J.R. Jones

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

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

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.

The auction makes for a pretty good hinge between the two narratives and, more importantly, allows Madonna to indulge her fetish for fine English things.

Contrived hunk of feel-good.

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

Whether or not she's alive is the question that's supposed to animate this ostensibly metaphysical horror movie, but thematic rigor mortis sets in long before the final reel.

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

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

Stephen Gaghan, who scripted this turkey, landed in the director's chair after Edward Zwick (Glory) bailed out, and you can almost smell the flop sweat.

Suzuki and Kaneshiro keep the first hour afloat with their easy comic interplay, but Yamazaki badly needs editing: the opening escape sequence is needlessly repeated later, and a slow drip of false endings drags this out to a tiring 118 minutes.

The tag here is more silly than haunting, but this is still a pretty wild ride, with a fine, knife-wielding score by Bennett Salvay.

Routine crime thriller.

There's a great "Office Space"-style satire to be made about big-box stores screwing their working-poor employees, but Hollywood studios covet DVD rack space at those same stores, so instead we're supposed to get excited about which of these two idiots earns more gold stars.

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.

Despite the syncopated score and subtitled patois, this is just another "Scarface" knockoff, with the usual array of bling, booty, and ballistics.

Director Steve Carr continues his streak of numbingly mediocre family comedies.

Writer-director Len Wiseman, now the star's husband, wisely moves this sequel to the countryside and wastes less time dispensing the same grog of grisly CGI combat and mythical mumbo jumbo.

Martial arts hero Jet Li takes on all comers--with one hand in his hip pocket most of the time--in this absurd but breathlessly paced actioner.

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 high-decibel shocker is an insult to intelligence and faith alike.

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.

Most of the action in this 2001 indie drama takes place on computer screens, with grainy faces framed by sharp little boxes; the 21st-century conceit is topical enough but the characters and their problems couldn't be more stale.

Pegg has some good obnoxious moments, but he's only a few movies away from becoming Dudley Moore.

Without the grandiose narrative structure of the six live-action releases, this feels even more pointless, a mechanical attempt to milk the kids for every last dime.

It's a victory of tone over storytelling, though perhaps a Pyrrhic one.

Like so many other CGI behemoths, this dull action fantasy ultimately squashes rather than inspires one's sense of wonder.

De Niro gives a crafty performance, and director John Polson (Swimfan) maintains a pleasantly low-key suspense. But the ending is a disappointment.

The road of excess leads to the palace of boredom in this overblown monster epic.

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

This story line turns out to be a put-on, and the latter half of the movie is a tedious mockumentary exercise.

The main pleasure of this high-stakes-poker drama is watching a septuagenarian Burt Reynolds effortlessly revive his 70s screen persona as a strutting paragon of male shrewdness and sexuality.

Using blasts of shrill, high-decibel noise in place of actual scares has become a common horror-movie tactic, the cinematic equivalent of botox, silicone, and penile-enhancement surgery. Producer Michael Bay and director Samuel Bayer deploy the tactic so regularly in this remake of Wes Craven's 1984 classic that after a while I just plugged my ears.

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.

This comedy is a bilge pump of tacky jokes, fake sentiment, and hollow performances, accompanied on the soundtrack by lite rock and hokey music cues. It should never have been made, though it's probably guaranteed a long life at bad-film festivals.

In the finest tradition of adolescent identification figures, he's not only ruthless, dispatching numerous baddies with hair-trigger shots to the head, but profoundly desexualized, brushing off the insistent come-ons of a slinky prostitute (Olga Kurylenko) he's taken under his wing.

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.

The story doesn't arc so much as unspool like a stretch of desert highway, but the Ghost Rider is such a powerful amalgam of hot-rod iconography that this is still fairly watchable.

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

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.

As romantic comedies go, this is the worst drivel I've seen since Nia Vardalos's "I Hate Valentine's Day."

Shelved for over a year, this incompetent mystery thriller stops periodically so some character or other can deliver an expository speech and pull the plot back on track, but by the end the story has turned into a hair ball.

Terence Stamp and Wallace Shawn spend a fair amount of time skulking around as ghostly servants, which kept me amused for the movie's 99 minutes.

Creatively it's a giant step backwards.

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.

The vile sadism of the Saw movies has been replaced by decorative references to Saint Augustine and Immanuel Kant, and there's a beautiful but brainy police profiler (Waddell) on hand to dispense a thick layer of psychobabble.

Soulless, hyperbolic actioner.

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.

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

This teen romance doesn't have a single authentic moment.

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").

By the time Gooding showed up for one of his assignments disguised as a call girl, even "Boat Trip" looked good to me.

In this comedy by David Koepp, Gervais handles the big, crowd-pleasing gags with aplomb.

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

Forgettable coming-of-age story.

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.

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.

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

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."

Never really generates any serious laughs.

This is dumb, raunchy, and obvious, but it's also pretty funny, and delivered with the gusto of a Redd Foxx monologue.

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.

Nicely paced but so fluffy it threatens to waft away.

The stoy makes no sense, and the two lead characters are repulsive, but I must confess I laughed immoderately at this clever piece of junk.

This drama, about the three days leading up to the murder, never overcomes its inherent ghoulishness, largely because Chapman, like so many mentally ill people, is a huge bore.

A more accurate title might be "Sub-Bad."

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

Schmidt works the slasher formula for all it's worth, but the repulsive stereotype at the center of the movie dampens the fun.

Wretched yuletide comedy.

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

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.

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

Whitney frames this as the pilot for a reality TV show, but if that doesn't pan out he can pitch it to al Qaeda as a recruiting tool.

Has exactly the same premise (Repo! The Genetic Opera).

Unwatchable-and, thanks to its high-decibel action sequences, barely listenable-this misbegotten medieval fantasy/stoner comedy marks a new low for David Gordon Green.

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.

Pine, who expertly approximated William Shatner in the Star Trek reboot, seems to have picked up some of the actor's air of self-serious buffoonery, and it suits him well; as Witherspoon's best pal, late-night TV comedian Chelsea Handler holds down what might be called the Nora Ephron part, dispensing an endless stream of bawdy man jokes.

The dearth of ideas is exemplified at the end by a Mary Tyler Moore freeze-frame of Graham leaping in the air.

At the very least, it's more honest and involved in its portraiture of American soldiers in Iraq than anything TV news of any political persuasion has given us.

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

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.

Portrayed ad infinitum in sci-fi and fantasy, the postapocalypse may now seem about as scary as Post Raisin Bran, but Hillcoat gives it an unnerving solidity by focusing on the drab details of survival and linking them to the more hellish aspects of modern American life.

Nothing to see here, keep moving.

A new low for director Alan Parker, this trite mystery thriller does for capital punishment what his "Mississippi Burning" did for civil rights: with its muddled message, liberal piety, and slick Hollywood plot mechanics.

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

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

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

It's a great premise for comedy, but this thing is too dumb to do it justice.

The serious Catholic themes that made the original film genuinely disturbing have been flattened out into a cartoonish backstory.

More or less restages Tobe Hooper's 1974 original, including its much-loved family dinner scene.

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

Suitable entertainment for boys too young to shave.

Abysmal thriller.

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.

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.

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.

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

A real air ball, this lethargic drama by Preston A. Whitmore II is so poorly scripted that most of the major plot developments occur offscreen.

Its labored goofiness seldom transcends the stale format.

This ensemble drama by screenwriter David Hubbard isn't perfect, but its harsh honesty and sincere faith in humanity make it genuinely uplifting.

With her tetchy screen persona, Sandra Bullock is well served by brainteasers like "The Lake House" and this passable thriller about a woman who seems to be bouncing between two alternate realities.

The laughs and emotional moments are so weak that director Jonas Elmer has no choice but to tweak them with music cues and bland guitar-rock.

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.

Corrupt warden, sadistic guards, new inmate debauched by her surroundings, prison-break hostage drama--could have come straight from an old George Raft vehicle.

It isn't bad enough to be good.

With its pathetic characters, questionable logic, and wall-to-wall Beethoven, the movie is a serious contender for this year's Golden Turkey award.

Sorry deep-sea adventure.

Like an idiot, I came to this movie hoping that director Catherine Hardwicke-who made her debut with the bad-girl shocker "Thirteen" (2003)-might engage in a feminist interrogation of the old fairy tale, just as French filmmaker Catherine Breillat has with "Blue Beard" (2009) and "The Sleeping Beauty" (2010). Instead this is a muddle-headed horror flick.

The remake begins with the same premise and appropriates the most striking visuals, grafting them onto a more explicable but equally dull George Romero-style doomsday scenario.

Breillat's mix of dramatic skill and feminist intimidation has cowed plenty of critics in the past, but no political agenda could redeem this movie's joyless pedantry.

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.

A better name for it would have been the Herschell Gordon Lewis: the godfather of gore himself couldn't have topped this succession of grisly deaths.

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).

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.

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

This one follows the depressing pattern of "Surviving Christmas" and "Christmas With the Kranks": enforced holiday cheer gives way to bilious hatred, then hollow forgiveness.

The cinematic debut of Chicago theater director Marc Rosenbush, this 2004 indie comedy is an irritating exercise in ham acting, metaphysical patter routines, and rim-shot-style comic editing.

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

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

Soporific comedy.

Slack direction from Walt Becker (National Lampoon's Van Wilder) sullies this formula comedy, but the cast is agreeable.

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

This remake takes an alternate tack from the original feature, expanding the story of "The Sitter" to a full 83 minutes, but the result is dull and painfully generic.

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"!

This dismal comedy joins a growing pile of Murphy disasters.

The tone seesaws between comic wackiness and romantic sincerity, with Paltrow better suited to the latter.

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.

Though the film lacks the frantic imagination of its inspiration, Robert Rodriguez's "Spy Kids" franchise, grade-schoolers should still enjoy its fresh-scrubbed humor and fantasies of youthful omnipotence.

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

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.

No laughs here, just the dull ache of seeing Heder slotted into a standard piece of Hollywood twaddle.

Someone should tell these guys you can't score a touchdown throwing lateral passes.

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.

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

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 awful crank comedy "Spun" (2002) still ranks as the most dehumanizing youth picture of the decade, but this New York drama by first-time director Hunter Richards is a close second.

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

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

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.

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

This tired action comedy is the usual weave of over-the-top violence and cross-cultural shtick.

Dismal.

A holiday film for the whole family, provided the whole family is obsessed with human waste.

It exchanges the police subplot that gave the earlier film its steady pace for a lot of pointless backstory about the mother-fixated stalker.

Even with the bar lowered, this seems appallingly bad, a lazy assortment of weak punch lines, sentimental music cues, and trite situations.

The thesis-driven story precludes much dramatic discovery, and the looming shuttle disaster only exacerbates the sense of heavy-handedness.

In any normal year this dire comedy would be the undisputed lump of coal in our psychic stocking, but with "Surviving Christmas" still in theaters it's a close second.

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

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.

Glowna presents this smoky German feature as an elegy for lost youth, but it's so tumescent with male self-pity that I couldn't wait for it to end.

Repulsive 80s flashback.

Grazer's writing team has filled up the film's 82 minutes with winking product placements, SNL-type goofs, PG gags premised on not quite cursing, a Smashmouth cover of the Beatles' "Getting Better," and a lame subplot about a scuzzy lothario (Stephen Baldwin).

The best thing I can say about this limp prequel to the Farrelly brothers' Dumb & Dumber is that it obliged me to check out the original, which I'd been studiously avoiding for years. If you haven't seen it, it's pretty funny, and mercifully light on the scatology and cheap sentiment of later Farrelly efforts.

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.

Before seeing this film I couldn't understand why the producers had given it a subtitle; afterward I realized "Ecks vs. Sever" was probably the full script.

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

Another go-round for the premise of an overaged kid insinuating himself into a stranger's family.

Director Kurt Wimmer has an eye for jackboot chic (Equilibrium), and the images here have been digitally polished so that the characters' skin is smoother than porcelain. It's a cool effect--I spent most of this interminable actioner wondering if one could bounce a quarter off Jovovich's bare midriff.

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.

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

Cuba Gooding Jr. is the kind of guy who does ten minutes of shtick every time the little light in the fridge comes on, and for years I've been waiting for him to just go away. If this dud comedy is any indication of the scripts he's getting, I may not have to wait much longer.

A nauseating, stridently phony rom-com.

The gilt-and-grime setting is eerily atmospheric, and screenwriter Dan Madigan has a nicely sick sense of humor.

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."

The troubled star writhes her way through a red-lit pole dance in the opening credits and shrieks her way through a prolonged torture-porn sequence; after those lurid turns the movie settles into an indifferent mystery plot as the cops pressure the girl to help them find the culprit.

Shameless exercise in high-tech sadism.

This is one dull party.

A fine supporting cast (Andy Richter, Molly Shannon, Michael Madsen, Dave Foley, Jeffrey Tambor) manages to keep this comedy respirating for 85 minutes, but personally I believe in a movie's right to die.

This excruciating sequel tries to squeeze a few more bucks from the "Spy Kids" espionage formula.

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.

Brain-dead adaptation of a popular video game.

The meanest and least inspired kids U know.

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.