For all her prolificacy, Agatha Christie relied too often on one particular plot twist, and as soon as you recognize her old favorite here, the film loses all interest—it has nothing going for it apart from the mystery, which, of course, is no way to make a mystery movie.

Forgettable coming-of-age story.

This drama about Baltimore firefighters makes a serious effort to honor the sacrifices of professional rescue workers, but blasts of hokum keep threatening to collapse the building.

It doesn't display an ounce of planning or simple craftsmanship (the Jamaican locations are photographed to look like the banks of Lake Calumet), but with a cast like that, it can't help but have its moments.

Assembled by Gene Kelly, it jerks and sputters along through an overedited collection of songs, dances, comedy routines, and dramatic excerpts, with a strong tendency toward camp. Gene should know better.

Maybury's art-world talents don't include storytelling, and his visceral bursts of fast editing and extreme close-ups don't yield any full-blown characters, narrative, or political vision.

The ultimately uncomplicated view of sexual and emotional violence in a family is only tragic, not insightful.

A cute send-up of preadolescent stereotypes.

The exotic plant and animal life is enhanced by the 3D process--which makes the two-dimensional screenplay all the more disappointing. With its weighty dialogue the movie becomes depressing well before the final violent showdown.

It's all so overdetermined -- each encounter of the present-day lovers mirrors some moment from the long-ago day when they parted -- that it reduces their whole affair to a matter of last-minute revisionism.

There's something offensive about the movie's chintzy view of death and the way it periodically flirts with promising conceits (i.e., Goldberg offering her body as a surrogate so that Swayze and Moore can "touch" one another) only to back away from them in as cowardly a manner as possible.

Becomes blandly idealistic.

Dog slobber enthusiasts (as well as fans of dog farts) will have a field day. Everyone else will have to settle for a formulaic cop comedy that has Hanks but little else.

Far less insulting to Pakistanis or Mancunians than it is to its audience.

It's predictable stuff, though with a nice old-fashioned edge.

Despite a good deal of witty, bantering dialogue and clever plotting, some interesting moral ambiguity about the relative corruption of a cop (Russell) and a drug dealer (Gibson), and a likable performance by Raul Julia, this film seems overinfected by the kind of southern California narcissism that makes all of the male characters a little too pleased with themselves, with Pfeiffer little more than a beanbag in the little-boy macho games.

Thematically the film starts off like “The Believer,” Henry Bean's 2001 drama about an anti-Semitic Jew, and winds up like “Sullivan's Travels” without the comedy.

Ultimately Barker's style drains the life from the film, making it feel like an academic exercise as it becomes increasingly inert, emotionally and dramatically.

The heroes (Kilmer, Derek Luke) are all totally good, the villains (Ed O'Neill, William H. Macy) are all totally bad, and the macho one-liners are sufficiently adolescent to produce the desired snickers. I tried very hard to imagine I was somewhere else.

Unfortunately this is much tamer than it had to be--Rudnick Lite, meaning on the edge of evaporation.

A flat, stagy, artificially cheerful affair that falls far short of the memorably creepy Laurel and Hardy version of 1934.

Never really generates any serious laughs.

It's hard to enjoy the movie's charms when writer-director Todd Graff (Camp, Bandslam) keeps trying to shove them down your throat.

The direction of this clammy 1935 horror item is credited to Louis Friedlander, which is actually Lew Landers in hiding—perhaps understandably.

Lugubrious and rather contrived... Because this whole project seems detached at times to the point of indifference—no one ever seems to be having any fun, including the filmmakers—even one's clinical interest eventually begins to evaporate.

Dopey, violent horror thriller.

Bay Area filmmaker Jon Moritsugu (Fame Whore, Mod Fuck Explosion) is known for his angry, manic energy, but the characters in this video, denizens of the San Francisco art fringe, seem like they're heavily sedated.

The ideological reasons for the heroine's project aren't divulged, so I guess we're supposed to be fascinated simply by the fanaticism of her will, doubts and all. I wasn't.

Better than slick, though it feels pointless -- another homage to a kind of filmmaking that's had more than its share.

The film's oily overdefinition of various class and cultural categories (ranging from “poor” and “well-to-do” to “avant-garde” and “vulgar”) is strident enough to betray a condescending attitude toward the audience.

I'm all for bold screwiness, but this provocation seems labored despite the striking images.

After making his best and smoothest drama (Match Point) in England, Woody Allen returns there for one of his most clueless and awkward, outfitted with a standard-issue Philip Glass score.

Like the first movie, this has some cute gags but collapses like a soggy paper plate because it can't decide whether to mock or celebrate the heroine's shallow materialism.

If you've never seen the lovely Wenders film, maybe you'll be charmed by this low-grade variation, all of whose best qualities--such as the airy crane shots poised over city vistas and freeways--can be traced back to the original; otherwise you might run screaming from the theater.

A piece of cheese without much flavor.

Despite a few flashes of talent in the 40s, Edward Dmytryk had descended to hack status by the time he filmed this 1954 version of Herman Wouk's novel, and his ham-fisted direction does little to alleviate the obviousness of the drama and the thinness of the characterizations.

Someone had another Hospital in mind, and they even hired Arthur Hiller to direct it, but the attempt to merge black humor and strident social commentary seems even more uncertain this time.

Hunt's crabby performance weighs on the film, though it's nothing compared to Colin Firth's scenery-chewing turn as her self-lacerating new beau.

Gordon still hasn't mastered the simplest filmmaking techniques. The gross-out sliminess and sexual acting out are supposed to provide a purgative release, but all Gordon does is gawk at the excess for what seems like forever: his voyeurism is too unpleasant for casual entertainment, too mild to constitute a pornographic vision.

The first four letters say it all.

The failure of director-writer Peter Hyams to put any weight whatever behind the moral issues (crude as they are) makes this merely violent nonsense. 

The picture seems deliberately trite, blunt, and manipulative, as if the producers didn't trust their audience to respond to anything else.

Well, it really is a stinker, a compendium of The Deer Hunter's weaknesses (of plotting, narration, dialogue, and character) with few of its lyrical strengths.

Even Cinerama (its original format) can't expand on the poverty of comic invention.

Director Arthur Hiller (Love Story, Silver Streak) just puts his apolitical head down and digs into the mess without worrying about style or sense.

Jessica Lange brings so much energy and personal involvement to her portrayal of Frances Farmer that you can't help but feel sorry for her; nothing else in the film remotely matches her talent and dedication, and she seems alone—and even slightly absurd—in her feverish creativity.

Overcalculated, thoroughly false humanist mush—one of those “real movies about real people” without a single authentic moment.

Dead-on imitations of some of the characters from the television series created by Bob Mosher and Joe Connelly will seem pointlessly stylized to viewers unfamiliar with the old sitcom.

Cary Medoway uses backlighting and spatially distorting lenses to give the film the hyped-up look of a rock video, but his handling of actors is so inept that he must rely on the rock score to make the most basic emotional points.

To my mind, this is one of Robert Aldrich’s worst films, but clearly not everyone agrees.

Lifeless, uninspired, and crammed with enough hints of intellectual consistency to give the socially conscious critical establishment shivers of excitement.

Despite all the anguished huffing and puffing, there isn't a single authentic moment in it, and all you're left with in the end is the fading memory of two overscaled, Oscar-bait performances.

Intriguing but poorly executed ideas are the basis of this not entirely unappealing romantic comedy.

Malkovich is severely miscast as a heartless and conniving thug admired by the hero (apparently Charles Grodin was busy), and Hopper, in a paper-thin role, barely registers.

Cathartically disgusting adventure movie.

Awkward storytelling and spotty exposition reduce it to a string of rude shocks--not even the eventual denouement provides a lucid enough account of where this is all coming from.

The plot of this PG action thriller, a remake of the 2002 Danish film Klatretosen, is so full of holes that even middle schoolers might give it the raspberry, but a bigger problem is the three leads' lack of on-screen chemistry.

Even Neil Simon fans (and they do exist, believe it or not) will probably be bummed out by this stunningly unfunny 1976 parody of detective films.

John Frankenheimer is credited as director, but given the scrambled, multiple agendas at play here, he seems to function more like a bemused traffic cop.

For a filmmaker like Julie Taymor, Shakespeare's language isn't nearly as enticing as Prospero's violent manipulation of the elements, and this screen adaptation of the play-like her egregious Beatles movie "Across the Universe" (2007)-is primarily an exercise in eccentric (and, I would argue, empty) spectacle.

After nine years, Duffy has coughed up a sequel, and like the first movie it's energetic, proudly juvenile, and reverently derivative.

To boost this movie's rating to "worth seeing" would make me feel like a publicist or simply a dope.

A soporific ghost story.

The panoramic backgrounds have a silky beauty, but the characters are cheaply rendered with doll faces, enlarged musculature, tiny joints, and clunky movement. It's like watching Max Headroom lead his people out of Egypt.

The grad student and her boyfriend (Marc Blucas) are blandly written and the story never develops any psychological depth; the paranormal explanation for what's going on is equally slight.

A murky, directionless plot sinks this big-budget fantasy despite Martin Laing's elaborate production design; the dark, industrial-looking sets often recall "Brazil" but without that film's thrilling sense of an imagination run amok.

Carpenter's direction is slow, dark, and stately; he seems to be aiming for an enveloping, novelistic kind of effect, but all he gets is heaviness.

The end justifies the means as long as everything turns out OK for the not-too-obedient American soldier and everyone else who enjoys Coca-Cola.

Director Niall Johnson struggles to find the proper tone: the serial murders aren't horrible enough to be funny, and the characters don't respond as if they're horrible at all. As a result the black humor thins into gray fog.

Director Adam Shankman (Bringing Down the House) can't block a sight gag to save his life.

This motorcycle melodrama is so stupid that during the press screening my colleagues' laughter threatened to drown out the roar of the engines.

This remake is interesting mainly for the chance to see top-flight acting talent labor over dialogue so leaden you could cast bullets from it.

Jaglom's 14th consists of his usual weakly improvised relationship comedy.

Director Bruce Beresford -- not intending to be funny but succeeding wildly.

A deeply stupid and offensive action comedy-romance.

Keith is an awkward, galumphing presence, but he's more fun to watch than Kelly Preston as the girl's uptight mother.

Though we are largely spared Leonard Nimoy's stentorian presence as a performer, we must endure his miscalculations as a director: the dialogue scenes are often hilariously turgid; the action scenes—when Nimoy can be bothered to descend from his podium and film them—are zanily maladroit.

The narrative decays more quickly than the characters.

Two generic ideas amount to nothing in this theatrical dark comedy about violence and information overload.

Considering the degree to which Fatal Attraction and Basic Instinct are already self-parodies, writer David O'Malley and director Carl Reiner don't have to do much to show how silly they are; in order to understand how silly this movie is, on the other hand, all you have to do is sit through it.

When the story finally collapses in a heap at the end, you'll probably want your money back, but that's where the title comes in: "Next!"

Franklin J. Shaffner's deadpan adaptation of Ira Levin's silly story about Hitler clones. The plot is less suspenseful than the overacting contest between the two leads, Laurence Olivier and Gregory Peck, who spend most of their screen time one-upping each other in affectations.

I'm usually a sucker for courtroom dramas, but Rob Reiner's highly mechanical filming by numbers of Aaron Sorkin's adaptation of his own cliched and fatuous Broadway play kept putting me to sleep.

Loaded with facile social themes, opaque characters, pointlessly intricate flashbacks, and inflated technique.

The drama is torpid, the astronomy lessons pedantic, and the spear-and-sandal production values flat-out cheesy. The whole thing is also historically ludicrous.

The movie's repeated attempts to combine seriousness and humor as in a blender give it a dysfunctionally earnest tone.

Though some of his one-liners are pretty good, his shtick can't sustain this dutifully scripted comedy. Megyn Price, who's done time on the sitcom Grounded for Life, is a welcome distraction as the waitress with a crush on Larry.

The video is heavy on actors and other showbiz types, and the self-centered Gurwitch doesn't distinguish between a factory worker laid off after decades on the job and an actor getting rejected during tryouts.

This kind of wheel spinning comes from having the desire to speak but nothing much to say, and Smith, who's made a slight movie about his being a slight filmmaker, seems to know this.

The villainous turns by Jon Voight (as a hard-hearted Mormon bishop) and Terence Stamp (as a bloodthirsty Brigham Young) would have been more fun if they weren't part of such a clumsy campaign to lay this tragedy at the church's doorstep.

German supermodel Uschi Obermaier slept with Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, and all we get is this lousy biopic.

Aside from the waste of a talented cast, the only thing that really caught my attention was the tomblike silence of the audience--at least until the bong jokes started.

With so many dubious elements at play, even the half-good ideas get lost in the shuffle.

Packed with gung ho war-movie clichés and subpar shock-and-awe visual effects, this terminally stupid sci-fi adventure pits an army of tentacled aliens piloting "Transformer"-style robots against a platoon of stoic warriors from the Fifth Marines' Second Battalion.

Contrasting the erotic with the disgusting is usually provocative and can be funny, but not in this underdog comedy.

The paltry theme is that we can't predict the future, but I spent part of the time calculating how many more feeble movies Allen will make, based on his productivity rate (one per year), his batting average (four duds for every success), his current age (74), and his father's longevity (Martin Konigsberg lived to be 100). Are you ready for 20 more remakes of "Manhattan"?

The result is TV flavored, less a narrative than a haphazard succession of vignettes populated by crude stereotypes instead of credible characters.

If you can swallow one more amnesia plot and one more recycling of favorite bits from Godard's Bande a part, pressed to serve yet another postmodernist antithriller about redemption, this has its compensations.