Michael Atkinson

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.

Actually lighter, wittier, and more original than it has a right to be.

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.

A thoughtful, stunning piece of work in what, of late, has been an otherwise arid indie landscape.

Roth never fully exploits the woods around him, and the homes of the locals are far too middle-class, but because so many clichés are discarded amid the flesh rot, even the patented "Night of the Living Dead" coda feels sharp-edged and genuine.

Wallows in the same affected retro stylishness as the earlier film (Croupier), suffers from the same lack of narrative focus, and is just as choked with clichés.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

It's a drab, familiar story with no oomph (and less humor than you'd think), and it's inconsistent.

Hardly gay camp for nothing, sword-and-sandal epics cannot help but teeter on the brink of self-mockery, and Troy, for all its grim seriousness, embraces both the clichés and the beefcake.

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.

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.

A film the family might've made themselves: sophomoric, hagiographic, amateurishly strobe-happy, and thoroughly hippiefied.

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.

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.

The first 15 minutes of Nowhere to Hide rock, and after that it's got nowhere to hide from its own excesses.

An aimless, pointless dawdle.

The film will come to share the video store shelf with Harlin's infinitely stupider rendition soon enough, but it's a shame they couldn't have been released theatrically head-to-head -- a death match-cum-clinical trial that might've supplied some objective stats on how much condescension the American moviegoer actually enjoys.

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

A pre-programmed mediocrity, a slave to its clichés.

The question of whether this is a movie about reincarnation or fate or middle-aged delusion remains unaddressed far beyond our capacity to care. Many of the admirably long conversational scenes are pointless; some, like Harden and Linney's climactic bitch-fest in a hotel room, are flat-out absurd.

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

When he isn't overreaching for absurdity, Curtis can write bouncy patter, but each character gets about 60 seconds before the movie jumps deck to the next love-seeker and the next moony pratfall.

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

Something of a wonder, a palm-size ball of banter and irony and earnestness that never stops rolling and almost never misses the sweet spots.

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

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

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

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

The heartfelt use of extrasensory events as metaphors for a child's grasp of adult mysteries has a poetry to it, and the unblinking sympathy for kids struggling with evil and with the strange frequencies of prepubescent passion can, if your defenses are down, lay you out.

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).

However bogged down by predictable story rhythms, banally assembled shoot-outs, and climactic mano a mano, The Missing has an acidic period tone, a respect for the reality of violence, and a refreshing dearth of superhuman heroics and easy triumph. For that much, we should be grateful.

Idlewild has a sober, loving respect for history and the old South, and thereby grants itself a measure of distinction.

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.

Nolte's exploding patriarch jacks up the story's antisocial wish fulfillment into a Nietzschean-anarchist's wet dream, but one can only vainly hope that the preordained sequel will head in that dastardly direction.

It's decent, exoticized pulp with a porcelain veneer, and should be consumed idly.

It's Besson's stunning visual fluency that takes center stage, and in the end, that's not quite enough.

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

One Missed Call, one of the five movies he made in 2003, is no more than Miike's shot at generating a polished, rote, expertly composed J-horror flick.

Lonesome Jim has the import of a deliberately squelched sitcom, or a home movie that's poisoned by unhappiness but shown anyway for stray laughs.

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

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.

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.

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.

Visconti's film remains a Euro-culture touchstone, though not nearly as convincing or visually stunning as its reputation insists.

Ishii's rough-hewn film may be the nastiest entry in its dubious but resonant subgenre since "I Spit on Your Grave." It's a black pearl for anyone who likes a little existential psychosis with their semi-softcore exploitation.

Aviva Kempner's utterly conventional documentary plays like a lost chapter from Ken Burns' "Baseball."

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.

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

You can't help wondering how the same Fifth Gen filmmaker who made "Yellow Earth" and "Life on a String" could've fallen on such hard times, or justified such goofiness to himself.

The comedy is somewhat doused by posture and repetition, and the characters' whimsical behavior is endearing and irritating in turn. Which still makes it the absolute best neo-samurai judo farce in town.

Cursed--but ironically!--with stomach-churning '60s decor, Slevin might round off in Park Chanwook country, but the lingering sense of it is as an amusement park for the actors, who are as infectiously overjoyed for the bouncy badinage as preschoolers on Christmas morning. Like tired parents, our enjoyment is primarily vicarious.

A pale imitation of the original Winnie the Pooh Disney shorts of the '60s, but a vast improvement on the current Pooh TV series and straight-to-tape specials.

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.

Never takes off, and much of the time Pool seems lost herself, resorting to clichés, redundancy, and dead-end allegory.

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.

She (Rossellini) is radiant in a profoundly ordinary and believable way, as always, and stirs up generational pathos all by herself.

Squint through the humbug, and there's some genuine life going on.

Even more of a party-hearty-Marty potlatch of silliness than its predecessor. The franchise having been established, Verbinski, Bruckheimer, and Co. have been liberated to indulge in absurdities, pile on the so-old-they're-new-again clichés, and make jokes at their own expense.

The historical road less traveled - shot in re-enactments that are obviously familiar with the terrain - is beguiling enough.

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

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.

For audiences new to this type of moon-mad magical realism and unembarrassed romanticism, Orfeu can spellbind.

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

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

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

For world-class lapses of judgment, Andrei Konchalovsky's House of Fools is a berserk overachiever.

Bizarre, off-putting, and finally demanding of rubberneck respect, this fish-tank indie never leaves a rather lovely duplex apartment, occupied by an unemployed Everyman (Brendan Fletcher) and his roommate, Jimmy (director Matt D'Elia).

While the line-readings are often dead-on, Fishburne's movie suffers from the usual one-room claustrophobia and Mametian repetitions.

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

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

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

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

A watchable mediocrity at best.

Taylor traipses around after Zizek on a continent-hopping lecture tour, and we get a face full of the man's tireless analysis, in a style that can only be characterized as hyperactive grizzly bear, complete with spit-spewing speech impediment.

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.

Just as fabulously cartoon-Gothic as "Sleepy Hollow."

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.

Rarely funny and straining to reach feature length, The American Astronaut achieves sweetness via its straight-faced take on utter gobbledygook.

Myers has hit upon a genuinely original schtick, and that fact alone is immeasurably groovy.

Has only its actors to keep it afloat.

Suggest a Clintons-at-home scenario for 2001 -- haunted by the ghosts of dalliances past.

A low-bore DeLillo-ness plays at the movie's edges, but does it aggregate into a substantial something? Not really, but the traces of postmodern dread, however Haneke-lite it all may be (isn't everything Haneke-lite?), can tickle your short hairs if you're prone.

Even though Gray is no raw-boned rookie-he has made TV movies for decades, plus, back in the day, a single Steven Seagal floater-his movie is rather inexcusably obvious, going for "troot," but recycling dese-dose-dem clichés already pressed into plastic lumber 25 years ago.

The omnibus film usually saves its home run for the climax, but Eros begins with the best third, Wong Kar-wai's "The Hand."

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.

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.

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

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

Dramatically lopsided, Assassination Tango is a spontaneous life-slice in which John J. (standing in for Duvall) fumbles like a besotted granddad toward empathic connections. That it doesn't "work" is a measure of its sincerity.

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.

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

Clubfooted but earnest, Pandya's movie never forgets about its second-gen issues, but never quite plumbs them, either.

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

No matter how quotable the one-liners, the movie remains a far stretch from truth or insight.

If the movie works on its own insipid level, it's because of high-gear star power -- 50 times the captivator Dennis ever was, Theron is terrific at creating adorable intimacy with little help from the script or director and exudes more guileless élan than any of the film's many puppies.

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

An utterly empty-skulled genre mechanism and nothing more.

Glossy, gruesome police drama.

Bad Guy, one of the seven films in Kim's fascinating back catalog, is another kind of cocktail--simple, bitter, served straight and in an unwashed glass.

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

Though a relatively sober essay on criminal organization, Tycoon is also thoroughly pulpy -- that is, crass, unimaginative, corner-cutting, and simplistic, with the visual vocabulary of daytime soap.

The techies still can't manage to make two characters look convincingly into each other's eyes -- it's like watching Disney World animatronic figures do soap opera.

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

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

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

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.

What results is unremarkably schizophrenic--half gritty sojourn into the inner-city furnace, half Hollywood brain death.

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.

It might be worth enduring the Limburger to see Fraser morph from freckled-faced Rod McKuen dweeb to seven-foot albino ball star and never miss a beat.

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

Formally astute, visually arresting, and fearlessly horrifying.

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.

A tepid and surprisingly dull farce stamped from the "About Mary" mold.

Though bourgie audiences looking for a sun-warmed romance will be slapped; the movie may look pretty and may plod, but it also leaves a bruise.

It's a shame that Jeepers Creepers cops out -- as American genre movies have been doing for years -- and plays it safe with an F/X-heavy creature that no one would believe in a thousand years.

Achieves an abrading, intimate, primal force his later films only hint at. It's difficult to imagine the Euripides original ever being more eloquently adapted.

Showing the sex seems to be the film's raison d'etre, which gets you only so far.

What a world we'd live in if Argento's Hollywood counterparts -- say, Sarah Michelle Gellar, or even Christina Ricci -- had this much imagination and nerve. Few of them, at any rate, have Argento's reserves of lonesome passion and unspigoted woe.

For a few brief moments, it's the bravest work this Hollywood gargoyle (Hawn) has ever done.

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

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.

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.

It is, for a contemporary CGI-fraught fantasy-slash-living-video-game, not at all bad, dotted with moments of Bosch and steady on its storytelling feet.

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

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

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.

Hardly the idiosyncratic Mickey Finn you'd expect from the men behind 1998's underrated "Zero Effect" and 2000's discomfort-splooge "Chuck & Buck."

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.

All of the stories are conceived as ongoing plights, and have no third act. Which would be an improvement on Haggis's hyperbolic civics lesson if Avelino had the chops to master realism and embrace ambivalence. The acting is pro enough to keep your blood up, but the reverb is minimal.

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.

The glacial pace is only quickened for seconds at a time with evocative ideas and hints of satire.

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

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

First and foremost a trial run for a Universal Studios ride.

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

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.

Sags, lollygags, and blusters too much to sustain the what-the-hell momentum that Kitano achieves in his best movies.

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

As homey as old sweats.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

Everything is pre-medieval and unwashed, but with Antoine Fuqua at the steering wheel King Arthur is still a comic book, if a little more "Classics Illustrated" in tone than we'd have the right to expect.

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.

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

An entrancing glimpse of true underground Americana.

Amelio might just be trifling around, and sometimes that's how the film feels — rudderless and unsure of its own purpose. If fuzzy thematic thrust doesn't bug you, however, the essence of Albanese as a shrugging everyman for post-debt-crisis Europe may be its own reward.

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

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.

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

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

Funahashi's visual mood-making is an object lesson in how to create a sense of intimate anomie with next to nothing.

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.

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

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

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.

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

De rigueur hypocritical as it may be coming from Hollywood, Click is a cultural critique, with the dull blade and impact of a battle-ax... But it's a farce about loss, and it doesn't flinch.

Casting Tokyo as a neon wilderness thick with aged "perverts" and teenage pimps, the movie frames a critique of socially permissible pedophilia as indelible as Harada's eavesdropping mise-en-scène.

Ends up second-guessing its own high-minded strivings, not trustful enough of its audience to be sophisticated about history and ethics, and not pulpy enough to keep us awake.

For better or worse, Vanilla Sky is a genuine, albeit jejune, statement of star consciousness -- blustery with self-awe and feverish with cataclysmic self-doubt.

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

Mostly pathetic but on occasion grimly funny.

The clichés lap like bay waves, from the salutes to the brotherly brawl to the olive-oil tear streaks semipermanently painted down Jackson's cheeks.

There's a sense of life to Committed that's unpredictable and sweet, but too much of it is cluttered with lazy shortcuts.

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.

Joffe's latest is a formless, inanimate lump.

The film has a standard trajectory, but the details are unpredictable: Kitano fluctuates between goofy pratfalls. . . and elliptical pathos.

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

The Libertine's trouble lies precisely in its efforts at conjuring the historical past: No one in the film seems much more convinced than I am that because playwrights and authors wrote in clever, high post-Elizabethan diction, then everyone spoke that way every day, in the pubs, with whores.

Can't surmount its own ineptitude.

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

For many, the enticement of seeing two old pros smartly step through their pressurized pas de deux might be reason enough to buy a ticket.

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.

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.

It's all about the performances. Kechiche is reserved and superbly troubled, but Wright Penn, her stardom-crippling reserves of bitterness and bile rising to the surface, is a scary monster in full bloom, and her habitation of this wacky role makes the movie worth its weight in pixels.

A shovelful of silly manure from the get-go.

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.

Bizarre, confused, sanctimonious manure that makes Lurie's own "The Contender" look responsible by comparison.

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.

Artless but seductive.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

Drama is minimal and character nonexistent.

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

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

Pernicious tripe suitable only for masochists and the intellectually disabled.

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

Just isn't funny enough to sustain the lunacy.

The bubble-kid moms can whine all they want, but Bubble Boy is a liberated movie --liberated from tastefulness, of course, but also from logic, suffering, consequence, and temperance.

Whatever the target demographic was in the pre-production phase, now it's limited to sexually active 14-year-olds still retaking the sixth grade.

A stiff, clumsy, amateurish mess, one of those ethnically righteous movies likely to be endured exclusively by its story's demographic.

Brand-new and uproariously unimproved.

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

Predictable, tame dreariness.

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

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

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?

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

A trial of cliche, strained optimism, and dire quasi-comedy.

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.

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

Beneath may be an earnest goof, but any intended irony is so spiked with rainy-day-matinee movie love that the result is an oddly guileless horror exercise, unscary but rather adorable.

A self-adrenalizing, self-destructing pop-culture whirligig.

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.

A shallow Brazilian trifle.

If I were 13, I might be sufficiently entranced by the movie's bicycle stunts (down stairs! across countertops!) and wouldn't be wondering why ideas for science fiction films haven't progressed very far from "Star Trek's" first seasons all those decades ago.

Repetitive, aimless, and as frustrating as you'd imagine any two-hour music video to be.

But it's Lopez's movie, and its limitations are hers: Both actress and movie tackle emotional turmoil with a minimum of insight.

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

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.

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

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

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

An adroitly made, perfectly acted little nightmare.

As matinee probations go, the movie's tainted by too many bad songs and too much of Bruce Willis.

Fleder's forgettable thriller has a convincing edge, and Douglas remains unchallenged as Hollywood's most tremulous and disquieting dad-under-pressure.

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

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

Has an unforgettable artery of hot-blooded talent coursing straight through it.

Wittily conceived but clumsy as a newborn calf.

Everyone in the film is a walking cliché.

Rock is brave, fully invested in his character, and with a wide-open face and foolish grin, outrageously funny. It's a singular performance achieved without condescension or camp. Who'd a-thunk it?

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

Predictably soulless techno-tripe, this Bruckheimer-in-a-can thriller is leavened only by the ludicrous notion of Chris Rock playing separated twins.

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.

Director Harold Ramis and his cast fetch overchewed shticks, but what's surprising is the incompetent witlessness on exhibit. There's no limit to the botched comedy rhythms and wasted opportunities.

The unaddressed incongruities are as stupefying as the music.

Manipulative tragedy, muddled motivations, incongruous reconciliations, deranged cuteness, all of it directed with a tin ear and laden with a score that evokes the experience of a conditioned lab rat.

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.

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

Hardly a project worthy of grown men and women.

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.

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.

Davis has energy, but she doesn't bother to make her heroine's book sound convincing, the gender-war ideas original, or the comic scenes fly. Instead, the film is buttressed by song montages and jokey chapter titles.

A hellish and unconvincing celebration of badda-bing-ness.

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

It's as if on some semiconscious level, Shyamalan, who I do not doubt is a serious and self-serious pop-creative original, is calling his own success into question and daring his audience to gulp down larger and spikier clusters of manure, just to see if they will. Or he's lost his mind.

When it isn't TV-movie familiar, Egoyan's film is bughouse crazy, mixing in campy pulp elements that bleed pressure away from the story.

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

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.

Too amateurish to lampoon or evoke either film industry, Bollywood/Hollywood is a movie that owes its presence in theaters to a certain ethnic soccer comedy still circulating like a virus.

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?

Farnsworth brings a smidgen of scary energy to the social hellfire, and his newbie cast often out-act the pros.

The naked, artless display of nerve and rebellious bile is altogether unique in modern movies.

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

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.

Possibly the most deranged, pointlessly complex, automatic-writing-like cultural manifestation outside the cosmologies of the more creative psychotics.

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

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

To spend even 10 minutes in the movie's universe is to experience the Sartrean nausea of an utterly hollow head and heart.

15 Minutes settles into Richard Donner-style goulash.

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.

The cheesy idiot-twin of Pawel Pawlikowski's superb "Last Resort."

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

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

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

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.

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

A treacly, ham-fisted, German-American co-production about family ties that should only have been released in the circle of Hell reserved for movie critics.

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

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

The characters talk like smart, unpredictable people, and Kelly Ernswiler is one of a kind.

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

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

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.

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

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

The movie is trite like the ocean is big.

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.

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

Virtually unwatchable.

The material it does pull off is daring and sharp.

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

Bloodless, lip-biting psycho-carnage.

Amid the cliché and foreshadowing, Cage manages a degree of casual realism.

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

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.

Far more preposterous in its details than the average blam-quip-kerplow, The Art of War isn't helped by the performances.