Mark Holcomb

Stupefyingly benign.

Rifkin milks the generic Bukowski-land setting for all its melodramatic potential, but what little grace his tale of precarious skid-row dignity achieves is pushed into the margins by predictable plotting and tiresome histrionics.

With its lukewarm gender politicking and clumsy performances, Make a Wish achieves only one real distinction: It has to be the dullest lesbian campout movie ever made.

McTiernan's Rollerball is a movie masochist's delight.

John Schultz's wan, unfunny The Honeymooners is unlikely to tickle devotees of Jackie Gleason's archetypal yuk-fest.

The pivotal plot twist isn't hard to predict, and Brit theater vet Hamm and screenwriter Mark Bomback rely on jolts that date back to the silent era.

Danny Provenzano's mafioso melodrama is the immoral vanity project to end immoral vanity projects.

Burt Reynolds turns up as scruffy mountain man, sparking unfulfilled expectations of some primo Deliverance jokes.

Sure to appear in everyone's worst-of lists at year's end, to say nothing of a few bad dreams, Bryan Johnson's Vulgar is an unclassifiably awful study in self- and audience-abuse.

Appallingly violent.

It all becomes little more than feel-good-about-feeling-bad window dressing, like an issue of "Utne Reader" in Dolby Surround Sound.

Cynically accumulates plot twists while showing little regard for suspense or audience sophistication.

Cloaks a familiar anti-feminist equation (career - kids = misery) in tiresome romantic-comedy duds.

About as threadbare as a favorite childhood plushy. What's more, trying to keep the story line of strained meta-sequel Freddy Vs. Jason straight requires too much of a cogitative investment.

Comes off as an overlong, overstuffed promo for an "industry" that hasn't needed promoting since the movie's target audience was in diapers.

It has Adrien Brody in his last pre-"Pianist" role, leading one to assume that the film -- which veers torpidly from antic humor to mortifying sentimentality -- would have remained shelved were it not for his Oscar coup.

This Dick & Jane is precisely the kind of social-problem comedy you'd expect from well-intentioned millionaires unaccustomed to putting their money where their mouths are.

Despite a couple of inventive CGI effects (one involving mass evisceration), the results are more predictable and less frightening than a Con Ed bill in mid August.

Avoiding this lump of low-camp lion poo couldn't be easier, what with MGM dumping it into a lone Manhattan venue, but if you're in the mood for some unscripted belly laughs or a catnap, Fascination should do the trick.

The most that can be said for Slackers -- aside from the unqualified pleasure of Schwartzman's unfaked, puppyish weirdness -- is that it doesn't abandon its putrid ideals for the sake of a neat finish.

To call this action gambit formulaic is to sell it short: The Rundown runs down more formulas than a month's worth of complimentary premium cable service.

Griffin and Solvang's obliviousness, and the filmmakers' habit of mugging condescendingly while conducting interviews doesn't help either.

Like the action movies of yore (you know, the 1980s), Catwoman is simultaneously overstuffed and undernourished.

A callous piece of work that exploits images of children in pain or jeopardy.

A kind of "Sex and the City" for L.A. bottom-feeders awash in clichéd, self-loathing misogyny that would make Howard Stern flinch.

Rote sequel that surely no one was waiting for: Like the serially thwarted Death (the only "character" to return from the first two Final Destination movies), audiences are required to endure banal exposition and junior-high-level foreshadowing before being treated to the nauseatingly detailed scenes of CGI slaughter.

Wanders all over the map thematically and stylistically, and borrows heavily from Lynch, Jeunet, and von Trier while failing to find a spark of its own.

A clumsy graft of Chekhovian high dudgeon and harsh, Albee-esque psychological realism that probably worked better onstage.

A valueless kiddie paean to pro basketball underwritten by the NBA.

It's nauseating, unfunny stuff, unmitigated by the revelation that Griffin's mom physically abused him.

Laughably unscary.

Suited only for unwitting under-twelvers (though even they may not outlast the midpoint evaporation of Lawrence's shtick).

Good intentions or not, ineptitude and cloying sentimentality don't do anybody any favors.