Wesley Morris

I laughed at the Wayanses' movie, and I don't even hate myself for it.

No one around this beauty-first rendition of these addled artisans and their brief, obsessive affair really understands the attraction, so most people just get out of the way.

The movie is made livelier by its bit players -- King, Murphy, Lupe Ontiveros as Lucia’s bigoted grandma, Anna Maria Horseford as Marcus’s grandmother, Shannyn Sossamon as one of Whitaker’s airhead girlfriends, and, best of all, Anjelah Johnson as Lucia’s car-mechanic sister.

The Great Raid amounts to a noble failure. This is sad news for those of us who remain hopelessly partial to Dahl's mean streak. The failure we can live with. It's the noble part that will never do.

Rush Hour 3 reminds us that Tucker is an utterly strange entertainment phenomenon: He exists only in the world of these movies.

One of those overstaffed, overstuffed "when do we eat?" holiday dramedies. Call it a double-extra-strength episode of "Soul Food."

Set in a vivid two-dimensional African village, the animated fable is jerky, odd but redolent somehow of Saturday morning and the night's sleep before.

Roth, though, is like a sociopathic arsonist, one enthralled with his ability to start little blazes and one who would even call the fire department, but wouldn't stick around to see whether anyone put them out.

The film builds into a lurid and suspenseful thriller.

Exacting but disappointing thriller.

The camera is just everywhere, from the point of view of everything. When I left the movie the other night, people complained of seasickness.

If good intentions were all it took to create a decent movie, Thom Fitzgerald's 3 Needles would be some kind of masterpiece.

Teeth is the "Incredible Hulk" of sex satires.

The movie Bonifacio and Famiglietti have made is much better as a bittersweet family portrait. But those in search of a mirror for their own weight issues will find a deluxe one here.

As it is, LaBute has cleverly repurposed his creepy source material. This Wicker Man, which wasn't screened for critics, is a nutty atonement for the gender assaults of his filmmaking and playwriting past, including "In the Company of Men," "Your Friends & Neighbors," and "The Shape of Things."

The punch line isn't that funny.

Shepard's Matador demonstrates what an Almodovar picture would feel like without his gonzo sensibility. It's Almodovar for heterosexuals.

You have to admire that someone thought it’d be cool to assemble three of the movies’ most fascinating noses for a 90-minute romp.

An enthralling special-effects tour de force with a lover's nook.

Bruce Almighty would rather go runny and bland, mostly where Aniston's Grace is concerned.

At its savviest, Scream 3 is a cheeky conceptual conceit, cheaply executed for the sake of achieving trilogy status. Instead, it's like a carnival that's been in town a week too long.

The first-time filmmaker aspires to show us what caused him to leave his neighborhood and stay gone for 20 years. All I can really glean is that the place was too loud.

This movie is crazy, but the insanity is electric.

This movie is to sweet as a dog is to a hydrant. But it's little things like that that keep someone like Diaz laughing all the way to the urinal.

Were there such a thing as a low-carb melodrama, Things We Lost in the Fire would be it - all the tears, half the guilt.

Fitfully good.

As wonderful as Testud is, her character doesn't make much sense.

It's a better movie than what's inspired it, but that fails to explain much. It's like preferring the line at the concession stand to the one for the bathroom.

To love Wilco is to believe in a certain rustic intelligence about popular music (and about yourself) and to embrace the Tweedy worldview that you need sarcasm and vagueness to cope with the pitfalls of sincerity.

This is bench-press melodrama, and it's as manipulative as anything Bette Davis or Jane Wyman ever starred in. You can't abide the shamelessness of any of it.

A fluffy piece of Disney nonfiction.

The movie is torn. It wants to honestly explore the natural wear-and-tear of the Grogan marriage. But it also seems OK with being something that could pass as a midseason replacement on ABC.

Demonstrates that sadomasochistic streak in von Trier that equates the raw with the experimental.

There is a good chunk of Lady in the Water that is simply too well made and affectingly acted to dismiss as a mere exercise in arrogance.

The director, Martin Weisz , doesn't lean on a lot of noise and editing tricks. He can relax, since all the scares are built into the Cravens' script, which invokes both "Goonies" and last year's instant-classic, chicks-versus-cave-dwelling-vampires flick "The Descent."

If 'The Flower of Evil' is not vintage Claude Chabrol, it's at least vintage mediocre Claude Chabrol.

Only theoretically, though, is this exciting. Mostly, it all feels like a lateral move that keeps alive a franchise without breaking new ground.

The film winds up stranding us in a desperate wilderness of collapse and betrothal.

Works more as an object of pop curiosity than as a work of popular entertainment.

Its seriousness is welcome. It's also a burden the film can't completely surmount.

Doesn't America's 50-and-fabulous set deserve better than a movie this superficial and pandering?

It's a self-conscious, inherently absurd tale of a rich black family invaded by secrets, lies, working-class loudmouths, and one or two pairs of pants found down around the ankles.

Crammed with such earnest belief in the power of love - even if it happens in the Chicago Zoo - it almost doesn't matter that O'Connor and Loggia have better chemistry than Duchovny and Driver.

A standard issue, first-movie navel-gaze whose cobwebs Braff meticulously sweeps away by directing the bejesus out of it. The photography makes loveliness out of the film's dank, hung-over atmosphere; the camerawork and editing lend the movie a luscious daydreaminess.

There is actually an occasional moment of inspiration, but as an experience, the movie doesn't hog much shelf space in the memory.

The most interesting thing about Smashed is the way Kate, the movie's alcoholic schoolteacher, never looks drunk - at least, not the way drunk people do in the movies.

Paul Haggis switches from the problem of racism to the problem of Iraq. The war is a better fit. None of the exasperating guilt on display in "Crash" has made it into In the Valley of Elah, a solidly made genre movie: the Army mystery.

Still comic, but bigger isn't better.

It's handsome filmmaking that doesn't surface until the final 25 minutes during which Stevo and company's sense of marginalization achieves the palpable, emotional import that's more expressive than anything its characters' have to bitch about.

Green Zone is somewhere between a blockbuster and a tract -- a traction movie. It whizzes and bangs and sizzles as it chases the truth like a dog off its leash.

Most of American Pimp feels like you've been slipped a Mickey.

A grubby little redemption comedy that in every way feels like a consignment-shop Jack Black vehicle.

For a movie, this feels inadequate, despite its splendors and, later, its social dismay. It does, however, have the makings of a grand postcard.

There’s something here. It’s just undercooked. The cinematic philosophy around these minimalist hallucinations comes down to whether the images ought to amount to anything, as they always do with Weerasethakul and almost always with Reygadas.

The movie gets lost in the gulf between standard, if illuminating, biography and roiling existential crisis.

If anything, The Automat seeks to burnish the mystique — it won’t be hijacked by social politics even if the company’s stance in such matters appeared to be the right one. The movie opts for a starry, top-down vantage.

It’s a shame that the shots here are all over the place — the stage, the sky, too close, too far, too kinetic; only occasionally, in medium close-ups, just right. The director is Sam Wrench, and it’s unclear whether he’s making a movie or a salad. Under the circumstances, he’s done the best he probably could.

You can see what this movie is after, something cockeyed but sincere, something in the neighborhood of Paul Mazursky, Elaine May or Alexander Payne. But the writing and filmmaking (Snyder directed) just aren’t quick enough.

As cosmetically sanitized revisions of history go: This is as good as it gets.

Mostly, Smart People is a failure of imagination.

Little Nicky is but a meek gross-out cousin of "The Waterboy."

There's something wrong with this picture, and the problem is there on Smith's face -- Smith looks distressingly I-was-an-Oscar-nominee bored. That goes double for Jones.

Waist Deep is a cynical excuse for the writer and director (and talented actor) Vondie Curtis-Hall to sock some money away for the kids' college tuition. It's as if he watched "Get Rich or Die Tryin' " and thought, "It needs more palm trees."

All the movie's good style goes to waste on a not terribly compelling conceit and loosely sketched characters.

It's the sort of movie that thinks cutting between two different stories makes it art. Usually, it feels like an exercise in art. There's a lot of calisthenics but very little beauty or truth or whatever it is the movie is going for.

Canner is either overwhelmed by so much impressive access to so many alarming business opportunities or lacking the investigative rigor to drive home the moral problems of these drugs and the existential problems of these women.

Reinforcing the chasm between movie magic and wishful thinking.

Martin puts a thankless gloss on the antic role he played in "Parenthood." As his wife, Hunt is the movie's saving grace.

An au natural (read: graphic) tryst-a-thon whose fashion sense is outweighed only by its bulky sexual intellectualism.

The movie attempts to both explain everything away and pat itself (and Norway) on the back once we see Noa watching President Obama deliver his Nobel Prize speech.

This movie wants to cover every base without thinking very deeply about them. So while a lot of ground is covered in 80 brisk minutes, the information presented is only abstractly useful.

Cop Out seems aptly named. It’s not personal. It’s barely even a movie. It’s a fire hydrant that the director and his stars use for exterior shots.

It's too long and self-consciously progressive to be entertaining, but it's too well-intentioned to be dismissed altogether.

I can't say why Coppola wanted to spend time with this man. It's like following someone on Twitter who fails to generate many compelling tweets.

So light it should wind up on the ''diet" shelf of the video store.

Everyone in this overstaffed showbiz sampler has been better somewhere else. An assortment of talented comedians, character actors, professional athletes, sports commentators, one rapper, and two former sitcom stars sit in this movie like too much food on a buffet cart.

In attempting to show us a love blind to class, culture, and color, she's (Chadha) also made it bland.

The Words aspires to depths greater than the sex we never see these two have. There's nothing for the eye to do while the ear fills with the banalities of two streams of narration, one by Dennis Quaid, the other by Jeremy Irons, all of it built around a lie.

For a little while, comedy ensues.

Paltrow makes the part look natural. She's not impersonating an actual singer, so she seems merely like a twangy, alcoholic version of herself. She should be stopped from dancing in enormous arenas, but her thin voice is rather pretty.

Jolie doesn't seem entirely bored with the routine. She has a laugh or two at her bionic image: Evelyn is a woman who uses a maxi pad as a bandage.

"Rear Window" never comes up in the Disturbia press notes, which is probably just as well since it steals that movie's premise but none of Alfred Hitchcock's wit, finesse, or seduction.

The film is nothing to be ashamed of (especially if you're Kingsley). But it's as if everybody involved knows what the deal is.

One wants to find enlightenment - or at least entertainment - in this reconsideration of Playboy and of Hefner. But it's tainted.

The movie is generic and shallow in its glimpse of the love and sex lives of a handful of young New Yorkers.

By Hollywood standards, a movie carried with such gusto by a 67-year-old woman has to be considered a miracle. And I'm not sorry to say I enjoyed watching her do it.

Every minute of the film is trash, and director Carl Franklin seems to know it.

It's scant to the point of irrelevance.

This new movie is a more credible, less grisly act of filmmaking , but it's a less compelling exercise. It doesn't have the ruthless moral reasoning of the first two "Saw" pictures, however grotesque and specious that reasoning was. But it does have a plot that revolves around a ventriloquist and her demon doll.

Shadyac doesn't film how his change inspires more change, or showing him, say, starting a school for destitute orphans. All we see him give is this movie. It's not much of a contribution.

This is a movie you could watch in your sleep.

The movie is so chilly and fundamentally empty at its core that we're more or less on the outside looking in.

Maybe my priorities are wrong, but this inquiring mind wants to know when these two will find a movie entirely worthy of his understatement and her naughtiness. This one has its moments, but it's also littered with action-flick junk.

Its finest moments come in sequences such as Alice and Darlene's prison break and the girls' final wrenching plea for freedom.

The movie is only sporadically interesting.

Gangster Squad is an almost movie. It's almost terrible. It's almost entertaining. But it's missing the shameless insanity of a wonderfully bad movie, and the particular vision, point of view, and coherence of some very good ones. So it sits there in between - loud, flashy, and unnecessary.

Generates very little heat.

What makes the film such a guilty pleasure is how Williams's righteous self-pity is perfectly matched to Collette's nuttiness and despair.

Osmosis is really an occasion for the brothers to take their culture- debasing scatology to a PG crowd.

The camera, costumes, and art direction do everything right. Too much so. The movie strips away both the grand weirdness of the circus and the dire desolation of the Depression. Diane Arbus and Dorothea Lange are exchanged for Vanity Fair.

The Patriot makes the Revolutionary War look like super-produced studio footage of the L.A. riots.

Determined to be inoffensively tidy and cute above all else.

The movie is long and uniquely bad, the last of Stephenie Meyer's four books greedily tortured into two installments.

It's a parade float atop which Streep can pose and impose. Sometimes her showmanship amounts to shamelessness. She wants us to watch her sack another part.

Studding your movie with friends, admirers, and sycophants is having a ball; it does not bring us to question the illusory power of cinema or the politics of entertainment.

He doesn't just kill a good buzz. He bludgeons it.

These movies are more about the experience of hearing girls and women who should know better holler at the screen. They could just as well be at a concert.

The film has a persuasive murkiness and one extended mythopoetic final sequence that's almost moving in its silence.

These are truly tedious stakes for an action movie. The franchise isn't worried about world safety. It's fretting over whether to start wearing Depends.

We do learn that love heals and that the movie's title makes a terrifically lewd little rock song. (Thank you, Sol.) But that's about it.

Works as a quixotic study of emotional quirks.

If you want to watch a gaggle of pretty faux-neurotic people hang out and throw quips, you're probably better off watching "Friends."

It's cheap the way The Grey wants to be both a Liam Neeson "Quit Taking My Stuff'' movie and an existential thriller about survival.

An archaic rail-ride into the heart of boredom.

I wish I could say there is something pleasurable in watching John Goodman reminisce about the good old days while impaled on a steering wheel in the Volvo he's crashed on a California freeway, but I can't find what it is.

It's fun, but the blatant, obvious kind that mistakes allusive cool for mature filmmaking and subtle ideasmanship.

Mediocre-TV-drama-load of formulas.

But that ending is a whopper all the same: a heartless blast of tragedy, exploitation, amusement, and general flagrance.

It's a movie so late in noticing a shift in American male grooming that for a documentary on the subject to work, Spurlock would either have to pitch it to our grandparents (or be a grandparent) or trace the arc of the shift and unpack it.

Fails to be the histrionic bubble bath that you want to carry you away.

A more convincing star could make this a degree more tolerable, although in Cyrus’s defense not much more.

A limp excuse for a coming-of-age flick, more interested in sexploits than sex, more adept at gross-out than girls.

Doing nothing special, Freeman manages to make the picture seem wiser, funnier, and more eloquent than it is.

The movie seems terrified of true psychological complexity or perversity. It's less a family tragedy than a lousy country dirge.

It also goes out of its way to give you a schlocky B-movie vibe by wrangling bait in the form of a bunch of Big-Gulp stupid stock characters - that's a whopping 44 oz. more stupid than you probably were bargaining for.

A feat of droll, refractive, melodramatic self-portraiture.

Runs out of fresh ideas about how to make its heroine look nuts.

Dave is one of the most ineffectual characters ever to have an entire movie built around him.

Timely in that it joins an already mammoth list of bad movies about post-hippie static, including the recent "Steal This Movie."

The crime of The Chorus isn't that it's corny. (I like corny.) It's that its corniness seems programmed.

The movie, instead, is a work of giddy self-sabotage that seems determined to matter and not matter at the same time.

Like the current hit "Taken," Last House 2009 packs a vicarious jolt that might feel cathartic to certain moviegoers.

Peregrym is like a secondhand Hilary Swank. She has a looser presence and might be a better actor, but since we already have Swank, finding out is not a priority.

No one tries for anything mightier than put-on dumbness because that’s the outer limit of where the acting, writing (by Jeff Buhler and Rebecca Hughes) and directing (by BJ McDonnell) can take this premise. It’s fun, nonetheless, to catalog everybody’s imperviousness to embarrassment.

If I wanted a Nora Ephron cuddle-ganza, I'd rent one.

Daredevil the movie strains itself trying to catch up with Sam Raimi's web-slinging megasmash. It's a faceless copy, right down to the muscle-rock groaning on the soundtrack.

The current, much better Canadian movie "How She Move" has a more realistic grip on the racial politics of hip-hop-dance.

Mosteller might be the movie's real discovery. He twists his lisp and slurry speech around the dialogue in a way that exudes far less attitude than the kids.

Gordon made similar lurches all over the map in his previous exercise in grotesquerie, "Edmond," which was based on a David Mamet play and starred William H. Macy as, of all things, a racist misogynist on a grisly bender. Stuck could have used some of that outrageousness.

The mix of mawkishness and polemic is naive. Children, though, will probably leave with a lot of good questions. A better movie would leave them with more.

Uses lots of stock footage and takes looks back at America's big transitional period as though the era came in a can.

An arcade game disguised as a love story, nearly comatose with cute.

The best and worst of old school -- retro but stale. Frankenheimer, along with Ben Affleck, donates what cool there is.

By 2009, the franchise has nothing new to offer. The culture, through video games and reality television, has caught up to the series and surpassed it.

There's a misery in Fassbender that's spellbinding. I rolled my eyes for most of Shame. But never at him. That face tells the story of addiction: the joylessness of sex.

The romantic comedy has never had a star as depressing as Jennifer Aniston. It's not the movies - well, it isn't simply the movies.

There is a mild pleasure in the sight of Jude Law pirouetting with a hacksaw through gangs of extras, but the amusement is notional. I actually don’t find him terribly interesting as a kinetic object.

It's basically a blaxploitation movie stretched to meaninglessly international proportions that leans on tired Colombian stereotypes. But if Saldana's aiming to be some kind of new Pam Grier, she needs to save more than herself.

Is a man with Asperger’s boyfriend material? It’s difficult to determine how we wind up here, but it’s strange that a movie ostensibly about a man and his lack of social options left me depressed about a woman and hers.

Like an ''Afterschool Special'' with costumes by Gianni Versace, Mad Love looks better than it feels.

It's a lot like a pumpkin spice frappuccino with extra sugar and extra cream. You'll laugh. You'll cry. You'll leave with foam on your nose. So cute. As a friend said on the way out: At least no books were harmed in the making of this movie. And he's right. But that's only because no one really tried.

As it escalates to a nasty conclusion, Alpha Dog doesn't have the moral or emotional weight of tragedy. These aren't the psychologically exploded youths of "Rebel Without a Cause," or even "The Outsiders." They're characters in a long, violent, unbleeped episode of MTV's "Cribs."

Guy Ritchie made a name for himself with scuzz, but even his shtick has exceeded its sell-by date. Nobel Son goes further, crossing the contortions of "The Usual Suspects" with the shallowness of certain intellectual family melodramas.

It's the men in ''Upside" who speak all the truth.

Blakeney can't decide if this is a quirky romantic comedy or a quirky mob essay, and you can see the movie thinking itself into a rhythmless hole with cement shoes.

The first thing you notice about this so-so adaptation of James Ellroy's novel is the shoddy acting.

This is Jenny from the blah.

The Collection is an honest title. The movie is just a lot of other people's greatest hits.

Cairo Time is a kind of bourgeois delusion. It's authentically aggravated but bogusly conceived.

What should have been 90 zippy minutes of jingling, giggling, winking fakery adds up to only about 20 minutes of fun.

The King of Staten Island is one of those 10-block-radius life slices whose smallness and intimacy ought to be a virtue. But the movie seems afraid of itself.

Numbing story.

It's a stupid movie by smart people who aren't smart enough to realize it's stupid.

Narrated from start to close by an 8-year-old, it often seems like a coloring book on tape.

Full of action, but no soul.

The whole thing ends with an urgent plea to visit the movie's site, which is partially devoted to The Issues, which involve such topics as "overmedication," "overtreatment," and "reimbursement."

In The Bucket List, Nicholson is human-ish. And Freeman is so human.

If only Miller's writing had some human zest. Nearly everybody here is crunchy, salt-of-the-earth organic, and off in a dreamland.

The unworthy new Hollywood remake of Japan's horror phenomenon, ''Ring,'' has packed on a definite article and a whole lot of hooey.

It's polished-looking, yet dull.

This is acting that seems more freaked out, more traumatized than it ought to for a movie about an unwanted houseguest.

An hour and a half of cultural and sexual headaches only barely leavened by MacLachlan's performance.

In a sense, Sandler is damned if he develops, damned if he devolves. But he needn't apologize for being who he is by turning a goldmine sitcom into a tame "Baby Boom" for guys.

There's also new piety and self-righteousness about parenting. Comedies are nervous to find the real humor and wonder in having a family. It's usually tragedy or nothing.

It's all been called Salmon Fishing in the Yemen, just like Paul Torday's 2007 novel, and, except for some despicable behavior in the later going, it couldn't be more harmless.

Its commendable, if juvenile, sense of erogenous adventure is sullied by bland technique, canned suburban punk music, and the fact that all the exploration does amount to maturer characters.

Part of the trouble is casting. This is a movie that needs a great or gonzo performer to give it depth or heft.

Sadly, this is the sort of movie in which the white Europeans do all the talking and worrying with each other. The Africans, for the most part, are either terrified, cowering, wincing masses or corpses strewn in the dirt.

Miley may vacillate, but for now her indentured servitude to Disney continues. The image that comes to mind is Princess Leia chained to Jabba the Hutt, but that's probably just me.

The director, Beeban Kidron, handles the proceedings with an episodic aimlessness on par with Bridget's.

One wishes Incantato was made of something other than musty air. Avati provides no real emotional counterweight for all the whimsy and nonsense, and the movie carries neither the force of morality nor the titillation of trashiness.

Looks and feels like someone else's better-made schlock.

This is the sort of asinine action exercise that needs a star to blow up cars and leap from rooftop to rooftop with gusto.

Takes a leaf from the "Psycho" handbook and abandons its star for stretches here and there.

The Last King of Scotland joins the ranks of nightmarish innocents-abroad movies, from "Midnight Express" to "Hostel," where the disillusioned hero fights to return to civility.

While Prisoners of Paradise gives us but an impression of Gerron's state of mind, the film does a powerful job of showing us how deflated, small, and desperate this boisterous man had become.

Bland though it is, "Havana Nights" could be the start of a globe-bettering franchise -- and across history, too: "Dirty Dancing: Monticello Mornings"; "Dirty Dancing: Gaza Strip Afternoons."

The best I can say about his (Diesel)performance is that it's charmingly terrible.

As long as Saw stays in that big, nasty bathroom, all we need to believe is the knot in our stomachs.

This tired little movie got on my last nerve. If Driss is so charismatic and so full of ingenuity, why isn't he using any of that skill to help lift up his family?

It's a self-amused, self-conscious, seriously limp throwback to motorcycle westerns of the 1970s.

As ponderous and overwrought as a film hogged by a couple of young hipsters named Roméo and Juliette can be.

The film feels long when it should be brisk, and it's bloated with stretches of hot, dead air. The racial kitsch goes nowhere.

The only person in Don McKay having a better time than Shue is Melissa Leo, who plays Sonny’s insinuating housemate. She’s too much by half, in an Agnes Moorehead sort of way.

To be endured rather than enjoyed.

It's pedestrian.

Well-meaning but trying documentary.

You needn’t actually see Fracture to know that if the charge is acting that winks, these two are guilty.

Part soap opera and part thriller, and it has the unique characteristic of being both undeveloped and overwritten.

The film is overripe with erotic symbols.

Moreover, what the film lacks in temporal credibility, it amply makes up for in sheer rawness -- the rawness being literal.

It doesn't belong at a megaplex. It should be playing on a Clear Channel station.

The film plays fast and loose with the book, until its emotional depths, spiritual conflicts, and Waugh's discreet humor have been wrung out.

Only occasionally do the thrill of the game and the passion of its players come together. That said, these guys' nakedly neurotic enthusiasm keeps the movie from being a total jumble.

New York, I Love You wants us to know that the city is a sexy, romantic, thrillingly random place where anything can go down. Sadly, two of those things are your eyelids.

Eden is "Once" after two kids and 10 years of marriage have sucked the music out of life.

A laughably disconnected hostage drama that rails against the perceived nightmare of inner-city public schools.

Watching what Howard has done with the book - covering up the lewdness, blunting the snobbery, and spackling the amazing plot holes - is dismaying. This adaptation has the stink of superiority about it.

Plays like a lost Rockford file.

Hollywoodland has scraps of old movie glamour. It also has shades of later movies that sullied all that class and refinement with a lurid touch, namely Roman Polanski's "Chinatown." But that's all Hollywoodland is: scraps and shade.

Technique is all you have to admire. There's nothing underneath the formal exercise. The film's coyness about what's happening is cheap.

There are moments when Hill and Giler dare to turn Undisputed into an episode of ''Oz'' - albeit an insipid, belligerence-, and sex-free episode.

The mess that's been made with all this money is maddening. This isn't economical moviemaking. It's a deluxe trailer for "Eragon 2."

What remains is Washington's volcanic and contemplative work at the core of a film packed to the rafters with raging bull.

The amusement it provides is cheap, disposable, and hardly worth the number of quarters you fed into the slot in a frenzy not to go home empty-handed.

Scream 4 has a smart beginning, featuring Anna Paquin and Kristen Bell, and one well-delivered line at the end that would have brought down the house in a better movie.

Some will find it chicly inspired, recalling blaxploitation's heyday with its grimy urban realism. Some will rightly find it corny, absurd, and an insultingly limited presentation of options for the most disenfranchised African-Americans: I'm still waiting for the movie fantasy about the pimp who wants to get his GED.

Sadly, more than an hour of this movie is given over to talking. And not the wink-wink Quentin Tarantino kind, either.

It does not feel good to report that a movie with Robert Redford, Meryl Streep, and Tom Cruise makes the eyelids droop. But that's what Lions for Lambs does.

About a magical toy shop, but it has some of the sadder moments I've seen in a movie all year.

In theory, there's nothing wrong with this unorthodox approach to Arbus -- attempting to explain her from the inside out. (In its way, Harmony Korine's freakfest "Gummo" is a better Arbus movie.) The trouble is that Shainberg and Wilson don't connect their conceit to anything artistically enlightening, erotic, or truly deviant.

There's the world-alteringly scary possibility that (Leder) might be trying to kill us with a star-studded "After School Special."

These are not the marks of true cinema; they're the makings of a droopy karaoke video.

Attempts none of the witty, provocative visual and metaphysical set pieces from any of the ''Nightmare'' movies. And it offers none of the real fright of the early ''Friday the 13th'' films. In fact, the movie is deeply, proudly unimaginative.

Director Nowrasteh seems to think the only way to save lives is to sensationalize death. You could trek to the theater and have this movie whack you upside the head. You could also just mail a check for $10 to the human rights group of your choice.

The movie is a serviceable way to pass the time: Kids will cheer the bright colors and funny new words ("Kowabunga!").

Lacks the creepy immediacy of even the most misbegotten of the found-footage genre.

Is, in its way, an apolitical comedy about politics. Or at least a naïve one, since those weapons likely eventually made their way into the hands of Al Qaeda.

Shopworn to the bone.

Fellowes is so desperate for us to like these people that, despite how guilty everyone seems, there's scarcely any pleasure in the film for us.

Audiences of a certain hipster disposition, in fact, will see Elizabethtown and pine for Zach Braff's ''Garden State," the movie to which Elizabethtown bears an unfortunate and inferior resemblance.

This remake is ultimately content to be repugnant.

Doesn't entirely work.

According to several sojourners who speak in the film, Amma is the embodiment of love. And according to her website, it's her religion, too.

Once the vulgar comedy dissipates, we're left with poorly photographed, bullet-riddled summer-action mayhem. The only thing drunker than Hancock is the editing and camerawork.

Silly to the last drop of rationed water.

The Others is great as a collection of acknowledgments, but a ghost story made of a bunch of ghoulish thank-yous isn't that haunting.

Little of the fragile wisdom with which García Márquez imbued that idea has survived this timid Hollywood treatment.

As insulting as taking the queen to the Olive Garden.

Buried works better as an evocation of "Twilight Zone'' eeriness. Even then, it's silly and gimmicky.

As the eviscerations ensue, the truth becomes undeniable: This is easily the most gruesome, most pointless, episode of "Scooby Doo" ever.

Rossellini doesn't do much more than show up and be a hundred kinds of ravishing. Yet there's a movie in her ageless face and that untamed bouffant.

A thriller whose title remains printable only because the right people probably don't know that it refers to a violent sex act.

Crime-by numbers-cop drama.

The result is a cheap and cloying contraption that doesn't know when to stop smirking.

Once a hurricane blows Gere and Lane into each other's arms, all the director's tasteful style and good sense turn into mush. Given the material, I suppose it has to.

I'd like to make a 911 call myself: Lord, please stop this increasingly fine actor (Smith) from climbing onto another cross.

The movie's afraid of [Stiles], turning Kat from riot grrrrl to Solid Gold dancer in the time it takes to drop one Notorious B.I.G. song at that house party - which is why it's the Spam of processed teen movies.

It’s bad, the sort of bad that knows what it is — campy rather than camp. “Campy” is camp with a diploma and a martini. And “Christmas on the Square” is a drunk.

It's one TV-movie romp that Kristy McNichol never got around to starring in.

The point of all this solemnity may be to pay serious respect to those rescue swimmers, who courageously look after errant kayakers or victims of Hurricane Katrina. But what we get in exchange is a movie that feels too much like a Coast Guard recruitment film. Who wants to pay to see that?

For a movie with such a misplaced sense of history, The Scorpion King seems afraid to have more fun with its own stupidity.

Frill-less almost to the point of minimalist, teary without being lachrymose, hers is a performance you'd think was great were the movie in a language you didn't understand.

Less like watching a movie than it is like being accosted by one.

In the Land of Women sounds like a piece of cheap science fiction about the last man on earth. If you're the lovelorn mother and daughter in Jonathan Kasdan's first movie, a grating romantic drama, that's painfully close to the truth.

By taking nonsense seriously Outlander never achieves camp. It's a comic book that's mistaken itself for scripture.

Whitney's body of work doesn't suggest a filmmaker so much as an opportunist with a video camera. He makes a very specific sort of reality movie. It's called porn.

Not particularly good -- meaning navigable, remotely entertaining, pleasing to the eye -- it does, rather nobly, want to hip its audience to gender fluidity.

This movie just seems like a scattered excuse to make political points without saying much of anything. Worse, it also fails to show us, with any vividness, how Mirit and Smadar think and feel as women.

All we have here are bits, so many, in fact, that Extract’ feels more like a collection of crumbs.

The party itself is something to see. A Pasadena blowout turns into a horny, druggy, apocalyptic scene culminating in riot police, news choppers, and a gentleman with a flamethrower.

Wimbledon is refried "Notting Hill" with a Teen People glaze. The latter movie also gave us an American star cheering up some tired British guy. Wimbledon is blander and far less worth rooting for.

A lot of the problem is that the picture's protagonist is both naive and foul.

A lark, with pretensions to be more.

A tall glass of hogwash that's terrified to declare itself the racial-healing melodrama it is.

The movie has to twist your arm to get you to feel for these people. But you wouldn’t be wrong to think it’s been broken.

A richer movie might speculate on McGartland’s life now. How does a local hero survive in an anonymous void?

A cheap, greasy time at the multiplex. You leave annoyed at having been hungry enough to have ever wanted it in the first place.

Had Stealing Harvard merely been a stupid movie about people stuck in a string of silly moments, it could have gotten by on charm. As written by Peter Tolan and directed by Bruce McCulloch (''Kids in the Hall'') it's a stupid movie about stupid people.

Formally, the effect is like watching really cinematic confetti.

Perrier’s Bounty is all stock material, full of characters that deserve more than the cliched shootouts and showdowns that befall them. Even the movie’s most natural impulses seem to come from a can.

Deal doesn't really care about the characters as much as it does the World Poker Championships, where Tommy and Alex end up. Once we get there the movie becomes interesting because Cates understands the game and its dramas a lot better than he understands people and theirs.

Unfortunately, there's never a moment where you can't see Anderson and his co-writer, Will Conroy, yanking on the strings.

Slow and ultimately distressing.

Emmerich does know his way around an action scene -- there's an exciting sequence in which Sam and his buddies run from wolves while looking for meds inside the huge ship that pulls up alongside the library. But he's a master of disaster with no people skills. The characters in The Day After Tomorrow are fantastically stupid.