Lisa Schwarzbaum

In the face of such junk, the idea that Fox would proudly put himself on a punishing regime of severe diet and exercise to get prisoner-skinny-yet-crazy-muscled for the job of make-believe is vanity at best, obscenity at worst.

This nadir of equal-opportunity raunch forces viewers to spend time with a needy yeast-infested adult who doesn't know how to go on a date with a man; her grating, neurotic monster of a best friend; and a third, random younger chick, who's crazy-upset about some tedious thing that happened with her boyfriend.

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.

An appreciation that the pain is personal doesn't compensate for the picture's self-absorbed need to alienate.

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.

This inauthentic teen tale, with its cosmetically softened edges, serves neither the young people nor the Mendes fans for whom it might be intended.

Terminal colon cancer has never looked more fetching than in the critically ill romantic-disease comedy A Little Bit of Heaven.

It's a tragedy, really: According to the hapless team who made the movie, Our Paige is a relatively interesting young liberal who knows her own mind before the accident and a rather tedious, girlish conservative who fusses about keeping her hair smooth afterwards.

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.

Under the direction of Entourage's Mark Mylod, the movie not only makes cheap sex jokes but looks skanky, too. Lighting, camerawork, and editing are all a slapdash mess, one that further hinders the actors trying their best to get through this failed hookup of a comedy.

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.

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.

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

Soul-sucking romantic comedy.

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.

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

Witless, insultingly derivative, muddy-looking, and edited in the hammering epileptic style that marks so many films produced, as this one is, by Michael Bay.

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

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.

What is there to do but laugh in self-defense at such pompous self-regard when blood gushes, fuses pop, and Seagal scowls in a series of snappy, embroidered buckskin jackets?

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

An awful, stillborn comedy assembled out of rusty spare parts from secret agent movies and run-of-the-mill ''Saturday Night Live'' skits.

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?

It's a toss-up as to what's the worse sin in this graceless piece of tragedy porn.

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

When you watch this failed horror thriller -- which has been under studio doctors' care for some two years, undergoing futile title changes and reshoots -- there's no respite from the odor of flop sweat stinking up the screen.

It's a puzzlement how so many pros could have so wrecked one of the most beloved, hummably familiar movie musicals in the Rodgers and Hammerstein repertoire.

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.

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

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.

Oooh, this is toxic.

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 Scottish weepie of such bathos and balderdash that it deserves a drinking game in its rotten honor.

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

This Debbie Downer of a drama is a bitter slog.

Maybe the worst thing that can happen is that every other movie at the multiplex will be sold out this weekend.

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.

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

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.

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?

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.

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.''

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

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

A half hour in and still, the plot, tone, and setting are incomprehensible.

Not one female character escapes mockery or patronizing.

A crude, silly supernatural thriller.

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.

In one rotten production -- all involved have managed to create the most unlikable, man hating, woman hating, unfunny idiots since ''Whipped'' ended up on worst movie lists last year.

The cast itself is weirdly overqualified.

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

A stinker, the more so for the thespian excesses of the accomplished cast.

A demented, orgiastically gory vampire/sex parable.

The movie wants so badly to be mentioned in the same breath as "Heathers" or "Election" that it's not even funny. Really, I mean it, this charred-black comedy is not even funny.

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.

This ill-fitting movie was mail-ordered from an out-of-date catalog of teen-com stereotypes.

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

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.

All I know is that something has gone terribly, drum-beatingly wrong in Congo (Paramount, PG-13), and you can sense Jungle Trouble brewing from the git-go.

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.

To a character, every man in this faux-homey burg has been castrated! They're all impotent buffoons!

There are no survivors here.

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.

Fanning is remarkably collected and even dignified. As for the rest of the gang, they ought to be returned to sender.

It’s an unmitigated nightmare of crude, boorish tripe-and woe unto our nation’s future if kids find it hilarious.

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.

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

A desert of shrill juvenile jokes and clanging chase sequences.

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.

Had the ghost of Paul Lynde swanned by in a caftan-clad cameo, you couldn't find a more outdated, miscalculated collection of stale, queen-size stereotypes than those trotted out on this ship of fools.

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.

It's a gussied-up sorority-of-rising-stars project produced, I fantasize, by baby-boomer studio guys whose younger spouses articulately defend a woman's right to stay home and raise the kids.

There's no artistic or thematic point — except maybe to demonstrate that a young filmmaker is as much in need of someone to say no as the characters in this disingenuous exercise.

Becomes yet another lame sports farce.