Slick and effective escapism with a touch of poetry (a la "The Sixth Sense") that left me vaguely dissatisfied once the mystery was supposedly resolved.

One more sluggish, artfully framed thriller with Rembrandt lighting set in a New York borough--a kind of picture that's awfully hard to do in a fresh manner.

As "Saw" demonstrated, Wan and Whannell have a carnivalesque sense of fun and a sure instinct for recycling classic horror tropes, but their characters are so flat and their plotting so listless that this low-budget feature fails to generate much suspense.

Richard Marquand's dull, literal direction takes all the edge off this variant on the “Will he kiss her or kill her?” formula.

Good movie roles have generally eluded her (Agnes Bruckner), and she labors in vain to keep this big-studio horror confection alive.

Overwrought indie crime drama.

I'm a fan of director Bob Odenkirk, but my high hopes for this comedy were dashed by screenwriters Ben Garant, Thomas Lennon, and Michael Patrick Jann, all alumi of "Reno 911"!

The film's hatred of Ricci and Channing and its affectionate tolerance of the hero's mousy hypocrisy and his mentor's negativity are familiar Allen motifs, but the faint echoes of his best work only make this one seem grimmer.

Soporific comedy.

Director Joe Roth (Streets of Gold) seems content with recycling the negative charms of the '84 original and hoping that nobody will notice or care. Roth's no stranger to coarse enthusiasms (he produced the amiably crass Bachelor Party, as energetic as it was inept), but this one's on automatic pilot all the way.

An empty-headed horror movie (1979) with nothing to recommend it beyond the disco-inspired art direction and some handsome, if gimmicky, cinematography.

Written and directed by Tom Six--who doesn't seem to realize that movie theaters rely on popcorn sales--this nasty stuff plays like a cross between "Saw," "Naked Lunch," and "Bride of the Monster."

Paul Bartel's "Death Race 2000" is a beloved camp item, but this slick, loud, violent remake is pitched at the video game crowd.

There are fascinating moments... but these are overshadowed by an endless stream of sound bites and pep talks to volunteers.

Everything wrong with today's hipster comedy seems to coalesce in this toothless satire.

You can't be both political and incoherent, and even though Kelly's models are "Kiss Me Deadly" and "Blade Runner," this vision of the near-future suggests a random blend of "Dr. No" and "Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!"

As the title of this splatter comedy by writer-director Stuart Gordon (Re-Animator) indicates, he's like a bug stuck to her windshield, and that's about the level of humanity and insight one can expect here.

Whether you want to trace this romance back to "La Strada" or Allen's marriage to Soon-Yi Previn is your business, but on-screen it never registers as more than a writer's conceit.

Platinum-selling singer Usher is one hell of a clotheshorse, but he's too amiable to be convincing as a leading man--not that anyone is particularly believable in this feeble comedy.

Torturously dull.

Abysmal thriller.

For me the film creates more embarrassment than sympathy, but at least it's a kind of embarrassment that's instructive.

This is funny mostly for its brazen disregard of common sense.

To her credit, Bello makes a real commitment to this spiteful, self-absorbed character, though the credibility she generates through sheer force of will is no match for the gimmicky plot twist that arrives at the story’s midpoint and sends the movie spinning off into stupid-land.

The very idea of handing him over to professional lad Guy Ritchie (who directed Snatch, Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels), to be played as a punch-throwing quipster by Robert Downey Jr., is so profoundly stupid one can only step back in dismay.

Young French director Luc Besson (Le dernier combat) aims for a little American slickness in this relentlessly empty action film: it zooms along from one arbitrary sequence to the next, and its only aim is to keep the audience pumped up with kinetic stimulation.

Ferrell and Reilly get more mileage out of juvenile pouting and bickering than any other performers I can imagine, but that's about as far as this goes.

Jarmusch makes some effort to deliver on the promise of suspense near the end, with de Bankole stalking despicable businessman Bill Murray at his fortresslike compound in the hills.

Fast-paced editing doesn't compensate for unconvincing dialogue.

This terrible live-action comedy based on Jay Ward cartoons has its moments and its near misses.

Despite a certain grace in the dialogue and casual plot construction, this is positively reeking of a desire to be cheerful in the face of adversity.

As satire it's toothless and at times close to incoherent; its predictable swipes are aimed equally at conservative racists and bleeding-heart liberals.

Ryan, barely refining her "When Harry Met Sally" persona, is a dud; Annette Bening, playing the best friend who sells her out to a tabloid, is better in the scenes she doesn't share with her.

Every effect is so calculated that only the conscious minds of filmmakers and viewers are engaged--and not by very much or for very long.

Though his subject is a serious one and his intentions are apparently noble, Nava has made a film that is essentially indistinguishable from Love Story.

This may not be as ill considered as it sounds--some of the sharpest material in Rock's last concert special, "Never Scared," dealt with the eternal conflict between men and women--but his crowd-pleasing gags tend to clash with Rohmer's sly moral comedy.

Misogynistic claptrap about a divorced husband (Dustin Hoffman) fighting for the custody of and learning to cope with his little boy (Justin Henry) - a movie whose classy trimmings (including Nestor Almendros's cinematography) persuaded audiences to regard writer-director Robert Benton as a subtle art-house director.

The orgy of violence, as ghastly as in any video game, should go a long way toward erasing whatever goodwill Stallone earned with his sentimental "Rocky Balboa."

There are a few pretty good design effects en route, but not enough to compensate for all the embarrassments.

By the end, when Moore presents himself as a lone crusader for justice and wraps yellow crime-scene tape around the AIG building, his reasoning is so muddled that he can’t distinguish an economic system (corporate capitalism) from a political one (representative democracy).

Director Ry Russo-Young, who cowrote the script with Schnabel, is gunning for a big generational statement, but her ordnance is strictly small bore.

Even 82 minutes seems an eternity...The net effect is weirdly reminiscent of taking part in any online community, where a "relationship" is more like a juxtaposing of egos.

Underneath the wrapping lies a squalid Tarantino-style crime flick.

This 2005 farce about a hellish Passover seder panders to middle-class Jews as gleefully as Tyler Perry's movies pander to middle-class African-Americans, though there's less religiosity and a greater degree of self-hatred in the vulgar stereotypes.

The unfocused story is so bereft of any clear sense of period or location that the political melodrama sometimes seems to be taking place inside a cigar box.

A watered-down satire of the pharmaceutical industry.

Tsai's obvious disgust at the sex is part of what makes the film so unpleasant; he remains a brilliant original, but this is a parody of his gifts.

Sally Field's direction is pedestrian, though she does manage to get winning performances out of Driver and Eisenberg.

At first I thought this was a Michael Haneke knockoff, but it's more depressing and less edifying than most of those narrative experiments, which is why I eventually tuned it out.

In this inept thriller...the script is a coloring book, and the director's careful to stay within the lines.

Spike Lee's fans have learned to take the bad with the good, but this is pretty damn bad.

There's some cute stuff involving Hanks and some teenagers who tool around campus on scooters, but an utter lack of chemistry between him and Roberts dooms the movie.

Unfocused, condescending, and corny.

The film itself regresses, starting in the present and winding up with a cautionary ending that evokes the hokiest SF movies of the 50s.

This is one dull party.

80 minutes of formulaic unpleasantness isn't even close to my idea of a good time, and I doubt that Hitchcock himself could have done very much with Mark L. Smith's script.

More of the same, though a lot coarser than its immediate predecessor, and the characters and situations have now calcified to the point where they're simply sitcom staples.

Contrived, sentimental, tonally bipolar, and as predictable as clockwork.

People frequently cover the camera lens with their hands or refer to the "documentary" being filmed, as if to assure us that what we're seeing is real.

The funny-looking kids steal every scene from Lawrence, simply by virtue of being funny-looking kids.

This big-budget bubble-gum musical is appalling but compulsively watchable; it's the perfect crystallization of a 13-year-old girl's taste, circa 1980, complete with roller discos, dreamy boys, fashion shows, and fantasy father figures. Director Robert Greenwald has a lot of ideas, all of them bad: his style could be described as rapid misfire.

Smug and unconvincing.

As in most bad thrillers, the number of pointless shocks increases in direct proportion to the drama's decreasing vitality, like defibrilator paddles jolting a dying man.

A rare dud from Pixar.

Years on the Hannah Montana TV series have not adequately prepared Miley Cyrus for screen acting.

Too much plot and too much faith in special effects and adolescent humor doom this "Babe" wannabe.

Slapdash plot, paper-thin characters, misogynist undertones, and mechanical crosscutting are all soft-core standbys.

In nearly every scene of her dangerously underwritten role, Diaz has a mouthful of cliches.

There are no characters to care about or remember afterward - just a lot of flashy technique involving decor, some glib allegorical flourishes, and the obligatory studied film-school weirdness.

This indie drama spends a lot of time mooning over classical Hollywood cinema, but its own visual style tends toward the pointless flash of music videos.

To call this Kevin James comedy fatuous might be misinterpreted as an attack on the star's girth--so how about inane, tepid, lazy, puerile, phony, and unfunny?

A shocking revelation near the end explains the soldier's nihilistic rage but simultaneously tears a gigantic hole in the plot, leaving little to admire but Considine's typically penetrating performance.

It's a rare sequel that fritters away the appeal of the original so completely: within minutes, this continuation of Romancing the Stone has reduced the Kathleen Turner-Michael Douglas couple to a nightmare pairing of the gushingly idiotic and the sourly venal.

First-rate schlock; overlong and incredibly stupid, but that's part of the formula by now.

Muddled attempt at edgy comedy.

It's not scary because not one second is believable.

The plot twists are mostly predicated on the characters' improbably shifting loyalties, the sort of thing you can get away with only when the people in your movie are drained of all compassion.

Writer Kevin Williamson, who's also responsible for the overrated "Scream," sets cleverness above emotional impact in a poorly conceived 1997 thriller with plenty of empty references.

The low point is a New York sequence in which Waterston puts some Puccini on his stereo, pops his personal (custom-made?) videocassette of Cambodian atrocities into his video recorder, and goes into a heavy voice-over recounting the crimes of Amerika. Didacticism doesn't get much cruder than this, yet the emphasis of the sequence is on Waterston's exquisitely tortured conscience—it's there to demonstrate the profound, compassionate depths of his humanity.

This bloated 2006 historical epic flatlines early and never regains a pulse.

The picture flogs a fake dichotomy between career and family for 119 minutes until Hudson digests a feeble moral that Laverne and Shirley would have covered in 25.

Out of Sight engaged me less and less, until by the end I no longer cared which of the characters lived or died. Not even the engaging Jennifer Lopez, George Clooney, Albert Brooks, Don Cheadle, and Ving Rhames or the talented secondary cast can survive the abbreviations and last-minute shoehorning their characters receive.

A feeble sequel to The Naked Gun that's about one and a half rungs down from its predecessor and a good four or five down from Airplane!

Stunning vistas of New Zealand's rolling countryside aren't enough to carry this lame 2006 horror spoof.

Costars John Cleese, Jean Reno, Alfred Molina, Andy Garcia, and Jeremy Irons look either bored or desperate, gasping for laughs in an airless screenplay.

I haven't seen the original, and this mishmash -- doesn't make me want to.

The cinematic equivalent of a tapeworm, this delivers few laughs beyond the initial chuckles of recognition. Seltzer and Friedberg (who also directed) have another script in development called "Raunchy Movie"; apparently one idea they haven't yet considered is "Watchable Movie."

The direction is so muted and sentimental and the pacing so soporific that only Ciarian Tanham's saturated color cinematography of the sylvan countryside breaks the monotony.

Having made the mad mistake of selecting the project, screenwriters Dan O'Bannon and Don Jakoby and director Tobe Hooper seem utterly baffled by it; they hesitate between camping it up (and thus destroying a film for which they have an obvious affection) and trying to recapture Menzies's sublimely naive presentation (which, 80s hipsters that they are, they can't sustain for long).

The bucketloads of sanctimonious message mongering ladled on by director Peter Hyams still can't disguise the sheerly mercenary basis of this 1986 project, a wholly uncalled-for sequel to Stanley Kubrick's 2001.

The result is a dull and campy 97-minute bloodbath offering little distinction between good guys and bad.

Cohen probably thinks he's Charlie Chaplin lampooning Hitler, but of course Hitler was still on top of the world when "The Great Dictator" came out in 1940; Cohen is actually Chaplin's antithesis, a first-world bully content to target the Other.

This lame comedy was adapted from a recent British TV movie, though its (quite literal) money shots of the women squealing and hurling cash in the air reminded me of 80s greed capers like "Trading Places" and "A Fish Called Wanda."

This one is overblown, over-dressed, and grandiosely dopey, packed with gargantuan sets and ludicrous action scenes and shot in unusually dark and dingy 3-D.

A straightforward account of the debate between evolutionists and ID proponents might have been both entertaining and enlightening; instead this follows the avuncular Ben Stein (who cowrote the movie) as he jet-sets around the globe trying to prove that a cabal of Darwinians has conspired to destroy academic freedom.

This never rises above the level of a plodding sword-and-sandal adventure, peopled with chiseled young beauties and bored industry hacks. Singh is a talented and eccentric visual artist with no creative future in the movie business.

In Private Parts Stern is clearly presenting a sanitized version of his story--he had control over every aspect of the film and vetoed more than half a dozen scripts before choosing the one that pleased him--in an attempt to reach a whole new level of stardom.

Indie moviemaking reaches some kind of awful zenith of self-indulgence in this scriptless drama, entirely improvised and shot on cellphones.