Lisa Schwarzbaum

The film values quips and declamations over natural conversation (or an explanation of how such intelligent women could have been so blind to world events).

British director Mike Barker and magpie New York screenwriter Howard Himelstein, have taken "Lady Windermere's Fan" - Wilde's first big stage success, written in 1892 - and pulped it senseless in the name of puttin' on the charm.

The second insurmountable problem is the difference between Parker's performance as a fortysomething banker, wife, and mother musing (in voice-over) at her computer and her previous performance as a single, thirtysomething girl-about-town in "Sex and the City": There is none. I don't know why she does it.

This is strictly substandard stuff, with imitative creepy noises, vertiginous camera angles, and long pauses.

Nobody's got a clue. Enquiring minds don't even want to know.

This Debbie Downer of a drama is a bitter slog.

A mess -- all high concept, stranded performances, and no laughs.

Washington is wasted here. Kelly Lynch is wooden. Crowe has a ball going over the top, but how much taunting and eyeball popping can a performer do?

Yes indeed, Pirates 2.0 is a theme ride, if by ride you mean a hellish contraption into which a ticket holder is strapped, overstimulated but unsatisfied, and unable to disengage until the operator releases the restraining harness.

Subplots go nowhere, and characters -- many played by well-known actors -- barely get screen time. Willem Dafoe, Salma Hayek, and Jane Krakowski are among those who are there and gone.

This toothless thriller...feels like a strained reworking of ''The Fugitive.''

Old Holden would call the whole movie phony, and I agree, if you want to know the truth.

Features the dullest, least lifelike collection of pals this side of "Eyes Wide Shut."

Not one female character escapes mockery or patronizing.

A demented, orgiastically gory vampire/sex parable.

No worse than any disease-of-the-week TV movie, and no more moralistic than any Lifetime drama. But it's no better, either, and it ought to be.

Really, all this movie is about is the joy of checks, calls, folds, rivers, and the acquired thrill of knowing what those words mean.

Robin Williams (yes, I'm afraid so) plays a kind of Manhattan-based Fagin with a touch of Midnight Cowboy to his wardrobe. And ants will play havoc in any cynic's pants as this loopy, goopy fairy tale about a kid looking for his parents oozes to its predictable finish.

FYI, there's zero chemistry between P.S. I Love You's two commodified headliners. P.S.: The plus in the harsh grade goes solely to the divine Lisa Kudrow, delivering desperately needed laughs as the twitchy widow's husband-hunting best friend.

In one form or another, you get exactly what you pay for at an Adam Sandler comedy. Otherwise the man wouldn't have earned zillions.

Nightwatch is a horror for reasons that have nothing to do with suspenseful moviemaking.

If your allergy to comedies bred from British style mugging crossed with Disney style prancing has, like mine, flared up in recent years, this hybrid from writer director Joel Hershman (''Hold Me, Thrill Me, Kiss Me'') will make you wheeze.

A recitation of woes doesn't constitute a plot, and panoramic shots of migrating wildlife don't convey enough African flavor.

An Unfinished Life is inert, kaput -- a middlebrow mush of platitudes rather than an okay corral of distinct characters with heartbeats. It's awful not in an exciting, uncontrolled way but in an overly controlled, narcotized way.

A film not even a star as foxed and foxy as Johnny Depp himself could save.

Disappointingly tired, unfunny, and disengaged.

There's no enjoyably outlandish hiss to this variation on the formula, and no Ice Cube or Owen Wilson, either. This time, a ship of capitalist fools (and no movie stars, unless you count utility player Morris Chestnut as a headliner) steams along the river in Borneo.

Every porridgy inmate in this instantly forgettable romp warbles in the prison's amateur musical, and one of them demonstrates a rather extreme devotion to the tomatoes he grows in the on-site greenhouse.

Holland's empurpled bio-fantasy is hooey with an anachronistic feminist slant from start to finish.

This mediocrity disguised as entertainment, this greed promoted as synergy — this, to paraphrase that seminal media study, Broadcast News, is what the devil looks like.

The star is done in by the deathless mediocrity of the production, an assemblage of random camera shots, messy editing, redundant scenes, and witless dialogue as haphazardly stitched together as the flesh on Jonah Hex's face.

The scenery (prettily captured by There Will Be Blood cinematographer Robert Elswit) is littered with heavy symbolism (fire! rain! dead birds!); the performances are merely heavy.

Silly, undone by lack of faith in its own subject.

Ultimately, the talented cast -- among them M. Emmet Walsh, Faye Dunaway, Skeet Ulrich, and Viggo Mortensen -- play to their easiest star turns rather than their most interesting strengths.

The endless, numbing sameness of it all.

Self-righteous and smug in its use of heartland stereotypes, the movie backfires by assuming that its intended liberal audience is just as intolerant and condescending as the conservative opposition insists it is.

This slapdash, charmless, baldly boomer-chasing romantic comedy, directed by Michael Lehmann (Heathers) from a clunky, orgasm-obsessed script by Karen Leigh Hopkins and Jessie Nelson, is the lazy studio's answer to a call for more age-appropriate entertainment for "More" magazine readers.

Perelman pays such cooing attention to surfaces that our response to violence carries no more importance than our response to the delicate jewelry around the adult Diana's neck.

Terminally muddled crime drama.

Insistently sullen, nihilistic, and successful to the point of smugness at transmitting buzzkill, Art School Confidential is the second collaboration between art-house cartoonist Daniel Clowes and director Terry Zwigoff.

McCarthy's rawhide has become movie Naugahyde, a substance unknown in literature or in nature.

Yet Speed 2 is as slow-moving as a garbage scow. Those blinking lights might as well be emanating from a vital-signs monitor. The story is dead in the water.

A portentous and goopy Dutch drama.

The gooey sanctity of the bond between fathers and sons all but nullify Jackson's zesty performance.

The few jaunty, ''Friends''-inflected lines Perry does get off are lost among the cow pies.

Just as all regular models can't be supermodels, so all action chicks can't be superheroines. Elektra Natchios turns out to be walled off rather than mysteriously alluring; blank rather than deep.

Empty jokes hang heavy.

Without any of the patented Farrelly insight into the insecure, horndoggy teen in every man, and without a grown-up setting in which Harry and Lloyd can transgress like dum-dum geniuses,Dumb and Dumberer is dumberest.

Quick, get the bug repellent, it’s another infestation of clueless, chatty, goofily dressed Gen Xers flitting around the scary idea of love!

Red Riding Hood goes from trite to triter, a plot collapse that overtakes any of the visual prettiness from cinematographer Mandy Walker (Beastly).

I don't know if it's ickier to assume that writer-director Brad Silberling (Moonlight Mile) thinks the culture-clash jokes he pushes in 10 Items or Less are charming because they're earnest, or because they're tongue-in-cheek. Either way, this sale is void.

The characters who cross paths here in the hard shadows of late-'90s New York City are meant to convey loneliness, bitterness, neediness, loss, and bad karma. Mostly, they convey bad Sundance.

As a shameless contraption of ridiculously sad things befalling attractive people, the engorged romantic tragedy Remember Me stands tall between those towering monuments to teen-oriented cinematic misery, Love Story and Twilight.

Garish, squeal-pitched preteen comedy.

A notorious opinion divider last year at Cannes, Battle in Heaven is less about heaven or battle, or hell on earth, or the soul of Mexico, and all too much about gawking. And so, for all the ''shock'' of the movie's clinical carnality, this battle is lost.

What's on screen is lazy, second-rate, phoned-in -- a heist in which it's the audience whose pockets have been picked.

So let's hear it for the giant wig of Pre-Raphaelite gray corkscrews planted on the noggin of Jane Fonda as a glamorous hippie grandma. The hairdo meets its match in the dull Ann Taylor togs encasing Catherine Keener: That's how you know Granny's daughter is an uptight lawyer.

A creepy, humiliating ''comedy,'' playing to Bullock's worst instincts for demonstrating the lovability of women who don’t fit in.

The film squanders every opportunity (and international-coproduction cent) on by now imitative Nine Inch Nails-video-style visual Goth-goo, and, scarily, forgets to input a plot or script that makes any sense.

What willful streak of perversity inspired Kevin Costner to take on this wacky tale of a letter carrier-turned-postapocalyptic hero?

An immediately forgettable action pic directed with a blowtorch by Lee Tamahori.

Processed comedy chop suey.

Unlike in ''Freaky Friday,'' no magic spells are involved. Nor is there any of ''Freaky'''s marvelous charm in this ungainly Manhattan fairy tale, directed by indulgent sentimentalist Boaz Yakin.

A tuneless variation on the working girl-captivates-Mr. Big formula that has propelled fairy tales as old as Cinderella.

A sodden drama of filial conflict that dares the audience to confuse the characters with the players. P.T. Barnum couldn't have come up with a better hook, but he would have rewarded his suckers with more ''On Golden Pond'' entertainment bang for their buck.

A bummer - slack rather than loose, tired rather than fun.

Eventually, the senses jam and a mental lube job is in order.

Killing looks ridiculously easy in this dispensable exploitation picture, directed for maximum impact of head-cracking pain by ad-trained Irish director Gary McKendry in his first feature.

A parent-and-kid-oriented comedy about the adventures of men doing the hard work of mommies, which couldn't be more timely -- or less delightful.

Even in the summertime, the most restless young audience deserves the dignity of an action hero motivated by something more than franchise possibilities. Movies like XXX -- a big 000 -- don't deserve our $$$.

Labored miscalculation of a teen-trend comedy.

Sends comedy backward in time, and we're in the 1970s, ethno-sitcom style: These Andersons in their out-of-date white, snooty gated community apparently confuse themselves with their forebears on The Jeffersons.

The loserville teen comedy Underclassman is like a student project sloppily cribbed from other kids' notes -- kids who have seen "Rush Hour" and still can't get over how funny it is to stick a noisy black guy in a distinctly nonblack setting.

A crappy thriller gussied up with a chrome-plated veneer.

Stripped of the pleasures of terror, flattened of grandeur (with a tacked-on coda that fairly groans with storytelling defeat), the movie sinks from the weight of its own heavyhandedness.

Just because A Walk to Remember is shrewd enough to activate girlish tear ducts doesn't mean it's good enough for our girls. They're willing to buy tickets; why not honor their wits as well as their wallets?

The laughs are few in this inert, ungenerous comedy.

It's young-Hollywood-driven business as usual in this derivative, nasty, and ultimately empty drama.

What Emily doesn't do, though -- what this slow-moving, sour, sloppily assembled teen drama doesn't allow her to do -- is make her predicament of any emotional interest.

The movie may be more bogus than a Gucci bag for sale on a Fifth Avenue sidewalk, but at least the backgrounds are real.

Director Peter O'Fallon fires his biggest gun: a blast of Mozart's Ave Verum Corpus, truly heavenly music wasted on a handful of dust.

Isn't a movie, it's Gorgonzola, a crumbly summertime stinker veined with pop-cultural fungus.

The only metatwist missing in the twittering self-regard of this indulgent home movie is the participation of a documentary video crew -- ideally helmed by some TV exec's USC-grad son -- shooting the filmmakers shooting the play within the play.

A cheap cut-glass tiara of a booby prize goes to Drop Dead Gorgeous for messing up so utterly.

Mostly about slapping together a bunch of clichés -- outdated clichés at that -- regarding the loneliness of ambitious women.

The music screeches, the actors vamp, the knives and weapons and bombs and fireballs fly around the screen. Meanwhile, the well-prepared moviegoer slips into her or his own private fantasy of a world in which movie effects are themselves locked away in an institution for the criminally insane until such time as those effects are really, truly necessary for the story.

A failing-grade comedy about the wishful triumph of high school dorks over high school bullies.

A painfully miscast Parker nervously flips her hair and waves her hands, sitcom-style, as a do-gooding dean of students.

Bride of Chucky is teen horror for dummies.

As for the splendid Spaniard Javier Bardem, now knocking socks off in "No Country for Old Men," his lot is worst of all. He's miscast as the romantic Florentino.

The movie's mortal failing is echoed in the religious medal Pita gives Creasy in a gift of innocent, uplifting love: Finding heft or coherence within all the lugubrious agitation is a lost cause worthy of St. Jude.

An unintentionally ludicrous drama of repentance.

A desert of shrill juvenile jokes and clanging chase sequences.

Pushes and pushes and pushes the emotional throttle without respite.

Plays out like a variation on an old design dictum: If you can't make it good, make it big.

This condescending story wastes him (Douglas).

Preposterous-for-no-good-reason supernatural tale.

The title Addicted to Fame hints that Giancola knows enough to count himself among the hooked. But the crappiness of this documentary about a crappy parody of a crappy B movie suggests that he hasn't kicked the habit.