Lou Lumenick

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.

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.

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

This movie fails so spectacularly - and on so many levels - that it's like watching a train plummet off a bridge.

Ang Lee's Taking Woodstock achieves an amazing feat: It turns the fabled music festival, a key cultural moment of the late 20th century, into an exceedingly lame, heavily clichéd, thumb-sucking bore.

It's bone tired.

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.

Under Mark Palansky's uninspired direction, magic eludes Penelope in scene after scene.

Rent "Enchanted" with Adams, and watch Goode as Colin Firth's boyfriend in his other current movie, "A Single Man."

One of those painfully earnest -- and pretentious -- little indies in which a pair of emotional cripples neatly resolve all of their problems within 48 hours of meeting each other.

Relentlessly mediocre cartoon.

For starters, it wasn't a great idea to basically borrow the premise of "The Blues Brothers'' and turn these quintessential Jewish characters (something that's not even hinted at) into the bumbling would-be saviors of the Catholic orphanage where they were raised.

A real crock.

You know a movie's got problems when the most memo rable thing about it is Sienna Miller's mustache.

Relies far too much on an overdose of gore and a pack of hungry wolves to deliver its chills.

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.

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

Bad in ways that are almost endearing, St. Trinian's does offer the spectacle of Rupert Everett mincing around in drag as a headmistress bedeviled by Colin Firth, as an education minister and former lover who wants to shut down her out-of-control school.

Lame family filler.

Mildly interesting.

Preposterous romantic melodrama, which uses a fractured narrative to cloud an absurd plot that would probably be laughed off the screen if it were presented in a straightforward manner.

Blake Lively doesn't have a whole lot to do as Hal's employer and occasional lover, who sometimes requires rescuing. No great loss; she and Reynolds have minus-zero chemistry.

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

Poor John Leguizamo, who hopefully got well-paid to voice a stereotypical Latino bird providing a stream of nonsensical narration.

Director Boaz Yakin (“Remember the Titans”) indulges in an awful lot of gunplay for a PG-rated family film, but sure knows how to stage a dirt-bike race. The Belgian malinoises who play Max way out-act the humans.

an overlong and surprisingly dull documentary.

Horror-movie vets Harrington ("Wrong Turn") and Sagemiller ("Soul Survivors") struggle unsuccessfully with characters who are frequently more plastic than Nikki.

Yet another screwed-up mess that will give audiences another excuse to shun the multiplexes this weekend.

A cartoonish, unfocused and mostly unfunny satire.

Oblivious to both narrative logic and the laws of physics, the cliché-filled San Andreas doesn’t nearly have the star power of earlier, better disaster movies it borrows from like “The Poseidon Adventure,” “Earthquake” and “The Towering Inferno.”

Li is powerless when the film slows to a crawl to provide a little drama.

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).

Director Kevin Bray, whose clichéd style betrays his music-video roots, devotes far too much time to the mechanics of the illogical plot.

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.

As huge a travesty and a bore as 1956's "Alexander the Great," in which Richard Burton looked equally uncomfortable as a blond.

The willfully eccentric Beyond the Sea seems to be telling us a lot more about its star and director, Kevin Spacey, than its ostensible subject.

Yes, there's some spectacular footage. But there's also an awful lot of filler for a 40-minute movie.

Isn't as relentlessly vulgar or cartoonish as "The Ladies Man" - nor is it a whole lot more realistic.

There was no need to edit it in overly slick ways that often make the story line seem contrived, accompanied by gag-laden narration that frequently made me want to gag.

The acting is, at best, serviceable; the sound track is too often unintelligible; the direction is often over the top; and the script relies heavily on stereotypes.

Nicely photographed and has impressive sets; too bad there's so little going on that it seems long even at 78 minutes.

Rappaport does a yeoman's job in this tonally confused oddity. The wonder is that Hal Haberman and Jeremy Passmore's Special is making it off the festival circuit and into theaters at all, however briefly.

A sincere but underwhelming dramatization of one of the biggest news stories of 1956.

Overall, the rambling Jayne Mansfield’s Car is almost as big a wreck as its namesake.

Disappointingly, Bourne never resurfaces in this less-than-satisfying series reboot. The film is more a talky, convoluted, action-starved two-hour subplot.

Their misadventures in the Big Apple, including Giamatti’s involvement with a Russian house sitter (a bizarrely cast Sally Hawkins) are neither funny nor touching, just tedious.

Peter Krause, the fine actor from "Six Feet Under," gives a one-note performance that seriously undermines Civic Duty, a thriller mining minimal dramatic payoff from the potentially potent subject of post-9/11 paranoia.

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.

One part cabaret, one part travelogue, one part comic heist, one part romantic tearjerker -- and all pretty tedious.

Strong contender for the weirdest movie released this year.

You'd think it would be hard to make an uninteresting movie based on the true story of Bethany Hamilton... But the terminally bland Soul Surfer comes perilously close.

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.

Dennis Rodman isn't half bad as a blond, multiply pierced Interpol agent.

Like many first films, Boricua's Bond is wildly uneven.

First-time writer-director Mark Hanlon lands only glancing blows in this grim black comedy.

Recycles every cliché of the genre to sleep-inducing effect.

Strictly summer schlock.

Devotes most of its energy to its costumes and makeup, which are fabulous. But that and a tabloid-worthy star just aren't enough to revisit this sordid tale as a kind of twisted comedy.

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

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

Hokey, inept tear-jerker.

The cast includes Oscar winner Louise Fletcher (Nurse Ratched herself) and Henry Thomas of "E.T.," and the special effects look like they were executed on somebody's laptop.

Markopolos repeatedly tells us he was scared for his life -- accompanied by hokey archival clips and music -- though nothing actually happened to him.

Well, nobody said The Grand was another "Best in Show."

About as exciting as watching someone else's home movies -- albeit, beautifully photographed ones.

A silly, boring supernatural thriller that squanders a potentially interesting premise and the rapper Snoop Dogg in his ostensible starring debut.

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.

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

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."

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.

Evokes such deja vu, you'd swear you'd already fallen asleep on the damned thing in the middle of the night on HBO.

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

Steve Carell is fatally miscast as an arrogant, flamboyant third-rate magician in The Incredible Burt Wonderstone, which by all rights should have been a second-rate Will Ferrell vehicle.

If Carrie Bradshaw ever trades her Manolos for sneakers and starts blogging about raising children, I pray she wouldn't be as tiresome as the heroine of Katherine Dieckmann's insufferable comedy Motherhood.

Harris can be a brilliant actor, and there are flashes of that here. But he's done in by a script that lacks any subtlety.

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.

An uninspired recycling of themes that were far more gripping in "The Lion King" and countless other earlier Mouse House classics.

Picks up steam when it finally arrives in Cannes just in time to wreak yet more havoc at the big film festival, but getting there is pretty tedious. A little of the wildly mugging Atkinson goes a long way.

Solid cast notwithstanding, 10th and Wolf is a generic, direct-to-video-grade gangster movie.

Tom Arnold plays the fatherly head of a child-prostitution ring and John Malkovich a sympathetic social worker - two clever casting twists that constitute the main interest in the grueling Gardens of the Night.

Pandaemonium plays like a bus-and-truck version of such Ken Russell's '60s classics as "The Music Lovers."

What starts as a fairly lighthearted satire ends in a tiresome, ultra-violent shootout -- and the film pretty much throws away the possibilities of Cruz's gender-bending role.

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

A crass, heavy- handed and -- most unforgivably -- largely laugh-free adaptation of The Master's infrequently revived 1924 comic melodrama.

It would also help if they were given some dialogue that was actually funny, or at least more clever than the lines provided to Ashton Kutcher and Katherine Heigl in the distressingly similar "Killers" from earlier this month.

Soggy, strictly by-the-numbers crime thriller.

A yawn-provoking little farm melodrama.

Writer-director J.S. Cardone's low-budget mishmash offers precious little in the way of thrills and chills, much less coherent storytelling.

“A license to kill is also a license to not kill,” M lectures his new boss in the 24th James Bond film, Spectre. Well, it’s not a license to bore as much as this bloated drag manages to do.

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

Jobs amounts to, at best, a Cliffs Notes version of the man’s early life. If you want the real story, you’ll have to read Walter Isaacson’s fascinating 2011 biography, which would make a much better film than this one.

Less than compelling as drama -- but boy is this an impressive collection of wildly ugly hairstyles, moustaches, clothing and "earth tone" furniture from 1983.

A sloppy and only mildly engaging documentary.

When Neeson engages in bare-knuckle fisticuffs at the climax of the cartoonish Taken 2, I honestly couldn't figure out if the 60-year-old actor was actually present at all except for the close-ups.

A brightly colored but terminally dull cartoon.

A good cast equipped with cute names is forced to muddle through terminal whimsy in this less-than-magical adaptation of Aimee Bender's adult fairy tale, sluggishly directed by Marilyn Agrelo, who more successfully helmed the delightful documentary "Mad Hot Ballroom."

"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.

In the clumsy hands of director Rob Marshall, this tacky, all-star botch more closely resembles a video catalog for Victoria’s Secret.

Suffers from terminal hoof-in-mouth disease.

So unremittingly vulgar and inept it makes "The Best Man" and "Runaway Bride" look like masterpieces by comparison.

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

Basically a deadly dull rehash of "Resident Evil," which in turn was a third-generation clone of "Aliens."

Remarkably dull thriller.

The kind of movie that cries out for the fast-forward button.

This (hopefully) final chapter's interminable first hour...showcases some of the clunkiest dialogue and wooden acting since the most recent "Star Wars" movies.

A raunchy, sporadically funny comedy.

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.

Even dumber than Perry's "Three to Tango," this latest sitcommy exercise is sporadically funny in spite of itself -- and not quite as dreadful as you would suspect.

Incoherent, inept, testosterone-drenched mess, which is very much the brain-dead male equivalent of "Sex and the City 2."

This is less a documentary than a wholly uncritical celebration.

Pretentious, stagy and over-the-top update of Chekov's "The Three Sisters."

The opening montage raises expectations of a serious, politically incisive depiction of the region. What we actually get is an offensively pandering, Bruckheimer-esque riff on the real-life Khobar Towers bombing of 1996, a Saudi Hezbollah attack that killed 19 Americans.

The clichéd and predictable Suspect Zero is the latest evidence that Hollywood has run the serial-killer thriller into the ground through overuse - the same way it earlier exhausted, say, buddy action-comedies.

Amy Sedaris, channeling her inner Frances McDormand as a hyper admissions coach, gets most of the laughs.

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

Murphy has fallen back into the comfortable rut of sloppy family comedies that are low on laughs and high on toilet jokes.

Well-meaning yawn-fest.

Remarkably sluggish and not particularly suspenseful.

Might have worked as a 10-minute sketch.

Slicker than most attempts to document Monroe's successes and tragic trajectory, but even her own words don't provide much more of an insight into what made this troubled icon tick.

The longest 85-minute road trip you could imagine.

A non-starter.

It's not uninteresting, but so much footage is given over to earnest discussion of sexual politics that the overall effect is like sitting through a semester's worth of transgender studies.

Here comes Wayne Kramer's Crossing Over, a bid to create the "Crash" of illegal-immigration dramas.

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

This messy, disappointing, self-important and utterly humorless version of the Marvel comic book character may be the toughest flick with a green protagonist to sit through since "The Grinch."

A depressingly predictable journey of self-discovery.

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

Smartphone apps don’t particularly lend themselves well to political allegory or satire. But that’s precisely what the makers of this fitfully amusing animated adaptation of the once-popular game seem to be fruitlessly attempting.

Filmmaker Josh Stolberg claims to have been inspired by real-life events, but mostly he ineptly rips off other movies and wastes a cast that includes Rosanna Arquette, Adam Arkin and Elizabeth Perkins.

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.

That someone as smart as Duchovny would get bogged down in such predictable treacle is a mystery worthy of investigation by Scully and Mulder.

This intense psycho-sexual drama doesn't easily lend itself to the camera.

Less fun than any circus movie I've ever seen - and I've seen lots. Maybe they should send in the clowns.

Rarely have I wanted to fast-forward through a movie as much as Click, a treacly and not-funny-enough Adam Sandler comedy.

Lust, Caution could have done with a lot more lust and a lot less caution.

Even if Corben hadn't photographed Gatien with lighting that makes him look like a horror-movie villain, he'd hardly come off as innocent.

A murky and morbid dirge of a gay romance.

The characters are so cartoonish, it's hard to care on any level -- except that it wastes such talented performers.

Watching Meryl Streep act can be an exhausting experience - and never more so than during Music of the Heart.

Unlike Van Sant's grittier, less sentimental recent small films, it's twee enough to make your teeth ache. It's the director's biggest miscalculation since "Even Cowgirls Get the Blues" 18 years ago.

This overlong, obvious and indifferently acted melodrama was written and directed by Luke Eberl, a former child actor, before he turned 21.

Coming-of-age road trips have rarely been more tedious or predictable.

A truly baffling late entry in the "Pulp Fiction" sweepstakes that ends up drowning in its own pretensions -- along with, quite possibly, what's left of Val Kilmer's movie career.

An unrelenting assault on the brain and eardrums.

Dicey entertainment, indeed.

The kind of thriller whose ridiculous climax hinges on a hitherto undisclosed GPS tracking device in a dog's collar - an appropriate touch in a movie that's more than a little flea-ridden itself.

The real coup de grace for this would-be serious-minded drama is the sledgehammer-subtle direction of Paul Weitz (who is also the screenwriter), who enabled his star's paycheck mugging in the execrable "Little Fockers."

If you insist on seeing Soul Men, stick around during the closing credits for the best part of the movie, an interview with Mac.

Slick as a pig and reeking of phony sympathy for recession-wracked consumers, The Joneses is a black comedy about stealth marketing made by a filmmaker who's evidently much too close to the subject to bite the hand that feeds him.

Solid performances can't save Melissa Painter's pretentious teen drama Steal Me, which plays like a cross between "Dangerous Skin" (without the gay sex) and "Picnic" (without the production values or credible situations).

A screwball farce that pulls off a pitifully low percentage of its gags, even with a star-crammed cast.

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

With thinly drawn characters, uneven performances and tin-eared dialogue, Stonewall plays at best like a musical without the songs.

Sitcomish, stereotypical and sporadically funny romantic comedy.

Milks the very real problem of "organ tourism" for all the melodrama and car chases it's worth.

The pretentious and unrelievedly glum first feature from music-video and advertising director Nenad Cicin-Sain, The Time Being looks sharp, but it’s about as dramatically satisfying as watching paint dry.

The effects are cheesy, the photography is murky, the sets look like leftovers from a Las Vegas stage spectacular -- and the flick appears to have been edited with a roulette wheel.

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.

Who let this dog out?

Slow-witted and occasionally unintentionally hilarious.

This excruciating adaptation of the innocuous '70s cartoon show makes the film version of "Josie and the Pussycats" look sophisticated by comparison.

None of this is remotely funny or interesting.

The low point of the new Shall We Dance comes when Miss Paulina finally confesses why she's so sad.

A lame teen comedy.

Slow-moving, yawn-inducing remake.

This is an exhausting, eyeball-gougingly ugly 90-minute assault of non-stop action, with an all-star voice cast shouting witless lines and a wide variety of objects lobbed at the audience in the crudest 3-D fashion.

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

Despite much effort, neither Johnson nor director George Tillman Jr. ("Notorious") can make this preposterous tale, live up to its title.

If the once red-hot Vin Diesel's overhyped career wasn't finished off by last summer's mega flop "The Chronicles of Riddick," the alleged family comedy The Pacifier ought to do the trick.

Elaborate vanity production.

This mess was directed with no skill whatsoever by Jesse Dylan, whose father, Bob, once urged us all to get stoned.

Un-magical, unfunny and un-romantic alleged comedy.

Indulges in some of the crudest Jewish stereotypes seen in a recent movie, right down to the crack about every Jewish girl having a nose job.

Despite solid contributions by vets such as Michael Lerner and Daniel Stern, Caleo isn't able to sell The Last Time - not the affair and especially not the ludicrous twist ending.

The stars' utter failure to create sparks is only one of the problems with this Labor Day weekend dump job.

The sort of lowbrow sports comedy best enjoyed on a 50-inch screen with a six-pack, a bucket of wings and a fast-forward button.

A labored romantic farce whose only asset is Carlos Leon, best known as the father of Madonna's daughter Lourdes.

Ineptly written and directed, the nihilistic The Son of No One flaunts an attitude best summed up by a cynical Pacino -- "A man has to live with s--t.'' Maybe so, Al, but audiences have the option of skipping this bomb.

Mostly unfunny, extremely silly pingpong comedy.

A flaccidly pretentious and snooze-inducing trilogy of allegedly racy tales.

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.

A shipwreck. They say a dead fish stinks from the head first - but the animated shipwreck Shark Tale arrives reeking all over.

The MPAA's rating explanation for this PG-13-rated snoozer misleadingly claims it contains "intense sequences of terror/violence"; it would be more accurate to state that Boogeyman contains "virtually every horror-movie cliché of the past 30 years."

More "it stinks" than *NSYNC.

Basically a much schmaltzier fantasy version of “Love Story.’’

“Scratch the surface and there’s only more surface,’’ a character all too accurately observes in this clunky, ugly and dull mash-up of a mystery.

So nasty, hysterical and long-winded -- and unintentionally makes capital punishment foes look so twisted -- you wish someone had administered a lethal injection to this dreck in its planning stages.

Suspenselessly directed by Robby Henson, Thr3e commits the eighth deadly sin - boredom.

A trite, incoherent and pretentious bomb.

Crashing chandelier, crashing bore.

Any way you slice it, A Tale of Two Pizzas is so ineptly written and directed that it's pretty soggy entertainment.

A slow-moving, dirt-dull narrative crammed with clunky expository dialogue and obscure Biblical references.

A total disaster.

Dear John is the sort of movie that gives tearjerkers a bad name.

Isn't particularly funny, romantic or well-acted. It drags on endlessly.

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.

Shlocky, sloppy and crass adolescent comedy.

Rock appears to have edited I Think I Love My Wife with a roulette wheel.

A bland, dull and only occasionally funny waste of time that will very soon be gathering dust in the remainder bins.

The sort of misfire that Hollywood has long buried in January.

Wastes some veteran performers in a slight, silly musical fantasy with two left feet.

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.

Veteran screenwriter John Pogue, in his second directorial outing, tries repeatedly and mostly unsuccessfully to jolt his audience by amping up the abundant sound effects to ear-shattering levels.

Most of the interviews are as brief as they are obvious, and it doesn't help that none of those interviewees, including clergymen who served as technical advisers, are identified.

Excruciatingly unfunny.

There's no excuse for a thriller as lame, leaden and unthrilling as Godsend, which manages to take a potentially interesting subject - human cloning - and use it to put audiences to sleep.

Interminably long, dull and incomprehensible, John Carter evokes pretty much every sci-fi classic from the past 50 years without having any real personality of its own.

Tiresome cavalcade of bickering — which feels like it lasts even longer than your typical Thanksgiving dinner.

Aside from a relatively brief appearance by Joan Cusack's avatar as the kidnapped mother, there are no involving characters or situations.

A truly repulsive piece of trash that says far more about the absence of values from contemporary filmmaking than the waywardness of teens.

Like “Traffic’’ on a massive dose of downers, Ridley Scott’s The Counselor is a great-looking and star-filled but lethally pretentious, talky, lethargic drama.

Even an appearance by Alec Baldwin as Moretz's eventual - if highly unlikely - savior isn't enough to keep Hick from leaving a bad taste.

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."

The schmaltzy Diana is directed at a dirge-like pace by German director Oliver Hirschbiegel, whose film “Downfall’’ depicted the final days of Hitler and provided one of the Internet’s most enduring memes.

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

The sad truth is these durable 80-year-old characters, who peaked with a 1950s TV series, never even come to life in this bloated, misshapen mess, a stillborn franchise loaded with metaphors for its feeble attempts to amuse, excite and entertain.

Have you ever seen a movie without a single believable moment? Perfect Stranger, a convoluted and altogether risible thriller with Halle Berry and Bruce Willis, manages this difficult feat.

Sometimes there's a fine line between a labor of love and a vanity project, and The Lost City, Andy Garcia's heartfelt - but hackneyed and interminable - love letter to his native Cuba, repeatedly crosses it.

Despite this seemingly surefire premise and cast of veteran comedians - there's even a cameo by Liza Minnelli as a masturbation coach - The OH in Ohio just lies there, without a single laugh.

The only hint of professionalism comes from Cheech Marin as Cannon's boss, who at times seems to be acting in a different movie.

Toothless, unbelievable and not particularly funny, New Suit is no threat to "The Player," "Swimming With Sharks" or "The Big Picture," to name but three more interesting pictures in this inside-baseball genre.

A very belated and very silly follow-up to "Death Wish."

Charles Busch's spoof of beach-party movies and psychological thrillers, an off-Broadway hit 13 years ago, stubbornly refuses to entertain in this unrelentingly dull film version.

A good cast can't save The Lodger, the utterly wrongheaded fourth movie version of a 1910 novel inspired by Jack the Ripper.

Repo Men is a rare film where Toronto plays itself. It's also the first I've ever seen where a typewriter is used as a lethal weapon.

Rates an "E" for effort -- and a "B" for boring.

An utterly clueless, relentlessly grim and rambling action epic guaranteed to displease devout Jews, Christians and Muslims alike, amuse atheists — and generally bore everyone.

The stars look bored out of their minds when the fourth episode of the franchise stalls between racing sequences.

A cheesy, often unintentionally funny, direct-to-video-caliber knockoff of "Aliens" that couldn't be more shallow.

The only prize this shamelessly derivative schlock is likely to be in the running for is the year's dullest thriller.

This low-caliber Gun Shy has singularly ugly cinematography by Tom Richmond that at one point shows off Bullock's facial hair.

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

Without any believable characters or situations, Reindeer Games is about as appealing as leftover Christmas fruitcake.

It's loaded with -- scenery-chewing melodrama, cornball pidgin dialogue and syrupy music.

A toothless, dated Seventh Avenue satire with shaky script, direction and acting - is the movie equivalent of something you'd find on the deep-markdown rack at Daffy's.

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."

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.

Ryan, the bodacious Seven of Nine on "Star Trek Voyager," is the only excuse to suffer through writer-director Harry Ralston's feeble comedy.

Annoying.

Except for Brolin as an unlikely born-again Jew, nobody fares well under Mulroney's ham-fisted direction.

Most of this movie is beyond lame. It almost makes "A Cinderella Story" -- the ever-mugging Duff's surprise hit of last summer -- look like a real movie by comparison.

About as artistically profound as those framed 3-D photos of the Twin Towers emblazoned with "Never Forget'' that are still for sale in Times Square a decade after 9/11.