Michael Sragow

It's about as much fun for the viewer as being dropped into a virtual-reality version of a highway-safety crash film. Hall writes and directs with the finesse of a rusty hatchet.

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.

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

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

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

Barf-bag baroque.

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 movie is a premise in search of a comedy. Rather than flesh it out, the filmmakers put familiar glad rags on the skull and bones.

The filmmakers lack any visual sense of humor and any talent for sustaining long-form comedy; the stunts have less wallop than a TV bloopers show and the Oedipal family slapstick goes around in circles, in more ways than one.

All it offers is sadism, impure and simple.

Jane Fonda coming back to the screen after a decade-and-a-half absence in Monster-in-Law is like Brando returning from the dead to star in a Police Academy movie.

Reprehensible.

Not since Rocky II has there been a more blatant attempt to recapitulate a box-office hit without adding any new attraction or appeal.

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

Ghosts of Girlfriends Past displays nary a wisp of life, let alone an afterlife.

Not enough to keep Clockstoppers from turning viewers into clock-watchers.

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.

The comedy of manners becomes strictly a comedy of bad manners.

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 desert is clean in Gerry, but it's also empty.

In this film, Soderbergh appears to judge the actors by how well they spew or swallow bile.

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

Here's my nomination for future grindhouse double-bill from hell: Pathfinder and "Apocalypto."

Here's hoping Allen's static Hennessey is due to an extreme acting choice and not plastic surgery. It would be tragic to lose a natural smile to star in garbage like Death Race.

"Hello, I Must Be Going," sings Groucho Marx in a clip from "Animal Crackers" at the start of the film. If I'd known what followed, I would have followed his advice.

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.

There's something junior varsity about the whole sensibility that makes the new version seem more dated than the old one.

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.

There isn't an earned moment of uplift or laughter in the movie. Everything in it is prefab.

In Schumacher's relentlessly arrhythmic and tone-deaf film, Gerard Butler plays the title role as if he were just plucked out of Monty Python's lumberjack chorus.

Takes a literary milestone of ambiguity and makes everything about it blisteringly obvious.

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 problem with Allen's latest, The Curse of the Jade Scorpion, is "Not enough Double Indemnity."

Perfume offers eau de crud.

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.

Gory overkill.

Peaceful Warrior fails pitifully at being transcendent. This New Age movie about living in the moment gets you looking at your watch and squirming in your seat.

Irreversible, though, is not a Kubrickian head trip. All Noe has come up with is a turn-on for sadists.

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.

In the Cut is a disaster. Familiar to the bone, arty on the surface, it could serve as the doomed pilot for a nightmare TV spinoff: Law & Order: Literary Victims Unit.

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.

The movie has nothing to offer except titillation.

How did an embarrassment of comic-book riches become simply an embarrassment as a movie?

Needs a story.

It's a gore sundae with an S&M cherry on top.

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

The movie goes awry from the opening shots.

The whirl, bang and general bother of crashing gears and gnashing metal ends up suffocating the senses.

Even the great Lily Tomlin can't muster a funny reaction to a Polish joke. It's an everything-including-the kitchen-sink comedy -- and the sink has rusty pipes.

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.

Margot at the Wedding is a Christmas gift for high-class depressives: a compendium of malaise fit for an L.L. Bean catalog.

The movie is a model of multinational incompetence.

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

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

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

Jane Fonda does an about-face on her persona and her talent, playing a teetotaler and, what's worse, a pious bore.

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.

The indisputably gifted Jim Carrey shows the side of him that just wants to be loved - the Riddler on Ritalin, the Mask unmasked. And it turns out to be stultifying.

A hollow excuse for an erotic mystery.

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

The only way sober adults will keep awake is wondering how the lead mobsters on "The Sopranos" -- who also are amateur film critics -- will rank the movie next year on HBO.

Venom isn't worth a critic's venom, but a brief condemnation is in order.

All Alexander proves in Punisher: War Movie is that a martial-arts-trained woman can make a film just as stupid, coarse and numbing as any muscle man.

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.

Excruciating...The movie proves to be singularly unfunny and static almost from the non-get-go. Virtually nothing happens; the movie is all premise.

Life as a House mounts a brutally insensitive attack on its audience's sensitivities.

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.

Smith appears to have poured his creative energy into the cheerful come-on of the title and left nothing in reserve for the movie. He fails to wring any memorable comedy from shoestring porno filmmakers because his own filmmaking is just as amateurish and slovenly.

A catastrophically messy action-movie mash-up.

So witless it wins most of its laughs when Czech-speaking characters spout obscenities that get translated into English subtitles.

To top it off, the ending is a clumsy cheat. Of course, I was rooting for the news gal to expire and the film to die a quick death.

Collateral Damage isn't jingoistic; it also isn't exciting. It's a depressed rabble-rouser.

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.

What's more annoying than the screenplay's relentless assaultiveness is its odd, sordid cuteness.

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

This chick flick never should have made it out of the incubator.

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