J.R. Jones

Like the incessant ringing of cowbells in the first two segments, the film may either hypnotize you or drive you stark staring mad.

Overlong, undercooked drama.

An agreeably shallow comedy.

The result is an uneasy mix of Coen-style laughs (particularly evident in the big comic close-ups) and Zhang's majestic imagery (in one shot the couple's divorce papers shatter into a burst of confetti).

Claudel commits the cardinal sin of withholding the full story until the very end, when it spills out in a histrionic scene between the two sisters and largely exonerates the older one.

This is fairly satisfying, particularly a ghoulish episode in a Victorian insane asylum.

The first third is terrific...After that the movie settles into a series of ho-hum conflicts and complications, and the requisite slam-bang ending is perfunctory at best.

A genial cast and moderately funny script prevail over the sort of sappy music cues and white-bread settings that have become the grating norm in Hollywood rom-coms.

Though its intentions are noble, it's hampered by a stock romantic subplot (Phillipe falls for his friend's squeeze, Abbie Cornish), a familiar structure (since The Best Years of Our Lives soldiers invariably come home in threes), and a lack of symmetry (some of Gordon-Levitt's story seems to have wound up on the cutting-room floor).

"Cut" is the most interesting of the three shorts because Park uses the opportunity to take stock of his career and the excruciating cruelty of his movies.

Apatow and director Jake Kasdan deliver a fair number of laughs, though nearly every good idea is pressed into service as a running gag. The biggest disappointment is their survey of rock history, which has all the depth of a Time-Life book.

Blaise and Walker cleverly widen the aspect ratio as the hero's consciousness changes and make some lovely pictures of the northern lights, but the atrocious Phil Collins score (with a vocal by Tina Turner) filled me with evil spirits.

Jeff Lipsky invests this indie drama with admirable intelligence and insight, though these fine qualities are undermined by a sense of writerly artifice.

This tepid sequel to Harold Ramis's mobster-on-the-couch comedy "Analyze This" (1999) is partially redeemed by Robert De Niro's handful of scenes with Cathy Moriarty-Gentile, who made her screen debut as the teenage wife in "Raging Bull."

The script is a lifeless succession of attorney-client debates and stormy horror flashbacks, though I had a good time watching Jennifer Carpenter, a comic Buffy type in "White Chicks" and "D.E.B.S.," hurl herself around as the title character.

The story is so packed with over-the-top characters (including a hit man and hustler played by Jamie Foxx) that no one gets a chance to breathe.

Watching her (Blanchett) and Jones work together is the chief pleasure of this polished but self-conscious drama--Howard delivers some terse and coherent suspense sequences, but Ford looms over the story like a rifleman hidden in the red rock.

Lichtenstein dutifully unpacks the family's unhappy past, but he's so easily distracted by surreal dream sequences and colorful supporting characters that his main story gradually dries up into a sitcom.

You won't find many surprises in the equally funny U.S. remake from producer and star Chris Rock.

Remaking Get Smart without Don Adams and Barbara Feldon is like remaking "My Little Chickadee" without Mae West and W.C. Fields--the best possible outcome is disappointment.

Whitaker directed this flaccid romance from a script by girl-power hacks Jessica Bendinger.

As the phlegmatic, beer-guzzling protagonist, Will Ferrell manages to keep this rolling, though Rush's corny narrative devices (each of the minor characters receives an ironic gift at the end) couldn't be less consistent with Carver's stubborn minimalism.

Rises only slightly above the level of a Harlequin romance.

I'm qualified to report that this piece of junk faithfully re-creates the Hanna-Barbera formula of scary monsters, flimsy mystery, and watery comedy.

As a movie genre, the ghostly romantic comedy dates back at least as far as "Topper" (1937), and the stale premise, combined with the leads' typecasting, makes for an eminently forgettable date movie.

Eric Brevig, making his feature directing debut after a long career as a visual effects supervisor, lurches from one CG set piece to the next, though he's helped along by Fraser's easy comic touch.

This gets off to a pretty good start, with most of the laughs coming from beefy Kevin Heffernan and nerdy Steve Lemme. But at 111 minutes, the movie is too slackly paced to build up enough momentum; like the characters they play, these guys don't know when to call it a night.

Producer Ismail Merchant died in 2005, but Merchant Ivory's stuffy tradition of quality lives on.

Throughout the tour O'Brien makes it a point of pride to oblige his fans, though even this comes off as self-centered.

The plot is just a delivery system for a series of gruesome, convoluted, and--depending on your tolerance for sadism--hilarious freak accidents.

A major disappointment because here, unlike on "Real Time," Maher aims for laughs instead of insight--and aims low.

The disconnect between the human actors and the digital backgrounds is more pronounced here than in a futuristic adventure like "Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow," and because classic Hollywood cinema is so rich with epic images of antiquity, this can't help but seem chintzy.

The story is often ridiculous, but director Antoine Fuqua provides plenty of fun distractions.

A substantial performance from Clive Owen rescues what might otherwise have been a fairly gooey fatherhood drama.

This is loads of fun in the early stretch, as the characters are being introduced, but the story never really goes anywhere.

With its stagy dance numbers, this reminded me more of Bob Fosse's confessional musical "All That Jazz" than "8 1/2," though it suffers from comparison to either, given that Marshall is several steps removed from Fellini's feverish self-investigation.

The script is a veritable cosmos of Spielberg in-jokes, but the writer-stars also make room for some vicious and decidedly English digs at red-state shit-kickers and Christian fundamentalists.

Commendable as pop history but fairly opaque as drama.

In the end I couldn't be sure whether its morality was complex or just confused. Like its young athletes, it earns a gentleman's C.

This 2003 drama suffers from a heavy narrative hand, as a series of ironic coincidences creates a tiny, hermetically sealed New York City, but the contrivances are overwhelmed by the intimacy and immediacy of the human encounters.

Fascinating and troubling documentary.

The project reeks of commercial calculation, which is just tolerable until Walker, in search of a story arc, follows two chorus members with serious illnesses into the hospital.

It's nice to see a high-concept comedy with such a generous concept.

It's almost worth seeing, though, for the incredible action set piece at the center.

It's a powerful psychological conceit, but Samuell subverts it at every turn with his carnivalesque style and canned Gallic wistfulness.

Best known as a still photographer, Ellis has a powerful motif in the idea of stopping time, yet he can't seem to move his characters along.

Jayasundara dispenses with conventional story pacing to alternate long, static scenes with moments of revelatory lust or violence; as a press release states, the movie is "composed of uncanny set pieces portraying sex, death, and waiting," though its aesthetic achievement may lie in making all three feel like the same thing.

Adapted from a Stephen King story, this trite but watchable chiller plays like a scaled-down version of "The Shining," with Cusack driven over the edge by hallucinations of his abusive father and dead daughter.

I'd recommend this, but only if you liked "The English Patient."

Diary of the Dead features some of the most hilariously gross images since "Dawn of the Dead." In one online video the filmmakers find, a father playfully pulls off a birthday clown’s red rubber nose and the guy’s real nose comes off with it.

This talking-heads documentary by Stefan Forbes doesn't waste much time delving into Atwater's misshapen character; instead it focuses on his South Carolina roots and his instinctive grasp of the southern strategy that's been the GOP's key to the White House for the past 40 years.

A novel twist in the second half succeeds in distinguishing this from the pack but also wrenches it away from the meager characters.

Machiavelli epigrams and 70s soul classics embellish this slice of thug life, which succumbs to the usual hypocrisy of condemning Barnes while grooving on his cars, clothes, and jewels.

There's something to be said for letting a comic book adaptation operate at the level of a comic book--i.e., with cheap laughs and ice-cold sadism.

Stiller plays a monster, and when Gerwig goes for him, declaring that she sees his tender side, the development seems like a fond indulgence on the part of writer-director Noah Baumbach.

The twee romance was too much for me, though the movie's first half follows in fascinating detail the innovations Warne introduced to popularize illustrated picture books for children.

A hodgepodge of half-baked characters and story ideas, stoked by a frantic climax and a blue-chip playlist of 1966 rock classics.

There's something wrong with a suspense film when the sets are more interesting than the characters.

What makes Outrage a bankable indie film is the promise of personal embarrassment--everyone loves a good outing. Except for the person at the center of it.

With its one-liners and welter of double-crosses, it should settle on the video shelf between "Intolerable Cruelty" and "Mr & Mrs. Smith."

If you've seen any of these, you know that the hero is always killed for her trouble, a final stroke of mordant wit.

In essence this is a celebrity revenge fantasy, something few of us can relate to, but director Paul Abascal has the sense to keep the homilies short and the pacing fast.

Tends toward the generic, and Jim Caviezel is hopelessly bland in the lead. Among the bright spots are Mary McCormack as the hero's wife and Bruce Dern as the wise old motorboat guru.

There's a lot of self-conscious talk about the importance of timing, but the tony sense of entitlement tends to dampen any laughs. The movie functions best as a middle-class Euro-postcard along the lines of "Chocolat" or "Under the Tuscan Sun."

This takes place in the same sort of pathologically sports-obsessed hamlet as "Friday Night Lights," though in contrast to that movie's grim honesty there's enough heartland schmaltz here to embarrass John Mellencamp. Remarkably, the movie rights itself once the actual season begins, focusing on game strategy more than the usual heart-stopping pep talks.

Director Shawn Levy delivers his usual middle-of-the-road product.

Despite the fascinating topic, director Yan-ting Yuen offers relatively little history or criticism of the works themselves, squandering screen time on such gimmicks as mock voice-over and scenes of young people performing hard-rock and hip-hop versions of vintage songs. It's enough to make you pine for the good old days when irony was illegal.

As a director Ball amplifies the flaws in his own writing; his supporting characters are too broadly pitched to take seriously, and he tends to smack you in the face with the point of every scene.

This historical drama is lovely to look at, with elegant Victorian fashions and verdant tropical scenery, but its story plays like a Hawaiian heritage lesson filtered through the melodramatic artifice of an old Hollywood costume drama.

Screenwriter Bruce Joel Rubin won an Oscar for "Ghost" (1990), a pleasant, moderately thoughtful weepie that this movie closely resembles.

In a novel twist, the movie's dumbest element--joke commercials for racist consumer products--turns out to be the most provocative when end titles reveal the products were all real.

This is hysterically funny in parts, but most of the laughs are raunchy or scatological--always a sure bet when puppets are involved.

Drew Barrymore is that rare movie starlet who can handle the comedy end of romantic comedy, but she coasts through her underwritten role as a goofy plant sitter recruited by Grant to write his lyrics.

The dopey premise only takes to a gross extreme the "Full Monty" formula that the Brits have been milking for more than a decade.

The movie's only unmitigated pleasure is a too-brief fight scene between Connor and a naked combatant made up to look precisely like Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Lately, most of Dustin Hoffman's roles have been grinning crackpots or talking animals, so accepting the 71-year-old actor as a romantic lead who could fetch the likes of Emma Thompson requires some suspension of disbelief.

Another disposable family entertainment.

Offers the same dramatic visual style and cruel plot twists, but the mechanical retribution is even more boring.

The talented Gleeson, who had a breakthrough role in Boorman's "The General," returns the favor here, carrying the whole movie on his broad shoulders.

One keeps waiting for the title characters' lives to intersect, but when they finally do--with a reporter asking Powell to comment on Child's disparaging remarks about her--Ephron scurries away from the moment and its implications.

Soggy stuff from French director Cedric Klapisch (When the Cat’s Away), set in the title city and collecting the routine travails of various urbanites.

Most of the gags misfire, though some scenes are memorably tawdry.

Rosenthal observes all the ritual elements -- a veteran of the series, he seems to understand that its fans crave certainty over shock.

This premise may sound all right on paper, but on-screen it doesn't really wash: if the girl had been half as committed to music as she now is to revenge, she would have overcome her disappointment.

There are some solid, outrageous laughs here--most of them involving anal sex--but don't expect a second lightning strike.

Every scene ends with a gag line, punched up by Jaglom's harried intercutting, and threaded through the story are close-ups of women discussing their obsession with new clothes, an exercise that yields its wisdom in the first 20 minutes and then keeps repeating it.

The movie's "Beverly Hillbillies" humor had me laughing moderately, and by the end I wasn't even looking around to make sure no one noticed.

Pleasant bubblegum romp, which was inspired by the old Sandra Dee picture "The Reluctant Debutante."

After a while I wasn't sure whether I was learning about cocaine or ingesting it.

A busy, Crash-like complex of LA stories, each hammering home the injustice of our immigration law.

The result is notably dim and flat on a big screen, and the giant-monster scenes, often cloaked in darkness, are few and disappointing. Edwards tries to take the high road with a politically intriguing premise (a la District 9) and a tight focus on the evolving relationship between his two traveling companions, but his shapeless script doesn't do much with either element.

The video has a funky, loose-limbed feel, but Van Peebles has been celebrated so much already you have to wonder how many victory laps a man needs.

Some may condemn this gruesome, heartless exercise, but I prefer to savor the irony: three years after the Francophobia that accompanied Operation Iraqi Freedom, every bonehead in America will be lining up to see a Frenchman's movie about subhuman hillbillies.

For this remake writer-director Neil LaBute has moved the action from Scotland to Washington State, added enough scares for Warner Brothers to market the movie as horror, and turned the story into an almost comically Wagnerian expression of the castration anxiety that snakes through his original screenplays.

Writer-director Derrick Borte brings a heavy hand to the comedy and an even heavier one to the drama.

When a respected actor moves into the director's chair, he can usually draw a pretty good cast, which is certainly the case here... But Sherwood Kiraly's slight script only makes this embarrassment of riches seem more embarrassing.

Solid performances by Fiennes, Jonathan Firth, and a frail but funny Peter Ustinov keep this watchable.

This dark comedy by screenwriters Jonathan Parker and Catherine DiNapoli frequently uses a .44 Magnum when a pea shooter would suffice.

So much has been written about the show's emotional importance to single women that I can't possibly add anything, except to say that, in both its TV and movie incarnations, the empty materialism and sincere longing for love always manage to cancel each other out, leaving behind nothing but what this started out as--a sitcom.

Proof positive that comedy is hard, this debut feature by Hue Rhodes offers a wealth of skilled players and admirably offbeat gags yet seldom manages to generate any laughs.

Like Scott's last picture, "American Gangster," this is a little too slick and commanding for its own good; despite Crowe and DiCaprio's best efforts, their characters keep getting flattened by the steamroller narrative.

Run-of-the mill drama.

As the smirking title might suggest, the movie is least prepared to process the feminist backlash against porn movies that followed their early-70s crossover -- in a way the most interesting part of the story.

This agreeable French comedy wears its class consciousness on its sleeve but functions primarily as bourgeois light entertainment.

I'd have preferred less personality stuff and more hard information about the current technical and commercial challenges, but if polishing these guys' egos is the only way to make them do the right thing, then so be it.

The two characters' pasts are so sketchy here that the drama lacks any serious emotional underpinning.

A forced screwball comedy for teenagers, partly redeemed by Brittany Murphy's giddy performance.

Alternates between chunks of opaque exposition delivered by cardboard characters and eruptions of colorful and highly imaginative action.

Though Istvan Szabo (Being Julia) was slated to direct at one point, the assignment ultimately went to Rodrigo Garcia, who's known for his female ensemble dramas (Nine Lives, Mother and Child) but demonstrates no particular affinity for this material.

It never conjures up any coherent drama of its own, focusing instead on the historical destiny of Bernal's beefcake messiah.

By the time the high-octane ending arrived I didn't even care what happened to the kid.

He's a fascinating character (even in the person of Gerard Butler), but his conversion from drug-crazed bruiser to psalm-singing family man is so swift and unconvincing that the movie is hobbled from the start. It becomes more engrossing once Childers finds his mission in Africa.

The deft physical comedy is a pleasure, though the leering chauvinism becomes more embarrassing as the movie progresses. Mel Brooks never had it this good.

Disposable teen romance.

Combining the undead and the Third Reich seems like a novel idea--the peanut butter and jelly of trash culture--but in fact Spanish exploitation legend Jesus Franco already got to it back in 1981 with "Oasis of the Zombies."

The plot, though, is recycled from the Vince Vaughn comedy "Fred Claus" (Santa's duties are assumed by a goofy relative, in this case son Arthur) and the old Rankin-Bass special "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer" (Arthur goes on a rogue expedition with a couple other misfits).

For the most part this reminded me of a hysterical passenger pushing random buttons in the cockpit of a plunging airplane.

There's nothing here about Monroe that we haven't been told a thousand times already: she was sexy, she was troubled; she was warm, she was selfish; she took pills, she lit up the screen.

The "Big Fat Wedding" formula dictates a certain amount of ugly-duckling fantasy along with the ethnic scenery chewing.

Mac was a magnetic performer with a long history of redeeming mediocre movies; unfortunately this is another one.

Like the recent Japanese import "Steamboy," this is worth seeing for the artwork alone, but it's so furiously overimagined it may leave you feeling dulled.

This male weepie is ridden with cliches (Farina's character tends to a pigeon coop on his roof, for God's sake) and climaxes with a predictable act of self-abnegation.

Combines absurd male fantasy and grating chick-flick cliche.

A pleasant but tepid comedy.

The Focker franchise has become such a swell payday (Meet the Parents grossed $166 million; Meet the Fockers, $279 million) that now everyone wants in on the act.

The movie's idea of funny is giving the two lovers identical moles bordering their upper lips.

Manages to transplant the action to Chicago without completely ruining it, though the emotional impact is largely deflated by the change in cultures.

The gender-bending comedy of Billy Wilder and Blake Edwards gets a teenpic makeover in this 2005 debut feature by Martin Curland.

There's one nifty and original sequence--an assassination attempt during a state funeral where the pipe organs in the church all go haywire--but otherwise, this is crushingly generic.

A Sears catalog of rock 'n' roll cliches.

Dylan Moran has a few funny moments as Pegg's shiftless pal, and Mike Leigh regular Ruth Sheen puts in an all-too-brief appearance.

This terminally sappy romance delivers heartache, sacrifice, a make-out scene in the pouring rain, and not one but two autistic characters.

Well-meaning but thick with cliches.

Director Kenneth Branagh has mercifully pared the action down to 88 minutes (the first movie dragged on for 138), but the final act, with its obscure homosexual flirtation, still seems to go on forever.

Routine crime thriller.

With its sappy musical vignettes and encounter-session dialogue, the movie consistently overplays its insights, though all three leads contribute thoughtful and genuine performances.

Indifferently scripted and shoddily animated feature.

Myers pumps out a river of inventive shtick, but it doesn't cohere or connect; he seems less a character than a comedian doing couch time on a late-night talk show.

A chaotic sequence midway through shows Mormon and gay-rights protesters shouting abuse at each other in San Francisco, and that's pretty much what the whole movie feels like.

Spade claims he latched onto his snide persona to distinguish himself from the pack; it's served him well as an ensemble player and a big-screen foil to Chris Farley, but as a romantic lead he's hopeless.

This has its moments--most of them thanks to Kilmer and Joe Mantegna as the boy's abusive father--but the troubled romance is unconvincing and the big-name actors hang on the story like ornaments on a spindly tree.

Frank Whaley and Philip Seymour Hoffman play minor characters so annoying they might as well wear T-shirts reading "Eat My Brain."

Without Diesel's brooding lunkhead presence it's more like "1/2 Fast 1/2 Furious."

Nicely paced but so fluffy it threatens to waft away.

It takes forever to get moving, but when it finally does, the Quaid and Stone characters still seem ill defined.

Coppola based her script on a revisionist biography by Antonia Fraser, though the film reads most poignantly as a personal statement; like Marie, the director was born to a life of privilege and carries the burden of a proud family legacy.

The movie's first half hour is a barrage of lazy narrative pointers--endless expository voice-over, freeze frames and captions to identify the numerous characters--and by the time screenwriter Tina Gordon Chism decides to write an extended scene, the story is already dead in the water.

This dull actioner, written and directed by Mark Steven Johnson, uses voice-over to hurry along Daredevil's genesis tale, and Affleck's rigid performance is a perpetual drag on the story.

The characters' undiluted self-interest will seem one-dimensional to all but the worst cynics.

Involves a team of divers exploring a vast cave system, an appropriate setting given the hollowness of the story and acting.

This isn't very good--the puritanical impulses of the slasher genre collide head-on with the sweet-butt requirements of gay exploitation flicks--but a gender studies major could have a field day with it.

The September Issue fixates on status and professional one-upmanship; if you want to see a movie that actually treats fashion as personal expression--in other words, art--keep a lookout for Anne Fontaine’s forthcoming biopic "Coco Before Chanel."

Despite a provocative climax, the movie settles into a ponderous collection of soliloquies.

A strong cast fails to rescue this ponderous Oscar bait.

It's a pleasure to see Jill Clayburgh on the big screen in a story about middle-aged love and sexuality, but she can't rescue this alternately trite and implausible comedy.

As Adam Sandler vehicles go, this isn't quite as dire as "Eight Crazy Nights," but any movie that has to fall back on Rob Schneider rubbing his nipples has some serious script issues.

This forced spoof seems to be targeted at lesbian couples and hetero men with severe schoolgirl fetishes; that may be a legitimate market, but I'd hate to be sitting between them.

Holding all this together would be enough of a chore even without the hollow black-pride message.

Three decades of skyrocketing income inequality have soured the comedy of Arthur's astronomically expensive self-indulgences.

It isn't bad enough to be good.

An especially lame variation on Crowe's feel-good formula.

The performers all move a lot better than they talk, which is bad news for the insipid melodrama but good news whenever the characters hit the floor in furious competitions between rival crews.

There's a gothic backstory to all this, which makes no sense but looks pretty cool.

Judge races through some of his most provocative ideas in the opening minutes and ignores his story's many logical inconsistencies; the movie is bracing for its bile but ultimately more frustrating than funny.

The result is a problem drama with more problem than drama.

With the "Lord of the Rings" trilogy completed and the next "Chronicles of Narnia" movie two years away, fantasy aficionados needing a Yuletide fix may have to settle for this dull sword-and-sorcery epic.

As on their TV collaboration, "That '70s Show," the time period never extends much farther than hairdos, costume design, and soundtrack hits.

Ulliel, the meek missing soldier in "A Very Long Engagement," makes such a tedious Lecter that this quickly becomes a chore, though Dominic West ("The Wire") is good as a French detective on the madman's trail.

Schizoid romantic comedy -- The first half of the movie is full of broad but capable comedy, but the original film's sexual and class politics are clumsily handled, and the mood turns serious with all the subtlety of a falling guillotine blade.

This low-budget sci-fi item was produced by some of the Brits who made "Shaun of the Dead" and "Hot Fuzz," including their writer and director, Edgar Wright, but it hardly compares, despite Nick Frost's brief appearance as a mangy pot dealer.

Watching John Leguizamo labor to keep this leaky vessel afloat, I was reminded of all those Hell's Kitchen melodramas James Cagney rescued in the early 30s.

Andrews is still a treasure, but the series's currency is plummeting.

You can't set the comedy bar much lower than spoofing the old Rock Hudson-Doris Day romances.

A perfect example of the modern comedy mill gone wrong, a prolonged muddle whose plot, specific situations, and improvised quips never line up.

Sicko horror flick.

This operates at the intellectual level of the old "Star Trek" in its limp last season, and the professed humanism is belied by the extreme violence and Nazi-chic production design (not to mention a voice-over that traces the outlawing of emotion to "the revolutionary precept of the hate crime").

It's so played out at this point that not even the enjoyably no-nonsense Statham can pump any life into it.

Buffeted by the usual car crashes and explosions, Wilson and Murphy never develop any comic chemistry.

There's no real reason it should be set in the 70s, except that the freaky wigs, loud clothes, and wall-to-wall soul classics are needed to bolster the nothing script.

The ghoulish tone and Mikkelsen's glassy performance smother any laughs.

At long last, the Dead series may be ready for that final bullet between the eyes.

It's gooey fun for the first reel or two despite an abundance of close-ups that render the frantic action nearly unreadable.

Some of the illustrious cast members were on their way up (John Travolta), but most of them were on their way down (Eddie Albert, Ida Lupino, Keenan Wynn).

There's a lot less here than meets the eye.

The story lurches from heavy-handed satire to heavy-handed drama. Heigl gives a winning performance, though Slattery-Moschkau seldom misses an opportunity to show her prancing around in her underwear.

Inevitably, however, this oh-so-cosmopolitan setup gradually devolves into resentment, messy romance, and marital strife.

This has wit and energy to burn, but I can't call it escapism, because tackiness and snarkiness are among the things I most need to escape.

Any guy who sits through this date movie deserves to get to third base at least.

Writer-director Toni Kallem generates some touching moments (most of them involving Tom Bower as Taylor's wisp of a father), but this never surmounts the woeful miscasting of its two leads.

Weak comedy.

Various news stories have noted the movie's accuracy, which I don't doubt, but the blanket antipathy makes for a wearying and predictable story.

The fourth installment in the horror-parody franchise combines plot elements from "The Grudge," "The Village," and "War of the Worlds," with abbreviated spoofs of "Saw," "Brokeback Mountain," and "Million Dollar Baby." The amount of screen time allotted to each movie is roughly proportional to its box office take, suggesting that the first draft of the screenplay was written on a calculator.

Ice Cube tries his hand at family comedy in this phony story.

The gags are consistently weak, though actor Miles Fisher turns in a hair-raising impression of Tom Cruise.

No one breaks into song, but this fact-based legal drama about a battered Anglo-Indian wife on trial for murdering her husband is infected with a fatal strain of heaving Bollywood melodrama.

This miserable comedy is enlivened occasionally by Jeff Daniels and Kristin Chenoweth as a cheerfully tacky couple who keep crossing paths with the dysfunctional clan.

This odd-couple comedy reunites Galifianakis with Todd Phillips, who directed "The Hangover," but don't expect anything like the other movie's novel plotting or wild slapstick.

I found it warm, humane, pretty, and dull enough to anesthetize patients awaiting massively invasive surgery.

This big-budget adventure is based on a recent Michael Crichton thriller, though its premise is too stale to instill the sense of wonder critical to great sci-fi.

This incredibly odd Japanese horror feature (1977) is like a Hello Kitty backpack stuffed with bloody human viscera.

It's more like a feature-length music video, with grainy images illustrating songs from (Youngs) recent album of the same title and actors lip-synching to his reedy vocals.

Packs a punch in its first act with a passionate lead performance by Cyndi Williams and a painfully concrete sense of modern life closing in. But gradually it slips into the indie paradigm of an alienated soul rushing into darkness, climaxing with a semiabstract montage sequence that's more rhetorical than dramatic.

Beneath all the forced hilarity lies an awful fear of aging--and Sandler is only 43! This is gonna be rough.

This UK drama by Stephen Woolley, a longtime producer for Neil Jordan making his directing debut, presents a fairly convincing version of what might have happened.

Forgettable coming-of-age story.

This drama about Baltimore firefighters makes a serious effort to honor the sacrifices of professional rescue workers, but blasts of hokum keep threatening to collapse the building.

Never really generates any serious laughs.

Like the first movie, this has some cute gags but collapses like a soggy paper plate because it can't decide whether to mock or celebrate the heroine's shallow materialism.

Hunt's crabby performance weighs on the film, though it's nothing compared to Colin Firth's scenery-chewing turn as her self-lacerating new beau.

Malkovich is severely miscast as a heartless and conniving thug admired by the hero (apparently Charles Grodin was busy), and Hopper, in a paper-thin role, barely registers.

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.

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.

After nine years, Duffy has coughed up a sequel, and like the first movie it's energetic, proudly juvenile, and reverently derivative.

The panoramic backgrounds have a silky beauty, but the characters are cheaply rendered with doll faces, enlarged musculature, tiny joints, and clunky movement. It's like watching Max Headroom lead his people out of Egypt.

The grad student and her boyfriend (Marc Blucas) are blandly written and the story never develops any psychological depth; the paranormal explanation for what's going on is equally slight.

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.

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.

Director Adam Shankman (Bringing Down the House) can't block a sight gag to save his life.

This motorcycle melodrama is so stupid that during the press screening my colleagues' laughter threatened to drown out the roar of the engines.

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

Keith is an awkward, galumphing presence, but he's more fun to watch than Kelly Preston as the girl's uptight mother.

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!"

Though some of his one-liners are pretty good, his shtick can't sustain this dutifully scripted comedy. Megyn Price, who's done time on the sitcom Grounded for Life, is a welcome distraction as the waitress with a crush on Larry.

The villainous turns by Jon Voight (as a hard-hearted Mormon bishop) and Terence Stamp (as a bloodthirsty Brigham Young) would have been more fun if they weren't part of such a clumsy campaign to lay this tragedy at the church's doorstep.

German supermodel Uschi Obermaier slept with Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, and all we get is this lousy biopic.

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"?

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.

As "Saw" demonstrated, Wan and Whannell have a carnivalesque sense of fun and a sure instinct for recycling classic horror tropes, but their characters are so flat and their plotting so listless that this low-budget feature fails to generate much suspense.

Good movie roles have generally eluded her (Agnes Bruckner), and she labors in vain to keep this big-studio horror confection alive.

I'm a fan of director Bob Odenkirk, but my high hopes for this comedy were dashed by screenwriters Ben Garant, Thomas Lennon, and Michael Patrick Jann, all alumi of "Reno 911"!

Soporific comedy.

Written and directed by Tom Six--who doesn't seem to realize that movie theaters rely on popcorn sales--this nasty stuff plays like a cross between "Saw," "Naked Lunch," and "Bride of the Monster."

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

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.

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.

Abysmal thriller.

This is funny mostly for its brazen disregard of common sense.

To her credit, Bello makes a real commitment to this spiteful, self-absorbed character, though the credibility she generates through sheer force of will is no match for the gimmicky plot twist that arrives at the story’s midpoint and sends the movie spinning off into stupid-land.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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."

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).

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.

Underneath the wrapping lies a squalid Tarantino-style crime flick.

A watered-down satire of the pharmaceutical industry.

Spike Lee's fans have learned to take the bad with the good, but this is pretty damn bad.

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 is one dull party.

The funny-looking kids steal every scene from Lawrence, simply by virtue of being funny-looking kids.

As in most bad thrillers, the number of pointless shocks increases in direct proportion to the drama's decreasing vitality, like defibrilator paddles jolting a dying man.

A rare dud from Pixar.

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.

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 plot twists are mostly predicated on the characters' improbably shifting loyalties, the sort of thing you can get away with only when the people in your movie are drained of all compassion.

The cinematic equivalent of a tapeworm, this delivers few laughs beyond the initial chuckles of recognition. Seltzer and Friedberg (who also directed) have another script in development called "Raunchy Movie"; apparently one idea they haven't yet considered is "Watchable Movie."

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.

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."

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.

This inept 2003 melodrama has become a Rocky Horror-style cult favorite...As someone who's watched more bad movies than you can imagine, I'm mostly immune to the so-bad-it's-good aesthetic, though I can see how, viewed in a theater at midnight after a few drinks, this might conjure up its own hilariously demented reality.

Big, cruel, stupid actioner.

The cat is computer-generated, as are his one-liners.

The players appear to be having a good time, though the situation is too sitcom-familiar to be funny.

Visual-effects wizards Greg and Colin Strause directed, showing more affinity for the city's steel and glass than for any of the characters.

This awful sequel dispenses with any such pretense, its cartoonish characters running an endless gauntlet of hypergruesome violence.

The whole thing is pretty stupid, but Angus Macfadyen is watchable as the villain.

Sorry deep-sea adventure.

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.

An almost comically lurid tale of a little boy abused by his malignant hooker mother, malignant fundamentalist grandfather, and malignant surrogate dads.