Keith Phipps

Peter Stormare has fun engaging in some Walken-level scenery-chewing-almost literally-as the patriarch of a werewolf clan. Good for him. That means at least one person has found something to like about this tedious collection of wisecracks and hand-me-down monsters.

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

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.

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.

It's a horror film better suited for skittish cats than humans.

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.

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

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.

As long it sticks to that chase, Babylon A.D. remains a sub-passable lead-footed action film with neat scenery.

Cage has some fun with the role, making Blaze a kind of Zen Elvis with a strange fixation on Carpenters songs, but the film's priorities lie with the digital effects and not the story, and even the effects aren't that hot.

When a film whose cast includes Michael Keaton, Jane Lynch, Fred Armisen, Craig Robinson, Demetri Martin, and the now rarely seen Carol Burnett can’t scare up more than a smattering of laughs, the patient was never meant to live in the first place.

There must be some solid marketing reason for putting out a Christmas movie before the jack o'lanterns have begun to rot, but if so, it's elusive. Couldn't this lump of coal have waited another month?

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

No one makes it out of this laughless mess unscathed.

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.

Even the movie's rubber monsters look tired.

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

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?

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

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.

It's seldom a good sign when a Rob Schneider cameo elevates a comedy, but Little Man aims so low and fires so often that it can't miss all the time.

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?

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.