Stephen Holden

The screenplay never begins to finds a workable balance between wit and adventure. And the performances in several smaller roles are so mechanical that they lend Kill Me Later the tone of a vanity production.

Just when its parts should come together, As Cool as I Am crumbles to bits.

Little more than a loose- jointed succession of goofy "Saturday Night Live"-style sketches and sight gags inspired by an actual event that is nearly half a century behind us.

Bravetown, directed by Daniel Duran from a screenplay by Oscar Orlando Torres, can sometimes drown in its own tears.

Squandered in foolish horseplay and on a story that zigzags so far out of control that it feels as if the screenwriter, Steve Adams, pasted together a bunch of zany notions in a frantic search for confusion.

Mr. Gyllenhaal’s strong performance still doesn’t add enough substance to a film that is hollow at the center. It’s mostly the fault of Mr. Sipe, who seems to believe that saying nothing is saying something.

The movie plays like a made-for-television quickie.

Feels like a desperate attempt to stretch a flimsy half-hour made-for-cable concept into a feature film.

The movie's endless action sequences are so stylized and overedited that they lack any visceral punch. And Mr. Van Damme's Gibson is so opaque that he makes Mel Gibson's Mad Max seem weepy by comparison.

This poorly acted, ramshackle tour of the lower echelons of the Los Angeles rock scene has the feel of a largely improvised home movie filmed without retakes, and its sense of humor could only be fully appreciated by struggling musicians.

The movie, which imagines its principal characters as metaphorically ticking time bombs, never convincingly portrays their passions.

Within the genre of supernatural thrillers, Split Second is fairly dull. Mr. Hauer's Stone is an expressionless, unsympathetic lug who grunts his lines in a near monotone that sometimes becomes unintelligble in the movie's muffled soundtrack. The film is so desperate to create tingles that poor Miss Cattrall has to endure two protracted nude scenes -- one in a shower, the other in a bathtub -- in which she is menaced. Neither is especially spine-tingling.

A hectic free-for-all with no point at all.

Makes no psychological sense. Even within the convoluted realm of film noir, the development of the relationships defies any logic.

The guiding philosophy of The Price of Milk seems to be that if you throw something on the screen and call it a fairy tale, it has to mean something. But it doesn't.

The re- enactments, however fascinating they may be as history, are too crude to serve the work especially well.

Many of the faces that emerge through the murk appear bug-eyed. And much of the dialogue, which is frequently shouted, is only semi-intelligible.

Shirley’s instant metamorphosis from insecure high school student to ruthless madam is ludicrous in spite of the best efforts of the talented Ms. Waterston to convince you otherwise. The Babysitters has the increasingly jerky momentum of a film that was butchered in the cutting room, sacrificing continuity and character development to whip the plot forward.

Unlike the juicy, overripe prose in the novel from which it was adapted, Mr. DeCubellis’s screenplay is utterly lacking in style. Mr. Brody captures his character’s attitude, but the colorless screenplay robs the character of literary imagination.

The movie’s only fresh element is the wintry setting, which shrouds everything in a mood of weary fatalism. Otherwise, it’s the same old, same old, efficiently discharged and utterly disposable.

For all its intimations of fire and brimstone, the film isn't remotely frightening, and the high-school-level acting doesn't help.

Metamorphoses from a character study into a confusingly edited sampler of sexual possibilities that feels both programmatic and old-hat.

What does it add up to? Nothing much. A tense, paranoid nightmare with a chilly metaphysical overview has been trampled into a blustering, bad cartoon.

A semicoherent, overacted mélange of travelogue, farce and suds.

As this strained, foul-mouthed exercise in gallows humor proceeds, God’s Pocket sustains a facade of meanspirited deadpan comedy. But there are no laughs, not even smirks to be had.

In the end you have to wonder why the highly reputed director Michael Apted ("Coal Miner's Daughter") and the gifted screenwriter Nicholas Kazan ("Reversal of Fortune") chose to go slumming in territory like this. They must have been offered wads of money to do the dirty job.

Flagrantly old-fashioned, triple-hankie tear-jerker.

The movie never bothers to show you life inside a shelter dormitory or tries to convey a broader vision of the city’s street culture. It is too busy showcasing its star Jennifer Connelly (Mr. Bettany’s wife) in degrading situations.

Unlike such forerunners as “Clueless” and “Mean Girls,” however, this movie, doesn’t have a believable moment in it.

Mr. Leguizamo, 50, still has charisma, but with his maniacal stage persona barely seen and the themes recycled from earlier projects, Fugly! is a dud.

In the movie's cheapest, most exploitative gesture - just as it is about to run out of tricks - a snake slithers into the pine box in which Paul awakens bound and gagged, not knowing where he is. With that gimmick, the movie sacrifices its last shred of integrity.

A grindingly conventional comedy that insists on tying up its subplots in pretty ribbons and bows.

Overcompensates for its sloppiness with loud, knockabout farce.

As A Rumor of Angels reveals itself to be a sudsy tub of supernatural hokum, not even Ms. Redgrave's noblest efforts can redeem it from hopeless sentimentality.

All it really wants to be is a hiphop answer to one of Elvis Presley's sillier vehicles. But the movie, which was directed by David Kellogg and written by David Stenn, fails to deliver an ounce of musical energy.

This crude, inspirational tear-jerker is as sweet as a bowl of instant oatmeal smothered in molasses. It should please those who honestly believe that Santa Claus and God are synonymous; others may retch.

Just when it seems as though the language of insult and humiliation couldn’t get any nastier, the movie escalates the barrage.

The director, as he showed in movies like "After Dark, My Sweet," and "Fear," specializes in conjuring conspiratorial atmospheres in which anxiety and sexual menace hang in the air like a heavy, bitter perfume. Long after you've dismissed the movie's ridiculous, convoluted story, traces of that scent may linger.

"Hee Haw” meets “Pulp Fiction” at the meth lab: That describes the style of Pawn Shop Chronicles, a hillbilly grindhouse yawp of a movie that belches in your face and leaves a sour stink.

Evokes a mood of tenderness. Beyond that, it is a weightless, sentimental and intellectually lazy effort from an independent filmmaker whose movies seem increasingly insubstantial.

But for all its provocation, Kedma is an often dull, incoherent film, and its characters remain frustratingly sketchy

It isn't saying much, but at least her (Carey) work here is more substantial than in the catastrophic "Glitter."

Pushes its ugly humor further than most.

Zoolander 2 has enough plots for several movies. They are so jammed together that they more or less cancel each other out.

The storytelling is infuriatingly coy, as if Mr. Haggis were trying to fool you (and himself) into thinking that he has something to say. Third Person finds Mr. Haggis, like Mr. Neeson’s screen alter ego, running on empty.

Muddled, pretentious assemblage of film clips of the band shot between 1966 and 1971.

The sloppy, absent-minded Premonition is a giant step backward for Ms. Bullock.

Might be described as a muddy, cliché-ridden sudsfest that lurches uncertainly between comedy and soap opera without finding its emotional or visual footing.

Sad to say: There is far more crackle in an average episode of “Law & Order.”

Its indictment of capitalism is so shrill and one-note that it may just as easily set off fits of giggling, because its characters are so ridiculously evil.

At least Mr. De Niro, who disappears from the movie until the end, seems to be enjoying himself. The force of his bonhomie gives this murky-looking, empty conceit of a film a desperately needed lift of facetious humor.

Sergio's urban melodrama Under Hellgate Bridge suggests the contemporary equivalent of any number of 1930's B movies.

The campy new screen adaptation of The Three Musketeers has all the reality and visceral excitement of a $75 million literary theme park dotted with fancy villages heavily patrolled by security.

A movie like We Are Marshall stands or falls on its ability to make you feel the pain and loss of individuals in a place where community pride and football are one and the same. As the film, directed by McG (the "Charlie's Angels" movies) from a wooden screenplay by Jamie Linden, follows a handful of Huntington residents during the months after the accident, not one of them comes fully to life.

The screenplay is closer in tone to an uneasy mixture of post-"Seinfeld" bile and unfocused Altmanesque satirical misanthropy. Partly because the story's structure is so haphazard, most of the jokes land with a thud.

As its momentum accelerates, and its special effects transform it into a pulpy cartoon, Predators loses its judgment and turns into a frantic, clichéd chase film. This chaotic stew of fire, blood, mud and explosives is so devoid of terror and suspense that any metaphorical analysis is rendered moot.

The film's spareness and lack of words seem affected and ultimately unrealistic. At such moments, its refusal to put things into words and its crushing sense of gloom turn self-defeating.

For all its visual pizazz A Glimpse Inside the Mind of Charles Swan III has the jerky momentum of a collection of disconnected skits loosely thrown together with only the vaguest notion of where it’s heading or what it all means. At best it is a mildly diverting goof with a charmless lead performance. Its underlying misogyny leaves a sour taste.

The movie’s principal saving grace is Ms. Winslet’s convincing portrayal of Adele, a despairing woman of low self-esteem just a twitch away from a nervous breakdown. In almost every other respect, this overbaked romantic hokum is preposterous.

The film's spiritual deck is stacked. In the mawkish tradition of movies like "Simon Birch," "Wide Awake," "August Rush" and "Hearts in Atlantis," Henry Poole Is Here is insufferable hokum that takes itself very, very seriously.

Ultimately seems naïve. In developing the comparison of sex and cannibalism, it never goes beyond the standard Draculian symbol of blood to include other bodily substances.

The Ledge, it should be noted, is not dumb. What undoes it is its mechanical structure: a stale dramatic formula of the sort taught in elementary playwriting classes.

The Skeptic turns into a cut-and-dried Freudian melodrama that gives repressed memory a supernatural dimension. I'll take a bunch of teenagers terrorized by chain-saw-wielding zombies any day.

Virginia is a wildly unpredictable piece of work. Playing the kind of role that is often associated with Laura Dern, Ms. Connelly gives a brave, full-tilt performance that is true to the character but can't hold the movie together.

War, Inc. is gonzo moviemaking with a bleeding heart. A satirical farce that wants to be "Dr. Strangelove" for the age of terrorism, it is a zany, nihilistic free-for-all that goes soft.

As you watch the comedy lurch along, the woozy, sinking sensation it produces suggests a movie slapped together after the consumption of far too many gallons of that spiked eggnog.

Love Sick Love deteriorates into a series of pranks that are not funny enough to register as comedy or brutal enough to qualify as horror.

After the Fall belongs to a type of movie that is too lazy to connect the dots and fill in the blanks between its supposedly teachable moments.

Not even the skillful performances of its stars, Susan Sarandon and Pierce Brosnan, playing the boy’s parents, can cover up the mysterious gaps in continuity of a screenplay whose thudding dialogue spells out every emotion while refusing to clarify many crucial plot details.

The kindest thing to be said about this deluxe photo spread of a film is that Sienna Miller's Edie and Guy Pearce's Andy capture their characters' images and body language with relative precision.

The movie's mentality is su'med up in one cutaway shot. A split second before a man's face is about to be shoved into a boat propeller, the movie flashes to another man pushing half an orange onto the head of a squeezer.

Picturesque seascapes are about the only thing to recommend in Summer in February.

Muddled little dud of a melodrama.

Filled with awful, recycled jokes.

If you're looking for a 90-minute post-teen soap opera with pretty people, ludicrous hairpin turns and a whopper of an ending, the movie will keep you mindlessly off balance.

Filmed in Rwanda, Shake Hands With the Devil is certainly panoramic. But the best that can be said of the film is that it is an honorable dud.

For much of the movie, the kinetic furor of the game sequences helps camouflage the weaknesses of a screenplay that is a mechanically contrived series of power struggles.

A hopeless jumble of visual and linguistic styles.

Terminally glum and waterlogged.

The movie works so diligently to convey a spirit of heroic uplift and fails so completely that it feels like a tragic misfire.

The indoor scenes are so dark that you can barely make out the outlines of the bodies, much less distinguish who is who. Because almost half the film is this dim, it makes for a frustrating viewing experience. The jerky cinematography compounds the irritation.

Hugely expensive, weakly formulaic.

[An] overlong, drab, not-so-funny sports comedy.

Strives desperately for a zaniness that is largely absent from the screenplay and from comic performances that are too blank and unfocused to register as parody.

Inhale is a creepy medical thriller in the tradition of "Coma" that amps up the tension and suspense by slicing up time.

Long before it ends Dark Tide capsizes and sinks with a sickening glug.

Drop Dead Fred wants to be an offbeat cross between "Harvey" and "Beetlejuice," but it is more like a shrill, interminable episode of "I Dream of Jeannie."

This 95-minute movie is so overstuffed with characters, it would take a whole television season to sort them out and give them any depth. And even then, these people have so little on their minds that 13 hours might not do the trick.

The cinematographer-turned-director likes his MTV-style editing so much that in his drive for hyperkinetic overkill he sacrifices coherence to wallow in barely contained chaos.

Nightwatch spends so much time churning up eerie atmospheric effects that it doesn't have time to develop its preposterous story in which Martin finds himself accused of the murders.

Doesn't deliver.

As the film loses its grip on its multiple stories, the title begins to suggest an overheated stew bubbling out of its pot. By the end of the film, the intersecting dramas and histrionic performances have spilled all over the floor, so to speak.

Amusing one-joke film.

So narratively garbled and its screenplay so underwritten that you have to strain to piece together the story.

A very shallow comedy. For the real thing, rent “The Ref,” in which Kevin Spacey and Judy Davis, with a boost from Glynis Johns, set the house on fire.

(Shue's) sweetly likable performance is the only coherent element in a film that has the impersonal feel of a television drama slapped together in a rush.

Despite its sociological tidbits and flashes of musical vitality, Saudade do Futuro never goes anywhere.

Wish I Was Here is so eager to please that you are never allowed to feel uncomfortable for more than a minute or two before a reassuringly stale joke rushes in to pat you on the head.