Lisa Schwarzbaum

Evenness of political keel, combined with a generic filmmaking style, is an artistic weapon way too puny for a successful assault on so tough, bruising, and crucial a subject.

The editing in Battlefield America is super-speedy: Each shot lasts about three seconds, and then it's off.

The punchlines are as tired as Hogan looks.

You know what happens in Taken 2, don't you? The same thing that happened four years ago in Taken, but different. (But the same.)

It's left to Caine to wink and nod at his own contribution to real caper classics of the 1960s and '70s, produced with more emphasis on fun and less on instructive fact-finding.

The comedic slaps are too limp to leave a mark. Director George Ratliff applied a much clearer eye to "Hell House," his chilling 2001 documentary about a real church.

The magnolias in Callie Khouri's fried green movie look limp.

Guy Ritchie's second feature, is a faux tough caper modeled lock, stock, kit, and caboodle on his earlier film ''Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels.''

An earnest, lumpy macramé of a personal nonfiction project.

In the way of workaday flicks built around long-in-the-tooth badasses, Die Hard 5 leaves room for McClane to make a few jokes about his thinning hair and to rue that he wasn't a better father when his kids were growing up. Oh, boo-hoo.

Watch for the ''Mrs. Doubtfire'' syndrome: In Santa drag and padded for laughs, Scott demonstrates how to be a more sensitive, more funsy parent than boring old Mom.

The director has said that the plot was influenced by a real English thief named Valentin who showed up at his door one day to repay money stolen a decade earlier.

As the groom's brassy-babe stepmother, Demi Moore does her own share of scenery chewing, but at least she looks like she's having fun.

Jammed with banner-ready political rhetoric, and the relentlessness of the lectures is wearying. The plot, on the other hand, is a standard contraption built on enduring urban anxieties and involving a nasty hotel-room trade.

Irksome dither of an indie drama.

The resentments acted out at the dining table by the rest of this miserable family - gathered for a graduation celebration that turns into a wake - are so oppressive that Eugene O'Neill might ask, ''Too much?''

The cockeyed C-quality B movie, shot on location with a Balkan supporting cast and crew, mixes a precarious pileup of visual clichés with over-staged action sequences.

No less sweet for being unoriginal: A guy (Charlie Sheen) mourns a bad breakup with the woman he loves (Katheryn Winnick). The execution, on the other hand, is perilously self-absorbed.

The mix is Lifetime soap–meets–Woody Allen smart-set comedy, with less humor and a genteel Connecticut setting.

A needlessly frenzied, pseudo-raunch comedy that whips up a whole lot of R-rated antics only to arrive at crunchy PG-13 lessons in love and tolerance.

Had Latura et al. paused for even a moment to acknowledge what they were doing, Daylight might have been a whole other ball of fire.

I'm confounded by the fact that, aside from the Pevensie siblings and their nicely obnoxious cousin, absolutely everything and everyone aboard the Dawn Treader looks one-dimensional.

The hero himself has been denatured for a young, late 1990s audience with little appreciation for real suavity or sex play.

Malty brew of heroics and minutiae.

Thor's Chris Hemsworth leads the pack as a high school football star-turned-Marine, while Josh Peck plays his stubborn younger brother. There's also a collection of junior guerrillas, including The Hunger Games' Josh Hutcherson and Friday Night Lights' Adrianne Palicki. Take that, screaming North Koreans with no agenda!

Because I’m not a 9-year-old boy, however, this story of a kid who acquires a blank check, cashes it for a million bucks, spends it all, and learns that having stuff isn’t nearly as satisfying as having a father’s love comes across as a calculated, mechanical production owing much too much to Home Alone.

Examination of one of the English language's most useful utterances and why the sound packs such a friggin' wallop.

Watching Running With Scissors the movie instead of reading Running With Scissors the best-selling memoir by Augusten Burroughs is like running with a spatula, or maybe some weird toast tongs.

The sermonizing on behalf of good clean fun and hard old effort (Cosby co-wrote the script) is as faded as Big Al's sweater after too many days on earth.

If you like Kathy Bates movies, you'll probably be frustrated with this one, since as Tripp's mother, the invaluable character actress is made to whipsaw between playing sappy domestic slave to her son's laundry and salty, overly sexual wife.

Sometimes Brenda Blethyn is content merely to nibble the scenery. In Introducing the Dwights, a drippy Australian family comedy caper, she chomps it to a pulp until we long for her straightforward monstrosity as a mother in "Little Voice."

Dopey, not dope.

The truth is, the freakiness kinda turns the director on, and he nearly strangles Suspect Zero with love.

With no thriller cliché left unused, the gaily outlandish plot is matched by tin-eared dialogue, ripe tough-guy overacting from the very game Pearce, and best-that-she-could acting from Grace.

This voyage is strictly one for the disposable present, however quaintly old-fashioned the hand-drawn work that the animators have blended with 3D effects. (Tots will twitch during the grown-up relationship parts, and teens will groan at the kiddie sops.)

No maid, and no fancy lady either, would swoon for a fellow as damp as the hero so grudgingly coughed up by Fiennes. In the words of Cinderellas everywhere, no effin' way.

The movie, by Dutch director Jan Kounen, is all surfaces, set pieces, Significant Looks, and voguing -- the same strictures Chanel and Stravinsky sought to bust.

For women who smoke and drink like fiends, the trio of pre-owned babes in this weirdly rotten femme-porn romance have awfully good, unwrinkled complexions.

When Bebop's anime characters stand still, chirping their strangely stilted, dubbed talk and not moving their strangely blank faces, I feel lost on Mars myself.

The filmmaker keeps himself squarely on screen. This is fine when he engages in throwdowns with the bigots but distasteful when Levin shows himself reacting to footage -- unseen by viewers -- of the beheading of reporter Daniel Pearl.

[A] gimmicky actors' holiday.

Gandhi tries to dodge criticism of his mocking scam by rationalizing that even a phony wise man can offer real solace.

At no time do the men -- that is, the straight ones -- believably hold the upper hand. In the new town of Stepford, there's no bitterness, no struggle, no competition, none of the scars of the sexual revolution. There's just gay apparel.

Everything old is old again in this rickety extension of 2002's already rickety "Van Wilder."

The teachers (including original cast member Debbie Allen as school principal) turn out to be the best part of the show.

You can forget about veracity, since this gauzy and sometimes dopey romanticization can't be trusted.

The accountant in Bloom would probably approve of the new Producers: It's an efficient extension of a popular brand. In theory, what's not to like? In reality, the whole schmear.

The young cast is terrific, giving the stories unearned weight.

Shyamalan's most alienating and self-absorbed project to date.

Soon enough it's back to stale jokes about spousal date nights.

Any random episode of Law & Order would be more sophisticated than this heavy-handed, moralistic Southern-lawyer corn pone, directed by Francis Ford Coppola.

Young boys are the only suitable audience for Speed Racer, the elaborate live-action adaptation written and directed by "Matrix" creators Larry and Andy Wachowski. And even they might feel an urge to squirm.

The biggest surprise in Shame is how distanced, passionless, and merely skin-deep the director's attention is - how little he cares about the subject of his own movie.

Comes from the same jolly homage-to-schlock-shock producers who remade ''House on Haunted Hill,'' and the emphasis is shamelessly on ornate scares. But with its high-gloss cast and French art-house actor and director Mathieu Kassovitz (''Hate'') in charge, the movie also shoots for class.

The unnecessarily famous cast for such a standard, creaking, fake-spooky ghost story (with Bible verses thrown in for good measure).

Creator producers Paul Germain and Joe Ansolabehere have come up with some unexceptional children and underdeveloped adults.

The best stuff: Wow, can those kids hoof - and so, even past his half-century mark, can the preening, Chicago-born Mr. F.

Really, I think we put up with Lars at all only because Gosling has such an affinity for the wounded boy birds he tends to play that it's easy to watch him do his thing.

A pompous and garbled parable about how terribly, terribly difficult it is to make it as a creative artist, and how important it is to maintain high standards of haberdashery.

The movie never gives its heart freely and honestly to the satiny whirl of post-"Chicago" showbiz spectacle it so clearly wants to be.

At times dark and at other times gooey.

Stock farce characters and stale scenes of mayhem fill the downtime between the Martin-Latifah skirmishes.

Nobody will go to see Michael Winterbottom's sexually explicit, novelty-act drama - a naughty peep show for sobersides, disguised as a nature documentary - to hear the songs; everyone will go to see the shagging, which occupies the majority of the screen time.

Written by Mr. ''Full Monty'' himself, Simon Beaufoy, and, like ''Monty,'' sprinkles pixie dust over the heads of worn out local folk.

Reproducing a period-piece screwball comedy for a modern audience turns out to be one playful, self-deprecating wink too many for the star, who also directed Leatherheads.

Tthis isn't just any setup, is it: It's suds being sold as ethno-sensitive reality, a case of coveting thy neighbor's fiesta.

Well-meaning but hopelessly lost little comedy.

This trip down The Road to El Dorado proceeds under the speed limit all the way.

With every recycled piece of business -- which is to say, every scene in Anything Else -- the distance widens between Allen and the elusive audience he pessimistically chases. He has never seemed less in touch with his own real, pulsing, 21st-century city.

We, the people, are meant to cheer in response, but the spirit isn't willing. War is hell, but so is peace -- at least when it comes to movies in a no-man's-land like this one.

It's tastelessness like this, served up as fair-game dish to a Downton Abbey-loving audience, that sours the flavor of this tittery production.

The makers of this mediocre comedy about dorky guys who work in a cut-rate electronics store probably hoped that "40 Year-Old Virgin" lightning would strike twice. It doesn't.

As Carrie might type on her laptop while giving one of her girly little shrugs, When did Sex and the City become so long and mean so little?

Brooks guards the movie from overheating in a surfeit of warmedy.

Anderson's adaptation is heavy on production numbers in which jingles come to life and light on conveying any real feelings of Eisenhower-era darkness the prizewinner herself might have felt during her decades of marriage to an abusive, drunken man.

Myself, I felt victimized by the stereotype shtick of reliably grating Rob Schneider as a Canadian-Japanese wedding-chapel minister from SNL castoff hell. But maybe that's just because this movie encourages sensitivity by hitting everyone over the head with its humor hammer.

Peculiarly coy feminine-empowerment fable.

The only real magic in The Lake House is that Kate and Alex have never heard of e-mail.

Reeves is a stiff dancer and he delivers his lines in a full leather jacket monotone.

Strands Cedric the Entertainer behind the wheel and forces him to motor a collection of laugh-and-learn wacky situations by sheer force of his outsize charm.

The lame-o aspects of the whole campy setup are still lame-o.

Earnestly ersatz down to every spangle, dance move, plot turn, and line of hokum dialogue, Burlesque is a showbiz pic for these American Idol times - a time when we agree to pretend that mediocre mimicry of better artists is good enough to keep us entertained. We agree to pretend that quality is in the eye and ear of the undemanding beholder.

Writer-director Steven Zaillian's version stultifies, especially when compared with Robert Rossen's fiery 1949 Oscar winner. How could such dullness defeat the retelling, when Willie Stark is one of the most vivid characters in 20th-century American popular culture?

The movie is rotten the way that only a denatured made-for-export slice of Gallic nostalgia can be.

I just don't know any chick who will make sense of this flick -- it's that blitheringly out of touch with present psychosexual (never mind feminist) time and space.

You should hear instead about Sam Elliott and Mary Steenburgen, who whip up cowboy fun as married U.S. marshals assigned to protect the pair in Wyoming.

The result is a stilted culture clash and a lot of monochromatically conflicted facial expressions from Perry before he's thawed by the love of an ethnic woman.

No excuse for the bitterness and crudity in America's Sweethearts -- a noxious combination that erodes the 1930s and '40s screwball-comedy armature on which this mirthless movie is based.

In the end, we never know why anyone is the one for anyone. And this qualifies as a filmmaking problem, at least for us here on Earth.

Pathfinder's moody, muddy look is courtesy of music-video director Marcus Nispel, who doesn't distinguish between people and tree trunks when it comes to emotional content.

Clumsy camera work adds to the pre-wedding jitters in writer-director Galt Niederhoffer's pashmina-thin drama about attractive self-congratulatory Yale alumni gathering for the nuptials of two of their own.

In the presence of profound questions, the filmmaker goes profoundly shallow.

So many body parts from other engineered romantic comedies have been crudely harvested and stitched together in the making of this weird robotic lark that "Maid of Honor of Frankenstein" might be more useful a nickname.

Bassett's natural dramatic fierceness, so powerful when incited to action, is at odds with the knee-weakening sexual surrender required by the story.

With no Jamie Lee Curtis as a volleying partner, though, Lohan's chipper energy is, like, so totally out of proportion given the colorless pliability of everyone around her.

A junky thriller that mistakes brute-strength plot twist, showy violence, and the against-type participation of Jennifer Aniston for earned excitement.

One piece of advice in trying to make sense of it all: Follow the sleepwear, since Bullock cycles through a few garments that clarify which day is which. Another suggestion? Ignore the two-bit psychological and spiritual doggerel with which screenwriter Bill Kelly tries to deepen the meaning of the game.

The ethos of the Chelsea Hotel may shape Hawke's artistic aspirations, but he hasn't yet coordinated his own DV poetry with the Beat he hears in his soul.

If this amateur justice league spent as much time analyzing clues as they did analyzing their junk, in every slang variation available in the Urban Dictionary, the murder mystery in The Watch could have been solved on the first night of surveillance.

A brain-squandering thriller.

Twelve ogles the lost boys and girls as they make their mistakes. But unlike the novel, the movie never really gets inside these kids, who aren't in the least all right.

The pond is so shallow in this wan romance that there's no room for anything to float.

A Smith production is always noisy, shambling, and liberally smutty on the outside while conservatively gooey on the inside.

The result is a naughty throwaway in all senses of the word.

A poky dawdle of a Southern-style indie that would pass without notice but for John Travolta and Scarlett Johansson.

Wan, generically pretty adaptation of Alessandro Baricco's 1996 novel.

The nightmare is that the live guys in this Dreamcatcher lose the battle the minute the mechanical worm turns.

A gaggle of hip actors squander their gifts in this unfunny, out-of-control comedy.

A cloddish, harmlessly drecky comedy from the Sandler factory of crude mush.

Politics is almost an afterthought in this balky, attenuated film.

Nothing about this sputtering midlife-crisis family comedy is natural except the timeless notion that even the most latte-tamed baby boomer has the power to reclaim his inner Iron John. Ray Liotta provides the one true blast of comedic energy as the leader of a real, more pugnacious head-butting gang who tangles with the four amigos.

Lane and Gere mime adult courtship with the efficiency of synchronized swimmers. Yet in this ocean of emotion, they look like they're drowning.

The Other Man is self-conscious, overproduced, overacted Euro-marital hoo-ha.

The whole movie turns into a violent, pointless, torture-or-be-tortured chase.

Long before the second hour of Australia (which feels like the fifth), it's clear that Luhrmann hasn't found a satisfactory way to make a movie nearly as ballsy -- or coherent -- as he wants his creation to be.

What's ultimately shocking about Kika is how empty mayhem can be made to look.

Williams turns out to be exactly the wrong candidate for the job, a comedian singularly uninterested in letting anyone else get a word in, but with nothing to say.

Runs into construction problems, maybe from too many foremen. DeVito favors pushy slapstick; Stiller prefers hotshot sarcasm. Barrymore's comic talents are wasted; she's there for decoration.

Like choral singing and travel photography, this adventure is more fun for participants than it is for spectators.

Union, who looks so chic and can talk so bitchy-funny, doesn't so much establish a character as roll out a series of attitudes. That's all she's called on to do. That's all anyone is called on to do: Be very tame, and make much ado about zilch.

As ungainly in its jammed-together East-meets-West-ness as Steven Seagal in a yoga pose.

The goons themselves, though, look rather chic, flying through the air in Galliano-goes-to-hell garments straight out of Vampire Vogue.

The story is as impersonal as it is labored.

Something puddles to nothing in this relentless Miami sun.

The incisive, close up photography by ''The Sixth Sense'''s Tak Fujimoto outclasses the story by yards.

Here's a romance without a spark of excitement.

A characteristically engorged and sloppy coming-of-age movie from the filmmaker (''Harvard '66'') who, in his body of work, indulges his fantasies as fetishistically as other men finger their cigars.

An only-in-the-movies mother hustles pool to raise the money to abduct the son she's been forbidden to see since her divorce.

It's not the homosexuality that's dubious here, it's the chicken.

Can these banal relationships between undifferentiated lovelies be saved?

Petroni takes the poem at face value, turning diaphanous literary imagery opaque and literal.

The movie is a folly, a desultory vanity project for its director and co-writer. But for those very reasons, W.E., by world-renowned personage and lesser-known filmmaker Madonna, is not without twisted interest.

Bale exists all too large under the circumstances, a well-fed actor playing at emaciation for the sake of a fiction about a character whose torment is as unreadable as his vertebrae are countable.

The big goofball relies too much on the funny hair and swingin' postures of the era as punchlines in themselves.

It allows for little of the dark and funny in Irving's picaresque morality fable. No room! Not with the buckets of bathos thrown our way, substituting for mass-market spiritual uplift!

Love means never having to say you're recycling plot material.

Thumpingly silly yet self-serious period-piece what-if.

This wan, formulaic teen movie from ''Metro'' director Thomas Carter is afraid to pump up the volume on its own interracial, hip hop Romeo and Juliet story, lest it challenge even one sedated viewer or disturb the peace.

Taylor does that thing she does when she whispers as if she has just discovered speech; Pearce enjoys himself doing his own singing, and embracing grunge.

In a last-minute tweak, the production has also been meaninglessly 3-D-ified - never mind that there's nothing whatsoever 3-D-ish going on. Maybe those clumsy 3-D glasses are meant to let moviegoers mimic the superhero mask-wearing experience?

Buscemi is stymied here by the inertia of his material.

The role of a poised daddy's girl is a dull one for Holmes, who looks pained, in a nonspecific way, throughout her capers; the movie itself, with a screenplay by Jessica Bendinger and Kate Kondell, is a dull one for director Forest Whitaker.

What slays them in the second balcony, though, flattens on the screen.

A drippy, uninvolving movie adaptation.

The sides to consider in Taking Sides are all but obscured by cinematic pomposity at best, Holocaust porn at worst.

Enthusiastic as one might be that Jack Lemmon has found a new lease on movie life with his Grumpy Old Men series, the funny-crankpots genre wears mighty thin on this road trip.

Any grown men and women who pay to see the movie face a harrowing ordeal.

Even those who don't know a foul tip from a chicken wing will be able to spot the desperate plays.

As with his previous film "Fireflies in the Garden," writer-director Dennis Lee scratches the skin of family bonds until it bleeds. This time, he uses whimsy as a salve.

In theory, Zoolander is ''Pret-à-Porter'' on laughing gas. In practice, however, the movie is an ill-fitting suit of gags, too long in the crotch even at 90 minutes.

The result is a slack do-over fantasy in which Zac Efron, as a basketball star, looks baffled as to why he hasn't been asked to sing and dance.

A charmless rom-com.

So shameless is The Kingdom, ignoring consequence and treating its audience like cash-dispensing machines with buttons to be pushed rather than thinking individuals willing to consider the reality of America's entanglement with the Middle East.

When not unnecessarily bland, synthetic, and indistinguishable from undistinguished teen TV, A Cinderella Story is unnecessarily coarse and dumbed down, with every character except Sam and Austin subject to perfunctory ridicule.

The movie is in love with its own story loops and fancy, pop-dream cinematography from Almodóvar associate Affonso Beato, which is fine; it's also in love with its own indie-culture cleverness, which isn't.

The movie is a morals-free procession of bang bang bang! and blood blood blood!, and men slamming each other with blunt objects and slicing each other with blades.

Nothing more than a bad harvest.

Perry has taken Shange's feminist word-and-movement portraits of disenfranchised African-American women and turned those howls into...a maddeningly choppy mess of a Tyler Perry movie.

Manages to take great characters and a great plot and leach them of all blood, terror, and excitement.

Director and co-writer William Bindley engages every move in the underdog playbook, including, but not limited to, the time the good citizens of Bedford Falls chipped in to make up George Bailey's shortfall in "It's a Wonderful Life."

Now it's just some thin chick in her underwear, kicking butt.

It's the showy story, script, and even staging that wear a fella out in this relentlessly precious feature debut by writer-director Jordan Roberts.

This unexceptional 1970s coming-of-age story is neither outrageous, new, nor comedic.

Cotton candy story with an acrid aftertaste.

As Williams ricochets between playing submissive soft-drink executive tethered to the whims of a hysterical boss and pathetic dad at the wheel, trying to cajole his family into vacation satisfaction, we can be excused for getting carsick.

Because the talk never gets beyond statement making, and because the characters emit none of Chekhov's radiantly lived-in soulfulness, there's plenty of time to appreciate the sun-kissed landscape.

Be prepared to collapse into a hoot and a howl of hilarity at all the wrong moments.

Be prepared to swallow a lot of empty-calorie jokes in which blacks and Latinos insult and misunderstand one another in a spirit of vigorous buffoonery.

An overly picaresque first feature written and directed by David Duchovny, who also co-stars.

Clearly, three sequels haven’t improved Miyagi’s English, but there is something bitchin’ about seeing a babe give a bully a good thwack. Not that girls will go see this or boys will care.

Comedy has changed. Jack can only give his son-in-law the stink eye so many times before the whole "I'm watching you" pantomime gets stale.

A comic-book superhero has seldom squandered so much screen time being conflicted about his heritage and destiny -- and I don't mean conflicted in a sexy, Wolverine-y, ''X-Men'' way, either; a big-budget comic-book adaptation has rarely felt so humorless and intellectually defensive about its own pulpy roots.

As an overwrought, overacted drama, Kill the Poor is negligible.

Along comes Two Can Play That Game to demonstrate that antifeminist silliness is color-blind.

Filmmaker Jared Hess (who cowrote the script with his wife, Jerusha Hess) installs Napoleon front and center as a punchline in and of himself -- and as that dispiriting product of narrative defeat, a symbol.

Maybe in a few years the incoherent gaudiness of this underperforming sequel to ''Interview With A Vampire'' -- will have transmuted into a kind of appreciable camp. Until that time, however, we're stuck with this damned production

What's shocking this time is how tame Sacha Baron Cohen's newest wild man is, for all the kerfuffle the comedian can stir up on the ­promotional trail.

For a story with so much going for it — including an interesting cast — Just Cause is just not taut and thrilling enough.

Milla Jovovich slinks cartoonishly as Stone's seductive wife, on a mission to compromise the lawman. Lordy.

For some four fifths of its length, Jersey Girl is as square as a turnpike-diner place mat.

The most frightening sight, though, is that of Theron and Bacon, good actors trapped in the muck of making a living.

Requires Neeson to stare coldly and talk to corpses, but Ricci has the greater dramatic challenge: She has to operate, unfazed, in close-up nakedness much of the time.

The antics involving ghosts, chases, and burping that divert the small fry don't mix with the jokey, tribute-band dialogue spouting from the Mystery, Inc. gang.

As for Monster-in-Law, it's tripe on a plate.

A visual and aural overload that ultimately tires rather than conveys a feeling of f—-d up-ness.

The message that comes across is: We're all screwed, and then we die. Ba-DUM.

An overstructured, overacted indie drama about gambling, addiction, and the sawdusty romanticism of old-time magicians.

Rudd's talents as a thinking woman's charmer are wasted -- as are those of amiable Jason Biggs in a weak variation on the pop theme of being a gal's gay best friend.

Every character in The Architect is crazily stuccoed with crisis.

This puffed-up Western set in Big Sky country becomes a small-screen horse opera.

What we learn in this all-pain/no-pleasure episode is that marriage feels like a life sentence, weddings are miserable events, honeymoon sex is dangerous and leaves a bride covered in bruises, and pregnancy is a torment that leads to death in exchange for birth.

Director Chris Columbus...seals this comedy in an impenetrable bubble of hollow humanism.

Soul-sucking romantic comedy.

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.