally Field's Beautiful.

Achieves inadvertent pathos via its own obscene irrelevance.

Me You Them can't find a rhythm or a consistent tone.

Pola Rapaport's slender documentary-cum-reconstruction Writer of O disappoints in its workmanlike approach to such fragrant material.

Brimming with fatuous "clever" dialogue and gorgeous women swooning over Schaeffer-played boors, the like-sounding titles denoted a vain, smarmy Woody Allen acolyte drowning in his own reflection.

Hammer betrays a tiresome attachment to cross-cutting ladyporn with antiquated educational filmstrips, to no real end but snarky giggles.

Energetic and thoroughly brainless.

Collapses in a heap of affirmational outbursts and metaphysical goop. The fond chemistry between the leads deserves a better movie.

Indulges something of a number obsession, amounting not exactly to a movie but rather a tallying of atrocities.

The traumatized critic must struggle to avoid capital letters in urging patrons to steer clear of the colorfully cast but unbearable Spun.

This ghastly comedy emits the subliminal whine of a sucking chest wound.

The staging and performances are awkward, the frequent shoot-outs a snore.

Only silent Becks himself rises unstained from this reheated ethno-niche stew.

Lame even by triumph-of-the-underdog sports-comedy standards.

Heartbreakers gives redemption a bad name, but gives conniving misanthropy a worse one.

The Governess is too dirty-minded to fit the Merchant Ivory mold but not salacious enough to qualify as bodice-ripping laff riot. [04 Aug 1998]

Paul Morrison's relentlessly unsurprising staging of a "Romeo and Juliet" story fetishizes its accelerating tragedies with morbid solemnity.

Boorman's bathetic tourism is unconscionable for a subject of this magnitude; for an infinitely superior account of this chapter of South African history, seek out the documentary "Long Night's Journey Into Day."

An epidemic of solipsism breaks out among four lifelong African American friends when one of them announces his impending nuptials. Cringe-inducing slapstick jockeys for screen time with undermotivated high-volume confrontation.

Plumbs new depths of craven heartstring-yanking.

Hide and Seek follows no semblance of internal logic--the unveiling of Charlie is a ludicrous cheat, the last reel a unique paroxysm of rancid idiocy.

Should come with a disclaimer.

All solipsistic jaded-Cosmo patter.

An oafish wish-fulfillment wankfest.

Creaky in its mechanics and numbingly protracted, this is basement B horror that fancies itself a prestige chiller.

Levin's Brooklyn Babylon, set during a hot summer in Crown Heights, is an ethnic-strife tract as thuddingly didactic as his previous "Whiteboys."

The loud, musty production design -- steeped in lime greens and tangerine oranges -- smells of recirculated air and enervated ambition, but unfortunately, so does the movie itself.

Throughout this Americanization of the Luc Besson–scripted French hit, Latifah itches to check her watch, Fallon appears mortified, and only Ann-Margret mainlines any comic adrenalin.

Ends up waddling its way toward gentler, mistier climes, stopping just shy of "Doubtfire" country. It doesn't run out of smelly steam so much as downshift and become a different movie.

Willing's confused procedural -- derived from a novel by Madison Smartt Bell -- is a hasty throwback to the sado-medieval Exorcist descendants of the turn of the millennium (Stigmata, Stir of Echoes, Lost Souls). The somnolent cast can't keep the faith.

Leaks treacle from every pore.

Baggy and overbroad, He Loves Me is notable only as a corrective to cinema's promiscuity with fabulous destinies.

This dreadfully earnest inversion of the "Concubine" love triangle eschews the previous film's historical panorama and roiling pathos for bug-eyed mugging and gay-niche condescension.

Sitting through the last reel is significantly less charming than listening to a four-year-old with a taste for exaggeration recount his Halloween trip to the Haunted House.

Especially in the climactic, clumsily staged gunfight, the prevailing mode is wide-eyed idiocy--which might be the point, since von Trier's satirical target is the hypocrisy of (news flash!) America's eagerness to enforce stability and security with all guns blazing.

An endless chain reaction of cartilage-crunching, organ-pulping brawls.

This is more than self-amused irony; this is kitsch as religion.

An arthritic exercise in self-pleasurement.

Can be blamed foremost on its fire-and-brimstone screenwriter, Pierce Gardner.

Aidan Higgins's novel undergoes a choppy, perplexing script adaptation by Harold Pinter (who enjoys a soused, belligerent cameo), further muddied by non sequitur editing inserts. Imogen and Otto's happenstance affair holds little intrigue or surprise.

Elicits not the voluptuous discomfort stirred by the boys' (Peter and Bobby Farrelly) best corporeal shenanigans but creeping embarrassment for everyone on screen.

Vomitous.

Mistakes self-pitying embitterment for carry-on endurance, and manages to have its causality both ways.

Hoffman has no particular argument to make, and neither does the movie -- just befuddled disgust with The System in general and the right wing in particular.

L'affaire du collier was a convoluted palace intrigue that Shyer and screenwriter John Sweet don't bother to unpack, crafting instead an endless illustrated Harlequin paperback of mawkish backstory and corset-popping purple prose.

There are many dramatic possibilities in an interracial lesbian romance set in a provincial town, but Out of Season focuses on the women's fears of commitment, which would be fine - even refreshing - if they seemed to, well, like each other or something.

Choppy, overlong documentary.

Anemic.

Blends past and present to draw some utterly stupefying parallels.

Cédric Klapisch has been compared to Truffaut, but the new-waver's weakness for glib sentimentalism seems to have left the biggest impression on L'Auberge Espagnole.

The rock hero starts out dead and so does the movie.