Director Ken Kwapis (The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants) gives this script by many hands a certain gloss it doesn't deserve.

Ritchie may be skilled at generating controlled chaos, but his surprise-a-minute strategy ultimately holds no surprises; Snatch is even more frenetically boring than his 1999 "Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels."

Ponderous, predictable, and unfunny, this gangster comedy was directed by Brian De Palma, though apart from a few of his characteristic symmetry gags in the opening sequences, it's indistinguishable from the work of any average TV hack.

Most of the action in this 2001 indie drama takes place on computer screens, with grainy faces framed by sharp little boxes; the 21st-century conceit is topical enough but the characters and their problems couldn't be more stale.

Director Paul Morrison forfeits any meaningful statement about art for a pedestrian coming-out story, based in part on Dali's unreliable, self-aggrandizing memoirs.

The result, messily directed by Jimmy Hayward, begins affably enough as a random slew of Leone-style squint-a-thons and shoot-outs but then loses it way in a dopey, anachronism-happy sci-fi plot.

Too slavish in its devotion to 50s sci-fi conventions to work as parody or camp, this indie comedy by "The X-Files" alumnus R.W. Goodwin sinks under the weight of its homage.

Loud, shiny, and critic-proof, this franchise launcher is basically Transformers minus the humanity. Dennis Quaid provides some ballast as grizzled patriarch to the troop of sexy young lock-and-loaders.

Though praised when it came out (1930), Alfred Hitchcock’s film of Sean O’Casey’s play, with some of the original Dublin cast (including Sara Allgood as Juno), is a fairly deadly case of canned theater that’s pretty close to what Hitchcock many years later would refer to as “photographs of people talking.”

Writer-producer Paul Kimatian was once a still photographer for Martin Scorsese, who reportedly encouraged him to write this Italian-American soap opera. Given its tired dialogue, predictable situations, and vicious street fighting, Scorsese may wish he'd kept his mouth shut.

Exploits all the cliches about shrewish women and pussy-whipped men without achieving satire.

Although their love is undeniably a blessing, I was disconcerted watching the elderly couple smile and chuckle today as they recall their daily letters and secret meetings in the midst of such wide-scale death.

Cowriters Luc Besson and Robert Mark Kamen (Gladiator) saddle Neeson with indigestible dialogue and preposterous situations.

You want misery? he gives you misery—dark, drear, suppurating medieval oppressiveness; monotony? he gives you that too, lots and lots of monotony; subhuman grotesquerie and primitive superstition? not to worry: this guy didn't direct Quest for Fire for nothing.

Tedious mockumentary.

Compels questions about Kinski's bravado and artistry, and suggests that it might not always be easy to distinguish his from Herzog's.

This comedy-thriller that has no particular motive for changing tones.

The movie occasionally makes an unexpectereference -- though with more desperation than wit.

The premise of this neither dark nor funny movie--which wants to be both--is that it's somehow ironic when wealthy characters are motivated by greed.

This is the dullest and least successful adaptation of the Christmas chestnut I've ever seen, possibly because the mixture of Muppets and humans creates anomalies of scale and degrees of stylized behavior that the film tries to ignore rather than work with.

Humorless, lugubrious, and interminable.

The movie offers an insulting "let them eat cake" gesture toward the 1982 audience, but the pacing is so ragged and the characters so lifeless that few will be able to stay awake long enough to feel offended

The protracted shoot-out at the end of Dear Wendy is even more pornographic than the moment when a female member of the Dandies exposes her breasts. The audience is clearly expected to enjoy the bloodbath even while it disapproves.

The thin story covering her acquisition of one wave after another while narrowly escaping death time and again is strictly for player one.

Aesthetically, Insidious operates at the level of a decent high school video project.

The plot of this character-driven drama is slender and the digital images rather muddy--apparently an impoverished indie feature can look bad and still not be very interesting--but to his credit, Thelemaque sticks to his minimalist turf. And the dogs are great.

Jarhead virtually begins with a rip-off of the basic-training sequence that opens Stanley Kubrick's "Full Metal Jacket."

Conveys little sense of a connection, as if di Florio had made it mainly because she had access to a celebrity.

The story unfolds briskly in the polished mode of a classic horror movie, then tanks after a plot twist at the midpoint alters the mood and slows the pace. Jim Sheridan (My Left Foot, In the Name of the Father) directed an ill-conceived screenplay that could have worked only as camp.

Poorly acted, over-the-top, and generally out-of-control bloodbath.

Josh Duhamel plays the smitten sports reporter who helps her mount her big art show, "Pain"--a fitting title, given the agony induced by this godawful comedy.

Valueless as entertainment, it’s still useful as a disambiguation tool for those who confuse Jessica Alba and Jessica Biel, or Taylor Dayne and Taylor Swift.

The wit is too weak to sustain a film, and the songs all sound the same.

Dumb.

More fanciful than factual, less likable than either The Big Easy or Breathless, McBride's previous two features, the movie tries hard to re-create the euphoria of 50s rock films, but the poor-white milieu is treated with such crude derision that all the characters wind up seeming like two-dimensional geeks.

By the time Gooding showed up for one of his assignments disguised as a call girl, even "Boat Trip" looked good to me.

The fundamental problems with David Cronenberg's disastrous 1993 adaptation, written by Hwang himself, are twofold: the unsuitability of such a premise for film, where the actors and audience no longer share the same space, and the miscasting of Jeremy Irons as the accountant and John Lone as the diva.

This feature debut by writer-director Scott Stewart may sound like an enjoyably goofy theo-horror romp, but it's a serious penance.

"Sorry, viewers" is more like it.

The concept was interesting and charming in "Love Letters," up to a point, but here it quickly becomes repetitive, obvious, and dull.

Whimsical fluff (1967) that weighs in on the far side of 50 tons; it's so clumsy and pounding that taking a child to it might be grounds for a visit from family services.

Writer-director Michel Leclerc keeps stressing how political all this is (the heroine labels almost everyone a "fascist"), but the movie never really decides what it's about, and its odd-couple romance is stale and unpersuasive.

A vicious, incoherent shoot-'em-up.

Overblown and stupefyingly dull.

The plot is largely a series of excuses for one-liners expertly delivered by Maguire, making all the hatred, maiming, and killing seem like digressions.

Simpleminded indictment of every senator who voted "yea."

With no personalities established and nothing at stake, it's no more interesting than a pickup game on your local court.

Director Robert Luketic telegraphs every dismal comic beat from Venus and Mars, then reinforces them with a twinkling, leering score.

This comedy is an ill-fated attempt to remake "Risky Business" (1983) for the 21st century, complete with a wind-chimey score, the hero posing in his underpants, and a cynical happy ending.

Bob DeRosa and Ted Griffin wrote the script, whose plummeting one-liners leave no actor unscathed.

If you're curious about the whole-foods movement, try Michael Pollan's book "In Defense of Food," which addresses the subject from a wider variety of perspectives and does so in a far less insulting manner than this extended infomercial, with its muzak score, entire sequences lifted from network TV news, and bar graphs illustrating every other scene.

If you're an 11-year-old boy at heart, this is undoubtedly even better than the pile of dinosaur shit in Jurassic Park.

Feeble exercise in brain-teaser noir.

The project would have been much more palatable as a TV special; as it stands, it's just another symptom of the American cinema's addiction to facile mythmaking.

This sequel to "Fantastic Four" (2005) drags in the Silver Surfer, who looks like a gigantic hood ornament and, given voice by Laurence Fishburne, has about as much personality.

I don't know the actual budget of this adventure yarn, but it feels like a middle-range effort whose heart is with the bargain-basement offerings of yesteryear.

What matters most is feeding white-bread fantasies (the film is set in the slow-footed 50s, when blacks are only a rumor and nobody's ever heard of slam 'n' jam) and laying on the inspirational corn.

The tricky plot has an interesting payoff, but it's a slow and bumpy ride getting there, and Koepp fares better with special effects than with generating either suspense or interest in the characters.

This 1965 hit is the sort of film that reeks of emotional Muzak, the most elemental responses programmed right into the scenario. Every audience sniffle and tear has been taken into account.

The rationale behind this unattractive animated comedy, a U.S.-German coproduction, seems to be that since it can't create a fairy-tale world of its own, it might as well riffle through many of the more familiar ones, with particular emphasis on Cinderella's, pretending to deconstruct them with postmodernist glosses, adolescent wisecracks, and a few high-tech anachronisms.

Most of the film feels recycled from sexually explicit art movies dating back at least to "Last Tango in Paris" (1972) and continuing with movies like Patrice Chéreau's "Intimacy" (2001) or Götz Spielmann's "Antares" (2004). With nothing new in its characters, settings, or themes, Shame has little to offer except McQueen's style, which does little to elucidate anything around it.

Sluggish, repetitive, and strangely timorous, with little of the zap and imagination of the Pythons' television work.

Writer Barry McEvoy and director Barry Levinson might want to brush up on the use of metaphor.

A horrendous effort all around.

As usual, Cage alternates between leaden line readings and thunderous outbursts, making his accomplished costars Ulrich Thomsen and Stephen Campbell Moore look even better.

The majesty of the landscape and the sweetness of a plot strand about the horse learning survival skills from a 12-year-old girl might have been more intriguing without the cloying voice-over.

Pretentious and overconceived, the movie purports to celebrate self-determination yet squashes it at every turn.

The resulting movie (2005) covers seven years and touches on some of the same social issues that gave "Hoop Dreams" its epic sweep, yet Serrill fails to treat any of them adequately, and the narrative loses its shape as events unfold.

Like Robert Altman's "M*A*S*H" this has a banquet scene posed like The Last Supper, but the basic idea--toothless satire trimming a dull star party--reminded me more of "Ready to Wear."

Viewers have almost two hours to become thoroughly disgusted.

A witless whack at sci-fi fanboys.

Has the spiritual and emotional depth of a Hallmark card.

Sean Penn's first film as writer-director, steeped in sullen Method acting, pretentious symbolism, and mannered slow motion, is obviously a sincere and considered effort, but I found it insufferably tedious, self-indulgent, and reeking with self-pity.

The dialogue is often grating, and some of the situations are distastefully cute, although John Carroll Lynch (Fargo) has a strong supporting turn as a grief workshop client.

Cruise and Diaz have worked together before (in Vanilla Sky), but this is their first summer-movie pairing, and their star qualities are so similar--dazzling looks, good comedic chops, complete emotional vacuity--that together, instead of romantic chemistry they generate a sort of giddy, blinding falseness.

The music Bjork wrote for the sound track is at least minimally accomplished, unlike Barney's staggeringly vacant direction.

Too low-key and amiable to match the lubriciousness Jim Carrey brought to the original.

The movie's notion of humor is exemplified by Bradshaw's extended nude scene, which might be termed "roughing the viewer."

Cinematographer Thierry Arbogast is the real superhero; his homage to noir thrillers compensates for the spotty CGI and rescues the movie from sex-kitten kitsch.

Director Taylor Hackford ("Ray") seems to be aiming for a big "Boogie Nights" social canvas, though the movie's risible prize-fight sequence is more reminiscent of the later "Rocky" sequels.

Pure punishment, this rote action flick from Australia.

Like the gods, the trading cards are capricious, with ever-changing rules and strategies so intricate that only Yu-Gi-Oh-ologists will fully enjoy this adventure.

This 1979 movie adaptation of the cult TV series is blandness raised to an epic scale. Robert Wise's bloodless direction drains all the air from the Enterprise.

The moody images and Michael Nyman's score aren't enough to salvage this banal 1997 science fiction story.

The resulting mix of hagiography and war epic is so muddled that characters keep addressing each other by their first names, the better to tell them apart.

Suspense is fairly effective until it's stretched to the point of monotony.

Every moment is hyped for maximum visual and visceral impact, but Scott doesn't display the slightest bit of interest (or belief) in the actual characters and situations.

I suspect the unconverted will want to be beamed up pronto.

Director F. Gary Gray doesn't have a clue about how to film this couple dancing, and Peter Steinfeld's crude script confuses character with shtick while racing us through a story where loyalties and motivations turn on a dime.

Tired, poorly paced Bond from 1967, with Sean Connery displaying his discontent. Donald Pleasence's Blofeld has a memorably creepy softness, but that's about it.

The laughs and emotional moments are so weak that director Jonas Elmer has no choice but to tweak them with music cues and bland guitar-rock.

This is the art-house equivalent of a Clive Barker splatterfest, punctuated by mildly amusing stabs at Lynchian absurdity and compromised by an incoherent plot twist that would leave M. Night Shyamalan rolling his eyes.

Makes for a tiresome antidrama populated mainly by unambiguously good characters who might as well be invulnerable.

Murphy seems either incapable of or uninterested in creating a recognizable world, so local comic effects count for everything.

This bleak little drama started as a play, and I'd bet that even onstage it felt contrived.

Well-acted but otherwise conventional war hokum.

Unfortunately, this is one of those movies with a twist ending that turns a character inside out, revealing earlier scenes to be essentially fraudulent and more or less invalidating one's emotional investment in the story. No one ever walked out of a Hitchcock movie feeling as cheated as this made me feel.

The received notion that kids want their movies fast and furious is barely in evidence in this 1997 comedy, a laboriously slow suburban adventure.