Robert Wilonsky

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.