Maitland McDonagh

The bar scenes are the only reason to sit through this jello shot of a movie.

fans of this venerable Eurotrash form will welcome any evidence that it's still alive and writhing lasciviously.

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

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

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.

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.

The novelty value of seeing 17th-century French swordsmen fight like Chinese martial artists doesn't compensate for the film's generally wooden performances and clichéd dialogue.

Bizarre, utterly original and truly indescribable comedy...You just have to see it for yourself.

Though glossy and smoothly directed, this limp concoction has all the sparkle of flat champagne.

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.

Only Sol and Sara even approach being real characters; the supporting players, Black and Jewish alike, are shrill stereotypes.

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.

So awash in tired ethnic clichés that the story drowns.

In the end it's the same old blood pudding.

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

Stylish and twisty, but not clever enough to support its more outrageous plot machinations.

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.

Slight, smart-alecky romantic comedy.

Director Joe Chapelle knows how to stage a spooky scene, and Going and McGowan supply a refreshing alternative to the shrieking bimbos so familiar to horror fans.

Very entertaining, if thoroughly silly.

One youngster -- even a youngster as talented as Rossum -- can't transform a mess of clichés into a little gem.

Though rooted in broad stereotypes and sassy platitudes, the film's feisty cast and generally sunny outlook make for warm and reassuring comfort viewing, the equivalent of a straight-from-the-box dish of mac and cheese.

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.

What makes it play is Archambault, who gives a strikingly unpleasant performance as Gerald.

As for first-time feature director Mark Piznarski, he should be cited for excessive use of slow motion, sun-dappled trees and golden light; one more cliche violation and his license to direct would be forfeit.

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.

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.

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 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.

While movies like "The Long Riders" (1980) and "The Great Northfield, Minnesota Raid" (1972) aim to be serious considerations of the outlaws' lives and legends, this picture just wants to have fun.

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

All's well that ends well, and rest assured, the consciousness-raising lessons are cloaked in gross-out gags.

Cross an episode of "Friends" with an issue-of-the-week movie about gay parenthood and you have this glossy vanity project.

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

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.

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.

Though handsomely mounted, this parable of intersecting destinies and implacable tragedy is as lifeless as a wax tableau.

Apparently intended as a larky, character-driven adventure with dark underpinnings, this attenuated road movie was originally envisioned as a vehicle for relative unknowns, and might have worked better that way.

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.

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.

Weepy, overwrought love story.

Lame, derivative comedy.

The film delivers lots of high-pitched hysteria but never manages to make its spoiled protagonists interesting.

Slight, over-long.

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

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

A morose, slow-moving action picture.

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

Dopey "thriller."

Is there anything more irritating than an exploitation filmmaker with self-referentiality on the brain?

Shot in shades of steely gray and streaked with near-constant rain, this gloomy revenge thriller is a sadistic cartoon.

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

The movie's gossamer-thin plot, padded with dream sequences and flashbacks to scenes you saw less than an hour earlier, exists only as an excuse for obvious homages to better films, stunt casting...and what pass for clever remarks in circles unfamiliar with real wit.

This package of three short films originally produced for German television is sex-themed without being especially sexy.

The politics get pretty short shrift, but cigarettes and liquor are everywhere.

Fart, feces and gonad gags notwithstanding, this knockabout comedy is no more vulgar than most contemporary children's films, and more good-natured than many.

Nathanson's script has a disheartening let's get on with it air, and the film feels like marathon training...

Horror buffs looking for a novel twist on genre formulas should look elsewhere, but this body-count potboiler about a sinister video game and the poor dopes who make the mistake of playing it is the movie equivalent of junk food: It's not good, but it's predictable and even satisfying, in a low-expectations way.

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.

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

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.

The result is sometimes strained, but often fresh and funny. And the sequence in which the entire cast sings "Avenues and Alleyways," bombastic '70s crooner Tony Christie's lush ode to thug life, is worth the price of admission in itself.

A straight-faced throwback to the glory days of mutant wildlife on the rampage.

Although the story is as predictable as can be -- "surprise" twist ending included -- the performances are better than those in most super-low budget horror pictures, and Jessica Gallant's super-16mm cinematography is surprisingly handsome.

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.

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

Cocky, vulgar and very noisy picture.

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.

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.

Sleek, pointless action picture.

Has a sour undertone that strangles its cheap laughs.

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

Bodrov's staging and cutting does a perfectly good job conveying their anthropomorphized feelings and motives; the spoken drivel is just a distraction. The film's human characters are largely inconsequential.

Witless comedy.

Allowing for the fact that any Pokemon movie is essentially a feature-length commercial designed to make little kids want Pokémon stuff, this one has its moments.

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

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.

If Reeves weren't onboard this picture would have gone straight to video.

Driver and Renner deliver haunting performances in this story of crime and punishment.

Nearly strangles in its own stylishness but benefits from smoldering performances.

A pitch-perfect parody of poverty row horror/sci-fi pictures of the 1950s, Larry Blamire's meticulous takeoff could easily be taken for the real thing, which is both its genius and its Achilles heel.

This picture's b-movie values probably play better on video than in theaters.

The premise is pretty simple, and at two hours the murky sound, muddy low-light images and frequently dreadful acting are a little tough to take.

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.

Gets off to a pretty intriguing start before degenerating into a series of routine action sequences.

The bad news is that, though professionally produced on a micro-budget, Azita Zendel's ambitious writing-directing debut is undermined by an awkward script and some very amateurish acting.

Walks a thin line between refreshing irreverence and shameless exploitation of offensive gay stereotypes.

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

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

The superficially cheery “Boogie Nights” is infinitely scarier.

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

Ledger swirls his cassock glamorously, while Weller is clearly concealing cloven hoofs beneath his; Addy plays the fool and the one-note Sossamon is thoroughly annoying, as fey as Meg Tilly but without Tilly's redeeming faraway air.

Cunningham tackles a complicated subject, rejecting the stridency favored by filmmakers of the Spike Lee persuasion in favor of a more even-handed tone.

A lifelong baseball enthusiast, director and co-producer Mike Tollin -- persuaded many real-life baseball figures to make cameo appearances.

This convoluted, time and continent-tripping tale is heavy on the adolescent angst and swoony romanticism.

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

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.

It's larded with blinding glimpse-of-the-obvious homilies.

This sentimental comedy is generally sweet natured.

Despite the handsome production values and best efforts of the attractive young cast, it's hard to get deeply involved with the frantic "what's going on?" sturm und drang.

A hyperactive hodgepodge.

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 script, based on a Dark Horse comic-book series, is hugely predictable, but the robot effects by veteran Phil Tippett are nastily entertaining.

A welcome alternative to such hyperkinetic drivel as Pokémon.

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.

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

Character actress Lin Shaye, usually relegated to grotesque supporting roles in mainstream comedies, is a revelation as Buono's embittered, cancer-ridden mother.

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

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

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.

Director Rick Rosenthal ("Halloween II") seems to have forgotten everything he ever knew about generating suspense, relying on cliched shadows and grainy, handheld images supposedly shot by the increasingly terrified students.

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.

The result is 93 very long minutes' worth of admirably committed actors putting themselves through the emotional wringer to very little end.

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

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.

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

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.

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 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.

The effectiveness of this kind of issue-driven give and take relies heavily on casting, and Ritchie puts himself at a disadvantage: Madonna looks terrific in a bikini but she can't act, and the younger Giannini is stunt casting.

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 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.

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.

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.

An excruciatingly unfunny comedy.

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

A rapper doesn't make the story fresh.

A preposterous misfire.

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.

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.

Formulaic to the core, this reworking of the fondly remembered high-school slasher picture works surprisingly well on its own terms.

Satanic silliness undermines this gloomy horror picture.

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.

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

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

Preposterous plotting and interchangeable young actors.

The plot is simply an excuse for a string of good-natured dope jokes (come on -- you have to love that their hookah is called Billy Bong Thornton) and goofy sight gags inspired by everything from Jerry Garcia to Jerry Maguire, most of which are undoubtedly funniest if you're eight miles high.

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.

Unfortunately, Flicker wasn't able to rise above the limitations of his microbudget, and his message is compromised by student-film production values and performances that range from adequate to pretty awful.

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

It never actually coalesces into a movie.

Lazy, superficially au courant and utterly forgettable.

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

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.

An amazing artifact; the decor and lighting mix '70s tackiness with odd '50s touches, the sound design is elaborate.

Obvious and, frankly, 25 years too late.

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

Jeremy Irons, giving what is, hands down, the worst performance of his career.

The music is lavishly overproduced pop pablum of the first order, and there's a deeply shallow irony in the fact the film's most memorable tune, KC and the Sunshine Band's 28-year-old "That's the Way I Like It," is easily twice the age of its target audience.

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 greatest mystery, though, is how this thoroughly trashy picture wound up opening theatrically, rather than going direct to video.

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

No one expects a light teen romance to be "Madame Bovary," but this is Colorforms filmmaking.

The film isn't even enjoyably sleazy: It's just dumb and tacky.

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.

Not clever. Not scary. Not funny.

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.

Painfully unfunny and misguided to boot.

Crass, trashy and none-too-funny comedy.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Formulaic but performed with some verve.

As bad as the title, and much longer.

Preposterous, disingenuous, remarkably unfunny and genuinely distasteful.

This is sorry stuff.

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

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

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.

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

There's nothing hugely original going on here, but as twisty-turny crime thrillers go, this one is perfectly entertaining.

Merits watching if only because it's a bracing corrective to the deeply entrenched image of Europe's Jews plodding, sheep-like, to their deaths in Nazi concentration camps.

This potent drama might be dismissed as therapy in the guise of filmmaking if it weren't so clear-eyed. At its core are three remarkable performances.

Davidson's young cast is remarkable, engaging and guilelessly funny without being so cute that their calculated actions ring false.

D.A. Pennebaker and Chris Hegedus's record of the event is an invaluable document, its technical limitations notwithstanding.

This feverish drama examines issues of faith and redemption through the practice of prayer intercession.

Overall, this puff piece is shapeless, repetitive and feels much longer than it is.

The rhythms of Charlotte's mannered, artificial dialogue are better suited to stage than screen -- each segment started life as a one-act play and overall the film works better as a conversation starter than drama.

Mukherjee's charm keeps the child-like Geeta from being thoroughly annoying, and the musical numbers are pleasant, if not particularly memorable.

The result is slick, mainstream entertainment with just enough surprises that you don't have to feel like a fool for enjoying it.

Clearly a labor of love and a call to action, but it's undermined by the sheer volume of topics it tackles in addition to the main subject.

Though more coherent than the disastrous Hellraiser: Bloodline, this psychological thriller with demons gets bogged down in too many "Is it real or just a nightmare?" sequences, and Sheffer's typically wooden performance as Joe makes it hard to sympathize with his travails.