The apotheosis of adolescent junk. Every sequence spews or splats carnage-filled effects. It's over-the-top, but not pleasurably so -- it's calculatedly over-the-top. The only way to get off on it is to revel in its prodigal waste of materiel.

I know Empire is supposed to be a movie, but for a while, I thought I was listening to one of those talking books.

Of Madonna's considerable talents, making the camera love her isn't one: The screen seems to go dead every time she's on it.

What's wrong with Latter Days is that its banter is pedestrian and its lessons forced.

Isn't serious enough to fulfill its ambitions, or funny enough to compensate for its failures.

A one-joke movie. What makes it misfire is that its one joke clashes with its one idea.

With a grating combination of naivete and arrogance, The Green Mile consistently overplays its melodramatic material, including a portrait of a black man that is as breathtakingly offensive as it is earnest.

The problem with Confessions of a Shopaholic isn't conspicuous consumption. It's ostentatious idiocy.

All this is out of the Haunted House 101 textbook.

Regrettably, Bones is what passes for horror these days: Throw a lot of graphic, gore-filled, darkly lit stuff on the screen, and see what sticks. Discerning moviegoers should pass on the opportunity.

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.