Lisa Schwarzbaum

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.

The trek is long, the direction (by Murray’s Quick Change colleague Howard Franklin) is soft, the script (by Roy Blount Jr.) is windy, and the occasional laughs are as heavy-footed as the thunking lead pachyderm herself.

The mangy joke in the defiantly homemade documentary 95 Miles to Go is that Ray Romano on a business trip is no different from any other schmo, minus the autograph signing.

Mostly about slapping together a bunch of clichés -- outdated clichés at that -- regarding the loneliness of ambitious women.

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.

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

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.

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

A desert of shrill juvenile jokes and clanging chase sequences.

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

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

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.

If, as Fincher has said, this movie is supposed to be funny, then the joke's on us.

Terminally muddled crime drama.

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.

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

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

Everything is wrong pretty much from the start of this misbegotten adventure.

A portentous and goopy Dutch drama.

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

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.

Labored miscalculation of a teen-trend comedy.

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

Exhausted as the premise already is -- hapless boomer learns that real manhood is a function of committed fatherhood -- Old Dogs nevertheless finds ways to make the lesson even less tolerable.

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

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 Arrival looks and feels awfully small and cheap. In that way, the movie does feel like those science-fiction classics of the ’50s. But back then, sweaty heroes didn’t utter lines of ’90s dialogue like ”I look like a can of smashed a–holes.”

This Debbie Downer of a drama is a bitter slog.

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

Three stories by the guy who wrote Trainspotting, banged and smashed into a film by Paul McGuigan with none of Trainspotting's charm and all its grotesquerie.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

A very low grade romantic drama indeed, a love story with all the life and death intensity of a heat rash.

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

Because the script, riddled with verbal ugliness by David Elliot and Paul Lovett, sends the movie to a series of arbitrary nowheres, the final showdown for the Mercer boys and their enemies is just as meaningless and sense-deadening.

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.

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.

Bride of Chucky is teen horror for dummies.

This is a deeply unpleasant movie masquerading as a heartfelt social commentary on life in these United States.

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.

The movie is so littered with clichés of genre, as well as clichés of artifice in Reeves' pained performance, that any semblance of social reality goes foul.

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 $$$.

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'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.

Calculatedly soppy, seasonally phony Americanized remake of Giuseppe Tornatore's 1990 "Stanno Tutti Bene."

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

Disappointingly tired, unfunny, and disengaged.

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.

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.

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

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.

Firewall is a witless entertainment, and a derivative one, too; it's everything listless about Hollywood in February, everything discardable about the genre in general.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

WDIGMT? serves up speeches about trust and fidelity and rolling with the punches and blah blah blah. But it does so with so little energy that the actors might as well be saying the words blah blah blah.

Lowest-common-denominator humor.

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.

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

A hateful ”family” comedy based on jokey insinuations of incest.

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

Director Stephen Herek (Mr. Holland's Opus) and screenwriter Tom Schulman (Dead Poets Society) offer no clues, no challenges, nothing to provoke the smallest bubble of curiosity in an audience that waits 40 minutes only to realize Oh, I get it, this isn't going to be Eddie Murphy Funny!

The scariest thing about The Haunting is how awful it is. No, worse than awful: desperate. It’s a horror flick afraid of its own audience, as lost in its own geography as the fictional film crew in The Blair Witch Project.

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

Becomes yet another lame sports farce.

Stumbling adaptation of a Sam Shepard play about men, horses, chance, and lies.

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

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

In Metro, he’s been replaced by a slick, businesslike machine of an actor, playing an uninspired variation on the Axel Foley character he’s done for over a decade now, since starring in 1984’s Beverly Hills Cop. Only this time he’s not even funny.

Garish, squeal-pitched preteen comedy.

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.

Pushes and pushes and pushes the emotional throttle without respite.

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.

A demented, orgiastically gory vampire/sex parable.

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.

There's something about Holly: She's the most ridiculous, irritating, two-dimensional rom-com heroine since...Katherine Heigl's last rom-com.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

Each man's shtick swells into a frenzy of overacting.

An unintentionally ludicrous drama of repentance.

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

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

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.

Soul-sucking romantic comedy.

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