Michael Sragow

Too soft on its lead character and too willing to chalk up America's drug appetites to the times-that-were-a-changin' in the '60s.

Weitz doesn't manage Pullman's feat of being rational and magical simultaneously. But he rapidly and intelligently opens up Pullman's world.

No matter how "mock" this epic gets, it isn't mock enough. The "D" in the title must stand for dead weight.

For a movie with such a vibrant real-life base, An American Rhapsody is surprisingly low-impact.

Woo's antiwar intentions and his talent are at odds. In Windtalkers, war is a beautiful hell.

Spider-Man 2 offers one emotional or action-packed aria after another; at the end you feel like giving it a standing O.

The final half-hour is like the not-so-grand finale for a silly-sticky sitcom. It's a college-town “Friends” with an unearned doctorate.

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

Like a party where everyone is so desperate to have a good time that it makes you miserable.

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

What makes it all work is that Frank remains a self-made hero.

In an age when light-and-easy racial farces have become mainstream hits, he remains a tough-love comedian.

Scrambled space-time comedy that's as light and silly as it is erratic.

Rarely has appalling, reckless behavior been so soporific as in Savage Grace.

Cut above this genre's usual industrial sludge, even when the chops and kicks are too fast to follow.

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.

A bit like a real-world horror film with "heart," right down to the trick ending.

Step Brothers at its best is a smarter "Dumb and Dumber."

Maybe the best way to see Serendipity is to take a cue from the characters and wait a few years.

Experiencing this film is like hurtling down a verbal slalom.

What keeps the picture alive is Ghobadi's surprising, often explosive grasp of visual farce.

If only the director, or his deus, could have delivered us from the inevitable shock ending, which blends Darwin and Einstein with purest P.T. Barnum.

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

It all comes off as a case of filmmakers wanting to have their communion wafer and eat it, too.

You should have been able to treat this film as a grab-bag and pull out some plums. Instead it goes grabbing after you.

The story may be about cold-blooded murder, but Bullock's pulsating performance is about the getting of wisdom.

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.

Like "Mr. and Mrs. Smith," The Island is the kind of suicidal high-concept movie increasingly prevalent these days: a film so thoroughly pre-conceived and pre-sold that most audiences know more about what's going on than the characters do for half the movie.

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

This rendering of the turbulent second marriage of England's King Henry VIII proves too heavy-footed for the old movie two-step of setting up a morality tale, then exploiting it for heat and titillation.

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

The movie's sweetness, wit and charm go beyond its can't-we-all-just-get-along premise.

The excitingly well-made Death of a President imagines the assassination of President Bush as a way of analyzing political violence. And Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, sight unseen, has labeled it despicable.

Even the title is off. I haven't heard an honest "Lucky You" since I was in sixth grade. For most people it registers as a sneer.

Too bad Dreamcatcher amounts to a pastiche of better films like the original "The Thing" and both versions of "Invasion of the Body Snatchers." It ransacks the audience's memory warehouse.

At its best, Tropic Thunder wrings divine madness from wretched excess.

The movie dramatizes a social-sexual sea change with an out-of-control blend of cartoon farce and melodrama and clinical, often ludicrous sex scenes.

The saving grace in an exuberantly graceless movie is Clive Owen. This actor is bulletproof. Even in a sick-joke jamboree like Shoot 'Em Up, he mows down the competition and gets his laughs without losing his composure.

This fourth "Terminator" film is the ultimate heavy-metal parody. Better make that travesty, because there are next to no moments of comedy.

The first half is diverting and inventive. But the filmmakers use the second half as a box-office insurance policy. They fill it with the conventional super-heroics and heartbreak that they spend the first 45 minutes gleefully deconstructing.

With Tristan & Isolde, the core must be a passion that enlarges two outsize characters and seems as momentous as the rise and fall of a kingdom. Too bad this film's Achilles' heel is its heart.

Despite the nice touches at the corners, the center does not hold. In I Think I Love My Wife, there's too much emphasis on the Think.

The most refreshing thing about the original Men in Black was that it was relatively small - a modest, slapdash, 98-minute special-effects farce. The most refreshing thing about Men in Black II is that it is 10 minutes shorter.

De Palma's direction shines, but noir script doesn't match his gifts.

Soul Men isn't much of a movie, but it bubbles along and reaches its percolating high point at the very end.

Could have been a contender, but it lacks the courage of its own ambivalence.

What makes the "Dolittle" movies stand out from this menagerie is the superb casting and matching of the animals and their human voices.

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.

The casting in K-PAX is canny, but the picture as a whole is a clunky mix of the canny and the would-be uncanny.

Cold, bland and gimmicky - that's how the movie has turned out.

Ragged and frenetic.

Rather than providing flashes of one-of-a-kind humor, Allen has reached the point where his critical and movie-going fans are humoring him.

Director Gillian Armstrong drains all the emotional energy out of the people who dot her movie's lovely landscape.

Modest, tasty, and it goes down easy, like home cooking.

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.

The real obstacle here is a lack of filmmaking imagination.

Unlike Nicolas Cage in "National Treasure," Hanks lacks the game for it. The surface seriousness of these Dan Brown movies obstructs his affability and easy, attentive way with romance.

It's hard to see Franklin's fingerprints on the material. It's as if he directed with his gloves on.

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

The lack of condescension is the movie's saving grace, if grace is the right word. There's no snobbery to the low-blow humor, or to Reynolds' low-key, genial comeback turn, or to Sandler's more-ingratiating-than-athletic lead performance.

I found the sight of McAvoy as a piano player in jazzy-seedy duds a lot more disconcerting than Ricci's porcine prosthesis.

As for the Ya-Yas: They're not as much fun as the First Wives' Club.

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."

A strictly by-the-book sequel: It doesn't cheat series fans but it doesn't offer many thrills or surprises or lingering puzzles, either.

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

All it offers is sadism, impure and simple.

As social commentary, Fun With Dick and Jane wears Leno-thin. As a big-screen sitcom, it's a procession of hit-or-miss touches that cancel each other out.

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.

Apart from the movie's moments of flesh and fantasy, it lacks the lyric impulse that would make the swank fantasy take flight.

The Matrix Revolutions blends feather-brained, starry-eyed camp and rock-'em-sock-'em spectacle -- so it's at least more entertaining than the second Matrix film, which hung in the air like a noxious cloud.

Uneven and affecting movie.

The one perfect aspect of Jennifer's Body is its title: No one is going to like this movie for its brain.

The problem with Lions for Lambs isn't its political engagement but its cinematic disengagement. Robert Redford directs and stars in this ambitious talkathon, which would have been more effective as a radio play.

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

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

Costner does something difficult: In the middle of a tepid comic whirlpool, he finds the humorous aspect of inertia.

A rapturous, ruefully funny flight of sympathetic imagination. Featuring the first movie role for Frank Langella that ranks with his best stage parts, it's a rare kind of American movie.

Hasn't got quite the right sound as it did in Annie Proulx's novel.

Watching The Lost City is like falling into a delirious dream on a marathon train ride only to be roused every 15 minutes by a conductor punching your ticket or barking out the next stop.

Director Martin Campbell and a quartet of screenwriters dump in everything from the rise of the Confederacy to the development of Weapons of Mass Destruction. What escapes them is the cool, clear line of action that would enable Banderas and Zeta-Jones to flaunt their amorous charms without huffing and puffing and stretch their swashbuckling muscles with dash, not balderdash.

It might be a solid hook if we thought their love was grand. Instead, it's kind of creepy.

On the plus side, the casting is superb - and the acting, too. Although the context is overwrought and the moviemaking over-the-top, Washington acts from the ticker out.

The whole enterprise suffers from tired blood.

It's the ideal capper for a cop comedy with a refreshingly wry, adult and humane attitude.

There are the gadgets and the effects. But Cats and Dogs definitely could have been more fetching.

Semi-Pro is so shabbily staged, shot and edited that it hardly ranks as a movie, much less a sports film, but hilarious people keep turning up in it.

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.

Sadly, most of the fun and all the magic derive from the location. The most enthralling fantasy of Just Like Heaven is that an unemployed landscape architect and a fledgling doctor can afford a sprawling apartment with a rooftop view in San Francisco.

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.

Too bad it doesn't deserve to fold the bedsheets of Paul Mazursky's L.A. roundelay "Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice" (1969).

It lands the characters in a shambles of farce, melodrama and forced chivalry. For all its promise and accomplishment, the screenplay, like Eva, needs a knight on a white horse.

Reading this book and watching this movie, as with "The Devil Wears Prada" a year earlier, I'm convinced that chick-lit books are formula - and chick-lit movies are baby formula.

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.

Plays like a remake - not of "Knights of the Round Table" (1953) but of director Antoine Fuqua's previous "Tears of the Sun" (2003).

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

Secret Window leaves you unsatisfied and frustrated. Depp's performance both makes the film and undercuts it. He's a poet caught in a machine.

I hope the producers bring Lin back for the fifth film and strip it down even more. They can lose all the human characters except Brian and Mia and simply call it F&F.

Lacks suspense, momentum and visual panache.

The overarching joke, of course, is that most movies are so lousy they might as well have been made by blind men anyway. Hollywood Ending is only mediocre, but you may leave wondering, what's Allen's excuse?

You leave this movie feeling mugged.

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

Overdoes it and falls on its farce.

"Everybody loved him. One woman understood him," goes the ad line. But the movie makes you wonder how anyone could love this screw-up and why anyone would have a problem understanding him.

This picture evaporates midway through because the story itself is a one-liner. Yet it also has a cast that gets into the silliness.

This Heartbreak Kid makes the mistake of trying to be semi-heartwarming.

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.

Pearce makes you see why Edie found Warhol as irresistible as he found her. His otherworldly eyes focus on both who she is and what she represents. He sees her as a star.

"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.

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

There hasn't been so much pea soup spit onscreen since "The Exorcist."

This movie is a case of arthouse bait and switch. Its true subject is one decent Yank's desire to believe that Everyman and Everywoman - Everywhere! - are as warm and amiable as your average American Joe: him, Morgan Spurlock, the regular guy as fearless globetrotter.

What keeps the Fantastic Four franchise alive is the Human Torch's emotional fire and the Silver Surfer's melancholy ice.

Terrence Howard has stolen 50 Cent's thunder - and his lightning, and his storm clouds, too - twice in one year.

It's the wrestling match between the banker and the bad guy that fuels the audience's adrenaline.

Costner succumbs to terminal self-seriousness when he makes a movie of his own either as the director or, in this case, a producer.

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.

Weitz's idea of satire is generally both ludicrous and mild: exaggerating types, then sentimentalizing them.

The best you can say about Owen is that no actor has looked better in thigh-high boots and puffed-out britches.

It overflows with a combustible blend of street sensitivity and testosterone.

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 opening half-hour may prove to be a disreputable classic of pedal-to-the-metal filmmaking.

Strip away the portentous style and lush views of nature in The Return and all you've got is a slender nightmare of a family gone haywire in an outing that turns into survival camp.

Like an over-packed three-scoop cone -- it melts into a mess while we're still slurping away.

The most appealing aspect of the movie is that the guys and gal at the center of it don't just love the Star Wars saga for its own sake. They love the way they feel about each other when they're escaping into its universe and sharing all the wonder and the trivia.

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.

This may be Thornton's most arch, least persuasive performance. With Heder he's a vacant scowl. With Barrett he's a threatening yet toothless Cheshire Cat.

A Slipping-Down Life may be low-key, but if you enter its unique atmosphere, you will leave exhilarated.

It's actually surprising that Chan is as engaging as he is. He's a canny performer in a canned-goods movie.

A brain-dead buddy-movie tearjerker with semi-tasteful romance and tasteful gore mixed in with the derring-do.

To Pellington's credit, the performers eschew sentimentality.

It's so wispy that at the end you wonder: Exactly what runs in the family?

In Head of State, Rock may be verging on becoming a heart-warmer.

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

Remember mood rings? The Ring Two is a mood movie - a bad-mood movie.

From the start, this movie sets the bar high -- then, unfortunately, runs smack into it.

Too bad Kidron, Fielding and company pay only cafe lip service to satire.

But by the end, you're only watching to see how far Wilmot's pustules will spread, or whether his various diseases will really make his nose fall off.

Turns the kleig lights around to produce a wry and dead-on commentary on the film industry and the journalists who cover it.

Eagle Eye has half an idea in its head, but over two hours there's no time to complete or explore it, since the movie isn't just a chase but a combination steeplechase and destruction derby.

Ball and his cast overcome clichés with gusto.

It's not a comedy-drama, really. It's let's-all-share therapy in beautiful Boulder, Colo.

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.

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.

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

This film's playful visual language pulls you in rather than shuts you out; it isn't difficult to decipher, and it enables Coppola and his editor, Walter Murch, to navigate the story's many realms with a directness and dexterity that are refreshing.

Unfortunately, the waste of artistic possibilities dwarfs the human wreckage - and the human salvage - in Freedomland.

More palatable than "Norbit" but equally uninspired, Murphy's benign, pedestrian Meet Dave mostly gives us "Mr. Ed," with a bit of Crazy Eddie mixed in.

The movie version of Love in the Time of Cholera doesn't have the drive or the dynamism to be an artistic nightmare. It's more like a dead dream, the kind that leaves nothing more behind in the light of day than a sickly cloud.

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.

The whole thrust of the movie is to warn black women against emasculating their men.

In the Valley of Elah is too inept and diffuse to be a howl against the war in Iraq. At best, it is a manly whimper.

Angelina Jolie focuses her wild energy into outlandish heroics, and emerges with more attractiveness and credibility than all three of those silly Charlie's Angels combined.

The movie, brief though it is, feels as padded as a travelogue.

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

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

Despite all its talk of genetic engineering and its deliberately stupid characters, the unintended message of Jurassic Park III is that when it comes to art and entertainment, you can't beat human DNA.

Great casting ideas, like Glenn Close and Christopher Walken as "the King and Queen of Stepford," don't pay off, because the filmmakers' increasingly desperate twists alter the basis of the characters.

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?

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

The movie is a model of multinational incompetence.

Knowing offers mumbo jumbo on an apocalyptic scale.

Black Hawk Down, in the end, is a docudrama. But it's sensationally well done, and it opens up a battlefield that needed to be documented.

The movie could use less romantic boo-hoo-hoo and more Bunuel: It's engaging whenever Bunuel acts as ringleader or troublemaker, even when he's blustery and piggish.

Borders on poppycock.

In Stay, the director, Marc Forster, fresh from "Finding Neverland," turns Manhattan into a nightmarish dreamscape and his characters into self-destructive ghosts.

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

Sahara doesn't waste time on introductions. It wastes time in other ways.

The result is an out-of-control, lost-in-the-funhouse experience.

Barf-bag baroque.

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

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.

Blessedly unimportant, Fantastic Four cruises along on modest yet genuine comic-book pleasures.

The movie is a monument to egomania - and I don't mean Alexander's.

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

A wholesome, headlong extravaganza - a sort of North by Northeast sans high style and erotic innuendo.

Passed my popcorn-movie test. Using the vast, expensive technology of a big studio production, it roused enough cheap energy to drive me to eat a bag of popcorn fit for a circus animal and wash it down with a quart of Diet Coke.

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.

Fame has today's usual gritty form of slick to it, but in every other way it's an Amateur Hour and a half.

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

The most refreshing thing about Man of the Year is its mingling of comedy and suspense with common decency. Levinson asks his countrymen not just to know their limits, but also to reach them.

Reprehensible.

As overstated and expository as a historical pageant, from the drippy music to a sputtering, running gag involving funky old jalopies to cliched speeches and teary-eyed deaths and a final voice-over crying out for peace. Why not add a song score and an exclamation mark in the title?

The script gives the actors less of a chance than the dragons give to Homo sapiens.

Salma Hayek merrily struts off with most of Brett Ratner's wispy caper comedy.

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.

At two hours, The Chronicles of Riddick is way too long for ridiculous.

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.

Most of the film simply wallows in gangsta hyperbole - it's all bling bling, bang bang.

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

Failed marital farce.

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

The movie has a lot going for it, including wonderful sets and locations - in Bucharest, Romania! - that create a heightened-reality English hamlet with pub, church, manor and shops (make that shoppes!). And the lead actor, Ludwig, registers the growth spurts of the stripling hero with the sensitivity and precision of an emotional seismograph.

To call Death to Smoochy satire -- or parody, burlesque, or even lampoon -- would be too generous. The moviemakers merely glide on the thin ice of yesterday's cynicism.

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

Even the cartoon Pink Panther in the credits seems off - at once too glitzy and too fey, more Peter Allen than Pink Panther.

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

Be Cool proves that when "cool" evaporates all it leaves are embarrassing little puddles.

Domino should have been a terrific anti-heroine, but the movie never gets deep enough inside this walking time bomb to reveal what makes her tick.

A colossal dud.

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.

For all his excesses and wrong turns, Lee has made a grown-up movie with an adult sense of loss and an adult sense of hope. He may be addicted to broad flourishes, but he has the big emotions to back them up.

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

Everyone from the ensemble appears to be acting in a different picture. Zaillian strands them all.

It's a family film done as a trip film. It is a trip, but it's a bad trip.

The whole narrative is too hollow and rickety as well as gimmicky for Muccino to breathe much life into it.

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

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.

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.

The movie has nothing to offer except titillation.

Although it's in the same genre as "The English Patient," it's a vastly better movie --more surprising and original, more rigorous and sympathetic. This film is oddly shaped. It is also heartbreaking and exhilarating.

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.

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.

If you like hard bodies and hot engines, if you want to feel like you're inside a cockpit or a video game with someone else working the joystick, you'll find decent escape from the summer doldrums in Stealth.

It's not exactly thrilling, and it doesn't cover much new ground. But young audiences will lap it up like ice cream.

This movie proves to be the year's most anti-romantic comedy.

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

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.

Up against the wit and teamwork of the sparkling TV original, this lame vehicle sputters and fades.

Most of the movie makes too much sense and is no fun at

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

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

Armed with few laughs, this clumsy sequel makes a sloppy mess of its plot ... and star Sandra Bullock.

Gory overkill.

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.

Shyamalan has said he wanted to create the best B-movie ever made, but it fails to be the best C movie of the month. (Stuck or Zohan are better C movies.)

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

At best it's a bit like Mel Brooks' "The History of the World Part I" (except Ramis stops somewhere in Genesis); at worst it's like a Scary Movie-type parody of John Huston's "The Bible."

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.

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.

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

Equilibrium doesn't tread softly on our dreams; it tramples them.

Despite the tenderness between them, Rose and her perfect younger man have the sickest mother-son relationship since Angela Lansbury and Laurence Harvey in "The Manchurian Candidate" - and Mikey seems just as brainwashed.

The astonishingly versatile Kinnear proves note-perfect as a huckster who slowly rids himself of slime.

It might sound intriguing to root the saying, "Physician, heal thyself," in the plight of a hypocritical self-help guru, but the romantic drama Love Happens suffers from acute irony deficiency.

You have to be willing to take a lot of punishment for a few good scares.

Les Mayfield doesn't know how to stage showdowns and chases so they're exciting or funny.

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

Since that gifted, attractive performer is Hayden Panettiere, who has already won a wide following for "Heroes," it's a wonder that the studio hasn't been more heavily promoting her appearance in this decent, genial youth comedy. After all, she does play, ah, Beth Cooper.

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

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

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

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

Although the acclaimed documentary Gunner Palace contains some electrifying vignettes of the Iraq war, its jaggedly elliptical and hopped-up style lands it in a limbo between ragged and slick.

By the end, Pootie Tang feels as long as Kevin Costner's "Wyatt Earp."

Quirky and enjoyable.

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.

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.

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.

Fails to meld suspense and farce or to bring even the wildest pursuits and smash-ups any visual sense of comedy.

It's like an Indiana Jones movie without rhythm, wit or personality, just a desperate, headlong pace.

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.

How does an embarrassment of riches turn into mere embarrassment?

Pious, high-minded and bad history.

This kind of fiasco turns movie critics into so many Night Stalkers.

Dramatically, it's a ghoul's parade of grieving folk finding solace and then danger through a tenuous connection to the after-life.

The movie goes awry from the opening shots.

As a comic fable for hard times, New in Town is irredeemably moronic.

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

The film is so busy that every minute is exhausting. It's as if the filmmakers were idealistic teen-agers afflicted with a group case of Attention Deficit Disorder.

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

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

Will have most audiences asking, "Can we leave now?"

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.

Wild Hogs puts the "ick" into City Slickers.

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

Now we get a lazy Eddie in Norbit, a lackluster attempt to make a gross-out romantic comedy. When I say lazy Eddie, I mean imaginatively lazy.

Twisted is an unusual forensic crime film because it's witty and sophisticated as well as taut and creepy.

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

I managed to get through the biker extravaganza Hell Ride, a narcissistic piece of soft-core porn and macho camp, by mashing it together in my mind with the equally woeful, family-friendly biker comedy "Wild Hogs." After all, both are full of hellions gone to seed.

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.

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

Manipulates the audience.

Adam Sandler does Frank Capra wrong. His unfunny remake stomps all over the honest values and endearing qualities of the original.

Bride Wars has possibly the worst comedy idea since "Springtime for Hitler," with almost no room for redeeming camp.

Newcomers to the Mike Myers experience will leave this love train early.

Finds it as impossible to locate a laugh in glittering Bora Bora as it was for Operation Enduring Freedom to nail Osama bin Laden in gritty Tora Bora.

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.

A catastrophically messy action-movie mash-up.

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

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.

Dr. Seuss' The Cat in the Hat is gorged with shtick and gadgetry. When it comes to highlighting everything better left in the dark, it makes even the Matrix sequels look like works of genius.

It's stupefying in its dullness and vulgarity.

The collateral damage of action products like Ballistic is to the sensibility of the audience.