Owen Gleiberman

The movie wants to be deadly cool, but mostly it's just deadly.

To call Demon Knight a popcorn movie is to give it too much credit — I doubt it would raise the pulse of Orville Redenbacher.

If you've always longed to see a Cold War satire done in the hit 'em over the head frantic camp mode of ''Love, American Style,'' then Company Man is the movie for you.

I love a good mind-bender, but it's getting more common these days to see thrillers that don't so much bend your mind as chop it, smash it, and place it in the Cuisinart. Trance, the new film directed by Danny Boyle is a high-brainiac art-world thriller that wants to do nothing more (or less) than give your head a majorly pleasurable spin.

Pauly Shore, the reptilian imp from MTV. Reeling off Valley Dude slang in a slurry monotone, as if he could barely be bothered to make his lips form words, he’s a fey sleazebag in hippie duds — a cross between Jim Morrison and Richard Simmons. The most interesting thing about watching Pauly Shore is wondering how long it will be before he has to take a day job.

It's hard to say what's more excruciating: Alex's novel, which is like ''The Great Gatsby'' rewritten by Lizzie McGuire, or his quarrelsome flirtation with Emma, who has no existence as a character apart from her drive to reshape Alex into a specimen of respectable tamed manhood.

The premise is out of '70s porn, and so is the overbroad satire and almost total lack of conviction.

A yawn-by-numbers romper-room dud.

Few comedies have worked this hard to make everyone on screen look this dumb.

In the history of bad ideas, George Romero’s decision to produce a color remake of his disturbingly frenzied 1968 zombiefest Night of the Living Dead has to rank right up there with New Coke.

It just makes you want to flip on the tube to see the real (fake) thing.

Had the killer droid been conceived as a charismatic demon, Hardware might have delivered some B-movie kicks. As it is, there’s nothing particularly scary or awesome about this low-tech walking junk pile. It’s as if someone had remade Alien with the monster played by a rusty erector set.

You can see what the film was going for, but the jokes just sit there; you chuckle a few times, mostly out of lame hope, but you never bust a gut, never really get what you came for.

Bland to dismal.

A brutally monotonous thriller.

Asia Argento is not what I would call a good actress, but she's a prime specimen of train-wreck sexuality: a debauched Eurotrash starlet who oozes punk cred more than she does talent. It's not too hard to see why she wanted to write, direct, and star in The Heart Is Deceitful Above All Things.

It was originally called ''Animal Husbandry,'' and while the producers were throwing away that title, they might have done well to chuck the movie along with it.

Van Helsing, a fusion of eye candy and brain sputter, is a long, kinetic, yet dreary mess.

The Farrelly brothers could burp out a movie funnier than The Hottie & the Nottie, a farce of corrupt stereotypes that's never more grotesque than when it pretends to be more than skin-deep.

The results in Employee of the Month are toothless.

The Avengers is too enervated to qualify as even a full-scale disaster.

Back to the Future Part III has that same sort of studio back-lot clunkiness. Only this time it's the audience that gets conked — by the sheer desperation of the whole enterprise.

Most of The Man is as awful as last year's debacle, "Taxi," yet Levy, stuck in a no-brainer variation on Billy Crystal's predicament in "Analyze This," shows just enough noodgy passive-aggression to suggest what the movie might have been were it not shackled to buddy-action clichés.

Belushi certainly proves that he can play an uncharismatic lout with conviction, but the talented Shakur is — literally — wasted in his final screen performance.

On Married With Children, the baby-faced Applegate has a slutty spark. Here, the role is too straight, and she’s blah — an apple pie that’s neither sweet nor tart enough.

Every chuckle feels engineered. Stallone is reduced to playing straight man to a gaggle of stock Damon Runyon hoods, though Tim Curry, looking like a stuffed cod, brings a prissy, nerdish glee to the role of a madly obsequious linguistics professor.

The Medallion makes you long for Tucker -- and for Jackie Chan to fly without digital wings.

I Love You to Death is strenuously unclever.