Lou Lumenick

A wonder to look at, even as its increasingly pretentious manga-inspired story line outstays its welcome.

Parker is watchable chiefly for Statham, who exudes effortless cool and excels in hand-to-hand combat, as well as demonstrating his skill at wielding some very unlikely weapons.

Set in a bar that echoes the far superior "Big Night," this labored two-hander plays more like an acting exercise than an actual movie.

The overall effect tends to be as chilly and monotonous as Shannon’s demeanor as Kuklinski — a real disappointment.

As Lydia Lunch of Teenage Jesus & the Jerks puts it, "They seem so desperate to be liked, desperate to have their music used in the next car commercial."

More watchable for secular audiences than the handful of earlier films released under the Fox Faith label, this one actually has a sense of humor, a politically progressive point of view and a solid cast including the ever-reliable James Garner.

So off-the-wall that it may well ultimately acquire the cult status of Resnick's earlier Chris Elliot vehicle, "Cabin Boy."

Proudly airheaded, incoherent, endlessly pandering - yet fitfully entertaining.

It's because of a superior cast that this version of "Death at a Funeral" is the rare comedy remake that's funnier than the original, however slightly. Personally, though, I'm not sure it was worth the effort.

With heavy emphasis on cliché and stereotype, has at least four false endings -- and drags on for nearly two hours -- before it finally contrives to reunite its sitcomish pals for a last drink together.

Good acting and some very good scenes don't quite add up to a good film.

A typically well-acted, if ultimately minor, effort by John Sayles, the socially conscious indie icon who's unafraid to take on unfashionable subjects.

Dan Schechter's no-budget comedy about the romantic and professional travails of a pair of financially struggling film editors offers a few laughs, all served up on eyeball-gougingly ugly digital video.

Like the prototypical "Shine," this is a film that romanticizes mental illness.

Danny Huston looks and sounds like his celebrated father, John, more and more each year, so I enjoyed watching him play a flamboyant and womanizing legendary director not unlike his old man in Bernard Rose’s modest little comedy.

Black loses control of Virginia as it lurches from political satire to unintended black comedy to mom-and-son melodrama. But the performances and the movie's sheer crazy audacity make it watchable.

An interesting - but very slow paced - thriller.

An extremely awkward cross between "Ocean's Eleven" and "Rain Man."

Lopez, appearing in her first rom-com since “Monster-in-Law” five years ago, is still a likable screen presence who throws herself into the movie’s slapstick sequences with unwarranted enthusiasm.

Though the performances are uniformly good -- Adams is a standout -- the movie plays like one long, meandering sketch inspired by the works of John Waters and Todd Solondz, rather than a fully developed story.

The pleasant but forgettable Adult Beginners strains a bit too hard for a happy ending, and tends to lay on the schmaltz and metaphors (like the swim class that gives the film its title) with a trowel.

Beautiful camerawork, some interesting scenes, but extraordinarily slow.

A substandard attempt to outfit a World War II submarine with every haunted-house cliché known to man and filmmakers.

Would be solid family entertainment if it weren't for the funereal pacing, which may kill its appeal among young audiences.

Michael Moore makes many of the same points, with far more impact, in "Bowling for Columbine."

The superficial script doesn’t go nearly deep enough to begin explaining Lovelace.

Genially preposterous, with stunt players outnumbering actors by something like a 3-to-1 ratio, the action thriller Crank is surprisingly watchable.

Excellent performances by a good cast and a fairly authentic look at working-class struggles go only so far.

This windy courtroom drama is punctuated by cheesy flashbacks.

Beyond the cliched diaper-changing scenes and the oh-so-predictable romantic complications, the film inadvertently insults its presumed target audience.

Little more than a supersized version of the popular PBS animated series that's stopping briefly in theaters en route to its natural habitat -- video.

A superficial documentary based on a best-selling book by Joe Conason and Gene Lyons -- which is being released just before the ex-president's memoir hits the bookstores.

Most of the laughs are collected by Lucy Punch as chirpy, borderline-psychotic teacher named Squirrel.

OK premise quickly deteriorates into a silly, badly acted slasher movie -- minus the slasher.

While recollections of the participants in the rescue are often riveting, the subject of Jonathan Gruber and Ari Daniel Pinchot's film remains elusively out of grasp.

Disappointing.

Directors Potelle and Rankin lack the skill to integrate the sometimes drastic shifts between comedy and drama - and the serious portions ultimately get short shrift, apparently at the behest of Miramax's marketing executives.

Fitfully amusing.

The cinematic equivalent of enduring a cross-country airplane flight trapped in a seat next to a manic depressive.

The Lady and the Duke, which drags on for over two hours, is an experiment in shooting a period film on a shoestring that turns out to be more interesting than actually entertaining.

This may be the most politically confusing movie about that conflict since "For Whom the Bell Tolls" -- I couldn't for the life of me figure out where Escriva stood.

A by-the-numbers follow-up to the highly successful 2005 feature that was no great shakes to begin with.

Even in support of the noblest of causes, manipulation is manipulation.

A mediocre music documentary about veteran country rocker and activist Steve Earle, who created a furor with a song sympathetic to American Taliban John Walker Lindh.

To enjoy this film, it helps to check your brain at the box office.

So slow the movie itself seems to be suffering from a hardening of the arteries.

The emotional honesty of [Lane's] performance provides a foundation that supports this shaky and often unbelievable Italian-set hybrid of "Shirley Valentine" and "Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House."

Well-acted but a bit creaky.

Rip Torn's recent real-life misadven tures are slightly echoed in Happy Tears, a moderately diverting black comedy in which he plays (what else?) a crazy old coot, to perfection.

As for Gooding, he's sadly gone to the dogs -- Snow Dogs has got to be his most humiliating role since "Lightning Jack."

A Southeast Asian thriller that positively reeks of atmosphere - but is woefully lacking in narrative credibility or character development.

Looks great, and the performances are solid, but the disparate elements in this oddity - which created a minor stir at the Sundance Film Festival last year - never entirely coalesce.

Gibson sure knows how to shoot a sequence, but he also doesn't know when to stop with the blood, gore and maiming.

Earnest and predictable.

Quirky and sometimes hilarious Canadian comedy.

These people are so selfish and self-absorbed you may not want to spent even 72 minutes with them.

For all of its in-your-face, full-frontal sex scenes and threesomes (one involving a transsexual), this autobiographical story is almost sweet.

Essentially a more awkward Afghan version of "My Big Fat Greek Wedding."

The disappointing The Company You Keep consistently stretches credulity way past the breaking point in its depiction of journalism, police procedure and political activism.

Needs less talk, more music.

Aimed squarely at the under-6 crowd, is basically the pilot for a Nickelodeon series with an already heavily merchandised character.

Beautifully shot and well-meant -- but fairly snoozy.

Some fine performances shine through in Joe Maggio's pretentious, credulity-straining dramedy.

Grows ever more manipulative and predictable.

Overall, The Last September is a real snooze.

Coming down too hard on this load of schmaltz — as I said when reviewing my first Sparks adaptation back in 2002 — feels like taking a baseball bat to a sack full of newborn kittens.

If you can check your brain at the popcorn stand and keep your expectations low, Dark Water is an OK genre exercise that maintains a consistently creepy tone.

Fails to dig out the dramatic meat, despite a yeoman performance by Danny Aiello.

Strands several generations of performers in a highly derivative script and hackneyed direction.

Never really gets out of the starting gate.

Initially shows promise, but filmmaker Frank Cappello (the early Russell Crowe vehicle "No Way Back") gets bogged down when Slater becomes involved with Elisa Cuthbert, a paraplegic survivor of the shooting who wants him to kill her.

What is Dick's excuse for outing one cable news anchor but not a rival counterpart who is far better known? The anchor isn't antigay, but Dick likes the other network's politics better. Hypocrisy? Your call.

A fairly painless, if not particularly stimulating, experience, Gray has no idea how to capitalize on the reunion of "Pulp Fiction" co-stars Travolta and Thurman.

It's suprisingly flat.

The sort of movie that seems to exist for no good reason except to keep the studio's pipeline filled with filmed product.

A dispiriting return to the tired, star-driven, pop-culture-ridden formula that DreamWorks Animation ran into the ground before its best feature in years, this spring's "How to Train Your Dragon."

There'll likely be more Z's in the audience than on the screen.

Heartlessly efficient kidnap thriller.

A slapdash, sporadically funny cross between the infamous “Ishtar’’ and the mercifully forgotten “American Dreamz.’’

Even a great British cast and obscenity-laden gangland dialogue aren't enough to make what amounts to an extended acting exercise into much of a movie.

Less an awful movie than a totally uninspired one. The under-5 set may find it funny, though I suspect their parents will be checking their watches a lot, as I did.

Filmmaker Alison Murray drew on her own experiences, but Mouth to Mouth would have benefited from more focus and fewer dance sequences.

You could do far worse in the current marketplace.

The actors don't seem to have been directed at all, and the movie is very sluggishly paced.

This laugh-starved twist on "Big" and the many lesser body-swapping comedies of the era is basically a lecture on sexual abstinence.

It doesn't help that the central character, Jerome - earnestly played by Max Minghella of "Bee Season" - is essentially a passive observer.

Zellweger dusts off her Bridget Jones accent - and a constellation of annoying vocal and facial tics - for Miss Potter, an unrelentingly mediocre, TV-movieish biopic of beloved children's author Beatrix Potter.

Watching The Italian Job in a theater makes you long for a fast-forward button - to skip past 90 eyeball-glazing minutes of generic caper plotting and cut to the chase, as it were.

Raja, which is basically a dark comedy about how this odd couple manipulate each other, is extremely well acted, though the direction by Jacques Doillon is on the leisurely side.

An intriguing, if seriously flawed, film noir.

A surprisingly upbeat look at that Middle East hotspot.

Playing for only one week. Parents of tweens, you've been warned.

Grant hasn't had any real chemistry with a female co-star since Julia Roberts in "Notting Hill," but Barrymore works so hard at it and is so charming that you might be fooled.

Treads an awfully thin line between the provocative and the exploitative.

Morrow fares less well with the script, which he also produced and collaborated on.

An unsatisfying drama that premiered at Sundance '07 and was supposedly delayed because of the Virginia Tech shootings.

Only sporadically entertaining.

Screenwriter Marc Lawrence, who worked on the original, throws in unbelievable plot twists merely as excuses for comic mayhem.

This generic exercise in computer-generated animation may provide passable entertainment for very young children, but adults will be less than enchanted by its preachiness, talkiness and Communist Party-line political views.

Tries to be a gay version of "Sex and the City," which was pretty gay to begin with.

A fine cast headed by the underrated Greg Kinnear lifts this year’s third major religious movie, the fact-inspired Heaven Is for Real, somewhat beyond its Hallmark Channel-caliber script and visuals.

Treads water.

Tries, with much less success, to do what "Witness" did in exploring an Amish town.

Ranges from exquisitely sensitive to crass, but overall, it's an interesting effort.

Though it comes from a director whose résumé includes "Flashdance" and "9 ½ weeks," these smoke-filled interludes are less erotic than today's average car commercial.

The extra money has bought a professional crew for scripted sequences, in which Jonathan and his mother too often mug for the camera.

The demand for her services is so great that she suffers from "penis elbow," but her popularity also brings self-esteem and a possible boyfriend in her boss (Miki Manojlovic) in this lethargically directed comedy.

The hippie heroine of this wacky Aussie comedy cheerfully theorizes that Australia was actually originally settled not by convicts but by mental patients — which may possibly explain the antics of Russell Crowe and Nicole Kidman, among others.

This cliché-filled labor of love is staffed with some fine performers - Jennifer Holliday sings at a juke joint and Frances Sternhagen plays an older version of Emily's sister.

Gandolfini acquits himself well in a rare big-screen lead as the depressed operator of a rinky-dink amusement park in the waning days of winter.

Little more than a series of sketches, tied together by Joe's on-air interrogation by a nasty shock jock played by Dennis Miller.

Director Adam Green's genuine affection for the genre helps make Hatchet a cut above average.

Suffers even more than the Harry Potter films from a compulsion to be faithful to the source material, including cramming in a head-spinning assortment of characters and subplots.

At times, writer-director Cedric Klapsich seems to be trying to copy the frestyle of "Amelie," but L'Auberge achieves only a fraction of its charm.

If this movie were a teenager, you'd put it on Ritalin right away.

Manages to create a creepy atmosphere, even if the plot itself is somewhat unfocused and the scares scarce.

Certainly nails the era, right down to a lengthy pan across a none-too-appealing dinner buffet.

Sort of a poor man's "Rent" - minus the music and the AIDS - and much blander than the title would have you expect.

While the latest installment avoids the nonstop parade of potty jokes, it never rises much past the level of mediocrity.

Occasionally funny but more often hackneyed, schmaltzy, predictable and overdone fairy tale that seems longer than 100 choruses of ''Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious."

A thoughtful, old-school documentary.

Visually striking but gets bogged down in supernatural clichés.

Sporadically funny, dumbed-down version.

Possibly because Heigl is one of the producers, the most beautiful woman in the film -- the stunning Christina Hendricks of "Mad Men" -- dies in an off-screen car crash barely before the opening credits are over.

Carell's frantic mugging as a modern-day Noah barely keeps Evan Almighty afloat.

It’s a disappointment as a movie, though Shannon is especially fine in a rare sympathetic role.

It's a drawn-out look at politics that's largely devoid of the trademark humor that long ago got New Wave veteran Chabrol labeled the Gallic Hitchcock.

Starts out promisingly, but quickly sinks under the weight of its own plot twists, ponderous pacing and Val Kilmer's monotonous performance as a ruthless special-ops agent.

The sort of enigmatic movie that many critics embrace because it's open to endless interpretation.

An atmospheric but sluggish and needlessly confusing British contemporary film noir that may indeed leave some audience members struggling to stay awake.

Its intriguing subject matter is diluted by too many bland performances.

A beautifully acted if fairly poky coming-of-age story.

Accomplishes a near miracle -- this British import makes you yearn for Burt Reynolds, who appeared in a vastly more entertaining version of the same story.

The acting is OK, but none of the leads has the kind of sizzle that might have turned this into something as special as another film set roughly in the same era, "Diner.''

Bland and timid.

Sometimes dull and mostly uninspired, it's much less a satisfying reboot like "Batman Begins'' than a pointless rehash in the mode of "Superman Returns.''

There's not a moment of true wildness in It's Kind of a Funny Story, which never gets any more outrageous than projective vomiting.

Juan Carlos Fresnadillo's Intruders looks great and has a promising opening, but this atmospheric Spanish psychological thriller is otherwise pretty underwhelming.

There isn't a surprising moment, and it's an affirmation for hard-core fans and pretty much everyone else of William Shatner's immortal exhortation to Trekkies: "Get a life!"

May be predictable and silly, but it's never dull.

They should sell antidepressants along with the popcorn at theaters showing Cecilia Miniucchi's Expired, one of those Sundance "comedies" that make you contemplate slitting your wrists.

It's basically a series of music videos - a few quite good - strung together over two long hours and loosely connected by a weak story line loaded with anachronisms.

Some may find it titillating; more will find it offensive and deeply disturbing.

Gets pinned down in a barrage of schmaltz, cliché, stereotype and racial condescension - not to mention a historically dubious premise.

You don't have to be gay or Italian or live in Canada to enjoy Mambo Italiano, but a tolerance for ethnic mugging helps.

Aside from a nifty new way to avoid surveillance in the middle of the desert, there's nothing here we haven't seen in many other movies - including "Spy Game," directed by Scott's brother Tony before 9/11.

Really belongs on Lifetime rather than in theaters.

The 3-D effects are among the most effective ever shot.

A sizzling soundtrack and Jennifer Lopez's best performance since "Out of Sight" go only so far in El Cantante, a downer of a musical biopic that leaves no cliché unturned.

“Let’s show ’em some good old-fashioned American swagger,’’ MacArthur says on his arrival in Tokyo. It’s too bad director Webber and the screenwriters, David Klass and Vera Blasi, didn’t take his advice to heart instead of largely wasting Jones and some very nice period details.

Strictly remainder-bin material.

May be the first movie that effectively erases virtually its entire story line by the very last scene.

Has its share of laughs.

Beautifully photographed and fitfully amusing, Gaudi Afternoon would be an impressive film from a first-timer, but Seidelman is experienced enough to know she should have told the actors not to camp things up so excessively.

A soufflé of a romantic and family comedy that stubbornly refuses to rise.

Harmless, fish-out-of-water fluff.

A campy guilty pleasure that serves up a “Gladiator’’ knockoff as an appetizer to the impressively flame-filled main course.

Sarah Silverman: Jesus is Magic works best when this equal-opportunity offender is on the stage.

Schmaltzy and endless.

Price of Glory isn't an embarrassment on the order of the last major boxing movie, "Play It to the Bone," but it's not especially worth intercepting on its way to the video racks.

The movie quickly sinks into a terminal case of the cutes and extreme predictability - amid the usual surfeit of wacky supporting characters.

It's terribly predictable and often risible stuff.

Fairly shapeless story.

I love musicals, but I'd be hard-pressed to recommend this curiosity, sort of a shoestring version of Francis Ford Coppola's "The Cotton Club."

Holds your attention for a while, but fails to build much suspense as it races toward a predictable climax. It probably would have worked better as a series of Webisodes, which reportedly was the original plan.

One of those potentially interesting movies that takes its sweet time getting to the point - by which time many audience members will likely have bailed out or dozed off.

You gotta give credit to any first-time direc tor who attempts an homage to classic screwball comedies on a shoestring budget, even if Kettle of Fish ends up not exactly being the catch of the week.

Vincent D'Onofrio does capture Hoffman's charisma and nuttiness - and he's the only reason to resist the temptation to skip this exasperating movie.

You'll have to look elsewhere than this love letter to the Great White Way to explain why "Wicked" and "Avenue Q" became huge hits, and why "Caroline, or Change" joined "Taboo" as a costly flop.

Boasts special effects that are really spectacular - too bad it lacks flesh-and-blood characters.

The performances are solid, but as a screenwriter, Guttenberg can't make the situation seem like more than a theatrical construct in a contemporary setting.

Whatever message Brooks was trying to put across with Spanglish, it clearly got lost in translaaaaaaaaaaation.

Does not offer much in the way of exciting boxing footage.

Based on a memoir by Nigel Slater, a British celebrity chef who makes a cameo appearance, Toast also charts the budding chef's growing interest in hunky, scantily clad guys. Be warned: Some of the regional British accents would benefit from subtitles.

Uncompromisingly mediocre comedy.

It says a lot about the sequel that the funniest moment belongs to none of the big stars, but to Owen Wilson.

A crock - a pandering epic that's as phony as it is condescending.

The first conservative documentary to join the bumper crop of liberal political films riding Michael Moore's coattails into theaters.

A cheesy affair with no big winners. Especially the audience.

Science fiction movies don't come much more ponderous than the beautifully filmed Never Let Me Go, which reduces the debate over genetic engineering to a mild, moist romantic soap opera.

The feel-bad movie of the holiday season, Spike Lee’s often-repellent Americanized reimagining of Korean director Chan-Wook Park’s twisty 2004 revenge thriller Oldboy is relentlessly gruesome, self-consciously shocking and pretty much pointless.

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.