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.