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.

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

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Mostly about slapping together a bunch of clichés -- outdated clichés at that -- regarding the loneliness of ambitious women.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

A desert of shrill juvenile jokes and clanging chase sequences.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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 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.”

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

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.

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.

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!

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.

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

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.

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

Another depressingly empty action thriller.

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

No authentic emotion of any kind happens in this damp, Seattle-based romance, a fizzle for both stars.

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

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

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

Just coarse, clunky, jerry rigged, and -- worst of all -- not funny.

Neither grand enough to be impressive nor antic enough to be charming, the movie settles for bland and frantic, climaxing in a showdown among decadent pyramid builders. How bad are these guys? They're sadists...and, wink wink, sissies.

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.

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

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

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

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

Torturously whimsical gumshoe caper.

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.

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

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

Tedious.

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

Lowest-common-denominator humor.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

A crude, silly supernatural thriller.

The cast itself is weirdly overqualified.

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.

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.

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

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

Becomes yet another lame sports farce.

An appalling, jaw-dropping movie that will cause serious nightmares.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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?

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.

Oooh, this is toxic.

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

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.

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

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

There are no survivors here.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Rancid, misogynist comedy.

Abysmally stupid drama.

There is not one honest moment, not ONE, in Hanging Up.

How you feel about Valentine's Day may depend on how you feel when someone really, really cute -- and someone you're really, really fond of -- gives you a nasty box of cheap chocolate on Valentine's Day, picked up at the corner Rite Aid and delivered with the price tag still attached.

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.

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

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