Michael Sragow

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."

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.

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

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

The film saddles Craig T. Nelson with the generally thankless role of Paxton's cold, distant dad. But when he feels like the only person who doesn't understand what's going on with Tate and his son, you feel like saying, "No, me too."

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

The result is a flabby, episodic phantasmagoria.

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.

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

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

The one actor I wanted more of was Williams, who imbues Jack's dad with a robust, sometimes domineering wiliness that suggests a real person. Of course, these silly, inept filmmakers probably cast him because he plays a good guy and his first name is Treat.

A hollow excuse for an erotic mystery.

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

The film itself is an exercise in frustration.

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.

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.

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.

All it offers is sadism, impure and simple.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bomback's script is the worst thing a thriller can be - a flip-flopper, using quick character changes for plot twists. And Langenegger's direction rarely sustains a mood or tone, only a sleek veneer of luxury and knowingness.

Made is an amateur-hour buddy movie.

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

It's the strangest comic misfire yet from Wes Anderson.

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.

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

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

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

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.

Perfume offers eau de crud.

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

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.

Needs a story.

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.

Will pop your eyes without tickling your funny bone.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This film isn't the most awful comedy of the year (that would be Bride Wars or New in Town), but it may have the grossest antihero.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

The movie bobbles along on a weird, soft-edged sarcasm.

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

Timeline lacks potency, drive, wit and personality -- all the things that make escapism worthwhile.

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

Avary has taken a pig's ear of a book and turned it into a pig's ear of a movie.

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

Solondz is still stuck in an adenoidal whine.

If this version had been called The Poseidon Adventure, audiences could have sued for truth in packaging.

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

The Emperor's Club is a beautiful fraud -- as gracefully proportioned as a Christopher Wren academy, yet as devoid of content as a prep-school promo film.

Isn't a full-bodied comedy, and it isn't a bona fide action movie, either. It just makes a facetious spectacle of itself.

As a romance, Spanglish is like a wholesome flirt who drags things out and becomes a tiresome tease. As a satire of upper-middle-class Los Angeles, it's a disaster.

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

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

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.

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

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

Brand's script is a puzzle without a satisfying solution. Even at its supposedly heartfelt conclusion, it's more ironic than emotional, more of an art thing than a suspense movie.

Pleasantly meanders around a group of people who pitch projects and pitch woo on the Riviera.

The best reason to see it is Kate Bosworth as Sandra Dee.

Too bad you can see this sort of thing done more amusingly every week on ABC-TV and Comedy Central.

You leave this movie feeling mugged.

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

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.

"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.

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

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

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

Too bad the director ties everyone's laces together and they all go down in a jumble.

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.

Plays like Abbott and Costello Meet Conan the Barbarian.