Robert Wilonsky

The film desperately wants to play like "Three Kings," a war film with a guilty conscience, but it's too pat and familiar to earn its high-minded stripes.

To say it's better than it has any right to be gives the original too much credit and the remake not enough.

That's not to say Simone doesn't offer a good time. Shove aside its self-righteous agenda and it's a deft kick, a light comedy whenever it's not trying to play heavy. And it's bolstered by Al Pacino in a lively performance.

The only thing worse than second-generation Guy Ritchie is fourth-generation Quentin Tarantino, and this movie has the musty smell of 1995 all over it.

If only Condon kept up the Q&A format, because when he ditches it the movie turns flat and familiar.

This film is no "Usual Suspects," because there is no twist, no gotcha.

Among the several iterations of Jules Verne's novel about the inventor's adventures whilst traipsing through England, Asia and the Wild West, this new one is the least impressive and most depressive. Even the 1989 made-for-TV version starring Pierce Brosnan possessed more spark and steam than this lazy, lackluster take.

Ultimately, Hart's War can't decide what it is: treatise on racism, escape (and escapist) thriller or murder mystery. So it sits there -- and we sit there with it, waiting and waiting. And waiting.

Little more than direct-to-vid nonsense offered by Disney at dollars on the penny to parents looking to waste time and money keeping kids occupied away from the TV screen.

It's just a familiar bore, offering chills and thrills only to those who have never seen a movie before.

It has its moments, but they never add up to a record you'd want to play again and again in its entirety.

Its heart is in the right place, but it has no soul.

The movie, which feels as amateurish as a student film made for cable access, doesn't deliver the goods; the gotcha moment never comes.

Never quite works, despite the wonderful performances or the decency in the screenplay's margins.

All Sinbad has going for it is Pfeiffer's Eris.

Final is one big hunh? barely worth the effort; just because it doesn't make any sense doesn't mean it's art.

Wacky chaos ensues, as the film veers toward a subplot about industrial espionage, but director Clare Kilner's debut is never as daft as it should have been.

It's as light on its feet as a dead elephant. It's never clever or smart, nor is it terribly thrilling or engaging during its numerous fight sequences.

Morrow the actor tries too -- but he's a stylish director with a steady hand and a shaky eye (the scenes from Lyle's tortured point of view are dazzling, if not a bit unsettling). It'd make one hell of a TV movie.

Once more, Tim Allen drops a lump of coal down the chimney.

It strains to be funny where the original's gags were efficiently deadpan, yet it's also so unbearably lazy, stooping to cliché and caricature when it backs itself into the shower.

Any goy, too, can fall for this tripe, especially if they've a fondness for mawkish cliché, sitcom pacing, popcorn psychology, and lousy cinematography.

It punishes rather than entertains; it condescends, it offends, it loathes its audience.

It's stunning, really, to consider how much time and expense went into something so chintzy and dull--a script full of non sequiturs shouted by a screen full of chum.

An antiadvertisement for itself.

Really, what women want is what all of us want: a decent movie, something vaguely insightful and occasionally funny. This isn't that movie.

No one is more blameworthy than Witherspoon...With her newfound clout and charm, she could make better films; instead, she strolls up to the audience standing in line at the ATM and demands we fork it over or else.

Runs out of breath and collapses into a heap of feel-good endings that turn a soaring feeling into a sinking one. But by then, the audience that adores it will forgive it its sins.

It wears out its welcome well before its halfway point, by which time you're either so tangled up in plot points you're strangling, or so bored you just wish you were being strangled.

To damn Herbie: Fully Loaded as soporific crap, as lazy profiteering, as yet another needless and cynical remake in a season populated by such con artists, would be as pointless as the movie itself.

It should be said that Travolta delivers a wonderful performance that's lost in a mediocre -- and, at times, rather misogynistic and homophobic -- film.

Ultimately, the filmmakers build toward a reasonably satisfying "Twilight Zone" climax, only they crawl toward the ho-hum ending; the movie appears to have been written and edited in a swamp too.

I liked when they had the paint fights and the pillow fights.

At its best, Cats & Dogs plays like a live-action Tex Avery cartoon, down to the exploding ACME dog bone; it's slapstick and slapdash, full of silly and violent nonsense worth a chuckle or two as dogs slam into glass doors and cats play dead on suburban streets.

Feels like an in-joke, a party where everyone on the screen's having a better time than anyone in the theater, and they all couldn't care less. And that's just no fun at all.

The result is something that feels very much like an overachieving made-for-TV movie--a history lesson dolled up like an action movie, with the action relegated to the final third, and even then, the battle is over before it really begins.

It's too turgid to awe the nonbelievers, too zealous to inspire and often too silly to take seriously, with its demonic hallucinations that look like escapees from a David Lynch film; I swear I couldn't find the devil carrying around a hairy-backed midget anywhere in the text I read.

The movie comes off as willfully eccentric when it should have been charmingly touching.

By offering up the feel-good, MGM-styled musical version, a movie you can hum along to, his biopic serves only as a giant question mark; why bother if you're going to excise the interesting and naughty bits.

It has but one thing going for it: a cast filled with Oscar nominees.

It winds up like all Hollywood comedies these days--merely resembling something funny.

A movie that leaves you wondering what the fuss was all about when its end credits appear; it's a mish-mash of a dozen other, better films ground up and watered down--Seven, Silence of the Lambs, and Manhunter, to name a few of the usual suspects.

Nothing happens. At all. Ever. Remember when Steve Martin was funny? Apparently, neither does he.

Moore's likable and Goode's good. But . . . so what?

You will leave Mona Lisa Smile with only the slightest hint of the grin every slick studio movie gives you--the grin of reassurance and superiority. But you will not be changed, only out about eight bucks.

A little too loud, and a lot too boring.

Into the Blue drowns before it even surfaces.

Leguizamo is all twitches and spasms; there's not a bit of subtlety in his high-wire performance. By the time you get past it, the film bogs down in dime-store potboiling.

When Affleck keeps getting work, the terrorists HAVE won. With blank eyes and soft features, he has none of the gravitas of his predecessors, Alec Baldwin and Harrison Ford, who saved the world with swagger. Affleck merely looks like a frat boy in over his head, which is perhaps the point.

Proof of Life kidnaps the audience, then tortures it to a slow death

Its execution is stultifying, laughable and ultimately a little offensive.

Plays like something Dr. Phil and "Sex and the City's" Carrie Bradshaw might have written during a commercial break, a feel-good fantasy that sounds deep but has no more depth than a kiddie pool drained for winter.

Which leaves Witherspoon, that delicious pastry, to heave the movie on her small shoulders and carry it home. The load is light -- the movie weighs no more than a glass of flat champagne -- but even she can't withstand the burden.

It's a mess, absolutely, more a collage than a narrative.

Crowe renders David's dream (and its accompanying nightmare) so literal we can't help but leave the theater feeling as though we've been lectured to, told how to feel and what to think. And for an audience, that's a bit of a nightmare.

That's all Full Frontal is: a brilliant gag at the expense of those who paid for it and those who pay to see it.

The whole thing seems to meander aimlessly, rarely creating a chill.

It's war porn, a movie that revels in the carnage.

Has all the charm of a canceled CBS sitcom.

Obnoxious, transparent cornball comedy.

Smith used to make movies to make fun of movies like Jersey Girl; now he's just another guy working the assembly line, which won't make you a sell-out if no one buys it.

Somewhere between setup and punch line, American Pie 2 starts feeling less like a sequel and more like the second episode of a TV series, a case of fine-tuning after the pilot's been picked up by the network.

An overlong compendium of Oprah moments meant to move and inspire, even if, by the end, it's too exhausted with itself to offer up a single authentic tear or revelation.

Paycheck is a terribly muddled mess, a Hitchcock homage (with generous, obvious nods to The Birds, Strangers on a Train and North by Northwest) by a great filmmaker trying to say a great deal with so very little.

Freedomland manages a seemingly impossible feat: It's both turgid AND overwrought, eliciting the shriek that fades into a yawn without anyone ever noticing. It's a wholly dreary piece of work.

Ultimately only Moore, with her eyes always half-damp and voice half-cracked and body language half-mad, keeps the movie on the ground, when it too often threatens to fly into the thin air, where the audience would laugh it off the screen.

It's a plot more worn out than the tinsel boxed up in the attic. In the end, they've given us a Christmas gift barely worth returning.

A shame Johnson couldn't give the movie over to Bullseye, since Farrell displays more danger with a cocked brow and sharpened pencil than Affleck with pages of melodramatic mush he can't force out without sounding like a high-school drama student with a sore throat.

Deadly dull thriller.

Succeeds in scaring you and boring you at the same time; unlike Moore's movie, it's agitprop bereft of artistry, porn for Republicans.

It's left to Barbra Streisand and Dustin Hoffman as Greg's parents to warm up the picture, and they light it on fire. Indeed, they're having such a swell time as Roz and Bernie Focker that they seem to be in an entirely different movie--a funnier one, a sexier one and a smarter one.

A tenth of a movie masquerading as a full feature.

A stunning piece of work--stunningly inept, stunningly incoherent, stunningly awful in every single way imaginable.

This circumcised "Shaft" plays half-awesome, half-aw-shit; it exists almost as if to prove you can cram every Jewish joke in the Old Testament into a single movie.

Adequately breezy and sleazy -- a movie about the horniest man in the universe looking for a little one-night stand.

Instead of satire, we're treated to diarrhea jokes, dogs dangled from the windows of speeding SUVs and tasteless sobriquets bestowed upon anyone who looks vaguely ethnic.

Evolution is merely stale, sterile and, worst of all, safe.

Not strong enough to stomach this leather-clad jerk-off session, which Miramax dumped onto Paramount in a rare case of common sense.

Like a half-remembered dream, the movie's often so overwhelming that even its dull, dead moments (of which there are many, unfortunately) leave you wondering what you're missing and what you've just forgotten.

A comic-book movie unashamed of its roots, meaning it's unabashed about being silly, overwrought nonsense, which works to its benefit--so much so that you're almost rooting for it by the end.

Isn't any fun at all, which is ultimately the most damning thing you can say about a Bruckheimer movie.

Disappointing only because its best moments are transcendent; its worst moments, sadly, are just so ordinary.

The X-Men franchise takes a giant leap backward and off a cliff with its fourth offering.

So convoluted and half-assed it's tempting to dismiss it as unfinished; it feels like six different movies cut together by a blind editor.

Murphy inhabited Jif like a sweet, innocent child, almost as though he were delighted to shed the cynicism and get down to the sweet, chewy center. Or day-care center, in this case.

It will linger like a foul odor or the taste of tinfoil between the teeth.

Nothing about Laws of Attraction is remotely original; even its title has the dull ring of the generic, like "Opposites Attract" or "He Said, She Said." See it or don't. You will never notice the difference.

Sitting through Raising Helen is an exercise in frustration, because somewhere inside this big heap of Hollywood nothing is a something (someone, actually) worth saving and savoring. Her name is Joan Cusack.

Little Nicky will redefine the phrase "worst movie ever," because it might actually be the worst movie ever.

Redundant to the point of being absolutely pointless, a sequel that's almost a note-for-note, beat-for-beat redo of its predecessor, only with all the entertaining stuff left out.

If this it supposed to be comedy, why isn't it ever, for one second, funny?

For the large-type crowd, one that prefers to have its "dirty" clean and silly.

Certainly it exists solely to sell a soundtrack; the movie, like most made for teens, is well beside the point.

Deafeningly dull movie.

A whole lot of something about nothing.

It's a self-satisfied, self-loathing mess that demands you adore and cheer for the very person you come to hate well before its 105 minutes are up. Little Black Book will leave you feeling skuzzy.

There's no kick to its bag of tricks...It's a mild one among biker pics, a tricycle only pretending to be a Hog.

A bland, obnoxious 88-minute infomercial for Universal Studios.