Lou Lumenick

Next, which makes "National Treasure" look like a model of narrative logic, is almost beyond criticism.

Jeremy Piven's infamous "sushi defense" for skipping out on a Broadway role is easier to swallow than his performance as a scuzzy auto liquidator who sees the light in The Goods: Live Hard, Sell Hard.

It's the audience that gets punk'd in this crass and sloppy comic recycling.

The year's most beautiful movie -- and surely one of the dullest.

A dull, dumb and derivative horror film.

This relentlessly mediocre romantic comedy is basically a pretty arthritic third-generation Xerox of "Annie Hall," with Jason Biggs and Christina Ricci in the old Allen and Keaton parts in a probably quixotic attempt to court the youth market.

As misconceived as it is corny and predictable.

The only darkness here — besides the dingy-looking images dimmed by 3-D glasses — is the murky plot, which is as silly as it is arbitrary.

This Sundance dud is a turgid gay soap opera with a limp twist, showcasing Robin Williams at his maudlin worst.

The sometimes painfully sincere and slow-moving For Greater Glory clearly aspires to be inspirational, but history won't cooperate. The Cristeros triumphed not because of their faith, but because the United States exerted diplomatic pressure to protect its oil interests in Mexico.

This is the time of the year movie studios traditionally dump their mistakes into theaters -- and boy, did Disney make a whopper with The Count of Monte Cristo.

Sort of "The Da Vinci Code for Dummies."

Repeatedly shoots for laughs -- but ends up mostly firing blanks.

Ron Howard's bio-pic is an Oscar-baiting fairy tale that manipulates the audience at every turn of the clich.

Aside from the very occasional stab with a dagger, John prefers to shoot people at point-blank range. It gets old fast.

Christopher Plummer confronts Nazi horrors again in Atom Egoyan’s preposterous thriller, which squanders a terrific performance by the Oscar-winning actor.

Has precious little to add to the canon -- and does so in a highly melodramatic manner.

This maudlin, fact-inspired and anti-feminist dramedy is no "Far From Heaven" or "The Hours."

This lame teenage James Bond will leave audiences neither shaken nor stirred.

So consistently silly and overwrought that it flirts with the elusive so-bad-it's-entertaining category.

The Chaperone squanders nice locations and an expert comic performance by Yeardley Smith (the voice of Lisa Simpson) as the teacher trying to supervise the trip.

Shankman's staging of the numbers - especially the leaden choreography and hackneyed locations such as the Hollywood sign - was far sloppier and less creative than for his last musical, the vastly superior "Hairspray."

The material in this spy spoof is, pardon the pun, awfully frayed.

This Canadian-South African labor of love has its heart in the right place, even if the leads seem to have been cast more for their hunky looks than their stiff acting.

A glacially paced, extremely moist, terminally gloomy and cliché-laden romantic drama with a supernatural twist.

Presenting a “true” adventure about a giant whale that supposedly inspired “Moby-Dick” raises tsunami-high expectations about In the Heart of the Sea that are crushed as thoroughly as if star Chris Hemsworth had brought down his “Thor” hammer on the entire enterprise.

A genuine oddity that's more watchable than it sounds.

Never decides whether it wants to be a black comedy, drama, melodrama or some combination of the three. The acting and direction are all over the map in this consistently depressing, if occasionally interesting, slice of life.

A gorgeous snooze, somewhere between imitation Terrence Malick and a feature version of star Brad Pitt's notorious Vanity Fair layout with Angelina Jolie and their faux kids.

This is one of those movies that's too cool to have a plot.

A sluggish and murky sub-Polanski-esque psychodrama.

Relentlessly depressing.

Overlong and grim to the point where some scenes are virtually unwatchable.

A better cast this time around — Michael Angarano, Milo Ventimiglia, Sofía Vergara and Max Casella, with cameos by Jason Alexander, Stanley Tucci and Hope Davis — tries to breathe life into Goldman’s cliché-ridden plot.

Has its laughs, but pretty much every single one of them is in the trailer. And even more unfortunately, the improbable new romantic comedy team of Steve Carell and Keira Knightley works about as well as you'd guess - like oil and water.

Lethally dull and self-important remake.

A wildly misanthropic and overlong black comedy.

A sluggish and prototypically earnest little indie on the not exactly fresh theme of a woman undergoing a midlife crisis.

A spoof of you-know-what that's a lot less funny than it sounds.

Seems almost like a self-parody of Williams' earlier work.

Amidst the ennui, there are some fine performances.

The film slowly builds up to Justin's first appearance at Madison Square Garden, where his show sold out in 22 minutes.

There are precious few laughs in this poorly written and directed "unromantic comedy" - the sort of dire date movie you'd take somebody to if you wanted it to be a LAST date.

Androgynous Clea DuVall's performance shines through a foggily told, vaguely acted coming-of-age tale.

A bizarre quasi-documentary that more or less tries to rationalize bestiality as a harmless quirk.

This silly extraterrestrial-invasion epic somehow manages the feat of making the destruction of La La Land seem tedious.

Low on raunch but even lower on laughs. It also looks like half the lighting crew failed to show up.

Dumbed down to the point where it's barely recognizable as coming from one of Donald Westlake's John Dortmunder novels.

Should appeal more to those who like to watch stuff blow up than understand exactly why the carnage is transpiring.

This is a cheap-looking lowbrow comedy that likely would have gone straight to home video.

Multiple Sarcasms happens to be the title of the play within the movie, and it turns out to be by far the most interesting thing in the film. Not that many people will want to suffer through the first 90 minutes of this vanity production to get there.

Visually striking but portentous and pretentious.

A witless and vulgar romantic comedy wrapped inside a mock documentary.

After the monster is subdued, then there's a much less humorous, and more mindlessly violent second half.

A mild cross between "The Big Chill" and "Sex and the City," this English-language German oddity is a romantic comedy passing through on its way to video.

You cease to care as they fall back on a catalogue of clichéd shocks, tired camera angles and an ever-mounting gore quotient.

Mind-numbing, would-be comic-book franchise, which often seems as blind as its hero -- not to mention deaf and dumb.

Much less a satisfying movie than an intermittently funny 90-minute acting audition.

It's hard to make a movie about moonshiners that isn't entertaining, but the lethargic, generically titled Lawless comes perilously close - at least a third of its two hours is devoted to "arty'' shots of landscapes.

Dazzles the eye, numbs the mind and may cause deafness in some cases. Did I mention to bring along some Excedrin?

Macht is the best thing in A Love Song for Bobby Long, but his intelligent performance doesn't justify a tough, and very long, sit.

Somewhere along the way, Borstal Boy became fatally compromised.

This version, flatly directed and risibly written by Billy Ray, is saddled with endless coincidences, questionably motivated characters and an utterly laughable climax.

One big hunk of cinematic moussaka with lots of appetizing shots of food.

Rarely does a movie go so thoroughly wrong in so many ways.

Beautiful Boy ends up being an endurance test.

Though Cho occasionally connects with her targets, more often than not she seems as intolerant and hate-filled as she accuses them of being - and that's not funny.

Light It Up would be a strong candidate for the year's most irresponsible movie - if it were remotely believable.

It's pretty hard to make a dull movie about Henry VIII and his complicated love life, but The Other Boleyn Girl, a failed Oscar contender, manages to do just that, with yawns to spare.

This sequel sorely misses the presence of Tom Wilkinson, whose out-of-the-closet character grounded the first film (but died at the end).

Even an engaging performance by Margot Robbie as the proverbial last woman on Earth isn’t enough to save Z for Zachariah from becoming yet another ploddingly pretentious Sundance dud.

The best drag movie since "Vegas in Space." That's hardly a huge recommendation.

When you awake, it may all seem like a bad dream - but why is your wallet missing $11? Scary.

Repackage clichés and stereotypes with attractive young performers in a simple-minded script that panders to the teen audience.

This is the sort of movie that requires you not only to suspend disbelief, but to check your sanity at the ticket counter.

Relentlessly dopey and vulgar.

That Eulogy has any laughs is largely a testament to the understated Romano -- he and Deschanel are the only ones in the cast who aren't straining to be funny.

A pretentious, unsatisfying and ultra-slow-moving thriller.

Something most have gotten lost in the translation.

Features less than 10 minutes of music in its mercifully brief 83-minute running time.

There are a few good jolts - and a moderate amount of spurting blood - but things pretty much proceed exactly as you think they will.

Michael J. Bassett's Solomon Kane is been there, done that.

Though it boasts excellent performances by Anna Friel and Michelle Williams as bosom buddies whose lives meander over three decades, it plods on with a wearying predictability and some truly terrible dialogue.

O'Brien also provided the lethargic direction and collaborated with Messina on the cliché-infested script, which is long on booze-filled confessions.

Disco may still be dead, but Benji: Off the Leash! resurrects another dubious artifact of the '70s - the crudely made family films starring that lovable mutt.

For much of Flannel Pajamas I wondered if the couple's big problem was that Stuart was secretly gay. Nothing so interesting - he's just a narcissistic control freak and she's off-puttingly needy.

In the hands of the formerly promising director Joe Carnahan, this stylish, nihilistic, hugely derivative mash-up of Tarantino and Guy Ritchie (before wife Madonna ruined his career) is fun for roughly half an hour.

Love and Honor may be politically clueless, but Hemsworth and the student journalist he hooks up with (fellow Aussie Teresa Palmer of “Warm Bodies’’) do make an undeniably attractive couple.

A low-key Field is the best thing about Two Weeks, which is set in a Wilmington, N.C., where everyone mysteriously sounds like he just got off a Los Angeles freeway.

There's no real payoff - artistically or emotionally - in Gregory Harrison's gimmicky and tedious psychological thriller November, shot on ugly digital video.

Given the complete lack of chemistry between Chan and Forlani, their rather awkward lip-lock isn't worth $10 to see. Sadly, neither is anything else here.

Anderson, in her first major non-Scully film role, is lethally miscast.

Features all too much footage of the scowling Burns, who has a narrower range than almost any actor working in Hollywood these days.

There are some decent actors and great costumes in this overly solemn compendium of rock clichés.

Might have been more successful if Darabont and his pal had attempted a Preston Sturges-like farce. Instead, it's played totally without any kind of edge - a fantasy that makes "The Lord of the Rings" look realistic by comparison.

Rambling, schmaltzy romantic comedy.

A rare dud from great Spanish director Pedro Almodóvar, I’m So Excited! is a campy, sex-obsessed spoof of airborne-disaster movies that never really gets off the ground.

Nothing in Redemption quite adds up, including the paranoid hero’s insistence that he’s being watched by drones.