Robert Koehler

The resulting film is a trite piece of storytelling, with character development and plot points that feel not so much lived in as borrowed from other movies.

A textbook example of a movie that betrays its audience, Entrance begins as a mildly interesting slice-of-life look at a struggling Los Angeles cafe worker, then impulsively devolves into a manipulative slasher picture.

Doubly disappointing considering that it marks the first feature by Rwandan filmmakers to address the country's 1994 Hutu-on-Tutsi genocide, Kinyarwanda awkwardly and fitfully patches together a half-dozen story strands meant to provide a panoramic view of war and reconciliation.

A weekend romp for four middle-aged buddies devolves into a drug-fueled, suicidal hell in Mark Pellington's ill-conceived and executed I Melt With You, a work of extreme self-indulgence.

More boring than stomach-churning, the film nevertheless contains scattered scenes and sequences so far beyond the tolerance of the squeamish that it can't be overstated.

This cautionary melodrama about a Korean-American teen girl's slide into depravity is too inconsequential and too earnest to belong in the So Bad It's Good category; rather, it's merely bad.

Little more than an overworked exercise in jostling red herrings, and not particularly fresh herrings at that.

An odd case of filmmaking with a crystal-clear subject but no guiding dramatic premise.

Midnight moviegoers aren't so desperate that they will opt for such trailer trash.

As hard as metal and just as dumb, Paul W.S. Anderson's Death Race couldn't be further from producer Roger Corman and director Paul Bartel's goofy, bloody 1975 original, "Death Race 2000."

This is the kind of movie that was doomed on the page, both by an inherently problematic premise and ill-conceived character motivations.

Broadway musical purists will shudder in horror, but parents will be whistling a happy tune that there's at least one acceptable pic out there for their kids.

Chaos may not quite be "the most brutal, horrifying film ever made," as its garish ads promote. But it does contain moments as thoroughly sickening as any in Herschell Gordon Lewis' or Lucio Fulvi's bloody exploiters.

Partially biographical story of a rich kid's unplanned encounter with the Marines and his even more random romance with a schizophrenic movie starlet is contrived and emotionally incomplete, and strained further by self-consciously cockeyed dialogue.

Sheer chaos on wheels, a hysterically edited jumble that defies belief at nearly every juncture.

Utterly drab and desperate for laughs.

Feels entirely a part of an already faded go-go era. Pic is too late by a mile and rightly dumped in a few theaters by Fox, which will doubtless send it to video bins faster than you can say gigabyte.

Writer-director Jack Piandaryan appears as tone-deaf to his miscalculated dialogue as he is unable to eke out convincing perfs from his cast.

A poorer film than the paltry original even as it strikes a self-consciously clever pose.

Lacking the kind of fire and energy that the best youth movies demand, leads Ash and Russell display skills better tuned to the small screen.

To be sure, Kelley's Emmy-winning brand of off-kilter humor and cockeyed affection for rural folk is on display, but his attempt here to blend the citified angst of "Ally McBeal" (co-star Bridget Fonda was Kelley's first choice as that series' lead) with the countrified absurdisms of "Picket Fences," plus bits out of the Peter Benchley playbook, doesn't hold water.

There seems to be no bottom to Going Down, a lame also-ran in the rapidly declining teen gross-out comedy genre.

Surely one of the most frantic, virulent and foul-natured Christmas season pic ever delivered by a Hollywood studio.

Every stab at comedy in this mirthless slog is botched.

A shoddy vehicle for Jamie Foxx to ride into the summer season on.

Though the superhero's fans have long awaited his close-up, the Devil's bounty hunter -- complete with a burning skull for a head and a killer motorcycle in flames --materializes in a movie that never measures up to his infernal potential.

A horror movie without horror, a spook pic without spookiness and a metaphysical drama without the slightest spiritual tug, Soul Survivors virtually dwindles away on the screen.

This deliberately pre-'90s slice of rock 'n' roll-tinged sci-fi horror, decorated with anything but the latest in special effects, seems particularly grungy and marginal.

Overall aroma of movie junk food.

Fails to stir the emotions despite its heavily melodramatic drive.

One of the most brutally awful comedies ever to emerge from a major studio.

Voice work is weirdly awful and funny at the same time.

Sloppy and dull in equal measures.

Haplessly blends live-action and visually repellent computer-animated work.

As generic as its title.

Little more than a slipshod, trashy, sometimes exploitative thriller.

A woefully under-realized story of small-time boxers enjoying perhaps their last moment in the spotlight.

Patently absurd in both the details and larger aspects, the ultraserious pic is undermined by poor casting.

Misbegotten, unimaginative buddy pic.

Nonsense, hysterics and many cuppas spill in Caffeine, an ensembler that serves up a menu's worth of forced and trite situations.

Sadly symbolizes the decline of the Western. The 36th bigscreen version of the exploits of the James-Younger Gang is one of the least convincing.

A lark gone utterly awry.

A pathetically conceived drama that wastes the serious theme of how emotionally and sexually inadequate men abuse others.

A quasi-metaphysical revenge Western that remains as elusive as a distant mirage on a long, dusty trail.

Perfs are either absurdly stiff or over-the-top, and effects and makeup look like they were made in someone's garage.

Suffers greatly from both a visibly constrained budget and an extraordinarily dated feeling.

Pic is hermetically sealed in a synthetic wrapping that's so total -- Sony's top-flight high-def cameras, visibly low-budget CG work, exceptionally hackneyed and imitative action and dialogue --that it arrives a nearly lifeless film.

Murphy's story lacks even the basic form that held most of "The Nutty Professor" together.

Remote, non-involving and finally incomprehensible.

This tale of mismatched lovebirds begins with considerable charm but eventually loses its winning ways with an excess of ridiculous elements.

Perhaps thinking he had a farce to play with, Flender encourages tons of mugging; by overplaying what should be underplayed, helmer and cast deliver a fatal stab to the intended comedy-horror.

Young teen girls will flock to pic in droves, dragging their boyfriends or other girlfriends.

Writer-editor-director Paul F. Ryan makes the mistake of focusing on an ungainly and, finally, unplayable verbal match between two high schoolers.

The combo of cheesy effects and martial arts choreographer Cory Yuen's unimaginative staging results in something that's martial artless.

A dumbed-down remake of Kiyoshi Kurosawa's disturbingly abstract Japanese horror film.

Commits any number of comedic violations during an aimless pursuit of laughs.

Rude, crude and, uh, cosmopolitan, Deuce Bigalow: European Gigolo waves the flag for R-rated politically incorrect studio comedy but doesn't top the laugh ratio of the first Deuce misadventure.

At the most basic level, Boricua's Bond is at war with itself.

Tries to salvage its dopey premise with frantic final-reel plot contortions.

Most discomforting of all is the sight of world-class actors stuck in such threadbare material.

In its overwhelmingly artificial depiction of the street gangs that ruled Brooklyn's mean streets in the 1950s, Deuces Wild draws from a phony deck.

Awful and subversively spunky at the same time.

Launched with a few surprising touches and a disturbingly bloody prelude, horror pic collapses under the weight of its own dull conception and weak direction, dialogue and character portraits.

An especially insipid example of the Hollywood message movie.

Utterly lacking the drive and roller-coaster energy expected of top action pics, this latest try at repackaging "Speed" is a Kmart version of a Jerry Bruckheimer production.

There are stiff politicians and there are stiff political movies, but the rigidity of the White House-based fairy tale that is First Daughter is in a category even pollsters may have a hard time assessing.

Demonstrates no improvement or enhancement. But the action this time is even less inspired than past battles

Mansion's drab comic strokes and narrative render the movie almost superfluous.

Although Erica Beeney's script beat out more than 7,000 entries, the screen version dulls her potentially distinctive voice with deadly doses of sentimentality.

Combines the most rudimentary of Catholic-inspired good vs. evil plots with visual effects that would barely pass muster in episodic TV.

A much more intense action vehicle for hero Ash Ketchum and his band of pocket monster trainers than its leaden, sometimes claustrophobic predecessor.

Lacks the comic style or abandon to make its cynical turn on male-female relationships anything more than a short-lived stunt.

Has the stench less of rotting flesh than the whiff of a thoughtless quickie.

Makes little impression and is sure to leave few memories for a teen.

Technically and comedically strained by the demands of its special effects-filled haunted house setting. Worse, the need to top the first pic's outlandish stunts is ghoulishly unfulfilled and terribly ironic.

The rags-to-near-riches saga of "Goal!" has turned into a risible riches-are-awful tale in Goal II: Living the Dream.

In recent years, Steven Seagal has been steadily losing any firm standing as even a B-grade actioner icon, and by the genre's most basic standards, he now displays a visible fatigue and lack of interest that proves deadlier than any of his hero's skills.

No cuddly, funky "Pokemon" pocket monsters populate this pic; this game is for the big kids, rife with a ruthless tone, heightened violence and cold calculation. However, fans will put up with a dull tale to finally see their obsession on the bigscreen.

Gruff and downright smelly, especially when star David Arquette is forced at one point to flop around in a pile of doggy doo.

Though Muniz and Bynes make a somewhat likable team, their funniest skills are dampened by the material's insistent stupidity.

Pity the children for whom this is their intro to the world of Grimm, for while pic stays to basic outline of the original story in opening and closing sections, the large middle is stuffed with badly staged slapstick and painful stabs at hip dialogue in an arch attempt to cater to modern kids.

Overshadowed by vastly superior sports movies like Invincible and hardly disguising its low-budget sources, pic isn't in any kind of shape for the theatrical leagues.

A remarkably boring comedy.

A collection of sentimental and emotional moments in search of a movie.

Even dumb farce has to be built on logic, but that crumbles in the face of a set of tired routines playing off of stock types.

Fires nothing but blanks.

Stuffed with attitude but just as hackneyed as the original, Love Don't Cost a Thing brings a year of exceptionally lame youth comedies to a fitting conclusion.

Morrow displays keen attention to physical detail, but starring both behind and in front of the camera looks to have been a mistake here.

Little more than a mall movie designed to kill time.

There's nothing in genredom quite so unhinged as the badly made psycho-thriller, and long before it's over, The Glass House collapses from wretched design and execution.

As weak and banal as its thoroughly uninvolving central character.

A perfect example of the sad trend in contempo Latin American filmmaking to imitate old Tarantino with only a fraction of the stylistic cojones, frantic comedy dealing with two pairs of confused guys and one pair of kidnap victims is an empty exercise that loses its juice before first reel's end.

Lame stuntwork and subdued thrills indicate not just a low-budgeter, but a blindness to what target aud demands.

The question isn't where is the love but where are the laughs?

Few recent movies have conceived their central female character more contemptuously -- a fanatic for a lifestyle that appears to have come from the bestselling "The Rules."

Director David Zucker, a master of whacked-out visual comedy during his “Airplane!” era, drops the ball here.

A sign that the Sandler comedy empire is expanding and reaching new depths of pure gross-out stupidity.

The more Marc Fusco and co-writer Michael Garrity's script aims for cleverness, the more it unravels.