Maitland McDonagh

It's all mean-spirited, foulmouthed sniping.

Hopelessly muddled film cries out for the firm hand of a dyed-in-the-wool cynic like Billy Wilder, who would have put some teeth in its jabs at amoral politicians and blindly ambitious journalists.

The sad thing is that Arnett, Shepard and McBride quickly establish a loose, easy camaraderie that's a real pleasure to watch. The shame is that they're working with such unrewarding material.

A stale rehash of Woody Allen-style "he's a neurotic Jew, she's a flaky shiksa" gags.

That the 27-year-old Usher isn't much of an actor is no surprise, but he's strikingly uncharismatic for someone who's been in the spotlight since he was six.

The story vacillates between broad, kid-friendly gags and a series of oddly sour riffs on the theme of adult sibling rivalry.

This trashy, overwrought thriller gets itself worked up into a fine, sleazy lather that recalls the matricidal glories "Die! Die! My Darling!" and "You'll Like My Mother", then wimps out at the end.

The trouble is that Turturro's reach considerably exceeds his grasp.

It's familiar stuff if you've sampled the vast body of work devoted to LA-dammerung.

Though Verow attended the American Film Institute and has made more than a dozen shorts and features since 1994, his low-budget gay-themed films are characterized by phenomenal indifference to framing, sound quality and performance. If his relentless amateurishness is deliberate, it's self-defeating; if not, it's inexplicable: Most people who do anything for more than a decade get better at it.

This live-action cartoon tries to walk the line between pleasing the faithful and appealing to a broad-based action audience. It fails on both fronts: It's too lifeless and watered-down to stand on its own high heels, but commits the cardinal sin of messing with the original.

The film's major draws are R-rated gore and some nice physical effects, proof that a man in a top-of-the-line monster suit can still be more effective than CGI.

Peppermint is a bloody crowd-pleaser, but it’s fundamentally forgettable, the kind of movie whose details begin to disappear the moment the credits roll.

For all the sex and slicing, the most shocking thing about it is how dreary it is.

Ironically, Faris' Samantha is the most convincing personality in the mix: She's a grotesque caricature of Courtney Love by way of Nancy Spungen, a vulgar, selfish monster of unbridled id, but you always know where she's coming from.

The loose, rambling conversations that substitute for action might be more interesting if any of the characters were capable of real introspection. But they're so shallow and distracted they can't even manage sustained navel-gazing, which makes their so-called relationships profoundly uninteresting.

Marvel-man Mark Steven Johnson, who wrote and directed "Daredevil" (2003) and scripted "Elektra" (2005), continues to demonstrate the wrong way to make comic book movies: Make sure special effects overwhelm the characters, let campy mannerisms go unchecked and be sure dialogue is declaimed rather than spoken.

A ludicrous mishmash undermined by ghastly performances and a hopelessly convoluted screenplay.

It's a one-gag film that rises or falls on how funny you find the sight of fat, grease-slicked Jack Black crammed into spandex pants and capering like an epileptic lamb.

It goes without saying that the humor is vulgar and juvenile.

Thinly conceived and thoroughly shallow.

The whole film is plagued by a sense of false, desperate cheerfulness.

Pays backhanded homage to Woody Allen via the travails of college loser Max (Gary Lundy), who fears that years of wallowing in "Annie Hall" have permanently poisoned his love life.

Noisy, derivative and thoroughly preposterous even by the standards of 21st-century action movies.

Tedious and obscure where it was apparently meant to be atmospheric and tantalizing.

Larry Bishop's painfully self-conscious homage to biker films of yesteryear is a carefully crafted pastiche that doesn't miss a wild-deadly-angels-devils-sadists-revenge cliché and can't hold a candle to the down-and-dirty likes of "The Glory Stompers."

The film pulls off a couple of "gotchas!", but the subtle creepiness of its predecessors is gone, replaced by a sense of numbing predictability.

Postal's touches of wit are lost in the flying body parts, gross-out gags, and the full frontal spectacle of Foley's no-longer-private parts.

The movie's film-studentish navel-gazing wears thin long before its over.

A crude, artless bogey tale.

Steve Austin is conspicuously inarticulate and uncharismatic. Former soccer lout Vinnie Jones, whom no one will ever mistake for Laurence Olivier, acts rings around him.

Welsh-born actor Roger Rees bares body and soul in director/cowriter Eric Werthman's handsomely photographed examination of the dynamic that unites a masochist and the sex worker who caters to his desires.

This formulaic mess of sports-movie cliches and self-esteem claptrap contains a couple of funny bits, but you have to slog through a lot of done-to-death bodily function jokes to get to them.

First-time writer-director Robert Edwards is nothing if not ambitious, attempting to encapsulate the history of totalitarian oppression and misguided revolutionary zeal into a broad, blunt, black comedy.

M. Night Shyamalan's sixth film mines a rich lode of end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it clichés, but while the set up is spooky, the development is heavy handed and marred by Shyamalan's inability to write natural-sounding dialogue or convincing characters.

Rip Torn, Linda Hunt and Jerry O'Connell mark time in minor supporting roles.

It's by no stretch of the imagination a good film, but it delivers what it promises: naked girls whaling on each other, flesh-ripping zombies and genre stalwart Todd growling and glowering satanically from beneath a mane of dreadlocks - the He-Who-Kills teeth are a nice touch.

A shameless puddle of romantic slop.

The occasional eerie moment can't elevate this routine piece of by-the-numbers J-horror above the pack.

Who will survive and what will be left of them? If you don't have a pretty good idea, this is not the movie for you. If you do, rest assured you've seen it all before.

Morgan borrows Christmas-specific nastiness from a wide range of fright flicks, but the result is less than the sum of its parts.

Though Keaton is convincing as a smarmy narcissist who secretly thinks he deserves to fail because writing plays isn't REAL work, he's also thoroughly unlikable -- a problematic trait in a protagonist.

If the characters were more interesting, the long, long buildup to their night of ghostly reckoning might be suspenseful rather than tedious.

It's tough going relieved only by some lovely Irish scenery. -

The most shocking thing about this ludicrous serial-killer shocker, released the week troubled 21-year-old former child star Lindsay Lohan was arrested on DUI and cocaine-possession charges, is that it's the kind of film actresses generally make when their careers are well and truly on the skids.

Proof that the US has no monopoly on white-trash humor.

John Gulager's directing debut is horror at its most reductive and least resonant.

Ultimately, Speed Kills feels startlingly like a 1990s direct-to-video action movie with an inexplicably inflated budget.

The films of writer/director Francis Veber are a bracing reminder that French comedies can be every bit as broad, unsophisticated and cliched as their American counterparts.

A slack combination of faith-based inspiration and broad 'hood comedy.

There's no meat on this film's borrowed bones: They're polished to an exquisitely tasteful shine, but efforts to class up exploitation are pointless.

For all its crudeness, Phillips' tale of men behaving badly is remarkably toothless.

The outtakes that accompany the end credits suggest that making the movie was a blast; it's a shame the same can't be said for watching it.

Too elliptical to be convincing.

Insipid, formulaic and suitable for the dumbed-down sensibilities of lowest-common-denominator couch potatoes.

Bean carves out his own modest variations on the theme of John Ryder-on-the-storm, but Bush and Knighton are so blandly forgettable that it's hard to believe that they're the protagonists and not Victims 1 and 2.

So overwrought that it quickly crosses the line into unintentionally funny and never recovers.

Like Doom itself, the movie is rich in backstory, but sparse in actual story.

It's hard to know who bears the brunt of the blame for The Eye's stunning dullness.

Black comedy requires perfect pitch: Pedro Almodovar has it and cowriters/directors Michalis Reppas and Thanasis Papathanasiou don't, at least by the evidence of this film.

There's less than meets the eye to writer-director Flowers' time-hopping narrative, and what could have been a routine but entertaining crime story gets hopelessly muddled in its telling, despite the efforts of a generally strong cast.

Astonishingly inept drama.

The supernatural plot elements are developed so unconvincingly that the story seems to be about people ruining their own lives by believing in stupid superstitions, so it’s a shock to realize the ghostly goings-on are meant to be taken seriously.

There may be a way to remake 1973's cult thriller The Wicker Man, in which a deeply Christian cop has his religious convictions shaken to the core as he investigates the disappearance of a child from within a cheerfully pagan community, but Neil LaBute didn't find it.

Watts is good -- occasionally very good -- and her willingness to be filmed at unflattering angles, in pore-wallowing or with bright blue ice cream smeared on her face is admirable.

It takes a certain genius to make butchered corpses, sociopathic lunacy and meth-fueled debauchery nerve-scrapingly dull, and German director Marc Schoelermann and screenwriters Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor (Crank) possess it.

To call the film noisy and brainless isn't even a criticism - it's unadulterated auto-porn, as shallow and shiny as it wants to be.

The result is a soggy swamp of nyah-nyah-nyah-nyah-nyahing, its only grace notes are Giamatti's fine, nuanced performance as Heep and Christopher Doyle's handsome cinematography.

For a family-friendly holiday comedy, it's still coarse, formulaic and occasionally just plain weird.

The charismatic Rajskub, who played a prickly computer geek on TV's "24," has nothing to do as Jack's loyal secretary.

The thrills are few and the expository dialogue tediously overwhelming in this preachy cautionary tale about getting too big for one's britches.

The willowy Danes' rich, melancholy characterization is sown in a barren field of snippy attitude and too-cool posturing, and the film's disingenuous air of bittersweet chic becomes deeply tiresome long before it's over.

The best thing about it is the cast. Baldwin's moronic Barney is an acquired taste, but Krakowski is an adorable, sassy Betty, and Johnston brings an endearing coltishness to the sensible Wilma.

Frankly, the film's nostalgia for the "coffee, tea or me?" era of flying, when stewardesses were fantasy figures in soaring heels and uniforms tailored for bust enhancement rather than utility, is retro in all the wrong ways.

This vapid, mean-spirited comedy is Lopez's show, and though she is utterly unconvincing as a paragon of down-to-earth virtues, the last laugh was hers from the outset.

The less you demand of this bloody, by-the-numbers sequel, the more you'll enjoy it.

The script, by co-writers and -directors Douglas McGrath and Peter Askin, is intermittently clever, but their direction is leaden and assassinates every gag with a lethal accuracy the CIA could only hope to achieve.

The film seems longer than its 93-minute running time, but kids will probably enjoy its potty humor, many scenes of 4-year-olds getting the better of harried adults and the inevitable moment when a cute little girl kicks the fat guy in the nads.

There's some fun to be had in seeing two of TV's resident sweetie pies, Campbell and ER's Noah Wyle, play unrepentant sons of bitches, but it's not enough.

Vonnegut's brand of juvenile surrealism...doesn't age especially well...but it could hardly be worse served than to be brought to the screen with such ham-fisted literal-mindedness.

Despite its provocative premise, this throwback to deliberately paced, low-tech chillers of the pre-CGI era is a dreary slog through haunted-child movie cliches -- portentous dreams, glassy-eyed stares, cryptic pronouncements.

If it weren't all so cluelessly sleazy it might be funny.

Unfortunately, the mystery isn't mysterious and the characters are caricatures; the wintery New England landscape is the most striking thing about the film, but it's not interesting enough to justify watching it for 100 minutes.

When a performer as sharp as Cedric the Entertainer is reduced to funny fat-guy shtick, you know you're in the presence of grinding mediocrity.

It's all terribly schematic, thematically obvious and not in the least bit funny.

Earnest but unenlightening drama.

Production values are low -- though, mercifully, the sound recording is clear -- and overall the project smacks of juvenile hijinks.

Preposterous plotting and interchangeable young actors.

Even by the debased standards of preachy sports movies aimed at kids, this is pabulum.

Though once capable of writing distinct characters, Toback now populates his pictures with one-dimensional conceits who all talk like undereducated hustlers, from college professors to bottom feeders and international lions of business.

This coarse, nearly incoherent action picture apparently aspires to a 'Pulp Fiction"-like mixture of brutality and self-referential insouciance.

A leaden, tone-deaf remake of the 1955 Ealing comedy starring Alec Guinness, the Coen brothers' painfully unfunny rehash hinges on the duel of wits between five larcenous oddballs and one sweet but strong-willed old lady.

So shallow and brainless it's in perpetual danger of drying up and blowing away.

Why would anyone who wanted his or her film to be taken seriously saddle it with a cutesy title like this?

This sour coming of age story is a testament to his self-centeredness and dogged perseverance.

This film will doubtless interest serious anime fans, but it won't win any converts.

This noisy, time-wasting spectacle is crammed with what purports to be characters, except that not one of them has any more depth than will fit into a one-line description.

The locations and production design are breathtakingly beautiful. But though cast largely with Chinese actors, it was shot in English, which no doubt made business sense but almost certainly accounts for many truly awful performances.