Robert Koehler

The pic plays like one long chase. Nevertheless, fashioned with ultra-sophisticated means, Sky Blue will be a must-see for anime fans around the world.

A film that ultimately feels stagebound and excessively talky, but which showcases an exceptional performance.

Genetically-modified (or GM) fruits and vegetables are a topic of raging debate in scientific and ecological circles, so it's a shame writer-director Deborah Koons Garcia opts to show only one side of the argument.

Stirring up a humid Gothic mood and amassing a gifted roster of actors, The Skeleton Key is unable to ward off the nasty spirits of formula screenwriting.

A rather stodgily directed pic by Michael Hoffman which extols the virtues of Greek and Roman thinking in the guise of Kevin Kline's classics teacher.

Relies on ensemble allure, with mixed results.

Picture seemed certain to either fly high on outrageous humor or crash under the weight of tastelessness. Instead, the movie just sits there and never comes alive.

Sequel is no more than a cheapo campy goof, but this edition does contain a higher quota of laugh lines and an unsubtle message that efforts to make gay youth "go straight" is destined to fail.

A creaky melodrama that wants to be a musical.

Grounded in bedrock formula and earnestness.

This is son-of-John-Waters with most of the grossness but none of the essential anarchism -- silly pop trash set for vid-classic status in gay households.

A golden opportunity to analyze the most vital and probably most creative contempo American playwright is missed in Freida Lee Mock's docu, Wrestling With Angels: Playwright Tony Kushner. Kushner's art demands a filmmaker of equally challenging artistry, able to plumb an opus based in polemics, politics and Brecht, instead of psychodrama.

Costner is as uneven as the storytelling itself, stone cold at moments, shimmeringly real in others.

The effect is often soporific.

Fortunately bypassing a re-run of "Days of Wine and Roses" but finding little inspiration to freshen an old concept, this tragedy about a lover and a friend helplessly watching the writer's fade-out comes up short of its potential impact.

Burdened with a complex flashback structure and an unemotional core, this multi-decade saga of an imprisoned Iranian poet and his family has surprisingly little resonance.

Girls -- a big part of the Pokemon crowd and what makes it such a humongous commercial success -- will feel left out in the cold.

Largely undone by a script that self-destructs in the third act of an otherwise well-made thriller.

A warm embrace of broadly but humanely sketched characters plus some scrappy casting of rising young stars led by an incandescent Kate Bosworth help overcome the half-realized comedic situations.

Sweet if slight Israeli comedy.

Darts back and forth from being a psychological thriller to a vaguely metaphysical drama to a fate-driven romance -- it all becomes a blur.

The screenplay by Daniel Tendler, Fernando Bonassi and Lula biographer Parana succumbs to many of the most unfortunate narrative tendencies of biopics, including a proclivity for piling on incident after incident as a substitute for real character insight.

Film struggles to balance its past-present memory drama and a rather standard take on an American immigrant family. Although accented by fine cinematic flourishes, pic is harmed by an abrupt conclusion and technical glitches.

A former rock 'n' roller withers on the vine in California Solo, Marshall Lewy's forgettable sophomore effort (after a promising beginning with "Blue State").

Writer-director John Hamburg does everything he can to pair up Ben Stiller's stiff, safety-first corporate man with Jennifer Aniston's free spirit in Along Came Polly, but the two are so fundamentally incompatible that story loses credibility long before the gags stop coming.

Respecting Mother Earth should never be as dull as watching Sacred Planet, a repetitive, globe-hopping Imax project that dresses up well-known ecological truisms with pretty nature photography.

Alternately seduced and repelled by its subject, the garish and power-hungry Harlem gangster and '70s cocaine kingpin Nicky Barnes, Mr. Untouchable is one seriously confused documentary.

Lame and inoffensive.

The latest picture to feature one of the movies’ oddest crime-fighting tandems nevertheless stays true to the franchise formula of East-West fusion action, broad cultural comedy and international intrigue, this time largely in Paris.

Gets into trouble when it reaches for laughs.

Heartfelt and formulaic in equal measure.

The film is never quite as startling or mysterious as it seems to want to be, leaving it in an uncertain cinematic limbo.

Without Smith's graceful presence, which more than once resembles Zach Braff's slightly older but observant New Jerseyite in "Garden State," Nearing Grace would be pure video fodder.

Even by the standards of the recent "Saws," which have enjoyed considerably larger budgets than the first pic, the new edition is more frenetically cut (by editors Kevin Greutert and Brett Sullivan), more dimly lit (by lenser David A. Armstrong), sweatier in terms of perfs by the grimly serious cast, more madly packed with micro-incidents and action, and more brazen in requiring suspension of disbelief.

This makes the film feel perilously close to widescreen sitcom, as do montages of New York set to Beethoven's Sixth Symphony.

Sometimes veering close to being a promotional film for the Special Olympics, pic will be applauded by the disability community and its advocates but quickly ignored by longtime fans of the Farrellys and Knoxville.

Conceit often stretches -- and breaks -- the limits of what the tales can handle, though the implication of viewers as voyeurs gives pic a subversive edge.

There's remarkably little done with a premise snatched from high-concept heaven, adding yet another file to the growing cabinet of under-realized comedies.

Exudes a pre-fab quality.

Pic's future as a cult item is a sure bet.

Apparently needing to release some private thoughts, musings and images to the world, Anthony Hopkins takes a leap into stunning self-indulgence with his directorial debut, Slipstream.

A meandering, semi-improvised tale of a terminal Gotham loser who works as Santa when he bombs as an actor.

Too self-serious to work as a straight-ahead whodunit and too lacking in imagination to realize its art-film aspirations.

Story's spurts of violence are designed to tear Seymour's world apart , but Rosenfeld's scripting and directing choices tend to lessen impact of a potentially gut-wrenching urban tale.

The tilt here toward a hyperactive, buddy-movie action-adventure with loud comic archetypes is a poor fit for a film that relies on fairy tale icons and themes.

Great for ADD-style viewing but not for advancing Iranian cinema's currently challenged profile.

Leiser flexes his animation muscles with a bewitching stop-motion technique, but it proves a poor fit with a scattershot storyline that includes quasi-interview and improv segments that never coalesce into a coherent whole.

New pic lets the air out by divulging the startling mystery that concluded the original. Add this to problematic juggling of police procedural and group-in-distress storylines, and Lions Gate has what looks like a sequel rushed for Halloween.

Preaches purely to the converted.

If anything, this Canadian production misses a great opportunity to dig into its setting and examine the dark side of seemingly pristine Toronto, even as the script by Elan Mastai and director David Weaver labors over a mostly boilerplate storyline.

Limp comedy-drama.

After a long, glum slide, pic becomes an unconvincing story of redemption.

Judd now is top-billed, but her performance is so resolutely humorless and businesslike that Freeman's gruffly affectionate warmth becomes doubly valuable, though not nearly enough to lend this generic project any special character.

A strenuously solemn film that wants to create some kind of American pastoral tragedy out of the nation's current angst with the war.

A blandly conceived youth adventure lacking zing or style.

The live event was hopefully more engaging than this dull adaptation.

The filmmakers seem split between doing it straight and gleefully ripping up the genre, and never make up their minds.

Can't decide whether to be an eccentric black comedy or a middle-of-the-road diversion.

A mechanically efficient yet soulless dramatization of the U.S. Navy SEALs in action, Act of Valor ultimately misses its target: The hearts and minds of American audiences.

This bad idea is then underlined by pallid direction from tyro helmer and TV ad vet Kevin Donovan, a virtually incomprehensible plot line and a less-than-satisfying co-starring turn from Jennifer Love Hewitt.

Mannion's script goes a bit too far in terms of twists, capping the third-act suspense with a plot U-turn, and then another, that leaves audiences feeling played. Worse, the final development loses credibility in retrospect, reducing the film to the level of an exercise in paranoia, effects and one actor's ability to hold attention for nearly 90 minutes.

If all that Ian Inaba's latest Guerilla News Network missive, American Blackout, wants to do is get left Democrats worked up into a lather of righteous anger at crafty Republicans, it does so at the expense of speaking to any other group of Americans. As such, docu is extremely limited and almost without purpose except as an organizing tool for party foot soldiers.

Result is a loose personal piece of reportage that places people over ideas and larger issues, and reveals the pic's severe limitations long before a surprisingly upbeat ending.

Begins as a smartly promising, gently farcical comedy of manners and ends as sourly and haphazardly as the lives it is poking fun at.

The latest model in the recent spate of underwhelming female star vehicles, Enough, a thriller detailing how a good wife gets back at an evil, possessive husband, is never provocative enough to generate strong emotional response.

Weaves a humdrum plot that's never ahead of the audience until three-quarters through.

The politics of homophobia and child molestation receive a badly misjudged tweaking in Peter Paige's writing-directing debut, Say Uncle.

An honorable but failed attempt to dramatize the dynamics that propel a basically good man to become a suicide bomber, The War Within contains provocative points inside a dull package.

Clearly inspired by, though not in the same dramatic league as, "Schindler's List," pic is marred by uneven perfs and lacks the intensity.

The star in this case is Martin Lawrence, who is not only thoroughly upstaged by nemesis Danny DeVito but is completely boxed out of his comfort zone for broad physical comedy.

Refreshing strokes of science-fact in the early sections give way to action strictly from the Ridley Scott-James Cameron playbook, but without a powerful helmer behind the camera or a memorable cast in front.

Hobbled by uninspired stabs at cleverness and surreal narrative curlicues, The Big Empty goes nowhere, replete with a question mark of an ending that isn't worth answering.

Every bit as cliched as it sounds, picture offers a dramatically crude, overly familiar take on the bad-boy-turned-good story. At its best, it offers young thesps E.J. Bonilla and Veronica Diaz-Carranza a showcase for their range.

Arguably the finest athlete in living memory deserves better than Michael Jordan to the Max, an honorific but unmoving portrait of the Chicago Bulls' No. 23.

Family drama appears content to present the situation without going for anything remotely close to the emotional jugular. Result is unsatisfying and even dreary, despite some fine work from Zooey Deschanel and a becalmed Will Ferrell.

Although guided by considerable empathy toward its small circle of kinfolk eking out a living in southern Texas, Eska's tale of a woman's unconditional support of her father-in-law is told with a faux-poetic sensibility that never really connects with his characters' lives.

The film toys with audience expectations and perceptions by playing fast and loose with circumstances and clues, while leading to an almost unavoidable and dismayingly obvious conclusion.

Never quite catches fire in its too-deliberate attempt to appeal to all ages and all tastes.

Ensemble proves improvisationally capable, but film overall is rather conventional, a Hollywood idea of an experimental film presented with a heavy serving of showbiz-type cynicism.

As a cautionary drama on the price of fame, Undiscovered could not tread on more exhaustively discovered territory, and the result is a reel-by-reel trail of cliches.

Picture veers unsteadily between melodrama and light comedy, with no confidence in either.

The joys of farce are fumbled in April's Shower, star-director-writer Trish Doolan's arch and undernourished comedy about a bridal shower turned on its head by the bride's lesbian past.

"Inspired by a true story" it may be, but inspired it's not.

Combining a gallery of targets including President Bush, "American Idol," the Iraq War and the overarching theme of a nation of citizens held in the thrall of phony dreams, pic and its ambitions are undermined by insistent cartoonishness and comic ineptitude.

Feels particularly like old news after the risks of the rock 'n' roll lifestyle were laid out for the previously uninformed in last year's "Almost Famous."

Pic displays filmmakers Kevin Harrison's and Kemp Curley's love of snowboarding, but suffers from an unjustifiably long running time, considerable repetition and a generally awkward structure.

Game 6, the first screenplay by one of America's great living novelists, Don DeLillo, is poorly served by Michael Hoffman's flat, soporific direction.

No movie like this about friendship between two young lesbians and their various adventures, punctuated with laissez-faire jump-cutting, should be this boring.

Snowed under by misjudgment on every level, The Big White is DOA. Despite a cast that generally reads like an indie production's wish list, pic's tendency to liberally borrow from the Coen Brothers playbook of comic mayhem is exceeded only by its lack of sense of what's actually funny.

This South Los Angeles-set dramedy flirts with terminal stereotypes and high-school movie cliches right and left.

Boilerplate crime comedy.

Nocturnal settings and musical interludes create their own kind of allure, but picture feels like an art film imitation, not an authentic art film itself.

The street action is vivid, but the dramatics are distinctly not, lending the film an unintended sense of fakery.

Darkly amusing idea delivers an early salvo that fades as the film swings across a range of styles and tones director Sergio Arau gamely tries to corral. Even at its half-realized level, pic will anger some as it amuses others.

Increasingly complicated comic maneuvers turn what should have been a hip look at sexuality into an antsy pic too busy to settle down.

An unappealing, stiff melodrama.

A string of scenes in search of a movie.

Uninspired star turns from Ben Affleck and Uma Thurman suggest something less than full belief in this quickly forgettable thriller.

The latest and most calculated re-do on the formulaic fantasy of an innocent conquering Gotham.

Penn looks bewildered in a role that simply doesn't track, but Kechiche rises to the occasion. Stanzler's helming, shot blandly in digital vid, amounts to point-and-shoot.

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.

Fails to stir the emotions despite its heavily melodramatic drive.

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

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

Misbegotten, unimaginative buddy pic.

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.

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

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.

Remote, non-involving and finally incomprehensible.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

Will greatly peeve many hardcore fans.

Amateurish, undramatic and bereft of any sense of pacing.

A lineup of comic actors running on empty long before the dust settles.

The proper mix is never found. Ill-conceived and expensive project that winds up looking like a bunch of talented thesps slumming it.

A comedy in the last century and a drama in the new one. At least, that's the dumbfounding impression left by writer-director Oliver Parker's utterly miscalculated film adaptation of Wilde's play.

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

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

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

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.

Overall aroma of movie junk food.

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

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.

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.

An especially insipid example of the Hollywood message movie.

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

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

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

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.

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."

Glitter deserves yet another title: "A Star Is Dull." As phony a vehicle as one could possibly concoct for a wannabe movie star, pic carries Mariah Carey into a swamp of gloppy melodrama.

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

Every stab at comedy in this mirthless slog is botched.

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

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

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