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.