Michael Atkinson

As filmmaking it's drearily anonymous — proof, if we needed it, that writing a screenplay via referendum is not a great idea.

The film is stale Chinese popcorn from the get-go, with only Chen's wiry guilelessness and wicked athletic skills to keep it remotely edible.

Kastner’s history is simplistic, his pacing is glacial and his film is laboriously constructed around a campy fictional trio of caricatured gay-black-girl “masterminds” planning the “revolution,” thumbing through a “manifesto” and sprinkling glitter ritualistically on a mirror ball.

This pubescent navel-gazer has only its star Holland (Brian De Palma’s stepdaughter) to recommend it, not for her acting but only for her undeniable corn-fed–Emmanuelle Béart looks.

Far from engaged, the film practically surrenders in an arthritic faint.

Patronizing from toe to chin, the film opts continually for self-congratulation and cheesy aphorism, and could've-should've been comfortable slotted into a half hour of airtime on TJC.

It's the kind of indie in which shrugging naturalism means nobody has a distinctive personality or energy, and the claustrophobic sense of young Industry workers collarbone-deep into their own navels is hard to shake.

Branded has ideas, but unfortunately, the ideas are reeking batshit nuts, especially once the cheaply animated "brand" monsters, which might not actually exist, start flying around like Ghostbusters mistakes biting one another. You've been warned.

Less Bollywood than Generic Asian Family Drama Lite, when it's not a flat-out sunset-choked infomercial for Ahmedabad and its annual rooftop kite-flying festival.

Unoriginal and mired in bad jokes.

Dorff's mannered Bruce Willis affect seems as insincere as the script, which helplessly loses credibility as info accrues and the narrative unpeels.

Pernicious tripe suitable only for masochists and the intellectually disabled.

The migraine of a story arc needed sharp comedy reflexes or, at least, a live-wire/slummy star turn and got neither.

Lumbers, stumbles, and blows all its secrets at the outset.

Can only be appreciated if you don't let guileless amateurishness, or chronic mumbling, ruin your evening.

Vacillating between free-associative shtick and complete inertia, Lord Byron is lost in thought and allergic to reason.

Shot with the TV-movie blahs, the film itself is nothing more than an elaborate reenactment, perfectly mating box-of-rocks acting (bring rotten fruit for Mia Dillon's Southern matriarch) and repetitious dialogue so scripturally florid Maxwell might qualify for a Comedy Screenplay Golden Globe next January.

A prototypical new-millennium summer movie, S.W.A.T. is no more than an extended trailer for itself.

Has nice, pearly, black-and-white cinematography, but it also has the shocking temerity to run over 100 minutes. Sweet air is required.

A heart-wrenching debacle from the starting gun.

Doesn't even have earnestness going for it -- a tepid, blindly assembled post-noir.

Every other line is a coy Oirishism, and Brosnan, despite being Irish, isn't any more convincing than twinkly-eyed barmaid Julianna Margulies.

So pandering and pebble-brained you'd guess it had been test-screened on barnyard animals.

Hamilton's quasi-Luddite tale doesn't make a coherent movie under the best of circumstances, and these were, apparently, something substantially less than that.

The characters aren't convincingly written, rarely if ever behave like believable humans, and consequently don't matter to us in the least.

Contrived and contrived sloppily, this self-adoring soap even manages to make its all-Hispanic cast seem unconvincing -- except for Seda.

Stunning in its guileless self-love, Smith's doodle-movie shows virtually no sign of being made for an audience. The 90-minute by-product of Smith's let's-shoot-a-movie pot party can be mystifying -- we've all stood soberly by as high friends guffaw at nothing in particular, but now we can pay for the privilege.

Shear away the film's pretensions, and it's a soap opera of assholes.

Eisenstadt has nowhere to go with her catalogue of relaxed urban crazies, and at 79 minutes, the movie is padded out by four song interludes too many.

Director Vicente Amorim's dramatic instincts evoke after-school specials (most of the drama entails the clan's brooding teenager chomping at the parental bit), and his visual ideas are restricted to aping "City of God's" fish-eye ambience and hectic editing.

A stinky dumpster for sentimental dung about homelessness and the magical mecca that isn't Manhattan.

Struggles like a fat kid on the gym rope to conjure up even a single decent laugh.

You'd think creating confusion during something as woodenly simpleminded as Dudley Do-Right is no easy task, but you'd be wrong.

Not only is the dialogue endless...it's like driving behind a 15 mph geezer on a one-way street.

The dialogue is trite and tinnily recorded, and the actresses have the chops of high-school drama students.

A swamp of clichés, contrivances, and cheap ham-and-cheese hero sentimentality.

If Lee's intention was to cement our loathing of blackface comedy, he's succeeded all too well.

Schmaltz served in a hand-painted cup, Happy Times culminates in a Chekhovian complement of two narrated letters that have a mutually corresponding force the rest of the film only hints at. By then, our hopes have fatally diminished.

Diesel himself has the personality of a golem and a knack for dialogue delivery that suggests recent oral surgery.

Better, as they say, than a poke in the eye with a sharp stick -- but only just.

Even at 70 minutes, The Charcoal People becomes repetitive and hopeless.

The unaddressed incongruities are as stupefying as the music.

A shallow Brazilian trifle.

This poor movie is like an abandoned car without plates: Nobody wants to admit it's theirs.

The carload of codgers in Fred Schepisi's Last Orders merely bellyache, philosophize, crack unfunny jokes, and ruminate simplemindedly about Death.

Greenaway has hit a brick wall, and it's no fun to watch.

An aimless, pointless dawdle.

It's a campy, juiced-up ker-splat, busy with clumsy pyrotechnics and never nearing the vicinity of satire.

Wildflowers is the only brand of requiem the '60s get anymore -- worshipful and ass-backward.

Inept, unfunny, and so brimming with bad ideas it's a wonder it wasn't manufactured by mandrills rather than adult humans.

Brand-new and uproariously unimproved.

It's not easy to endure, despite -- or due to the embarrassment of -- an all-star cast.

Costner's not a mannered showboat, and what we get isn't a riff—it's a semi-oblivious glimpse of bitter outlaw banality.

Garcia's tale bemoans the loss of easy wealth for a precious few. Poor people are absolutely absent; Garcia and Infante seem to have thought that peasant revolutions happen for no particular reason--or at least no reason the moneyed 1 percent should have to worry about.

This "Black Hawk Down" theft is a trial by cliché until the climax, which suggests a dress rehearsal for the torching of Baghdad.

What should have been an idiosyncratic 20-minute short is distended by repetition and loads of standard indie-film time-killers.

One of our very few consummate movie star actors, Washington can't quite elevate this dismal material as he's been able to do in the past, but he retains his dignity.

If you're considering the scenario via Japan's ubiquitous pedo-porn tendencies, you're too educated for this exhaustive, manga-based bloodbath, which trails after these angsty teenyboppers on a scorched-fake-earth path through hundreds of growling baddies of every genre size and type.

Antitrust is anti-fun, anti-wakefulness, and anti-interesting.

A walking-talking affront to every middle-class middle-ager it intends to sucker, this remake of the 1979 accidental-classic screwball hits every wrong note and trips on every chair leg.

I'd rather watch a forgotten houseplant dehydrate and die.

It's a chilling piece of legal hysteria, and ripe for nasty farce. But Pooh plays it all for buffoonish pratfalls and fart jokes.

This all-digital indie is, by genre standards, either a misfired doodle or an attempt to Lovecraft-ize the popular movement. Or both.

Gardos, an experienced film editor, has little narrative sense, and decent performances (except from Kinski, who just worries and huffs around) are left out to dry.

Not only microwaves what is already four-day-old fish in Paris, but lets the original director, screenwriters, and stars do the reheating.

Red Dragon's formula is so risible and rote by now that the natural reaction to scenes of peril, torture, and suffering is flippant laughter.

It wouldn't be fair to gripe about the hundreds of plot holes; the whole thing is hole.

Ivey hits the turf pitching and catching dialogue like a pro, but nothing could have saved What Alice Found from a fundamental cinematic illiteracy.

Despite exposition delivered so redundantly and witlessly you think you're in a Kaplan class, Stigmata manages to be incoherent.

Endearingly pretentious -- as if it swallowed a thick brick of Beckett and can't pass the uncooperative Beckettian stool.

Throughout, Tykwer reaches for mysteries he has no idea how to evoke, relying instead on his actors' empty stares.

Since Lee is a sentimentalist, the film is more worshipful than your random "E! True Hollywood Story."

85 percent explosions and editing idiocy (a window can't break without director Peter Hyams cutting between five different angles) and 15 percent Arnold trying to grow a third dimension. Seeing him try for "sad" is like watching a dog try to talk.

Dim and eye-rollingly foolish -- Call it Dumb, Dumber, Dumber Still, and Dumbest.

The digital-video results play like a flatulent teenager's first discovery of jazz, cigarettes, and hooch.

It's the casting of Liam Neeson as the nervous breakdown that turns the movie to asphalt -- it's like watching Andre the Giant play Woody Allen.

The movie neither inspires us to pine for what might've been nor makes Gilliam-style filmmaking seem like a noble pursuit.

Dissing a Bond movie is quite like calling a dog stupid, but when it has the temerity to run over two hours, you feel like winding up with a kick.

Essentially a reheating of 1982's "First Blood" -- a psychologically wounded warrior-vet pits himself against civilized America -- but the fallout this time is simultaneously more ruthless, less emotional, and duller.

Offers director Roger Spottiswoode a chance to have the worst actor in Beverly Hills play scenes with himself.

Disheveled tripe pieced together with the good intentions.

Can't surmount its own ineptitude.

Wenders's The Million Dollar Hotel is something of a monstrosity -- liquored self-indulgence taken to its own astral plane.

Earthsea seems to be a stupendously dull place. It would try the patience of any kid.

At its most indulgent and posturing, Piñero plays like a movie the man himself might've made, between scores.

Yim's film is kneecapped by its soundtrack twice over.

Sheridan seems terrified of the book's irreverent energy, and scotches most of its élan, humor, bile, and irony. What's left wouldn't have substantiated a memoir of any reputation, much less a movie.

Allegiance to Chekhov, which director Michael Cacoyannis displays with somber earnestness in the new adaptation of The Cherry Orchard, is a particularly vexing handicap.

It is merely another inept teen movie ripping off better horror movies.

Requiring an enormous amount of suspended disbelief, the original Rings may be a culture-specific phenom; despite strenuous efforts to Americanize Nakata's field of bad dreams, the preview audience did a lot of cackling.

An earnest but fatally amateurish and stereotypical melodrama about fraternity hazing.

A tepid, pretentious indie that flies from the memory like a tissue in a twister.

Can only be enjoyed with a skullful of Old Bohemian and a faceful of high school crotch.

Clumsily staged (a bike accident any 15-year-old Super-8 maven could’ve cut better), lit like a soap opera, and acted with all the bribed relish of a peanut butter commercial, Majidi’s movie is merely the simplistic bid being made by every national industry impatient for mass audience attention. Gallingly, it may succeed.

Les Mayfield's unintentionally wry American Outlaws just smells -- of filmmaking manure as well as yard-sale revisionism.

The movie is trite like the ocean is big.

Watching it is a smidgen like listening to the same monkey-walks-into-a-bar joke for the 105th time, but for the Spierig brothers, it is clearly a demonstration of fast-cheap capabilities and a one-way ticket straight out of Queensland.

Merely an indulgent vehicle for Mrs. Ritchie -- and Madonna is so spectacularly convincing as a hateful, self-absorbed, nouveau riche ogress that her character's third-act transformation is as preposterous as her overmuscled physique.