Nick Pinkerton

That even the criminal class has gone sensitive and finicky eco-conscious has some potential for comedy-or drama, as in Oliver Stone's undervalued Savages-but there's no single detail that might convince a viewer that the characters played by Dax Shepard and Bradley Cooper might ever have been compelled to steal for a living, and this alienates the crime picture from any social context or sense of actual danger, making it essentially a celebrity goof-off.

All might be good for a flask-to-the-theater laugh, if not for the unconscionable price gouging.

Bracingly inept.

This crude, overlong chunk of kung-fu kitsch lays its scene in a 1920s Republican China, torn by internecine fighting and weighed down by drably expensive production design.

Add to this that it takes place in the town of Merkin, and you'll get an idea of the labored spirit of dirty-old-man humor that prevails.

It is dreary to envisage the viewer who could become emotionally involved in The Victim, but it does have the kind of slack watchability - lugubrious driving scenes and girl-talk flashbacks pad the movie toward feature length - that make for good late-night TV.

The Apparition is not a great or even good haunted-house movie, but it does have the advantage of a memorable setting.

The proximity of horrible headlines scarcely matters - released on any day of any calendar year, Gangster Squad would be a crime against cinematic sensibility.

Cage's avenger is named Milton; this reference to the author of Paradise Lost is the sole hint that Old World culture ever existed in Drive Angry's convoy of hyperbolized-unto-parody Americana: bad drawls, obese gawkers, roadhouse demonology, coochie-cutter shorts, and engines revving under guitar stomp.

The enjoyable moments are limited to Alison Brie, funny as Sidney's publicist, and the final recasting of the movie as a backstage diva drama. As ever, the self-reflexive horror stuff is superficial, loveless, and constant-a ladled-on sauce to disguise what you're eating.

A cinematic event. It's not every day, after all, that you get to see two great American traditions - guitar/bass/drums rock music and Tin Pan Alley musical theater - so thoroughly, mutually degraded.

The film is a burdensome two hours.

It can't sustain interest in the endless unraveling of Molly's psyche, which, as handled by Sánchez, has all the interest of watching an inexplicably untreated wound fester.

While Sandler has never trafficked in epigrammatic wit, there's a difference between, say, Billy Madison's "Of course I peed my pants--everyone my age pees their pants" or "I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry's" shakedown of hetero squeamishness, and this lazy stuff--the difference between smart-dumb and plain-dumb.

Neither intellectually nor viscerally engaging, what The Divide finally offers audiences is the not-terribly-edifying, stagnant experience of being locked in a basement with a pack of assholes.

The forced horseplay is entirely without ensemble chemistry, probably because the leads were hired principally as singers/musicians, as this, the directorial debut of former Law & Order: Criminal Intent star Vincent D'Onofrio, is that rarest of mongrel movies: a slasher/musical.

An unnecessary retelling of rock's dingiest "legend"--ever get the feeling you've been cheated?

On every level this production - from Robinson's callow performance to Vila's hackneyed handheld camerawork, punching beats in the stead of the actors - remains firmly on the level of the obvious.

The most avid fans of merciless mugging will be the sole admirers of the bookending story of Liu Xiaoye's Butcher.

It is draggily paced and lacks felicity of form; the 3-D is a rip-off and the songs are pap, save a snippet of Etta James singing "At Last" while Bieber's glossy fringe sways in slow-motion.

A pretend poison pen letter to Hollywood sleaze and excess, Prince of Swine is in fact Toma's application to join the club - hopefully denied.

When every injury is repaid with interest, this self-destroying work has nowhere to go but to the credits. Such symmetry is a dismal, barbarian sort of perfection.

Christian "Direct-to-Video" Slater lends not a shred of credibility to the role of Craig MacKenzie.

It is part of the film's premise that the movies are only a pretext to serve personal needs. Given how little the murky finished product offers an outside audience, this comes across all too convincingly.

Ball, who can't conceive of human motives beyond the hypertrophic, smutty sexuality that's his stock in trade, primly divides his characters into avatars of Sick Repression or Healthy Liberation.

Ten interviews with 10 "name" American and European directors--including Todd Haynes, David Lynch, Bernardo Bertolucci, and Catherine Breillat--diced into a documentary as asinine and fawning as its title suggests.

It is plodding, lazily filmed, gassy with James Horner's score, and pads its runtime only by way of tolling repetition.

Taken together, the whole thing is good for approximately one laugh, generated by the shabbiest CGI reptile since "Anaconda."

It's one of the most obnoxious movies ever made.

John Dies at the End is a product of a parallel universe where slacker flippancy never got old-and, oh, it is terrible.

A Little Bit of Heaven demands miracles of its cast to keep proceedings from becoming grindingly mawkish and does not get them.

Smart money says Friedberg and Seltzer never sit through these movies in entirety.