Maitland McDonagh

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

This big-budget bore looks lovely but is so miscalculated that you can't help but wonder whether anyone involved had ever seen the original.

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.

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

Directed and co-written by country singer Dwight Yoakam, this film just screams "vanity project."

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.

Two idiots embark on a life of crime to help a deserving teenager attend Harvard in this lowbrow but generally sweet-natured comedy.

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.

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

Soulless, sleekly executed product.

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.

As to the dream sequence featuring Lonnie's and Brandy's trash-talking babies, it's just creepy.

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.

Pseudo sci-fi gobbledygook aside, X-Files alumni James Wong and Glen Morgan's script is little more than an excuse for Jet Li to kick his own ass, which he does energetically and often.

The tiny, impassive-faced Liu is a disaster. She looks cute in her custom commando gear, but she's not actress enough to make Sever's ridiculous, faux hard-boiled dialogue sound like anything but the formulaic nonsense it is.

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.

Hardman is a grating, mannered onscreen presence, which is especially unfortunate in light of the fine work done by most of the rest of her cast.

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.

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

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.

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

Queen Latifah is a natural-born charmer, but there's only so much she can do when paired with a costar so irritating it's hard not to squirm when he's on the screen, which is most of the time.

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

Though there's some trashy fun to be had in the film's first half, this cynical sequel -- devolves into space junk even faster than the unfortunate Ross.

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.

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

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.

Sleek, pointless action picture.

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.

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

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.

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

No better than the first.

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

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

A misfire of spectacular proportions.

Maybe gross-out romantic comedy is a shallow well, and it was simply Rogers's misfortune to find himself with a bucket full of sludge.

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.

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.

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."

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.

Were the film's tone not so hysterical it might be provocative; as it is, insights and insults are inextricably intertwined.

This soft, formulaic comedy/drama has a far better cast than it deserves, and they work their hearts out trying to bring life to a cliched script.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

This picture is just shapeless and shrill. It's disposable, forgettable and aimed at an audience that doesn't care.

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

A convoluted exercise in shifting perspectives and fractured storytelling.

The dramatic scenes are frequently unintentionally funny, and the action sequences -- clearly the main event -- are surprisingly uninvolving, especially given that director Christian Duguay is an extreme skiing buff who habitually shoots dangerous stunts himself.

Self-indulgent wallow in privileged malaise.

This is a terrible movie in its own right, tasteless and condescending -- if Sandler's character is an Everyman, than the Everyman of today is a boorish jackass

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.

There's a germ of an interesting idea here, but it's smothered by gloomy cinematography a la "Seven" (1995) and grating implausibilities, like the fact that everyone lives in the kind of cavernous, dankly art-directed dumps that only internet millionaires and trust fund twinkies can afford in the real New York.

This mean-spirited invisible man movie tries to hide its poverty of fresh ideas behind a load of state-of-the-art special effects.

The cloying odor of therapy hangs over this preachy holiday fable about a boy whose neglectful dad dies and comes back as a snowman.

Hippolyte subsequently reinvented himself first as a director of baroque erotic thrillers and then as music-video maestro to pop tarts like Britney Spears, but stalk-and-slash horror -- for all its porn-movie rhythms -- appears to have defeated him.

A morose, slow-moving action picture.

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.

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.

Ritchie wraps this folderol in cinematic razzle-dazzle, including animated sequences, reverse motion, trompe l'oeil production design and tricky lighting. But it's still claptrap.

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.

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

Lazy, superficially au courant and utterly forgettable.

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

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 film's Montana vistas are breathtakingly beautiful, and the crisis-in-the-hot-zone sequences are as spooky as those in Outbreak, but Seagal's monologues about the environment, biological warfare, Native American spirituality and natural medicine are excruciating.

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.

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

Shot as "Backwater" and test-screened as "The Reaper," this film contains a couple of bracingly mean sequences, but it cleaves so closely to the slasher-movie formula that it can't muster up any suspense at all.

The lesson is that money can buy a vanity project, but it can't buy talent, imagination or an audience.

A preposterous misfire.

So awash in tired ethnic clichés that the story drowns.

The musical number that runs during the closing credits funnier than anything that precedes it, which isn't saying much.

Peter Fonda's cameo appearance is a cute fillip, but hardly worth the wait.

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

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.

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.

An all-but-incoherent mess whose main components are palpably fake-looking CGI effects, video-game-style action sequences and Milla Jovovich's admirably taut abdomen, Kurt Wimmer's film epitomizes just about everything wrong with post-MATRIX, comic book-/video-game-inspired, Hong Kong-action-style sci-fi thrillers.

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

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.

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

It fails utterly as a horror picture, although it delivers plenty of PG-13-rated flesh and unintentional laughs.

While the film isn't entirely amateurish -- shots are cut together and the cinematography is professional if not precisely stylish -- the story feels as though large pieces are missing and the characters behave so inconsistently that there's zero incentive to care about their tribulations.

This shotgun marriage of coarse laughs and low-rent action cliches is, of course, utterly predictable: Cutting-edge comedy isn't lurking under the corpses of old TV shows.

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

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

Witless farce.

Director Uwe Boll sticks with what he knows -- how to turn video games into dull, cheap-looking movies.

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 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.

One of the most dismal excuses for family entertainment ever perpetrated by a major studio, this crude, lazy variation on Disney's "Sky High" (2005) revolves around the education of four "special" youngsters at the hands of a washed-up superhero.

The lighting and makeup are exceptionally harsh; all the women look shockingly rough beneath their garish makeup.

The laughs are low, the breasts are high, and the film is instantly forgettable.

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.

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.

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?

Why do moviegoers and gamers keep going to see video-game-based movies when neither group is ever happy with the results?

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

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.

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.

A crass, tedious sequel.

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.

The hyperactive Hong Kong action stuff is getting old.

Painfully unfunny and misguided to boot.

Bloated and incoherent.

Obvious and, frankly, 25 years too late.

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

The profoundly unconvincing CGI work only makes the sorry screenplay and lackluster performances look worse.

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.

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

Is there anything so painful as a comedy whose every gag falls flat and then lies there, flopping like a dying flounder?

As bad as the title, and much longer.

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.

Lame, derivative comedy.

The bottom line is that Reprisal is an extremely silly movie doing its damnedest to look tough and gritty and clever, none of which it is. In fact, it’s both tediously formulaic and weirdly puzzling.

Utterly amateurish.

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

Crass, trashy and none-too-funny comedy.

In the hands of a more gleefully provocative filmmaker, this variation on the standard erotic-thriller stew of sleaze, tease and murder, this ludicrous farrago might have been tawdry fun.

The spectacle of the near-naked Ricki (Lopez) striking sexually provocative yoga poses while floridly extolling the virtues of female genitalia is particularly mortifying, but it's only one of many horribly miscalculated scenes.

This new SAW film is so utterly unimaginative it doesn't even count as hommage; it's just a smudgy copy of a still chilling original.

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

This amateurish comedy features some amazing sequences shot in Moscow. But everything else about it is second rate.

Even Spade's most dedicated fans would probably be better off staying home and watching a "Just Shoot Me" rerun.

This is sorry stuff.

There's at least one ending too many, Union regularly vanishes for long stretches of the movie, and director Michael Bay's unmitigated pandering to viewers who whoop with glee whenever someone gets it between the eyes is genuinely distasteful.

It's hard to imagine who would find this funny.

Juvenile and pointless.

An excruciatingly unfunny comedy.

Director Jamie Blanks "Urban Legend" appears to be carving himself a career making slasher movies for a new generation; unfortunately, he's in no way improving on the originals.

The story's broad strokes are painfully clichéd and its details make no sense at all.

Cynical and contemptuous of its audience, this lazy sequel oozes an insufferable air of self-satisfaction.

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.

An arty fright flick that's neither artistic nor the least bit scary.

This big budget mish-mash is almost unbelievably derivative and shockingly cheap looking.

The less said about the story's twists and turns the better, except to warn that they become increasing preposterous with each passing minute.

The pacing is slack, the comedy has an oddly sour tone and frankly, no matter how hard the script tries to paint Sean as a petty martinet with a stick up his butt, it's hard not to sympathize with him.

The gags are familiar collegiate stuff, involving horny young men, horny old whores -- horny young tramps -- silly foreigners, uptight authority figures, homosexuals and sassy fat women.

The air of low-budget Eurotrash is unmistakable. Almost everybody has an unidentifiable accent.

Not funny at all.

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.

This bare-bones plot is merely an excuse to string together a series of gross-out jokes involving bodily fluids, private parts, food and genetic deformities.

Muddled tale of demonic hijinks and devil worship. It's terrible.

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.

Has a sour undertone that strangles its cheap laughs.

Repetitive, predictable comedy.

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.

This tedious hodgepodge of martial-arts mayhem, bogus mysticism and computer-generated special effects doesn't even pretend to have a plot.

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.

What really sinks the film, though, is the utter absence of chemistry between Perry and Willis.

Despite the futuristic setting, which relies so heavily on GGI effects that it looks like a feature-length production concept painting, this film is painfully predictable.

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

Frenetic and cheerless action aside, the film's real problem is the Cat, who looks most unmagically like a second-string college sports mascot and conducts himself like a risque baggy-pants comedian.

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

Surprisingly, Hurley comes off better than either of her demonstrably more versatile co-stars; she's not much of an actress, but she has an engagingly saucy swagger and her open-mouthed expression of outraged disbelief is priceless.

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

A failure on every level.

Not clever. Not scary. Not funny.

Vulgar doesn't begin to describe it: Try one of the foulest, least funny films ever made under the rubric of black comedy.

Preposterous, disingenuous, remarkably unfunny and genuinely distasteful.