Megan Lehmann

Any one episode of "The Sopranos" would send this ill-conceived folly to sleep with the fishes.

Ryan spends much of the grubby-looking boxing drama Against the Ropes with her face screwed up in distaste, as if a dirty sock is being waved under her nose. Perhaps it's because the movie she's in stinks.

Kicks off as a cheap piece of retro schlock and quickly devolves into a putrid bloodbath with a thin narrative made utterly indecipherable by the first-time director's clueless approach to filmmaking.

There's little action in this snail-paced bore, you'll need a high-powered magnifying glass to spot the comedy and the "buddies" have about as much chemistry as a pair of wet socks.

Some solid performances and pretty scenery don't do much to conceal that there's a whole heap of nothing at the core of this slight coming-of-age/coming-out tale.

A confusing mishmash.

It's a simple-minded celebration of speed that pretends to be nothing else, even throwing in the occasional wink to acknowledge its own silliness.

Unfathomable balderdash.

Snoozy and unconvincing.

It wouldn't matter so much that this arrogant Richard Pryor wannabe's routine is offensive, puerile and unimaginatively foul-mouthed if it was at least funny.

An exercise in drudgery... The whole thing is so patently uninteresting it's hard to see it as anything but a Douglas family vanity project.

Kicks off with an inauspicious premise, mopes through a dreary tract of virtually plotless meanderings and then ends with a whimper.

Nasty, borderline bigoted, stunningly amateurish film.

The promising tension between Gypsy and the arrogant Lucian never amounts to much, and the climax is comically melodramatic.

The problem is that there's not a sympathetic character among the nasty, brutish males. And the women, except for a flashy cameo by a swimsuit-clad Paris Hilton, are given short shrift.

Anselmo handles sensitive issues not with kid gloves, but with a metaphorical baseball mitt, fumbling with tone and obviously laboring to force quirks upon characters and situations.

Indulgent, tedious documentary.

"Schindler's List" it ain't, and the whole is rendered occasionally surreal by Janusz Stoklosa's laughably heavy-handed score.

The script is so overstuffed with painfully obvious clues (the constant patina of sweat on the cocky doctor's face, for one) that we don't need the ominous rumbles on the soundtrack to tell us where we're headed.

Tries to be many things -- romantic comedy, mockumentary, a satire on beauty and aging -- but ends up succeeding at none.

The only feeling the character seems capable of is lust -- and when he hits on the male nurse looking after his newborn baby in the hospital, this hollow, unfunny "comedy" moves from merely tedious to nasty.

Lee gives his childhood hero altogether too much face time to defend himself against the numerous allegations and charges of assault, both physical and sexual.

In trying to straddle both the grown-up and kiddie worlds with this inappropriately sexualized effort - their first theatrical release since 1995's "It Takes Two" - the Olsens have lost their footing.

Self-indulgent folly.

Boasts one of the most ludicrous plots ever committed to digital video.

Frustratingly superficial.

Clayburgh is the most dignified thing about this dreadfully overwrought, often preposterous romantic comedy.

This furious finger-pointer's doc is so one-sided, it undermines its own integrity.

The story is so slight, a low-wattage hair dryer could blow it away.

Spun is quickly exposed as being all flash, no substance.

As if the witless cultural stereotypes weren't bad enough, misogyny is rampant -- bare-breasted women abound, yet the protagonist remains fully clothed while having a bullet removed from his butt.

How do you inject life into a film whose central character is dull, slow, stupid and grim?If you're Arnaud Desplechin, you don't.

Not as bad as rumor would have it. It's worse.

Beautiful Brit actress Sophia Myles ("From Hell") is so arch, canny and amusing as the posh, pink-obsessed spy Lady Penelope, it's as if she is acting in the movie this should have been.

Despite oblique references to "Psycho" and "Children of the Corn," Freddy vs. Jason lacks the knowing wit needed to keep it afloat in an age when even the horror spoofs have been spoofed.

Ben Stiller's overbearing schtick officially reaches its expiration date with the desperate and puerile Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story.

Fairly cringe-inducing, full of witless double-entendres and the requisite "gags" involving bodily fluids.

The finished product looks like it was thrown together during a lunch break -- by a drunk person. The level of ineptitude on display in this urban version of "Three Men and a Baby" is simply gobsmacking.

Presumably, Deville wants to show life returning to normal after WWII, but in the context of this inert movie, "normal" equals "tedious."

Amateurish, irritatingly gabby indie.

Psst! Wanna vicariously experience a consciousness-raising LSD trip and watch Sarah Michelle Gellar star in some explicit sex scenes?

Contains much more prosaic ingredients. Like props and sound effects that could have been borrowed from an off-off-Broadway play, a host of painfully strained performances and a plot that's almost unbearably stupid.

This pursuit farce is harmless (if stale) entertainment, but the sledge-hammer attempt to appeal to the country's fastest-growing movie-going demographic makes for a clunky narrative and one-note characters.

The animated, Hanukkah-themed musical is, in fact, 75 minutes worth of belching, barfing and poo-jokes braided into a Grinch-meets-Scrooge-meets-"It's a Wonderful Life" storyline that's as stale as last year's potato latkes.

Follows a narrative arc as choppy as a messy windswell, and the result is a dog's dinner of profiles, repetitive narration, safety tips and banal "insights" into the joys and dangers of cresting waves that sometimes reach 70 feet.

This witless action comedy begins to insult the audience's intelligence from the opening scene.

The film is lousy with cartoonishly off-putting characters.

This Alfie has been castrated.

The documentary's director, Arnon Goldfinger, may have had a chance of expanding on the limited audience for such a film if said clan, the Bursteins, exhibited either talent or likability.

This one-joke comedy vehicle is flying through a laugh-free zone.

There's obviously some philosophical comment on the alienating effects of ho-hum toil buried somewhere in this weird mess, which features an irritating, theremin-heavy score. But can you be bothered stifling a yawn and searching for meaning? I would prefer not to.

Enough to give you brain strain -- and the pay-off is negligible.

It's really just about a bunch of pathetic losers whiling away the hours with their hands jammed down their pants.

A sluggish meander through the life of the man considered by many to be a deity of golfing.

Behind the glitz, Hollywood is sordid and disgusting. Quelle surprise!

Falls far short of capturing the hedonistic spirit of this ephemeral art community. It's more like a routine home video with arty pretensions.

The biggest problem with the corny horror film Anacondas: The Hunt for the Blood Orchid is that its titular reptiles are about as scary as jellied eels.

It all falls apart when the Wendigo unleashes its fury - no doubt upset at being neutered to look about as frightening as Bambi.

Predictable and uninspired romantic drama fizzles like a wet squib.

Kalem's grasp of dramatic storytelling is no firmer, and the disorderly film merely chases its tail for the second half, going nowhere fast.

De Palma fools around with split screens and slo-mo, but no amount of cinematic artifice can varnish over the fact that this is simply a bad film.

A stinker.

Incoherent, laugh-free comedy.

Prywes has produced a technically accomplished nostalgia piece on a shoestring budget, but the plotting is too sitcom-lite to support its aspirations to magic realism.

Combined with the eyestrain produced by the cheap cardboard 3-D glasses, the resulting vertigo is decidedly unpleasant -- although having moon rocks and blobs of cream pie flying out from the screen is kinda cool in a retro way.

Bart Everly followed Frank around for two years, yet his film seems to consist mostly of regurgitated C-Span and news footage from the period, interspersed with asides from the outspoken liberal.

Seems to exist solely to drive this observation home in the most heavy-handed way.

See it only for Paul Bettany's performance.

At some point, all this visual trickery stops being clever and devolves into flashy, vaguely silly overkill.

Another repulsive, fetishistic trawl through the life and crimes of a serial killer.

Lurches so wildly and meaninglessly between genres and time frames that all it creates is motion sickness.

The gay sex scenes that punctuate Eloy de la Iglesia's limp Spanish comedy, Bulgarian Lovers, are frequent and graphic, and it often seems as if the lackluster story exists solely to showcase them.

Exploitative rubbish.

Riddick-ulous.

Violent and unoriginal actioner.

It's awkward, listless and fails to reach any sort of climax.

A well-intentioned, semi-autobiographical pastiche, is trapped in a straitjacket of political correctness, self-conscious acting and spurts of try-hard dialogue that come off as precious.

Not as vile as "Sleepover," nor as tangy as "Mean Girls."

What is astonishing is that husband-and-wife writers Wally Wolodarsky (who also directed) and Maya Forbes, with combined credits that include "The Simpsons" and "The Larry Sanders Show," could churn out something this nasty and ludicrous.

The worst crime perpetrated in the Swiss-cheese screenplay by Gerald Di Pego ("Angel Eyes") is the cynical use of a mother's love for her child as a plot device for an intelligence-insulting sci-fi dud.

For a movie that's trumpeted as providing a probing look beyond the comic's onstage patter, there's an awful lot of onstage patter -- and what nasty, hateful stuff it is.

There's a hint of nostalgia toward the end, with Jason encountering two nubile female campers in a virtual reality Camp Crystal Lake -- but it merely serves as a reminder that the franchise should have quit while it was ahead.

The narrative itself, attributed to three former "Seinfeld" writers who also worked on "The Grinch," reeks of desperation.

Despite a crafty premise and a clever kink in the tale that almost saves it, Connolly isn't dexterous enough to achieve the Hitchockian level of suspense the movie needs.

The cheap-looking special effects, embarrassingly clunky attempts at humor and one-dimensional characters are bad enough, but the PG-rated movie's most offensive crime is its uncomfortably lewd interactions between adults and kids.

Vivid visuals can't save an insipid plot.

An exercise in cynicism every bit as ugly as the shabby digital photography and muddy sound.

A rote exercise in both animation and storytelling.

Tedious and obnoxiously manipulative.

It's so gosh-darned darling it almost turns your stomach.

One of the silliest, most sieve-like screenplays of the year.

It's just another discordant note in this tone-deaf movie -- a trashy, exploitative, thoroughly unpleasant experience.

Can be summed up by the fact that Ashton Kutcher, making a glorified cameo as a narcissistic model-slash-actor, is the best thing in it.

The family at the center of "Catch" is likable and authentic, but the seriousness of their plight sits uneasily with the shoddily assembled escapist goof it generates.

There are more misses than hits among the myriad plot strands that make up the sweaty Spanish sex comedy KM.0.