Nathan Rabin

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.

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.

It goes about its idiotic business swiftly and efficiently, which is about all you can ask for from this manner of silliness. It never goes anywhere worthwhile, but at least it doesn’t take too long to get there.

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

With "Super Troopers" and Club Dread, Broken Lizard has cranked out two genuinely funny movies in a row.

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.

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 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 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.

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.

Parts of Get Rich Or Die Tryin' crackle with energy, vitality, and texture, like the prison-shower fight that descends into a weird sort of slapstick farce. But 50's leaden turn drags the film down. Scenes celebrating his personal and professional triumph ring hollow, since Rich never really gets under his skin.

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

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

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.

Detention is ballsy, audacious, and uncompromising, but the overall effect of Kahn's Hellzapoppin-meets-Twitter aesthetic is exhausting rather than energizing. It's an ice-cream headache of a movie-movie that's so relentlessly "fun," it's borderline obnoxious.

The advanced 3-D technology of today meets the mothballed clichés of yesteryear in Step Up 3D.

The exuberant dance sequences have long been the series’ saving grace, but even those are starting to feel redundant and interchangeable.

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

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.

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.

Delivers pretty much exactly what its audience wants and expects: big, dumb, campy fun so deliriously, comically macho, it's remarkable that no one in the cast died of testosterone poisoning.

As the team leader, Jackson finds exactly the right tone for the role: a sort of playful cockiness that comes from knowing just how good he is. He's clearly having fun, but he never winks at the audience too much or allows his performance to devolve into camp.

While there are moments throughout when the film looks primed to break out of the indie arthouse ghetto, it never quite pulls it off.

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

The Incredible Burt Wonderstone has its cornball charm, thanks largely to the confident work of old pros Carell, Arkin, and Buscemi, but it’s ultimately a big, gaudy, predictable show, strictly for the rubes and tourists.

It’s ambitious, drug-infused, psychedelic, and fractured in strange and interesting ways.

A vanity project about a vanity project.

For a series devoted to giving audiences exactly what they want, it'd be pretty damn appropriate.

MacFarlane’s follow-up feels less like a film than like an extremely long, fairly inspired live-action episode of Family Guy, one that’s only as strong as the latest gag or riff. And this being a Seth MacFarlane production, those gags and riffs are of varying levels of quality.

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.

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

Nowhere is Araki's most accomplished film yet, and if it never quite comes together, it's still a wildly entertaining film.

A Good Old Fashioned Orgy takes its cues from Sudeikis' character and performance: It's randy, good-natured, moderately amusing, and charming in a glib, facile way.

To its credit, the new Walking Tall is a good half-hour shorter than its predecessor, but even at 86 minutes, sitting through it is a chore.

Voight and Young play the kind of old friends who know each other’s many faults well enough for their bond to be characterized more by richly merited resentment than affection. After spending two plodding hours with these jerks, audiences will know that feeling all too well.

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.

Offers a smattering of big laughs and an overall tone of ramshackle likability, but considering Rock's talent and the film's potential for smart satire, Head Of State registers as a somewhat wasted opportunity.

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

Damn! would be a more insightful condemnation of the exploitation process if it didn't reek so strongly of exploitation itself.

Never as edgy as it imagines itself to be. Bangkok may swallow innocents whole, but director Todd Phillips has a lucrative franchise to protect, so the film's flirtation with the comic abyss gets compromised into something that looks more like a rock-solid mainstream comedy with a prominent dark side.

Despite its numerous missteps and miscalculations, What Dreams May Come is often a powerful, affecting piece of filmmaking.

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

Barney's Great Adventure will bore adults to tears.

Unoriginality is the greatest and most flagrant of its many sins.

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.

It’s bloated, overwrought, and nakedly sentimental, a sappy and cliched celebration instead of a searching and incisive exploration.

The film is ostensibly about sex and swinging, but in depicting the complex boundaries of the sexual fringe, it ends up saying a lot about the joys and frustrations of maintaining any relationship.

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.

A film divided against itself. Granted, neither part is particularly distinguished or appealing but the old-timey sports-movie elements at least possess a quaint charm. Unfortunately, that's wholly negated by the film's stumbling attempts at comic relief.

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.

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

As an '80s curio and perhaps the only film to feature the voices of both Welles and That Guy From The Micro Machines Ad Who Talks Real Fast, it possesses a kitschy, low-budget charm.

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

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

A joylessly plodding film that cannibalizes Allen's classics of the '70s and '80s while managing only a few decent one-liners.

Wonderland is to "Boogie Nights" what "Blow" was to "Goodfellas": an accomplished knockoff with all the tricks and none of the soul.

He seems to have given up on making art long ago; these days, all he wants to do is entertain, and with Stolen, he succeeds, albeit only on the guilty-pleasure level. Like seemingly the sum of late-period Cage, Stolen is unashamedly cheese, but at least it's cheese of a pungent, flavorful vintage.

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.

Combining raunchiness and sweetness in a slapdash but generally effective manner.

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.

Steal Me suffers from a distinct charisma vacuum at the center, which makes it easy to linger on its many shortcomings, especially its stilted dialogue and pseudo-poetic, pseudo-philosophical narration.

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

Like its characters, Hey, Happy! is more comfortable with music, images, and rhythms than words, but unlike raves, narrative films generally need dialogue, and whenever the characters open their mouths, the movie crawls to a halt. Even at 75 minutes, it seems less like a party than an endurance test.

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."

Where "Crash" relentlessly pushed every conflict to a fever pitch, Elah takes its cues from Tommy Lee Jones' low-simmering lead performance.

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

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.

Offers plenty of eye candy, if little else. Ultimately, the film is clearly superior to its predecessor, but that's mostly because the first Tomb Raider left so much room for improvement.

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.

Dealin’ With Idiots is at its strongest when it forgets about plot and character development altogether (which is most of the time) and gives itself over to the laid-back pleasure of improvisation among veteran professionals finding and exploring a good groove together.

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.

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.

For a film about shimmering surfaces and the glittering allure of the superficial, G boasts a depressingly flat, undistinguished visual style, and whenever Bill Conti's score reaches for rarified, elegant romance, it instead suggests the dewy earnestness of a feminine hygiene commercial.

The film's clumsy sloganeering, however, largely defeats the leads' fine efforts.

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.

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 pleasant piece of commercial filmmaking, but as a satirical comedy, it's devoid of laughs and insight.

Celebrity is a waste, a tedious and depressingly routine film by a filmmaker on a steep, possibly permanent artistic decline.

The film is curiously joyless and inert.

A tone of lurid idiocy permeates Trapped, a Z-grade woman-in-peril thriller starring scenery-chewing Kevin Bacon.

Not since "Battlefield Earth" pitted overacting, nine-foot-tall Psychlos against puny man-animals has there been an interspecies match-up this perversely uninteresting.

Grace and his collaborators set out to make a typical '80s sex comedy and succeeded all too well; most of the movies they're paying homage to weren't very good, either.

Sandler's best movie, a surprisingly touching and consistent comedy that finds him reaching out to new audiences without abandoning the transgressive meanness that has enlivened his best work.

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

This adventure strands Johnson's famously animated features in eyebrow jail, and squanders his outsized charisma and gift for winking self-deprecation in a thankless worried-stepfather role. It doesn't call for much, beyond a lot of muscles and an ever-present look of concern for his whiny stepson.

The middling new Milwaukee, Minnesota, on the other hand, qualifies as 100 percent faux-noir. It recycles much from classic thrillers but has little to add.

Revenge movies often end with the message that vengeance is empty and futile, but it's never encouraging when revenge seems pointless from the start.

It is much less understandable, and not at all forgivable, that in eschewing the culture-clash comedy of the first film for generic action, the filmmakers forgot they were making a comedy at all.

A fine cast and breezy tone elevate it to exactly the type of adequate time-waster made for intercontinental airplane flights.

It's more consistently amusing and inspired than an adaptation of an '80s TV show has any right to be.

The leads here aren't the only element of the film that's past its prime.

This is time-worn, overly familiar material, indifferently directed by journeyman Tim Story, but Hart’s manic comic invention and textured persona elevates it somewhere beyond the level of pleasing mediocrity onto the slightly more distinguished realm of the agreeable-enough time waster.

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.

Meet The Fockers has assembled a historic, once-in-a-lifetime cast, then stranded them in the laziest, most mercenary kind of sequel imaginable. It's like the 1927 Yankees taking on the Special Olympics softball team.

For all its gender-bending, La Mujer De Mi Hermano's primary appeal is Mori's stunning beauty.

A corny yet unexpectedly moving scene in which Morgan is moved to tears by Loretta Devine's simple kindness helps make the film's shift into inspirational drama far more palatable than it really has any right to be.

It’s modest, scrappy, and resourceful, a low-budget comedy that makes the most of a central setting and a cast packed with gifted improvisers.

It's become a tired cliché for characters in "serious" science-fiction movies not to realize they're dead or dying, but Stay as a film doesn't seem to realize that it's dead from the outset, an unconvincing automaton grimly going through the motions.

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

It's agreeably mediocre, a cinematic paperback novel transformed into the kind of fare folks mindlessly consume on planes and forget about before touching down.

Sal is so inconsequential, it barely exists. It seems possible that even Franco has forgotten it, in order to make room in his memory for the 74 similar projects he was pursuing around the same time.

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

Cheap and ugly in every sense--morally, cinematically, creatively--Nowhere Man accomplishes the seemingly impossible by dragging the seedy revenge genre to a horrific new nadir.

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

Bettany's performance consists entirely of a purposeful frown paired with a menacing glare: He goes about his godly business with solemn, no-frills intensity. The film follows suit.

The tone is mild, the setting is peaceful to the point of sleepiness, and the stakes are incredibly low, even with the heart-tugging central presence of an adorable animal in danger.

Like too many horror movies these days, House of Wax goes for scares, but settles for being gory and deeply unpleasant.

Aided by cinematographer Caleb Deschanel, Friedkin works economically, lending the film the mark of a master craftsman, albeit of the coldly efficient variety. The terseness and surplus of technical skill make The Hunted surprisingly engaging.

Roberts blunders amiably and cluelessly through his amateurish eyesore of a documentary on society's obsession with beauty, perpetually searching for a thesis that will transform a shambling mess of half-baked thoughts and pointless digressions into a real documentary.

Gangster Squad aims for the pop-operatic intensity of "The Untouchables," but ends up feeling like a savage, simple-minded comic strip.

Better Living Through Chemistry suggests a new cinematic rule: the more impressed a movie is with itself, the less likely it is to impress a discriminating audience liable to have seen all its silly little tricks before.

Ribald yet frantically unfunny, it wears out its welcome within the first five minutes, and never comes close to gaining it back. It feels like an alternately flat and flailing television pilot for a bro-comedy no one in their right mind would ever pick up.

Here Comes The Boom seems to have made it from the pitch stage - Kevin James does MMA to save his school or something! - to the big screen without an iota of inspiration, ambition, or personality seeping in at any juncture.

Lawrence's public foibles haven't magically transformed him into a comic genius, but they have made his act surprisingly poignant, if never especially funny or profound.

Adding an additional layer of cheese to a project that already reeks hopelessly of Velveeta, Schumacher pumps up the empty spectacle, stranding his fetching-but-lifeless mannequins amid giant sets and overblown production numbers.

It would be hard to imagine a film with less going for it than Dance Flick.

Bennett never lets us forget that his character is in profound pain, even while attempting to perform oral sex on a transsexual blow-up doll. It's a daring, sweet performance that almost single-handedly elevates The Virginity Hit from a standard Superbad knock-off into a film that feels raw, painful, and real.

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.

In a timid comic world, Tim & Eric's Billion Dollar Movie feels genuinely dangerous and transgressive: it makes a virtue of going way too far because other comedies don't go far enough.

It’s many different films at once—all muddled, all unsatisfying, and all crying out for Liam Neeson’s participation.

Instead of building toward a grand romantic climax, it just gets sillier before exploding into a torrent of unintended laughs.

Salinger thinks it’s big, important news, but it’s barely a footnote.

Well-intentioned to a fault, Sleepwalking blurs the line between dramatizing free-floating misery and spreading it.

A pathetic wallow, first in misanthropy and later in sentimentality.

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.

It lacks the conviction to embrace its own garish awfulness, resulting in little more than tedious historical and patriotic hokum, a preposterous potboiler done in by slack pacing and pedestrian execution.

Shrink is exactly like virtually all his (Spacey) post-"American Beauty" vehicles: flashy, phony, nakedly melodramatic, and full of big actorly moments disconnected from real life.

If Levinson weren't so intent on cramming whimsy and joy down the audience's throat for two punishing hours, he might very well have succeeded in his very noble ambitions. Whimsy is a tricky thing: too much can become oppressive.

At its core, Homefront is thoroughly generic, a grim exercise in formula whose action sequences are edited into a frenetic, incoherent blur, especially the awful opening setpiece.

Jack Frost's juxtaposition of the absurd and the absurdly predictable results in a film that's frequently entertaining, but for the wrong reasons.

It would be a lot easier to buy Exorcist II: The Heretic as a mood piece if it was able to sustain a tone beyond clumsy exposition and hysterical camp for longer than a few minutes.

David Dobkin's film has the faults of raucous recent scatological comedies like "Bad Teacher," "Horrible Bosses," and "The Hangover Part II" with none of their redeeming facets. It's scattershot, sexist, and vulgar without being funny.

Dead Man Down exerts an unconscionable level of effort for minimal reward: It aspires to exquisite world-weariness, but just ends up feeling exhausted by its frenzied yet fruitless exertions.

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

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.

James has a sweet, appealing presence, but the dreary, joke-light script and generic direction do him no favors.

Even at its best, film noir dialogue teeters on the verge of self-parody and City Heat all too often crosses the thin line separating crackling from cornball.

As Above/So Below purposefully generates a certain air of mystery by keeping the exact nature of its protagonists’ experience enigmatic, but for a film that takes place underground in tightly enclosed spaces, it’s surprisingly thin on suspense and palpable physical danger.

A big-screen sitcom so sleepy and juvenile it might as well come with its own nap break.

It does strive for substance and meaning in a way that gives it an unmistakable Barton Fink feeling, if nothing close to a Barton Fink sensibility.

The line for The Apple cult officially starts here. I humbly propose this as the ultimate midnight movie.

The bigness of Mann’s performance can’t help but set the film’s tone, which goes manic and high-strung to the point of hysteria before settling down and becoming really stupid and gross.

A crowd-pleasing, proudly working-class celebration of large women, old women, broke women, and women who love women, Tammy isn’t just consistently funny and unexpectedly touching and tender, it’s also genuinely subversive.

Chick's underwhelming exploration of post-millennial angst is as empty and vacant as its protagonist's inexpressive peepers.

Voices is visually impressive, and it sustains a mood of downbeat romanticism throughout, but because it lacks an essential core of humanity, it's never as haunting or resonant as it should be.

We remain a nation divided, but hopefully we’ve at least progressed beyond the need for clumsy message movies about racial tolerance, as fortified with dick jokes.

As bloated and ponderous as its predecessor was lean and focused, Chronicles ups the stakes along with the budget while jettisoning just about everything that made "Pitch Black" stand out from other thrillers about weary humans battling nefarious space beasties.

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

Never remotely frightening.

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.

Add Balls Of Fury to the list of movies that not even Walken's moon-man delivery and oddball comic energy can save.

Though steeped in both subgenres, Never Die Alone subverts that vicarious enjoyment by showing violence and abuse so unrelentingly ugly that only a sadist could derive the least bit of pleasure from it.

As Christian knock-offs of secular films go, The Remaining is surprisingly respectable. At the risk of crazily overrating the film, The Remaining has to qualify as one of the most stirringly adequate, totally acceptable explicitly Christian horror movies ever made.

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.

At best, Lay The Favorite registers as cartoon sociology, but the film's featherweight charms dissipate whenever it moves away from the world of gambling and devotes time to go-nowhere subplots involving Hall's bland romance with Jackson, or Willis' troubled but fundamentally healthy marriage to Zeta-Jones.

Moore works to feign vitality where none exists, but that just makes it even more embarrassing to watch her writhe around fruitlessly in the most thankless and ill-fitting of roles.

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.

To paraphrase a famous Mae West wisecrack, when Cage is good, he's very good, and when he's bad, he's better. Here, however, he's just plain lousy, and like the film he so passively carries, that's no fun at all.

There's something strangely charming about films that are all artifice, explosions, and naked calculation. 12 Rounds is at least honest trash: It never pretends to be anything other than manic schlock.

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.

Think Like A Man Too isn’t a movie, or even an arbitrary sequel to an arbitrary adaptation of a novelty book, so much as an extended victory lap from filmmakers and actors convinced that all they have to do is show up to equal or top the first film’s success. The sad thing is that they’re probably right.

Simultaneously swooningly romantic and transcendently idiotic.

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.

Rugrats Go Wild! represents one giant leap forward for corporate cartoon synergy, but one similarly large step back for the Rugrats franchise.

Shadyac didn't need to channel his angst into narrative fiction: He just needed to look in the mirror to find a symbol of Hollywood's arrogance and misplaced priorities.

While “Final Destination” was gimmicky enough, its sequel begins with the same flawed premise, then piles on layers of contrivances until it reaches a level of implausibility rarely seen outside of films pitting giant radioactive monsters against each other.

While stylistic excess keeps Gothika mildly diverting, though suspense-and horror-free, Kassovitz can't do anything to keep the film's ending from degenerating into camp.

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.

The idiotic melodrama The Words is a maddening contradiction: a film about the publishing industry and a great literary fraud that doesn't have a literary bone in its body or a thought in its pretty, empty little head.

I don't know that Striptease could ever have been anything more than second-rate Elmore Leonard, but Moore's dour lead performance sabotages the film from the get-go.

Trespass begins loopy and mounts in craziness until it's frothing-at-the-mouth insane. It's hard to sustain that level of inspired lunacy over the course of 90 minutes, but Trespass is up to the challenge. As always, it's foolish to underestimate the appeal of Cage at his most agreeably unhinged.

Clark is either doing way too little or way too much here; he rarely hits the right tone.

Though it's never wise to underestimate the power or universal appeal of Rai's cleavage and lustrous hair, that's about all that sets the doggedly mediocre The Last Legion apart from every other sword-and-sandal epic about the origins of Camelot.

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.

In the insufferable, secondhand tradition of countless other regrettable genre films, Black Out is so impressed by itself, it doesn’t even need an audience.

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.

The Living Wake is cursed with a permanent smirk of smug self-satisfaction: It’s so delighted with itself that it leaves audiences out of the equation.

Thankfully, State Of The Union's pulpy, adrenalized blaxploitation spin on the secret-agent genre provides the dumb fun its predecessor should have dished out.

Wrath Of The Titans is shopworn and derivative even by the degraded standards of contemporary blockbuster filmmaking.

Like the forgotten blaxploitation schlock it often resembles, the film aspires to nothing but cheap thrills, but while it's plenty cheap, it's far from thrilling.

The film aspires to educate as well as entertain, rattling off the names and relevant distinctions of various dinosaurs as they appear onscreen for the first time. But the overwhelming impression the film leaves is that dinosaur poop was enormous.

The Spy Kids series once seemed charmingly homemade. These days, it feels less charmingly homemade than maddeningly amateurish.

The film boasts compelling performances--from Bruckner, and especially from Stephen Dillane as a wildly pragmatic money-man who radiates well-deserved cynicism. But Bloom is the giant void at the center of the film, and his laughable histrionics pull Haven firmly into camp territory.

A tonal mess, a kitchen-sink comic melodrama that veers from broad comedy to sticky drama without ever finding a palatable or consistent tone.

Two Kitties marks a considerable improvement over its predecessor. It's faster paced and the filmmakers wisely shift the focus away from bland owner Breckin Meyer and onto a menagerie of chattering animals.

So with two great, ideally cast actors and such potentially fascinating subject matter, why does Love Ranch feel like a clumsy TV movie?

A non-movie that seems to wash over audiences without making any kind of impression. Except for those it does impress.

Cotton-candy filmmaking, all spun sugar and hot air.

The screenplay relies far too heavily on coincidences, misunderstandings, and characters purposefully not saying things for reasons rooted in plot contrivances rather than clear motivation.

I was never bored, even if the film ultimately amounts to little more than a very expensive freak show. Just before slurring one of the all-time great terrible last lines ("I want to go to dog heaven"), Kilmer utters, with sublime understatement, a line that doubles as the film's epitaph: "Well, that didn't work out." Failure, Fiasco or Secret Success: Fiasco.

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

For the scandal-prone icon behind the camera - who glibly writes off all that talk about her subjects' Nazi sympathies as slanderous nonsense from a jealous, hateful press and gossipy busybodies - the film might as well be called ME.

Not nearly as bad as it should be. For the most part, it's a well-made, enjoyably pulpy little genre film, albeit one that never quite overcomes the flimsiness of its source material.

It'd be tempting to accuse Rebound of neutering Lawrence, but the sad fact is that Martin Lawrence doesn't have a whole lot of comic genius to betray.

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.

Could and should have been a giddy, tongue-in-cheek action-comedy romp. Instead, it's a meandering action-drama, in which nearly all of the abundant laughs are unintentional.

Gaghan shows promise as a director, but Abandon leaves a lot of room for improvement.

Anyone older than eight is likely to find it a ridiculously extravagant exercise in stupidity.

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.

A film that sometimes suggests "Traffic" remade as a brainless action thriller.

In spite of a late-game adrenaline surge, the hoped-for fireworks between Li and Statham never quite materialize.

There are elementary school playgrounds with substantially higher levels of verbal wit and intellectual discourse than Under The Cherry Room.

A symptom of cinematic de-evolution run amok.

As slick and attractive as its cast. But the movie gets away from Shafer.

Big Fat Liar's screenplay, co-written by Robbins and fellow Head Of The Class alumnus Dan Schneider, is a model of comic inefficiency. Like a Rube Goldberg contraption, it goes to excruciating, wildly implausible lengths for the flimsiest of payoffs.

Dreary, joyless.

Takes too long to get going to qualify unequivocally as a good movie, but when Jovovich finally starts kicking zombified ass, it becomes good enough.

It isn't gangsta, but it's winning all the same.

It's a struggle with quasi-profound ramifications that crystallizes Prince's long-standing obsession with sin and salvation, sex and Godliness, the hungers of the body and the demands of the spirit. Or, at least, it should be. Instead it plays like a cartoon parody of Prince's soft-headed spiritual concerns.

A shamelessly derivative mob movie.

Parental Guidance is the abysmal grandpa/grandkids bonding comedy he's (Crystal) been destined to make since he first started creating new comedy with an unmistakable old-person smell.

The profound moral and spiritual emptiness at the core of The Secret Of My Success keeps it from being the dumb fun promised by its premise, title, and extensive use of Yello. The film never bothers to consider why Fox is in such a huge hurry to make it in business, or why the audience should be so invested in his professional success. Instead, it just assumes that everyone is out to make their fortune, get the girl, and come out on top at the end. The film consequently feels like a souped-up Rube Goldberg contraption in a furious hurry to get nowhere in particular.

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.

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.

Shockingly misconceived, poorly executed effort.

The film's only real bright spot is Seth Green, who, as Culkin's sidekick, brings Party Monster a droll wit it otherwise lacks. It's such a dreary mess that when Culkin insists that life in prison isn't too different from being a club kid, it's all too easy to believe him.

Reggaeton has officially come of age: The burgeoning subgenre now has a terrible, opportunistic exploitation movie to call its own.

The almost perversely colorblind College Road Trip represents a strange milestone in black film.

For all its cornball charm Rhinestone ultimately does little to disprove the widespread notion that the "funny Sylvester Stallone comedy" remains a pop-culture oxymoron.

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

Fans know exactly what they're in for, while everyone else knows to stay far away. Everyone can agree, however, that this is probably the worst date movie ever. For non-sadists, at least.

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

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

Too grim and humorless to even qualify as trashy fun.

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."

Like the film itself, Ruffalo and Aniston exacerbate a bad, unfeasible idea with clumsy execution, exerting a whole lot of energy and effort for very little payoff.

A work of Battlefield Earth-level miscalculation.

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.

If Spurlock had simply followed Waters around for 80 minutes, the result would be more entertaining than Mansome. Hell, 80 minutes of John Waters sleeping would be more fun than Mansome.

A work of staggering stupidity.

An unabashed valentine to Winters, but like an unfortunate number of valentines, it proves a little embarrassing to the giver and recipient alike.

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.

Urban Legend has an undeniably clever premise, which plays on a sort of cultural mythology shared by the filmmakers and the ostensibly media-savvy audience, but it fails to do anything interesting with it.

There's a smart, funny, observant comedy-drama to be made about the role our romantic pasts play in determining our futures, but director Mark Mylod and screenwriters Jennifer Crittenden and Gabrielle Allan are less interested in making that movie than in cycling Faris through a series of non-starting encounters with one-note-joke ex-flings.

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.

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.

The film’s lazy reliance on distraction extends to keeping its female lead underwritten and unsympathetic.

Bewitched piles miscalculation upon miscalculation, beginning by casting the iron-willed Kidman, one of film's gutsiest and most fearless actresses, as a regressive pre-feminist dumb-blonde doormat, a sort of mildly retarded amalgam of Marilyn Monroe, Renée Zellweger, and Meg Ryan.

A film divided against itself. It’s really two movies, one silly and one serious. Too bad neither is particularly compelling.

Vardalos has brought back the tourist comedy and delivered the dumbed-down "If It’s Tuesday, This Must Be Belgium" no one wanted.

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.

The tone is delicate and vaporous, more attuned to mood and melancholy than anything resembling a conventional narrative. And despite the ambition on display, the film feels awfully slight, like a dream forgotten immediately upon waking. In its admirable but muddled attempt to fuse pure poetry and pure cinema, it ends up doing justice to neither.

The deathly silence doomed to haunt theaters during Get Hard allows audiences far too much time to think about its problematic attitudes toward race, gender, sexuality, and class, as well as its borderline-nonsensical plot.

The charismatic Idris Elba debuts in a key role as an alcoholic priest who recruits Cage's unique services. Yet instead of elevating the franchise, Ghost Rider: Spirit Of Vengeance ends up squandering even more potential.

The film’s constant nods to the artificiality of its narrative highlight its precious, cloying phoniness rather than subvert it.

Jingle All The Way is one of the most mindlessly flailing films I’ve ever seen.

Its pleasures are all glib and surface-level, although Luke and Patton have enough chemistry to make their painfully clichéd relationship go down smoothly.

Sex Ed takes a lot of glee in subjecting its timid hero to a rancid sewer of sexual excess early on, but the film’s apparently strong belief that it deserves to be taken seriously—despite its title, premise, and utter worthlessness—both as a comedy and as social advocacy might just be the most offensive thing about it.

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

There's something depressing about seeing the low-energy, family-friendly Lawrence sleepwalk through the film's sappy plot points.

Explores love in all its myriad forms, from the sickeningly sappy to the cornball to the groaningly precious and obnoxiously cute.

Movies have the ability to make history come alive, but this dull period soap opera feels more like history that's already been embalmed.

A witless, bloody, unpleasant mismatched-buddy movie.

21 & Over seems particularly redundant, since a film already exists that’s exactly like "The Hangover," only not as good: It was called "The Hangover Part II." 21 & Over is so slavish in imitating its screenwriters’ big claim to fame that it even ends by teasing a sequel, to which the only sane response is a polite but firm, “Thank you, no.”

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

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.

Despite a novel premise and an appealing, energetic cast, Full Of It seldom finds magic in its supernatural whimsy.

Kidnapping Mr. Heineken isn’t a comedy of incompetence, or the psychological battle of wills its opening scene suggests. It’s hard to see exactly what the filmmakers were going for, beyond bringing a real-life story to the big screen as dutifully and dully as possible.

The Chaperone is being marketed as a comedy, though no one seems to have told anyone involved.

Grandma's Boy aspires to nothing more than the frathouse goofiness and juvenile high spirits of early Sandler vehicles, but it possesses the energy of a funeral dirge played at half-speed.

Such a stupid, painfully obvious, gratingly unfunny dud that it's unlikely to please even the most gullible and easy-to-please members of the Kiss army.

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.

With its mixture of whimsy and special-effects-driven humor, My Favorite Martian aims to blend E.T. and Men In Black, but in its sad, mercenary shamelessness, it ends up recalling Mac And Me instead.

Dash directs with a certain visual flare and a sense of humor, but as the film lumbers toward its climax, keeping track of the innumerable allegiances and double-crosses becomes an exercise in futility.

With deadening predictability, the filmmakers have reduced a definitive satire about the flaws and foibles of human nature into family-friendly sub-Disney pabulum about an affable slacker who finally musters up the courage to ask a pretty girl at work for a date.

Browning has wildly expressive eyes and body language, but she turns wooden when delivering Snyder and Steve Shibuya's alternately purple and stilted banter. Like the film, she seems to regard plot and dialogue as necessary evils.

Undiscriminating comedy fans hungering for the High School High of superhero parodies need look no further.

Uptown Girls refuses to make Fanning likable, which speaks to a certain misplaced integrity, and tends to throw a wrench in the film's halfhearted attempts at formula.

Thinner’s problems begin with a grotesquely unconvincing fat suit and makeup that make Burke look less like a big man battling obesity than a melting marshmallow man. The plug really should have been pulled on Thinner after the first makeup and prosthetics tests, since the bad design digs the film into a hole it never begins to shimmy its way out.

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.

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.

The film's sole redeeming facet is Mike Myers' rich, multilayered performance as Rubell: Simultaneously repulsive and charming, hedonistic and oddly paternal, Myers steals every scene he's in. It's a great performance that deserves to be in a much better film.

In the midst of this comic black hole, only Snoop Dogg and Method Man emerge unscathed, as even material this bad can't mask their languid, long-limbed charisma.

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

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

The lucky Mulroney gets to play the kind of sensitive hunk that women want and men want to be, but he's the only one who can be heard over the tired wheezing of the romantic-comedy machinery.

It never comes close to being funny.

Diaz does what she can under adverse circumstances, but she doesn't come close to salvaging this ramshackle vehicle.

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.

Ford and Oldman’s scenes together are Paranoia’s sole redeeming facet.

A headache-inducing mess without direction or purpose.

King Kong Lives is a terrible film, alternately boring and fascinatingly misguided. But it’s ragingly inessential more than anything else.

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.

Unfinished Business aspires to high-spirited antics, but it feels defeated and exhausted from the very start.

Charlie Countryman feels like the cinematic equivalent of a dodgy first novel, the kind authors write when they’re young and full of romance, hubris, and pretension—then look back on later in life with something approaching mortification.

Even Tyler Perry seems bored and exhausted by his own shtick. To its credit or detriment, Single Moms Club cannot muster up the energy to be as insulting and offensive as Perry’s previous two films.

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

All Usher fans really seem to want out of a movie like this is an opportunity to ogle their idol for an hour and a half. And that's all this movie affords them.