Megan Lehmann

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.

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

A hit-and-miss affair.

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

They resort too often to infantile flatulence jokes and fairly obvious gags about errant G-strings, with the anorexic plot culminating in the brothers having - yawn - learned to respect women's feelings.

The plot is thin as consomme, and the thudding score is distracting, but the heartfelt storytelling and Michael Bertl's disarming cinematography make this a food film to savor.

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.

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

Without Branagh's pitch-perfect comedic skills the entire movie could have been crushed under the avalanche of quips and wisecracks tumbling from Kalesniko's too-clever-by-half pen.

An overlong melodrama-by-numbers.

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.

One of those all-too-rare cases in which a riveting premise is expertly executed.

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.

Stevens has a keen sense of the absurd, but the whole thing is too forced - and his use of "rotomation" (last used in Richard Linklater's "Waking Life") to give a Timothy Leary-swirl to key dramatic moments winds up looking incongruous.

Only really little tykes will find the surplus of pratfalls and poo and fart jokes a hoot.

Smarter than your average serial-killer movie, thanks to unusually fleshed-out characters inhabited by a high- pedigree cast.

Riddick-ulous.

What the filmmakers do to the splendid Moore is simply criminal.

A throwback to the kind of '80s action flicks that had titles like "Adrenaline Force," is enlivened by a raft of celebrity cameos, including a blink-and-you'll-miss-it appearance by Gibson.

Harmless, if slightly hyperactive, fun.

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.

A cinematic petit four.

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

Too unfocused to make any point worth taking with us into the 2004 presidential campaign.

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

The jaw-droppingly nasty second act is intriguing, but it veers into territory so dark that it sucks the air out of the bouncy chick flick that surrounds it, making for one confused -- and confusing -- comedy.

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.

A confusing mishmash.

Violent and unoriginal actioner.

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.

It's not surprising that This Thing of Ours -- the title refers to the literal translation of La Cosa Nostra -- rings with authenticity and solid acting.

An interesting addition to a genre that tends too often to disregard artistic technique.

The majority of Dickie Roberts winds up looking like a tame episode of the "Brady Bunch" -- spiked with Spade-esque crudity.

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

If you've come to appreciate Hal Hartley's idiosyncratic style through films like "Flirt" and "The Unbelievable Truth," his take on the monster movie genre will intrigue you. But, ultimately, disappoint you.

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.

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.

Chases its tail for so long, it morphs from a whodunit into a who-cares.

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

It actually works as a sometimes funny, occasionally scandalous, but mostly involving narrative.

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.

Screenwriter Tom Schulman, who won an Oscar for "Dead Poets Society," gives us a narrative reminiscent of a pup chasing its tail, as characters struggle to catch up with inexplicably chopping and changing motives.

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.

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.

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

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.

A weird hybrid of cloning thriller and futuristic love story, with hints of "The Godfather" and "Ice Castles" - and it wears its disjointed nature like a badge of honor.

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

Makes an earnest stab at illustrating the hardships and sacrifices humanitarian workers contend with - but in the end, all the suffering merely forms an amorphous backdrop for a Harlequin romance.

From the incessant rain that blurs the joyless Boston setting to the mysterious decision to make a brunette Hudson look as plain as possible, it's an evanescent fancy devoid of sparkle.

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.

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

Unfathomable balderdash.

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

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

A likable trio of actors struggles valiantly but ultimately fails to keep this dopey buddy comedy afloat.

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

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

The film is lousy with cartoonishly off-putting characters.

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

A rote exercise in both animation and storytelling.

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 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.

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.

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

A cheerfully trashy, dead-on spoof of the B-movie genre, boasts the kind of cheese-tastic effects, overcooked dialogue and rigid performances that would make Ed Wood proud.

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.

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

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

A harmless celebration of idiocy that is the cinematic equivalent of an overeager, block-headed puppy chasing its tail.

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

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

Nasty, borderline bigoted, stunningly amateurish film.

Exploitative rubbish.

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

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.