Jonathan Foreman

After a dreadfully clunky start, Left Luggage picks up and becomes quite moving.

Recycles gags from various, more successful gross-out and romantic comedies, but without any zest or imagination.

Much of Tomcats is actually boisterously, crudely entertaining.

Better than any automobile flick put out by Hollywood in a while and, thanks to some genuinely exciting moments, it is easily the most entertaining so far of this summer's big, brainless action movies.

Has some entertaining moments, thanks mainly to Bullock herself, who is surprisingly glamorous as well as endearing.

The sad truth is that TV series like "Dawson's Creek" do a better job with precocious teen dialogue.

More impressive than the sight of these acts on an eight-story screen is the excellent six-channel IMAX sound system.

Crippled by lame storytelling.

Draggy and contrived.

Flat dialogue and stiff performances (especially by the street kids, like Ballesteros, turned into actors by Schroeder) don't help.

Courageous, convincing performance by Dunst.

About two-thirds of the way through, a stupid, hyperbolic sensibility takes control of the project, running it screaming off the rails.

Eyes Wide Shut is Stanley Kubrick's Hindenberg.

Though it contains some very funny, cleverly written comic sketches, Human Traffic shares with other drug movies the problem that watching other people on drugs is not interesting.

Merely a watery, poorly directed update of "Clueless."

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

Intermittently funny, often vulgar.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

Neither convincing nor remotely dramatic.

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

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.

Has the cheesy, deadened feel of a straight-to-cable film.

Smug, often tedious, and comically crude.

Isn't as bad as the year's first abysmal Martian movie, "Mission to Mars," but it's pretty close.

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

The film is clearly an unfinished work and one that feels like a ragged assemblage of parts from at least two entirely different movies all with the same cast.

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

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

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

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

Unfortunately, this version of the familiar formula lacks the inspiration, genuine wit and raunchy charm of 1998's outrageous "There's Something About Mary."

An awkward hybrid of genres that just doesn't work.

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.

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

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

Heavy-handed, predictable and almost completely unbelievable.

A particularly gross exploitation of the Holocaust for financial gain.

Essentially a downscale TV movie about spousal and child abuse.

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

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

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

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.

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.

Best watched while doing a crossword or reading the paper.

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.

Mostly an unfunny, rather dull affair.