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.