Nathan Rabin

This sluggishly paced quirkfest is awfully sophomoric for a film all about giving up the facile thrills of youth for the responsibilities of adulthood.

A manipulative attempt to swindle money out of the generation that came of age during the Harding Administration, Out To Sea has the wit and sophistication of your average Fox TV pilot.

Super Mario Bros. devotes half its run time to lumbering exposition, yet still makes no f.cking sense. Seldom has a film done such heavy lifting to such meager effect.

Luke Matheny’s perversely milquetoast romantic comedy seems to have escaped from the afternoon schedule of the Lifetime network and secured a VOD and theatrical release it patently does not deserve.

With its shameless melodrama, ghoulish violence, and scenes of Christians being slaughtered en masse in holy places for the crime of publicly being Christians, the religious drama For Greater Glory feels an awful lot like evangelical Tribulation dramas such as "Left Behind: The Movie" and "The Omega Code."

It’s simply tacky consumer product that dishonors the famous name in its title—the same one that’s keeping this film from the direct-to-video burial it deserves.

A bad-movie-lover's heaven, and a good-movie-lover's hell.

Any pretensions of satire, moral ambiguity, or social commentary get lost in a hurricane of empty, mindless spectacle.

A Cinderella Story banks far too heavily on its audience's affection for Duff, who's dreadful in a terrible role.

It's the ultimate pop-culture sacrilege: a movie about soul music that has no soul.

Courageous literally preaches to the converted, delivering ham-fisted messages of responsibility to the most receptive audience possible.

The film crawls to a halt, its pace further marred by anemic, time-wasting pop songs. Even at 72 minutes, Never Land feels padded, while the animators make Never Land so unmagical that war-torn London seems preferable by comparison.

Straight from the fiery, churning bowels of high-concept hell comes Kangaroo Jack, Bruckheimer's idea of kid-friendly fare, and some of the longest 90 minutes ever committed to film.

Gives the Michael Moore muckraking-underdog treatment to the kind of delirious conspiracy theories generally associated with mentally ill homeless people screaming at passersby to stop stealing their brainwaves.

Scary Movie 5 aspires to timeliness, but its comic sensibility is so groaningly retro that the film features a series of tributes to The Benny Hill Show and its signature ditty, “Yakety Sax.”

The Signal would desperately like to be a film of ideas, but the few it presents are vapid and secondhand. Eubank’s overachieving work on the film suggests he’s destined for bigger and better things, though given the airy nothingness of the film’s mind games, that’s setting the bar awfully low.

God-awful.

Would You Rather has one major asset in an appropriately gothic, larger-than-life performance by Jeffrey Combs, the great, chameleon-like character actor best known for playing a mad scientist in "Re-Animator."

A generic time-waster powered by a lazy, cynical combination of scatological kiddie humor and maudlin sentiment.

Darts around maniacally before congealing around a touchy-feely message of personal empowerment whose secular humanism and moral relativism is bound to strike fundamentalists of all stripes as downright Satanic.

Deconstructing Harry is a mess: a shambling, narcissistic, sexist romp that is, worst of all, almost entirely devoid of laughs.

Just like "Illegal Aliens," Addicted To Love is an exploitation movie, albeit one without even the science-fiction spoof's sunny, dumbass innocence.

A repellent orgy of gratuitous violence and hackneyed melodrama, Deuces Wild marks a grim nadir for everyone involved, including late cinematographer John A. Alonzo (Chinatown, Harold & Maude), who deserved a much better swan song.

This glossy musical, from "Hairspray" director Adam Shankman, is a shameless crowd-pleaser where cardboard characters use the most overplayed and ubiquitous hits of the 1980s to express the aching banality of their souls.

Forever Mine explores many of Schrader's pet themes—obsession, revenge, jealousy, betrayal, guilt—but they've seldom felt as empty, shallow, or ridiculous.

Rapper, producer, and mogul Tip "T.I." Harris was recently named "global creative consultant" for Rémy Martin cognac. Coincidentally or not, he's also the star and producer of Takers, a heist thriller that feels suspiciously like a feature-length commercial for expensive liquor.

There's precious little of Lennon's legendary crankiness on display in The U.S. Vs. John Lennon, a fawning hagiography that diligently shaves away the ex-Beatle's rough edges and knotty idiosyncrasies.

In a squandered lead performance, the adorable, winning Schwartzman plays the non-adorable, non-winning title character.

Essentially "Bring It On" minus the effervescence, star power, energy, and brisk pace -- in other words, everything that made it bearable.

Garai's flowery, overwritten narration proves irritating in the movie's first half, then unfortunately sets the tone for a fatal second-half descent into soap operatics, dippy dialogue, and airless melodrama.

Marginally better than its predecessor, but only because "Next Friday" lowered standards so far that only a homemade cockfighting video would have failed to surpass it.

TMNT confuses “dimly lit” for “gritty” and humorless for substantive. It’s afraid of being too fun or too light, and doesn’t seem to know whether it wants to be a Nolan film or a 21 Jump Street-style spoof.

Myers returns as his menagerie of repulsive characters, but this time, his frantic mugging feels more like an insipid parlor trick than ever.

Throw out the presence of Dennis Quaid, and the new science-fiction/horror snoozer Pandorum could easily pass for a Roger Corman cheapie.

An unabashedly pop confection, but it's flat where it should fizz, lumbering when it should skip.

Crude, grating.

Dolphin Tale 2 makes audiences wade through endless oceans of tedium for those scattered, fleeting moments of grace.

Takes almost two self-infatuated, smarmy, condescending, cringe-inducingly sentimental hours to reach its pre-ordained conclusion.

Not since Pet Rocks riveted the nation have so many gotten so excited over so little.

Pearce is usually dependable, but here, he's utterly unconvincing as a slick phony, and the film peddles a bogus bill of goods in kind.

It feels like the series has run its course, and should be relegated to the dustbin of history alongside the hardware it so lovingly pays tribute to.

Unfortunately, nothing about Tony Goldwyn's vapid, navel-gazing, claustrophobic adaptation of a 2001 Italian film rings remotely true.

Rising Sun boasts shiny, shiny production values befitting a big-budgeted Sean Connery vehicle adapted from a bestselling novel, but scratch the glossy surface and Rising Sun reveals itself to be a Cinemax-ready B-movie, complete with a rogue’s gallery of villains, each tackier and more ridiculous than the last.

It's a film of shuddering earnestness and fevered good intentions gone awry, a dreary slog of a message movie with little but noble if unfulfilled aspirations to commend it.

Quirky, unsatisfying portrait.

Tony Scott’s bracingly awful remake/desecration of the classic ‘70s thriller.

Astonishingly boring.

A second-rate comedy and a third-rate drama, Melinda And Melinda gives viewers two unsatisfying movies in one. The only genuine tragedy here involves a once-brilliant comedy writer plunging further into a seemingly permanent artistic freefall.

Mean-spirited and stagy where "Psycho Beach Party" was cinematic and charming, Die, Mommie, Die recycles gags from Busch's screenwriting debut--from transparently phony rear projection to a character's crippling constipation--and the law of diminishing returns kicks in pretty hard.

Director Sam Weisman's pushy, subtlety-free direction certainly doesn't help. Martin is still capable of making a decent film, but The Out-Of-Towners isn't it.

The energetic musical sequences help make it feel warmer and more ingratiating than it otherwise would, which is fortunate, since this rickety vehicle needs all the help it can get.

The Independent Film Channel is distributing Girls Will Be Girls; perhaps its executives failed to realize that this kind of mirthless, tacky independent film sends traumatized audiences racing back to the glossy production values on display at the local multiplex.

Malibu's screenplay inexplicably required the creative efforts of four screenwriters (including Kennedy), which works out to about half a funny gag apiece.

A mess, a poorly paced, poorly structured, lukewarm comedy-drama that fails even to capitalize on the cheap nostalgia inherent in its plot.

The acidic Shakespearean family drama The Sea can't be faulted for lack of ambition. It can, however, be faulted for a fatal lack of heart.

The film’s reliance on formula and stereotypes wouldn’t be so frustrating if that formula worked and provided the glib pleasures the filmmakers are going for; instead, Ping Pong Summer feels stilted, undernourished, and oddly sour.

Rock acquits himself nicely as the responsible brother and resident straight man, but everyone else in the cast has apparently been advised to mug shamelessly and yell their lines as loudly as possible.

An insanely overlong infomercial for the book.

West is heavy on Vaughn, at least initially, but woefully short on comedy.

It almost seems that Watts made a movie this intentionally scuzzy and low-rent as a severe form of penance to the gods of authenticity for the sin of making millions jet-setting around the world appearing in big, glamorous super-productions. But she goes too far in making the audience suffer as well.

Despite the parade of pretty images and lovely scenery, Big Sur stubbornly fails to cohere into a real movie; instead, it feels like an illustrated novel full of words, ideas, and images, but devoid of structure or characterization.

A hysterically over-the-top backstage melodrama whose temperature seldom falls below overheated.

For all its crudeness and desperation, Soul Men can't scare up a single laugh.

At heart, it's just the latest from one-man industry Luc Besson, so even though it looks like art, it plays like schlock.

Writer-director Jonathan Jakubowicz does his best Quentin Tarantino impersonation, loading the film with percussively profane dialogue, smug adolescent nihilism, rampant drug use, pop-culture references, homophobic invective, and empty stylistic excess.

Made In America is a puff piece, a shallow, insufferable exercise in hagiography that seems to operate under the delusion that a festival bill combining rock, pop, and rap acts represents a dazzling innovation, not the status quo for festivals like Lollapalooza, Coachella, Bonnaroo, and countless others.

When the film ends after a mere eighty-one minutes it feels like Toback and company simply gave up and decided to let the audience go home twenty minutes early as a covert apology for the film they just endured, a glum little trifle that fails as both a James Toback movie and a Molly Ringwald vehicle.

It's never a promising sign when an attractive young woman's insatiable sexual desire for Danny DeVito represents the most convincing and compelling aspect of a movie, but that's the best this one can do.

Bound to wind up as one of 1999's worst films.

Frankie & Alice gives her the rare opportunity to play a film’s hero and its villain inside the same body, and she does a memorably dreadful job in both capacities. That trainwreck fascination is about the only redeeming facet of a prestige picture gone terribly, though not entertainingly, awry.

All talk and zero characterization, it doesn't even feel like a real movie.

Few actresses exude restless intelligence as effortlessly as Stiles, which is fortunate, since Martha Coolidge's film relies on that forceful charisma to make it past awful dialogue, contrived situations, and hokey use of Disney-style butterflies.

A painfully earnest drama about post-traumatic stress disorder that sticks so closely to the soldiers-coming-home template, writer-director Ryan Piers Williams seems to be diligently working through a checklist of returning-warrior-movie clichés.

Wholly devoid of suspense or chills, The Skeleton Key simply bides its time until its big final plot twist, but the filmmakers don't seem to realize that a second-rate twist can't redeem a third-rate fright flick.

Only succeeds sporadically, even if it's never quite the unwatchable monstrosity it so clearly could have been.

It plays like unwitting art-house self-parody from a narcissist who takes himself, and his brooding subject matter, way too seriously.

Sure Tank Girl has a lot of energy but then so does a Pixie Stix-addled eleven-year-old screaming in your ear about the intricacies of Pokemon for hours at a time during a cross-country road trip. That doesn't mean either ordeal should be experienced by any reasonable human except perhaps as a form of torture.

It’s so egregiously awful, so utterly without merit, that it makes its predecessor seem much worse by association. The film’s brainless, chest-beating brand of hyper-pulp calls into question whether Sin City was any good at all, or whether the novelty of its visuals and storytelling merely masked a howling nothingness at its core.

Unsurprisingly, the unimaginatively filmed but high-intensity gospel performances prove a highlight, radiating an energy and urgency that the film's stilted dialogue, awkward romance, and clunky plotting can only aspire to.

A well-intentioned but ultimately incompetent Irish dud.

This results in a film that spells everything out visually, then further elaborates through groaningly obvious dialogue, then drives every point home for slow-witted audiences via shameless narration.

The film strays so far from verisimilitude that it feels more like a big celebrity dress-up party than history brought to life. The profoundly silly Internet favorite series "Yacht Rock" offered a more convincing take on pop-culture history and that was at least going for laughs.

Girl In Progress is ultimately less interested in subverting the clichés of the genre than in recycling them. It wants audiences to know it's in on the joke though it's not always apparent that there even is a joke in the first place.

Laughably awful.

Everything is pitched to jarring emotional extremes of good and evil, joy and pain, chitlin'-circuit broad comedy, and melodramatic speeches.

The Possession attempts to breathe new life into a creaky old subgenre by taking its exorcist and demon from Jewish mythology, but even this backfires: The casting of Jewish reggae star Matisyahu would be distracting even if he weren't introduced singing softly to himself.

So why is The Paperboy so bizarrely dull? It's as if the filmmakers combined 18 different kinds of scalding-hot peppers, yet inexplicably emerged with oatmeal.

Norton is infamous for rewriting scripts and acting as a de facto director on his movies yet he seems lost and defeated here.

Another contrived, unconvincing romantic comedy that once again mixes stale sitcom humor with laughable attempts at pathos and emotional depth.

Browns is ultimately a victim of its creator's success: What once felt novel now feels well-worn, following the success of Perry's films and imitators like "First Sunday."

It's all quirk, posturing, attitude, and needless exertion signifying nothing beyond its own sad need to impress.

Any social good the film might do gets lost in a soupy morass of histrionics, clumsy storytelling, overripe dialogue, and rampant didacticism.

The film overflows with inspired comic ideas that fizzle and die in execution like a marathon fireworks display of nothing but duds.

As written and directed by newcomer Troy Duffy, The Boondock Saints is all style and no substance, a film so gleeful in its endorsement of vigilante justice that it almost veers (or ascends) into self-parody.

Out-and-out dud, underlining how far the mighty have fallen.

Barney's Great Adventure will bore adults to tears.

This clumsy action movie feels too generic to be real. The film attempts to add an element of sophisticated sociopolitical commentary to the typical Jason Statham head-busting shoot-'em-up, but only ends up draining it of visceral thrills.

Fischer at least has personal and romantic reasons to be involved with this film, but audiences are unencumbered by such obligations, and should heed the title's warning sign and opt out of Kirk, Fischer, and Messina's fruitless little circle of pain.