Nathan Rabin

Really, the whole series would be unthinkable without the films of George Romero. In that respect, Anderson has taken another page from the Corman playbook for his superior B-movie: If you're going to steal, at least steal well.

It's a flawed film, hampered by weird tonal shifts and an overpopulated cast. But, 31 years later, Catch-22's chilliness seems forgivable, its vision of a military (and a nation) ruled by gung-ho capitalists, shameless opportunists, and evil yes-men as prescient and incisive as ever.

Howard The Duck has several jokes, really, they're all just desperately unfunny.

With the exception of its bland leads, Back In Action's frenetic plot serves as its biggest weakness, but it at least provides the framework for two Tashlin-worthy setpieces.

Sure enough, director Betty Thomas delivers pretty much the bare minimum: peppy, brightly colored, tune-filled nonsense sure to meet the low, low standards of its pre-kindergarten core audience.

What begins as a scathing but loving satire of materialism loses its way once it turns into a warmhearted after-school special about a nice young Jewish boy discovering the true meaning of the bar mitzvah.

Don't be fooled by the action-packed DVD cover: Pacino spends roughly five minutes of Deerfield racing, and two hours learning, from a woman facing death, how to embrace life.

The Hidden is a textbook example of how a B-movie can transcend its origins and budgetary constraints through craft, imagination, and all-around resourcefulness. Shifting genres almost as often as its villain changes bodies, it's at once an enormously effective thriller, a smart exercise in science fiction, an exciting action movie, and a kinetic dark comedy.

The film accomplishes a remarkable feat of creative alchemy by breathing life and depth into characters that, in lesser hands, could easily have come across as grating caricatures.

Dillon comes off as a whiny, unlikable brat, the premise's comic potential goes unrealized, and the spy stuff feels familiar and halfhearted. Good as he is, Hackman can't transform the second-rate into a masterpiece.

Tennant keeps his extravagantly stupid new comedy breezing along affably on the strength of photogenic locales, obscenely beautiful stars, a laid-back soundtrack, and a wholesale unwillingness to take itself the least bit seriously.

The Dukes could use more music and less sap, but it's refreshing to see a film about the problems of working-class men on the far side of middle age, struggling just to get by.

Finds a winning formula: Chan provides the action, various exotic lands serve up props begging to be employed in Chan-style combat, Coogan brings the dry wit, a minor constellation of surprise guest stars provides razzle-dazzle, and a steady stream of mild chuckles helps the whole fandango fly by painlessly.

Incident is too reverent for its own good. It could use a big blast of Herzog-like madness, but it sticks to the conventional show-business satire's arsenal of clichés.

Often uproariously funny, even though much of its queasy power comes from its acknowledgment that some matters are too horrifying to be washed away with cheap laughter, or packaged into soundbites.

A shamelessly derivative mob movie.

A tepid variation on the rash of cartoonishly drawn Indian-Anglo culture-clash comedies afflicting both sides of the Atlantic.

It isn’t exactly good, but for audiences in search of nothing more than a few silly chuckles, it should prove good enough.

Robinson is hilarious, at least in the early going. Sadly, Robinson is all that stands between Miss March and complete worthlessness.

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.

In a star-making performance, Evan Rachel Wood stars as essentially a younger version of Nicole Kidman's media-age femme fatale from "To Die For," an aspiring 15-year-old actress who hides a sharp, calculating mind behind a façade of vapid, chattering self-absorption.

In jumping from the small screen to the big one, the franchise seems to have dropped its collective IQ by a good 50 points. Cohen's HBO series was a smart show pretending to be stupid. Making its debut on DVD after a brief 2002 theatrical run, Ali G Indahouse feels like a stupid movie made by smart people.

The makers of “Bringing Down The House” should thank the gods of cinema for Marci X, which has relieved the Steve Martin/Queen Latifah hit of its status as the year's most misguided culture-clash comedy.

Corey Haim plus Corey Feldman plus Joel Schumacher doesn't seem like a foolproof formula for a good movie, but when the three oft-maligned figures united for 1987's horror-comedy The Lost Boys, the result was briskly entertaining.

Bugsy is part tormented character study, part old-school Hollywood glitz. Its fabulist protagonist acts like he's stuck in a '30s gangster melodrama, but Levinson's lushly stylized film gives his story the A-list treatment.

Hatchet II is distinguished both by a funky, frisky sense of humor, and gore of great quality and quantity.

Henry Poole cycles through so many indie film clichés--that it continually skirts self-parody.

Doesn't pretend to be objective, and the film derives much of its power from the way it invites audiences to look at the rapper's life and times through his own soulful, animated eyes. It doesn't always succeed, and there are times when it feels terribly strained.

The only folks Montana is interested in pleasing are prepubescent girls and Disney stockholders.

Iron Man is the rare comic-book movie that makes the prospect of a sequel seem like a promise instead of a threat.

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

Devotes so much time and energy to flashbacks and recycling footage from its predecessors that it threatens to implode.

Crudup delivers a bracing, uncompromising performance, but it's unmistakably a solo turn in a romantic comedy that's supposed to be about the blurring of egos and the fusing of two idiosyncratic voices into a single harmonious duet.

Simultaneously swooningly romantic and transcendently idiotic.

It's a measure of the film's infectious goofiness that Cage seems altogether more interested in clearing the name of a long-dead ancestor than in finding a city of gold.

Without a unifying authorial voice to tie it together, the film often feels shapeless and rambling, brought together by little more than free-ranging contempt for capitalism's excesses.

Gillespie showed a real knack for '80s-style retro horror with "I Know What You Did," and while a few sequences here have the familiar-but-enjoyable framing and stylization of an old EC horror comic, his material defeats him.

A supernatural religious thriller so awful it should result in the retroactive forfeiture of the Oscar writer, director, and producer Brian Helgeland won for co-writing "L.A. Confidential."

A PG-13 celebration of hot chicks, fast cars, and deplorable behavior is like diet Mountain Dew, near-beer, or an expletive-free version of Straight Outta Compton--a tame, watered-down version of the real thing.

The film keeps adding layers of superfluous nonsense to its plot until all that's left is glowering ultra-violence and a whole lot of missed opportunities.

The real problem with One Last Thing… isn't that it's a teen sex comedy or a sappy melodrama, it's that it can't make up its mind.

Perhaps it was inevitable that a movie about the ultimate stoner would be undone by fuzzy execution and lack of ambition.

In its shameless excavation and exploitation of the killer-queen archetype–the homosexual so riddled with self-loathing and guilt that they feel an insatiable urge to kill and punish others–the film is bad politics and dodgy, flawed filmmaking, but it's weirdly resonant and thoroughly haunting all the same.

Flirts bravely, though gratingly, with messy, complicated emotions before ultimately drowning them in a warm bath of sticky sentimentality.

Bride Of Chucky is pretty f.cking stupid, but it's also oddly effective in its sheer audaciousness and contempt for good taste. It probably won't win a lot of converts, but for Child's Play fans, horror geeks, and stoners, it should seem like manna from heaven.

Decomposition bears powerful, uncompromising witness to man's inhumanity to man, which is one of the most important things any documentary can do, though, it's also one of the most grueling.

The most consistently funny studio sequel in some time, and the rare blockbuster that actually delivers on what it promises.

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

Contrived, clueless, reprehensible.

It'd probably feel just a little bit timelier and more relevant if it took place in a universe that bore even the faintest resemblance to our own.

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

An incorrigible tease. It baits its audience with the promise of fluffy, light-footed cotton-candy fare, but delivers a clumsy, talky, indifferently filmed lesbian romance.

A paper-thin character study undermined by a convoluted conspiracy thriller.

Trade is a pulpy Hollywood-style melodrama disguised as a harrowing message movie about Important Social Issues. It labors under the delusion that it's this year's revelatory, eye-opening Maria Full Of Grace, when it's little more than a B-movie with an overwrought conscience.

A film this slipshod needs much more star-power than it's able to muster.

A provocation first, an insult second, a publicity stunt third, and a film a distant fourth.

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.

The film is too busy hurling its cast from one labored slapstick setpiece to another to loosen up and allow them to have fun or be spontaneous.

The Interview is mannered, implausible, and stagy, but queasily compelling all the same.

Hackman makes a plausible ex-president, but his graceful, lived-in performance is just about the only element of Welcome To Mooseport that rings true.

A well-intentioned but ultimately incompetent Irish dud.

Sadly, it's yet another intercultural mishmash that hopes for its iconic star's charisma to overcome a dire script, cardboard characters, indifferently directed action scenes, and an atrocious villain buried under layers of unconvincing old-man makeup.

Nichols succeeds in spinning an entertaining yarn, but the cautionary aspects feel fatally undernourished.

Perhaps the harshest criticism that can be directed at Chapter 27 is that it's awful even for a late-period Lindsay Lohan movie. It might even be bad enough to inspire "Catcher" author J.D. Salinger to break his decades of public silence to speak out against this high-camp fiasco.

The film is essentially a skillful advertising-industry infomercial that speaks its subject’s slick aesthetic language.

A triumph of craft and narrative economy, the darkly funny Undisputed is as lean, mean, and skillful as its competing heavyweights.

While Conn's story is inherently compelling, it's pretty much ruined in the telling thanks to her unnerving choice to fill it with a twinkling piano-heavy score, florid narration, and trembling slow-motion.

Everything "Blade" should have been but wasn't: stylish, fast-paced, and comfortable with its own ridiculousness.

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.

It's refreshing to see a film that so directly addresses the issues and concerns of a vast, overlooked demographic, but it'd be much more satisfying if Boynton did more than just affably skate along the surface.

Bogdanovich’s affection for film’s embryonic beginnings informs every frame, from the machine-gun crackle of snappy banter smartly executed to meticulously choreographed pratfalls and comic fights to silent-movie-style intertitles.

Funny excuses an awful lot, and at its best, Hamlet 2 is nothing short of hilarious.

Sensual but profoundly silly, Silk is ultimately little more than softcore porn with arthouse trappings, a moony, dopily romantic "Red Shoe Diaries" variation for the NPR set.

How is an action movie that aims for kinetic thrills supposed to develop any forward momentum when it spends so much time looking back?

It's as notable for what it isn't as for what it is, but in a field full of loud, obnoxious fare, its easygoing affability qualifies as a welcome change of pace.

Carny feels like a throwback to the ’70s. It’s an evocative character study with a firm grasp on its subject matter that may be traced back to Robertson, an ex-carny who also produced and co-wrote the story.

The film nearly works in spite of its adherence to formula, thanks to clever one-liners and appealing, sharply drawn supporting performances.

In making The Matrix's leaden answer to "The Phantom Menace," the Wachowski brothers seem to be afflicted with George Lucas Syndrome: They're so enthralled by the convoluted mythology of their own private universe that they've lost touch with its human core.

The Yes Men's brilliant lies unlock explosive satirical truths, but the film runs out of steam a bit toward the end.

A symptom of cinematic de-evolution run amok.

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.

Engaging enough, but its characters’ path to redemption would be more satisfying if it weren’t greased with authentically ’80s-style casual sexism, gay panic, and frat-comedy clichés.

It maintains a strong enough sense of squirmy humanity that its characters' epiphanies and emotional growth feel both hard-earned and richly deserved.

This material could easily have devolved into soap opera or romantic melodrama, but Wilkinson and Watson's superb, subtle performances lend it tremendous depth and gravity.

Ffor all its clumsiness, Sir! No Sir! movingly captures the raw excitement of grunts discovering their power and their voices in their ability to resist.

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

Ultimately more interested in exploiting clichés than subverting or commenting on them, and Coyote and Dunn's grotesque caricatures are embarrassing.

Offers viewers a trade-off: half an hour of phenomenal dancing in exchange for an hour of atrocious drama.

Mortensen nicely underplays his role, offhandedly tossing off one-liners and making the script's sometimes purple dialogue sound a little less cheesy, but the rest of the film often lurches into hammy overdrive.

Benefits from extremely modest expectations. For it to be anything but painfully arbitrary would count as an accomplishment, so the fact that it's superficially entertaining qualifies as a minor triumph.

Block Party is largely a giant love-fest, which is fitting given the staggering amount of simpatico musical and comic talent on display, though some conflict surfaces nevertheless.

Like many social issue documentaries, Food, Inc. is better at addressing problems than offering solutions: its endorsement of organic food in particular feels a little flimsy. Nevertheless, it’s entertaining and fast-moving enough to make audiences intermittently forget they’re consuming cinematic health food.

Brilliantly photographed by William H. Daniels, Brute Force is both a humanistic personal drama and a bravura piece of genre filmmaking.

Harsh, unsparing, unsentimental, and uniformly well-acted, The Mother bravely and intelligently tackles subject matter widely ignored in cinema--the sexuality of a plain-looking woman edging toward the twilight of a life of quiet desperation.

There isn’t a spontaneous or unpredictable moment in this loving, perversely reverent homage to rom-com, road-movie, and mismatched-romance conventions.

Sadly, the film's creaky, sometimes painful dialogue makes it all too easy to believe that it was genuinely co-written by a small child.

Unexpectedly heartwarming documentary.

A laughable would-be fright-fest that's as strikingly inept as a Boll movie, but nowhere near as much guilty fun.

That 8MM fails miserably as a psychological thriller is forgivable. The fact that it is nearly as creepy, sleazy, and manipulative as the pornographic films it so cluelessly and hypocritically condemns is not.

The ethnicity of its leads is the only novel aspect of an otherwise bland exercise.

Shyamalan still has an abundance of personality and ambition, and there are scattered moments of craft throughout, but the gulf between his lofty aspirations and feeble accomplishments has seldom been wider or more chuckle-inducing.

An Education shares with Hornby’s best work trenchant insight into the way smart, hyper-verbal young people let the music, films, books, and art they love define themselves as they figure out who they are and what they want to be.

Where the prequel is weighed down with noble intentions, Caballeros boasts a breezy, exhilarating lightness and a refreshing undercurrent of perversity.

It's a sweet, human movie, if not an entirely successful one.

Rounders is such a smart, tough little film that its strengths override its fairly serious weaknesses.

The vapid teen talent show Undiscovered turns on a plot point so moronic that even the most dedicated bad-movie buffs have cause to stay away.

Pretty but overwrought, Hounddog doesn't deserve its infamy, nor does it merit being seen or remembered.

Like Affleck's performance, Hollywoodland has its affecting moments. But generally it feels like an HBO original movie, where respectable but uninspired execution mars a fascinating subject and great cast.

Burton rebounds in a big way with Big Fish, a Daniel Wallace adaptation and visual feast that recaptures the fairy-tale simplicity and wrenching emotional power of "Edward Scissorhands."

The Horn Blows At Midnight rarely pauses to catch its breath or give audiences time to catch up as it runs its hapless protagonist through a gauntlet of frenzied business and smart comic conceits over the course of its briskly paced 78 minutes.

There's a good chance that Judge's smartly lowbrow Idiocracy will be mistaken for what it's satirizing, but good satire always runs the risk -- of being misunderestimated.

A film that's prescient and mind-bogglingly ill-conceived in roughly equal measures...Strange Days is the cinematic equivalent of trip-hop, a shadowy realm of atmosphere, mood and suggestion with a decidedly drugged-up, post-apocalyptic feel. But the many things Strange Days gets right are negated by the things it gets wrong.

Like the rest of the film, Beckham's climax is surprisingly satisfying, however, in large part because director Gurinder Chadha films the competing big game and big fat Indian wedding of Nagra's sister with equivalently bursting levels of color, panache, and verve.

The four protagonists aren’t about to let something as minor as the complete breakdown of society get in the way of having a good time, and their fun proves infectious.

Far better than you'd expect. Despite its intelligence-insulting premise, Mouse Hunt is a well-crafted, surprisingly smart film that benefits tremendously from the winning chemistry between Lane and talented newcomer Evans.

"Women" confirms that the only thing less enjoyable than enduring long, drawn-out conversations about feelings and relationships in real life is watching movies about people having long, drawn-out conversations about feelings and relationships.

T3, while far from a classic, is an overachieving, mercenary sequel that's short on thrills, but surprisingly long on laughs and surprises.

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

Rize eventually gets a little preachy and sentimental, but a little sermonizing seems a small price to pay for such an industrial jolt of kinetic electricity.

Fine lowbrow entertainment, a fast, funny pastiche of science-fiction, horror, and teen-movie archetypes that is, aside from the original Scream, perhaps the most entertaining, fully realized film of the current postmodern horror/sci-fi cycle.

A dark comedy about speed freaks that feels like it was directed and edited by someone in the midst of a methamphetamine jag.

Convoy has one huge advantage over the song that inspired it: It’s one thing to hear about a mighty convoy, but it’s quite another to see it. There’s a certain tacky, truck-stop grandeur to witnessing so many huge vehicles traveling together like a pack of steel, gasoline-fueled animals.

That's ultimately the film's fatal flaw: it bumps Showalter's Baxter up to the role of the romantic lead without giving him an equivalent increase in complexity or depth.

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

A nearly unparalleled actor's showcase, the film boasts performances of impressive quality and quantity...Their complexity matches the film's.

An uncomfortable-looking Lee soldiers doggedly through a thankless role, while Green, though never particularly funny, at least brings off-kilter energy to a role that provides Stealing Harvard's only spark of spontaneity.

The always-dependable and chameleon-like Craig has the chops and substance for that kind of film, but Vaughn prefers to keep matters brisk and superficial.

It's an unflinchingly raw and honest look at a family splitting apart, and it seldom strikes an unconvincing or inauthentic note. Though it surveys rocky adolescent emotional terrain from the safe distance of adulthood, The Squid And The Whale still resonates with the sting of a fresh wound.

Like its lead characters, Lucky is wounded, lost, and impractical, but it has a messy, winning humanity and an agreeably leisurely pace that almost redeems it.

With Glenn offscreen for huge sections of the film, Mercy devolves into yet another navel-gazing drama about a glib cad redeemed by the love of a good woman.

The dialogue is witty and piquant, and the supporting players droll, but the labored farce of madcap marital misunderstandings are as flatfooted as the dance numbers are memorably airy.

Unforgettably documents the kind of journey that leads not to easy answers, but rather to an even thornier knot of questions.

Billy Jack is a film of violent contradictions. It is a fortysomething über-square’s tribute to the promise and potential of the hippies, as well as an intensely violent homage to non-violence.

Laughably awful.

Jeepers Creepers aimed for the archetypal primal spookiness of a scary campfire tale, and halfway succeeded. Here, Salva makes it work virtually every step of the way.

Though it grows silly and sentimental, Funeral scores enough big laughs to make its shortcomings eminently forgivable.

Dull and sappy, though anyone who finds Sandler dreamy should love it.

Devotes its first two acts to establishing the comic monstrousness of all its characters.

If a great movie is one with two great scenes and no bad ones, then Dirty Work is half a great movie. It contains more than its share of bad scenes, but it does have two brilliant ones.

With Piranha, Dante delivers a superior Jaws rip-off with a light, goofy touch that anticipates the anarchic, gleeful mayhem of his later work.

A witless, bloody, unpleasant mismatched-buddy movie.

Minnelli and star Kirk Douglas give Vincent Van Gogh's famously tortured existence the melodramatic treatment in 1956's Lust For Life, and the result falls closer to high camp than high art.

Mann's moody Collateral unravels toward the end, faltering at its conclusion but dispensing enough atmosphere, characterization, and world-weary humanism along the way that audiences would be wise to enjoy the ride without worrying too much about the final destination.

For all its delightful performances, savvy location shooting, and breezy charm, They All Laughed is ultimately something of a tantalizing tease, all flirtation and no consummation.

As befits a heartfelt ode to working-class values, Diggers puts in lots of hard, honest work that finally pays off in a wholly predictable yet unexpectedly moving conclusion.

"May" uses the quirks and well-worn traditions of horse racing as a vehicle to quietly explore idiosyncrasies of the human condition.

The film's featherweight tone and self-conscious excess would be a lot more palatable if everyone didn't seem so insufferably pleased with themselves. The film acts as if it's won the race before the starting gun has even been fired.

Part of Spielberg's skill as a filmmaker comes in choosing the right collaborators. Janusz Kaminski's gorgeous cinematography, Michael Kahn's graceful editing, Jeff Nathanson's clever script, and John Williams' score all work well in unison, but the film's masterstroke is the casting of Walken as DiCaprio's utterly decent father.

This isn't a movie: it's a feature-length Ralph Lauren commercial.

Sets a new nadir in the reality genre's race to the bottom. The price of sacrificing dignity for the amusement of the general public gets lower every day.

Rush undercuts the subgenre's innate didacticism with a light touch and a playful, assured visual style; he never lets audiences forget there's a surplus of authorial intelligence behind the camera. Gould is in a unique position to see the weaknesses of the stodgy academic establishment and the confused counterculture alike, but as it enters its third act, the film grows less ambiguous and more heavy-handed.

Stays unrelentingly pleasant, but affability is a poor substitute for laughs or chemistry.

It's probably not the year's worst film, but it would be difficult to imagine three more interminable, snooze-inducing hours of film than you'll find watching this narcoleptic dinosaur.

Essentially just an above-average Hong Kong action movie, but as such, it's still far better than just about anything else Van Damme has done.

With humor that cuts through a deep undercurrent of sadness, Baker Boys captures the rinky-dink milieu of second-rate lounges, where patron kibitzing threatens to drown out the piano-tinkling of the paid entertainment.

For the first two acts, veteran lowbrow director Dennis Dugan at least keeps The Benchwarmers' pace brisk and the wall-to-wall soundtrack upbeat and infectious. Then the big third-act twist arrives and the film drags to a finish, leaving a slug-like trail of squishy sentimentality.

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

Spade proves that he's entirely capable of making unwatchable dreck all by himself.

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.

In the wrenching final scene, the concept of "dying with dignity" becomes much more than just a catchphrase used to justify a controversial practice.

Though the filmmaking is pedestrian, The Camden 28's timeless truths come through with resounding power.

While Cat People feels like an early Bruckheimer production, it’s also permeated with the themes that personify Schrader’s work as a screenwriter and filmmaker: obsession, sex, the strange permutations of destiny, and man’s bottomless capacity for cruelty and violence.

Part incomprehensible GoodFellas rip-off and part feature-length music video, Belly is a millennial head film that subscribes to the sort of logic usually found only in acid trips, nightmares, and big-budget music videos.

Curse Of Chucky gets wilder and crazier as it goes along, but it surprisingly doesn’t sacrifice atmosphere or tension for laughs, even as it circles back to the raucous comedy of Seed Of Chucky and Bride Of Chucky in its final minutes.

Wah-Wah can't sustain the mastery of its superior first hour, but it maintains a core of truth that sets it apart from less-convincing depictions of boys becoming men.

As is probably inevitable for a film with two corrupt, murderous, drug-dealing cops for protagonists, Gang Related is a nasty, vicious little movie. It's also an excellent genre film. Like a good pulp novel, it tells a lurid story cleanly and effectively, without calling undue attention to itself. The cast is uniformly excellent, with James Earl Jones, David Paymer and Gary Cole making good turns in supporting roles. Belushi turns in a surprisingly restrained performance as the nastier of the two corrupt cops, but the real surprise here is Shakur's work as an essentially moral officer who is gradually sickened by the murky moral swamp in which he finds himself. Shakur's growth as an actor since his unheralded debut performance in Nothing But Trouble is nothing short of remarkable

Its creepy use of DMX's daughter is reprehensible, but the film is otherwise so unrelentingly sleazy that its use of the child-in-danger gambit actually qualifies as one of its subtler moves.

In a masterful performance, Langella highlights Nixon's oily charm and guile.

Like far too many junky post-"Sixth Sense" thrillers, Hide And Seek essentially exists for the sake of its third-act plot twist, but the climactic revelation merely pushes it from bad to worse.

In a self-conscious moment late in the action, one character says she feels like she's in a bad horror movie. No kidding.

Without its mesmerizing lead performance, Traitor easily could have devolved into direct-to-DVD fodder.

So how can a project that began with such promise end up such a slick, pandering misfire? The answer, unsurprisingly, has a lot to do with Jim Carrey.

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.

Twisted marks a bottoming-out for pretty much everyone involved, particularly Judd and director Philip Kaufman, who should know better. The film is the creative equivalent of waking up naked in a puddle of cheap wine and vomit.

As Overnight progresses and its title grows increasingly ironic, it paints a mesmerizing portrait of a profane, overbearing monster engaged in a drawn-out act of professional suicide.

Amigos sandwiches four pedestrian animated shorts—two featuring Donald Duck, one featuring a Gaucho Goofy, and the fourth starring a family of anthropomorphic planes—inside agonizingly dull travelogue footage of Disney writers, artists, and musicians on a research trip, exploring all that Latin and South America have to offer. The stale, joy-killing odor of the classroom hangs heavy over Saludos Amigos: it aspires to educate and entertain, but fails on both counts.

A work of staggering stupidity.

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.

A loving tribute to chicanery, deception, misdirection, scoundrels, sleight of hand, con artistry, dishonesty, and flimflammery in all its myriad guises. It is, in other words, a valentine to filmmaking in general, and its larger-than-life creator in particular.

The Pirate Movie suggests what Gilbert & Sullivan's original would look and sound like if it were rewritten by a boy-crazed middle-schooler who'd rather drool over John Travolta in Grease for the 50th time than suffer through anything close to opera.

There is a time and a place for scruffy independent also-rans like this, and that time and place is the 2 a.m. slot on IFC.

Originally titled Lady Killers, this rancid, underlit B-movie aspires to little more than cheap laughs eked out of the discomfort and queasiness Owen and Friedle feel over sexually servicing assertive, kinky old women.

Scott's latest exercise in assaultive excess nevertheless lingers for two and a half hours, like a drunken houseguest who won't leave.

Loaded with smart sight gags and endearing secondary characters, it effectively mixes slapstick splatter and deadpan satire...Pretty damned irresistible.

Entertainingly captures the camaraderie and spirit of competition among the affable boarders as they battle nature in the form of imposing mountains, regular avalanches, and jagged rock formations.

Pretty much everyone in the cast is wildly overqualified, including Pete Postlethwaite and David Thewlis in key supporting roles.

In a medium generally about action and momentum, Factotum is largely concerned with inaction and inertia.

It falls upon Finney to dramatize the inner workings of a man gradually, unmistakably succumbing to oblivion. Finney is up to the task: The pungent poetry of Lowry's prose comes through in his pitch-perfect performance, with its exquisite turns of phrase, boozy bravado, and theatrical panache.

By giving Taylor the last word, Dig! becomes little more than a self-serving, unconvincing infomercial for a musician who comes across as functional and bearable only when compared to his counterpart.

It's simultaneously intriguing and repulsive, a would-be cult curio not even the most indulgent cult could love.

I found a great deal to like about She-Devil, especially Streep's performance, but it's easy to figure out why it didn't find an audience. It deals with just about everything American film-goers traditionally don't want to think about: old people, fat people, ugly people, nursing homes, class, money, and the ever-present specter of death. Also, it involves a dog dying.

Continental Divide should have marked Belushi's tentative, encouraging first step towards quirkier, more substantive roles and films. Instead it, and Neighbors were more of a dead end.

As a comic heist film, The Italian Job is diverting, though slight. As a feature-length advertisement for the MINI Cooper, however, it's an unqualified triumph.

The degree to which Shopaholic actually works is a testament to the looks, charm, and comedic chops of Fisher, who stole "Wedding Crashers" and has a gift for slapstick that places her somewhere between Téa Leoni and Lucille Ball in the pantheon of foxy redheaded physical comediennes.

Surveillance suggests "Jennifer Lynchian" should be used for films that aspire to David’s moody, idiosyncratic genius and fall woefully short.

When Lightning In A Bottle steps back and simply lets the old-timers ply their trade, the result is consistently riveting.

Prototypical summer-movie fare, designed to be consumed, enjoyed, and forgotten all at once.

Entertaining, casually satirical crowd-pleaser.

In spite of End Of The Spear's fundamental conservatism, the missionaries' disastrous initial encounter with the Waodani ultimately teaches the progressive message that when it comes to winning the hearts and minds of foreign cultures, Bibles and superior technology are no substitute for a thorough understanding of their language and culture.

Empire devolves into a bloody revenge thriller with an ending as primitive as its opening is convoluted.

Maxed Out sacrifices depth for breadth and like a lot of low-budget documentaries, it's done no favors by its grimy, no-fi aesthetic. But the film's scattered ruminations on credit card mania add up to a powerful indictment of a culture of mindless consumption spinning out of control.

I Spy confirms Wilson's ability to turn mediocre, mercenary endeavors into fun crowd-pleasers. Of course, Wilson starring in I Spy is like Phil Jackson coaching a junior-high basketball team, but as long as the results are this entertaining, it's doubtful audiences will care.

In a heartbreaking, scene-stealing performance, Wilkinson plays his bipolar character's manic delirium as a heightened form of awareness, a life-affirming source of moral clarity in a cloudy and corrupt world.

A terrific cast, stylish direction, and elegantly choreographed mayhem help make it far better than it might have been -- Though ultimately silly, Equilibrium's shopworn but stylish synthesis of ammo and ideas is surprisingly engrossing.

The problems with Street Fighter: The Legend Of Chun-Li began with the casting of dead-eyed, sleepy-voiced, charisma-impaired automaton Kristin Kreuk.

Jesse Eisenberg stars as a kinder, gentler version of the insufferable faux intellectual he played in "The Squid And The Whale."

Efron has yet to learn that smiling pretty is merely a component of acting, not its entirety. He makes for a supremely passive lead whose chemistry with Danes is nonexistent.

Don't let the film's highbrow cast, portentous tone, and leisurely pace fool you: Cleaner is just as empty and formulaic as his previous films, just much, much duller.

A mushy-headed, unintentionally funny inspirational drama that plays like a clumsy attempt to crossbreed "The Shawshank Redemption" and "One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest."

It's glossy, dumb fun that is diverting enough but forgotten 20 minutes after it's over.

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

Deserves credit for attempting something more emotional and dramatic than the typical Ferrell gagfest, but Harrelson and Benjamin's earnest subplots cost the film comic momentum and big laughs without adding much in return.

Arteta’s well-intentioned film version feels simultaneously overstuffed and undercooked.

Afterglow gets off to a weak start—and it's occasionally hampered by stilted dialogue and cutesy conceits; Nolte's character is named Lucky Mann—but it is nevertheless a strong, frequently touching film that benefits from a pair of brilliant performances by Nolte and Christie.

It's the kind of featherweight slot-filler people turn off after 15 minutes on a plane or have on in the background on cable while they vacuum the floor.

As a film composed entirely of nine continuous long takes, Nine Lives certainly qualifies as unique. But what makes it rarer and more auspicious is that it offers such a rich bounty of great roles for middle-aged women.

The Reaping is Bible camp, pure and simple. And for bad-movie lovers, it's manna from heaven.

Has an agreeable air of anything-goes vulgarity, which is so transcendentally idiotic that it's impossible to tell whether the film is a brilliant, deadpan parody of raunchy lowbrow farces from the '70s and '80s, or one of the stupidest, most regressive films ever made. Or, more likely, it's a little of both.

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.

Movies don't get much more wholesome and earnest than The Other Side Of Heaven, a handsomely mounted but empty-headed drama that attempts to do for fresh-faced Mormon missionaries what Top Gun did for cocky fighter pilots.

Reflects poorly on everyone, particularly its makers, its stars, and the studio laboring under the delusion that this stuff was worthy of release.

Dreary, joyless.

The Wiz is a weird, ugly film that nevertheless attains strange, fleeting moments of grace.

Brody's Oscar victory and newfound star power might have secured Love The Hard Way its theatrical release, but his depth and charisma are what make the film haunting and surprisingly resonant.

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.

In her feature-film debut, writer-director Patty Jenkins combines the gritty, claustrophobic neo-realism of "Dahmer" with the unlikely gutter romanticism of "Boys Don't Cry," creating a haunting portrait of how a person can feel so desperate and hopeless that murdering for a few crumpled bills and maybe a beat-up car can begin to seem like a reasonable option.

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

The Cartel frequently veers into the realm of black comedy, as Bowdon uncovers instances of nightmarish teacher behavior, but the dark comic elements would be better served by deadpan detachment.

Gehry is a fascinating subject, a strangely magnetic combination of rumpled, aw-shucks humility and Herculean ambition and hubris, but every time Pollack stumbles onto a fascinating topic like Gehry's battles with anti-Semitism, he pulls away instead of delving deeper.

Catching Out could stand to be half an hour longer, which speaks to both its scruffy charm and its frustrating inability to dig beneath the surface.

Withnail And I works as a comedy, but it's a comedy of desperation, and the ever-present specter of failure, overdose, and addiction haunting its leads lends it an aura of lyrical sadness.

To quote Yogi Berra, it’s déjà vu all over again.

This suspense-free, originality-deprived mess will likely be a major contender for the title of 1999's worst film.

Having broken free of the Disney machine that molded her, Lohan now seems intent on destroying her career and credibility on her own terms.

People's title proves prophetic, only this time the people being alienated are the suckers in the paying audience.

It's a clammy, odd duck of a movie, a black comedy that seems strangely content with merely being morbid.

Consistently clever without ever being funny. The film is so in love with its own carefully calibrated outrageousness that it doesn't bother to give its characters any depth beyond sitcom-level stereotypes.

Delivers a steady stream of cheap B-movie thrills, plus two positive messages for young people: Be nice to animals, and when in doubt, always aim for the tendons.

Like Ribisi and Macht's miniature porn empire, Gallo's mildly diverting but overstuffed, underdeveloped opus could use the cinematic equivalent of a fix-it man like Wilson's character to transform its frenetic jumble of subplots and sleazy characters into a cohesive, satisfying whole.

Like The Star Wars Christmas Special, Sgt. Pepper puts a beloved, ubiquitous cultural institution in a new context so staggeringly, mind-bogglingly inappropriate that it engenders an intense, almost unbearable level of cognitive dissonance.

The Coens engineer a funny, entertaining battle of the sexes here, but the preponderance of indelible male characters and less memorable female roles render it something of a mismatch.

There may be a trenchant satire to be mined from our culture's materialism-warped wedding madness, but Bride Wars instead opts for graceless, flailing, poorly choreographed slapstick performed by characters who suggest a dumbed-down tour production of "Sex And The City."

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.

Hokey and convoluted, but as a sticky-hearted fable of redemption, it's surprisingly seductive.

Removing many of the mythical elements of the tale is an intriguing idea that would undoubtedly have paid richer dividends if it didn't mean relying on a heavy who looks like a cross between a Neanderthal on steroids and stilts, and an unusually hirsute wrestler.

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.

Writer-director Davaa allows the drama to emerge organically out of the characters, the beautifully captured setting, and the conflict between the past and the present.

The worst Hanukkah movie ever made, Adam Sandler's Eight Crazy Nights does for the holiday what "Santa Claus: The Movie" did for Christmas.

Gulpilil, a solid cast, and gorgeous scenery keep The Tracker watchable, but they can't mask the fact that as an adventure, it's sluggish, and as a film about racism, it's often reductive and clumsy.

With Over The Top, Stallone had clearly exploited the Rocky formula once too often and audiences rebelled against its condescending family melodrama and heavy-handed working-class trappings.

Weitz has a winning way with a one-liner, and he's recruited a stellar cast that gets the most out of his material.

Maybe Benton's serenely dull time-waster should take a cue from one of its main settings, and become the first Hollywood film released directly to coffee shops. Otherwise, it seems destined to find an indulgent second home as an unusually classy slot-plugger over at Lifetime.

It’s a fascinating story, it doesn’t always make for a fascinating documentary.

Though Hall's stunning vistas and gorgeous exploration of wide-open spaces hearken back to John Ford, Butch Cassidy otherwise radiates the youthful energy, manic pop playfulness, and antic clowning of the French New Wave.

It’s too much fun to be a failure and too transparently, giddily awful to be an unqualified success, so I’m going to split the difference.

It never comes close to being funny.

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.

When American films were addressing social turmoil like never before, Brooks used his clout to turn back the clock by combining silly sight gags, show-biz satire, silence, and celebrity cameos in 1976's aptly named, ingratiatingly goofy Silent Movie.

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.

Not even amusing cameos from Bill Murray as a freeloading producer and Michael McKean as a proctologist can keep With Friends Like These... from being as minor as the film careers of its two-bit protagonists.

Best known for "Notting Hill," Ifans remains a charming actor, but even his fine work can't get this lead zeppelin off the ground.

Nearly everything about Fascination feels overdone. At its delirious worst, it's as pungent a Parisian cheese shop, offering a cornucopia of laughable scenes.

Gorgeously shot by Lance Acord, who makes Toyko a gaudy dreamscape that's both seductive and frightening, Lost In Translation washes away memories of "Godfather III," establishing Coppola as a major filmmaker in her own right, and reconfirming Johansson and Murray as actors of startling depth and power.

Broomfield's documentaries present life on the fringes as one long, sick joke. The joke still works, but in Life And Death Of A Serial Killer, it leaves a bitter aftertaste.

Retains every hooky, marketable, and superficially attractive element from its source material while losing everything that made it special.

A quirkily funny, startlingly assured comedy-drama.

Though certainly dull and didactic at times, Tout Va Bien is remarkable foremost for its sustained twilight mood of exquisite resignation, of exhausted sadness and bone-deep world-weariness.

For a film shamelessly trumpeting the importance of staying together through the hard times, Broken makes a disconcertingly convincing case for divorce.

Following two superior entries, Ratner's slick placeholder of a sequel lacks that crucial X-factor called inspiration.

Superman argues convincingly that everyone should have the right to a good education, not just folks lucky enough to score winning numbers: It should be a birthright, not a matter of chance.

While Sleepwalkers fails spectacularly as a horror movie, it triumphs as a loopy camp comedy. Sleepwalkers gets crazier and crazier as it proceeds, which is saying something, as it starts out batshit insane.

Embracing ugliness, lousy production values, and borderline hysteria as virtues, A Dirty Shame is one for the cultists, a proud retreat back into the sandbox of sexual juvenilia, a potty-mouthed manifesto from an elder statesman of shock.