Stephen Holden

Although the early scenes hold out some promise...the movie quickly runs out of ideas.

Mr. Buscemi wrote and starred in the small gem of a movie ("Trees Lounge"), which had more psychological nuance than this emotionally cauterized slice of minimalist malaise.

It's a striking measure of the nervousness of the country right now that a movie so full of holes should be as gripping as it is, at least for its first two-thirds, after which it collapses into a swamp of sentimental mush.

Too leisurely paced and visually drab for its own good, it succeeds in being only sporadically amusing.

Content to go only a third of the way to the bottom of its characters, the movie gives each a few comic tics and leaves it at that.

A rom-com fairy tale so tepid and well behaved that watching it feels like being stuck in traffic as giddy joy-riders in the opposite lane break the speed limit. You have little choice but to cool your heels and pretend that the parched crabgrass in the median is a field of flowers.

May be humorless, paranoid nonsense, but its biggest failure is its inability to scare.

Ashby is a movie divided against itself. It’s a comedy afraid of being too funny lest its macho sentimentality seem even more ridiculous than it is, and a drama afraid of appearing too serious lest you dismiss it as hogwash.

The schmaltzy sports movie Legendary is a kind of contemporary answer to the old Charles Atlas ad in which a 97-pound weakling develops muscles and triumphantly punches out the bully at the beach.

The film can't seem to make up its mind whether it wants to be a comedy, a fantasy or an adventure film. Mr. Kingsley's villain gnashes his teeth and snorts, I love being the bad guy. Those who displease him are threatened with the tearing out of a heart or liver. The character ends up being neither scary nor funny, while the boys are so busy demonstrating their superhuman skills that no personalities emerge.

The end product suggests tepid, bottom-drawer Merchant-Ivory in which the emotions rarely catch fire.

Has no interest in exploring Mr. Frank's family background or love life. This frustrating lack of context leaves you wanting a lot more in the way of texture.

Has a strained, unconvincing screenplay whose failure to connect the dots of its story suggests that it might have been largely improvised.

This pulpy, sex-drenched wartime epic seems frivolous, quaint and foolishly prurient.

The core of the movie is a satirical political thriller that juxtaposes dual points of view that could be described in cinematic terms as "It's a Wonderful Life" versus "Chinatown." The digressions should have been pared away.

Cultivation and fine manners are nowhere to be found in the foul urban cesspool of William Monahan's London Boulevard. This palpitating mess of a movie certainly doesn't lack for pungent atmosphere.

Atmospheric, propulsive and ultimately preposterous melodrama.

The screenplay relies on so many mechanical contrivances to make the story gripping that you can hear the rusty machinery clanking.

The full explanation for the movie's graphically depicted horrors is preposterous even by the almost-anything- goes standards of the action-thriller conspiracy genre.

The action is so frenetic that the ominous mood isn't allowed to penetrate, and this time the human factor is all but erased.

Certainly begins with its heart in the right place. But the movie eventually snaps under the strain of its plot contrivances and its need to reassure.

The film’s method of circling around its subject, then closing in at the end, feels coy and withholding, as if Mr. Greene reserved the few juiciest moments for last.

A sour portrait of Gen X yuppies who settle for adult lives that appear at once soulless and overprivileged.

True to Saturday-morning cartoon tradition, GoBots is a jerky, semi coherent series of chases, laser-gun battles and explosions, with an allegorical plot about how no one can handle too much power.

Parked collapses into sentimentality that not even an actor of Mr. Meaney's dignity and restraint can redeem from mawkishness.

The film's biggest weakness is its unsympathetic main character, a snippy, nervous, expressionless control freak who gets more despicable as the story unfolds.

Faced an insoluble problem: how do you make a boundary-shattering gross-out farce about the porn business that isn't itself pornographic? Having the actors wear silly costumes embellished with sex toys just won't do the trick.

Certainly an honorable film. But honorable is not always watchable.

Stagedoor is like leafing through a collection of snapshots assembled with few captions and no text.

With its many unsolved mysteries, WXIII joins a long list of film-noir projects that end up stranded in the maze of their own invention.

A lip-synching hall of mirrors, it is essentially a piece of highbrow karaoke.

The Program, much to its detriment, concentrates almost exclusively on the history of the doping effort.

“Saturday Night Live” deserves much better than the documentary equivalent of what a book editor would surely dismiss as a rushed, careless clip job.

This season's answer to "Dr. Seuss' How the Grinch Stole Christmas," it's an overstuffed grab bag in which lumps of coal are glued together with melted candy.

Although this is potentially juicy stuff, it is as dry and tasteless as a shrunken piece of fruit left in the refrigerator far too long.

To say it feels reasonably authentic doesn’t mean it’s very good. Mr. Kelly, who directed the well-received “I Am Michael,” starring Mr. Franco as a Christian pastor with a gay past, clearly knows the territory, but he barely skims the surface.

In "Going All the Way," a flashy movie adaptation of Dan Wakefield's popular 1970 novel about growing up in the heartland in the repressed 1950s, Mark Pellington, a director from the world of music video, has inflated a realistic memoir into a garish, hyperkinetic social satire.

Although there's plenty of opportunity for low comedy in the notion of an emperor and an oaf exchanging roles, The Emperor's New Clothes, much to its detriment, doesn't pursue them.

A cream puff with a melted marshmallow inside it. As the temperature rises, the whole gooey thing starts to melt.

The Last New Yorker would like to think of itself as a comic fairy tale, but Lenny’s pride and self-delusion are too pathetic to be amusing.

Milk and Honey is the kind of nightmare-in-a-box you might expect if Neil LaBute remade Martin Scorsese's "After Hours" on a shoestring.

If Dot the i, the directorial debut of Matthew Parkhill, has a crass visual flash, it fails to give its characters any credible substance. Even after it purports to eviscerate their psyches, they remain diagrammatic contrivances.

It all seems - dare I say it? - of little consequence.

Tidy, predictable, excruciatingly fussy in its details and lacking the tiniest glimmer of humor, The Life Before Her Eyes contradicts the director’s claim in the production notes that the movie “is not a perfectly ordered experience with clear causes and effects.”

A bland, well-meaning mishmash that never coheres into a dramatic whole.

If the movie were a farcical free-for-all ridiculing the hyper-competitive world of college football, it might be amusing. But it can never decide whether to be an athletic answer to "National Lampoon's Animal House" or icky-inspirational like "Rocky."

By the time it reaches a weak, ambiguous conclusion, the movie has gone everywhere and nowhere, much like its psychotic main character, Bob Maconel (Christian Slater).

The saving graces of the film, written and directed by Chris Kennedy, are its performances, especially Mr. Roxburgh's portrayal of a floundering lost soul with little to show for an itinerant life, and Ms. Otto's ditsy, mercurial and ultimately touching country singer.

The performances are so skillful that the actors almost carry it off. But as the shocks come thicker and faster, the credibility of The Intended, wears away.

Its satire is too broad to carry much of a sting.

So intent on pushing its virtuous agenda that its characters often sound like mouthpieces parroting predigested attitudes.

Feels too cramped, indoorsy and bloodless to catch romantic fire.

Son of a Gun adds to the mystique that Australian crime films are meaner, nastier and more brutish than their American counterparts. But it changes style roughly every half-hour. And behind its macho preening is a preposterous, routinely executed story.

That Flipped isn't insufferably cute is a measure of its integrity. But it still strains to view the world through the eyes of children without a filter of grown-up cynicism. It is plodding and awkwardly paced.

The movie’s refusal to abandon commercial formulas and examine its characters’ inner lives suggests that the director’s years inside the Hollywood bubble may have prevented him from recognizing the degree to which independent films and television are already overrun with deeper, more sensitive explorations of addiction and recovery.

The movie is in dire need of character development and a wider social context.

An occasionally savvy farce that suffers from attention deficit disorder.

Bulletproof, directed by Ernest Dickerson from a screenplay by Joe Gayton and Lewis Colick, is really a screwball love story disguised as a macho action film.

Compacted into an 80-minute mishmash of interviews, confessions and sketches, melded into a shaky mosaic, the answers from a cross section of men are shallow, self-serving and ultimately unenlightening.

Where the director Paul Verhoeven infused the original Robocop with an attitude of mock solemnity, Robocop 3 has the energy and style of a cartoon free-for-all. [05 Nov 1993, p.C29]

Although these scene-setting futuristic details have some humorous promise, "Double Dragon," the movie they embellish, is an incoherent children's adventure based on a popular video game.

The movie never recovers from its jarring turn into a rushed, unconvincing caper movie with a blasé, Robin Hood attitude.

The grittier side of Coming Up Roses, which Ms. Albright wrote with Christina Lazaridi, is unconvincing boilerplate grunge.

A business course on cutthroat capitalism disguised as a slacker comedy: That’s the kindest way to describe Michael Lehmann’s Flakes.

A big dripping scoop of marshmallow sentiment topped with whipped-cream spirituality. [15 July 1994, p.C10]

Mary Lambert, who directed the original Pet Sematary, has returned for the sequel, which, like its forerunner, is much better at special effects than at creating characters or telling a coherent story.

Because Kids in America can't decide whether it wants to be a stock teenage comedy or something more, it ends up stranded in the middle of nowhere.

Although neither Ms. Berry nor Mr. Del Toro can be faulted in their scenery-chewing moments, these star turns make you uncomfortably aware that they are Oscar-conscious auditions for the Big Prize. Their naked ambition subtly contaminates a movie that, despite its fine acting, has the emotional impact of a general anesthetic.

In aggressively sunny picker-uppers like the Marigold movies, there is a thin line between adorable and insufferable. And in the second “Marigold,” Mr. Patel has succumbed to his tendency toward cuteness.

Watching it is like a slow injection of a numbing anesthetic. It may send a chill to your heart, but along with it goes a warning signal to your brain not to believe a word of this hooey.

There is a paradox at the heart of the film. It strains to celebrate diversity and individualism, while its processed music exemplifies strict corporate teamwork.

It has the loose-jointed feel of a bunch of sketches packed together into a narrative that doesn't gather much momentum. Its conspiratorial eager beavers are so undeveloped that they could hardly even be called types. You don't care for a second what happens to them.

As the film veers uncertainly between meticulous historical recapitulation and shameless hokum, it brings enough characters to populate a mini-series. When the historical details become too clogged, the movie shamelessly overcompensates by wallowing in cheap sentimentality.

Slackly directed and thinly written, "Airborne," which opened yesterday, exists mainly for its scenes of the big race, in which two teams rocket down a series of winding hills, jumping over cars, scooting under trucks and bouncing down stairs. The camera work in this extended sequence has a nice gliding energy, but the participants are so thickly encased in helmets, goggles and padding that it is impossible to see how the two sides are doing as they elbow each other around the course's hairpin turns.

The film is so flat that it leaves you wondering if Mr. Kaniuk's book is ultimately untranslatable to the screen.

Gets lost in a fog of indecision and compromise.

A mediocre gross-out movie that barely pushes the envelope.

The best and maybe the only way to appreciate Alice Through the Looking Glass is to surrender to its mad digital excess and be whirled around through time and space in a world of grotesque overabundance.

Like "Cruel Intentions," Swimfan is entertaining enough to be considered a guilty pleasure. But to transcend the teenage movie genre both movies would have needed a baby Glenn Close, and both came up short.

Written and directed by Tim Kirkman (“Dear Jesse,” “Loggerheads”), Lazy Eye has realistic dialogue and believable performances by its stars. But unless you consider subjects like saltwater swimming pools and the movie “Harold and Maude” fascinating topics, “Lazy Eye” has little to say.

Although it exhibits a heartfelt connection with the city's half-invisible population of illegal immigrants, its myriad inconsistencies and strained plotting are increasingly frustrating.

So oblivious to genre that it occupies its own special stylistic niche, if you can imagine such a thing as a romantic revenge farce.

Don't Tell, which was unaccountably nominated for an Oscar for best foreign language film, is no better than a second-tier candidate for the Lifetime Channel.

After a certain point, watching it is like listening to the ravings of an increasingly incoherent and abusive drunk.

Stoned accomplishes the unlikely feat of making the golden years before medical science and the law caught up with rock culture look dull.

As an instructional movie on the sport, Ride offers some useful tips, but beyond that, it feels like a slightly bizarre vanity project.

Bland, obsequious adaptation of John Grogan’s best-selling memoir.

Although the opening scene suggests a dark urban satire, Blade quickly turns into a cartoonish futuristic action-adventure yarn in which Blade is the only thing keeping humanity from being exterminated by vampires in a hematological holocaust.

Veering wildly between farce and suds, the movie never makes up its mind whether it's a spoof, a soap opera or a feminist pep talk.

Likable but muddled screen biography.

I felt tentative stirrings of admiration for an indie movie that so aggressively flouts the hard-shelled conventions of romantic comedy. But more often than not, I felt suffocated by the gaseous sentimentality and lightheadedness of a story that drops in subplots that it can't begin to develop.

A movie that knows much better than to try to make sense. It is essentially a strung-together series of gags, most of them thought up by Lloyd, an inveterate practical joker.

Strains to be the ne plus ultra of arch, hyper-sophisticated fun, but the laughs are few.

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.

This candy-colored movie, whose soft hues match the colored cereal loops that Alby devours at his mother's house, is a post-Freudian fable that wants to be a kind of anti-"Wizard of Oz" for a culture inundated with toys and toons.

Good intentions do not guarantee good movies, or even watchable ones. A sad case in point is The Kid and I.

The film's elegantly tricky cinematography and ominous, pounding score by Hans Zimmer (provocatively juxtaposed with the Rolling Stones), only underline the emptiness behind its technical flash.

If 1st Night had a glint of social satire, it might have amounted to something more than a frivolous fatuity. But it plays as an arch, hammily acted farce.

The kindest thing to be said of Movie 43, a star-saturated collection of crude one-joke vignettes made with big-time directors, is that most of the participants seem to relish being naughty.

Advance word of mouth has suggested that Ms. Basinger...turns in a performance comparable to Meryl Streep's in "Out of Africa." Would that it were so. Ms. Basinger certainly works hard at her role.

A movie that pits a substantial actor like Mary McDonnell, playing a New York madam, against a bogus story that crossbreeds noirish affectations and romantic comedy into an unpalatable mush that suggests strawberry ice cream slathered with beer.

A candy-colored, unabashedly sentimental movie.

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.

Were it a farce instead of an earnest, paranoid thriller with pretensions to historicity, An American Affair might not seem so offensively exploitative. The fact that it is quite well acted, especially by Ms. Mol, who has the air of a sophisticated 1960s party animal down pat, only compounds the insult.

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.

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

An interminable mess of a film that juggles more characters and undeveloped subplots than it can handle and even manages to bungle the setup.

Mental wildly overplays the kookiness and quirk.

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?

If nothing else the ramshackle, scatterbrained rom-com What's Your Number? confirms the arrival, heralded by "Bridesmaids," of a new subgenre, the smutty chick flick, into the Hollywood mainstream.

So preoccupied with delivering its effects that it doesn't bother to make sense of its story.

The movie has a frantic staccato style that is more game-oriented than cinematic.

The movie, which is crudely dubbed into English, lacks the raucous, anything-for-a-shock carnival humor of its American prototypes. After it's over, the only question worth asking is whether dear, cozy old Heidelberg can survive the slander.

The screenplay, by Mr. Cooper and Jonathan D. Krane, is so sketchy that it feels like a hastily executed first draft.

Too lazy and too loosely structured to accomplish much besides conveying some vivid physical impressions. There is no narrator, and the structure that exists is clouded by the new-age mumbo-jumbo of eight principal commentators.

So why? Why would stars of the magnitude of Mr. Cage and Ms. Kidman sign on to a project whose screenplay is so inept that the movie, even if profitable, will stand as a career-impeding setback? Can't they read?

In the filmmaker's nightmarish view, the heartland is a decaying citadel of ignorance, boorishness and xenophobia, smugly rotting away in the twilight of the American empire.

The product is so synthetic it has only attitude where its heart ought to be.

A depressing two-hour infomercial pitching Times Square as the only place in the universe you want to be when the ball drops at midnight on Dec. 31. (Believe me, it's not.)

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 low point in the director’s career, this sleek chilly film isn’t acted so much as posed.

A leaden, skimpily plotted space-age Outward Bound adventure with vague allegorical aspirations that remain entirely unrealized.

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

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

It is so vague, cliché-ridden and devoid of surprise and suspense that once you grasp its premise, watching it is like leafing through a design magazine kept in a refrigerator.

Breezing along on gusts of stale air and perky inanities, Two Weeks Notice is a romantic comedy so vague and sadly undernourished that it makes one of Nora Ephron's low-cal strawberry sodas seem as tempting as a Philip Barry feast.

A stultifying hybrid of athletic instruction film and Christian sermon.

Bland, unrevealing.

Turns into an impenetrable essay on guilt, memory and the fear of death that even Mr. Langella's gravity cannot salvage.

Dramatically as well as visually, The Musketeer conflicts with itself by trying to blend grand old- school costume drama and MTV- style rhythm and attitude into the same movie. The juxtapositions are often preposterous.

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

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

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.

Although there is the germ of a very sharp comedy in the intersection of real mobsters and make-believe thugs in a Hollywood mob comedy, Analyze That is far too lazy to do much with it.

You might blame Nora Ephron, whose screenplay for “When Harry Met Sally” established the formula that I Hate Valentine’s Day runs into the ground. Compared with this, Ms. Ephron is Chekhov.

In Ms. Mirren's first film to be directed by her husband, Taylor Hackford, since "White Nights" in 1985, her formidable dramatic resources can't camouflage flat writing that eventually veers into gloppy sentimentality. At times even Ms. Mirren, who adopts a regionless American accent, seems uncomfortable.

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.

Rob Schneider runs an obstacle course of taste and emerges remarkably unsullied, considering the choices he faces.

Doesn't have a genuinely human moment.

The Son of No One self-destructs in a ludicrous, ineptly directed anticlimactic rooftop showdown in which bodies pile up, and nothing makes a shred of sense.

After barely stirring to life, Night Train to Lisbon mercifully expires.

Watching Ms. Zellweger’s joyless performance, you have to wonder what happened to this formerly charming actress who not so long ago seemed on the verge of becoming a softer, more vulnerable Shirley MacLaine.

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

In trying to be both bold and nonthreatening, the movie ends up seeming tame and mildly offensive.

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

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

A thuddingly blunt contemporary morality tale devoid of wit and only minimally suspenseful.

A chilly machine-tooled comedy.

The weakest parts of Safe Haven are its action sequences, in which the illusion of reality is shattered by ham-handed editing, garish special effects and comic-book dialogue.

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.

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

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

The spectacle of two mature stars forced to grovel in the bathroom for cheap laughs is pathetic.

A supernatural thriller so mechanically inept and lacking in suspense that it doesn't even pass muster as lowbrow Halloween-ready entertainment.

If Down Periscope, directed by David S. Ward, has the ingredients for a lively spoof of everything from Mutiny on the Bounty to Crimson Tide, they are slapped together so crudely that nothing gels, including any sense of a coherent ensemble. The tone of the acting, which is set by Mr. Grammer's blandly laid-back performance, is all wrong for a genre that demands over-the-top hamming.

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.

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.

Starbuck is up to its eyeballs in mush.

Written and directed by the husband-wife team of Kieran and Michele Mulroney, Paper Man is so unsure of itself that its symbolic edifice feels like a desperately erected defense system.

The Next Karate Kid doesn't even try to achieve surface credibility. Under the patient ministrations of Miyagi, Julie metamorphoses from an angry tomboy into a loving, disciplined beauty in a matter of weeks. [10 Sep 1994, p.14]

Beyond its eye candy, this wisp of a movie, inspired by Arthur Schnitzler's play "La Ronde," offers only hints of the complicated personalities behind the characters' sleek, well-toned surfaces.

The body-swapping premise, which is stale to begin with, isn't explored with any depth, unless you find meaningful Freudian subtext in the movie's relentless anal fixation. But the premise at least sets up a farce that surpasses "The Hangover" in gleeful crudeness and profanity.

This is a movie that runs on magical thinking.

Quickly curdles into a nasty variation of the one-last-score genre.

A bleak, static mood piece about adolescent emptiness. There's little dialogue, and what there is offers the scantest information about Gerardo, who, as played by Mr. Ortuño, conveys an impenetrable blank-faced melancholy.

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.

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.

A slapdash, poorly acted, paint-by-numbers teen horror comedy, the sequel is too frenetically edited to build any suspense, and its special effects are strictly bargain basement.

May be the opposite of trash, but it is something just as disposable: dead literary meat. Dragged down by a stuffy screenplay clotted with generic period oratory, overdressed to the point that the actors seem physically impeded by their ornate costumes, and hopelessly muddled in its storytelling, the movie is edited with a haphazardness that leaves many dots unconnected.

The home-movie crudeness of Dead or Alive: Final indicates it was made on the cheap with minimal preparation.