Robert Koehler

Undone by an idea capable of hanging together for 30 minutes at best.

Lacks the consistent tone, pace and point of view for either a science fiction thriller or medieval war adventure.

Suffers from the same rancid dialogue and acting problems as the original but with a much funnier pulse. The real progenitor here is less the previous pic than the sick-funny horror cinema of George Romero.

Imposter is a penny-pinched "Blade Runner," a stubbornly unexciting ride into the near future.

Plainly disappointing as a well-sustained kick-butt thriller, and politically toxic.

The strain needed to extend The Whole Ten Yards a yard -- and to feature length -- is so painfully evident it breaks new pic's comedy spirit, making it a particularly dubious member of the Sequel Hall of Shame.

Picturesque pic, however, lacks even a penalty kick's worth of tension and is paradoxically inert for a movie about guys running up and down the pitch for the glory of the U.S.

Ridiculous would-be thriller.

This overlong march will bore all but the most nobly patriotic.

Archival material -- especially rare B&W Soviet footage -- is a knockout, though the assembly of talking heads, nearly all Reagan loyalists, is predictable and uninspired.

The court action contains only a fraction of the hoops energy one would expect from a pic co-produced by NBA Entertainment -- and film suffers from the conspicuous absence of the title's Michael Jordan.

Except for Eisenberg's superb comic timing and his ability to make the familiar seem interesting, the high school scenes play like "Scream" outtakes.

The result under Penny Marshall's direction is a film with genuinely serious intentions that falls considerably short of its intentions.

A disappointingly mild re-creation of true events.

Stumbling its way down the comedy runway, Miss Congeniality is yet another miscalculated vehicle for the ever-feisty Sandra Bullock.

Couldn't be less involving and more sentimentalized.

Messy admixtures of drama and mockery crucially undermine pic's serious message.

A virtual template of every imaginable cliche of the musical biopic, picture suffers from a lack of narrative and character focus

A powerful premise turned into a stubbornly flat, derivative war movie.

May leave itself open to charges of being little more than a promo feature posing as a documentary, but pic nevertheless is a warts-and-all look at a group of musicians -- and the music biz -- likely to make most record label flacks flinch.

Lacking much dramatic or intellectual stimulation, it's ultimately a limp effort.

Ochoa is such a masterful actor that he makes things fairly interesting despite the script, with Hernandez and Espindola well-cast as two young men operating by different moral compasses.

Both extremely familiar and, despite frequent references to Stanley Kubrick and Orson Welles, cinematically and dramatically dull.

Proceeds like a stultifying history pageant rather than a movie with a pulse of its own.

Aiming to join the Jerry Bruckheimer/Michael Bay school of American movie war games, Stealth is just too dumb to make the grade.

Unfortunately knows no tone between schmaltzy/gooey and slapstick/gross-out. Pic is as far from the original pic and its autobiographical memoir source as it can be while retaining the same title.

A comedy that starts the date in a frisky mood but sours before it's time to kiss goodnight.

The filmmakers themselves betray a lack of knowledge about the Old World, while unfailingly repeating physical hijinks one time too many.

Standard-issue directorial approach is perfectly in keeping with a script whose natural berth is on the tube.

Gods and Generals is American history transformed into a museum movie, consistently making the flawed human characters at the heart of the Civil War into flawless figures Olympian in their statuesque remoteness.

Unable to blend artfilm with psychological thriller, writer-director Hamlet Sarkissian makes something opaque indeed out of Camera Obscura.

There's no cork inside Hardball, but there's more than enough corn. Everything about the movie is geared for maximum uplifting and tear-jerking effect, and seems designed, in the end, to question the old saw that there's no crying in baseball.

Impressive as the combination may seem on paper, having Sheridan direct this sort of genre fare reps a clear miscasting of helmer and subject, as he displays no particular feel for the material and is unable to overcome the story's generic approach, lack of striking psychological ideas, and literal-minded denouement.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

Utterly drab and desperate for laughs.

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.

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

Sloppy and dull in equal measures.

As generic as its title.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A romantic-comedy melodrama that’s too gentle by half.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

A dull afterthought and a sorry vehicle for the comic expression of Martin Lawrence.

Supposedly, Pokemon can't be killed, but Pokemon 4Ever practically assures that the pocket monster movie franchise is nearly ready to keel over.

This extremely plot-thickened tale finally offers little more than the usual genre elements pushed to the kind of extremes that recall the acrid "The Way of the Gun."

Flubs nearly every opportunity to be the comedy it wanted to be.

A valiant but seriously flawed attempt to belie the notion that if you remember what you did in the '60s, you weren't there.

Shrouded by memories of better times and better movies, Frank Gorshin and Rodney Dangerfield's final screen appearances are unfortunately in the thoroughly hapless and embarrassing comedy, Angels With Angles.

It ends up a grinding, ludicrous depiction of a thuggish Bosnian's abuse of his sister.

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

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.

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

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.

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.