Jonathan Foreman

Branagh's attempt to meld Shakespeare's densely verbal early comedy with Broadway show tunes fails, thanks to stunt casting, poor singing and dancing, and the incompatibility of the two art forms.

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.

A predictable tearjerker whose main redeeming feature is that you don't actually see any of the angels in the title.

Bedeviled by labored writing and slack direction.

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.

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

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.

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

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

Resolves the romantic dilemma in the most artificial and unsatisfying way. A blaring swing score and some obvious dubbing do little to ease the pain.

A hokey, overblown and deeply unsatisfying movie.

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.

A smarmy, smirky but ultimately boring film.

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.

The best thing about Equilibrium is its impressive look. Along with its generally fine cast and some well-choreographed fights, that goes a long way to making the movie watchable -- despite its underlying stupidity.

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

Even the lovemaking scenes between two of Hollywood's most attractive stars -- often shot from above, like Cinemax soft porn -- are so unerotic, they make your skin crawl.

Unfortunately, Impostor doesn't do much with its template, despite a remarkably strong cast.

A lame, glossy and disastrously misconceived film about three ditsy sisters dealing with the death of their horrible father.

Intermittently funny, often vulgar.

Simply not up to the task.

Travolta is terrific as a bad guy, making Saint almost sympathetic. His co-stars however, flounder in a sea of bad lines, with poor Romijn-Stamos getting stuck with the worst.

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.

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

Plays to none of Rock's strengths (even though he co-wrote the film with members of his HBO team) and intensifies his tendency to mug and shout.

It's a film that reeks of stupidity and cynicism, one that makes you feel soiled just to have sat through it.

Could hardly be more predictable.

Less an updated version of the Dostoevsky novel than an unusually somber Hollywood teen love story.

If this cheesy, cheap-looking update of "A Connecticut Yankee at King Arthur's Court" had been co-produced by the Ku Klux Klan itself, it could hardly be more repellently stereotypical.

It's a wretchedly dumb, lazy and incoherent movie that's magically rendered watchable by Eddie Murphy's charm and Robert De Niro's presence.

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.

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.

As lifeless and unfunny as a corpse on a slab.

It's moody and atmospheric. But with the exception of a few cool moments that remind you of Ferrara at his best, it's dull and written with little attention paid to basic storytelling.

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.

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.

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

Everything about National Security is so lazy and uninspired, it's hard to believe that director Dennis Dugan also made "Happy Gilmore," arguably Adam Sandler's funniest movie.

The film's staggering incompetence can be measured by the way it makes some of the most fascinating and heart-rending episodes in American history tedious.

A bad film with some oddly charming moments.

Not a movie but a live-action agitprop cartoon so shameless and coarse, it's almost funny.

It's not to say that the adolescent humor isn't funny; some of it is hilarious. It's just that this movie lacks the overarching comic sensibility that made "Mary" and even Adam Sandler comedies like "Happy Gilmore" and "The Waterboy" so satisfying.

Hard-core chick shlock, weakened by odd shifts in tone and a slack pace, but elevated by a luminous performance by Natalie Portman.

Formulaic but surprisingly charming.

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

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

There are times when the urban dialect is so thick, you wish the film came with subtitles.

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

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

This must be one of the worst movies ever to get a big-screen release. If it weren't so boring, this unbelievably bad indie sex comedy would be worth going to for five minutes of laughs at its sheer incompetence.

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

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

Not only is Adored amateurish and mawkish even by the standards of American "gaysploitation" cinema, it's weirdly shy about showing nudity and sex.

Anyone interested in this remarkably prolific author would be better off visiting a library or bookshop.

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

An example of lazy, dumb and couldn't-care-less hack movie making.

It's so painful to sit through you eventually stop feeling sorry for the floundering cast.

Pretentious and trite.

Overall, this sci-fi/martial arts hybrid has the stale aura of a product assembled out of bits of other action movies.

Unoriginal but effective raunchy drag comedy.

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.

Stinks even by the standards of late summer movie garbage.

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.

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.

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

Uneven but occasionally hilarious teen comedy.

Good-natured but mostly unfunny.

Bereft of inspiration, the agonizingly witless screenplay - blamed by the credits on George Gallo - resorts to pathetic cheap jokes about flatulence and impotence, lame slapstick and that juvenile gag about the horror of two men waking up naked in the same bed.

Occasionally amusing, extremely gross, but mostly tedious.

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

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.

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

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

Every possible film student visual cliché (plus quite a few from the world of music video) gets a thorough workout.

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

Thanks to the amateurish, spectacularly talent-free quality of its cinematography, direction, writing and acting, Emerald Cowboy is simply impossible to sit through.

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."

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

Shapeless, tedious, hopelessly bad sequel.

Feels much more like a very, very long, music video, albeit one made for an audience that gets off on high-tech firepower rather than nearly-naked babes.

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

A perfectly enjoyable sci-fi thriller.

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.

A pathetically inane and unimaginative cross between "XXX" and "Vertical Limit," it could only harm the careers of everyone involved in its making - including top British stage actors Rufus Sewell and Rupert Graves.

Mostly ludicrous, but occasionally effective.

Predictable, rarely scary.

Atrociously written.

Much of Tomcats is actually boisterously, crudely entertaining.

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

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

Helplessly clichéd, predictable and unaware of its own lameness, it could easily become a camp classic on the order of "Grease 2" and "Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band."

A laughably bad B-thriller.