Phil Hall

While the Raymond Burr sequences and the subsequent clumsy English dubbing of the remaining Japanese footage made the U.S. version an unintentionally funny movie, the complete Japanese version is an unfunny bore.

For the most part, Fleck doesn't seem particularly intrigued on finding the banjo’s African heritage – the film offers little in the way of historic value in understanding the origin of the instrument.

This is a curious example of taking a hair-raising story and draining the drama from every corner, leaving it a bit flat and ultimately forgettable.

A dull film, inspired by a true story.

It is a shame the film doesn't cast a wider net into deeper political waters – the outrage is barely scratched in this production.

Chinese filmmaker Zhang Yimou has created so many memorable films (most recently the wuxia double-play "Hero" and "House of Flying Daggers") that one can easily excuse his new clinker Riding Alone for Thousands of Miles.

Handsomely produced but emotionally inert offering.

Beautifully produced but emotionally vacant drama.

The result is a great-looking bore.

Maybe someday an enterprising filmmaker will make a film about this forgotten chapter in Muslim-Jewish relations. It would be a lot more compelling and memorable than the nonsense in Monsieur Ibrahim.

The film is a bore.

Sadly, Naqoyqatsi quickly degenerates into a monotonous skein of banal images which strangely reinforces the message that we're living in a damn dull society.

A stale and poorly researched documentary.

Sometimes Duck Season is amusing. More often, though, it is boring and icky.

Fairly mundane and frequently boring.

The film presents the Rwandans in the worst possible way: venal, corrupt, vicious, stupid, barbaric and completely incapable of governing themselves. Honestly, I've seen more intelligent and sympathetic depictions of Africans in Tarzan movies.

Unfortunately, Brooks errs badly by having his film centered in India. Yes, India - which, as most people know, is not a predominantly Muslim country. Rather than look for comedy in the Muslim world, Brooks uses this film to make fun of contemporary Indian society.

What may have seemed energetic and innovative four decades ago is fairly enervated today, and only the most rabid Godard fanatics will find reason to seek out its new theatrical re-release.

In throwing hatchets at Murdoch and his silly Fox network while pretending the rest of the media world is fine and objective, the film comes across as a shrill, one-note slam against a very easy target.

Through the Fire is a fraud masquerading as a documentary.

The film's screenplay is thick with major lapses in logic, resulting in a story that ultimately makes little sense.

Filmmaker Hany Abu-Assad, who helmed the excellent "Rana's Wedding," missed the boat on this one. He may have hoped to give a human voice to the suicide bombers, but instead he gave them a misfired movie.

Quite frankly, the film looks terrible and moves with painful slowness, while the voice performances by both the juvenile and adult actors are so lacking in character that one could almost assume the cast performed their lines phonetically.

Achieves the impossible in taking a genuine socio-political tragedy and turning it into an anvil drama which will fray the patience of the most sympathetic audiences.

While Fryar is a charming man and his work clearly deserves recognition, A Man Called Pearl is an obvious case of building a three-story house on a one-story foundation. Really, can you make a feature-length film about a man who carves unique shapes out of trees, shrubs and bushes?

Wilson overstuffs the film with endless artsy shots of nature.

What’s a muscular guy like John Cena doing in a flabby movie like this? This connect-the-dots action-adventure may appeal to undemanding ten-year-old boys but will bore everyone else.

A compelling screenplay, to be certain. But sadly, Omarova's direction is too leisurely to wring any emotional power.

By the end of the 99 minute running time, there is a terrible sense of been-there/done-that. And for artists of the Quays' caliber, that is a huge mistake.

Even if you love all things Yiddish, there is precious little to embrace here.

Rarely has a film been cast with so many gifted performers who are either wrong for their roles or are given nothing to do.

If anything saves Elling, it is the trio of supporting performances that are closer to the real world.

A strangely inert affair. The stories devolve into one-dimensional squabbling and too many loose threads flap around the edges.

The only obvious question that Oswald’s Ghost raises is: how come Mort Sahl wasn’t in the movie? (If you don’t get that joke, you need to brush up on your Kennedy conspiracy lessons.)

Wooden, one-dimensional epic.

While I admire Bishop Jakes and I frequently watch his sermons on TV, I have to question his tactic of charging people admission to generate hosannas on his behalf.

So ham-handed and relentlessly overbaked that it is easy to see why audiences initially stayed away from it. Just when and how did anyone come to see this as a classic?

Obviously, this is one subject which may not seem to require the attention of documentary filmmakers.

This much-ballyhooed gay cowboy melodrama is an inert disappointment.

A mediocre film that presents the troubled poet Sylvia Plath as a jealous, possessive and irritating woman. It is hard to recall another biopic which is so unflattering to its subject.

By the time the film is over it is not so much a "who-done-it?" but a "why-did-we-sit-through-this?"

It's all a case of been-there, done-that, although the singing is nice. Still, do we really need another movie with thirtysomethings who ache to re-live their college years? C’mon, guys, grow up!

About as funny as a funeral.

A noisy, chaotic affair.

Small, amateurish Israeli feature.

Zhang Yimou is seriously off his game with the utterly ridiculous Curse of the Golden Flower, a new epic that feels like "Hero" meets "The Lion in Winter" meets "Peyton Place." The film is worthless as a serious work of art, but it may offer the jaded viewer a surplus source of MST3K-inspired wisecracks.

Valeria Bertucelli and Ingrid Rubio as Elena and Natalia barely register for the camera, either in their adult incarnations or as the mod teens of 1975 Argentina.

With a clumsy hip-hop score permeating every free inch of the soundtrack and ugly 16mm cinematography that would never be allowed out of Film School 101, the audio-visual experience is a wreck. The quality of Quality of Life is non-existent.

Inert, inept epic.

Chicago is a failure, but that should not come as a surprise. Bob Fosse, who directed and choreographed the original 1975 Broadway production, was long baffled in making a film of the show and eventually gave up trying.

If Dogville has a reason for importance, it is the astonishing all-star ensemble who try very hard to put life into their cardboard characters and make this silly film work.

Reconfigured into a very different one-woman movie by Gibson and director Jeremy Kagan. Unfortunately, the transformation was not successful.

The Quiet is best for cheap laughs by jaded moviegoers with absolutely nothing better to do with their time.

Nothing more than a big old chunk of horse poop.

The primary problem with “Rabbit Test” was that it was based on a hoary one-joke concept – in this case, a man becomes pregnant. But Rivers had no clue how to take the concept and expand it into a flowing, coherent comedy script.

The film is professionally made but a thorough bore at every imaginable level.

Easily the most surprising comedy of his career. The surprise: it's not funny.

Thoroughly obnoxious and relentlessly unfunny comedy.

Sadly, the whole affair is little more than ennui with a pedigree.

More of a hangnail sketch -- no one can come away from this offering with a clue on what makes Wall Street click.

The one lesson learned from watching this film is that Canadians can make movies just as badly as anyone else.

An Italian-British-French-Spanish-Romanian co-production. A better argument against multinational cooperation cannot be imagined.

Writer/director Gary Burns offers a suffocating experience which is too boring to be accepted as a satire, too lame to be accepted as a farce, and too infantile to be accepted as a drama.

Perhaps it is a shame that no one thought of digitally restoring and theatrically releasing the sex videos that Crane made with the many women he pleasured...that would have been far more entertaining than anything found in Auto Focus.

Emily Blunt’s Victoria and Rupert Friend’s Albert come across like museum mannequins – utterly devoid of any genuine passion.

The new bad movie from Clint Eastwood which takes Dennis Lehane's best-selling thriller and turns it into an inert mess that clocks in at 137 minutes but feels like 137 hours.

While it would be foolish to expect a completely faithful Shakespeare adaptation from Godard, there is no pleasure in being fooled into thinking that this vague, obscure, annoying, cacophonous wreck of a film is anything but a joke being played by a self-indulgent filmmaker.

Typical of too many films produced in Israel: plodding, verbose, badly-made and completely monotonous.

A thoroughly awful Korean production which vainly attempts to recast the slam-bang conventions of American action-adventure flicks into the sticky world of contemporary Korean politics.

Clooney has littered his film with such a high quantity of mistakes that it is hard to know where exactly to begin finding fault.

Fans of prison flicks would do better to catch the HBO series "Oz" or the five millionth rebroadcast of "The Shawshank Redemption."

Painfully boring.

Tiresome, trite and choked with every lousy Dixie-fried stereotype imaginable.

Little more than a travelogue designed to show off the grandeur of the Hermitage, with the silly actors in fancy costumes getting in the way of the paintings and sculptures on display.

Bubble is among his (Soderbergh) worst films. What in the world was he thinking with this?

Has a terrible air of been-there/done-that.

It seems as if every possible cliche and story twist from any seafaring picture of the past 80 years made its way into this flick.

To its credit, the film's costume design is stunning. But unless you have a kimono fetish, there's no reason to pay a good dollar (or a yen, for that matter) on this junk.

Although it runs 78 minutes, it feels like 78 hours.

A small, tacky non-comedy.

A minor and forgettable bore.

More of a curio than a classic and it takes the strongest of constitutions to endure this film without entertaining notions of matricide

Unless you are severely addicted to Johnny Depp, this film offers very little in the way of genuine entertainment value. Ultimately, “The Brave” should have been renamed “The Foolish.”

The single worst Shakespeare film ever made.

Such garbage that taking a shower at the Bates Motel is a more appealing alternative.

About as much fun as a grouchy ayatollah in a cold mosque.

Such a hopeless mess that there's no fun in tossing insults at its endless shortcomings.

An astonishing mess.

This one deserves to go back in the refrigerator – preferably to the very back of the refrigerator!

At 100 minutes in running time, Dallas 362 can be called "The Amateur Hour-and-40-Minutes."

A painfully awful film.

The production values on Dirty are so painfully amateurish that it is often hard to determine what is happening. The cinematography is murky and shaky, the editing is dull and clumsy, and the sound recording isn't exactly pristine. Not that any of this matters when you have a script where every third word is scatological.

Ghastly.

After sitting through this movie, you will want to throw something more pungent than rice at The Groomsmen.

London is the independent film world's equivalent of a fiasco.