Rodriguez retreats into gruesome violence and flaccid comedy, grasping feebly for topical relevance by referencing the current immigration fracas.

A more accurate title might be "Sub-Bad."

A tiresome 1998 rip-off of The Hustler, with poker (in a New York Russian Mafia milieu) taking the place of pool, Matt Damon taking over for Paul Newman, and John Malkovich's scenery chewing supplanting Jackie Gleason's self-effacement.

It's a failure, less because the odd stylistic mix doesn't take (it does from time to time, and to striking effect) than because Landis hasn't bothered to put his story into any kind of satisfying shape.

Director Philip Kaufman's usual flair for erotic detail largely deserts him here, and this thriller seems most interested in lingering over battered and bloodied male faces.

An exceptionally stupid movie.

The whole movie feels stiff and awkward whenever the actors stop chasing each other long enough to talk.

The effects are just as delirious this time around, but the nightmare poetry has vanished, along with the sense of archetypal purpose and narrative inevitability that held the jack-in-the-box original together.

Even the always radiant Linney can't save this misbegotten film.

De Niro gives a crafty performance, and director John Polson (Swimfan) maintains a pleasantly low-key suspense. But the ending is a disappointment.

The director of "American Pie" has set out to make a merciless satire of American media culture along the lines of "Network," but his ideas are so commonplace that nothing registers except the bile.

Frantic and unfunny.

This ambiguously pitched comedy--its idea of sexy humor is a cheerleader farting--shoots for camp without bothering with satire.

Essentially a one-trick pony.

If misery were inherently interesting, this adaptation starring Emily Watson and Robert Carlyle as a couple plagued by alcoholism and child mortality might be too.

Watching this quick-buck sequel was about as pleasant as having my wisdom teeth pulled.

The screenplay for this 1985 feature is so riddled with character inconsistencies and unmotivated behavior that it plays like science fiction: the unsuspected presence of body-snatching aliens is the only conceivable explanation for the bizarre twists of psychology the film proposes.

Too dull even to function as camp.

Though it's meant as a droll comedy of manners, what emerges is mincing, crabbed, and petty.

A bewildering mixture of fairly accomplished storytelling (I enjoyed it more than Dead Poets Society, which isn't saying a lot), awkward contrivances in the script, and lies in the overall conception so egregious they undercut any pretensions the film might have to social seriousness.

Director John Landis is so deficient in basic storytelling skills that he must spend hours explicating the most elementary plot points while and Murphy are sidelined.

Bored me for most of its 178 minutes and then infuriated me with its cheap cynicism once it belatedly became interesting--which may be a tribute to writer-director Lars von Trier's gifts as a provocateur.

By the end of this 124-minute drama I'd have settled for ANYONE else, but like most visits with irritating people, the movie lingers, sharpening one's judgment.

There's so little respect for the music that we never see or hear a number from beginning to end, and we rarely hear any of the musicians speak more than a few seconds at a time. Overall the glibness and self-contempt are so thick you can cut them with a knife.

A muddled, talky affair, part soap opera, part undercover police procedural.

This live-action feature actually has less of a pulse than the puppet version.

Breillat's mix of dramatic skill and feminist intimidation has cowed plenty of critics in the past, but no political agenda could redeem this movie's joyless pedantry.

Another virtual-reality SF movie -- and you're not likely to care.

This dismal comedy joins a growing pile of Murphy disasters.

Maybe the self-consciously stoopid humor works better in microbursts, but at 75 minutes it's a total drag.

Ultimately the movie is alluring and respectful--its sadness may be what saves it from becoming sensationalist or trite.

If your kids are fans there's probably no escaping this installment.

This teen romance doesn't have a single authentic moment.

Their splashy gore is more convincing than this incompetent horror-comedy's attempt to mock bourgeois high school dissoluteness without appearing judgmental.

13 (Tzameti) might seem allegorical, but it’s too cynically concerned with what works as entertainment to offer larger truths about human existence.

But the big scare scenes seem particularly isolated here, supported by neither the flat characters nor the vague plot.

Director Kurt Wimmer has an eye for jackboot chic (Equilibrium), and the images here have been digitally polished so that the characters' skin is smoother than porcelain. It's a cool effect--I spent most of this interminable actioner wondering if one could bounce a quarter off Jovovich's bare midriff.

Even the most shocking elements of the story are made bland by childish overkill.

Not a movie, just one gigantic commercial for Hasbro.

With artifice as layered as the tiers of a marzipan cake, this resembles nothing so much as a stale Rock Hudson-Doris Day comedy.

Verde is too blankly amoral to sustain interest, but the film has isolated moments of haunting poetry.

As effective as MacDowell was in sex, lies, and videotape, she's clearly no match for the talented Depardieu; perhaps she'd seem less out of her depth if the script wasn't so implausible and threadbare.

Insipid, TV-bland drama.

The story, which is even dumber than it sounds, is told in flashback.

As a drama this is rote, as a musical it's uninspired, and as a comedy it's adolescent; ultimately it's a mess, unsure what it wants to be.

Arnold Schwarzenegger and Jamie Lee Curtis must have a soft spot for the disabled kids of billionaires, because both have cameos near the end of this vulgar and dreadfully dopey enterprise; more impressively savvy is director Penelope Spheeris, who plays herself directing the movie-within-a-movie and manages to seem superfluous in both roles.

Despite the resourcefulness of the two leads, the movie finally registers as much ado about very little.

Armitage adds a slick veneer of one-liners and slapstick to Leonard's novel, but the story has been so spun around that it barely knows how to end.

Unbearably twee mockumentary.

Jackman and McGregor throw their best American accents behind the effort, but Michelle Williams seems fairly bored as the sex-club partner who wins McGregor's heart. I'm with her.

If DiCillo had been going anywhere with this, I'd have gladly followed. But setting up petty ironies and pathetic references to Woody Allen seems to be his only goal.

How long do you have to be gone to make a triumphant return to the screen, and how triumphant can your return be when all three movies are duds?

For the first 100 minutes or so I found this hokey but serviceable; after that my watch became more meaningful than anything I could locate on-screen.

This Spanish comedy showcases a gallery of popular actresses, but writer-director Manuel Gomez Pereira gives them nothing to work with aside from tiresome romantic complications.

Pretentious and dull, this Uruguayan exercise in magical realism takes place during the annual carnival in Montevideo.

I've observed this Seth Rogen comedy, and I can report that it's not very good.

The film exudes complacency and self-congratulation; it is a very cowardly, craven piece of ersatz art.

Despite the syncopated score and subtitled patois, this is just another "Scarface" knockoff, with the usual array of bling, booty, and ballistics.

The movie not only indicts the country's embrace of capitalism by showing how low people will sink to make money, it also denigrates the agrarian class--once celebrated as heroic under Mao--by portraying its members as illiterate barbarians concerned only with continuing their family lines.

Suffers from suspense-killing righteousness.

Overblown and unconvincing, the director's bright, poppy style clashing with the grim subject matter.

With any luck this biopic of Amelia Earhart will also vanish without a trace. Hilary Swank is sorely miscast as the legendary aviator.

The action is clotted and murky, and Coppola obviously hasn't bothered to clarify it for the members of his cast, who wander through the film with expressions of winsome, honest befuddlement.

Even likable star Zach Braff can't salvage this clunker.

The troubled star writhes her way through a red-lit pole dance in the opening credits and shrieks her way through a prolonged torture-porn sequence; after those lurid turns the movie settles into an indifferent mystery plot as the cops pressure the girl to help them find the culprit.

This story line turns out to be a put-on, and the latter half of the movie is a tedious mockumentary exercise.

If a bullet hadn't killed John Lennon, this Beatles-scored musical might have.

Unfortunately, director Richard Donner doesn't pay much attention to text, subtext, or anything else; his 1986 film is empty glitz in search of a style, with arbitrary action substituting for ordinary narrative coherence.

The little heroes and their families are surprisingly ugly, with faces resembling skulls, and the colors are so faded and muddy the movie feels tired and bungled.

Put this one back on the shelf, and walk away.

Muddled and boring.

One very sick and messed-up movie.

Steve Martin and Goldie Hawn are too good for this embarrassing remake.

Fans of director Lynne Ramsay's first movie, the bleak Ratcatcher won't be surprised that this little existential exercise makes The Stranger look like a funwagon.

The novelty wears off almost immediately, leaving this a real chore to watch; there's something bizarre about low-budget spontaneity being replicated in such a labor-intensive medium.

This is basically sloppy, all-over-the-map filmmaking with few hints of self-criticism and few genuine laughs.

Not a fraction as scary as George Romero's low-budget "Night of the Living Dead." Fans of the first installment will probably like this too--it's essentially the same movie, plus helicopters and lots of flying glass.

The crosscutting between the two plot lines is so feeble and intrusive that it destroys whatever faint narrative momentum the film possesses.

The best thing I can say about this sleep-inducing kiddie comedy is that the need to bring in a PG rating must have precluded the endless series of giant-turd gags promised by the title.

Boring, irksome family movie.

More concerned with attitude than character and too moralistic to be much fun.

The script, by Nolan and his brother Jonathan, takes a few vague pokes at Wall Street and the financial elite but mainly revives the ponderous psychodrama of the first movie.

An exercise in robotic filmmaking.

The remake begins with the same premise and appropriates the most striking visuals, grafting them onto a more explicable but equally dull George Romero-style doomsday scenario.

Running beyond three hours, the movie more than overstays its welcome, and despite some vague genuflections in the general direction of The Godfather regarding family ties and revenge, there are simply too many years and locations covered, too many crane shots and rainstorms.

Osunsanmi's big formal innovation tunrs out to be the split-screen pairing of patently bogus "archival" black-and-white video that shows alleged abductees undergoing hypnosis and color "reenactments" of same. Ultimately it's up to you, the viewer, to decide which is more boring.

Every eerily tranquil shot, weirdly elliptical scene, and peculiar line reading contributes to a mood of detachment rather than creeping dread.

Predictable outrage.

Melissa George's performance has more Lady Macbeth in it than Kidder's.

Bland comedy romance. Grant and Bullock fail to put across the tired dialogue, and many scenes seem ad-libbed--in desperation.

Woody Allen's naive notions of art--he thinks it means a story with a moral--might have some primitive charm if he didn't put them forward so self-importantly.

In any normal year this dire comedy would be the undisputed lump of coal in our psychic stocking, but with "Surviving Christmas" still in theaters it's a close second.

Slow, arty thriller.

Despite the sophistication of the source material, this 1984 film isn't particularly successful: Petersen insists on forcing the superficial moral lessons, and the half hour removed from the film by its American distributors leaves it with a harsh, choppy rhythm.

Whatever you think of her, Madonna’s a veteran video star with a well-developed ability to use a camera as a blunt instrument. A good or honest director would see that, and take steps to compensate for it, but Keshishian is a collaborator, not a journalist. With a child’s self-absorption, Madonna thinks everything she says or does is endlessly fascinating.

This movie feels like it was made by a bank rather than a person.

It’s a heart-tugging scenario undermined by a striking hypocrisy: obscuring a hot-button issue in casting, some actors with Down's syndrome have minor roles, while Penn plays the lead -- and chews the scenery.

As hard as the film tries to pander, the kids at the preview screening seemed a bit disengaged.