Luke Y. Thompson

Unfortunately, it's also pretty banal -- translating the songs into English reveals just how dull their lyrics and sentiments really are. The colors are pretty though.

Your individual tolerance for Jimmy Buffett music will determine how well all the scenes set to his music go down.

The goal of a movie like Dig ought to be simple: keep ratcheting up the tension to the point that when our main character(s) finally turn the tables, it’s hugely cathartic. Unfortunately, the “ratcheting” part is where Dig fails to hit paydirt.

James does a decent job with what he’s been given, but it’s never clear exactly what the movie hopes to do with his character. Is this just another crime and punishment retread? Or is it meant to serve as a metaphor for dealing with grief while disabled? It’s too broad to work as the latter, and too unhurried for the former.

The movie at times feels like an eternal cycle of the nine-minute ride, which loses its luster after 123 of those minutes. It offers you this chilling challenge—find a way out! Better yet, refrain from being the mortal foolish enough to enter in the first place.

From the cast to its odd, intriguing locations, Sigal was successful in assembling many of the right ingredients. Unfortunately, they lack a chef who knows how to properly combine them, whether that’s to create a meaningful sense of cohesion or to truly create the kind of beautiful chaos that makes Lynch such a mesmerizing source of inspiration.

For a solid portion of its running time, Gigi & Nate at least delivers what it promises: a young man and his monkey—to be more specific, a young, newly quadriplegic man and his service monkey.

Far be it from us to actively reveal what scuttles Zemeckis’ film, but let’s just say that it seems like the people who made its biggest creative choices have more wood for brains than the character they brought to life.

As intriguing as the combination of Binoche and Grillo might sound, it would be much more impactful if they shared the screen for more than a handful of scenes. As such, the movie begins with a bang, but it ends with a whimper.

In the wrestling ring, Cena used to wear a shirt which read “Rise Above Hate,” and indeed, he does so here. It would be better if he found a project where he didn’t have to.

Generally speaking, the best kinds of story surprises illuminate the material; the worst simply laugh at you for falling for red herrings. Much of what happens in The Twin bounces back and forth between those ends of the spectrum.

For the first half-hour, Netflix has a high-concept hit on its hands. Pause it there, and imagine the rest—you won’t do any worse than Barris and Hill’s script at conceiving an ending.

The movie's not without moments of genuine humor--no comedy starring Steve Martin could be--but sad to say, his Oscar-hosting gig two years ago was funnier.

Film falls into the same trap as the book: a moderately interesting setup ultimately undone by an ending that makes the audience feel like fools for investing any sympathy with the characters.

It's not a terrible premise -- It is, however, terribly executed.

It isn't until Joe starts getting confident and cocky that Allen starts to feel a little more natural in the role, and by then the movie's plot has all but evaporated into a series of wispy gags that barely register.

Rebound isn't funny.

Some fairly standard shenanigans ensue, and when the clichéd high school culture clash stuff stops, there's clichéd cop movie stuff going on.

No less amusing than an average sitcom, but that's certainly not reason enough to buy a ticket.

Stallone's script is well structured, though the jaw-droppingly banal dialogue gives us little reason to care.

High Tension often feels like a ’70s exploitation movie in the best sense; unfortunately, the ending is so bad that it mars everything that comes before.

Nothing worse than a silly movie that takes itself seriously, that bores us to death while we wait for the finale that comes too late.

It's hard to see why her audience seems so much more rabid than that of other, funnier comics. The secret seems to be in her appeal to the gay community.

Too bad it isn't quite funny enough to be mistaken for "Jackass."

It's not a bad film, exactly, just a confused one, too violent to be a straight romance and too focused on aid relief to be an ass-kicking action flick.

Isn't quite as offensive as it sounds, nor is it in any way rousing; Spacey and Bridges are watchable, but nothing more.

The next time Irwin wants to make a feature, however, he should find a director who knows how.

"Center of the World" portrays a much more believable example of what happens when a computer nerd realizes that his erotic fantasies aren't the same thing as love.

The prettiest Dogme film to date may be the one that has the least to say.

Since we know most of this cast is capable of acting, one must assume they received little instruction. Even if they did, who could blame them for not listening? After all, they are dealing with a script that tries to play scenes featuring drunken ghosts with silly accents for tragedy.

Spends most of its 114 minutes on the making of a demo tape. People in a studio, rapping and recording. If you're going to watch that, wouldn't you prefer it to be Dr. Dre, or Lil Jon, or whoever, rather than actors pretending to be their kind?

Where "Twin Falls" was slow, brooding and haunting in a manner that fit the subject matter -- the imminent death of one of the principal characters -- Jackpot is just slow and uneventful, like a cross-country Greyhound bus trip that never stops.

Roberto Schaefer's cinematography keeps things visually interesting, but spending an hour and a half with a gloomy, static lunatic hardly makes for a scintillating evening out, no matter how pretty she may be.

The bottom line, however, is that cheap and unoriginal as The Gift may be, it sucks you in.

It's dull enough to make a Mormon fidget.

Salva directs cheap thrills effectively, but his own apparent desires come off more frightening than any winged demon.

The movie is perhaps most successful as a preview of greater things to come from both Hughley and Union.

It's technically a well-made film: Chandrasekhar, who directed, gives it the look of a studio feature on a sizably smaller budget. It's just the script that betrays its cast.

This mean-spirited little comedy actually isn't bad.

Joe Morton, Linda Hunt and Kathy Bates show up in supporting roles, only to have Costner's flagging energy drag them down, too.

Eternal promises kink and delivers next to nothing.

Director Dwight Little, who has made many mediocre films as well as the gleefully gory Robert Englund version of "The Phantom of the Opera," gets at least one thing right -- he really does take time to establish the characters.

So long as they're only stupidly endangering themselves along the way, it's easy to watch this with a sort of libertarian detachment. It's also annoyingly predictable this time around, though the leads at first maintain their strong chemistry and essential likability.

The sappy trappings that director Raymond De Felitta piles onto the burgeoning romance story line kills any spark that remains, despite the best efforts of the cast to keep it real.

A key problem here is that the film is adapting a short story, and, as such, has to pad it out to feature length -- it still comes in at a scant 82 minutes, about 52 minutes too long.

Full of fits and starts, it never really gets going, stalling at every turn without even giving us enough of what we paid to see -- Snoop Dogg and gore.

The heist itself is quite nicely filmed herein, but unfortunately, getting to it requires sitting through a bunch of noisy, fussy crap, from the overly busy soundtrack to the irritating narration of stoned guy Leonardo Nam.

Imagine a feature-length version of the "Large Marge" sequence from "Pee-wee's Big Adventure" and you won't be too far off, only that was scarier.

Taylor and Pearce just aren't believable.

A film you can dump your kids off at the mall to see in order to get peace and quiet for an hour and a half.

Hilarity should ensue, but it doesn't.

This is fun for a while, but the ending is so ridiculous, and obvious, as to sully all the small joys that come before it.

Unless you count "Lilo & Stitch," this is the first of several surfer-girl movies out of the gate, and it seems clear that in the rush to put it out there, a script was the last thing on Universal's mind.

What this Reagan movie really needed was . . . more Reagan. None of his admirers have his charisma, and none of the footage here is surprising. Fox News could easily produce a better film.

For better or worse -- plenty of both, in fact --it's a movie that has a coherent vision. It's a shame that vision just doesn't happen to be very interesting.

Be forewarned: The rural Irish accents may be incomprehensible to viewers who aren't accustomed to them.

You will regret paying money to see something that unfolds rather like something you'd watch on TV when you're ill and bedridden and confronted with nothing else but daytime soaps.

If sudden loud noises, relentless strobe lights, digital hallucinations and mutilated corpses make you jump, and you feel that nothing more is required for a good time at the movies, welcome to Feardotcom.

The budget is low and the acting grade C at best, but director Lorena David stages one or two genuinely impressive stunts, and the script, by newbies Scott Duncan and Ned Kerwin, manages to skillfully maintain the plot's central mystery all the way to the end.

At least the jump scares are effective, especially in IMAX theaters where the headrests rumble every time Valak makes a sudden move. That, and a couple of decent makeup tricks are pretty much all The Nun II has. The character deserves better, and so do you really.

Watching it feels like attending a Halloween party and never striking up a conversation with anyone; you can only look at the decorations for so long before getting bored.

There’s a funny notion in Chris Evans effectively playing a damsel in distress, but like everything else in Ghosted, the filmmakers have no idea how to play it.

Cut God Is A Bullet down to a tight 90 minutes, and it might at least consistently deliver the cheap thrills and nihilistic kick it only occasionally achieves.

If Alfred Hitchcock were retarded, lobotomized, and freshly dug up, he might possibly c--- out a movie like this one.

Of all the various low-budget documentaries chronicling the Star Wars phenomenon, Tariq Jalil's is certainly the most recent. There's not a whole lot else to say about it.

If you were ever in marching band, you'll love this; if not, stay far away.

You probably saw this film the last time around, when it was called "Sleeping With the Enemy." This one merely adds a better car chase and more ass-kicking.

What saves the film from utter forgettability are the strong supporting performances, especially from Peter Caffrey as the town atheist, and Tony Doyle.

If you really want to live life to the fullest, step one is to avoid wasting an hour and a half of your life in a theater showing Last Holiday.

It's a bad sign when you're rooting for the film to hurry up and get to its subjects' deaths just so the documentary will be over, but it's indicative of how uncompelling the movie is unless it happens to cover your particular area of interest.

Some of this stuff should give you some good laughs. Unfortunately, the film's not a comedy, and once the conservative-bashing wears off, the alleged thriller elements kick in. Too bad that for you, the viewer, there's still another hour to go.

King's decision to co-write the script and turn it into a CliffsNotes version of The Stand only makes things worse.

This sort of thing is the problem with making stuff up as you go along.

History buffs will find this film lacking, and it isn't really deep enough to educate the rest of us as thoroughly as it should.

Like the recent "Baise-moi," Bully is a whole lot of shock and titillation trying to pretend it's saying something. Unlike the French import, however, there's no awareness of its own absurdity, nor anything for the audience to care about in the slightest.

The co-director/co-writer team of Fabio Guaglione and Fabio Resinaro are none too subtle, and their reliance on hallucination sequences suggests a (misguided) lack of faith in Hammer to pull this off by himself.

Director Marcus Raboy hasn't made a bad movie, exactly -- just one that seems to have forgotten its own jokes, much as those who watch it will forget everything about it a week later, stoned or not.

It's unfortunate that, nudity and all, this is one of Toback's absolute worst efforts.

The best way to watch it is with a loaded bong, the volume turned down and the Orb cranked up on your stereo.

Not just another disposable romantic comedy, but an ambitious, overreaching mess.

So desperate are the filmmakers to create a "hip" western that they try to cram it with action sequences that aren't very exciting.

There's no reason to see this film in a theater -- you'll hate yourself for paying full price. Plus, you'll need beer, and lots of it, to appreciate the movie properly.

The final showdown between sole survivor and killer is sufficiently well done that you wonder why the rest didn't measure up.

Not that there aren't funny moments in the film, but they're cobbled together so awkwardly that you'd never suspect the director had made a film before.

It's a lame Heather Locklear romantic comedy and a lame Hilary Duff romantic comedy all in one!

While not entirely successful, at least deserves points for creativity.

Ultimately, the film amounts to being lectured to by tech-geeks, if you're up for that sort of thing.

So how bad, in the final analysis, is Gigli? The best that can be said is that it doesn't beat out "The Ladies Man" as the most abrasively awful film of the past five years, nor does it top "Battlefield Earth" for sheer misguided lunacy.

That some of the super-visions manage to disturb regardless is arguably a testament to writer-director Stanley Jacobs, but he’d have been better off keeping this as his demo reel and showing whatever he does next to the public at large.

It plays like a parody of suspense movies, then occasionally becomes serious, then boring, then makes a jarring 180, then frustrates, then gets vaguely interesting again.

Less fun than "Cry_Wolf" and "Venom," if that's possible.

No doubt Fox wants to tap into those Latina dollars, but you've got to spend money to make money, and this shoddily cheap-looking product ain't gonna do it.

Hackman, playing it gleefully amoral, walks away with the film, for what that's worth...which is a video rental for fans of the actors involved. Yes, that's video, not DVD -- four bucks at Blockbuster is more than you ought to be paying.

Plays like a knockoff of Michael Bay's already derivative and much more fun "Bad Boys," only with even less plot. It also recalls the worst qualities of John Singleton's mean-spirited "Shaft."

If it had anything that even approached the vaguest vicinity of a plot, The Wash might be a cool diversion for a Saturday afternoon at the mall.

Mandel Holland's direction is uninspired, and his scripting unsurprising, but the performances by Phifer and Black are ultimately winning.

The movie is not without some appeal, mainly due to the fact that the whaling town of Taiji is beautiful to look at, and principals from the original The Cove, Louie Psihoyos and Ric O'Barry, gamely give interviews to explain that of course they want to hear both sides.

It would take the ghost of Stanley Kubrick to get great performances out of Jimmy Fallon, Queen Latifah, and supermodel Gisele Bündchen, and Tim, you're no Stanley.