Scott Foundas

Its characters are as flimsy and expendable as the title suggests, while only the most gullible of viewers (i.e., those who've never seen a David Mamet picture) will likely be duped by the painfully et cetera who's-conning-whom antics or the mounds of forced sentimentality under which they're ill-disguised.

A schlock supernatural shocker.

Bearing a distinctly musty odor confirmed by its 2011 copyright date, this day-and-date Lionsgate pickup never achieves dramatic liftoff.

A steaming compost heap of high-art pretense and half-cocked psychoanalysis that almost makes you sorry Nicolas Roeg isn't making pictures anymore.

This appalling multiculti upgrade of the ’50s sitcom is about as funny as a bus accident.

Kinnear and Romijn-Stamos appear to be vying for the title of filmdom's least-convincing married couple, while Robert De Niro, as the movie's modern-day Dr. Frankenstein, takes his own expert career slumming to a new depth -- he's become an evil clone of a once-great actor.

Chandrasekhar is a master forger of images and situations from horror movies past, but unlike Wes Craven did in "Scream," he doesn't build on them in any way, and the result is the opposite of what's intended; the movie is stultifying.

The thunderous clashes between armies of computer-generated Trojans and Mycenaeans, when they do arrive, feel decidedly un-epic, as though we were watching a child's toy-box war between plastic figurines. Which makes them perfectly in line with the rest of Petersen's artless approach.

For all of its 93 minutes, you never feel anything significant is at stake for anyone — save for a paycheck.

The movie's chief liability, though, is Rose herself, who also co-scripted with first-time director Robert Cary and who registers several notches below Nia Vardalos on the totem of unlikely double-threats.

Director Rob Reiner’s atrocious cancer “comedy” marks a new low in Hollywood’s self-flagellating “things to be thankful for” tradition.

In fairness, the movie isn't the absolute worst of its kind and there's a certain charm to Butcher's amiable, puppy-eyed performance. But Michael McGowan's direction is as flat as an asphalt road, and his script is gasping for air long before it enters the final stretch.

Surprisingly unsexy, uninvolving affair.

This depressingly uninspired action-comedy (based on the 1975–79 TV series) is Hollywood’s latest McMovie -- name-brand recognition as raison d’être or, if you will, creative bankruptcy on a very large scale.

Viewers of this Sam Raimi-produced, sub-"Amityville" scarefest are likely to hold the real grudge.

Not just instantly forgettable, but beginning to fade from memory even as its images still play across the screen.

They only want us to play that tiresome guessing game: Is it all a dream or is it really happening? Instead, you may find yourself asking: Is this cinema or merely Cinemax?

Features fewer small-town scares than a rerun of “Dawson’s Creek” and more wooden acting than a marionette theater. Memo to Rob Zombie: Don’t fear the competition.

As repellent and repellently opportunistic a piece of work as the various shock-horror provocations (The Isle, The Coast Guard) that helped to launch this worrisome career (Kim Ki-Duk).

There may, somewhere in the premise of Incantato, lie the inspiration for a fine farce, but under Avati's shaky stewardship, the picture is leaden and charmless.

The result is unquestionably an auteur film, but one festooned with so many bad and unnecessary ideas that one can’t help wondering if a more modest, hemmed-in version of the same project might not have proved more effective.

The tension rarely rises above a low boil.

Cosgrove and screenwriter Dean Craig aim for the kind of close-quarters chaos that John Cleese and Connie Booth turned into high comic art on "Fawlty Towers," but Caffeine's roundelay of sophomoric urination, masturbation and pedophilia gags isn't half as funny as the atrocious British accents of the largely American cast.

Honoré never gets beneath these characters' sunburned skins, and well before the end, the film tips irretrievably over into the realm of absurdity.

Strictly for the birds.

A dreary, weary psychosexual thriller that's neither sexy nor thrilling.

Begins as a serious, straightforward account of the origins of the cocaine trade and "gangsta" culture in 1980s Harlem, but then downward spirals due to a weak plot and gratuitous violence.

An anemic sitcom pilot dragged out to an excruciating 108-minute running time.

Pic has a stagy, boxed-in feel. Both visually and energetically, it suggests something that has been done onstage to the point of mechanized repetition. And even though Whaley is supposed to be playing a disillusioned character, it's the actor himself who seems fatigued and over-rehearsed.

No doubt, Levinson thought he was making this generation's "Dr. Strangelove." What he's actually made is a desperate, ponderous sop to progressives that caters to all of the left's worst fears about voter fraud, corporate malfeasance and the impossibility of effecting real change.

Like "Life Is Beautiful" before it, Imagining Argentina juxtaposes horrific images of torture and humiliation against gooey optimism and thinks it's saying something profound about human resilience in the process.

Lutz’s acting muscles aren’t nearly as well developed as his pectorals and deltoids, and while the role may not call for a master thespian, it at least begs someone who can emote without looking like he’s straining to execute a dead lift.

Where "Amores Perros" was a feast of energy, wit and imagination, 21 Grams is like a starvation diet -- a movie that wallows so profoundly in its own misery that watching it is like atoning for some sin you didn't commit.

This Hannibal is a stick-in-the-mud altogether lacking in the wit, gourmet appetites and romantic flair required of any surrogate for Sir Anthony Hopkins. By the end of two full hours, it's only Harris' head you long to see on a plate.

The disparate tones never gel, and the movie has an airless, stop-and-go feel, as if a studio-audience laugh track were intended but never inserted.

This is "Crash" with gun violence substituted for racism, although the tone of director–co-writer Aric Avelino's debut feature may be closer to one of those pious public-safety films that used to be shown to schoolchildren in order to frighten them out of potential bad behavior.

Initially promising, but quickly disappointing.

Oz tilts towards the mawkish, as the sham wizard learns the value of selflessness and an incessant Danny Elfman score tugs so shamelessly at your tear ducts that it would make the Tin Man surrender his heart on the spot.

Shyamalan is clearly a director-for-hire here, his disinterest palpable from first frame to last. Nowhere in evidence is the gifted "Sixth Sense" director who once brought intricately crafted setpieces and cinematic sleight-of-hand to even the least of his own movies.

Not quite aptly titled, but close, writer-director Ryan Schifrin's cheapo horror opus pits everyone's favorite hirsute hominoid against the denizens of a remote town nestled at the base of a mountain called Suicide Peak. It's not much of a contest.

V for Vendetta is a dud - far too long at nearly two and a half hours, with flat, grungy visuals, choppy editing and no sense of urgency. But as a political work, it's something else - heavy-handed, reactionary and flat-out stupid. (For the record, Moore has publicly distanced himself from the film, saying it bears precious little resemblance to his original creation.)

[A] talky, contrived and ultimately tedious actors’ exercise.

Calamitously uninspired and borderline incoherent, new pic lacks even those fleeting pleasures (namely, a sense of humor) that made the first film a passable popcorn attraction.

Less compelling than all the behind-the-scenes Sturm und Drang. Even Baldwin, who waived his directing credit in favor of the pseudonymous Harry Kirkpatrick, has warned fans to stay away.

While Gens can splatter gore with the best of them -- early in the film, a human body packed with C4 goes off in graphic detail -- he fails to stage so much as a single rousing action scene, even when he has four double-fisted swordsmen facing off inside an abandoned subway car. Game over. The audience loses.

This anemic genre parody from two of the six writers of "Scary Movie" strives for the goofball precision of the brothers Zucker and, long before it reaches the end of its 70-odd minutes, gives you newfound respect for the comic genius of the brothers Wayans (two of the other writers of "Scary Movie").

It's one of those rare movie failures that truly warrants being called ambitious.

Some will see this as a movie about how we're all God’s children. I saw only the misanthropic fulminations of Jensen's runaway ego.

This is a dark, vulgar, brooding turnoff of a movie, minus the steady laugh quotient needed to appease Sandler's core constituency.

Apocalyptic gobbledygook.

The direction is lazy and the script thoroughly witless, from its token Bergman references to dialogue that suggests a night in borscht-belt hell.

Monumentally terrible but far too bizarre to be boring.

Director Jessy Terrero's spasmodically funny air-travel parody unfailingly counters every one of its genuinely uproarious gags with at least two or three others rooted in retrograde racial panic.

Into the Storm can make it rain like nobody’s business, but when it tries to be smart, it comes out all wet.

The ultimate test of one's tolerance for King's self-aggrandizing postulations about writer's block, obsessive fans and the potentially frightening manifestations of the writer's id...It's just plain lousy.

What the movie needs is a director, and what it gets instead is Pitof, a French visual-effects maestro so much fonder of technological wizardry than of human flesh that he manages to turn even his slinky, sinuous star attraction into a digitized synthespian frolicking about endless CGI cityscapes.

Neither particularly fast nor furious.

A lurid, overheated Southern Gothic that wallows in its own unpleasantness.

A limp facsimile of a Woody Allen ensembler set in a familiar world of New York Jewish intellectuals — minus only the wit, and the intellect.

Now, Soderbergh has made a movie so cool it's practically comatose. Sputtering along from one half-cocked gag line and self-satisfied in-joke to the next, Ocean's Thirteen is as slapdash and slipshod a three-quel as any in this summer's box-office sweepstakes.

All might have been forgiven were it not for a needlessly Shyamalanized ending that deserves to earn Wyatt at least 25 years for grand-theft cinema.

Ladies in Lavender oscillates between scenes so relentlessly nice they make you want to scream and others - particularly those depicting the crush Dench develops on her new housemate - creepier than anything in "The Amityville Horror."

Dracula Untold opts for the stately, staid approach, and even at a mere 85 minutes (sans credits) it’s something of a bore — neither scary nor romantic nor exciting in any of the ways it seems to intend.

An alleged satire that’s about as funny as a communist food shortage, and just as protracted.

Torpid, academic vanity project for helmer-thesp Rodolphe Marconi.

What sounds like a veritable B-movie wet dream — with that master of the subzero scowl, Jason Statham, starring in a screenplay written by Sylvester Stallone — turns out to be considerably less than the sum of its parts.

Is there a Razzie Award for worst casting? If so, it’s one of several that can be reserved early for this fourth, spectacularly lousy screen version of Jack Finney’s 1954 novella "The Body Snatchers," which some bright light envisioned as the ideal starring vehicle for the Cold Mountain herself, Nicole Kidman, and for Daniel Craig, last seen as the most poker-faced James Bond on record.

Further proof that titular antagonist Jason Voorhes is ready for retirement -- to videostore shelves.

Easily one of the dopiest major studio releases since Elie Samaha got out of the business.

Black Snake Moan is, at its core, a fairly straightforward variation on George Bernard Shaw -- "Pigsfeetmalion," if you will. One day, when he outgrows his terminal adolescence, Brewer might be the perfect filmmaker to tackle Faulkner or Tennessee Williams.

Directing seems an unduly elegant term for what Hollywood hack du jour Tim Story (Barbershop, Taxi) does here -- the action scenes are so choppily constructed that their excitement disappears faster than the Invisible Woman.

An ultra-touchy-feely race-relations, civil-rights drama as imagined by theme-park organizers, with every character painted in broad strokes in a story that eagerly tugs at every available heartstring -- and rings false at every turn.

Appealing performances by a trio of second- and third-generation Hollywood kids keep this three-hankie twaddle more bearable than it deserves.

An orgy of bloodletting and dismemberment that's more monotonous than shocking. Aja and Levasseur are to splatter what Liberace was to rhinestones: practitioners of gaud.

When all its threads are finally pulled into place, Do You Believe? proves about as spiritually enlightening as a Kmart throw rug.

If Napoleon Dynamite really is, as reported, a semiautobiographical exercise, it is one of the most astoundingly self-hating such exercises in memory.

The movie rarely overcomes its terminal Scorsese- and Ferrara-isms, or fulfills the promise, evident in the film's early passages, that Montias might be a fine observer of local color with his own unique stories to tell.

The movie is so rigged to elicit the audience's empathy that it becomes difficult to watch; it's stifling.

Shrill, smug would-be satire.

The pic falls well short of its efforts to combine the raucous vulgarity of the “Hangover” movies with Cameron Crowe-ish depth of feeling.

Both stars are atrocious -- but the real blame for this cosmically self-indulgent disaster lies with Kevin Smith, who directs like a proud father who can't stop showing you pictures of his kids. And here's the thing: The brats are ugly.

The movie is monotonous, and by the time it gets to its climactic re-enactment of the Tate-LaBianca killings, it seems little more than the heir to "Survive!, The Zodiac Killer" and other unsavory 1970s horror cheapies that tried to turn a quick buck on real-life tragedy.

A chiller resolutely without chills, in which even the pool water always seems heated. And inasmuch as the pic never owns up to its own trashiness, it's not even enjoyable camp.

The truth is still out there, like an unsold lawn chair at a garage sale, in this just plain lousy second big-screen outing for erstwhile FBI agents Fox Mulder and Dana Scully.

The most resounding thuds in From Justin to Kelly, however, come from the musical numbers.

This feels like a movie that was grown in a petri dish -- poked and prodded with all manner of overcooked symbolism and thesis statements, but fatally absent the genuine human emotions about which it incessantly prattles on.

It has a terminal case of the cutes crossed with the labored earnestness of a disease-of-the-week melodrama.

It’s only the Brazilian-born Da Costa who seems to be trying to create a real character.

They ought to be a whole lot scarier than they are in this tepid genre offering from director Robert Harmon, whose debut film "The Hitcher" set a high bar for screen terror in the 1980s. Pic looks like a holiday gobbler.

A preposterously bad, grade-Z adventure yarn.

Amel’s script is agonizingly airless and contrived

Astonishingly inept alleged satire.

It's a timely, noble undertaking ill-served by a dry, history-textbook style that is at once too much and not enough.

Lacks sufficient appeal beyond niche aficionados of its featured performers.

An erratic, psychobabbling jumble of scenes that never builds to any discernible point.

There’s precious little glory — and not even that much cage fighting — in Chavez: Cage of Glory.

Even grading on a generous curve, this strident melodrama about the insidious efforts of America’s university system to silence true believers on campus is about as subtle as a stack of Bibles falling on your head.

Depressingly thin and exhaustingly contrived. Only masochistic moviegoers need apply.