Lisa Schwarzbaum

A movie not funny enough for a comedy, not touching enough for a heart-warmer, and not energetic enough for a story about a robbery of rare coins — Danson and Culkin end up exposing all their weaknesses.

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

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

Mostly about slapping together a bunch of clichés -- outdated clichés at that -- regarding the loneliness of ambitious women.

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!

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.

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

The mood is ruined by the bitchy 1990s stereotyping of the husband hunters.

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

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.

Universal should have marketed this formulaic drivel as the taboo love story it really is, and then watched its stars run for cover.

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.

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.

The answers he strings together are babble in this superficial vanity documentary. Nice shots of awesome, God-approved scenery, though.

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

I don't know that Where the Money Is would work at all were it not for what we, the audience, bring into the theater.

If you had never encountered Bullock’s patented brand of appealingly unglamorous, warm-eyed gal before this dispiriting production, you might think the star of Speed and The Net was nothing more than a Marisa Tomei knockoff.

Chan needs a foil, and Hewitt, while perky, doesn't project nearly enough comedy weight; she's too slight and tailored for his style.

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

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.

Every signifier in this quintessentially American domestic thriller is in satisfying running order.

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 story is as impersonal as it is labored.

A gentle, traditional (like, from the last century) romantic comedy.

This ill-fitting movie was mail-ordered from an out-of-date catalog of teen-com stereotypes.

Enough cheery mockery to amuse even non-tokers.

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.

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

As distressed as a comedy can be without qualifying as a snow emergency.

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

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.

Unfortunately, the charming Batfamily can't stay in their cave indefinitely; they've got to go out and fight crime. And that's where this elaborately high-style production from Batman Forever director Joel Schumacher hits an iceberg.

A crude, silly supernatural thriller.

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.

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

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

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

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 audience may have bought the act in "Napoleon Dynamite." But this time, the act bombs.

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

With no headliners to raise hopes, this negligible entertainment has its own boneheaded charms.

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

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?

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.

Not only makes excellent use of the singer's sweetly coltish acting abilities, but it also promotes a standardized set of sturdy values with none of Mariah Carey's desperate ''Glitter,'' or any of Mandy Moore's gummy pap in ''A Walk to Remember.''

Maybe this well-loved Luke is who his neighbors want him to be, a good fellow who, with his father, reopens the old movie house in town -- the Majestic -- thus allowing his neighbors to dream in the dark again.

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.

When a Stranger Calls is ba-a-a-a-c-k, in frightless form, updated for the age of anytime minutes and caller ID.

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

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.

Tedious.

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.

Torturously whimsical gumshoe caper.

Oooh, this is toxic.

In a feat of dullness quite powerful in its own way, this lifeless family comedy sucks the joy from every joke it touches.

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

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

The actors more eager to goof around in schlumpfy costumes on a low-budget lark than to play their trashy characters with the seriousness such farce requires.

There are moments of real funniness in this smarter-than-anticipated goof-fest.

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.

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

It's not the fault of "The Sopranos" charismatic, beefy star (Gandolfini) that he's an actor of such substance and quiet ardor as to make idle movie star ribbitting look frivolous.

It’s an exercise in mad-as-hell vigilantism. And to reinforce the absurdity of what fury can be unleashed in a woman when a killer smirks, Sally Field — the Not Without My Daughter star herself — plays the ponytailed mom with the itchy trigger finger.

Some things are funnier than a barrel of monkeys. Most things, frankly. And anything is funnier than Ed.

Antielitist, anti-hypocrisy, pro-feel-good entertainment.

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.

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.

This garbled American remake of Takashi Miike's already staticky 2004 exercise in J-horror is a wrong number.

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.

Still, it's refreshing that the animals don't talk.

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.

Not one female character escapes mockery or patronizing.

Rancid, misogynist comedy.

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.

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.

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.

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

Peculiarly bloodless.

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

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

The steady drip-drip-drip of nothings like this are killing us all.

The endless, numbing sameness of it all.

A huge pile of horsefeathers is being peddled as fairy dust in Bigger Than the Sky.

Each actor appears to have received the script to a different movie, while Allen adds his own directorial touch of sexual vulgarity.

A loony attack on wacko liberalism and a ding-dong defense of wacko conservatism.

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

The movie can't be saved from its own vices of manic pacing and tediously pro forma pop culture jokes.

A talent-stuffed assemblage of barbs and giddy musical numbers that shouldn't be written off as a feature flop -- but savored instead for the cult-ready collection of late-night satirical skits and misses it is.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

There are no survivors here.

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.

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

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.

Terry Gilliam-ish territory here, spiked with imagery from Holocaust nightmares and drug trips. Attention, university film clubs: Here's your cult-ready midnight-movie programming.

A charmless rom-com.

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

Abysmally stupid drama.

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

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

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.

A desert of shrill juvenile jokes and clanging chase sequences.

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.

Zucker directs this mess like a substitute teacher soldiering through a day's work for a day's pay at a decertified school.

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

Processed comedy chop suey.

Malty brew of heroics and minutiae.

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

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