Maitland McDonagh

(Griffith's) appearance often verges on the grotesque. Which, come to think of it, could be said of the movie as well.

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.

Lame, derivative comedy.

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

It's all mean-spirited, foulmouthed sniping.

So consistently, outrageously wrongheaded in every way it's hard to know where to start.

A crudely executed affair that doesn't play well to Western sensibilities.

Lazy, superficially au courant and utterly forgettable.

So awash in tired ethnic clichés that the story drowns.

This stage-bound farce could easily be an American sitcom: It's all slamming doors, eavesdropping and stupid miscommunications, garnished with a heavy-handed helping of comedy of humiliation.

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

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

Its misogyny, homophobia and overall grossness undermine the tired gags, and its relentless portrayal of African-American women as money-grubbing hootchie mamas (the sole exception is, of course, Dre's mom) would be wholly unacceptable if a white filmmaker had been at the helm.

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.

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

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.

This amateurish picture was built around surfing footage that Mikelson shot for a Compaq computer ad and developed with an eye for accommodating a series of lush tropical locations: It's no wonder the plot and characters feel like afterthoughts.

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.

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

Toback quickly reveals himself as an insufferable, opinionated blowhard who pontificates shamelessly about the art of the cinema while indulging his own obsessions on film.

Played for Maverick-like comedy, the film might have coasted on Harris and Mortensen's dialogue. But played straight it's both dull and preposterous.

If it were half an hour shorter, China Salesman (released overseas as Deadly Contract, the epitome of generic titling) might be a candidate for “so bad it’s good (or at least kind of fun)” status. But it’s not.

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.

There's never a dull moment and seldom one that isn't sublimely ridiculous.

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.

Its real problem is that Matilda Dixon, apparently conceived as a cross between the Blair Witch and Freddy Krueger, is an oddly characterless bogeyman, perhaps because she's 100 percent special effects technology with no actor underneath.

This limp, forgettable fluff is as preachy and heavy-handed as the "Goofus and Gallant" cartoons that a generation of children far less media-savvy than today's recognized as ham-fisted lessons in good behavior masquerading as funny strips.

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.

The film rings so consistently false that it's more likely to induce snickers and eye-rolling.

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.

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 not precisely charismatic, Statham brings authentic athleticism and a certain cheeky presence to his lightly written role.

An excruciating series of gags aimed at kids old enough to think it's funny when a grown-up acts like a small child.

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

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.

Only die-hard and undemanding Chan fans need apply.

Director Jesse Peretz, onetime bassist for The Lemonheads, cut his teeth on music videos and appears to have embraced the austere aesthetics of Dogme 95 filmmakers without comprehending that an interesting story and well-developed characters are supposed to be part of the package.

Juvenile and pointless.

The parade of eccentrics never ends, and Stone's near-miraculous achievement is to drain the life right out of material so sordid you'd think it couldn't help but be interesting. A must to avoid.

If you can't spell "bogeyman," you shouldn't make movies about him.

The only serendipitous touch is the casting of New York's "quality of life" watchdog, Rudolph Giuliani, as himself.

Depending on your taste, either much hilarity or a tedious barrage of tasteless, juvenile pranking ensues. Trust your instincts.

A crude, artless bogey tale.

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.

This dreary science-fiction/historical-action hybrid is a misfire of staggering proportions.

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.

This whimsical weeper gets off to an awkward start and never finds its footing.

Everyone involved seems to have been operating from the presumption that gross and blasphemous equals hilarious. Would that it did.

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

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

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

Films like this are the definition of "critic proof"; if the casting, synopsis and very concept don't deter you, you'll probably find it very funny.

This oddly flat serial-killer picture shows none of the baroque flair that characterizes the best of Italian horror filmmaker Dario Argento's work.

Thinly conceived and thoroughly shallow.

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 first fruit of wunderkinder Alicia Silverstone's First Kiss Productions, this muddled thriller-cum-romantic comedy of errors suggests that she might want to lay off the producing for a few years.

You can see the outline of an interesting movie beneath the cutesy-pie characterizations and heavy-handed mockery of small-town small-mindedness, but any chance it might have had is short-circuited by director Griffin Dunne's overwhelming inability to establish a consistent tone for the admittedly off-kilter material.

It's not the bomb on the plane that scuttles this film: It's the mugging, ham-fisted direction and total absence of comic timing.

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.

Witless farce.

It's not that you can't go home again. It's that you SHOULDN'T, at least not in a lowbrow Hollywood comedy, because your family will inevitably be lewd, crude, loud and obnoxious.

A failure on every level.

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

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.

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 heart of the problem may be that real life youth-sports insanity has far exceeded the bounds of family-friendly comedy.

Too elliptical to be convincing.

The best you can say is that it's all pretty harmless and pretty stupid.

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

A romantic comedy whose sour take on romance never manages to be comic.

A painfully self-conscious comedy that mistakes relentless self-referentiality for cleverness, this half-witted misfire is filled with accelerated motion, repeated and overlapping scenes, direct address to the camera and other cliches of defamiliarization.

No cliché is unturned, no "dog duty" pun avoided (get it -- dog doody), no creepy gay-panic subtext unplumbed in this family comedy.

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

These lessons are driven home via silly dialogue ("Her name was Marion and she loved volcanoes...") and painfully predictable plot complications, repeated often enough that there's no need to take notes, except for the benefit of friends who fall asleep.

In search of inspiration and the human spirit triumphant, they managed to cook up a pot of sanctimonious, reductive claptrap (which the credits confess was only "inspired" by Quinn's book) that's not in the least instructive or entertaining.

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

Most of the scenes fall flatter than a lead soufflé, and the film's sight gags -- Andy dumping campers' bodies by the roadside, Gene humping the refrigerator -- are outrageous without actually being funny.

Coarse, cliched and clunky.

Self-indulgent wallow in privileged malaise.

The movie takes a desperately wrong turn about 45 minutes in, and you can almost hear the great sucking sound as the whole thing churns down the drain in a swirl of narrative contradictions.

Rob Reiner's feel-good tear-jerker, in which dying well is the best revenge, wants to be heartwarming. But first-timer Justin Zackham's screenplay is so stridently formulaic and disingenuous that the film falls flat at every inspirational turn.

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

All but the most easily pleased kids will be bored as can be, and anyone who has fond memories of TV's Leave It to Beaver would probably rather not besmirch them.

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.

Hard though this antic farce tries to be outrageous, its satirical jabs at American culture are obvious and juvenile, as is the use of Jimmy's plastic bubble as a goofy metaphor for fear of life.

A riot of artfully grungy hotel rooms, sleazy costumes and sordid behavior, Allan Mindel's directing debut gives off the smug air of hipsters at play, making it hard to care what happens to any of its lost souls and inept opportunists.

The final irony is that it's tailored for a PG-13 audience: The violence is bloodless, the sex is all come-on and the surreally reckless stunts cater to viewers too young to drive.

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

Puerile, gross and pandering to the lowest impulses of teenage boys.

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

First-time writer-director Ryan Shiraki's crude, gross comedy of campus sexual errors might push boundaries better were it not so painfully unfunny.

Where else are you going to find an extended riff on the weird, weird world of David Lynch movies, an homage to "The Shining" and flatulence gags in the same place?

The greatest hits of '70s bar-rock soundtrack - "We're an American Band," "Right Place, Wrong Time," "Sweet Home Alabama," "Magic Carpet Ride" etc. - has a certain rollicking, kick-ass energy that, unfortunately, never rubs off on the movie.

The result is an unpleasant slog to an unrewarding conclusion that feels far longer than it is.

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

Buono is truly charming, and the film delivers a handful of genuine laughs -- low laughs, but laughs nonetheless; if only they weren't so few and far between.

A convoluted exercise in shifting perspectives and fractured storytelling.

Amateurish performances from nonprofessional actors undermine this ultra-low-budget crime drama.