Jonathan Foreman

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

A bad film with some oddly charming moments.

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

Heavy-handed, predictable and almost completely unbelievable.

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

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

Smug, often tedious, and comically crude.

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

Best watched while doing a crossword or reading the paper.

One of those French films whose makers won't lower themselves to tell a story in a way that is entertaining or compelling.

Self-righteous, economically illiterate and sometimes flatly dishonest.

It's unfortunate that the people DuBowski profiles tend to be self-indulgent or otherwise unappealing. It's still more unfortunate that the film focuses more on relatively easy issues of acceptance.

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.

The result is inept, tedious kitsch that even at its best feels like John Waters minus the joie de vivre.

A misfiring black comedy oddly reminiscent of all those bad 1990s movies about strippers getting killed at bachelor parties.

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.

There is hardly a moment during this overlong, stunningly smug exercise in moral self-satisfaction when you actually care about a character, real or invented.

Neither convincing nor remotely dramatic.

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

Bedeviled by labored writing and slack direction.

You have to sit through 90 minutes that feel like three hours.

One of those thriller-comedy combos that never get the balance quite right.

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.

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."

A misguided exercise - a crude merger of "Fiddler on the Roof" and "Schindler's List" that somehow reminds you of "Hogan's Heroes."

Mostly an unfunny, rather dull affair.

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.

It lurches ineptly from lame comedy to hokey melodrama.

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

Fake-sounding dialogue, some over-deliberate performances and five amazingly trite linked stories.

A slow, self-consciously low-key, very dull film that strains for eeriness with long silences and affectless performances.

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.'"

Honest but also derivative and crude.

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.

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.

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.

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

A campy docu-drama about the secretly gay world of 1950's muscle magazines.

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

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.

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

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

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

It reeks of contempt for the audience. This is not just a "B-movie" -- it's a B-movie that fails to entertain on any level.

Looks and feels like a bad imitation of "Trainspotting" without any of that film's wit or charm.

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

For the most part, it's both sitcomishly predictable and cloying in its attempts to be poignant.

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

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

In any case, the presence of O'Hara, Kline, Ramis, Black, Tomlin and John Lithgow (who plays Shaun's father) serve mainly to underline the feebleness of the screenplay and the slackness of the direction.

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

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

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

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

Every good joke in the movie is to be found in those trailers.

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]

There is something offensively lazy about the thinness of the Jaglom's movie-industry characters, the simplistic problems they face, and the clumps of clumsy, apparently improvised dialogue they have to deliver.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

Even a hardened voyeur would require the patience of Job to get through this interminable, shapeless documentary about the swinging subculture.

It's muddled and shallow and obvious. Worse, it fails as entertainment, being so ineptly directed and written it often has the feel of a high school production by kids with more money and ambition than talent.

A profound disappointment, given its cast and source material.

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.

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

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

The "Jurassic Park" movie franchise does not evolve. Quite the opposite: It degenerates at great speed.

It's hard to imagine how Shyer and script writer John Sweet could have brought this tale to the screen in a cruder, cornier or less interesting way.

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.

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

The whole movie is so ineptly written and directed that its 90 minutes seem to take twice as long.

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

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

A pointless, wincingly snide exercise.

A particularly gross exploitation of the Holocaust for financial gain.

Relentlessly stupid.

It's a thinly disguised lecture about intolerance, spotted with historical inaccuracies and groaning with dialogue so dreadful that it makes a fine cast look ridiculous again and again.

During an endless, maudlin last act, it becomes more and more difficult not to laugh -- or barf -- as the protagonists tearfully come to terms with their issues.

More tedious than affecting.

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.

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.

This movie, cynically and patronizingly aimed at Seagal's predominantly "urban" audience, is sad, tedious proof that even violent exploitation isn't what it used to be.

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

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

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

Essentially a downscale TV movie about spousal and child abuse.

Alas, the laughs - courtesy of screenwriters J. Mackye Gruber and Eric Bress and director David R. Ellis - are unintentional.

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.

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.

More prettily photographed pretentious rubbish from the ridiculous Peter Greenaway.

An ugly, failed attempt to pull off a "Heathers"-style, teen-oriented black comedy.

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

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.