A textbook case of filmmakers who can't make up their minds about their characters; it's a failure of nerve disguised as dramatic ambiguity.

In this TV reality show masquerading as a movie documentary, Brian Herzlinger is a creepy voyeur, a run-of-the-mill loser who obsesses about living the celebrity high life but lacks the talent to pull it off.

Isn't so much awful as it is self-conscious, overdone, shallow, and just not up to the level of its star.

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

Coming and going through the wall's checkpoints is a tiresome and undignified process that makes US airport security look like a cocktail reception.

A sequel that makes it clear that the outrageous antics of the first movie had a one-time-only charm.

Like most of Hallström's Hollywood movies ("The Cider House Rules," "Chocolat"), this one is excruciatingly tasteful.

If the movie's not as bad as it sounds, it's not all that great, either.

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.

This nostalgic licorice whip of a movie assumes there's still an audience for a straight-faced, family-friendly salute to the 1970s heyday of competitive roller disco.

Taking wobbly aim at our country's complicated love affair with guns, the movie's the very definition of a cheap shot.

Even if the story is hackneyed, it's hackneyed in a warm and universal way.

A heartfelt but muddled melodrama.

It's as if a version of Oliver Stone's movie has been frozen in some fraternity house beer cooler since 1987 and thawed for the age of plasma screen TVs.

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 new Fog floats in on the fumes of the 1980 John Carpenter original, but the surprise is that it's arguably better.

Dreary-looking and painfully slow, but it's not terrible.

Keep your big-budget horror movie expectations locked away in a separate crawl space, because this grainy feature debut from writer-director Ti West demands that you buy into the silliness, and the cheese.

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

A tawdry, predictable hunk of movie headcheese, and I still had a pretty good time with it.

Here the foundation has been miscast. That's M-I-S-C-A-S-T.

Zizek is a revolutionary playing a comedian playing a revolutionary. Which makes him worth watching, even in this movie.

It's pedestrian.

The movie equivalent of a box of generic macaroni and cheese: bland, easily digested, comforting, forgettable.

Less a documentary than a PR package with a chip on its shoulder.

A watchable disappointment. Sumptuous to look at, tastefully dull, and ultimately rather silly.

Has a daft sweep, and if you're in the mood for empty swordplay in baroque settings, purple dialogue delivered with straight faces, and romantic yearnings that never, ever resolve, The Promise may be your cup of oolong.

Not horrifying enough.

This is a movie you could watch in your sleep.

It's not remotely as luscious or half as bold as Malick's movie, but it is shorter and more educational.

They're still fighting in this sequel. But this is a more visually inspired, muscularly made movie than its predecessor.

Completely unnecessary but painless, like dentistry performed by mimes.

A Good Woman is pretty to look at and fakes witty elegance passably, so consider it a diversion -- a movie that might have been in the Oscar race if the elements had jelled but has instead been properly hung out to dry in February.

Genuine, artful simplicity may be an impossible quality in a modern children's movie, so Curious George opts instead for mayhem under a blanket of sweetness. The little ones understand.

A movie like this needs a suave, amoral villain, so here's Paul Bettany.

Suffice to say that Shawn Levy, director of the "Cheaper by the Dozen" movies, is no Blake Edwards; for every finely tuned slapstick fillip, there's a ton of messy, family-friendly buffoonery.

Perry is a playwright, and his dialogue here is usually entertaining.

It's a heart-warmer, a well-meaning movie that sets out to wring a modern message (and preferably some tears) from a famous but largely forgotten moment in history.

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

Redmon's film is a welcome reminder that everything comes from somewhere and responsible people should at least pause to examine the label. For one thing, that's how bigger and better documentaries get made.

Ice Age: The Meltdown is pure sequel product that should make children and undemanding grown-ups happy even as it lacks anything resembling storytelling inspiration.

Not the knee-slapper it wants to be, but it's endearing nonetheless.

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.

Not terrible, not terrible at all. Yes, the plot is terrible, some of the jokes are terrible, and Rob Schneider's bizarre from-the-neck-up oxblood tan is terrible, but the movie as a whole is a more-than-acceptable addition to the genre of shameless and hastily made American comedy.

The movie partners all the cliches of the inner-city school drama with the cliches of the dance instructional, and the two keep stomping on each other's toes.

The Sentinel isn't an entire season of ''24" smushed into a bland two hours of movie? Does Kiefer Sutherland know?

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.

An acceptable but uninspired simulacrum: an overly faithful multiplex translation of a very, very popular airport novel.

Maybe it's the era we're living in, but the new film is as much fun as a shroud.

In James Marsh's The King, the usually wonderful Gael Garcia Bernal is all wrong for the role of Elvis Valderez.

The score is the most effective thing about the film. Sometimes it's a suspicious, mischie-vous distraction from the reality that not enough of this makes sense.

The F&F series is the 21st century's beach movie, one for some beachless future world where the kids are crowning 25 and seem capable of living off of hair gel and exhaust fumes.

Very broad and very silly, it's a doodle of a comedy -- a one-joke idea (fat guy goes luchador) padded out to feature length by Black's willingness to do anything for a laugh.

Everyone involved in the film seems better than the material.

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."

The film is very near a comedy, and I'm not sure that's on purpose.

Time to Leave is an unintended litmus test for lovers of foreign films.

A so-so documentary about another fascinating, underreported piece of Harlem history.

Monster House is the first horror comedy made exclusively for fourth-graders.

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

Scoop is distinctly minor Allen, with less weight to it than one of his old humor doodles in The New Yorker.

The movie is as inconsequentially pleasant as its star, and far nicer than the title lets on, too.

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

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.

If Pulse is unsurprising as a horror movie (come on: chalky, soul-sucking freaks again?), as a campaign against the Internet, digital piracy, cellphones, and anything that computes anything (like laptops or brains), it's a riot.

Isn't as witty, stylish, or sophisticated as the similarly themed "The Devil Wears Prada." Material Girls is pitched to the Seventeen crowd, and it succeeds on its own terms. These days, even pre teens live in a material world.

The camerawork is steady, the editing patient, the choreography playful. It's a zippy and inspired piece of moviemaking. But there's one problem. It's playing under the closing credits.

The movie has a pleasing skinned-knee innocence that makes you wish everything else about it wasn't so shoddy.

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.

It's called Queens and, no, silly, it's not about six gay men who want to get married. It's about their MOTHERS. And this being a Spanish comedy of the lowest Almodovar-ian order, the moms are a lot more flamboyant than their sons.

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

Everyone's Hero is sincere and heartwarming; sometimes it's funny.

It very much wants to be "Garden State" five years down the line.

An unremarkable comedy-drama.

A good-natured but terminally mild British mockumentary.

Silly little thriller.

I'm not the first observer, or even the second, to liken the star's (Penn) portrayal of fictional Louisiana governor Willie Stark to the late John Belushi's impersonation of Joe Cocker.

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.

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?

As cartoon rip-offs go, Open Season can be surprisingly entertaining, in a made-for-6-year-olds kind of way.

To those filmgoers who wouldn't know Rat Fink from Barton Fink, this reviewer's advice is: Pass. The latest counterculture tribute by Mann, director of 1988's "Comic Book Confidential" and 1999's "Grass," is as proudly silly as it is informative, and it can't help that a critical amount of brand coolness gets lost in the translation.

One walks out of Man of the Year aching for the squandered opportunities.

What follows is serviceable action set to music you'd find in a video game -- or a military ad.

Everybody in the movie is so tightly wound that Walters seems a model of actorly limberness. She cuts through the movie with speed and mannish, zany wit.

Turns out to be rather less than the sum of its headlines.

Unknown is punchy and entertaining. Maybe not the sort of thing you'd want to spend $10 plus a mortgage for popcorn on, but a nifty surprise on DVD several months from now -- or on pay-cable on-demand right now.

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.

The film squeezes out its feel-good messages like toothpaste from a tube.

This sequel, with the return of the first movie's insatiably slutty Los Angeles collegians, is as vulgar as its predecessor and just as almost-smart.

A lark, with pretensions to be more.

It's taken Dreamgirls 25 years and several false starts to get to the screen, so it's a shame to see what a rush job it feels like.

If you're young, the film may intoxicate you. If you're older, it may make you relieved you're no longer young.

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."

This is no corporate project made to squeeze a few more dollars from a fading cash cow. No one else has been asking for another "Rocky," other than maybe Burt Young . No, this is a rarer beast -- an auteur sequel -- and it's so wrapped up in its maker's personal mythology and psychic needs that it becomes a hall of mirrors to which we're given a slack-jawed ringside seat.

The immediate problem with making a movie based on Potter's life is that it doesn't seem to have been very interesting.

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."

The filmmakers don't appear to know what's important, let alone how to pace an epic for big drama and maximum thrills.

Entertaining in a B-movie sort of way, and you can't help admiring its earnestness about the philosophical issues it invokes.