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Mostly about slapping together a bunch of clichés -- outdated clichés at that -- regarding the loneliness of ambitious women.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