Maitland McDonagh

An amazing technical accomplishment that never becomes a coherent movie.

This mean-spirited revenge story would once have starred Cole Hauser's father, veteran B-movie psycho Wings Hauser, and played grindhouses and drive-ins. And it would have been a far more entertaining picture.

It has the air of a particularly accomplished student film, by a student whose philosophical concerns outweigh his interest in narrative filmmaking.

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

Is it funny? Sporadically.

Produced by the son of Trinity Broadcasting Network founder Paul Crouch, this historical epic offers a solid two hours of spectacle and intrigue drawn from The Book of Esther by way of Tommy Tenney and Mark Andrew Olsen's novel "Hadassah."

A protracted piece of whimsy.

Chilly, muted and refreshingly free of cheap shocks, this stylish psychological horror tale is greatly enhanced by subtle (acting) performances.

It's really all about the cars, kandy-kolored nitro-injected streamline babies with sweeter curves than a Playboy photo spread, more personality than Rome, Brian and Monica combined and enough juice to send a fleet of rockets to the farthest reaches of the known universe.

A misfire of spectacular proportions.

This by-the-numbers (no pun intended) psychological thrill ride is efficient and utterly soulless.

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

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

Classic Italian splatter directed by Lucio Fulci, reviled and adored in equal proportions by Euro-horror fans.

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

Overall, it's an interesting experiment, but the idea is stronger than the end result.

Welcome Home also features surprisingly strong performances from Ratajkowski, Scamarcio and Paul (“Breaking Bad”) and ends with a nifty little parting shot whose implicit condemnation of mindlessly consuming the lives of others should give audiences a little chill.

There's nothing beneath the flashy editing and self-consciously cool production design but a soulless adrenaline machine that's never scary and rarely engrossing.

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

London-born director Asif Kapadia's second feature, following 2001's critically acclaimed "The Warrior," is a slow, low-key supernatural thriller whose story is too slender to justify its feature-length running time.

First-time feature director Eytan Rockaway (also producer and co-author, with screenwriter Ido Funk, of the film's story) does a commendable job of ratcheting up the scary atmosphere and images.

There's just no reason why it should take more than two hours for so little to happen.

A slow-moving, dramatically slack film.

Diehard Sandler fans will probably find it uproarious, but others will have to make do with the occasional chuckle.

If this is your idea of fun, step right up.

A gloomy-doomy ghost story that gets off to a creepy start and then spirals into flat-out preposterousness.

So low-key that it verges on unconsciousness.

The plot's preposterous and Affleck is way too callow for a role that would have fit Robert Mitchum like a second-hand suit.

Desperate-to-shock slice of sleaze life.

There's something disheartening about seeing real-life stories and their inevitable complexities put through the Hollywood sausage machine and transformed into bland parables about a privileged, wayward young bucks redeemed by wise, infinitely patient mentors and the self-abnegating spirit of team sports.

Abel Ferrara's gift for getting actors to dredge up the ugliest muck in their souls and bare it onscreen is used to strong effect in this psychological thriller.

Hong Kong action pioneer Tsui Hark is in high form here, tricking out the bare-bones story with disorienting camera angles, trick photography and virtuoso action sequences.

No two ways about it: The screenplay is derivative. But the location adds a little novelty to the standard-issue running and screaming.

Formulaic hodge-podge that trades on a certain demographic's affection for the bogeymen of their formative years.

The sweet nostalgia of Travolta and Thurman's reprise of their "Pulp FIiction" dance-floor flirtation cuts through a lot of rubbish, including the Black Eyed Peas' smutty "Sexy."

Tatou IS adorable, but Michele is a such a brainless flibbertigibbet that it's hard to take her spiritual quest at all seriously, and if you don't feel in your heart that she's really TRYING to grow and mature as a spiritual person, then who cares about her idiotic antics?

Hogan returns with what feels like a feature-length vanity project.

The "Bullet" is an amusement-park roller coaster, and the title is a ham-fisted metaphor for facing your fears.

Burnett and Lee's graceful, sympathetic documentary focuses on participants who embody Burning Man's ideals without being blind to the opportunists and party animals it inevitably attracts.

Hopkins and Rock are a surprisingly good mix; Hopkins actually underplays his role as a company man with a barely acknowledged conscience, while Rock's manic impulses aren't allowed to run riot.

Fatuous twaddle posing as a REALLY DEEP consideration of what's wrong with our crazy, mixed-up world, Matthew Ryan Hoge's slick but deeply dumb film unfolds in a picture-perfect suburb of Anywheresville, USA.

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.

The trouble with this satirical take US involvement in Iraq, penned by Mark Leyner, John Cusack and Jeremy Pikser, is that the real thing is equally absurd and only marginally less funny.

Though this frank documentary about extreme sexual practices comes with a cautionary message, it could perhaps use a stronger one.

You come away from the film wishing her the best, but fearing the worst.

It's seldom boring and always beautifully photographed, but it's also considerably less than satisfying, perhaps because its internal logic never comes into focus.

Litvak's broad comedy has novelty on its side, and though the script never rises above sitcom-style one-liners and sight gags, strong performances invest both the jokes and the syrupy moments of forgiveness and reconciliation with no small measure of, yes, heart.

A crass, tedious sequel.

No matter how you parse it, the film is a bizarre muddle.

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.

Surprisingly effective supernatural tale in which there's more to fear from the living than the dead.

The voice-over narration is obvious, but overall the message is integrated into an unusual story that's enhanced by Liberato's and Fulton's appealing performances as the youngsters who see through their elders' lies and help right a terrible wrong.

All of which would be fine if Figgis managed to work up any real suspense, but the film slogs towards its inevitable mano-a-mano showdown like something up to its knees in mud.

The sequence in which the crew acquires press credentials to the Republican National Convention by helping organizers desperate to book a rock band (they deliver Leitch's scruffy pals the Interpreters USSA) is priceless.

And if you never learn much about the man behind the mask, well, that's as Nomi would have wanted it.

Slick and glib when it means to be profound yet ruefully witty; its rhythms are pure sitcom, complete with emotional rimshots.

MacDowell, Staunton and Chancellor are terrific, tearing into their juicy roles and reveling in first-time feature writer-director Jim McKay's sharp-tongued dialogue.

Bright, who reworked co-writer Stephen Johnston's screenplay, changed all the names except Bundy's so he could "make up stuff," but the irony is how close to the facts -- at least to the degree they're known -- he stays.

It's hard to say whether the Wachowski brothers' live action take on the Japanese Speed Racer cartoons is more irritating because it looks like a Hot Wheels video game or because the brothers seem to think that there's a powerful family drama humming away beneath the flashing lights and spinning wheels.

There's nothing hugely wrong with this picture, if you allow for the fact that it's derivative, predictable and crude. There just isn't anything especially right with it, except for a pretty creepy black-and-white nightmare sequence and a scene that reveals more than most people want to know about vampires' urinary peculiarities, but is certainly something you haven't seen before. Unfortunately, both occur within the last 20 minutes of the film, and there's a formulaic lot of nonsense to huff and puff through first.

Brassy and energetic, first-time director Mars Callahan's vividly photographed ode to the seductive allure of professional sharking succeeds in making the game seem genuinely kinetic and thrilling.

It's a compelling story, and very of its tumultuous time.

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

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.

Even by the standards of pop-moral parables passing for entertainment, this is bland stuff.

What a joyless, fussy contraption of a movie!

Mines familiar territory and does nothing especially new with it. On the plus side, Kishitani is a spectacular villain.

The film delivers a few slick thrills before beaching itself on an ending that would be chilling if its depiction of unimaginable horror's lingering legacy weren't so muddled.

The film works best when it's sticking to the guns and poses conventions of macho crime pictures. When it reaches for emotional resonance, the results range from unconvincing to ludicrous.

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

Even Mo'Nique's outsize presence isn't enough to make ancient gags about stuck-up popular girls or about voluptuous vultures clearing a whole buffet table in one fell swoop funny.

Fresh-faced leads Muniz and Bynes are charmers, Giamatti makes Wolf into a splendidly loathsome adversary, and the film is refreshingly free of bodily function jokes.

A spectacular natural disaster spiraling out of control, a crime gone wrong and a poor jerk caught in the middle: Yes, it's a standard action-picture recipe. But what a difference a cast makes.

The production design is phenomenal, reproducing the series' swinging '60s decor and techno-geek flourishes, from the launch pad under the swimming pool to Lady Penelope's pink roadster, which turns into a mini-plane.

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 consistently handsome, the film never quite achieves the shallow but hugely seductive intensity of its MTV-style opening credits sequence.

The film is never dull.

Director Stephen Purvis and writer Chris Haddock never rise above the material's inherent pulpiness, but they keep the twists coming until the very end.

This flashy and ultimately conservative morality tale relies on shockingly frank sex talk to cover the fact that the characters are shockingly poorly developed.

Features generally crisp dialogue, solid performances by a mix of newcomers and familiar character actors, and Provenzano's direction is strikingly accomplished.

The narrative is cluttered with backstory, and the endless digressions overwhelm the efforts of a generally strong cast.

Soulless, sleekly executed product.

Though his film is breathtakingly art-directed, Greenaway wallows in epater le bourgeois nastiness -- his inner naughty child could use a good paddling.

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.

The film is preposterous on so many counts that it's hard to enumerate them.

The breakout star is retired English bouncer Lenny McLean, 49, who memorably declares, "I f***ing hate violence."

Screenwriter Chris ver Weil's directing debut is good-natured and never dull, but its virtues are small and easily overshadowed by its predictability. It's the kind of film that plays better on video than in theaters.

Culkin's Alig has the face of a debauched cherub, but the former child star never quite captures the charisma everyone swears was an essential component in Alig's success. Green's St. James steals the picture out from under him (poetic justice of a sort), and the supporting cast is nothing short of amazing.

Though conceptually clever, the results look stagy and schematic and recall nothing more than a pale imitation of Terry Gilliam's "Brazil" (1985).

Yet another of Israeli-born filmmaker Amos Kolleck's pointless, meandering tales of eccentric New Yorkers navigating the treacherous waters of love and survival.

While the transgressive trappings (especially the frank sex scenes) ensure that the film is never dull, Rodrigues's beast-within metaphor is ultimately rather silly and overwrought, making the ambiguous ending seem goofy rather than provocative.

Painfully cliched. The music is throbbing and the leads are cute, but there's nothing here viewers haven't seen before.

The film's strident tone also serves to undermine its generally above-average performances.

Just when the film seems to be getting bogged down in "before I made it big" anecdotes -- around the time she and Andy Dick, who was once dismissed from a food-service gig, spend a day operating a mobile lunch stand -- Gurwitch wisely broadens her focus, interviewing ordinary victims of corporate "right-sizing," plant closings.

Lawrence runs through his usual repertory of mugging, seething and generally acting like a fool, only to be regularly upstaged by Arnold, Trey's pet piglet.

Despite earnest performances by Mueller-Stahl, Bierko, Mol and Vincent d'Onofrio (in the duel role of a programmer and a VR bartender), the movie feels like a bit of a rehash.

It's all mean-spirited, foulmouthed sniping.

A textbook illustration of the American movie industry's ability to take an offbeat foreign film and systematically alter or soften every provocative and original thing about it.

Dawson actually delivers the film's most persuasive performance.

Handsome and sometimes creepy, but formulaic in the extreme.

Even by the degraded standards of dim-witted summer blockbusters, this is sorry stuff.

Essentially an extended trailer for the 2008 Cartoon Network animated series.

The film LOOKS great, but at a brisk 88 minutes, there's no time to fill in back story, from the epic history of paladin persecution to the deeply personal mystery of David's mother, and the cliffhanger ending is so abrupt that the movie seems bizarrely truncated.

Though occasional flashes of the radiantly bi-cultural romp that might have been peek through, writer-director Deepa Mehta's hybrid is strangely clumsy, given that she's an experienced filmmaker familiar with both Hollywood and Bollywood conventions.

As live-action adaptations of cheap, unapologetically stupid cartoons go, this is top of the line: The cast is appealing, the sets brightly colored and fun to look at, the mystery as lame and goofy as any featured in the many inexplicably beloved Scooby-Doo cartoons.

The film's last 20 minutes devolve into a tedious slog through the kind of pointless, predictable running and screaming that give horror movies a bad name.

Westby's sympathy for the Scottys of the world is evident, but like them he doesn't always know how to put his best face forward.

The movie fails to make Alma a vivid presence -- She deserves better, and so do viewers.

The car stunts are ridiculous, all lightning-fast editing and computer enhancement -- by the time action is this far removed from reality, who cares?

A hokey monster mish-mash that plunders the richly textured histories of Dracula, the Wolfman and Frankenstein's monster.

This flashy fright flick doesn't break any new ground, but puts an attractive gloss on genre conventions.

Tthough it comes wrapped in a stylish French mantle of feminist rage and sexual empowerment, the picture ultimately belongs squarely in the tradition of rape revenge pictures.

Bad enough that the plot is shopworn, but the tough-gal talk is unintentionally hilarious, and the complicated narrative structure is annoying and pointless.

Freakies fans will swoon.

Fun if you like this kind of thing and don't expect too much of it.

Sprawling, gooey and profoundly juvenile, this derivative thriller piles on the cheese: aliens, male bonding, psychoanalytic gobbledygook, childhood secrets, military black ops, gross-out special effects, explosions, bodily function humor and a retarded boy with special powers.

Were it not for Kumar's luminous charisma, the film would be unwatchable.

Adults -- even the die-hard dog lovers -- will just have to resign themselves to being bored silly whenever the cartoonish Cruella is absent from the screen.

This violent action is stylish but painfully formulaic, even by the undemanding standards of video-game narratives.

A sweet-natured and refreshingly uncartoonlike look at the trials of an unworldly Midwestern college boy negotiating his freshman year at NYU.

It's familiar, undemanding and not as bad as it could have been, but you can't help thinking that somewhere else, there's a real party going on.

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.

The cast, including genre veteran Bruce Dern as a kindly lawyer, do their best with the material, but you can't make a crackling thriller out of soggy cliches.

The script is heavy on platitudes about friendship, but since there isn't a single fully fleshed character in sight, who cares?

Writer-director Henry LeRoy Finch's ripely overwrought exercise in Southern Gothic psychodrama, which happens to unfold in a picturesquely decaying house in Maine.

Falls victim to an overly tricky rethinking of the way familiar TV shows are transformed into movies.

No one and nothing can be taken at face value in Beach's twisty tale of secrets and lies, which buries its very interesting idea in a welter of ludicrous dialogue and skin-flick imagery.

The trouble isn't just that this haunted-house story, written by Mark Wheaton and directed by Hong Kong filmmakers Danny and Oxide Pang, is both formulaic and derivative. It's that it's completely free of atmosphere, the very thing that their 2002 "The Eye" had in such creepy abundance.

The film's performances are uniformly strong and remarkably coherent, given the conditions under which they were delivered. The actors shot for eight hours straight in a fully lit and set-decorated house, each individually miked and followed by his or her own personal camera operator.

Without Bullock, the film's frantic antics would be painful to watch; with her, they're just trivial.

Repetitive and uninspired, it panders to the lowest expectations of horror buffs and squanders the efforts of a competent cast.

A preposterous wilderness adventure (the kind that makes kids think sneaking into the zoo's bear pit is a cool idea) laid over a touchy-feelie story about good parenting.

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.

The main characters are defined by their problems, and the secondary characters (notably Brigette's parents) are so crudely drawn it's hard to imagine what Cates was thinking.

Herzfeld's sophomore movie is one long howl of rage over the relationship between criminals, journalists and thrill-hungry audiences.

Lurches queasily between ghastly broad gags and oddly engaging, character-driven laughs born of clashing cultures and expectations.

If not an entirely successful film, it's a bold and haunting one.

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

Ultimately aimed at a Christian audience looking for genre entertainment with a certain sense of propriety (which partly translates into there being no murders), the film tries to serve two masters and doesn't quite deliver for either.

Lacks a sense of bone-chilling dread.

Smoothly enjoyable, undemanding entertainment and features a couple of knock-out giant croc attacks.

This is not a film for neophytes: It proceeds from the assumption that the viewer is familiar with the events and people of Jesus' life, and is probably right in doing so: Its intended audience is seriously Christian.

Contains several profanely amusing moments, but they don't add up to much.

The few minutes of footage devoted to a performance by bona fide jazz artist "Little" Jimmy Scott, an eccentric cult favorite, is more genuinely evocative than anything else in the film

As the mismatched interrogators, Travolta and Nielson seem to be in two different and incompatible movies.

A high-profile cast can't save this multi-narrative drama about gambling addiction from its wildly uneven tone, which veers from high melodrama to hard-boiled pastiche so overwrought that it's unintentionally funny.

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.

Todd McFarlane's Spawn plays better on the page, but the adolescents of all ages who buy Spawn comics will probably enjoy the movie. Others should consider themselves forewarned.

Unfortunately, the result is little more than a glossy parlor trick, a stripped-to-the-bone "Of Human Bondage" recast with two women.

This labored farce relies on an unpleasant collection of stereotypes for its comic effects, and Janger is a singularly unappealing leading man.

Oddly, the most appealing thing about the movie is that in an age of ever-escalating special effects, it's refreshingly low-tech, more like a '70s action movie than a modern-day one.

It's all pure, brainless fluff, but it's unpretentious and "Wannabe" is damnably catchy.

There's nothing under the goofball gags and gushing gore, and its welcome is worn out well before it's over.

The film's liabilities include Lustig's excessive reliance on flashy editing, tacky special effects and a blaring alterna-rock soundtrack that's used to make the characters' thoughts and motivations painfully obvious. Among its assets are the clever premise and generally appealing performances.

The occasional amusing one-liner can't compensate for the broad caricatures and awkwardly structured story.

Pinup appeal alone does not a compelling movie make.

A goofball gore picture with aspirations to cult status.

It lacks the courage of its swinish convictions, and abruptly acquiesces to bland rom-com clichés three-quarters of the way to its appointed end.

It's more silly than scary and relies excessively on surprisingly low-rent CGI effects and crude wirework to drum up interest in the slight story.

Utterly predictable, noisy and stupid.

It's all about action and ogling -- Jolie's boobs, butt and thighs get so much screen time they deserve their own credits.

Despite the edifying square-up -- moral lessons about family, the legacy of violence and the tenacious power of love -- the appeal is freak-show all the way.

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

A far cry from such sneakily subversive werewolf-sex tales as "The Company of Wolves" (1984) or "Ginver Snaps" (2000), this pallid little picture is all "Lost Boys" (1987) posturing by way of the sublimely ridiculous "Covenant" (2006).

The war between highly specific coming-of-age angst and icky-sticky overcoming-adversity cliches eventually brings the whole thing down.

A romantic comedy that's trying its damnedest to be cute and endearing and might be more successful if it weren't built on a foundation of barely-concealed misogyny.

Based on a goofy '60s TV series and aimed squarely at vulgar 10-year-olds (and inner vulgar 10 year olds), this sappy comedy is relatively harmless and occasionally serves up a funny bit.

Dash and screenwriter Adam "Blue" Moreno abandon the stone-faced seriousness of the first film for a more playful approach, goofing on gangsta' poses and colorful hood-speak.

None of this is especially funny, nor is it particularly exhilarating; at best it's throwaway entertainment.

The film's tone is hard to pin down, especially with the actors dubbed flatly into English.

Once you get past the lengthy, graphic geyser-of-liquid-excrement gag, it's not as irredeemably vulgar as it might have been.

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.

Adds little to the annals of werewolf lore. But it's briskly paced and features a couple of clever twists on genre conventions.

First-time feature director Andrew Douglas, whose advertising background is evident in every frame, brings lashings of style but no sense of real horror to the recycled script.

Hauser and Miles go for broke, lobbing their every comic idea at the screen. Some work better than others, and overall tomfoolery like this is a matter of taste.

Ridiculous, yes, but in an eminently watchable way. Most of the plot twists work surprisingly well, and the frequently naked leads work up some genuine chemistry.

Boyar's best efforts -- which are quite good -- can't begin to compensate for Guttenberg's grotesque excesses or make the weirdly warm relationship that develops between them convincing, let alone appealing.

This psychological sci-fi thriller was originally made as a 40-minute segment of an unrealized portmanteau picture, then expanded into a freestanding feature. That's probably why it's padded with shots of Olham running down corridors.

The first half of Lover's film is surprisingly affecting...But the film comes apart in its second half, when James' flight triggers a long series of flashbacks to the brothers' childhood.

Harlin's brisk pacing leaves little time for reflection, but the whole house of blood-spattered cards dissolves upon even cursory reflection.

Frankly, it's dumb, but no dumber than "Transformers."

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

In a world filled with crude movie sitcoms, Berg's bitter, worst-possible-case scenario really does stand alone.

If it weren't for the running flatulence gag, the whole silly business might be mistaken for slight, clean, fast-moving fun.

So outrageously, unregenerately stupid that you might be tempted to think it's smart. But it's not: It's as dumb as Georgia dirt.

Jade's seamy excesses would be conventional in a direct-to-video erotic thriller; in a major studio production, they're embarrassing.

None of it really amounts to anything, even as a nostalgic snapshot of a time and place.

Though beautifully acted by Basinger (everyone else is relegated to a supporting role), there's a strange vagueness to much of this sumptuous, stunningly photographed melodrama.

"Saturday Night Fever" with designer drugs and duds.

The second attempt to bring a dark corner of the Marvel comic-book universe to the screen, this comic-book-based revenge story is undermined by its inconsistent tone.

Without an assured character at its center, the movie quickly collapses in a heap of moldy clichés and contrived (and not especially funny) situations.

The sheer force of imagination that produced the film's unique mix of different styles, musical numbers and hipster doggerel is extraordinary.

Film is preposterous without being surreal; only at the Tailor's Ball -- which takes place shortly before the end -- does it strike that perfect balance between the bizarre and the curiously mundane.

This scattershot comedy (which might be called "irreverent" if anyone actually revered movies like AMERICAN PIE) features vulgar gags at the expense of recent youth-oriented pictures.

How engaging you find this loosely structured road movie will depend on how charming you find the over-aged slackers played by Josh Alexander, who also wrote the screenplay, and Robert Bogue.

The film's 85 minutes drag by painfully slowly, because there's no respite from Chapman's tedious, self-pitying reveries.

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.

Not funny at all.

The juvenile gags seem aimed at moviegoers who hate the whole idea of independent/art/foreign-language films and the stuck-up eggheads who like them -- so what's the point?

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

Though Dylan shuffles through the dramatic sequences like a dessicated mummy, the music sequences are strikingly vibrant -- he's never looked worse or sounded better.

Ralston gets solid performances out of his cast, and the film has a surprisingly polished look. But in the end, there isn't much to it.

Raised in Mumbai, classically trained actor-turned-writer-director Khanna addresses the volatile issue of women's rights within Islamic households, and if his sensationalistic debut feature makes its point with a heavy hand, it's also starkly effective.

While handsomely mounted and generally well acted, the film is undermined by long stretches of awkward, obvious dialogue and by the vagueness of Lisa's revolt against the status quo.

Noisy and obnoxious, this flashy action picture is so hell-bent on seeming smart that it fairly forces you to think about how fundamentally stupid it is.

Despite excellent performances all around, the actors can't overcome the script's limitations.

The result is sheer, unadulterated nastiness with no apologies.

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

Melodramatic look at alienated California high school students.

The Country Music Channel's first foray into feature filmmaking is sickly sweet and thoroughly predictable, and woefully underuses veterans Harper and Reynolds, but it features some stirring performances, including BeBe Winans and Willie Nelson dueting on "The Uncloudy Day."

The downside is that it all feels like a big in-joke, and you're not in on it.

There's no denying the freak-show appeal and you don't see frontal nudity like this on TV, but otherwise it's all as contrived and artificial as "Survivor."

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

Forget about social significance, depth of character and complex thematic underpinnings, and repeat after me: "It's only a werewolf movie."

Simultaneously nakedly formulaic and oddly clumsy, particularly in terms of character introduction.

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.

Runs out of story a good half hour before it runs out of spooky images, but it comes to a quietly chilling conclusion far more haunting than any bloody mayhem.

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.

The film vacillates between inanity and flat-out lameness, and the decision to recut from an R-rated version to a PG-13 sucked out whatever life might have been left.

Shock-rocker Rob Zombie's loving homage to flat-out nasty horror films of the 1970s will leave many post-"Scream" (1996) horror fans cold because of what it's not. It's not slick or glossy. It's not funny or self-referential.

Though the story eventually runs out of steam and it's never clear why the night-crawlers torment certain children and then come back to get them, fledgling screenwriter Brendan William Hood and director Robert Harmon -- whip up some effective suspense sequences.

A painfully claustrophobic picture.

Thoroughly preposterous on every level.

Ironically, the filmmakers seem to think the audience for this movie about super-smart people is super-dumb.

The hyperactive Hong Kong action stuff is getting old.

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

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.

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.

It's a kiddie movie rejiggered for childish grown-ups, of whom there are enough to make it a hit. How such childishness has become a virtual secular religion is hard to imagine.

Jackman and McGregor are a delight to watch.

Seriously undermined by its sour tone and an unusually charmless performance by star Chris O'Donnell.

Ryan Schifrin's first film is a pleasant surprise, an old-fashioned monster movie that relies more on genuine suspense than bare breasts and blood.

There's about half an hour's worth of sickly amusing material here...Unfortunately, that leaves a solid hour's worth of witless screaming, running around and expiring in a welter of icky special effects.

The film's greatest asset is Linney, whose prickly, finely calibrated performance as the doomed Harraway makes her loss resonate more powerfully than any of the point-counterpoint rhetoric.

For the first hour director Arau and his co-writer and wife, actress Arizmendi, negotiate the story's tricky mix of comedy, social satire and science fiction with surprising aplomb.

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.

Utterly amateurish.

But what truly distinguishes the movie is Cage's performance, which is so off the wall that even if you don't like it you have to watch in awe.

Anemic chronicle of money grubbing New Yorkers and their serial loveless hook ups.

Bloated and incoherent.

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

Rymer's film doesn't revitalize vampire clichés in any significant way and, frankly, "Velvet Goldmine" is a more seductive movie about sex, death and rock and roll -- and it's not even about vampires.

Increasingly preposterous, thoroughly credibility-straining escapades.

A lightweight parody of the porn industry and daytime talk shows that has the look and feel of a middling direct-to-video feature.

Pokey, blood-spattered, cheap-scare-larded prequel.

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.

There's a caper and there are some laughs, but this isn't a larky caper flick; it's a pulpy little story that could at any minute go straight to hell.

The movie's tone and plot twists are so ludicrously overwrought that even Washington's admirably restrained performance -- can't rescue it from its own excesses.

The film's poky pacing is a liability -- the setup takes an awfully long time.

Though clearly well-intentioned, this cross-cultural soap opera is painfully formulaic and stilted.

Kutcher's performance isn't terrible, but the brilliant, bewildered, increasingly desperate Evan is the film's center, and grounding its flights of fantasy in rock-solid emotional reality is more than Kutcher can manage.

While his film is less than satisfying, it's a refreshingly off-kilter experience.

The soundtrack, which ranges from Johnny Cash to Serge Gainsbourg to the Wu-Tang Clan, is admirably eclectic but can't be said to pull things together.

This high-concept gangster picture tries unsuccessfully to duplicate Reservoir Dogs's(1992) hair-raising high-wire balance between dark comedy and violent crime thriller, undermining some entertaining performances and the script's small virtues in the process.

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.

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.

Feather-light and proudly goofy, this Jackie Chan action comedy appears to be aimed squarely at under-12s.

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

Astonishingly inept drama.

Earnest but unenlightening drama.

This efficient but soulless funhouse ride eschews suspense in favor of frantic scrambling from disturbing specters, like the naked female ghost who lurks around bloody bathtubs.

Smacks of a certain kind of TV movie filled with pious uplift, even as it makes token concessions to contemporary lifestyles.

The script's vague, silly "explanation" for Linda's experiences -- nature abhors a spiritual vacuum, so weird stuff happens to the faithless -- is the icing on the irritation cake.

This old-fashioned Western about the glory years of the Texas Rangers, cast with fresh-faced, telegenic young actors whose performances range from adequate to awful, is undermined by a serious lack of true grit.

The film's subtexts are profoundly reactionary. Women are foolish and untrustworthy.

Fiore captures various artists horsing around with groupies, smoking dope and hanging out backstage, and cuts the material together in the kinetic but meaningless manner of MTV promos.

Heartfelt but overly familiar film.

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.

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

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

As meticulously deranged as its paranoid protagonist.

There's way too much of the usual bonding, beatings, petty humiliation by guards, cat fights in the yard and trips to the hole.

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 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.

A reductive spook show in which a bunch of puny humans get chased around by scary monsters.

Neither Ketchum nor the filmmakers take an exploitative approach to the material; their focus is the way the youngsters' petty cruelty erupts into murderous sadism.

Derivative, predictable and entirely forgettable, the sort of low-expectations genre picture that generally goes directly to video.

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

Ethan and Lenny's story is silly, good-natured and full of unlikely moves, just like the titular twister.

Costner's ponderous post-apocalyptic morality tale feels every minute of its nearly three hours.

Well-written and surprisingly well-acted by a relatively inexperienced cast

It's a gee-whiz kiddie movie imagined by pervy grown-ups who get a giggle out of mixing bloodless fight scenes with close-ups of rubber-wrapped butts and baskets.

Director/co-writer/co-producer Jon Gunn's Christian agenda is evident without being intolerably sanctimonious, and he's a competent filmmaker who shows sign of having a little style.

The result is rather like eavesdropping on a bright but painfully self-absorbed adolescent's secret thoughts: sometimes fascinating, other times just infuriating.

The movie is simultaneously soft and icky; the gross-out effects are grafted onto a sub-"Tales from the Crypt" ghost story that never scares up any serious chills.

The script recycles clichés that go back to 1937'S "Dead End," the performances are one-note, and the whole thing has the flat, bright look of a TV cop show.

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.

Screenwriter Lona Williams doesn't seem to have gotten much beyond the petty absurdity of theme headdresses and ludicrous talent competitions.

No better than the first.

In all, it's a peculiar mishmash, simultaneously bland and suggestive.

For horror fans in a forgiving mood, it's an adequate fear fix.

The filmmakers created an animated version of the writer to accompany audio clips of Dick speaking. It's a well-intentioned but unsatisfying invention, which pretty much sums up the whole enterprise.

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

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.

Repetitive, predictable comedy.

The film's mealy-mouthed messages about feminine empowerment will almost certainly fall on deaf ears, since even 11-year-olds know Spears's power resides largely in her taut torso.

That Carrey, who's a bit old for the part, always seems one facial muscle away from a smirk doesn't help matters.

The formulaic mechanical plot machinations benefit greatly from the presence of the vivacious Stiles, gravely beautiful Blair and personable Lee, who radiates fundamental decency without seeming like a sap.