Michael Atkinson

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

Writers are only interesting for what they've written, and for that you'll have to go read.

Culminates in a second bing-bang-boom triple shoot-out that effectively cancels out the shreds of remaining plot but is shot and cut like a sixth grader's Super-8 struggle for Woo-ness.

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.

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

Drama is minimal and character nonexistent.

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

It's a warped kind of romantic comedy in which the whole is substantially less than the sum of the parts.

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.

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

Yet another leaden, witless, cliché-drunk, teen romantic comedy starring the preposterously good-looking stars of mediocre TV series.

Manure of a relatively clover-scented variety, George Hickenlooper's The Man From Elysian Fields is at primal odds with itself.

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

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

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.

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

Invoking unpleasant memories of "Caligula" (only without the sex), Titus does no justice to Shakespeare.

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

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

Go see this movie and you'll be...yup. You should save your money; Norm Macdonald should save his career, by quitting movies altogether.

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

Virtually unwatchable.

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.

Disheveled tripe pieced together with the good intentions.

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

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.

A heart-wrenching debacle from the starting gun.

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

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.

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

The unaddressed incongruities are as stupefying as the music.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

Pernicious tripe suitable only for masochists and the intellectually disabled.

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

May be Jordan's wildest mis-shot yet, so dense with dying fizzle and limp ideas that I began to wonder if Jordan has an evil twin, or if there are in fact several Neil Jordans, among them at least one literate stylist and one humor-handicapped village idiot.

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.

Bloodless, lip-biting psycho-carnage.

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.

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

A real midlife crisis might be more enjoyable.

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

I'd rather eat ball bearings.

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

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.

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.

It's barely a movie.

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.

The fiercely original Eddie Izzard is wasted in this botch, not something you could say for lucky millionaire Friend Matt LeBlanc.

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.

Clearly the product of an editing-room scramble, New Best Friend is a self-lambasting farce, despite Kirshner's passionate college try at establishing a third dimension in a brain-dead movie flatland.

As the basest form of genre hootenanny, it wimps out: There's no twist, no showboat acting, not even an outrageous crisis of paternal violence.

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

Appears to have been written and directed by a grade-school dropout snorting airplane glue.

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.

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.

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

Self-involved, amateurish, and unoriginal.

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

Actual concussive cranial abuse would be preferable to Jessie Nelson's I Am Sam.

Comes scarily close to being the most unendurable Hollywood creation of the last dozen years.

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.

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.

Stay home. Your entertainment-seeking efforts would be better expended perusing old phone books. The white pages.

One of a barely acknowledged sub-breed of indie: howling-vanity amateur-work.