Owen Gleiberman

Spaceman, it’s my duty to report, is a glum and meandering science-fiction fairy tale of a movie.

The trouble with a film like Spies in Disguise isn’t that it’s less than sparklingly animated but that as technically bravura as it is, there is never anything at stake.

What you don’t feel, ever, in this fundamentalist weeper is a sense of drama rising out of feelings that are less than absolute.

There’s dialogue, but very little interchange. The movie makes your average mumblecore mumblefest sound like Preston Sturges.

There are a minor handful of scenes in Johnny English Strikes Again that will make you laugh. A bit.

And that’s what this overly eager, fractious, Burtonized but standardized, loudly comic but ultimately rather mirthless remake does to Dumbo. It transforms a miraculous tale into a routine story by weighing it down with a lot of nuts and bolts it didn’t need. The character of Dumbo is still touching, but the tale of entrapment and rescue that surrounds him is not. It’s arduous and forgettable, done in busy italicized strokes, and apart from that FX elephant the movie doesn’t come up with a single character who hooks us emotionally.

Of course, the essence of the fish-out-of-water comedy is that it’s never been a realistic genre — it’s pure Hollywood fantasy. Yet An American Pickle, in its ethnically satirical and scattered way, lacks the integrity of its own ridiculousness. It’s pungent but flavorless: an unkosher dill.

It’s not just a quirky, morose downer of a movie — it’s didactically morose.

The flamboyantly heavy, life’s-a-bitch-and-then-it-ends drama of Black Flies isn’t much fun to sit through, but I think that’s ultimately because the movie, for all its grungy surface authenticity, is a bit of a fake.

There have been worse ideas, but in this case the execution isn’t good enough to bring the notion of an emoji movie to funky, surprising life.

Another Round is the kind of movie that’s so into its cool concept that it doesn’t sweat the details. Yet the film’s sloppy broadness ends up fighting the Dogme style, which keeps telling us that these people are authentic.

Abigail was directed by Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett, who made those last two “Scream” films, and though I was impressed, to a degree, by what they brought off there, this movie feels like a step backward into overwrought generic schlock.

The technical bravura that Guiraudie summoned in “Stranger” — the subtle manipulation of light, weather, shot language, and temporal cunning — now falls by the wayside in a story that lurches from episode to disconnected episode.

It’s another of Perry’s raucous and slovenly comedies of responsibility, which means that its heart is in a very old — and right — place. If only a message that was this solid equalled solid laughs.

Sleepless is a propulsive thin exercise, “energetic” but tedious, the kind of January movie that Jamie Foxx should have permanently graduated from. Foxx is too good an actor — taut and committed — to phone in his performance, yet that hardly matters, since the whole movie is phoned in. It’s far from incompetent, but it’s a who-cares? thriller.

In Consecration Jena Malone doesn’t just sport a casually impeccable British accent. She becomes British — her mood and manners, the way she rocks the sweaters and bangs and debonair politeness. She creates a compelling character, only to see the film’s director, Christopher Smith, swallow her up in all the ecclesiastical gothic malarkey.

The Addams Family has an overly processed outré harmlessness. It’s so busy treating its famous domesticated ghouls as icons that it forgets to rediscover what’s memorable about them.

Basmati Blues is one of those movies that isn’t terrible but still leaves you wondering why it exists.

Rodeo is a movie that’s all surface, all present tense, all too-cool-to-be-anything-but-French-vérité gestures.

The movie is a true folly, yet there's no denying that Gilliam has gotten some of the hallucinogenic madness of Thompson's novel on screen.

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.

A massive Hollywood biopic about a man who never quite seems there.

No belief on earth can rescue Swank from a film that's a chain of disaster chintz masquerading as a sermon.

For all of De Palma's studious multimedia trickery -- a valid, even inspired idea -- Redacted is so naive it's an embarrassment.

Adam Sandler stars in a one-joke Caddyshack for the blitzed and jaded.

Stella is never dull, but by the time it replays the famous Barbara Stanwyck-in-the-rain scene, it’s jerking camp laughter instead of tears.

Lawrence is so ON that he appears to be gunning for clockwork bursts of audience approval.

Orphan isn't scary -- it's garish and plodding.

Trivial and charmless.

The fusion of cheekiness and deliberately overscaled fantasy never jells.

This rusty jalopy of a movie, which is so ramshackle it's nearly enough to make you forget how tossed-together the 1976 ''Car Wash'' was.

This one is just murk.

Antonio Banderas is a charming and talented man, but in Take the Lead he lays on the old-world panache so thick - the accent, the flowery courtliness, the romance of romance - that he comes off like Dracula's metrosexual cousin.

"Species" at least had the benefit of Henstridge's glazed porn-doll perversity, but this time any glimmers of sexual ominousness are buried in a lame, desultory chase plot and in the woefully underimagined special effects.

Since there is a mystery, the movie might have been entertaining camp had director Taylor Hackford staged it with pace, style, or a whisper of surprise. Instead, the plot just clunks forward-for two hours and 10 minutes.

Tame and witless enough to make me long for the ancient, dusty fright kitsch of ''The Munsters.''

The movie doesn't so much extend Schwartzman's antic outsider persona from ''Rushmore'' as uglify it, reducing him to the ultimate Uncool Anti-WASP.

The movie is MTV Kafka: Instead of dialogue, character, behavior, it has a look and a mood. And that's all it has.

In its hostile sitcom way, Christmas With the Kranks is a paranoid comic nightmare of conformity gone mad.

Flubber was more edifying than My Favorite Martian — and more fun.

At least Ribisi's fake-cojones histrionics are fun. The rest of this "Donnie Brasco" knockoff, with James Marsden as a Gulf War veteran who goes undercover, is a turgid, ketchup-spattered dud.

If you want to know how inept the movie is...well, it's so inept that you may wish you were watching an M. Night Shyamalan version of the very same premise.

Stuart Townsend, Theron's reallife boyfriend, may have inner fires as an actor that have yet to be revealed, but in Head in the Clouds he's a somber puppy who looks as if Theron could eat him alive. I wish she had.

Tells a moldy-oldie, not-nearly-as-nasty-as-it-thinks-it-is joke. Over and over again.

A few of the images are startling, but as Radha Mitchell (a good actress) wanders through a ghost town, searching for her lost daughter as though she was touring an abandoned movie set, Silent Hill is mostly paralyzing in its vagueness.

Has all the mood enhancing flavor of a tropical cocktail made with watered down rum and fake fruit juice.

The movie has no script, and even the better gags - like one in which a couple of the pilots scribble away at coloring books in the backseat of a plane - could have been staged more vividly.

If Crowe's eyes are open, he seems to have directed most of Vanilla Sky with his mind wide shut.

Even the film's one "original" twist is just a desperate attempt to link it up to Ghost Rider, the only lousy Nicolas Cage action film that is actually spawning a sequel.

The film is proof that if you repackage the classics (in this case, Dickens) for the youth market in an era of MTV dislocation, what you get, in essence, is postmodern Cliffs Notes with an alt-rock soundtrack.

Even in her dullest vehicle, Lindsay Lohan exudes an unfakable shine.

By now, I’m not sure even Donald Trump could love a movie that asks us to get misty-eyed over real estate.

If Fathers’ Day really had been released in the mid-’80s, I’d have said it was so funny I forgot to laugh.

The director, Nora Ephron, displays her peerless gift for making everything seem snappy and mushy at the same time, and Travolta's performance has a slovenly, I-can-do-anything-and-you'll-still-love-me obnoxiousness.

It takes the movie all of 15 minutes to descend into sub-Spielbergian banalities about poor Max's search for his absentee dad.

Though not quite the fiasco of revved-up gunplay that Beverly Hills Cop II was, this new movie, directed by John ''Rock-'em Sock-'em'' Landis, is just a clunky action thriller, with occasional comic moments rationed out to the audience like stray crumbs.

The Last Picture Show was a mood piece drenched in acrid despair. Texasville is two hours of flat, Southern Gothic whimsy. The movie has the form of a soaper without the juicy content.

Most of this just seems, you know, so three years ago, so "Bourne" again.

Viewers primed for a postapocalyptic blowout will be disappointed to learn that Universal Soldier is set in the boring old present day, and that until the climactic clash the film is slow-moving and short on firepower.

Total Eclipse is pretty unbearable: The movie is dour and patchy and stilted — it leaves you sitting glumly waiting for the next baroque bout of tormented misbehavior.

In the end, there’s something a little insulting about a contemporary movie that reduces women to either trashy bimbos or repressed virgins.

Jean-Claude Van Damme's latest dud.

North is structured like a black-comic Wizard of Oz, but by the time North awakens from his dream, even home doesn’t seem like a place worth visiting.

He now imparts so many life lessons via his Rube Goldberg thresher devices that he's starting to turn into the Rod Serling of severed body parts. Now that's torture.

I gave up making heads or tails of Synecdoche, New York, but I did get one message: The compulsion to stand outside of one's life and observe it to THIS degree isn't the mechanism of art -- it's the structure of psychosis.

Myers is trying for another of his endearingly hormonal imp-egomaniacs, but hidden behind a wavy beard, a wax-curled mustache, and an astoundingly ugly squashed fake nose, he's a little too grotesque.

In Baker Boys, Kloves crafted a melancholy vision laced with ripe possibilities for pleasure and love. But the movie was (inexplicably, to me) a commercial disappointment, and Kloves, perhaps as a delayed response, has returned with a vision drained of joy, freedom, excitement.

How lame have high-concept, no-brain comedies gotten?

Bloodless and false.

Jack Frost is so treacly and fake it makes you feel like you’re trapped in a winter-wonderland paperweight.

“Mother Mary” turns into the most befuddlingly pretentious movie about a pop star since Brady Corbet’s “Vox Lux.” It heads down a blind alley of cosmic meaning that, in the end, means nothing.

A school-shooting drama needn’t be any one specific thing, but to ask an audience to sit through one is, implicitly, to promise some wrenching insight in return. Eric LaRue is just a lot of indie showboating signifying nothing.

When a film’s basic strategy is to cut between the past and the present, it should create ripples of anticipatory tension. But Despite the Falling Snow is one of those movies in which the cross-cutting keeps destroying all mood and momentum — it feels more like channel-surfing.

Almost everything that happens in this movie rings cloyingly false. It wants to make you laugh and cry, but you may be too busy cringing.

The actors give little life to the proceedings, since no one’s bothered to figure what this movie has to offer beyond terrifically tactile stone figures going through the motions of what might be called Generic Animated Action Rescue Plot.

Ambulance is simply too much of a not-so-good thing. It never stops huffing and puffing to entertain you, but it’s joyless: a tale of escape that’s far from a great escape, because for all its motion it’s going through the motions.

It would be generous to call the film a continuation of the “Chainsaw” saga. It’s more like a blood-soaked but unscary footnote.

Planetarium is an inert and slipshod movie — messy and aimless, a period tale told with zero period atmosphere (you have to keep reminding yourself that it’s not taking place in 2016), built around a situation with enough possibilities to make you wish that the director, Rebecca Zlotowski, had taken advantage of at least one of them.

Slender Man is the kind of movie in which images come before logic, because there really isn’t much logic. There’s just a movie out to goose you.

You watch Our Little Secret, seeing through the paper-thin contrivances, tittering at the imbecilities, and somehow that all becomes part of the experience. It’s mainstream fodder as downgraded camp. It’s pablum so numbing it makes you feel good.

Some viewers will surely be moved. To me, though, The Midnight Sky just proves that a movie that reaches for the stars can still come up empty-handed.

It’s like watching the lamest Indiana Jones sequel ever imagined, minus Indiana Jones.

This is true 21st-century trash: a movie in which the action itself is expendable.

Shepard just sprinkles overstated banter onto a generic plot and bits of pedal-to-the-metal action, as if he was serving the action-comedy gods by sticking the usual ingredients in a blender and pushing “puree.”

The movie isn’t scary, it isn’t gripping, it isn’t fun, and it isn’t fueled by any sort of clever compulsion. It’s just a strangely arduous exercise that feels increasingly frantic and arbitrary as it goes along.

The Woman in the Window would like to be a contempo “Rear Window,” but it’s so riddled with things you can’t buy that it plays like a bad Brian De Palma movie minus the camera movement.

Bones and All is a concept in search of a story. The film doesn’t draw us in. It stumbles and lurches and seems to make itself up as it goes along. You may feel eaten alive with boredom.

"USS Indianapolis” is a World War II “epic” that’s overscaled yet underimagined. It’s a tale of survival that never provides the audience with a basic entry point into how and why we should care.

Super Troopers 2 is an aggressively lame and slobby comedy full of cardboard characters and in-your-face naughty jokes that feel about as dangerous as old vaudeville routines.

Burn Your Maps is one of those movies that’s glib and facile and threadbare all the way through, then the ending sort of gets to you (you’d have to be made of pretty stern stuff if it didn’t), so you think back over what you’ve seen — and it’s still a crock.

You might be wondering if “Clown in a Cornfield” is at least scary. No, it’s not, and it’s not trying too hard to be.

The line between a good soap opera and a bad soap opera can sometimes be razor-thin. Regretting You walks the line for a while but lands on the wrong side of it.

It’s a low-budget generic shrug of a movie, one that recycles clichés both ancient (testy drug dealers) and slightly less ancient (the hero films his life with a camcorder).

“The Greatest Beer Run Ever” lumbers and meanders, and not just because the structure isn’t there. What we’re seeing, on a human level, is only half-interesting and rather slipshod. Like “Green Book,” “Greatest Beer Run” is based on a true story, but what Peter Farrelly responded to in that story translates, this time, into a token “relevant” boomer nostalgia that hasn’t been fully thought through.

The dark-side-of-the-L.A.-club-scene premise has potential, but the movie turns out to be a cut-and-paste thriller without any night-world bloom to it.

It’s a ham-handed, lurchingly obvious mess, without the glimmer of human interest that even a sensationalist horror film needs.

There may be a lot more going on “Blood and Honey 2,” but let’s not kid ourselves. It’s mostly a shambles.

The combat is neither funny nor intense. The War with Grandpa is like “Home Alone” replayed as a tit-for-tat battle of logistical booby traps that never rises above the innocuous slapstick benign.

It’s Perry’s version of a holiday movie and a connect-the-dots love story, but it’s cliché-driven in such a minimal way that it almost makes you yearn for the Perry movies that can feel like a long night of channel surfing all rolled into one.

Tyler Perry hasn’t generally been in the business of sequels, but apart from Joe’s overly salty soul-food patter, this one has a joyless, obligatory, cardboard feeling that marks it as one of Perry’s least satisfying films.

It’s monotonous and derivative and numbing. It’s a grab bag that traps you in a version of hell, though the problem isn’t that the movie is like a video game. It’s that it’s like a video game that’s got no game.

“American Woman” tries to give us a fresh angle on a familiar subject, but the film is listless and desultory. It sketches in the scuzzy power dynamics of these characters but fails, in most cases, to dramatize what made them tick.

Wain made a terrible mistake when he decided to turn Kenney’s story into a goof, a sketch, a riff of threadbare mockery, instead of treating it as a relatively straight movie with laughs. If he had done that, it might have been hilarious, though in an acidly downbeat and far-reaching way.

Your Place or Mine is an outrageously benign movie, which may not sound like much of a criticism. But it’s so benign it’s innocuous. There’s no tension, no comedy with any bite (except for the dry one-liners of Tig Notaro as the best friend who’s there to give advice), no romantic friction.

Phil is a trifle, and there’s no harm in that, but it’s an unconvincing trifle. The words “coy” and “whimsical” scarcely do justice to its coy whimsicality.

The House, like too many Hollywood comedies of outrage, turns the extreme into the innocuous.

The movie is a romantic action comedy that starts off light and breezy but turns, before you know it, into a dead-weight spectacle of wretched excess.

While there’s no denying that Howard has made the ultimate movie that’s not in his wheelhouse, what’s most different about it isn’t the eccentric subject matter. It’s that Howard got so immersed in the subject, so possessed by it, so lost in it that he forgot to do what he can usually do in his sleep: tell a relatable story.

The Cloverfield Paradox is a mind-boggling mish-mosh. It squanders whatever stray crumbs were left of the “Cloverfield” mystique by banging together bits and pieces of what must be a dozen genres. The result is a desperate plunge into the abyss of shoddy sci-fi.

As it goes on, this all becomes a marketing hook for an increasingly flaked-out fantasy.

The Specials, in the end, is not a very compelling movie. It’s arduous and rambling and repetitive; it skitters across the surface of the story it’s telling. The film lacks a vibrant structure, but more than that, it never brings us close to the people it shows us.

The Grudge plods on as if it were something more than formula gunk, cutting back and forth among the thinly written unfortunates who’ve been touched by the curse of that house.

Halloween Ends doesn’t finish off the franchise by being the most scary or fun entry in the series. (It should have been both, but it’s neither.) Instead, it’s the most joylessly metaphorical and convoluted entry.

The Last Face would have been a better movie if it had an actual screenplay, rather than the bare-bones one credited to Erin Dignam.

The Modelizer feels like a sketchbook version of the movie it could, or should, have been.

Unplanned isn’t a good movie, but it’s effective propaganda — or, at least, it is if you belong to the group it’s targeting: those who believe that abortion in America, though a legal right, is really a crime. It’s hard to imagine the movie drawing many viewers outside that self-selected demographic.

Morbius is a movie in which it’s clear that no one ever sent the script back for a rewrite with the instructions, “Please add a script.” As in: Add spice, add dialogue, add something so that the movie plays like more than a barely colored-in diagram.

I appreciated that Robinson was actually trying to make a real movie out of all this. Yet it’s not a real movie. It’s a concoction impersonating one.

Orphan: First Kill is draggy and suspense-free. Fuhrman, as before, invests her role with a cold creepiness, but the minimal, haphazard script sticks her with playing Esther as a one-note mascot of terror, somewhere between Freddy Krueger and Leprechaun.

It’s a drama of dour and often impenetrable obscurity. ... Yet everything about it that’s unsatisfying is also weirdly intentional.

Hunter Killer has good enough actors, but it never figures out what to do with them. They’re stuck in an underwater vacuum, a submarine movie that submerges anything of interest.

It seemed like an entertainment that might have something for everyone. But The Electric Kiss is so overcalculated, so stuffy and labored, so infatuated with its own conceits that I suspect it will end up satisfying virtually no one.

At one point, a character in a coma is referred to as having Locked-In Syndrome, which means that she’s still aware of her surroundings but is totally unable to move. By the end of Demonic, you’ll know just how she feels.

The two actors are appealing; they’ve got marriage-as-domestic-fight-club chemistry. And when Glenn Close shows up as Emily’s British mother, a former superspy herself, the film calms down for a bit ­— and perks up.

It’s not as if we needed to see “Dracula” remade as a blood-soaked Valentine’s Day movie.

The dedicated entertainment junkie now has more options than ever before. So if you’re wondering which logy, derivative, visually pedestrian piece of made-for-Netflix pulp you should avoid at all costs this week, it would be hard to top In the Shadow of the Moon.

Underwater is a stupefying entertainment in which every claustrophobic space and apocalyptic crash of water registers as a slick visual trigger, yet it’s all built on top of a dramatic void. It’s boredom in Sensurround.

There’s no real terror or dread in it, just the same old meat-puppet gore and cattle-prod scares served up with a kind of ritualized self-satisfaction.

It’s a badly shot one-joke movie that sits there and goes thud.

Dangerous is a bits-and-pieces action thriller with a fluky premise and a lead actor good enough to embody it. Made in the slipshod, overlit style of a straight-to-streaming potboiler, it’s not a rip-off so much as a film built out of spare parts from other movies, to the point that it never fully becomes itself.

The plot — which is to say, the plot against the president — is, once again, a violently overwrought confection of “topical” comic-strip ludicrousness; that’s the DNA of the “Fallen” series. Yet when you’re watching a big-budget B-movie, there’s good preposterous and there’s bad preposterous.

The Woman in the Yard never musters the imagination to horrify or even jolt you. It’s a tale of one-note inner demons.

Once Nancy Meyers went out on her own, she became a wittier and more nimble filmmaker. So maybe Hallie Meyers-Shyer will follow in her footsteps and improve. Right now, she’s got nowhere to go but up.

To hear the unmistakable sounds of yet another lavishly orchestrated Donaggio swoonfest laid over the flat, static expository scenes of the choppy benumbed “international” police thriller Domino is to watch De Palma trying to create cinematic fire out of burnt-out match sticks.

It’s a softheaded piece of morbid romantic treacle — two parallel cloying love stories for the price of one.

Everything is at once telegraphed and derivative.

Playing with Fire . . . is a barely glorified sitcom made in the overlit and benignly smart-mouth Nickelodeon house style.

The film enunciates its raw themes — punk means individuality! the aliens are all about conformity! — but never begins to figure out how to embody those themes in a narrative that could lure in the audience.

The film’s muted yet still rather flamboyant terribleness derives from the fact that it seems to be juggling three or four borderline schlock genres at once.

It's an utterly fake nostalgia piece -- stupid and pandering, a bad-boy teen flick that plays less like a loving look at the late '70s than a terrible movie from the late '70s.

The only performer I enjoyed watching was Martin Short, who plays a bitch dandy music teacher with a smile so fake that the comedian seems to be acting with his gums.

If you've been longing to see the worst family entertainment of 1966, A Dog of Flanders may be the movie for you.

It's "Alvin and the Chipmunks" with only one chipmunk, and (if possible) even less fun.

Whenever an actress takes on a gritty working-class role, the audience does a gut check of authenticity. Either the actress gets it, like Melissa Leo did in "Frozen River," or she doesn't, like Michelle Monaghan as the spoilin'-for-a-fight truck-driver heroine of the inert indie dud Trucker

The audience gets the message (religious fanaticism: bad), but nothing we see is convincing on its own.

The movie lacks even the misplaced fervor of obsession. It's lifeless kitsch.

A sodden ''feminist'' vulgarization.

It will have you groaning between yawns.

It barely boasts enough funny material to fill four minutes.

Instead of exploiting the mystery and dread, or even the comedy, of Billy’s condition, Thinner turns into an excruciatingly low-grade pursuit thriller, with Billy hunting down the old Gypsy sage (Michael Constantine) who put the curse on him.

Antal has assembled what may be the single most colorless group of mangy lowlifes I have ever seen.

Would like to be a Halloween treat, but it's more like a nightmare of blandness.

The producers of Nowhere to Run simply toss out the mousetrap. They make the dismal mistake of turning Van Damme into a softy, a sensitive lunk who puts up his dukes only because he wants to help his new family. The former kickboxer would do well to remember that the most heartfelt performance he was put on this earth to give revolves around the tender sound of snapping limbs.

The Rite commits the supreme sin of making the devil dull.

The title, Machine Gun Preacher, makes it sound like a piece of grindhouse kitsch - and by the time it's over, you'll be thinking, ''If only!''

If you were looking for an actress to play a tempestuous, schizophrenic movie-slash-rock star, you might go for Courtney Love or Angelina Jolie, or maybe even Jennifer Connelly. But Rachael Leigh Cook?

Isn't it time Steve Zahn grew up? Ever since the '90s, this walking quirk of an actor has pushed his dazed solipsistic zaniness (he's like Michael J. Fox’s hillbilly cousin), but he's 41 now, and it no longer looks cute on him.

Instead of rooting for Pullman and Fonda, we end up praying that the crocodile is hungry enough to put them out of their misery.

The movie is trash shot to look like art imitating trash.

This is the sort of cloddish thriller in which characters keep putting themselves in dangerous situations because…the movie requires them to be in dangerous situations. The one true surprise has nothing at all to do with the plot: It’s Kevin Spacey’s hair. Dyed a glittering blond, it sets off his smirky, come-hither mug with maximum perversity.

Randall Miller (Bottle Shock), appears to be trying to cross a bad Elmore Leonard thriller with a bad indie-festival family-angst comedy. He gives us the worst of both worlds.

It's a dismal mess...What's most grating about Hackers, however, is the guileless way the movie buys in to the computer-kid-as-elite-rebel mystique currently being peddled by magazines like Wired.

The film completely misses what should have been its real target -- the filming of Game of Death, a martial-arts campfest worthy of Edward D. Wood Jr.

It's like "Schindler's List" crossed with "The Sound of Music," and Roger Spottiswoode directs it in a stiff, lifeless, utterly dated style of international squareness.

You can expect a lot of shredding and gurgling. 30 Days of Night is relentless, but it's also relentlessly one-note.

Vampire in Brooklyn is a horror comedy that mixes lame blood-pellet effects with lame gags, and it clunks along on a series of interchangeably deserted streets that manage to look dank and overlit at the same time.

The United States of Leland is tedious yet infuriating, since its characters, all of whom seem to have emerged from a screenwriter's manual, are like exhibits in a thesis meant to indict the middle class for the crime of its collective dysfunction.

Has a topsy-turvy sense of injustice.

The plot is déjà vu all over again, another variation on the proletarian-joker-goes-yuppie formula used in Trading Places, The Secret of My Success, and Opportunity Knocks. In Taking Care of Business, the formula gets boiled down to its bare bones. The movie is nothing but a series of executive signifiers — it should have been called The Trappings of My Success.

The most irritating thing about Hoffa is that even after you've sat through Danny DeVito's turgid, meaninglessly sprawling account of the Teamster boss' rise and fall, you still won't have any idea who Jimmy Hoffa was.

Kate Hudson is as blah and dazed as her costar is cloyingly enthused. If it's possible to have too even a tan, Hudson in Fool's Gold would be the poster child for it.

If any of these characters were half as resonant as Wenders appears to think they are, the film might have seemed charming instead of merely stranded.

The morality of revenge is barely at issue in a movie that pushes the plausibility of revenge right over a cliff.

The thinnest, draggiest, and most tediously preachy of the Saw films.

While George Lopez, Cheech Marin, and Paul Rodriguez are funny men, it's amazing how boring these Latin-shtick cutups can be when none of them gets a single good line.

The result is a sub-"Saw" knockoff that manages to be brutal yet monotonous, not to mention monstrously unpleasant.

Simply put, it may be the lamest movie ever made about poor white... Southern characters.

You may go into Flatliners hoping for a psychedelic mindblower, but the film is about as exciting as staring at a lava lamp for two hours.

Writer-director-stars Zach Cregger and Trevor Moore, of the Whitest Kids U'Know, here prove the crassest, most maladroit moviemakers you know.

Yet another low-grade spectacular about an evil force that leaps from body to body.

Kollek is a fringe auteur who makes independent films the old fashioned way: no budget, static camera, a script that telegraphs its tiny, paste gem ironies.

Warlock is an occult schlock-o-rama, with special effects so low-budget they might have come out of a joke shop.

Nothing in John Carter really works, since everything in the movie has been done so many times before, and so much better.

In Trash Humpers, the latest slovenly, haphazard, is-it-a-travesty-if-it's-bad-on-purpose avant doodle from director Harmony Korine, three figures in rubbery old-age makeup do indeed mimic intercourse with Dumpsters.

Feeling Minnesota suggests Sam Shepard trying to be Quentin Tarantino. It makes even gun battles seem pretentious.

The wedding, which turns the very concept of ''Greek'' into the sort of hideous, pandering clichés that look rejected from bad Jewish and Italian sitcoms.

A convoluted ''dweeb meets the Mob'' farce in which everyone is trying to kill everyone else, but it's the movie that's the real corpse -- albeit a busy, twitching one.

It's not much fun to see these two reduced to "Mad TV" parodies of themselves.

As Brier's comrade-in-lip-gloss, Ashlee Simpson, dressed to look like a teenybop girl version of Crispin Glover in "River's Edge," is the real deal -- in fake cred.

If there were truth in advertising, The People Under the Stairs would be called The Not Very Scary Movie Set Inside a Grungy, Badly Lit House.

A stillborn rendering of Michael Chabon's first novel.

A third-rate knockoff of Top Gun and Blue Thunder.

This dank and rhythmless ''psychological'' potboiler was directed by Jamie Babbit, who made 2000's "But I'm a Cheerleader," and though she has shifted tones from shrill camp to moody angst in The Quiet, she still thinks in stereotypes so thin that they put you to sleep the moment they open their mouths.

Bird on a Wire is far from inept-every one of those car chases is masterfully staged. Still, for most of two hours you’re pummeled with formula; it would be hard to name another movie at once so proficient and so dull. When a director as talented as Badham reaches this state of empty craftsmanship, who can say whether he’s working out of boredom or cynicism? At this point, there may be very little difference.

Isn't up to much of anything besides pretending that swearwords and snot-nosed insults, served up by Santa with an almost institutional monotony, aren't just naughty. They're -- big joke! -- incorrect.

The nuttiest thing about Mercury Rising is that when Alec Baldwin, as the silky-voiced evil defense honcho, explains that he took his cutthroat actions to protect the lives of American undercover agents, he actually sounds quite reasonable. You can just about feel the imbecility rising.

As anyone who has peered in on the actual WNBA for five minutes knows, professional women basketball players are as tough as men. That the film treats this as a joke isn't funny -- it's the height of lame condescension.

Bruce Willis is at his most morose in this flat, dankly lit, grindingly inept thriller about a serial killer whose victims all turn out to have been acquaintances of Willis’ rumpled, alcoholic cop hero. As his by-the-book partner, Sarah Jessica Parker is the only one in the movie who doesn’t look sleep-deprived.

Hannibal Rising reduces this great creature of the pop imagination to a Eurotrash Boy Scout throwing a homicidal snit fit.

A witch comedy so slapdash, plodding, and muddled it seems to have had a hex put on it.

Last Action Hero makes such a strenuous show of winking at the audience (and itself) that it seems to be celebrating nothing so much as its own awfulness. In a sense, the movie's incipient commercial failure completes it aesthetically.

De Niro seems to be reacting to nothing so much as the lame movie he's stuck in.

Murphy speaks in a breathy lisp, as if his mouth had been partially buttoned shut, and he doesn't give himself the nerd's traditional redeeming feature of a geeky, slide-rule intellect. Norbit, all frozen gawk, is just a very dim bulb.

The Zatoichi films are amusing comic-strip spectaculars — the blood spurts like something out of a Hawaiian Punch commercial. The action in Blind Fury, on the other hand, is resolutely earthbound and heavy-duty. The fact that Hauer kicks, slashes, and punches without the benefit of sight just makes you acutely aware of how ludicrous this stuff always is.

Anderson has made a zombie movie without the zombies.

Homophobic, sex-phobic, maybe even human-phobic.

Is less an end in itself than an excuse, a jumping off point for showy, contrived, borderline exploitation sequences that fail to tie together because they're not really there to do anything but sell themselves as money shot thrills.

None of the faux icons comes close to being a character. Instead, they are contrasted with a group of nuns who skydive without parachutes. Could this possibly be a metaphor for Korine's filmmaking? It certainly goes splat.

The Bodyguard is an outrageous piece of saccharine kitsch — or, at least, it might have been had the movie seemed fully awake. Instead, it’s glossy yet slack; it’s like Flashdance without the hyperkinetic musical numbers and with the romance padded out to a disastrously languid 2 hours and 10 minutes.

Inert dud of a hitmen-are-people-too comedy.

Atrociously scripted and edited.

The bad acting — make that nonacting — of rappers DMX and Nas merges, all too well, with the shallow dehumanized vision of director Hype Williams.

In Cobb, Jones seems trapped inside his own febrile personality. He’s so utterly, hyperbolically Tommy Lee Jones that his performance doesn’t begin to register as an imaginative look at who Ty Cobb was.

By the end, you feel like a drill sergeant-you want to wipe that stupid grin off Sandler's face.

Doesn't contain a single scary or imaginative moment.

Allen is no more convincing than the writer-director, Chris Ver Wiel, who strings together faux-QT, faux-Elmore Leonard clichés like so many necklace beads and pretends that's the same thing as making a movie.

Just a lumbering, poorly photographed piece of derivative sci-fi drivel, full of grunting extras scampering around in animal pelts and more dank, trash-strewn sets than I ever care to see again.

It's no insult to Melville to say that he wrote, in effect, the original ''Dilbert.'' This movie, unfortunately, makes ''Dilbert'' look like Melville.

A ponderous dystopian bummer that might be described as "The Road Warrior" without car chases, or "The Road" without humanity.

A cheaply made piece of ''psychological'' occult schlock, subjects you to that depressing stop-and-go rhythm that defines inept fantasy thrillers.

You'd think that the film would ask you to be appalled at this scenario of forced servitude -- but no, it's treated as harmless and cute, like an Israeli ''Chico and the Man.''

Critics tend to fawn over the Japanese director-star Takeshi Kitano (a.k.a. Beat Takeshi), but am I the only one who finds his films impossible to make heads or tails of?

This ''satire'' of triple-X raunch and ''Jerry Springer'' sleaze starts off at a pitch of preening dementia and just grows more hysterical from there.

God-awful?Gooding screams out lines like ''I'm about to get in yo' ass like last year's underwear!''

An action-choked dud in which even the closing outtakes barely deserve to be left on the cutting-room floor?

This high-concept update of It’s a Wonderful Life, Mr. Destiny, is pure formula treacle, but James Belushi, playing a schlub who learns what life would have been like had he become a big executive, is at his most immediate and appealing.

The plot, which features Lea Thompson as a gold digger scheming to marry Jed, is like something you’d catch on the USA Network at 4 a.m. But enough of beating a dead possum. After sitting through The Beverly Hillbillies, I now realize that the best tribute anyone can make to the pop detritus of our childhood is to let it rest in peace.

The backstories keep piling up, with nods to "The Shining," "The Ring," and a dozen other gothic supernatural chillers, yet the result doesn't remotely scare you.

The movie, which strains to be hip in a faux-1985 beat-the-system way, takes such a light view of cheating that it has the ironic effect of rendering the heist that follows utterly innocuous.

A few more films like Tears of the Black Tiger, and kitsch will be on its way to having a bad name.

The trouble with Scott’s movies is that they’re not just star vehicles. They’re about the aesthetics of celebrity, about the narcissism that’s going on offscreen. If Revenge ends up knocking Costner down a peg, it’ll be just what he needs — and deserves.

At 2.5 hours, 1492 is even harder to sit through than last month’s schlock extravaganza Christopher Columbus: The Discovery. In each case the filmmakers have fallen into a similar trap. Out of some vague mixture of historical ”duty” and commercial myopia, they’ve presented Columbus as the same cardboard visionary we learned about in school.

The Power of One spends so much screen time reveling in the eloquence and bravery of its hero and depicting South Africa’s blacks as an anonymous horde of victims that the film, in effect, becomes their victimizer.

Might best be described as bereavement porn.

A glumly serious British mock rock doc: You could forgive the paucity of jokes if Brothers of the Head had anything to say, or if the '70s-vérité surface were remotely convincing.

Has Brian De Palma finally lost his mind? Ever since "Carrie" (1976), his one true masterpiece, this director has evolved into a cinematic serial killer of common sense.

The Shadow, like 1991’s The Rocketeer, tries to pass off its retro thinness as a quasi joke, but it’s a desperate strategy. The filmmakers seem to be kidding everyone — the audience and themselves — and that just leaves us waiting for this particular flashback to fizzle away.

It's a dispirited, galumphing mess.

The film’s most distinctive, if obnoxious, feature is the coy, look-at-what- an-adorable-doofus-I-am clowning of Adam Sandler, who here, as on Saturday Night Live, parades his ironic infantilism.

As the brutish Kable, Gerard Butler must find out who's pulling his strings, but it's the audience whose chain gets yanked by this headache-inducing techno-violent mishmash.

Someone (Myers?) came up with the bright idea of turning the Cat in the Hat into the worst Vegas nightclub spritzer of 1958. He's become a furry version of Rip Taylor: a walking, talking vaudeville idiot box.

How appealing is Muniz, taking a break from ''Malcolm in the Middle,'' a day job he should by no means let go of?

Watching Pecker, his rickety new comedy about a teenage Baltimore shutterbug, it becomes clear that Waters has grown color-blind to his own sleazo-shock aesthetic.