Keith Phipps

Chow has a future in a America if given better material with which to work; here, he's wasted in a movie that's forgotten 20 minutes after the credits roll.

As a piece of storytelling, The Haunting In Connecticut is pretty lazy. As a horror movie, it’s lazier still, bringing out every annoying shock-cut and disorienting sound-design trick of the last decade.

Whatever its model, the film is assembled from much poorer material, leftover parts of Lifetime movies and well-meaning indie films seen only on opening nights at some forgotten festival in Tampa.

The film combines dour heroes with a drab look, and the string of "Don't try this at home"-style stunts should underwhelm even viewers too young for James Bond or XXX.

The original was a tart dipped in acid; this one's a biscuit sprinkled in Splenda.

A fairly faithful adaptation of what a game is like, but without the pleasure of getting to play or the much-needed option of pressing the "off" button.

As a sci-fi action movie, the latest Moreau is sub-schlock. As a thinly veiled post-colonial allegory, it's dangerously close to racism. Either way, it's one of the most ridiculous movies in a ridiculous summer.

As for the 3-D, much ballyhooed in the film's advertisements, it's another muddy conversion that does little but make the film's unconvincing blood effects look a little darker. It's good, theoretically at least, to have Craven back. But why come back for this?

A mud bath of sentiment, strained speechifying, and gloppy music.

The best that can be said of Son Of The Bride is that it's attractively photographed. But, then, so was the Hindenburg explosion, and this packs far less excitement into its two shapeless hours.

Tough to respect a documentary that doesn't play fair. Anyone interested in the subject would be better off spending Life And Debt's torturous 80-minute running time with a good article on the topic.

It's... directed by Andy Tennant ("It Takes Two") with all the flair of an episode of "7th Heaven", making it that much more worth avoiding.

About Piven: When did it go wrong? When did the caustic character actor guaranteed to liven up even the dullest movie turn into a walking black hole of smarm from which no joy can escape?

Maybe the broad gestures, colorful costumes, and exaggerated acting worked in the theater. As a movie, it's actively, fascinatingly terrible, with a vision of Christ more likely to instill in viewers a fear of traveling bands of loony street performers than a desire to embrace the Holy Spirit.

However misguided, it’s clearly one from the heart, a movie that should never have happened, and one that’s hard to believe actually exists. Roar is one of a kind. With any luck, it always will be.

Through it all, Muccino piles on one shrill confrontation after another. At times, he seems headed for the melodramatic turf owned and operated by Pedro Almodóvar, but where the young Almodóvar would have deployed a prankish wit and the older Almodóvar scraped toward the humanity beneath.

There's not a relationship in He Got Game that feels right, especially the one between Washington and Allen, and if that doesn't work, neither does the film.

Dredd, a second attempt at making Judge Dredd a movie star, overcorrects, veering in the opposite direction with a dark - literally and otherwise - nearly humorless bit of ultraviolence distinguished largely by a fondness for spurting CGI blood.

Some good Bob Dylan songs are called in to underline the big moments, but end up eclipsing them instead. There's more drama and insight in a snippet of "One More Cup Of Coffee" than the entirety of Jack & Rose.

Adults should steer clear. Kids should be sent to it only if they’ve been extraordinarily naughty.

Beloved has an almost gut-wrenching quality to it. But the same can't be said for the movie overall--it's a noble, ambitious failure, but a failure nonetheless.

Gibson makes sure that no blow remains unfelt, and his approach can't help but stir the body, but he never touches the soul.

Maher's too smart to make a movie this dumb.

Troy does look good--so good, in fact, that it takes a while to reveal itself as a thundering dud with much action but little personality, human drama, or brains.

Never recovering the energy of its early scenes, the heavily improvised Château becomes shapeless and dull.

This isn’t a movie. It’s a MySpace page.

Mostly Boogeyman remains content to be a film about a boogeyman who hides in closets and under beds and gobbles people up. And for that, it deserves a certain amount of respect. On the other hand, the film could hardly be any sillier.

What a shame that The Hunting Of The President feels like part of the problem.

McKellen is fine, of course, but the film as a whole offers about as much insight into evil as Ming The Merciless in a “Flash Gordon” serial.

The Black Hole will likely bore anyone not immediately captivated by V.I.N.CENT, the prissy, Cicero-quoting robot with a voice provided by Roddy McDowall and a body that looks like an art-nouveau reinterpretation of a can of beans.

It doesn't help that neither Ferrell nor McBride bring their best material, with McBride offering yet another variation on an angry redneck, and Ferrell falling back on Ron Burgundy-like bluster and nonsense exclamations.

Until Timeline reaches its flaming-trebuchet-siege finale -- which should impress anyone who's never seen "The Two Towers" -- it has the stirring production values of an episode of the Tia Carrere action series "Relic Hunter," but with only a fraction of the acting talent and intellectual heft.

It's as dull as it is brainless, the work of creators who've spent far more time concocting silly stories about Shakespeare than learning from him.

A conclusion featuring a dizzying string of betrayals that leads to a confusing anti-climax robs the film of even cheap action thrills, making Hoodlum an almost thoroughly forgettable experience, albeit probably the only film in history to unite Queen Latifah and The Mod Squad's Clarence Williams III.

The first 20 minutes of Blast From The Past, in which the film actually does something with its central concept, aren't that bad.

2012 is ultimately only about finding new ways to topple monoliths. Only they don’t feel that new.

The junk-shop surrealism ultimately gets the better of everyone's good intentions.

No one makes it out of this laughless mess unscathed.

Shakespeare hasn't had it this rough since Lemmy from Motörhead performed the opening soliloquy in "Tromeo And Juliet."

Has little to recommend it. A sterling example of how an unimaginative combination of interviews and archival footage can drain the life from even the most compelling topic, it feels padded at a mere 68 minutes.

Parker's film is flat beyond the flatness appropriate to the story; the conflict between Glover and Paymer follows Melville's original so squarely that it quickly begins to feel like they're going through the motions.

Even the movie's rubber monsters look tired.

Even if the time were somehow right for a madcap comedy about terrorists, What To Do In Case Of Fire would still look pretty lousy.

Emmerich now directs entirely in watered-down Spielbergisms, and his storytelling skills, never strong, have gone slack. His talent for stretching a concept that can be described in 10 seconds into a feature-length movie, on the other hand, remains impressive.

As much an inspirational email forward as a film, it’s helped by the work of a strong cast and some photography that makes Nebraska look like heaven on earth. That doesn’t make it persuasive, however.

The Spanish import The Other Side Of The Bed takes a winning idea and drives it directly into the ground.

Hardwick switches gears from wacky comedy to romantic drama about halfway through Deliver Us, but it's too late, and what follows is far too dull to make any difference.

Lyne doesn't seem to get the novel, failing to incorporate any of Nabokov's black comedy -- which is to say, Lolita's heart and soul.

A lot of The Break-Up doesn't work. Actually, apart from some funny moments between old Swingers sparring partners Favreau and Vaughn, and a nice scene with Jason Bateman as the couple's realtor, virtually none of it works.

Bynes appears in practically every scene, and the film seems to have been designed as a showcase for her comedic skills, which she apparently left behind in the trailer.

Hoffman and Travolta are both good, but this toothless satire does little to justify their performances.

The original was repulsive but impossible to shake. This remake is pure applause bait, which makes it barbaric in ways Peckinpah would never have dreamed.

Evening proves that there are such things as mistakes, by featuring two hours of bad choices and half-executed ideas.

It's not the implausibility of its plot, the shallowness of its characters, its funereal pace, its tenuous understanding of teenage behavior, its commercial-ready TV-movie-style direction, or the fact that Pfeiffer and Williams may be the most implausible Italian-Americans since James Caan -- the film is most undone by its near-complete lack of genuine drama.

So instead of history and drama, we get images, many of them striking but none of them memorable, and noise that deafens until no sense can escape. The events beg for Shakespearean gravity, but the only tragedy here is that so little could be made of so much.

Stone's film, more an act of boosterism than inquiry, is a tremendous missed opportunity.

There's "so bad it's good," but there's also "just plain bad," and Skeleton's pre-processed shittiness spoils the fun.

It doesn't help that the characters have so little to them. Weston plays Moriarty as such an unfailingly good, temptation-free kid that he only needs a halo floating above his pre-Raphaelite curls to complete the picture.

The once-reliable Danes is a particular detriment, but it's really hard to care whether either character escapes from what looks like a really unappealing summer camp.

When a sequel has to hit the reset button and take all its characters back to where they started, it probably didn't need to be made.

Dunmore creates a memorably grimy London, but the moral grime covering the film proves less memorable.

Add to these problems the fact that Fathers' Day is a comedy starring two reputedly hilarious people who don't make you laugh once, and you have a movie that would be great if everything about it weren't terrible.

When the film doesn’t strain for twinkly enlightenment, it stoops to find the easiest possible joke.

A film as grisly as it is dumb.

If there's one thing more heartbreaking than a crying child, it's a crying child wearing thick glasses, an image exploited numerous times throughout the course of the dull, uninvolving, tissue-thin Hope Floats.

Fans of the genre might appreciate the decidedly R-rated violence and nudity, but that's really all the film has to offer.

Though it soon devolves into a laughable mess, The Forgotten at least spends its first 10 minutes or so raising provocative questions.

Shamelessly exploitative, but never entertainingly so.

Rudnick is a wit, and his script allows everyone a decent one-liner or two. But the problem with one-liners is that they only last one line, leaving a whole movie around them that needs filling in.

If director Jaume Collet-Serra (House Of Wax) set out to make a parody of horror-film clichés, he succeeded brilliantly.

Torque has a sense of humor about itself, but the laughs stick in the throat.

It's drainingly mediocre.

Slater not only makes for a dull Supergirl, but she's stuck in a clumsy, silly film that tries for the light touch of Richard Lester's Superman II and fails decisively.

A grimy mess set among L.A.'s speed-abusing "tweakers," Salton has neither the substance to justify first-time feature director D.J. Caruso's pretentious flourishes, nor the skill to make those flourishes work on their own terms.

Candy-coated or otherwise, crap's still crap.

It's thin material, to say the least, and manipulative to boot, putting women, children, and a SEAL father-to-be in jeopardy in ways more about servicing cheap thrills than any larger point about the perilous state of the world in 2012.

It's a lot to suffer through for a film that has nothing to say, but insists on saying it anyway. Repeatedly.

When the CGI snakes finally arrive, they look like they've just returned from a guest spot on "Charmed;" if the film had cut any more corners, it would have had to borrow graphics from an old Intellivision game.

A couple of halfway decent action scenes do little to distract from the story’s mounting ludicrousness—two words: adamantium bullets—or a conclusion that’s only a little more satisfying than a projector breakdown. Maybe.

Yet another comedy that suggests someone should take Martin aside and remind him that he can do better.

If there's anything sadder than a satire without teeth, it's a thriller without thrills. Even sadder is the rare movie that fails at both genres simultaneously. That, and that alone, makes Man Of The Year exceptional.

The plot's profound implausibility wouldn't matter if the ideas and emotions behind it had any power.

The result is a relentlessly dour film livened up only by Bardem’s shameless scenery-chewing and the occasional jolt of action. Otherwise, it’s an endless frown of a movie that does little but confirm that Penn’s talents, while impressive, aren’t limitless.

It's a film for kids who want to know what headaches feel like.

If you have an audience that doesn’t mind a story that includes lies, aversions, and omissions so long as it doesn’t get in the way of thinking too much about the songs they love and uncomfortable truths about the artist who created them, you don’t even have to put that much effort into what you’re making up.

Director Rob Bowman seems at a loss as to what to bring to the film, which, even with its good choice of leads, plods along from one dragon fight to the next, all of them staged to showcase Fire's impressive CGI dragons, but none choreographed with any real flair.

John Travolta should realize that people appreciate him, maybe more than ever, but that he should start making movies people won't feel ashamed for having seen if he wants to avoid co-starring with a talking lemur in the future.

Anyone who already knows better than to taunt the disabled, or former Oscar winners, should probably give it a pass.

Like everything else in this needless remake—from a heartless performance by Williams to the patented kiddie-sadism of screenwriter John Hughes—it's sloppily grafted onto a skeletal version of the original, with scenes lifted from the source and reinserted in a manner that doesn't make sense.

Aside from a promising scene involving a cornfield rave and the pyrotechnic potential for grain alcohol, it drags along, taking a small eternity to set up a final showdown that plays more like a bloody pro-wrestling event than the stuff of nightmares.

Though light on drama, Apple’s scenes at the shelter are easily the best part of the film, among the few moments when Gimme Shelter decides to show the effect of faith and charity rather than simply preach it.

There’s little in Burying The Ex to suggest it’s a Dante movie at all, given how far it’s removed from the smart, exciting films he used to make. Maybe it’s best if everyone just pretends he wasn’t involved.

Excerpted from The History Channel’s 10-part 2013 miniseries The Bible, then given extra footage, Son Of God boils the life of Jesus down to feature-length, but it plays less like a movie than a hastily edited attempt to explore a new revenue stream.

Domino de-emphasizes the human element--not to mention such niceties as plot and clarity--to such a degree that only those who show up purely to watch combustibles go "boom" won't feel insulted.

This is teen product at its most generic.

All the principals -- except, significantly, screenwriter Kenneth Lonergan -- reprised their roles for the sequel, and all seem confused as to why they returned.

At the very least, this film should hush those who insist that Diaz has talent beyond visual appeal, but it's unfair to single out her relatively minor offenses when there's so much else to hate about A Life Less Ordinary, an embarrassment for all concerned.

Never good, Crush takes a turn for the worse when it takes a turn for the serious. Its attempt to drop cartoon comedy for cartoon tragedy essentially thrusts the characters from Cathy into the panels of Mary Worth.