Michael Sragow

Painfully boring.

The movie is mainly geared to putting new twists on what John Hughes comedies used to call "sucking face." It will satisfy Meyer's devotees.

The Missing is so dour it makes you wonder why they didn't all just pack up and go back East.

So minimalist that you wouldn't miss much if you watched semi-awake and listened to a friend's running commentary.

Confetti overdraws on an audience's generosity.

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 credits list a couple of dozen medical and scientific consultants. What this film really needed was a script doctor.

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

Whale Rider is one long, sensitive downer capped by an uplifting finale. A martyr fantasy that turns victorious -- it's a surefire recipe for arthouse crowd-pleasing.

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.

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.

Yet [Smith] can't keep the movie from stopping cold with another hour left to go.

What's hilarious about the build-up is that Secretary proves to be the softest, most middle-of-the-road movie that could have been made about this subject.

Stripped of texture, even the sharpest comments come off as bromides.

The Mist contains nary a dollop of wit and irony. As adapted and directed by Frank Darabont, there's no ambiguity either.

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 fake-feminist thriller hides its sadism under a show of sympathy for its beleaguered heroine.

It bears roughly the same resemblance to the Bennett Miller-Dan Futterman-Philip Seymour Hoffman masterpiece as the now-forgotten "Valmont" did to "Dangerous Liaisons."

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

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

Bubble is the moviemaking equivalent of the worst narrative journalism. Every bit of "human interest" is so painstakingly planted, so determined to be applauded for its observation and sensitivity, it ends up seeming as slick and bogus as the worst Hollywood blockbuster.

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.

Those who come to the movie cold will find it an exasperating assembly of brutal pedantry and whimsies, boasting far less charm or grace than even the first Harry Potter picture.

Any chance to generate atmosphere or sustained comedy and melodrama goes down the tubes, often literally.

Eastern Promises is intensely anti-dramatic.

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

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

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

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

In Robert Gordon's script, Handler's hilariously literate bouts of psychological torture develop no consistent tone, voice or momentum.

Auto Focus is a gutless wonder.

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.

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

This movie is genial, forgettable piffle about the perhaps-beginning of a maybe affair. It's a romantic daydream so slim that it barely leaves the requisite sweet aftertaste.

The blend of chic histrionics and ultra-bright daylight imagery make much of the movie resemble a network soap opera with an on-location interlude. It looks as cheap as life is held in Medellin.

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.

Sin City is a seedy tribute to rugged masculinity disguised as a rogue's gallery, all the better to please college boys who like their sentimentality slicked with grunge.

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

In Spy Kids 2, Rodriguez tries to hold his family-spy saga together with the digital equal of rubber bands and chewing gum.

This movie asks us to "accept the good" in life - not a bad message. But to overpraise Things We Lost in the Fire would be to accept the mediocre.

Even with the great Ken Watanabe lending command and compassion to the role of General Kuribayashi, it's a formless slog across a treacherous field.

You have to grasp at straws to make even "poetic" sense of the narrative.

Dubowski's movie is an act of hope that the basic human needs of the gay Orthodox will someday be reconciled with their faith.

"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.

It's a bad joke that District 9 will be hailed for its "originality."

Denzel Washington does a cocksure turn in Training Day -- That may be enough to transform a shallow picture with delusions of grandeur into a crowd-pleasing hit.

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

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

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

At the end of Napoleon Dynamite, you're glad the geeks have their day (even Kip's chat-mate turns out be a winner); you're also relieved to be rid of them.

The movie leaves you in an awful tangle of amazement and disbelief: Amazement that Tuvia Bielski did turn a group of civilians into a nimble fighting force and a commune that could defend itself, but disbelief at his accomplishment's stagey and banal rendering.

Owing more to the sword-and-sex-play fantasies of 12-year-olds than the traditions of Old English poetry, Robert Zemeckis' Beowulf will allow adolescents to have their cheesecake - and beefcake - and eat it, too.

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

If Pride had concentrated on a gifted coach's teaching and training techniques, it might have been a contender. Instead, all the overheated melodrama evaporates our rooting interest.

As an action comedy, it's just a bad trip.

You begin yearning for more cuteness from the anthropomorphic animals: a pelican, a sea lion and, best of all, a bearded dragon lizard. They're a lot more amusing than Foster, who pours on the angst.

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.

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.

In the movie, the unconverted will hold their ears as the banal tunes blare out in multichannel sound. And they'll wince as the camera closes in on every heart-tugging moment.

The plotting is so rickety that the action hinges on suspicions roused by a character carrying a cigarette lighter and matches. Is that more rare or suspect than a man wearing a belt and suspenders?

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

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

This movie doesn't have a mean bone in its body; the problem is, it doesn't have any bone in its body.

Wild Hogs puts the "ick" into City Slickers.

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.

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.)

Munich is so broad-stroke it cuts itself at every turn. It's also a thoroughly lifeless movie.

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.

It aims for outlandish and athletic love lyrics and instead achieves all the potency of a makeshift nonsense song banged out on a toy lyre.

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.

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.

But even those who succumb to his primitive, survivalist vision may resent the way he presents every kind of atrocity at least twice without illuminating any of the exotic details once.

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

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

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

Anderson and Day-Lewis strip themselves of their natural talents for invention and poetry, as if any hint of romance, nobility or fun would soften the film.

Flags of Our Fathers fails as fact or legend. It's woefully incompetent as narrative moviemaking.

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.

Sex and the City, as a film, is a testament to bad faith. It wants its characters to eat their wedding cake and have it, too.

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

The writer-director, Babak Shokrian, has made an erratic autobiographical film about juggling artistic ambitions and family expectations in L.A.'s close-knit Iranian Jewish community.

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 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.

Barf-bag baroque.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

"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.

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

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.

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

Perfume offers eau de crud.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

Solondz is still stuck in an adenoidal whine.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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."

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.

The film itself is an exercise in frustration.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

A colossal dud.

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.

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.

All it offers is sadism, impure and simple.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.