J.R. Jones

Jaglom's 14th consists of his usual weakly improvised relationship comedy.

This might have had some potential as a German exercise in self-examination, but as a tony BBC Films production, with the actors all speaking British-accented English (including Jersey girl Farmiga), it reeks of self-righteousness.

The action plot is lousy with cliched suspense scenes of back-road executions halted at the last possible instant.

By now the hypocrisy of simultaneously condemning and exploiting the audience's sadism has become so commonplace in American movies it hardly seems noteworthy.

The scenes in which Charlie plays catch with the ghost of his Red Sox-happy brother are only the most mawkish in a movie whose every element is calculated to set a 12-year-old girl's heart thumping.

The plot of this PG action thriller, a remake of the 2002 Danish film Klatretosen, is so full of holes that even middle schoolers might give it the raspberry, but a bigger problem is the three leads' lack of on-screen chemistry.

The script, by Nolan and his brother Jonathan, takes a few vague pokes at Wall Street and the financial elite but mainly revives the ponderous psychodrama of the first movie.

For a filmmaker like Julie Taymor, Shakespeare's language isn't nearly as enticing as Prospero's violent manipulation of the elements, and this screen adaptation of the play-like her egregious Beatles movie "Across the Universe" (2007)-is primarily an exercise in eccentric (and, I would argue, empty) spectacle.

Abysmal thriller.

Brain-dead adaptation of a popular video game.

Excruciatingly narcissistic.

If a bullet hadn't killed John Lennon, this Beatles-scored musical might have.

Having defused the fairy tale, first-time screenwriter Leigh Dunlap pads this out to 96 minutes with stale high school politics and the usual claptrap about believing in yourself.

A watered-down satire of the pharmaceutical industry.

The resulting movie (2005) covers seven years and touches on some of the same social issues that gave "Hoop Dreams" its epic sweep, yet Serrill fails to treat any of them adequately, and the narrative loses its shape as events unfold.

A dearth of game footage and a wealth of inspirational platitudes contribute to the sense of a powerful tale having already faded into yellowed newspaper clippings.

A flimsy setup dooms this from the start, though its sheer awfulness is something to see.

By the end of this 124-minute drama I'd have settled for ANYONE else, but like most visits with irritating people, the movie lingers, sharpening one's judgment.

Rodriguez retreats into gruesome violence and flaccid comedy, grasping feebly for topical relevance by referencing the current immigration fracas.

Watching Allen fart out a story when he has no characters is always painful, as people are defined through clumsy expository dialogue and ranked according to their cultural accomplishments. But the script here is lazy even by his standards.

Pretentious and overconceived, the movie purports to celebrate self-determination yet squashes it at every turn.

As creator and head writer of "The West Wing," Aaron Sorkin had a gift for making policy debate seem sexy, but what worked in the context of that liberal fantasy founders badly amid the realpolitik of this cold war drama.

The witty title aside, this is a miserably dull exercise in stingy-Jew humor and post-Jarmusch nonreaction.

Jarmusch makes some effort to deliver on the promise of suspense near the end, with de Bankole stalking despicable businessman Bill Murray at his fortresslike compound in the hills.

Unfortunately, as the opening title might suggest, the filmmakers have punted on the hard cinematic work of making the incredible seem credible; instead they've turned Russell's story into a broad farce with one wocka-wocka gag after another.

Big, cruel, stupid actioner.

The novelty wears off almost immediately, leaving this a real chore to watch; there's something bizarre about low-budget spontaneity being replicated in such a labor-intensive medium.

The U.S. vs. John Lennon isn't so much a history of Lennon's pacifism as a continuation of it, the last bed-in, so to speak, with contemporary figures like Gore Vidal and Noam Chomsky on hand to connect Vietnam with Iraq, President Nixon with President Bush, and the FBI's spying on Lennon with the current administration's domestic surveillance.

The orgy of violence, as ghastly as in any video game, should go a long way toward erasing whatever goodwill Stallone earned with his sentimental "Rocky Balboa."

I can't remember when I last hated an art-house movie as much as this one...Other reviewers have praised the film's alleged quirky humor, but I was repelled by the two heartless creeps who set the story in motion and baffled by the protagonist's fascination with them.

Jackman and McGregor throw their best American accents behind the effort, but Michelle Williams seems fairly bored as the sex-club partner who wins McGregor's heart. I'm with her.

Writer-director Michel Leclerc keeps stressing how political all this is (the heroine labels almost everyone a "fascist"), but the movie never really decides what it's about, and its odd-couple romance is stale and unpersuasive.

As the title of this splatter comedy by writer-director Stuart Gordon (Re-Animator) indicates, he's like a bug stuck to her windshield, and that's about the level of humanity and insight one can expect here.

Repulsive 80s flashback.

The word "raunchy" doesn't begin to describe this.

By the end, when Moore presents himself as a lone crusader for justice and wraps yellow crime-scene tape around the AIG building, his reasoning is so muddled that he can’t distinguish an economic system (corporate capitalism) from a political one (representative democracy).

Only in the last third, when he gets down to the business of telling a story, does The Brown Bunny become a porn movie -- though not in the sense you'd expect.

Despite the 138-minute running time, Temple holds all the artists to one song (or less), devoting about half the movie to kaleidoscopic--and ultimately wearying--montage of festivalgoers past and present.

Simpleminded indictment of every senator who voted "yea."

With no personalities established and nothing at stake, it's no more interesting than a pickup game on your local court.

Even Herzog loyalists will have to concede that this fact-based 2009 hostage drama is a serious dud.

A tedious movie about excitement.

Cohen probably thinks he's Charlie Chaplin lampooning Hitler, but of course Hitler was still on top of the world when "The Great Dictator" came out in 1940; Cohen is actually Chaplin's antithesis, a first-world bully content to target the Other.

A murky, directionless plot sinks this big-budget fantasy despite Martin Laing's elaborate production design; the dark, industrial-looking sets often recall "Brazil" but without that film's thrilling sense of an imagination run amok.

Insipid, TV-bland drama.

A rare dud from Pixar.

Smirky, gum-in-your-hair humor dominates this dreadful 2005 feature.

The very idea of handing him over to professional lad Guy Ritchie (who directed Snatch, Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels), to be played as a punch-throwing quipster by Robert Downey Jr., is so profoundly stupid one can only step back in dismay.

At its core this is just another piece of big-studio nothingness. The characters are so underwritten they barely qualify as types, and the movie is badly paced, bookended by high-ordnance action sequences but painfully static in the middle.

Predictable outrage.

Verde is too blankly amoral to sustain interest, but the film has isolated moments of haunting poetry.

Ferrell and Reilly get more mileage out of juvenile pouting and bickering than any other performers I can imagine, but that's about as far as this goes.

Unbearably twee mockumentary.

Tends toward arch silliness more than actual humor, a formula that's tolerable enough in 15-minute tube installments but deadly dull in this 86-minute feature.

I've observed this Seth Rogen comedy, and I can report that it's not very good.

Director Niall Johnson struggles to find the proper tone: the serial murders aren't horrible enough to be funny, and the characters don't respond as if they're horrible at all. As a result the black humor thins into gray fog.

The best thing I can say about this sleep-inducing kiddie comedy is that the need to bring in a PG rating must have precluded the endless series of giant-turd gags promised by the title.

As it turns out, what's going on is yet another cinematic rip-off, this time of “The Exorcist.” Apparently rec stands not for record but for recycle

A shocking revelation near the end explains the soldier's nihilistic rage but simultaneously tears a gigantic hole in the plot, leaving little to admire but Considine's typically penetrating performance.

The paltry theme is that we can't predict the future, but I spent part of the time calculating how many more feeble movies Allen will make, based on his productivity rate (one per year), his batting average (four duds for every success), his current age (74), and his father's longevity (Martin Konigsberg lived to be 100). Are you ready for 20 more remakes of "Manhattan"?

This Spanish comedy showcases a gallery of popular actresses, but writer-director Manuel Gomez Pereira gives them nothing to work with aside from tiresome romantic complications.

A career low for Mark Wahlberg and director John Singleton (Boyz N the Hood), this ridiculous mean-streets adventure starts out like a Hell's Kitchen melodrama from the 30s and eventually spins off into a series of gunfights, beat downs, and trite Motown numbers.

This may not be as ill considered as it sounds--some of the sharpest material in Rock's last concert special, "Never Scared," dealt with the eternal conflict between men and women--but his crowd-pleasing gags tend to clash with Rohmer's sly moral comedy.

Jules Verne's novel has been flattened into a standardized Jackie Chan vehicle.

Distributors are clearly scraping the bottom of the barrel with this flimsy exposé of presidential adviser Karl Rove.

The movie's notion of humor is exemplified by Bradshaw's extended nude scene, which might be termed "roughing the viewer."

Like Robert Altman's "M*A*S*H" this has a banquet scene posed like The Last Supper, but the basic idea--toothless satire trimming a dull star party--reminded me more of "Ready to Wear."

The young sweethearts amuse themselves by donning steampunk outfits and crashing the funerals of dead children, which may seem quirky and sweet if you can disregard the awful grief of such gatherings; the problem is that, once you manage this, the main characters' grief doesn't register either.

These ideas may well have cohered in Chuck Palahniuk's best-selling satirical novel, which I haven't read, but in this screen adaptation by writer-director Clark Gregg they seem more like an assortment of gimmicks.

This is mostly a listless hodgepodge of half-improvised whatever, the seven lead characters so flatly conceived they're like the Keystone Kops (without the chops).

I missed the first half hour of this Zorro adventure, and it's a tribute to the idiot-proof screenplay that I had no trouble following the rest.

This parallel-reality shtick would be OK if the gun violence weren't so awful--but staging a murder again and again for the sake of some undergraduate head game is no more defensible than using it to pump up an action flick.

Even 82 minutes seems an eternity...The net effect is weirdly reminiscent of taking part in any online community, where a "relationship" is more like a juxtaposing of egos.

So stale and complacent that it could be a rerun of "Love American Style."

This never rises above the level of a plodding sword-and-sandal adventure, peopled with chiseled young beauties and bored industry hacks. Singh is a talented and eccentric visual artist with no creative future in the movie business.

Sicko horror film from Australia, whose sadism is topped only by its absurdity.

Cruise and Diaz have worked together before (in Vanilla Sky), but this is their first summer-movie pairing, and their star qualities are so similar--dazzling looks, good comedic chops, complete emotional vacuity--that together, instead of romantic chemistry they generate a sort of giddy, blinding falseness.

Whether you want to trace this romance back to "La Strada" or Allen's marriage to Soon-Yi Previn is your business, but on-screen it never registers as more than a writer's conceit.

The narrative emphasizes how much danger Spurlock is in and how noble he is to embark on all this while his wife is back in the U.S. expecting their first child; it's a little insulting to all the real reporters who've died in the field looking for hard information, not weak indie comedy.

How long do you have to be gone to make a triumphant return to the screen, and how triumphant can your return be when all three movies are duds?

This sequel to "Fantastic Four" (2005) drags in the Silver Surfer, who looks like a gigantic hood ornament and, given voice by Laurence Fishburne, has about as much personality.

The director of "American Pie" has set out to make a merciless satire of American media culture along the lines of "Network," but his ideas are so commonplace that nothing registers except the bile.

This ends on an uplifting and philosophical note, equating moral blindness with the literal sort, which you'll probably appreciate if you haven't already slit your wrists.

The premise for this sci-fi actioner makes sense for about four seconds, after which you begin to wonder why everyone on the planet would willingly become a shut-in.

This didn't make me laugh much, but I liked the music, a patchwork of samples culled from the various atomic-monster epics.

This indie drama spends a lot of time mooning over classical Hollywood cinema, but its own visual style tends toward the pointless flash of music videos.

Feeble exercise in brain-teaser noir.

Pure punishment, this rote action flick from Australia.

Caruso and Spielberg probably thought they were reviving the paranoid style of 70s political thrillers, but their story is so implausible it barely provokes a tremor.

Armitage adds a slick veneer of one-liners and slapstick to Leonard's novel, but the story has been so spun around that it barely knows how to end.

Kline gives an interesting performance playing against type, but with its action plotting and sensationalistic scenes of women being brutalized, the movie often seems to be exploiting as much as illuminating the problem.

Bland comedy romance. Grant and Bullock fail to put across the tired dialogue, and many scenes seem ad-libbed--in desperation.

When the story finally collapses in a heap at the end, you'll probably want your money back, but that's where the title comes in: "Next!"

There's some cute stuff involving Hanks and some teenagers who tool around campus on scooters, but an utter lack of chemistry between him and Roberts dooms the movie.

This lame comedy was adapted from a recent British TV movie, though its (quite literal) money shots of the women squealing and hurling cash in the air reminded me of 80s greed capers like "Trading Places" and "A Fish Called Wanda."

Delivers state-of-the-art freeway thrills tenuously held together by an absurd plot, cheap but pretty leads (Martin Henderson, Monet Mazur), diner and gas station locations that look like they've been preserved in amber since the 1950s, and plenty of engine porn.

Everything wrong with today's hipster comedy seems to coalesce in this toothless satire.

A turkey of Rubenesque proportions.