Look, I love dogs. But this film tried my patience almost beyond endurance.

The movie plays like a dunk-the-clown game at a carnival. Through intent or ineptitude, he sets up the Bush family and administrations as caricatures.

Despite these flaws, people sick of gross-out films and teen-sex comedy may be so hungry for farce that they laugh.

S.W.A.T. may be an acronym for Special Weapons and Tactics, but by the end of this routine melodrama, it might as well stand for Standard Whacking and Trashing.

Without Duvall, this movie would be as wet as Waterworld.

Blessed with some outstanding performances, among them Ribisi's.

Gibson mounts a convincing crucifixion, but his victim is the audience. The Passion of the Christ aims its metallic cat-o'-nine-tails at the viewers' nerves.

The Safety of Objects is just another stilted comic-dramatic essay examining the mold in the white bread.

Its pleasures are slight and fleeting, and so many movies have done what it does, and done it much better, that there's nothing to get even remotely excited about - much less to draw audiences into theaters.

Made is an amateur-hour buddy movie.

The dramatic content in Memento is as blank as Leonard's post-traumatic mental state.

How does an embarrassment of riches turn into mere embarrassment?

Never persuasively dramatize the agony, ecstasy and intricacy of composing poetry. Without that aesthetic component, all you see is that Plath's hunger for life couldn't compete with her death wish.

Lame.

It's hard to know what these stars are ready for after this fiasco. Maybe a fitness video.

Pious, high-minded and bad history.

The only question is how many levels of meaning can be plumbed from the phrase "Let's party!"

Forget chemistry: There's no biology to the star casting.

You don't want to look at anything else when Zeta-Jones is on-screen.

Manages to pretty much ignore all the strengths of the earlier film while exacerbating all its faults.

There's way too much blarney in Evelyn.

There's no irony within the film, but there's a whopping irony surrounding it. Just as Star Wars has finally ended, Rocky seems to be starting all over again.

Malkovich acts as if he's doing Shakespeare, pontificating, enunciating and generally overreaching.

Manipulates the audience.

Overblown sanctimony and sentimentalism as corny as the Fourth of July.

Method Man and Redman just don't have the comic timing to pull off 90 minutes at front-and-center.

An uninteresting take on a tired formula that is only occasionally funny and usually pretty gross.

Torque isn't a movie, it's an 81-minute soda commercial.

So, here's the problem with The Butterfly Effect: It's silly.

What it is not is funny.

The movie's own style is strictly an anti-style, all pre-packaged post-punk.

For grownups, this treacle is going to be pretty hard to swallow.

Roos suffers from fallen archness in his interminable new movie Happy Endings. He wants to be mischievous and ambitious and "human," all at the same time. He ends up with delusions of tragicomic grandeur that leave an audience fed up and dissatisfied.

It's supposed to be funny watching these two characters and wondering who'll be the first to start acting her age, but it's really just pitiful, watching two talented actresses...given so little to work with.

The Hangover is like an infernal comedy machine. Surrender your soul to its foul mesh of cheap cleverness and vulgarity. and you howl like a delighted demon. Resist, and you feel all sense and sensibility being crushed in its cogs.

The movie gives us a time machine that resembles a twin-engined Mixmaster and a script that was tossed together inside one.

So what do we have here? Lots of cars going very fast.

Alex & Emma is a literary-minded romantic comedy that barely passes English, and flunks chemistry.

This new version may be closer to the Cole Porter biography, but it's hardly any more true to life. There is no life in this movie. It's a brittle contraption of a biopic.

The result is a flabby, episodic phantasmagoria.

Nolan pushes the twilight-zone atmosphere so hard that it loses its capacity for mystery. When it's not assaulting us with jolting audiovisual expressions of fatigue, this movie plays like a pedestrian response to David Lynch's effortlessly eerie "Twin Peaks."

This Women doesn't take place in reality or even in a glamorous urban fantasyland. It's strictly TV Land.

At least The Honeymooners is not one of those remakes that looks bad compared to the original. It's just bad, period.

An only fitfully engaging L.A. soap opera.

And Witherspoon? She does the American equivalent of a mechanical British performance: She hits every note too perfectly. There's no shadow to her smile.

Brain-softener.

Busy, over-stylized mess of a movie.

Formless, feckless, mindless, directionless and at times stunningly humorless.

By the end, this movie's balancing act is the equivalent of network news' equal-time laws. The "fairness" becomes deadening.

There's little that's special about Underclassman, certainly nothing that Murphy and Eddie Griffin haven't done better in movies far funnier than this.

Wonderland marks a "biopic" first: Moviegoers will know less about the real-life subject going out than they did going in.

A mess, but it means well.

There's nothing about The Wedding Date that isn't forced or labored; there's only a stubborn determination to embrace every cliche and make sure the stars photograph well.

Hanks tries his hand at a king-size heartless comic role, and flubs it terribly. He looks slack and pasty and, what's worse, sounds slack and pasty.

Garfield the comic strip stopped being funny about 10 years ago. Garfield the Movie makes it to about the 10-minute mark before tedium sets in.

Needs a story.

The movie goes awry from the opening shots.

All in all, Jennifer 8 is about four bricks shy a load and two hours too long.

This sophomoric film has little to do with Elvis, and everything to do with putting as much carnage as possible on screen under the guise of art, poetry, choreography, taxidermy.

It's no compliment to say a movie is "all of a piece" if the piece is all worn out. For all its surface harshness, this movie is a star vehicle at once rickety and cozy.

A visionary sort of horror movie should ponder three words: "Bram Stoker's Dracula."

Offers jaw-dropping visuals, but its troubling images of violence may cause this revolutionary effort to miss the evolutionary boat.

Rock Star neither touches a raw nerve nor garners any resonance as a period piece. You'd be better off renting "This is Spinal Tap."

If you put the word Tired first, it would perfectly describe the movie.

This movie makes it official: No matter how awful, even the networks and basic cable are now officially hipper than the studios.

To be fair, Friedkin does amp up the tension when called for. If only it were all for some purpose, or in service to a story that actually went somewhere.

A hollow excuse for an erotic mystery.

Beyond Borders keeps angling for a peace prize; it might have won more hearts and minds if it came together as a movie.

The astonishing brio and verve of street dancing deserves better than this.

Failed marital farce.

It's hard to go wrong with a movie full of talking dogs. But the makers of Beverly Hills Chihuahua sure try.

Under the guidance of Jon Avnet, they're (De Niro/Pacino) both playing New York police detectives - partners, no less - in the cop-and-serial-killer tale Righteous Kill, and they're thunderously mediocre.

Heaven knows what the suits at Disney were thinking, for what they ended up with was a bland Jackie Chan movie and a lifeless travelogue.

(Perry and Willis) are blown off the screen by Amanda Peet and Natasha Henstridge.

Tries to be both poignant and wicked, and succeeds at neither.

It seems that in the movies, at least, there is a limit to how far low expectations can take you.

No visual style, amateur effects.

The only hope for Inglourious Basterds is that audiences will embrace it the way the Broadway crowd did "Springtime for Hitler": because it's so bad they think it's good.

Like Adam Sandler's "Mr. Deeds," this is a hybrid, hipster-cornball movie that wants to celebrate common folk but unapologetically uses words like "trailer trash" to describe them.

Painstakingly painful.

The biggest crime of Van Helsing is that it resurrects classic monsters and fails to make them scary. With a full 132 minutes of feeble jokes and gimcrack phantasmagoria, it's not spine-tingling - it's butt-numbing.

Simply go out and rent the original. In the thin ranks of killer-power-tool flicks, it's still the standard to beat.

Congratulations, Renny Harlin. You've successfully exorcised all the horror out of The Exorcist.

The supernatural stuff is ho-hum, the dubbing is sloppy and the action will only make you pine for the younger, hungrier and more injury-prone Jackie.

The only reason to see Nights in Rodanthe is to check in with Diane Lane.

As sweet and hopeless and silly as a doting dad framing his second-grader's latest finger-painting and calling it a Matisse.

Luhrmann steals good ideas, fair ideas and terrible ideas - anything that once moved him when he was a little boy. He's turned Australia into a more-than-you-can-eat buffet of colorful kitsch.

You won't believe the story director George Clooney and his goofball TV host are trying to sell. Really.

Plays like Abbott and Costello Meet Conan the Barbarian.

It's disconcerting to see Ferrell, a master of macho psychosis, adopt the stop-and-go dithering of Woody Allen-style neurosis.

It's hard to figure who this picture is supposed to be for. Although a cartoon, it's way too mean-spirited and crass for young kids (parents, be forewarned!). And the idea that any substantial number of adults would find this sort of thing entertaining ... let's pray civilization hasn't come to that.

The film is hapless. The gap between the moviemakers' ambition and their wit is dizzying. It's as if they thought they were filming The Importance of Being Unimportant.

As each male-female relationship works itself out in ways either contrived or predictable, here's betting you wind up more disappointed than enlightened.

An underlit, overlong, underwritten and overloud albatross of a movie.

The unearned air of moralism that wafts through 15 Minutes pollutes its entertainment value.

Strings of four-letter words are a poor substitute for dialogue, and it's not until the movie is almost over that someone realizes there's no reason, other than assumed macho posturing, for Cube's character to go after these bad guys so hard.

A violent, dumb, offensive mess.

But worse, it never offers much of a mystery at all, for the identity of the killer arrives with no great surprise, and without a clue as to his motive.