Nathan Rabin

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.

Somehow, music-video veteran David Meyers fails to hurtle this project into the pantheon of great horror movies.

For all its florid pretensions and epic length, the film's overwrought take on its subject's not-so-rosy life leaves behind no lasting insight.

Bratz's strong anti-clique sermonizing would be slightly more convincing if it weren't tethered to a movie romanticizing the most awesome clique ever.

The only bright spot--beyond McConaughey's boyish Southern charm and a pleasant soundtrack--is Zooey Deschanel as Parker's acid-tongued roommate, whose quirks include alcoholism and nihilism. Someone really should tell Deschanel that she's already too big and too good for thankless Eve Arden roles.

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

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

Powered by a soundtrack featuring many of classic-rock radio's most comically overplayed songs, The Hollywood Knights has almost nothing going for it aside from a surplus of enthusiastic vulgarity.

Things pick up a bit toward the end, abetted by a string of relatively energetic musical numbers, but they can only partially redeem a film that's as pointless as it is perfunctory.

Zoom suffers from following three "X-Men" movies and "Sky High," but even if it preceded them, it'd still qualify as little more than a cheap, ugly, forgettable footnote to the seemingly endless superhero boom.

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.

Kinky Boots doesn't seem to realize that its time came and went long, long ago.

Singleton once radiated ambition and vision. These days, he seems to be aiming for mediocrity at best. Even by those extraordinarily lenient standards, the inessential, perfunctory Abduction falls short

Follows a dispiritingly predictable arc.

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.

The Bonfire Of The Vanities gets a lot of things right but they're largely negated by the colossal things it gets wrong.

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.

Shockingly misconceived, poorly executed effort.

Thanks to assured direction and a fine cast, Hills isn't terrible, only terribly unnecessary.

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.

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

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.

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.

Musical Chairs wants to speak eloquently and powerfully for the disabled. Instead it speaks down to them in the vernacular of bad television comedies, cheeseball underdog dance movies, and abysmal soap operas.

Cars 2 looks fantastic, but the studio has never given audiences - especially audiences over the age of 10 - less reason to be emotionally invested in the beautiful shiny things flying across the screen.

The bluntness wouldn't be so oppressive if the film weren't so austere and glacially paced: Welcome To The Rileys is way too humorless.

For a film that has nothing to offer but lazy '80s nostalgia, Kickin' It Old Skool doesn't even bother to get the details right.

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.

Carter and his underachieving cohorts have seldom given cultists less to believe.

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

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

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.

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

While the film is often playful, it never attempts to be particularly funny, perhaps out of a fear that too much levity in a World War II-themed movie would be in poor taste. Instead, it loads on great quantities of tacky crowd-pleasing moments and clichés.

The film is curiously joyless and inert.

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.

Like much of Mann's work, it's an unabashed love letter to the counterculture. But this time out, Mann has made an unintentionally vicious satire of the fuzzyheaded self-intoxication and impracticality of the progressive left, a film that's far more scathing than anything Tom Wolfe could dream up.

The film doesn't begin to take off until its second half, when it thankfully shucks its weak supporting cast and turns into a three-way battle of wits involving Jackson, Jovovich, and Skarsgård, its wiliest and most compelling characters.

Forster's movie doesn't want to grow up, but it doesn't seem to understand childhood, either. For a film about the life-affirming power of imagination, Finding Neverland displays precious little of its own.

The film begins to resemble the dramatic equivalent of a porno movie, with emotional orgasms spewing forth at a rapid clip. By the time Patch Adams reaches its narrative climax, it has long since shot its dramatic load.

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.

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.

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

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.

The tantalizing promise of 90 heavenly minutes of Ryan Reynolds in a roly-poly fatsuit and unconvincing tubby make-up (which make him look like a younger version of Martin Short's Jiminy Glick) proves a case of the old bait-and-switch.

Norton is a strong lead in an overwrought, mediocre film that trumps even Hannibal in its mercenary shamelessness.

It's refreshing to see an American movie with an Indian protagonist not played by a white actor in makeup, but it would be a lot more refreshing if that actor (Jimi Mistry) were given a character to play, not just a comic conceit and near-toxic levels of enthusiasm.

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

A comedy with a terrific premise and little else.

The film feels epic in scope, visually at least, but the depth of its deep-focus composition is bitterly at odds with the flimsiness of its characterization and plotting.

It’s a passable knock-off of less-godly but more inspired secular fare, which may not sound like high praise, but is clearly all the filmmakers were aiming for. They set the bar low enough to clear it.

Lunchbox-toting time-waster.

Boasts an action-movie plot and an action-movie title, but precious little action. It's a lovely film about brutal men, but its integrity and visual splendor ultimately can't make up for its overall lack of visceral excitement.

A comedy just funny enough to make viewers wish it were far funnier.

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.

Nothing is surprising about The Hundred-Foot Journey. It’s a film that telegraphs all its beats and character arcs, executes them adequately but without passion or personality, then congratulates itself on a job done.

The pleasure to be derived from watching a loopy Australian risk life and limb is not to be dismissed or underrated, but Collision Course proves that that guilty pleasure, no matter how potent, just isn't a solid basis for a film.

A vanity project about a vanity project.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

V/H/S/2 is content to recycle the conventions and stylistic restrictions of the original while pursuing the default vision of just about every horror sequel: more of the same, with less inspiration, a bigger budget, and more gore.

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.

An overblown science-fiction epic in which ostensibly unthinking, unfeeling stem-cell-like entities not only think and feel, but look and act like glamorous movie stars.

Seed Of Chucky goes even further toward comedy over horror, but the Chucky-as-comic-antihero gag has grown stale.

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 definition of a vanity film, Weber's latest opus lacks the focus even to qualify as dilettantish. Offering plenty for the eye and little for the brain, the film suffers from a dearth of ideas as it glides pleasantly but emptily from one gorgeous surface to another.

It's a testament to Michael Keaton's fine lead performance that White Noise doesn't come off as laughably preposterous.

Secret Window is almost worth seeing for his characteristically assured performance alone, but Koepp sabotages Depp and his surroundings with an ending so atrocious, it callously betrays everything that came before it.

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

Despite its shortcomings as a narrative, Man Of Tai Chi nevertheless feels like Reeves made exactly the movie he set out to make, assuming he didn’t set out to create a movie that was “good” by any stretch of the imagination so much as intermittently entertaining, albeit probably not for the reasons intended.

Schneider and director/co-writer/Animal vet Tom Brady continue to subscribe to the notion that any joke worth making is worth beating to death, but there's still something strangely endearing about Schneider's willingness to do anything for a laugh.

Doesn't aspire to do much more than disseminate Chomsky's ideas. On that level, it's a success, but on every other level, it's downright snooze-inducing.

Yves Saint Laurent is the kind of heavy-handed, substance-light, spectacle-driven period film where the set decorator and the costume designer don’t just have the most important jobs on the film, they have the only important jobs.

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

As a comedy, it's painfully unfunny, and as a drama, it's both silly and overcrowded with unnecessary characters and subplots. Still, Best Men has its moments.

It’s the geriatric equivalent of a ramshackle teen sex comedy, only intermittently elevated by the caliber of the talent involved.

Da Sweet Blood Of Jesus is the best kind of failure, impassioned and singular, but it’s a failure all the same— glacially paced, stiffly acted, shapeless, and for the most part tremendously boring. It’s an intriguing idea ruined by the execution. There’s a fine line between hypnotic and somnolent.

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.

Well-intentioned to a fault, the film packs a strange, ultimately unsuccessful combination of prurience and clumsy identity politics.

Chavez was a man of intense, overriding passions, his biopic feels strangely academic and detached, an unimaginative, straightforward catalog of his greatest hits and most historic campaigns that provides precious little insight into his inner life.

Feels like it was written as a fairly straight horror/sci-fi movie, then script-doctored by a comedy writer intent on satirizing the original script. As a result, the film's intentional and unintentional laughs mingle so freely that it becomes difficult to differentiate between the two.

In a shrill attempt to overcompensate for the film's shortcomings, William Ross' hyperbolic score does the audience's work for it, cheering heroism, guffawing during lighthearted moments, and getting all misty-eyed during the tender and tragic scenes.

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.

Ultimately it lacks even the conviction of its own nastiness.

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

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

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.

A sustained mood piece of disquieting intensity, but its almost unbearable air of morose ennui becomes hard to take even in small doses, let alone in a highly concentrated torrent of misery like this.

An implausible, wildly protracted setup that drags on forever before reaching a payoff that barely registers.

Chelsom has transformed a low-key charmer into an overblown shtick-com whose idea of restraint only extends to forgoing wacky sound effects, a laugh track, and amplified rim-shots every time a character delivers a wisecrack.

Nicotina's lack of originality ultimately proves forgivable. Its glib, heartless nihilism doesn't.

Instead of committing wholeheartedly to telling the story of a single family, Daniels gets distracted trying to tell the story of our nation’s complicated racial history.

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.

As a testament to the vitality of—and sense of community engendered by—black comedy, The Original Kings Of Comedy is a success. As a comedy, however, it's sluggishly paced and not nearly funny enough to justify its two-hour running time.

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.

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

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.

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.

For a film about a "sport" where every competition is literally a matter of life and death, the oddly inert, suspense-free 13 is strangely lacking in urgency.

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

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.

With its wall-to-wall pop covers, Chipwrecked isn't a kids' movie so much as a brightly animated, instantly forgettable animated feature-length advertisement for the NOW That's What I Call Music! compilation series of contemporary pop hits.

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

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.

Simultaneously swooningly romantic and transcendently idiotic.

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.

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.

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.

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

It isn’t until Temptation grows flamboyantly bad in its final act that it rises to the level of good dumb fun in the trashy tradition of Perry’s most entertainingly awful films.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

If the sluggishly paced, virtually laugh-free Haunted House is Wayans' conception of a passion-fueled labor of love, it's horrifying to ponder what he'd consider a mercenary cash-grab.

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

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

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

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

Films like these have taught us that suffering is the incontrovertible existential fate of attractive Los Angeles residents. Must these dour exercises in alienation make audiences suffer as well?

It's safe to say to no idea was nixed on the set of New Year's Eve for being too cheesy or sentimental; if anything, ideas were nixed for not being sentimental or cheesy enough.

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."

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

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

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.

Myers combines his love of references, silly names, and mindless repetition by having his guru use "Mariska Hargitay" as a greeting/mantra. The first time it's employed, it's merely unfunny; by the 13th or 40th time, it's almost hypnotic in its awfulness.

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

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.

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

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."

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

The main problem, however, is Tamra Davis' leaden direction, which prevents Half-Baked from developing comic momentum. There are a few scattered laughs.

Revealing hitherto unseen depths of stiffness, Diesel stumbles badly in the role.

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.

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

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.

A frenetic, busy, expensive machine that looks good but runs on autopilot.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

Buddy comedies rely heavily on their leads' chemistry, and in this regard, Without A Paddle fails.

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

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

The popularity of Davis' strip represents the ultimate triumph of mediocrity, but even the cartoonist's competent hackwork deserves better than this.

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.

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

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

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.

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 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.

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 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.

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

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

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

A witless, bloody, unpleasant mismatched-buddy movie.

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.

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.

A Yuletide comedy so slight, it sometimes feels like a bonus-sized Christmas episode for a sitcom that never should have been green-lit in the first place.

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

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

Dreary, joyless.

As a film, it’s sappy, preachy, and sleepily paced, but it also makes walking in faith seem about as flavorful and appealing as a lettuce sandwich on white bread, slathered in mayo.

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.

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.

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

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.

Unrelentingly dreary, and seemingly destined to be remembered, if at all, as that movie Christian Bale lost a full third of his body weight for. It doesn't deserve any better.

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.

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

Quirky, unsatisfying portrait.

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.

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

Though it never really taps into the whole JFK-as-alien-sex-fiend plot as a source of satire, Species 2 is still the superior piece of trash its predecessor should have been.

Too grim and humorless to even qualify as trashy fun.

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.

Feels stitched together from bits and pieces of lame '80s buddy-cop movies.

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.

Likely to appeal only to undiscriminating nudity-- and gore -- starved adolescents.

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

What's perhaps most surprising about European Gigolo is its reactionary streak, exemplified by knee-jerk attacks on Europe's equally knee-jerk anti-Americanism. Then again, that seems fitting. The sequel functions as the ultimate Ugly American, good for a few cheap, vulgar laughs and nothing else.

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.

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

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

The least necessary sequel since "Agent Cody Banks" embarked on a London mission a few weeks ago.

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

Civil Brand's aesthetic is pure mid-'70s blaxploitation, and not in an ironic or reverent sense. Even the heavy-handed political rhetoric is in keeping with the neo-blaxploitation vibe, since even bad blaxploitation movies often had revolutionary undercurrents.

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

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

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

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

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

It seems content to plod listlessly through the motions.

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

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

Crude, grating.

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.

There's gore aplenty here, but precious little suspense or terror.

Dimly lit, emotionally empty, and devoid of thrills, Bangkok Dangerous should disappoint Cage fans looking for Wicker Man-style camp thrills just as thoroughly as action buffs looking for a passable thriller. It's never close to good, and it can't even get bad right.

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.

Laughing at this turkey might not necessarily make you a redneck, but it sure does make you easily amused.

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

Fortunately, as a showcase for Sharon Stone's physique, Basic Instinct 2 is a rousing success. In every other respect, it's a colossal failure.

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.

The Spirit feels like the follow-up to "Batman & Robin" no one wanted.

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

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

Superman IV lacks the wonder and awe of Superman, that giddy sense of boundless possibilities. Superman had gotten old and familiar and the message-movie trappings feel tacked-on and desperate.

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.

A rancid new Yuletide comedy.

Stiff, episodic, and disjointed, Silent Hill: Revelation 3D replicates its source material all too faithfully.

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

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

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

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

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

Evidence tries to one-up Basic Instinct through the sheer quantity and length of its sex scenes, but it backfires.

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

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

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

The Cold Light Of Day is the antithesis of a labor of love; it's a cold, mercenary endeavor that, like the thematically similar Taylor Lautner vehicle "Abduction," diligently ignores the potentially intriguing issues of family and identity its plot raises.

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

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.

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

A symptom of cinematic de-evolution run amok.

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

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

An insanely overlong infomercial for the book.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

It never comes close to being funny.

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.

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