Stephen Holden

The suds that cascade through Tyler Perry’s The Family That Preys more than equal the cubic footage from nighttime soaps like "Dallas," "Dynasty" and their offspring.

This disjointed, desperately whimsical film is simply not funny: not for a minute.

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.

The movie equivalent of a box of Froot Loops followed by a half-gallon Pepsi chaser.

The worst flaw of Willard is a clunky tone-deaf screenplay based on Gilbert Ralston's original and updated by the director. Barely a line flies by that doesn't land with a wooden thud.

Bogus on every level, right down to its half-hearted trick ending.

The kindest thing to be said for this frantic, cluttered mess of cheesy computer-generated action-adventure clichés is that at least you can see how the estimated $175 million budget was spent.

You may view Untraceable, as I do, as a repugnant example of the voyeurism it pretends to condemn.

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.

As tightly plotted as a standard French farce.

Lullaby, the directorial debut of Andrew Levitas, a jack of all artistic trades, is the kind of manipulative, cliché-infested hokum that alienates moviegoers by its insistence on hogging all the tears.

So inept on every level, you wonder why the distributor didn't release it straight to video, or better, toss it directly into the trash.

Even for a fairy tale, A Cinderella Story, directed by Mark Rosman from a screenplay by Leigh Dunlap, fails to make sense.

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.

Rarely has a film exhibited a bigger disconnect between urban realism and utter ludicrousness.

Just Before I Go, the directorial debut of Courteney Cox, lurches along a wobbly line between salacious comic nastiness and nauseating sentimentality. The two strains are so poorly integrated that the screenplay (by David Flebotte) feels like pieces from two different projects mashed together with little oversight.

Because all of this looks blatantly unreal, and because the timing of the shock effects is so haphazard, Dead Alive isn't especially scary or repulsive. Nor is it very funny. Long before it's over, the half-hour-plus bloodbath that is the climax of the film has become an interminable bore. [12 Feb 1993, p.C16]

A facile exercise in nihilism posing as an indie "Training Day" with street cred. Don't believe it.

Terminally scatterbrained gangster farce.

An incoherent hybrid of buddy movie, "Girls Gone Wild" episode and James Bond spoof that employs cheap cinematic tricks like multiple split screens for no apparent purpose.

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

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

Are they fools or heroes? Because the movie can't decide, neither can we. And without an emotional payoff, Play It to the Bone ends up stranded in serio-comic limbo.

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.

Bland, unrevealing.

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

Filled with awful, recycled jokes.

A film that desperately wants to be a music video circa 1983.

A candy-colored, unabashedly sentimental movie.

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.

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

Because it unfolds like a garish hybrid of Simon Birch and What Dreams May Come, with some horror-movie touches thrown in to keep us from nodding off, "The Sixth Sense" appears to have been concocted at exactly the moment Hollywood was betting on supernatural schmaltz.

The Hangover Part III, directed by Todd Phillips from a screenplay he wrote with Craig Mazin, is a dull, lazy walkthrough that along with "The Big Wedding" has a claim to be the year's worst star-driven movie.

Silly, heavy-handed film.

Why Mr. Foxx, who was so impressive in "Any Given Sunday," chose to make a movie so boring and idiotic that it barely meets minimal standards of lowest- common-denominator entertainment.

Admirably high-minded and visually gorgeous but fatally anesthetized by its own grandiosity.

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.

This imbecilic, mean-spirited farce, which sneers at adults, leaves you wondering: where are the Three Stooges when we really need them?

Although the concept seems promising enough, it is undone by disastrous casting decisions and an utter lack of ensemble unity.

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.

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

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

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.

Soon after that the movie simply stops dead in its tracks, as though the money had run out and the project had been called off in the middle of a scene that makes no psychological or dramatic sense. It leaves you frustrated and annoyed.

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

Once Ice-T sticks his mug in the window of the couple's BMW and begins haranguing the wife in bad stage dialogue, all credibility flies out the window.

Mush, delivered with a trembling, quasi-biblical solemnity, is what emanates from Anthony Hopkins most of the time in Hearts in Atlantis, a nostalgic fiasco so shameless it makes movies like "Simon Birch" and "Frequency" seem as austere as the work of Robert Bresson.

The Book Thief is a shameless piece of Oscar-seeking Holocaust kitsch.

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.

Its tepid satire of art world pretensions culminates with a visual dirty joke that is mildly amusing but still not worth the wait.

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.

Short-circuits the novel's quirky charms and period atmosphere by its squeamish attitude toward gritty circus life and smothers the drama under James Newton Howard's insufferable wall-to-wall musical soup.

Rudderless, the misbegotten directorial debut of William H. Macy, is so dishonest, manipulative and ultimately infuriating that it never recovers after its bombshell revelation two-thirds of the way into the movie.

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.

Can a feature-length movie be built on minutiae like jammed copying machines, unsent business letters and orientation programs for new employees? This innocuous wisp of a film, as weighty as a scrap of fax paper caught in an updraft, suggests that the answer is no.

No amount of gorgeous costumes and painterly chiaroscuro can endow this terminally silly film with even a patina of class.

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.

The movie, directed by Gavin O’Connor (“Tumbleweeds”), makes little sense. The screenplay, by Bill Dubuque, is so determined to hide its cards that when the big reveal finally arrives, it feels as underwhelming as it is preposterous.

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.

Doesn't have a genuinely human moment.

As flimsy and manipulative as the shallowest Hollywood fantasy.

Trash is a shameless bid to recycle the mystique of “Slumdog Millionaire,” its likable, overrated prototype.

Played in a loud sketch-comedy style that might be described as "Gay Mad TV." The haranguing, badly acted farce wears out its comic welcome within half an hour.

Ms. Ryan's lean, eagle-eyed golden girl is enough to curdle milk.

Starbuck is up to its eyeballs in mush.

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 question is why. Why would a star of Michael Douglas's stature and intelligence attach himself to a Washington thriller as deeply ridiculous, suspense-free and potentially career-damaging as The Sentinel?

Solemn, sentimental bore of a movie that suffocates in its own predictability and watered-down psychobabble.

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 novelty of hearing Ms. Bonham Carter spew four-letter words fades quickly. So does the sight of Mr. Branagh elaborately rehearsing how to rob a bank. This versatile actor has many strengths, but as his wooden turn in ''Celebrity'' has already demonstrated, comedy isn't one of them.

Like Warwick himself, the movie begins to run amok after a taut and tantalizing first act. Not even Mr. Hyde Pierce's best efforts can make sense of a character who by the end of the film seems to be a completely different person with the same name.

A hopeless jumble of visual and linguistic styles.

A tedious World War II epic that slogs across the screen like a forced march in quicksand.

The gay, independent comedy Adam & Steve is as crude and nonsensical as any number of B-list studio equivalents, with the added disadvantages of a low budget and shaky direction by Craig Chester, who wrote and also stars.

Neither funny nor sexy, nor leavened by the wistful laissez-faire wisdom of the typical sophisticated Gallic comedy, it is less than a trifle.

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

A moth-eaten stranded-in-the-desert yarn that throws in every cheap trick in the manual to pump up your heartbeat, is so manipulative that the involuntary jolts of adrenaline it produces make you feel like a fool.

The upbeat ending can't erase the lingering aura of being trapped in an insane asylum with the Manson family.

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.

The queasiness produced by this sentimental weepie builds into a wave of nausea during its interminable finale.

Overcompensates for its sloppiness with loud, knockabout farce.

What one word might best describe Payback? How about "loathsome"?

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.

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

So clogged with kooky gadgetry and special effects and glitter and goo that watching it feels like being gridlocked at Toys "R" Us during the Christmas rush.

Proving once again that skillful performances can't create something out of almost nothing - the best they can do is make it palatable.

Plods along in its sloppy, joshing way, it tastes like pasta sauce that has sat on the shelf long after the expiration date on the can.

A bubbling crockpot of farcical mush to warm the tummies of anyone who really and truly misses "The Brady Bunch," and I mean really and truly.

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.

It is no wonder that the insufferable romantic comedy Happythankyoumoreplease, set in New York, looks and sounds like a flop pilot for a television sitcom.

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.

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.

Did I mention that Upside Down is simply awful?

Under the direction of Andy Tennant, the Olsen sisters lay on the icky-poo cuteness with several trowels, often delivering their lines as though they were reciting the alphabet.

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

You see, this character, who is given no back story, is Life with a capital L. He is the Forneys' guardian angel who rouses them out of their funk. Given the movie's U-turn into allegory, maybe he's supposed to be a punk Jesus. Not even Mr. Gordon-Levitt's unremittingly savage performance can begin to salvage such hokum.

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

As this chaotic barrage of muscle flexing, swordplay, fireballs, crude digital effects and comic-book quips hurls itself off the screen, it's like having several garbage cans clogged with stale pizza, lukewarm cola, soggy French fries and greasy, ketchup-stained napkins emptied over your head.