The accidental comedy sensation of the year to date.

The results are dull, of all things. The movie itself feels like an overstuffed burrito,

Pure Saturday matinee kiddie fodder and this close to going straight to DVD.

Slightly better than it should be. For Tucker Max, this possibly represents a triumph.

For some, Atlas Shrugged Part II is a ridiculous movie. For others, it's scripture.

Worst of all, the movie's simply not very shocking. Madonna has made a career out of toying with image and ego, but this is a vanity project in the smallest sense possible.

Well, fair's fair. George W. Bush got Michael Moore and "Fahrenheit 9/11." Now Barack Obama gets Dinesh D'Souza and 2016: Obama's America. Both films are wildly partisan attack documentaries made by wildly partisan and generally annoying polemicists (D'Souza is more personable, actually, than Moore).

It’s an idea that could make for decent genre viewing, if only its cast had some range, and its indie reach didn’t exceed its mainstream-polished grasp.

The Strauses don't care about how to keep an audience. Their movie has no sense of suspense or dread - Skyline is an apocalypse movie that plods like one of Romero's zombies.

The movie isn't THAT bad -- it's just made-for-TV historical treacle that has somehow found its way to the big screen (and barely that; if you want to be moved or outraged by the film, you'll have to travel to Danvers or Revere).

Introduce the supernatural, and anything goes. Here, everything does. And that's a problem no one can solve. At least it wasn't called "Case 666."

Maudlin script mars teen love.

The problem in The One isn't the black holes in the universe, to which the characters refer at periodic intervals, but the black hole on the screen. The One is a zero.

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.

For proof that some actresses can take on a misconceived role and get out alive, there's Huffman as Lilly.

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

If unused spit takes, flubbed dialogue, and extra improvisation are so uproarious, why not give us 90 minutes of that? License to Wed is tolerable for about five.

At least hits a certain adrenaline level, and the stunts have panache. If you crave the ''Young Guns'' approach to the Old West, here it is again.

Executed on a pretty broad level, but if characterization is slighted, the ensemble is so rich, with such depth, that every few minutes another juicy turn keeps coming our way to divert us.

As dumb spoofs go, The Comebacks isn't bad. It takes almost every sports movie of the last five years ("Field of Dreams," too) and blends them into a single slapdash comedy.

Crude, lewd comedy that makes ''Animal House'' seem wholesome.

This is mythology that’s famously transportive in every sense, but the animators struggle to take us anywhere truly captivating, or even clearly defined.

The problem with the realization of this concept, Drop Dead Fred, is its lack of subtlety. The filmmakers go too broad. Where there should be whimsy, there is grating farce. The character of Fred is like "Laugh-In" comedian Alan Sues doing Monty Python comedy skits on Billy Idol for "Sesame Street." Whenever he's onscreen, he's picking his nose and slinging food and muttering insults. Early into the movie, he gets on your nerves. [24 May 1991, p.52]

Never having decided whether it wants to be comedy or a sentimental hand-wringer, it tries to be both and winds up being neither.

Deeply, proudly average..."Mean Girls" it's not; a plastic butter knife has more edge. But sometimes it's nice to know your kids won't cut their fingers.

It winds up being predictably charmless and forgettable, even as a travelogue or iPod download.

Harmless in the extreme and it'll mute your kids for nearly 80 minutes, but why not just treat the little yard apes to the real deal and take them to ''Spirited Away''?

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.

There is less eye candy than you would expect, and it’s underwhelming.

If ridiculous, hackneyed, gratuitously violent slasher movies aren't your thing, don't go near Venom with a 10-foot snake pole.

Stunningly insipid and pretentious.

I watched at least a quarter of My Soul to Take, the worst horror movie Wes Craven's made perhaps ever, with the glasses off. It was shot - and is available - in a standard format, and, like many conversions, the 3-D gimmick is like watching a movie through an ashtray.

The only chills to be found are courtesy of your theater's central air, and the suspense will come from the wait to see which disappointed kid in a hockey mask will be the first to slash the screen.

At least Dragonfly isn't contemptible or altogether dismissible. But it doesn't use Costner well, and it even more unforgivably wastes Kathy Bates.

What the movie lacks in wit it makes up for with variety.

This one, a comic vacuum, is close to amateurish. [22 May 1992, p.32]

No doubt a labor of love, the result is just plain laborious for the audience.

The latest Guy Ritchie shoot-em-up, is a joke. You laugh with it but mostly at it.

Gallo has delivered a clever suspense comedy that, thanks to a taut script, creative direction, and first-rate performances from its leads, gives Double Take more weight than one would expect from a genre crowd-pleaser.

If you close your eyes you’d think it was a commercial for a “Great Love Songs” DVD collection.

Shamelessly exploits the horror of domestic violence for melodramatic, cheap thrills.

Contains nothing original or over-the-top enough to make it a real scream fest. For most horror fans it will be kind of a snooze.

It is all style and no substance.

Probably would have worked better as a slamming soundtrack than as a muddle-headed movie.

There’s no redeeming this softcore nonsense, which plays like a script that “Storage Wars” stumbled across in Joe Eszterhas’s old locker.

The movie fails to conjure the wonder of the Ray Bradbury short story that inspired it.

An action flick loaded with cars, chrome, and silicone, is everything you'd expect it to be, and yet so much less: less character development, less believability, and most unforgivably, less escapist entertainment.

Bangkok Dangerous is bad without lifting a finger toward interesting. The trouble with it is that the people who've made it don't appear to understand life enough to allow any of it into their movie. This is an airless affair.

Not as desperate, unfunny, and nonsensical as its title. It's worse. Worse than you can imagine. Unless, of course, you've imagined 90-something minutes of bloopers and outtakes that congeal into a story -- much the way a scab is formed.

Follows the imaginatively bankrupt trend of remaking slasher films from the 1970s and ’80s. This time, it’s a regurgitation of Mark Rosman’s “The House on Sorority Row.’’

Plummets into the realm of ludicrous failure.

The Strip makes you appreciate what hard work effortless comedy is.

Cyborg is cyboring. [07 Apr 1989, p.34]

A sodden-looking film.

Armed with a dinner theater accent and hair that looks like an LP melted on his head, Turturro pockets the picture. As a demonstration of his newly accessed maturity and benevolence, Sandler helps him do it.

The Adventures of Ford Fairlane is a nonstop gross-out contest of absolutely no socially redeeming value at all, unless you happen to value laughter. Ford Fairlane is funny garbage. [11 Jul 1990, p.41]

A chick flick that makes its chick characters - and by extension its chick audience - look like hateful, backward toddlers, and there is something wrong with that.

There isn't a single glimmer of intelligence in Dirty Work. It's a must-miss movie. [13 Jun 1998, p.C6]

One Missed Call was originally a so-so Takashi Miike freak-out. Now it's a worse-worse American eyesore.

A wan, derivative entry in the torture-porn cycle.

It is Kevin Pollak who steals what there is of a show as Jamal's passive-aggressive, pressure-cooked agent. His comedic timing, particularly given the thinness of the script, is the only genuinely impressive slam dunk this movie has to offer.

Devoid of personality and has an annoying gratuitous sentimental streak.

See Spot Run isn't solely responsible for the dumbing down of movies, but it's part of the dismal phenomenon.

Staying Alive, the sequel to John Travolta's "Saturday Night Fever," plays like wet cement. [16 Jul 1983]

Always the way in horror flicks: These first scenes, when the characters are being tenderly established and the concept is still young, are the best.

Godsend makes swill of religion, science, family, and morality. It has the sensitivity of a cactus, the ingenuity of a square wheel, and the integrity of a CEO.

Should have been an inaudible man movie. Every time the characters open their mouths, they hammer it deeper into the ground.

The dismemberment and torture are now shtick. The filmmakers - "Saw" veterans - struggle to imbue this movie with the usual righteousness.

There's no excuse for Her Alibi. [3 Feb 1989, p.42]

This is the first time we've seen Myers in the flesh since he committed assault and battery on Dr. Seuss, and I wish the cat had stayed in the hat.

The result isn’t art but it is an improvement: a scurrilous, lowdown, sub-Tarantino action comedy that, unlike the original, doesn’t make you want to claw your eyes out. How’s that for praise?

Whatever character they bring to their lines, the actors' voices are mostly unrecognizable after being digitally 'munk-ified.

Cool as Ice ends up seeming tired as well as twisted. The man whom promoters call the rap-era Elvis has negative charisma. [19 Oct 1991, p.11]

Charm-free, incoherent, and heartlessly sentimental, this woodenly animated co-production by American, British, and French companies offers boredom and irritation for parents, needlessly scary images for tots, and, for the pubescent boys who apparently run mass culture, a flatulent blue moose. It's ugly to look at, too.

When you become a megastar like Arnold Schwarzenegger, you must expect your past to jump up and bite you - especially if you've made a stinker like this one. A great rental for frat parties, this Manhattan melodrama features Zeus sending Arnold, as Hercules, to present-day New York. [06 Dec 1991, p.62]

Eddie Murphy and Nick Nolte are back in Another 48 HRS., and so is some of the chemistry between them. But although this sequel is more amped up than the original "48 HRS.," most of the thrills are gone. [8 Jun 1990, p.35]

Vengeance has the odor of court-ordered community service. The jokes never rise above the groin. The trees look plastic, the characters more so.

If all the first "Deuce" had going for it was a regular-guy approach to over-the-top humor, that's completely absent in this follow-up.

Too well-meaning and too infused with genuine poignancy from Smith and Harris for the film to be dismissed as just a trigger for our snark reflex. But it’s a shame that the tears Smith sheds aren’t serving a better conceived story.

Director Tomas Alfredson and cinematographer Dion Beebe have given The Snowman a gloriously subdued look.

What's more genuinely wacky is what a kick the movie can sometimes be, completely in spite of its big, flat stunt.

Everything about Couples Retreat feels plastic, though: the jokes, the trees, the extras, the attitudes. It’s dumbed-down entertainment aimed at a dumbed-down audience - the comedy equivalent of a McMansion.

A reassuring little cheeseball of a movie.

Likable performances from its young cast and a better-than-average script add spark to this formulaic fairy tale and make the wrestling mania watchable.

Bloody and bloody funny, and Jackson and Carlyle make the best salt-and-pepper team since Eddie Murphy and Nick Nolte knocked heads in ''48 HRS., '' but ultimately the movie can't find a way out of its own dead end.

Just watch Austin on "WrestleMania" instead, avoiding the shower this movie leaves you wanting.

It's the latest in the blank-from-hell genre, in which misogyny and entertainment are made to seem indistinguishable while the blank makes life hell for someone who then is cornered into striking back.

So much schlock and melodrama find their way into Darkness Falls that when an exasperated character shouts near the end ''All this over a [expletive] tooth!,'' you know how he feels.

The tame, confused script eventually sinks the film, although Field shows skill directing actors.

Brilliantly named Half Past Dead -- or for Seagal pessimists: ''Totally Past His Prime.''

What's special about the movie is how totally it believes in itself as a musical. The tunes, co-written by Sandler and a bunch of his pals, take on rock opera and traditional Jewish folk music with boyish exuberance.

It would have done better to go straight to video, where it belongs.

Wirkola tears through Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters with such giddy abandon, it ends up being splattery fanboy fun. Preposterous, clearly, but fun.

The Bounty Hunter does give Christine Baranski, as an Atlantic City entertainer and Mama Aniston, another opportunity to enthrall us with her drag-queenliness.

Reagan is the worst kind of hagiography. It’s a wretched 2½-hour bore that’s uncurious about its subject.

Fresh or not, creatively merited or not, here it comes: the third installment of Martin Lawrence's big, dopey franchise.

Overstays its welcome.

The kind of comedy that takes the fun out of stupidity.