Wesley Morris

This isn't a genre-less character study, it's myopic romantic comedy, and watching a woman of Catherine Zeta-Jones's easy carnality and fathomless beauty compete for the attention of Gerard Butler, who's pining for Jessica Biel, is dismaying, like spotting Anna Wintour in line at a soup kitchen.

The Strip makes you appreciate what hard work effortless comedy is.

For Hilton haters, the stupid and grotesque remake of House of Wax will only stoke their schadenfreude.

The lack of sexual tension is astounding.

Stardust certainly could have gone somewhere fun. But the magic and zip you need to get a blimp like this off the ground is scarce.

The casting alone should warn you about what kind of bottom this movie's going to hit.

The movie treats trysting as comedy and yet is stingy with the laughs.

Boring, mediocre movie.

Never achieves the exhilarating feat of exemplifying the types of Hollywood movies it wants to unpack.

Swing Vote is a satire that's afraid to satirize.

It's doom that we're meant to feel here. And repulsion. I hate to say, but I shrugged.

Like so many of these farm-raised films, this one looks polished, but takes no risks, offers no surprises, and contains a final sequence that's laughable for its lack of courage.

Between fights, the film can't even rely on the luxury of Lindo, Isaiah Washington, Russell Wong, Rottweiler rapper DMX or the scary Henry O as Han's father to make it watchable - the dialogue is wreaking more havoc than Li.

There is much to learn from Picasso and Braque Go to the Movies. First, a wealth of sharp professorial minds and great artistic eyes is no guarantee of equivalent documentary moviemaking. Second, when making a sort of thesis statement, it helps to have a thesis.

You could cast this movie with potato chips and still get cheers when one of the bad guys is cuffed. It doesn't matter that none of it is to be believed.

It’s a fascinating story: part genetic mystery, part socio-racial tragedy. However, Laing’s life, despite its inherent melodrama, does not automatically lend itself to the screen.

Watching the movie made me long for the big , risky ideas and entertainingly fearless filmmaking in David O. Russell's "I Heart Huckabees " and Spike Jonze's "Adaptation ," which Kaufman wrote. Both were similarly conceptual escapades, but they let it all hang out.

The secret here is that the movie is rather tasteless. It has the high, slightly nauseating stink of perfume on garbage.

The movie is a work of ambivalence. Is English making fun of these women? Or is she making a pilot for Lifetime?

Good Deeds is the first of the 11 movies he's written and directed to try a one-tone-fits-all approach. Sadly, that tone is funereal, and it's always a beat out of step with the rhythms of both real life and most movies.

Watching Granger and Priya chase each other around a hotel like squirrels in a park, you wonder what these two see in each other.

A one-trick action thriller that feels like a poor cousin of an episode of ''24." Call it ''12."

Franco can be exhilarating in movies -- tremulous, unhinged, a little wild. Here his jaw never stops quivering and his eyes stay welled up, advertising a breakdown that never comes. Not that Myles has a presence a man would fall apart over. She's too professional to drive anybody crazy.

It's actually a pretty lousy thriller.

Finding Home is well meant and earnest but is stretched to almost twice what would have been a comfortable length.

Seeing her (Kidman) in junk like this is a bit like watching the Queen of England eat a Taco Bell chalupa.

Noe's summation is an ideological sucker-punch from a filmmaker who gets off on abusive relationships. He may as well have thrown a big ''whatever'' up on the screen.

The horrible anticipation he [Aja] builds is derailed by a gimmick that makes the twist in, say, ''Fight Club" seem perfectly logical. To say more would be to ruin the movie, and why should I do that when its own makers have done it for you?

At the very least, a movie like this requires coherence to stay afloat. Barring that, it needs a star to distract us.

Nothing works. Or some of it works, but that doesn't matter because what's working is so deeply, painfully boring.

Some bad movies can make you feel awful for the people who made them and worse for the audience that shows up. The actors, the script, the camera: There's nowhere good they can go. For Greater Glory is that kind of bad movie: a total embarrassment.

Unlike most of what Moore has been in, Dedication is unlikely to delight retirement homes on movie night. But it's not imaginative, lively, or true enough to speak to its intended audience of American Apparel shoppers, either. It's a slog.

The most popular facial expression for victims in The Grudge 2 is something I'd like to call "deep befuddlement." This time "deep befuddlement" goes double for paying customers.

The Hollywood version of one of those fawning "60 Minutes" segments about musical prodigies. For most of it, I could hear the congested awe of Morley Safer.

It plays better as exasperating comedy than genuine horror -- although there is something terrifying about being stuck in a movie whose idea of a bogeyman is a scarecrow with an eating disorder.

If Bunraku were serious about subverting or reinventing the genres it's cobbled together, Moore would play the gunslinger or the samurai or the crime boss. But no. All she gets are a couple of scenes that demonstrate that she still looks great soaking wet.

Perhaps Employee of the Month, which was typed then directed by Greg Coolidge, is unfolding in the key of satire. But you'd have to be a dog to hear it.

Human trafficking is an awful societal issue, and Trade happens to be an awful movie about human trafficking.

Brainless thriller.

It’s like Bob Fosse night at the martial-arts studio. Most of the killing here is done with bladed throwing stars that, like the ninjas themselves, arrive from nowhere. They appear to have been used to edit the film as well.

The Bounty Hunter does give Christine Baranski, as an Atlantic City entertainer and Mama Aniston, another opportunity to enthrall us with her drag-queenliness.

Because Spun is so plotless it's almost avant-garde, we're meant to be delighted with its assortment of set pieces.

Drillbit Taylor sounds like a rediscovered blaxploitation movie or a name near the top of the NFL draft.

It’s unclear what Amy Adams did to deserve Leap Year, but all that’s missing from the movie is a set of jailhouse bars over her scenes.

Offers cliches instead of chills.

Creaky, earnest melodrama.

The movie is swept up in earnest self-importance.

For better and worse, the movie is more attractive and competently assembled than its schlock peers. That's refreshing, but it hardly excuses the appalling lack of suspense, intermittent tastelessness, or shockingly low camp quotient.

Almost nothing works in this movie.

This story could have gone in a number of more inspiring allegorical directions but winds up your average bedtime story instead.

The sex bits are flat, the racial innuendo is flatter, and somewhere, Cosby is having a Pudding Pop and shaking his head in disbelief.

Rarely is a movie audience asked to put up with so much noise for such a thankless payoff.

As lifeless and unneeded as The A-Team is, it might have been worse.

Blithely inept.

The movie might have been more tolerable had Besson searched harder for a performer and not a specimen. Barbara Stanwyck in her prime might have made more sense.

Gabizon never establishes a consistent tone or point of view. Instead, we hop from one episode to the next, with no momentum and no reason to care about these people.

The only recommendable thing about Norbit is that he's not as bad as every other person in this movie.

The average Bollywood routine is passionately cheesy. This movie seems cursed with a lactose intolerance.

A slick but dull new shoot- ' em-up from Jamaica, doesn't penetrate the mysteries of high-rolling, high-risk thug life.

This is all a long way of saying that the best way to better understand the man who made those and dozens of other movies is simply to see them. There's no case to be made for a mangy shortcut like Hitchcock. It's all surface and formula.

When it's funny it's uproarious. Otherwise, you're crestfallen to discover that the movie is a relentless sucker punch to black entrepreneurship.

The strip is now a cartoonish sitcom pretending to be a romantic comedy about a drama queen and his adventures in lust. The movie might have gotten away with it, were it interested in romance or comedy.

An erotic thriller. It is also an Atom Egoyan picture, which means any claims either to actual eroticism or conventional thrills are theoretical at best.

The most dispiriting thing about Anger Management is that its cameos seem like leftovers.

Too dumb to realize that the senselessness is viral.

A sorry excuse for a ghetto SOS.

There's nothing really wrong with it -- it's bad, but no worse than it needs to be, which is the problem.

The directors don't know how to make this new plot funny or infectious. Most promises of comedic pleasure go as unfulfilled Stifler's T-shirt. This movie hasn't a clue where to begin the donation process.

For too long, this movie asks us to be interested in something that rarely in the history of the service industry has been sustainably entertaining: how dull certain jobs can be.

Comes tantalizingly close to being interesting.

Brilliantly named Half Past Dead -- or for Seagal pessimists: ''Totally Past His Prime.''

It’s network television drama, starring actors best known for their TV work and full of the petty gripes and mild worries of characters who really have nothing compelling to worry about.

It has no pulse, no apparent breath.

Just Like Heaven suggests that a post-coma Elizabeth might understand what life is truly all about. Of course, if being alive means having to live in this movie, maybe she was better off the way she was.

You don't have to hand the folks behind Dragon Wars much (the acting, directing, costumes, editing, props, music, etc: They're all off). But when they decide to sic that giant snake and those prehistoric dino-birds on downtown Los Angeles, the movie turns shockingly watchable.

Nothing about this movie works, not the title (it used to be called "Clubland "), not Blethyn's attempt to inject comedy into her rickety stereotype of a character.

This is many lousy movies for the price of one.

Even by the unambitious standards of some children's movies and many movies that star Caine, this one has a difficult time making a case for itself as anything other than an adventure in baby-sitting.

This is one of those your-roots-are-showing family circuses where just about everybody seems like a clown.

Watching [Berry] run around in that getup I felt embarrassed, the way I do for people who put on makeup before climbing a StairMaster -- it's too much.

A powerful film of suffering and sacrifice and desperation. But it's vacuous, banal, and, where its mix of sentiment and grisliness is concerned, rather despicable.

Jeff Who Lives at Home devotes so much of itself to mocking the loneliness and personal shortcomings of these characters that once it stops jabbing and turns serious, you start laughing.

An overblown urban crime drama that should be a lot better than it is.

Neither (Bullock/Reynolds) brings out anything good in the other, and watching them try hurts the eyes, the tummy, and the libido.

Rarely have clips from so many good and great movies been put to such dull use.

Seeing her (Schilling) and Efron fumble at each other is like watching a stick of butter and a bag of flour not turn into a cake.

Fired Up feels like everybody's first time doing anything - writing, acting, directing, cheerleading.

Miserable as it crawls for two eternal hours toward being "life-affirming."

Lila is all come-ons without any charm.

The thrill of the ridiculousness is gone. So is all the mystery that made Statham so appealing in the first place.

This is not a movie. It's a coming attraction for a theme park.

Like the horror-flick hacks who infest Hollywood like termites, the Pangs don't build suspense, they assault the senses with twitchy photography and Danny's editing.

There's just very little in Beautiful Boy that feels fresh or new or truly raw. The houses, that title, every emotion, even the false moves: They're all generic.

The movie needs Richard Dreyfuss .

I don't know whether she's (Hudson) drunk, stoned, or simply out of her mind, but if it weren't so sad watching her pick away at this skimpy, overlong romantic lie, she might be entertaining.

The finale of this tedious piece of Asian-ish action-schlock based on a popular anime series implies an intention to make more. One was plenty for me.

It's all emotionally counterfeit, and that bogusness infects the comedy.

I was not a fan of Albert Brooks's "Looking for Comedy in the Muslim World" (2005), but Brooks, at least, seemed willing to concede before it was over that his movie was a terrible idea. Spurlock seems opportunistically optimistic.