Michael Atkinson

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

A peerless indignity, a club-footed vomit launch of teen-horror clichés, overproduced self-importance, and scareless gore.

Oak-stiff and witless, but a few scenes muster up embarrassed chuckles.

Brand-new and uproariously unimproved.

The jerry-rigged result is a trite espionage thriller without the thrills but with a lingering measure of nausea.

The actors all function as best they can as glowering clichés, though the narrative's temporal jump presents difficulties.

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

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.

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

The entire matter of totemistic home-team dementia is roasted on a spit and then embraced for all its sorry pointlessness.

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

The movie's only discernible purpose is as publicity for the book. An admitted egomaniac, Evans is no Hollywood villain, and yet this grating showcase almost makes you wish he'd gone the way of Don Simpson. Instead, he'll probably get an Irving Thalberg award.

First-timer Dylan Kidd's film isn't Molièrian in its misanthropy, but rather as boneheaded as an hour of talk-radio hobgoblin Tom Leikis.

Kate Plays Christine is a documentary, but often a totally fake one, cheekily defining itself as its own making-of DVD supplement and documenting its own evaporation into near-nothingness. Every scene cries — or whines — about the entire project's inherent impossibility.

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

15 Minutes settles into Richard Donner-style goulash.

The movie is trite like the ocean is big.

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

A laughable disaster: an agonizingly long, perversely dull, childishly conceived fantasia on marital sexual angst that could only have been made by someone (like Kubrick).

Cannot help but be merely another debacle that Tammy Faye will survive, eyelashes and integrity intact.

I'd rather eat ball bearings.

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.

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

Something does have to give, and that's the nine-figure public patronage of this kind of anemic, wit-free entertainment. Meyers's shakin' moneymaker isn't the worst film of 2003 -- no cat suits, for one thing -- but something scarier: a standard-issue bog of glossy idiocy and audience disrespect.

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

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.

Sitting through the film is like Chinese water torture, for sure, and for reasons beyond the forced, idiotic campiness of the thing. For one thing, there is not one word of dialogue.

Hardly a project worthy of grown men and women.