Jonathan Foreman

No one but a convict guilty of some truly heinous crime should have to sit through The Master of Disguise, an unbearably tedious and unfunny comedy.

The film is only 91 minutes long, but it seemed to stretch out for days.

A test of endurance, and not just because you need a rather stronger word than "explicit" to describe this long-unreleased, self-consciously provocative film.

Despite some genuinely funny scenes, American Desi turns out to be inferior to the as yet unreleased "ABCD" and even last year's "Chutney Popcorn."

It proves once again that it doesn't matter if the camera is dancing a jig on the ceiling if the storytelling is no good.

The demands of formula eventually stifle anything that even looks like inspiration or honesty.

There are a few chuckles here and there, and there are odd wisps of cleverness in the script by Steve Adams, but for the most part, Envy is a film that doesn't know where it's going.

The dramatic history of the Soviet space program deserves a far more competent documentary than this amateurish Dutch production.

It features well-below-par writing, acting, direction, special effects and music, while oozing a nauseating New Age sentimentality that undermines any tension in the underlying story.

A surprisingly nasty fable about a particularly silly, very English brand of animal-rights extremism.

A shame that this indie's willingness to trade in stereotype leaves a sour taste in your mouth.

So tedious it's almost worth watching to see just how bad acting, inadequate direction and most important, a criminally crass and unimaginative screenplay can make so little out of a proven idea.

One of those "Lifetime"-esque horror stories of evil husbands in the suburbs.

Good-natured but mostly unfunny.

It's no funnier than your average grade-school biology lesson and less pedagogically useful than your typical Farrelly brothers comedy.

Large chunks of the film seem like a record played at the wrong speed: The tempo of the dialogue as delivered doesn't match the lines as written, and the filmmakers are too lazy or too inept to make their convoluted premise jibe with any recognizable idea of human nature.

Unwatchably bad.

Boasts exceptionally attractive locations, but its painfully amateurish plotting, dialogue and acting -- combined with slack pacing -- make this Beijing-set indie romance something of a trial.

An inept, tedious spoof of '70s kung fu pictures, it contains almost enough chuckles for a three-minute sketch, and no more.

Resembles a period version of "The Rocky Horror Picture Show" - played dead straight.

Honest but also derivative and crude.

It's a shame that the book "We Were Soldiers Once . . . And Young" fell into the hands of writer-director Randall Wallace ("Braveheart"), a filmmaker who wouldn't recognize subtlety and understatement if they were to attack him in the street.

Boring and irritating, and also mildly offensive in its ignorant depiction of both Judaism and Catholicism.

A crass, mechanical attempt at a thriller that should have gone straight to video.

A strange Gallic imitation of a Woody Allen comedy, replete with a neurotic older hero.

This oddly scrambled new version eventually falls apart so badly you feel embarrassed for the people who made it.

James' character is a charmless, boring lump and it's very hard to care if he gets the girl or not.

An almost chuckle-free mess, so amateurish and lame that the cast often has that embarrassed look you see on dogs given ridiculous haircuts.

Richard Jeffries' script tosses together bits of plot borrowed from such "bad things happen when you leave the city" classics as "Straw Dogs" and "Deliverance" without any awareness of how or why genre conventions work.

Self-righteous, economically illiterate and sometimes flatly dishonest.

A deep disappointment to fans of sci-fi and the once great John Carpenter.

Laughs are few and far between, and the film feels brutally long.

Toomuch of the humor in Not Another Teen Movie is either lame (the school in the movie is called "John Hughes High") or lamely disgusting.

Bedeviled by labored writing and slack direction.

In the end, it is inadequate, juiceless storytelling that deprives Titan A.E. of any dramatic force.

More tedious than affecting.

An inferior factory product, cranked out with little care and less imagination, that seems all the dumber because it's pretending to be smart and topical.

What really wrecks Wolfgang Petersen's Troy is some of the worst casting in recent Hollywood history: The lackluster ensemble hired by the director is overwhelmed by the generally impressive sets and crowd scenes, by the task of playing epic heroes and by David Benioff's rambling, tone-deaf screenplay "inspired by Homer's 'Iliad.'"

A miracle of badness, a kind of art- house "Showgirls" -- which actually exceeds "Showgirls" in its self-indulgence, shallowness and sheer stupidity.

Embarrassingly bad - the kind of slapdash exercise that gives even Hollywood formula a bad name, while doing little justice to the sport.

Calling it pretentious doesn't do justice to the toxic faux-bohemianism and unearned self-regard that bubble and ooze out of every aspect of Chelsea Walls.

As lifeless and unfunny as a corpse on a slab.

A lazy and uninspired knock-off of the hilarious 2002 movie "Road Trip."

The screenplay is packed with so many hilariously bad lines (it's hard to believe that writer-director Helgeland won an Oscar for co-writing "L.A. Confidential") that the movie would be perfect material for a resurrected version of the TV spoof "Mystery Science Theater."

A laughably bad B-thriller.

This is a lazy, careless film that feels strangely unfinished.

Part of the problem is that the Finbar character is both underdeveloped and unattractive - you don't get a sense of why anyone would miss him, let alone go searching for him in the snow. [17 Mar 2000]

About three-quarters of the way through, Havana Nights suddenly becomes laugh-out-loud awful, with dreadful, lame lines delivered painfully badly - as if a different screenwriter and director had taken over for the movie's final act.

The result is an intermittently instructive and amusing jumble that might have been seen as daring and "transgressive" in both form and content if it had been released, say, three decades ago.

Partly a schmaltzy, by-the-numbers romantic comedy, partly a shallow rumination on the emptiness of success -- and entirely soulless.

This inferior sequel is doomed by a lousy - and extremely vulgar - script.

Fitfully funny at best, it's a sophomoric, facetious road comedy.

This crude, deeply dishonest documentary does no such thing. David Russell's fictional "Three Kings" does a much better job.

Summer Catch is the sludge at the bottom of the barrel.

The problem with Gigli is that it is an inept attempt to do Elmore Leonard by Martin Brest, a filmmaker whose coarse sensibility makes him catastrophically unqualified to the task.

Despite its talented and/or attractive cast, Heartbreakers is an ugly movie: The kind that makes you feel slightly soiled afterwards.

Relentlessly stupid.

It lurches ineptly from lame comedy to hokey melodrama.

It isn't entirely clear if Games People Play is a spot-on but longwinded and excessively campy spoof of those TV "reality" game shows... or just a particularly ingenious and sleazy example of the genre.

Stinks even by the standards of late summer movie garbage.

May well be the dullest and most pointless version ever filmed, thanks to a stunningly bad lead performance by Ethan Hawke.

Darkness Falls was formerly known as "Tooth Fairy," but could just as well have been titled "Dumb Then Dumber" for the way its plot makes decreasing sense even by the low standards of B horror flicks.

It's all so insincere, you can almost imagine the filmmakers rubbing their hands together at the prospect of ripping off the public.

A noisy, amateurish mess that doesn't work on any level - an extended, clich-ridden MTV video set to anachronistic bad music.

It's a film noir spoof, replete with hard-boiled narration, lounge-music soundtrack and dramatic black-and-white photography.

Hollywood movies are rarely as contemptuous of the audience as Dragonfly, with its half-witted, treacly New Age sappiness and its mechanical borrowings from other, better supernatural thrillers.

Occasionally amusing, extremely gross, but mostly tedious.

Sucker bait for the sort of credulous cinast who'll buy anything ugly and boring that looks like it's avant-garde...rancid stew of cheap shocks, sleaze and phony artiness.

The screenplay by Zekri (based on Jorge Amado novel) is crude stuff, and director Ossama Fawzi gets such cartoonish performances from his cast, it's hard to care about the characters.

Amazingly amateurish, the film lands wide of satirical targets that should be impossible to miss.

The contrast between Chan's charm and physical prowess and Tucker's lack of same is even more dramatic in this tiresome, leaden sequel.

A strong, early candidate for the worst movie of the year.

Takeshi's elliptical directorial style here is overwhelmed by the script's crudeness and lack of narrative power.

Intermittently funny, often vulgar.

Unfortunately, Scorpion King has none of the qualities -- epic sweep, relative originality and heartfelt bloodthirstiness -- that made "Conan" so trashily entertaining.

Would be a perfectly decent B-action movie if it weren't shipwrecked in the last act by laughably ridiculous plotting and a lazily executed climax.

Works just fine as a generic but fast-paced - and rather ugly - cop buddy flick.

Isn't really a movie: It's a grab bag of mobster clichés lifted without finesse from "A Bronx Tale," "GoodFellas" and at least a score of lesser Mafia flicks.

If the movie were funny, the implicit sermonizing would be more tolerable, but apart from four or five good one-liners, The Next Best Thing is a thudding failure as a comedy.

A cast almost talented enough to distract you from Ted Griffin's gimmicky screenplay.

The characters are tired stereotypes, the sentimentality nauseating and the situation comedy way below the standards of the very worst WB or UPN shows.

Amateurish in the extreme, the film is a feast of bohemian cliché, bad writing and worse acting.

It's hoary and clunky even by the low standards of contemporary thrillers.

An embarrassing misfire...feels like a long, slow TV pilot about L.A. twentysomethings, only it lacks the polish and wit of your average sitcom.

There's no limit to Coyote Ugly's crass shamelessness.

What follows is very gruesome indeed, though the footage of people being chased by hideous ghosts soon becomes rather dull.

So patchy in its laughs, so calculated in its grossness and so lacking in genuine comic exuberance, it makes you look at "Road Trip" in an admiring new light.

What dooms Never Die Alone even as amoral pulp entertainment is the screenplay by neophyte James Gibson, which combines clichéd characters and a contrived plot with stale dialogue.

A bad film with some oddly charming moments.

An example of Hollywood schlock from the team of Joel Schumacher (director) and Jerry Bruckheimer (producer) that lacks the faintest trace of imagination or genuine feeling.

More prettily photographed pretentious rubbish from the ridiculous Peter Greenaway.

A lobotomized attempt to make a no-budget John Waters movie, Men Cry Bullets is a painful reminder of just how bad indie cinema can be - especially when it plays with gender roles. It's desperately unfunny and dreadfully acted, written and directed.

A non-thrilling occult thrillersolame and unoriginal that it would be an embarrassment for any director, much less a talent like Roman Polanski.

A profound disappointment, given its cast and source material.

A big, incoherent bore, interesting only as an example of assembly-line movie-making gone awry.

Shapeless, tedious, hopelessly bad sequel.

The acting, camera work and writing are all crude and amateurish, even by the standards of student films.

It strains belief that nuclear weapons couldn't kill off the dragons, but three people with crossbows could.