Michael Sragow

The movie plays like a dunk-the-clown game at a carnival. Through intent or ineptitude, he sets up the Bush family and administrations as caricatures.

Despite these flaws, people sick of gross-out films and teen-sex comedy may be so hungry for farce that they laugh.

S.W.A.T. may be an acronym for Special Weapons and Tactics, but by the end of this routine melodrama, it might as well stand for Standard Whacking and Trashing.

Without Duvall, this movie would be as wet as Waterworld.

Gibson mounts a convincing crucifixion, but his victim is the audience. The Passion of the Christ aims its metallic cat-o'-nine-tails at the viewers' nerves.

The Safety of Objects is just another stilted comic-dramatic essay examining the mold in the white bread.

Made is an amateur-hour buddy movie.

The dramatic content in Memento is as blank as Leonard's post-traumatic mental state.

How does an embarrassment of riches turn into mere embarrassment?

Never persuasively dramatize the agony, ecstasy and intricacy of composing poetry. Without that aesthetic component, all you see is that Plath's hunger for life couldn't compete with her death wish.

It's hard to know what these stars are ready for after this fiasco. Maybe a fitness video.

Pious, high-minded and bad history.

Forget chemistry: There's no biology to the star casting.

You don't want to look at anything else when Zeta-Jones is on-screen.

There's no irony within the film, but there's a whopping irony surrounding it. Just as Star Wars has finally ended, Rocky seems to be starting all over again.

Manipulates the audience.

The movie's own style is strictly an anti-style, all pre-packaged post-punk.

Roos suffers from fallen archness in his interminable new movie Happy Endings. He wants to be mischievous and ambitious and "human," all at the same time. He ends up with delusions of tragicomic grandeur that leave an audience fed up and dissatisfied.

The Hangover is like an infernal comedy machine. Surrender your soul to its foul mesh of cheap cleverness and vulgarity. and you howl like a delighted demon. Resist, and you feel all sense and sensibility being crushed in its cogs.

The movie gives us a time machine that resembles a twin-engined Mixmaster and a script that was tossed together inside one.

This new version may be closer to the Cole Porter biography, but it's hardly any more true to life. There is no life in this movie. It's a brittle contraption of a biopic.

The result is a flabby, episodic phantasmagoria.

Nolan pushes the twilight-zone atmosphere so hard that it loses its capacity for mystery. When it's not assaulting us with jolting audiovisual expressions of fatigue, this movie plays like a pedestrian response to David Lynch's effortlessly eerie "Twin Peaks."

This Women doesn't take place in reality or even in a glamorous urban fantasyland. It's strictly TV Land.

And Witherspoon? She does the American equivalent of a mechanical British performance: She hits every note too perfectly. There's no shadow to her smile.

By the end, this movie's balancing act is the equivalent of network news' equal-time laws. The "fairness" becomes deadening.

Wonderland marks a "biopic" first: Moviegoers will know less about the real-life subject going out than they did going in.

Hanks tries his hand at a king-size heartless comic role, and flubs it terribly. He looks slack and pasty and, what's worse, sounds slack and pasty.

Needs a story.

The movie goes awry from the opening shots.

It's no compliment to say a movie is "all of a piece" if the piece is all worn out. For all its surface harshness, this movie is a star vehicle at once rickety and cozy.

A visionary sort of horror movie should ponder three words: "Bram Stoker's Dracula."

Rock Star neither touches a raw nerve nor garners any resonance as a period piece. You'd be better off renting "This is Spinal Tap."

If you put the word Tired first, it would perfectly describe the movie.

This movie makes it official: No matter how awful, even the networks and basic cable are now officially hipper than the studios.

A hollow excuse for an erotic mystery.

Beyond Borders keeps angling for a peace prize; it might have won more hearts and minds if it came together as a movie.

Failed marital farce.

Under the guidance of Jon Avnet, they're (De Niro/Pacino) both playing New York police detectives - partners, no less - in the cop-and-serial-killer tale Righteous Kill, and they're thunderously mediocre.

The only hope for Inglourious Basterds is that audiences will embrace it the way the Broadway crowd did "Springtime for Hitler": because it's so bad they think it's good.

Like Adam Sandler's "Mr. Deeds," this is a hybrid, hipster-cornball movie that wants to celebrate common folk but unapologetically uses words like "trailer trash" to describe them.

The biggest crime of Van Helsing is that it resurrects classic monsters and fails to make them scary. With a full 132 minutes of feeble jokes and gimcrack phantasmagoria, it's not spine-tingling - it's butt-numbing.

The only reason to see Nights in Rodanthe is to check in with Diane Lane.

As sweet and hopeless and silly as a doting dad framing his second-grader's latest finger-painting and calling it a Matisse.

Luhrmann steals good ideas, fair ideas and terrible ideas - anything that once moved him when he was a little boy. He's turned Australia into a more-than-you-can-eat buffet of colorful kitsch.

You won't believe the story director George Clooney and his goofball TV host are trying to sell. Really.

Plays like Abbott and Costello Meet Conan the Barbarian.

It's disconcerting to see Ferrell, a master of macho psychosis, adopt the stop-and-go dithering of Woody Allen-style neurosis.

The film is hapless. The gap between the moviemakers' ambition and their wit is dizzying. It's as if they thought they were filming The Importance of Being Unimportant.

The unearned air of moralism that wafts through 15 Minutes pollutes its entertainment value.

The apotheosis of adolescent junk. Every sequence spews or splats carnage-filled effects. It's over-the-top, but not pleasurably so -- it's calculatedly over-the-top. The only way to get off on it is to revel in its prodigal waste of materiel.

What's wrong with Latter Days is that its banter is pedestrian and its lessons forced.

Isn't serious enough to fulfill its ambitions, or funny enough to compensate for its failures.

A one-joke movie. What makes it misfire is that its one joke clashes with its one idea.

The problem with Confessions of a Shopaholic isn't conspicuous consumption. It's ostentatious idiocy.

Too bad this movie is more tepid than the average Snipes potboiler and even rustier than his mindless Blade pictures.

As a spy film, The Sum of All Fears is flaccid, and as an expose of nuclear threats, there's not enough information.

It's the oddest case yet of the Emperor's New Clothes. After all, the Emperor in the fairy tale was naked. This movie has tons of fabulous clothing. The people disappear within their wardrobes.

Shyamalan plows the same old ground of juiced-up surprise endings.

Because this Four Feathers is an utter botch, it might make savvy viewers feel that the subject matter is hopeless.

The film's storytelling and image-making lack originality and vitality. Nothing sticks to your memory unless you come in with recollections of the book.

American art movies rarely come fancier or emptier than Northfork, a down-home arabesque made of angel fluff.

This film isn't an enjoyable martial-arts extravaganza like "District B-13" or the "Transporter" films.

Revolutionary Road isn't just a failed literary adaptation. It's a failure of the worst kind: It doesn't even make you want to read Richard Yates' deservedly legendary book.

The surprise behind Town and Country isn't that the director started filming without a finished script, but that he ever thought he had the start of one.

Bad Company is about an undercover brother, but it will never be confused with "Undercover Brother."

Unfortunately, nothing in it rings with the faintest tinkle of truth.

8 Women would probably be a looser, giddier salute to show-biz ideas of femininity if it were performed by eight drag queens.

Maybe this is a psychological thriller after all: Every thinking member of the audience will be driven insane.

Sheila Bernette, as an aged pickpocket, is less a stereotype than an escapee from some provincial British comedy of the early 1950s. But she steals necklaces and knickknacks with such finesse and gusto that she also steals the movie.

If it worked, The Fast and the Furious would put viewers in the same position as the policeman protagonist, attracted to speed but appalled by crime. Instead it sentences you to an hour and a half in a high-decibel limbo.

The serial-killer thriller of the week, should have gotten a life of its own instead of trying to steal it from Michael Pye's novel of the same name and several other movies.

Most of the film is one big blooper reel. There's not enough of a gap between the rejects and the finished movie.

Starts out mixing social burlesques and melodrama and ends up one more failed thriller about men behaving badly - and stupidly.

Ends up neither fish nor fowl. It's a misanthrope's "E.T."

What kills Max Payne is that the characters think and feel in slow motion. Half the time, mentally, they're just running in place.

The low points in this movie aren't just catastrophic: they're bewildering.

In this movie, when the honeymoon is over it's really over.

A mistaken message is a price a filmmaker pays when he tries to load weighty themes like the cycle of violence on an overgrown boy who scoots around on a bicycle.

Will pop your eyes without tickling your funny bone.

It's not hell, but limbo, junior high-school style.

It's a mishmash of "The Bridge on the River Kwai," "From Here to Eternity" and "The Great Escape," with everything complex and entertaining siphoned off.

The result is as flat as a year-old beer commercial.

However you pronounce Bythewood -- I assume it's by-the-wood -- his work here is strictly by the numbers.

It has graceful layers and folds and a nice swing to it, and Jackson moves superbly in it. Unfortunately, I'm talking about the kilt, not the movie.

Is there anything more pathetic than a movie that will do anything for a laugh or a tear that doesn't get any laughs or tears?

The movie has nothing to offer except titillation.

A movie made at wits' end. There are four or five authentic laughs in the whole 170-minute extravaganza.

Was the Swedish director, Mikael Hafstrom, taking revenge on the American star system?

Forget any hope of raffish adventure if you think of seeing Flyboys.

The second movie, Dead Man's Chest, is everything you feared the first would be: a theme-park spectacle lasting 2 1/2 hours.

A catastrophically messy action-movie mash-up.

The surefire laugh-getter centers on using a tampon to stop a nosebleed. Watching this movie, I had to hope it could stop brain-drain.

By the end, it doesn't even have the courage of its political incorrectness.

It's as if all the digital tools of new millennial filmmaking fell into the hands of men who had less storytelling sense than a campfire bard or a cave painter.

If you're not a fan of M. Night Shyamalan's convoluted, teasing thrillers, you'll find that getting into this movie is like cracking a puzzle in which the constructor keeps breaking his own rules or grabbing new ones from ultra-thin air.

You have to identify pretty strongly with suffering artistes to find anything to root for in The Science of Sleep.

Bullock does her damndest to be nerdy and instead becomes excruciatingly artificial - a malfunctioning verbal fun machine.