Too bad this movie is more tepid than the average Snipes potboiler and even rustier than his mindless Blade pictures.

Bullock's character goes through some changes, but she never turns into some unrecognizably serious actress.

As a spy film, The Sum of All Fears is flaccid, and as an expose of nuclear threats, there's not enough information.

Whatever spark the newer Precinct 13 has comes from its supporting players.

A hollow, relentless mess.

Christmas with the Kranks is so calculated that it's pathetic, a warm-hearted holiday greeting card with not one scintilla of honest emotion inside.

Greenaway's film is about making people's jaws drop.

Tries to rock our world, but it regresses to a single-celled B-movie.

A film that really has no idea what it wants to be, so it tries a little of everything, and does nothing very well.

It's the oddest case yet of the Emperor's New Clothes. After all, the Emperor in the fairy tale was naked. This movie has tons of fabulous clothing. The people disappear within their wardrobes.

Shyamalan plows the same old ground of juiced-up surprise endings.

Because this Four Feathers is an utter botch, it might make savvy viewers feel that the subject matter is hopeless.

The film's storytelling and image-making lack originality and vitality. Nothing sticks to your memory unless you come in with recollections of the book.

A return to form -- bad form. Lifeless, unimaginative and almost determinedly uninspired, it's paint-by-numbers filmmaking at its dreariest.

American art movies rarely come fancier or emptier than Northfork, a down-home arabesque made of angel fluff.

This film isn't an enjoyable martial-arts extravaganza like "District B-13" or the "Transporter" films.

Revolutionary Road isn't just a failed literary adaptation. It's a failure of the worst kind: It doesn't even make you want to read Richard Yates' deservedly legendary book.

But The Ugly Truth can't escape its own ugly truth, that the central characters are written to extremes both ludicrous and tiring.

The surprise behind Town and Country isn't that the director started filming without a finished script, but that he ever thought he had the start of one.

The material has a definite "haven't-we-been over-this-before?" feel.

The residents of Beauty Shop never quite gel. Instead of camaraderie, the feeling is one of bare tolerance.

Bad Company is about an undercover brother, but it will never be confused with "Undercover Brother."

Lackluster in narrative and in no way original or innovative, the movie is pretty much generic Disney, a film about universal brotherhood stitched together from parts that worked better in other films.

Kids, except for the very youngest, are going to be bored.

Little more than an electronic press kit for the band, produced for the benefit of its fans.

Crush is the kind of movie that gives friendship a bad name.

Unfortunately, nothing in it rings with the faintest tinkle of truth.

8 Women would probably be a looser, giddier salute to show-biz ideas of femininity if it were performed by eight drag queens.

Catwoman is a mess, there's really no other way to describe it... It doesn't work as high art, and it's too ponderous to be truly high camp. As a fashion shoot for the pin-up crowd, however, it's the cat's meow.

Maybe this is a psychological thriller after all: Every thinking member of the audience will be driven insane.

Sheila Bernette, as an aged pickpocket, is less a stereotype than an escapee from some provincial British comedy of the early 1950s. But she steals necklaces and knickknacks with such finesse and gusto that she also steals the movie.

If it worked, The Fast and the Furious would put viewers in the same position as the policeman protagonist, attracted to speed but appalled by crime. Instead it sentences you to an hour and a half in a high-decibel limbo.

The serial-killer thriller of the week, should have gotten a life of its own instead of trying to steal it from Michael Pye's novel of the same name and several other movies.

Most of the film is one big blooper reel. There's not enough of a gap between the rejects and the finished movie.

Starts out mixing social burlesques and melodrama and ends up one more failed thriller about men behaving badly - and stupidly.

Two of the most insistently unlikable movie creations to afflict audiences in some time, a pair of self-obsessed anti-romanticists who spend some two decades doing stupid things at each other's behest. They also whine a lot.

There's less here than meets the eye, not to mention the ear, nose, tongue and fingertip.

The story is without an original thought, the characters little more than caricatures (unappealing ones, at that) and the filmmaking so uninspired that it's hard to imagine anyone embracing it with anything more than a shrug and a wonder why they didn't wait to catch it on TV.

17 Again errs not only by covering such well-trod ground, but also by doing so through a main character - played by a game but ill-served Zac Efron - who's about as dense as they come.

Misfires on nearly every possible level.

Ends up neither fish nor fowl. It's a misanthrope's "E.T."

What kills Max Payne is that the characters think and feel in slow motion. Half the time, mentally, they're just running in place.

The low points in this movie aren't just catastrophic: they're bewildering.

In this movie, when the honeymoon is over it's really over.

To his (Snipes) credit, there are few other stars who could breathe a degree of credibility into a film like The Art of War.

Sttrictly movie-of-the-week stuff. And not very good stuff, at that.

A mistaken message is a price a filmmaker pays when he tries to load weighty themes like the cycle of violence on an overgrown boy who scoots around on a bicycle.

At some point the foul language, lascivious sight gags, references to sex toys, violence against animals and cruelty toward children simply ceases to be funny.

The best thing about Black Knight is when it finally says goodnight.

Will pop your eyes without tickling your funny bone.

Giamatti provides those small moments of triumph that Duets pretends to celebrate but instead stifles with its sense of superiority.

It's not hell, but limbo, junior high-school style.

Never makes the Jordans' tribulations feel like anything more than yuppie angst.

It's a mishmash of "The Bridge on the River Kwai," "From Here to Eternity" and "The Great Escape," with everything complex and entertaining siphoned off.

Movie lite, a clueless, formulaic paint-by-numbers comedy.

The result is as flat as a year-old beer commercial.

All the characters are writ in broad strokes, making it impossible to sympathize with, much less relate to, anyone.

As shallow and manipulative a movie as any that come to mind.

A listless, disjointed collegiate opposites-attract comedy.

However you pronounce Bythewood -- I assume it's by-the-wood -- his work here is strictly by the numbers.

It has graceful layers and folds and a nice swing to it, and Jackson moves superbly in it. Unfortunately, I'm talking about the kilt, not the movie.

Meet the Fockers? Avoid them would be a better suggestion.

A ham-fisted cautionary tale of religious fanaticism that would have been hooted out of even 19th-century theaters as melodrama of the most lurid kind.

Is there anything more pathetic than a movie that will do anything for a laugh or a tear that doesn't get any laughs or tears?

Formulaic 'Chuck & Larry' is a crass, unfulfilling effort.

The movie has nothing to offer except titillation.

A movie made at wits' end. There are four or five authentic laughs in the whole 170-minute extravaganza.

Was the Swedish director, Mikael Hafstrom, taking revenge on the American star system?

Forget any hope of raffish adventure if you think of seeing Flyboys.

The second movie, Dead Man's Chest, is everything you feared the first would be: a theme-park spectacle lasting 2 1/2 hours.

A catastrophically messy action-movie mash-up.

The surefire laugh-getter centers on using a tampon to stop a nosebleed. Watching this movie, I had to hope it could stop brain-drain.

It's hard, bordering on impossible, to evaluate this movie without stepping on people's beliefs.

By the end, it doesn't even have the courage of its political incorrectness.

It's as if all the digital tools of new millennial filmmaking fell into the hands of men who had less storytelling sense than a campfire bard or a cave painter.

The latest failed Hollywood attempt to make a movie from a video game.

The Loss of Sexual Innocence is belabored, pretentious and often willfully opaque. [25 Jun 1999]

At least "White Chicks" had a point behind the humor.

If you're not a fan of M. Night Shyamalan's convoluted, teasing thrillers, you'll find that getting into this movie is like cracking a puzzle in which the constructor keeps breaking his own rules or grabbing new ones from ultra-thin air.

A karate movie so devoid of inner substance that it threatens to suck all known life on planet Earth into the void at its center. [20 Mar 1991]

When Catch That Kid isn't careening from plot point to plot point, events turning on unseen dimes, it's trying to ingratiate itself with stunts and chases that its young audience have seen done better on Saturday-morning TV.

If ever a project seemed utterly unguided by a compass, it's "North," the dreary new film from Rob Reiner. [22 Jul 1994]

Hands-down, the best James Brolin-in-an-Italian-accent movie ever.

You have to identify pretty strongly with suffering artistes to find anything to root for in The Science of Sleep.

After a fast, smart start, White Sands implodes like a black hole, sucking all goodwill from the atmosphere of the theater, turning those of us who started to love it into embittered cuckolds.

Bullock does her damndest to be nerdy and instead becomes excruciatingly artificial - a malfunctioning verbal fun machine.

Barf-bag baroque.

The movie is a premise in search of a comedy. Rather than flesh it out, the filmmakers put familiar glad rags on the skull and bones.

Jane Fonda coming back to the screen after a decade-and-a-half absence in Monster-in-Law is like Brando returning from the dead to star in a Police Academy movie.

Reprehensible.

Not since Rocky II has there been a more blatant attempt to recapitulate a box-office hit without adding any new attraction or appeal.

Not enough to keep Clockstoppers from turning viewers into clock-watchers.

The comedy of manners becomes strictly a comedy of bad manners.

Ultimately groans under the weight of its own quiet gorgeousness.

It's last in laughs, last in drama but first in Murphy ego, as he gives a performance that everybody has seen before, only louder. [04 Dec 1992]

Catherine Breillat's pretentious, meandering, self-indulgent portrait of a libidinously deprived young woman is nothing more than pornography tricked out as feminist parable.

Super Mario Bros. ain't no game, but it ain't no movie, either. The huge, busy, empty, uninvolving mess is marooned halfway between narrative and spectacle, neither fully one nor the other. [28 May 1993]

A story about unmotivated characters trapped in an ill-conceived plot.