Lou Lumenick

Essentially a weird series of nonsequiturs. I'd rather be watching a sequel to the much-maligned "Little Nicky" -- a Sandler film that was at least trying to do something interesting -- than this failed experiment in fusing high and low culture.

Feels like it was written and directed by an audience focus group in Omaha?

So awful it qualifies as cruel and unusual punishment.

Autumn wants to do for Jean-Pierre Melville what "Reservoir Dogs" did for Hong Kong cinema, but this new film is a joyless exercise in film appreciation.

Do your kids a favor - and take them to see something more worthwhile than the relentlessly vulgar and stupid See Spot Run.

This rambling, overproduced, tone-deaf melange of romance, comedy and drama is only slightly more engaging than Brooks' other feature this century, the unfortunate Adam Sandler vehicle "Spanglish" (2004).

A mild, slow-moving drama that belatedly tries to argue that graffiti writers are political artists, not an urban blight.

You'd be better off renting "Eddie and the Cruisers" (1983) than slogging through this latest, far more dire recycling of the same rock clichés.

Tedious and pretentious.

A collection of product plugs masquerading as a movie en route to home video.

A moribund attempt to exhume the Jack Ryan techno-thriller franchise with a severely miscast Ben Affleck, is truly the 20-megaton bomb among this summer's blockbusters.

Only Bryan Cranston, as Teller’s downsized dad, emerges with his dignity fully intact from Get a Job, whose scattershot direction is credited to Dylan Kidd (“Roger Dodger”).

Soggy, strictly by-the-numbers crime thriller.

More "it stinks" than *NSYNC.

This time out, Broomfield comes up with maybe enough halfway decent material for a 10-minute segment on a second-rate tabloid TV show.

A maudlin and unintentionally hilarious romantic weepie.

The apolitical and well-meaning Home of the Brave is predictable and maudlin.

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.

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 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.

James Franco, all is forgiven. His woebegotten “Oz: The Great and Powerful’’ is practically a masterpiece compared to this eyeball-gougingly ugly, charm-free animated musical sequel.

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

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

A surprisingly unengaging and charmless fantasy from a director whose previous films ("Across the Universe," "Titus," "Frida") were, despite their other issues, never boring.

A total disaster.

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

A great-looking but wearyingly cliched and confusing vanity production.

The joke is on arthouse audiences who show up for Funny Games, which is basically torture porn every bit as manipulative and reprehensible as "Hostel," even if it's tricked out with intellectual pretension.

If you’re going to invest three hours watching a movie about a convicted stock swindler, it needs to be a whole lot more compelling than Martin Scorsese’s handsome, sporadically amusing and admittedly never boring — but also bloated, redundant, vulgar, shapeless and pointless — Wolf of Wall Street.

Dr. Godard drops and quotes more names than you’d find in a week’s worth of Page Six, but lots of luck figuring any of this out before dozing off. The good thing about Goodbye to Language is that you’ll wake up with no side effects, albeit your wallet will be $12 lighter.

By the time two hours had dragged by, I felt a lot like I had sat through a five-hour wedding.

What Amenabar offers here is an unconvincing, pretentiously artsy pastiche of just about every hoary old gothic thriller you can think of.

A witless homage to "Shampoo" and "American Gigolo" that's brain-dead on arrival.

A dumb, by-the-numbers children's movie.

If ever a movie could be charged with imperiling the morals of a minor, it's probably Sleepover, a sleazy, PG-rated sex comedy that's apparently aimed at 8- to 10-year-old girls.

A very shallow, very glossy 2½-hour travelogue starring a miscast Julia Roberts as a spoiled, self-centered divorcée who decides to get away from it all.

A yawn-provoking little farm melodrama.

The plot contortions that very slowly unfold under Michael Radford's arthritic direction in Flawless are not much more entertaining.

A dull, by-the-numbers psych-ward horror thriller that's sadly a lot closer in quality to "Sucker Punch" than "Shutter Island."

An excruciating indie knockoff of "Training Day."

A long, tedious and often unintentionally hilarious adaptation of Stephenie Meyer’s sci-fi follow-up.

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.

Wal-Mart's home office in Bentonville, Ark., can rest easy: Greenwald, as usual, is hysterically preaching to the choir.

“Short Circuit” meets “RoboCop” — with asides to “WALL-E,” “E.T.,” “The Road Warrior” and many other better movies — in Chappie, an interminable, violent, incoherent and wearying R-rated sci-fi action comedy.

To describe Love, Honor and Obey as a cross between "Duets" and "Snatch" doesn't begin to suggest how desperately unfunny this musical gangster comedy is.

Fanning gives a sensitive and fairly impressive performance. But like her over-the-top movie family, Hounddog is still trailer trash of the worst kind.

Laughs are few and far between in the innuendo-laden script attributed to Dana Fox, who's also responsible for the reprehensible "The Wedding Date."

This bomb, which premiered at last year's Sundance Film Festival, belongs in the same remainder bin as Spacey's "Pay It Forward," "K-Pax" and "The Life of David Gale."

It isn't as ridiculous as this year's other version of a local best seller set during WWII ("Captain Corelli's Mandolin"), but it's arguably even less entertaining.

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

Nearly two hours of New Age hooey.

Pierre is at best competent as the star, director and writer of this good-natured compendium of ghetto movie clichés, which doesn't have an awful lot to offer in the way of laughs, pacing or originality.

In this pretentious art-house downer version of "The Bad Seed," the only surprise is that the folks didn't ship the little monster off to the looney bin before he reached puberty.

It's bone tired.

A depressingly predictable journey of self-discovery.

The Hateful Eight is basically an expensive vanity project allowing Tarantino to expound on his bizarre theories about race relations.

Hard-core Hollywood haters will best appreciate Maps to the Stars, a campy poison-pen letter to Tinseltown that makes “Sunset Boulevard’’ look like a tourism infomercial by comparison.

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

Even if it weren't three years too late to parody Moore (ineptly played by Kevin Farley), Moore's ridiculous tribute to Cuban health care in "Sicko" is far funnier than anything in this desperately laughless farce from David Zucker ("Scary Movie 3").

Basically a carefully airbrushed and authorized portrait of the Gray Lady during 14 months when there was serious speculation about the paper's impending demise.

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.

A real head-scratcher that somehow won the grand jury prize at this year's Sundance Film Festival.

The bottom line of Last Days seems to be, fame's a bitch. Yes, Gus - now start making movies again that tell stories, please.

There's little sense of the Carol Channing beneath the overdone makeup - if there is one.

Latifah, a formidable actress who's almost always better than her movies, easily dominates this hokey cross between "Glee'' and "Sister Act.''

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.

Neither a concert film nor a documentary but a ghoulish “event” offered just in time for Halloween, This is It is sadly -- and reprehensively, if you ask me -- the movie equivalent to the National Enquirer’s infamous post-mortem shot of Elvis Presley.

While sporadically funny, the sophomoric My Name Is Bruce is no "Bubba Ho-Tep," the movie where Campbell unforgettably played Elvis Presley as a nursing home patient battling a mummy with the help of John F. Kennedy. But Campbell's fans can feel free to add a star or two.

Pointless and mind-numbing.

A lot more stupid action - and a lot less heart - than the character-driven original, as Stuart ends up rescuing Margalo from Falcon.

Sort of "West Side Story" set in 1958 Brooklyn -- minus the music or competent storytelling -- is clearly not dealing from anything close to a full deck.

If you thought Matthew Broderick looked uncomfortable playing “himself” in “Trainwreck,” wait till you get a load of the actor portraying a married man who wonders if he’s gay in Neil LaBute’s mean-spirited comedy Dirty Weekend.

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.

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."

If I weren't already being paid to watch this movie, I'd feel entitled to compensation for having to sit through this many product plugs.

I've had root canals that were more enjoyable than Margot at the Wedding, Noah Baumbach's hugely pretentious, ugly and annoying follow-up to "The Squid and the Whale."

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

There are probably enough moments to satisfy hard-core fans, but for the rest of us, this amounts to the Middle Earth equivalent of “Star Wars: Episode II — Attack of the Clones,’’ a space-holding, empty-headed epic filled with characters and places (digital and otherwise) that are hard to keep straight, much less care about.

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

When Will I Be Loved would rate no stars except for Campbell's brave, totally committed performance -- which deserves a far better movie than this.

The Oscar-winning director of "Rain Man" - whose last film, the abysmal documentary "PoliWood" never went much further than the Tribeca Film Festival - demonstrates he can make a shakycam found-footage horror movie every bit as fake-looking, clumsy and unscary as your average college student working on a $200 budget.

Relentlessly mediocre cartoon.

There's nothing you haven't seen before - and better - in Deadfall, which would seem to appeal mostly to fans of snowmobile chases.

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

Nearly totally laugh-, chemistry- and coherence-free, this fiasco from the director of "Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle'' has a script whose sensible parts would fit on a napkin with enough room left over for the Gettysburg Address.

Hopefully Jennifer Lawrence will actually be given something worthwhile to do next time around. That would actually be worth paying to see.

An exceedingly silly historical fantasy.

As in genuine porn, most of the acting (except for Skarsgard, who deliberately tries to be funny and sometimes succeeds) is as flat and uninteresting as the script — even when the older Joe narrates a montage of flaccid penises.

The only thing remotely scary about Monsters is that Magnolia is releasing this boring scare-, suspense- and gore-free horror movie (which reportedly cost less than $100,000) on Halloween weekend.

Abysmal performances, limp direction (Will Gould) and a heavy-handed script drive a stake through a semi-interesting idea about the persecution of gay werewolves in a remote English village.

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

Admittedly, I’m far from a fan of Korine’s “Gummo,’’ “Julien Donkey-Boy’’ and the absymal “Trash Humpers.’’ But that he is proud of making intentionally sloppy and tedious movies doesn’t make them any easier to watch. Or all that much fun, for that matter.

To call Jackass: The Movie the worst movie of the year is practically a compliment. This plotless, crudely videotaped collection of moronic stunts is a movie in the same sense that those hideous, velvet depictions of Elvis are paintings.

Quickly devolves into a nonprescription alternative to Ambien.

"Precious" worked partly because it did not wrap its sordid tale in Christian uplift and dime-store psychology -- elements that have made Tyler Perry a rich filmmaker but have turned For Colored Girls shrill and manipulative.

Beautiful Boy ends up being an endurance test.

Visually striking but portentous and pretentious.

It doesn’t add up to much of anything exciting, even with an appearance by Isabella Rossellini (of Lynch’s “Blue Velvet’’) as the mother of one of the doubles.