Michael Atkinson

As is typical of contemporary Italian movies, every one of Comencini's women seems on the verge of a hysterical collapse.

Kid-pulp screenwriter Goyer (Dark City, Blade I and II) manages some mature textures but his movie never surmounts its manipulative ideas.

Green Dragon's portrait of refugee angst is decidedly glossy; the grief and lostness are glimpsed rather than explored.

Monahan's debut has verve and charisma, but, in the end, the tension of a late-night pub shrug.

Winterbottom never provides the empathic connective tissue we expect. Love it or not, 9 Songs amounts to a common human rite fastidiously caught in amber, giving off no heat or joy but crystallized for the future.

An entrancing glimpse of true underground Americana.

It's "Broken Flowers" with bourbon and ten-gallons and meta-country soundtrack warbles.

Promised Lands is the only western documentary made about the war, but today, the movie seems more remarkable as a Sontag artifact than as political filmmaking.

As obvious in many ways as its title (and its poster), Mean Creek retains a gritty working-class ambience, but it feels over-rehearsed.

A modest and mildly pretentious mediocrity in the Woodman canon.

Complain all you want about Willis's posturing and the rabbit-in-the-hat ending (predicated as it is on a vast plothole), the film is still a rarity, a studio horror movie focused on a child's traumatic stress.

Turturro's movie is all surface, all artifice, and little substance. Actors love artifice; the rest of us wait for it to clear so we can find something meatier.

Predictable, tame dreariness.

Mangold ultimately delivers the same film any number of other Hollywood journeyman could've made from this material, and the results are predictable and stale.

Somehow manages to stay afloat on a sea of pretension, thanks largely to some splashy visuals.

Its characters and plot are almost wholly negligible. It's just a party.

A modest project with an agreeably modest point of view, but it cries out for a sharp, believable naturalism Kusama simply doesn't supply.

Strains our patience with overacting and photography so sumptuous you can't help but ponder why so much bloodshed and mayhem is being so expertly prettified.

Crammed with interesting ideas, visuals, and people, but Stone buries it all in a s--tstorm of technique.

Few other 1999 films are as filthy with tantalizing elements as Agnieszka Holland's The Third Miracle, and of those that come close, none other is as pointless, confused, or unsatisfying.

A pale, derivative little Brit ditty that will be forgotten almost as speedily as it was dumped...into theaters.

Whatever extraordinary ingredients are necessary to fashion a 1776 home run, this movie doesn't have them.

Isn't terribly revealing, and though it is interesting to watch Condo paint, it's only interesting for so long.

It's gibberish, but when X works at all, it works not on the brain, but on the gut.

A thoroughgoing mediocrity that musters up just enough low-down chuckles to remind you that you're not watching another Freddie Prinze Jr. yawner.

An empty, affected exercise, executed with just enough style to make you wish McQuarrie had a motive beyond his own career.

Provocative but lame-brained polygamy comedy.

Has only its actors to keep it afloat.

Aims low and cheats on an ending, but meanwhile it's a bottom-shelf hoot.

Hardly a ripping, inspired children's film.

Mostly pathetic but on occasion grimly funny.

Exhausting and fruitless: Having seen it, you know nothing more about strippers or the stripper mentality than you did going in. What's the point?

Only Nthati Moshesh, as a single black mother working as a housekeeper wooed by a displaced Congolese (Eriq Ebouaney), makes a dent in white-American-expatriate Mark Bamford's toothless scenario.

His movie (Jordan's) winnows the original's existentialist fable into a busy caper thriller, copping plot devices from Soderbergh's "Ocean's 11" and even straining to Wong Kar-wai its camera's way around the fleshpots of Nice. It's all pizzazz, and the pizzazz is all borrowed.

Treading on a shameful piece of French history, Bosch bizarrely intercuts scenes of Hitler, Himmler, and Hess working out the logistics of the exportations, in vignettes that smack of "Inglourious Basterds" farce, but otherwise, she's got a steady grip on the tear-jerking, if that's your awards-season cocktail.

Cliché-density aside, Roger Donaldson's perfectly rote movie is childishly naive about the reality of the CIA as it stands in the official record and in the public mindset.

Wacky, vividly conceived but mundanely executed cartoon fantasy.

Land of Plenty is a woozy fantasia on California dreaming, all agog at urban strife and blabby with redundant voiceover.

Years of HBO seasoning has given Garlin and his cast a sure touch and great timing...but the whole project is mean-hearted and lazy, and it dawdles in repetition and dead air as if it's got a 14-show TV season to spin out.

Apart from the historical eminence of the poetry itself, Pandaemonium is about nothing much at all.

Penn goes for larger-than-life, wrapping his pinched frown around an unintelligible Louisiana drawl and swinging his arms like an autistic evangelist... Law is no asset--looking rather sadly like John Ireland (the actor who played the 1949 Jack Burden), he has little control over his accent and zero energy.

Dryly cynical; the scenarios pit plump, amoral, industrialized Jews against draconian, wife-beating, tribal Arabs.

A standard-issue fin de siècle costume parade, simplifying every dramatic transaction to a torpid minimum but never answering its own looming "why": Why Alma?

Campbell is the movie's primary power source. His steely gaze and overbearing quietude are forever tainted; "Once and Again" doesn't stand a chance in Lifetime reruns.

You're stuck daydreaming about a far, far better movie.

I have a friend who insists Allen should make a western, if only because the demands of genre might force the birth of new ideas. His movies do create and service an innovation-free comfort zone that makes most TV sitcoms seem adventurous.

Gave me a craving for something nouvelle, not a half-hearted Hollywood co-optation.

Jonesing for headlines and gossip-buzz, Wonderland is too look-Ma for its own good -- the simple story of a doomed hop-hog over his head in bad shit could've hit the nerve if left to tell itself.

Watching this movie go through its simplistic dramatic motions, you begin to understand why some actors stick to summer stock and live Ibsen revivals.

Overshadowed by its own marketing hurricane and popular rage, Code struggles for significance as a movie experience and flies a weak flag as a provocation.

Documentarian Anailín Lucy Mulloy’s eye for the decaying textures of modern Cuba on the ground is sharp, and there are passages—as the dull characters mope and kill time and work up snits—in which you wish the movie were simply nonfiction. As it is, everything feels fake except the Centro Habana barrios themselves.

Little more than a résumé film for all involved, it certainly feels more Park City than Bushwick.

Shot in DV by Lisa Rinzler, Joseph Castelo's modest drama struggles for verisimilitude, but it wears clichés like concrete boots, down to the cycle-of-intolerance-and-violence message that we hear every day on NPR.

Desperately avoiding the risk of even a half-second of boredom, the movie is wall-to-window-to-door noise, babbling, and jokes.

Gone are Chung's willfully irrational non sequitur surrealisms, vertiginous designs, dry humor, and physiological weirdness; now we have Charlize Theron trying to look icy, leaping about in resistance to a future dystopia that looks a lot like an overlandscaped European Union industrial park.

Demonstrates that even if you live in a country intimately familiar with fascist occupation, you might still not have the least clue how to communicate that experience on film.

Stilted as a beach house, the movie crawls from one harangue to another.

The movie's single brilliant invention -- Julianne Moore as a used, contentious, profoundly odd floozy on her own magical mystery tour.

On a strictly experiential level, Deborah Scranton's The War Tapes is remarkable, tactile, and affecting; as a piece of sociopolitical culture with context and ramifications of its own, it's a worthless ration of war propaganda--ethnocentric, redneck, and enabling.

Written, directed, and edited with the offhand shoddiness of a day worker thinking about his evening beer.

Kill Your Darlings is an undernourished and over-emphatic film.

That the Cold War was a wasteful charade proves Bitomsky's point amply enough, but his movie is a repetitive bore.

Gay jungle sex (gasp!), gone-native intellectuals, tribal rituals (gulp!), cannibalism (none of which the film shows, by the way) -- it sounds like a "Weekly World News" front page, not the thematic fodder of a highbrow non-fiction film.

Adroit but finally a trifle flat, Mad Love doesn't galvanize its outrage the way, say, Jane Campion might have done, but at least it possesses some.

An adept mood maker, Medem strains madly for cosmic alliances, fairy-tale imagery, and fated coincidences, but he triumphs only with two hot bodies, a cluttered apartment, and a Shower Massage.

Honestly, Courtney and his crew all seem like nice people, but if there's an unironic audience for this kind of romantic jock-cup fondling, I'm not interested in knowing it.

Sandler is less goofy than spitefully self-absorbed, and most of the comedy feels like child abuse.

The commonest sort of cultural pasteurization.

Vertical Limit's real problem is its digitized sheen. Every shot seems to have been CGI-enhanced, so the movie has an overpasteurized, Velveeta-like glow -- processed movie food.

The movie is typical Hill-pulp: modestly scaled and efficiently cheesy.

Following is modest and engaging, but in being strenuously clever, it surrenders any dibs it might have on being relevant, or original.

A Spanish Blair Witch DIY-er with a nutsy pre-emptive title, this trifle scoots and skitters along guilelessly, as if the mock-doc horror trope hasn't already been tourist-trampled to death.

Only Giovanni Ribisi, with a back-of-the-bus speech about the betrayals of insurgent and counter-insurgent politics, finds a genuine moment. All the same, for some unfathomable reason, Dylan's autumnal self-salute is not particularly difficult to watch.

Far from creating a pungent portrait of a society gone mad with blood and greed, Schroeder's movie strives for political points while it's whiffing on simplicities like character, motivation, and believability.

It's an easy movie to loathe, but it's designed imaginatively and enjoys the committed attention of its cast.

The gooseberry Harlin came up with will win no proselytizers, but it does have a pleasant matinee modesty, a cool sepia-period look, and an interesting flashback relationship with Nazis.

Never good with nuance, Kim is a beast with disarming imagery but has few resonating ideas, leaving the domino-tumble of brutality to become its own tiresome spectacle.

One of those hellishly predictable digital-monster gauntlets that makes you pity the actors.

Obsessives can be seductive, and Toback is interesting for the same reasons his films are often unendurable: He's not an artist so much as a giant pop-cult testicle pumping absurd energy in a rampaging, self-justifying gout.

The vibe rarely expands beyond dozy Comedy Central skits sprinkled with ironic cliches rather than jokes, 99 percent earnest slo-mo quirk and 1 percent funky non sequitur (the characters sport brand names, like Plymouth Ray-Ban), most of it explained rather than performed.

There's precious few yucks, for one thing, but you can't say you're surprised that the astonishingly humorless Lyne hadn't noticed or cared that the Nabokov original is a droll comedy of errors first and a self-pitying romantic tragedy second.

It's not the freshest scenario, and Baker lets Lucky sputter and moan about his fate for so long that we wonder, as his sensible girlfriend does, why we're bothering with such undiluted dickness.

Irritatingly repetitious and piled high with long-foreseen conclusions.

The ambitions are so paltry that our response should be too: Wolf Creek is unimaginative, light on the grue and heavy on the faux-serious desperation.

Elling is nothing if not carefully controlled hokum -- both actors, the director, and screenwriter all worked it through first as a stage adaptation of a novel by Ingvar Ambjornsen.

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

Pushing Tin pivots on our dubious fascination with professional erection duels, which are a sad substitute for dramatic conflict.

Wittily conceived but clumsy as a newborn calf.

Messy, frantic, and repetitive, Everybody Famous! takes on both vapid pop culture and the mindless hoi polloi that consumes it.

Prince Chatri Chalerm Yukol's movie is lovely, large, and tedious, subscribing blindly to storybook stereotypes (this warrior is brave, this prince is noble, this consort is evil) and acted, for the most part, in a passionless monotone.

The Rod Serling tension Byrkit is angling for never quite arrives, nor does any real Borgesian frisson. But thanks to its social setting, it does offer a vivid and perhaps intentional satirical portrait of L.A. culture.

Not exactly a hagiography, Polish's film isn't a tragedy, either -- it's just an uneventful afternoon spent with a dozing rummy.

Derrickson's flick can sour your stomach with piety, which is a shame -- its moments of jolt wattage rate with many J-horrors.

Has only its stylized designs to recommend it.

All the same, The Rider Named Death is curiously anemic; rather than passion, outrage, and danger, we're contemplating the sotto voce conspiracy love of a quaintly distant age, when results weren't quite as emotionally important as commitment and camaraderie.

Good intentions can be deadly: Benoit runs into the common tripwire of caring more about pitching her cause than she does about movies. Scenes illustrate simple social-injustice points, and the characters are one-dimensional sufferers.

Bumrushed onto American screens like late-breaking news, the Japanese TV doc Power and Terror: Noam Chomsky in Our Times is a relatively thin slice of Chomskiana -- a chapter from any of the man's many interview volumes, or even an hour of his C-SPAN dialogues, has more political substance.

Everyone in the film is a walking cliché.

The movie is a sloppy amalgamation of animated instruction, dramatic vignettes (starring actualization-starved single gal Marlee Matlin), and talking-heads interviews.

The three stars are all perfectly naturalistic, but their roles are too bloodless and their patter too dry.

First-timer Nick Tomnay has expanded his movie from a short, and the point where he ran out of ideas looms like a cliff edge.

Beauvois, who co-wrote, seems hellbent on making the most realistic cop film of all time, shruggingly consumed with downtime, small talk, minor incident, and dead ends, and he's succeeded--the narrative wouldn't have cut it in a Kojak story meeting.

It's an easier movie to tolerate than it should be if, like me, you're in love with Téa Leoni, who, as a lithe, lusty, strangely patient firecracker Superwife in a shag, rescues the movie from the tar pit of irrelevance. With some decent lines, she could be the new Myrna Loy.

However brightened by some fast dick-and-pussy banter and lovely Tuscan scenery, the film's slow boil makes it fairly unconvincing, and Creatini is one of modern European movies' least palatable, and least animated, protagonists.

Indulges in enough grubby histrionics and costume-adventure cliches to give you fifth-grade flashbacks.

Leopold's movie is superbly shot and restrained, but not economical; the brooding and introversions profitlessly pad out what might've been a leveling featurette.

It's not a riot, though the Midwest textures are sharp (especially for an Irish filmmaker in an entirely Irish production), and the idea of witnessing a killing spree from the p.o.v. of a town's funeral home is full of rich discomfort.

The Motel, Michael Kang's modest Sundance applause reaper, doesn't deserve to be shotgunned for the sins of 30 other movies. But the underwhelming syncopation of make-nice clichés is too familiar.

It's a shame that, somewhere in his mystagogical handstanding, Fresnadillo forgot the real world.

Wang mistakes affectless storytelling and character conception for rigor, and as a result huge portions of Beijing Bicycle are dull and repetitive.

At first, Hoffman appears to be juxtaposing the savoir faire and genuine deprivation of the Depression society with the spoiled, consumption-crazed world we have now, but then he merely lapses into a vague Occupy-ish indictment of the 1 percent and the collapse of community as a cultural foundation.

What's more disappointing is how filthy Invincible is with missed opportunities for Herzog to be Herzog.

An air-conditioned bus tour of Punjabi ritual. Nair stuffs the film with dancing, henna, ornamentation, and group song, but her narrative clichés and telegraphed episodes smell of old soap opera.

The net effect would be doze-inducing if in fact the Dolby didn't attempt to wake the dead.

As his story emerges-rape, assault, manslaughter, prison, and torrential self- destruction-it becomes clear that Pacheco is some kind of sociopath, and the movie evolves into a monstrous portrait of economic annihilation on the outskirts of the global village.

Sayles, it seems, doesn't think much of his audience, and the tone of his discourse is only nominally less pandering than a politician's.

de Broca's efficient fencing-mania melodrama brings little that's original to the table.

The film is more stale than crisp, with dialogue that is at least 50 percent old aphorisms, homilies, and clichés.

Polished and visualized with a sharp sense of place, writer-director Robert Connolly's drama is propped up by bogus science (the relationship between stock undulations and the Mandelbrot set is never made plausible), and the characters are paint-by-numbers.

All in all, Hijacking is less a movie than a litany of arguments intended as, or at least only useful as, a brickbat in the discourse, aimed at your neighbor's Republican noggin.

As used cars go, the latest and possibly last Harrison Ford thriller, Firewall, is no deal: It runs rough, stalls frequently, smells like the stale sweat of four dozen older movies, and handles like a blind mule.

Opting for this refried mash over Lee's rentable beauty is like choosing canned beans over an Asian feast.

The upshot is a general fog of two-dimensional characterization, slowly churning plot gearwork, and an ineffective air of forced lyricism.

A big, stupid bull with bodacious tits, but that's not to say it doesn't dish out some lite hardy-hars.

Strangers With Candy regularly lampoons junkie-reparation melodramas and after-school specials, but with so little focus it's never clear what the film, or even Sedaris's vaudeville buffoon incarnation, is supposed to be parodying. That may be its fascination for some--it's a satire without a baseline, free-floating in its own self-indulgent ether.

For some fans, the taste of on-location color matters most, but Nuñez's idea of the characters' ordinariness translates to flavorlessness.

Eccentric enough to stave off doldrums, Caruso's self-conscious debut is also eminently forgettable.

Mattei is tiresomely grave and long-winded, as if circularity itself indicated profundity.

Zucker's frenzied trifle is painless, with a few decent running gags -- and an ocean of bad ones.

Arguably the most dysfunctional culture of the past few centuries, North Korea is a cosmically mad movie waiting to happen. But for now, Heikin's is merely insubstantial.

The film galumphs along in static panels, prioritizing flash over thought, hyperextending a story that would barely sustain a children's picture book.

The dialogue is as stock as the characters, and James's visual palette never surpasses the adequate.

Has a customarily jovial air but a deficit of flim-flam inventiveness.

It might be the most maturely conceived role in Burns's films, but the plot around it is flimsy, the visual storytelling simpleminded, and the general ideas for character one-note. At 78 minutes, the movie says howdy, rewards little, and does not test its welcome.

In the end, Ted Bundy's only justification is the director's common but unexplored fascination with the frustrated maniac; there's no larger point, and little social context. "Badlands" this ain't.

Obvious, simplistic, and never funny, Johnson's movie may be useful only as real estate porn--Cornwall and the Isle of Man never looked so super cute.

An orgy of bad decisions and cheap ideas.

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

Pushes the standard tropes of gay romance movies a few more steps toward full-blown cliché-dom.

To say that it's dull barely scratches the surface.

A ponderous stage adaptation that expends only the mildest effort to overcome its staginess.

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

Joffe's latest is a formless, inanimate lump.

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.

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

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

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

Flows like day-old cement.

The movie is so slovenly in its animation and graceless in its writing that few viewers over the age of 9 are likely to notice.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

Unoriginal and mired in bad jokes.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

So feel-sniffly-good it could make you revisit lunch.

An utterly empty-skulled genre mechanism and nothing more.

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

An overwhelming portion of Saved! is wall-to-wall Jesus-Jesus-Jesus talk, closer to dead air than social spoof. At times, the screenplay (including Mary's voluminous narration) has the monotonous cadence of a recruitment sermon.

Although inexplicable brogues and burrs appear and disappear, and although Stone post-produces the dickens of his movie trying to generate the maximum spit-fog of sound and fury, Alexander manages to be as dull as the Victor Mature films of the 1950s, which barely moved at all.

Gigli berates, insults, dismisses, throttles, and bellows at Bartha's meticulously aped retard, and then turns sensitive and warm—it's hard to decide which attitude is more insulting.

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

Fawzi shoots the proceedings in clumsy, gotch-eyed spurts, and the level of incoherence is impressively high.

Amy Goodman's narration, though correct, has a petulant, Spanish Inquisition ring to it, only made more childish by the film's cheap idealization of the senator from South Dakota as some kind of pacifist Savonarola, overdue for canonization.

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

An overproduced, video-director remake, slick and grue-marinated and loud as a sonic boom.

It'll make you cyberlaugh, it'll make you cybercry, just like cyberlife -- One thing is certain: your boredom

15 Minutes settles into Richard Donner-style goulash.

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.

Soft-boiled blarney so sluttish with Hollywood clichés it could've been made in Burbank.

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

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

The dead-end social points Gonick is making are so blunt they're hardly points at all anymore, but the galleon anchor that's weighing down this well-intentioned homey is the amateur acting.

Brown's saga, like many before his, makes for snappy prose but a stumblebum of a movie.

Remains simplistic and gimmicky in the context of Iranian cinema.

Smartly written, unevenly executed.

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).

The story is little more than overdetermined trials and triumphs. Kids won't care, but they won't fall for it either; unsurprisingly, it doesn't stand a chance of providing them with the memories the book provided their parents.

The screwiest yarn yet from Shyamalan's metaphysical-Limburger career project, a non-horror horror film.

There is an odd cognitive dissonance at work between the obvious ingenuity dedicated to the film's visual details -- alien anatomies, industrial machinery, technological minutiae -- and the retarded intelligence quotient evident in its content.

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

The film exists in a humid meta-movie ether all its own.

Hardly a project worthy of grown men and women.

Indiana Jones has never been so missed, but instead this shaggy God story hones in on the faith dilemmas of Banderas and a sputtering Derek Jacobi, so Sunday-hammy you want to rivet him with cloves.

The notion of grievingly happening upon your dead beloved, young and lovely again, is simple and potent, but the film's airless amateurism, belabored ethnicism ("Oy gevalt!"), and trite dialogue kill it in the water.

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.

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

Agazzi's movie rather provincially hints at sexiness, humor, and satire without actually manifesting them.

Washington directs with proficient blandness charged only occasionally by organic acting moments.

Beautifully shot and littered with disquieting character business, the film is hog-tied by its own bad Big Idea.

A decked-out mediocrity with a high-octane cast.

The director knows how to apply textural gloss, but his portrait of sex-as-war is strictly sitcom.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The movie hardly has enough beef on its bones to make a meal. The very notion that movies about torture are considered "horror," and are more profitable now per foot of celluloid than any other type of independent film, is what's qualmy.

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

Logic, motivation, suspense -- anything that might make the film frightening or resonant -- is buried under Dolby blams, medulla-shaming dialogue, and a rain of overdubbed hunting-knife schwings that grate like a 3 a.m. car alarm.

The story -- is just what fills in the gaps between slow-motion fireballs, Matrix-style frozen mayhem, and Halle Berry's notoriously undraped breasts.

Tries to show the oh-so-human side of Gospel-hawking, His Word, the Path, and so on.

Scene-by-scene, things happen, but you'd be hard-pressed to say what or why; occasionally, a poetic moment leaps out of the soup.

Despite this ripe framework and the talent on deck, ILYW is not a satire...Rather, it becomes a cold-serious, dead-air brood about how tough, lonely, and desolate it is being a celebrity.

If you see it, the sequel will be your fault.

The even faintly informed will see only a cut-rate vision of flabby white men defending their own bloodthirsty opportunism.

A drearily over-cynical farce.

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

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

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.

An aimless, pointless dawdle.

A shovelful of silly manure from the get-go.

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

There's nothing wrong with Down to You that a smart script and savvy direction couldn't cure.

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

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

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

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

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

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

A shallow Brazilian trifle.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

Can't surmount its own ineptitude.

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

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

The movie is trite like the ocean is big.

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.

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.

Doyle loves bad jokes and his story has no rhyme or reason, dissolving in its last third into a bungled heist and jailhouse face-off.

The climax comes at you like a thrown cream pie, but given its faux-mythic nerve, it's tolerable. Too bad this latest station in Costner's ongoing self-crucifixion is such small potatoes until then.

A clumsy, witless cartoon version of E.B. White's rather uncelebrated children's story.

The blood is raspberry syrup, the gags gag, and the film virtually falls over itself informing us how lame it is.

I'd take the stakes driven right through my platform pumps over listening to Bruce Vilanch jokes, but that's me.

This movie doesn't just kill time but tortures it.

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.

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