Originality has never been a high value in the genre-bound aesthetic of filmmaking, but De Palma cheapens what he steals, draining the Hitchcock moves of their content and complexity. He's left with a collection of empty technical tricks—obtrusive and gimmick-crazed, this film has been “directed” within an inch of its life—and he fills in the blanks with an offhand cruelty toward his characters, a supreme contempt for his audience (at one point, we're compared to the drooling voyeurs who inhabit his vision of Bellevue), and a curdled, adolescent vision of sexuality.

I missed the first half hour of this Zorro adventure, and it's a tribute to the idiot-proof screenplay that I had no trouble following the rest.

The film is flat, dull, and sloppy.

These ideas may well have cohered in Chuck Palahniuk's best-selling satirical novel, which I haven't read, but in this screen adaptation by writer-director Clark Gregg they seem more like an assortment of gimmicks.

The story--written by Brian Helgeland and directed by Richard Donner--was just dumb.

The young sweethearts amuse themselves by donning steampunk outfits and crashing the funerals of dead children, which may seem quirky and sweet if you can disregard the awful grief of such gatherings; the problem is that, once you manage this, the main characters' grief doesn't register either.

Throughout most of her career Diane Keaton has shown sound instincts, so it's a mystery why she failed to sniff this false, brittle comedy out as a waste of her gifts.

The boring, humorless pair do nothing to refute the image of eco-worriers as preening, puritanical douchebags addicted to symbolic gesture and allergic to cost-benefit analysis.

It's fast-paced and full of gaudy action, yet it's thoroughly unsatisfying, largely because it's so lazy: once Stallone (also the screenwriter) and director George Pan Cosmatos have sketched out the standard genre archetypes, they leave it at that, not bothering to fill in the niceties of characterization, plausibility, motivation, and suspense.

When the cast is shown during the final credits repeatedly cracking up in blown takes, one would like to think they were laughing at some of the lines they were expected to deliver.

A tedious movie about excitement.

Perelman never overcomes the disjuncture of having two familiar actresses play the same grown character, and despite the endless crosscutting, the two halves settle respectively into ghoulish foreboding and murky psychological drama.

Kasi Lemmons directed this tepid thriller, whose only genuinely creepy aspect is its cavalier and uninformed use of mental illness and classical music to heighten the meager suspense.

The kids are impressively plucky, but Weihenmayer comes off as an egomaniac, arguing with his team and endangering the youngsters' lives. Lucy Walker directed this cloying and manipulative 2006 documentary.

In middle age Jackie Chan can't keep coasting on boyish charm, as evidenced by this dreadful family comedy that does him no favors with its opening title sequence.

The few halfway decent ideas in the story (by John Skip, Craig Spector, and Leslie Bohem) and production design (by C.J. Strawn) are mercilessly and fatally crushed by the inept direction of Stephen Hopkins and the flaccid editing.

This all-day sucker put me to sleep -- though it's possible I retreated out of self-defense.

Now that Robin Williams has been emasculated--dangerously schizoid comic turned into nice-guy movie star--it isn't too surprising that a commercial hack like Chris Columbus would use him the way he does in this cutesy 1993 comedy: cutting between Williams trying on different voices rather than holding the camera on him as he lurches between these voices without notice.

Grazer's writing team has filled up the film's 82 minutes with winking product placements, SNL-type goofs, PG gags premised on not quite cursing, a Smashmouth cover of the Beatles' "Getting Better," and a lame subplot about a scuzzy lothario (Stephen Baldwin).

A more helpful title for this date movie would have been Couples, Retreat!

This caper movie starts off as enjoyable guff before turning strictly formulaic and winding up as unenjoyable guff.

The kind of ugly-duckling role that's long been ironic for her (Bullock).

Little remains of the original but its weakest element - its overelaborate intrigue - and Hackford seems only to scramble it further.

This is shocking only for its tepidness; except for some raunchy language, it's ready-made for basic cable.

This interminable, poorly constructed drug thriller by writer-director Frank E. Flowers sat on the shelf for two years before winning a release.

Having defused the fairy tale, first-time screenwriter Leigh Dunlap pads this out to 96 minutes with stale high school politics and the usual claptrap about believing in yourself.

Unfortunately the story lurches like the characters' beat-up T-bird...and the film's rebellious attitude wears thin long before its sentimental denouement.

This remake takes an alternate tack from the original feature, expanding the story of "The Sitter" to a full 83 minutes, but the result is dull and painfully generic.

This Mike Myers vehicle exemplifies American comedy's continuing slide into infantilism.

Suzuki and Kaneshiro keep the first hour afloat with their easy comic interplay, but Yamazaki badly needs editing: the opening escape sequence is needlessly repeated later, and a slow drip of false endings drags this out to a tiring 118 minutes.

"Soppy" doesn't begin to describe this 2004 drama by Quentin Lee.

The sort of thing that makes you wish you were playing a video game instead.

A kind of idealist fantasy that seems almost hamstrung by its plot.

Milius has nothing to say: this 1982 film only hints at the romantic heroics of "The Wind and the Lion" and has none of the personal quality of "Big Wednesday."

Unfortunately the movie's more interesting and challenging social aspects, which imply more than one "British-Chinese gay experience," are often overtaken by its smarminess--including an aggressively banal score and the way some actors have apparently been encouraged to overwork their eyebrows.

Smug, uninsightful light drama.

The high school is so sanitized that there are no drugs, cutthroat competition, or--inconceivably for a theatrical milieu--no gay students.

There aren't any flesh-and-blood characters here, only superimposed attitudes: it's almost like reading a rape-crisis textbook, with every lesson italicized.

I can't remember another film that took so little care with the details of ambience: the cruddy sets and flat, underworked sound track drain any sense of life from the project, to the point where it looks like the cheapest kind of TV—canned theater.

Easy to take but even easier to leave alone.

The script...and Rob Reiner's direction...bristle with phoniness.

Would have proved the point if it weren't so mechanically scripted.

A flimsy setup dooms this from the start, though its sheer awfulness is something to see.

Interminable...Writer-director Richard Lowenstein seems as bored with the proceedings as most spectators are likely to be; consequently there's probably more gratuitous camera movement per square inch here than in any other film of 1986.

Wacky mix-ups and a stunningly unfunny climax.

Suffers from clumsy acting (mainly Hispanic amateurs), an obvious screenplay by Paul Laverty, and a simplistic view of the characters.

Must have been slapped together fast: live-action stunts created by uninspired editing lead up to computer-generated imagery that's just as lame.

With its hypnotic pacing, blatantly nonsynchronous sound, clunky robot costumes, and graphic but unconvincing violence, the movie falls flatly between camp and art-house pretension.

The film is far too appreciative of its own jokes to let the audience discover anything on its own.

The result is your basic Bruckheimer action spectacle plus lots of leather, shaggy haircuts, and Celtic tattoos.

It's a great premise for comedy, but this thing is too dumb to do it justice.

The cinematic debut of Chicago theater director Marc Rosenbush, this 2004 indie comedy is an irritating exercise in ham acting, metaphysical patter routines, and rim-shot-style comic editing.

Schwaba's uncertainty as a director is underlined by the almost arbitrary jump cuts, freeze-frames, and sped-up action.

Translating Woolrich's pulpy obsessiveness and crazy contrivances into the stuff of light comedy is no easy matter, and the movie gets as far as it does mainly with the help of Lake and Shirley MacLaine.

Director Steve Carr continues his streak of numbingly mediocre family comedies.

Tends toward arch silliness more than actual humor, a formula that's tolerable enough in 15-minute tube installments but deadly dull in this 86-minute feature.

For a movie about the undead, this lacks any supernatural chills, and by the time its obligatory final showdown arrives, it seems as hollow as the terra cotta soldiers brought to life by CGI.

If you care whom she winds up with or why, you probably caught more of the TV references than I did.

The film runs through most of Leni Riefenstahl's bag of tricks as it builds up a patriotic frenzy, yet the crazed flag-waving would be a lot easier to take if it weren't so clearly a commercial calculation meant to salvage what is otherwise a crass, careless, shamelessly padded film.

I don't believe in fixing things that aren't broken. Sandra Nettelbeck's wholly accessible "Mostly Martha" (2001) is one of the most delightful comedies of recent years, so the idea of a remake with English instead of German dialogue is already pretty dubious, an insult to the capacities of both audiences and the original filmmakers.

Overall, though, the flashes of competence just emphasize the extent to which the film has no idea what it's doing.

Eugene Levy is the only actor who emerges relatively unscathed in such a fetid climate; as for Joan Plowright, I hope she took home a healthy check.

Watching Allen fart out a story when he has no characters is always painful, as people are defined through clumsy expository dialogue and ranked according to their cultural accomplishments. But the script here is lazy even by his standards.

After loosening us up with some irresistible shtick that rigorously fulfills genre expectations, the movie subtly, systematically begins to break down familiar tropes in the depiction of attractiveness, attraction, and heterosexual courtship.

Based on a novel by Jonathan Ames, this drearily quirky mess wants to be "Secretary" for submissive males, but it's just a sitcom in a powdered wig and size 17 pumps.

The narrative emphasizes how much danger Spurlock is in and how noble he is to embark on all this while his wife is back in the U.S. expecting their first child; it's a little insulting to all the real reporters who've died in the field looking for hard information, not weak indie comedy.

If Sayles had persuaded me he knew anything about Bush, his background, or his entourage that isn't already well-known, I might have felt more like laughing.

The U.S. vs. John Lennon isn't so much a history of Lennon's pacifism as a continuation of it, the last bed-in, so to speak, with contemporary figures like Gore Vidal and Noam Chomsky on hand to connect Vietnam with Iraq, President Nixon with President Bush, and the FBI's spying on Lennon with the current administration's domestic surveillance.

Grating romantic comedy.

A romance between Fox and the attorney trying to force her out (Darrin Henson) taxes belief and leads to a sappy ending that doesn't come soon enough.

George Roy Hill's 1969 film moves with steady, stupid grace from oozy sentimentality to nihilistic violence.

Its paper-thin characters turned into caricatures by egregious hamming, this 1996 Japanese comedy-drama about shy ballroom dancers is sentimental goo and downright interminable.

Laughless, brainless, styleless, and clueless.

A fine supporting cast (Andy Richter, Molly Shannon, Michael Madsen, Dave Foley, Jeffrey Tambor) manages to keep this comedy respirating for 85 minutes, but personally I believe in a movie's right to die.

Trite transformation comedy.

Andy and Larry Wachowski barrel through this adaptation of the 60s animated series, hoping perhaps that no one will notice the story is as flat as roadkill.

Insofar as one can distinguish the investigative research from the career move, this Sundance prizewinner is effective muckraking, but it lacks much of a political program apart from the message that we're poisoning ourselves.

A lot of effort appears to have gone into the glitzy period re-creation, but this is mainly a tearjerker.

With this odd mixture of elements the film's tone is gloomy, portentous, and hysterical, yet at the same time strangely earnest and square, as if David Lynch had tried to somehow make a movie version of Scientific American.

As it turns out, what's going on is yet another cinematic rip-off, this time of “The Exorcist.” Apparently rec stands not for record but for recycle

The Rube Goldberg variations are repetitive and devoid of the visual snap that helped distinguish James Wong’s "Final Destination" (2000).

Generally I don’t mind a little recreational fascism as long as it’s deep-fried in savory violent vengeance, but this overwrought mess gives vigilantism a bad name.

It's a victory of tone over storytelling, though perhaps a Pyrrhic one.

James Jones's antiwar novel was blandly realized by the usual bunch of Hollywood do-gooders in 1953...Sominex is cheaper and probably safer.

I'm guessing Donald Sutherland agreed to do this tedious horror flick because he heard Sissy Spacek was on board, and Spacek agreed to do it because she heard Sutherland was on board.

Ward, a gruff, amiable presence, has the stuff of an appealing blue-collar hero, but he hasn't got a chance with the feeble setup the filmmakers have given him: he's made the butt of meathead jokes for 60 minutes (as he tries to cope with the rigors of Chiun's training) and then plopped down in the middle of a slipshod intrigue, where his success has more to do with luck than any of the skills he has supposedly mastered.

Michael Mann (Miami Vice) produced this exercise in fascist chic, and it plays like a TV pilot filled out with a few cusswords and strokes of excess violence.

Alexa Vega, having graduated from the "Spy Kids" franchise, seems too poised to be vulnerable but too young for all her makeup.

Just when you thought camp was dead, along comes this bizarre cross between a Tarantino knockoff and a Hammer horror film.

Cringe-inducing when it's not cliched, this brassy, vulgar 2008 comedy from Australia mines mental disabilities for laughs.

Allen Coulter (Hollywoodland) directed this morose and sluggish drama, which gets more mileage from Pattinson's anguished profile than from Will Fetters's thunderously overwritten screenplay.

Initially this struck me as something you'd take your grandmother to see, but by the end it seemed more like something your grandmother would take her grandmother to see.

Smirky, gum-in-your-hair humor dominates this dreadful 2005 feature.

Proves that the Disney people can sell just about anything--including a misogynistic celebration of big business and prostitution.

A pretentious, unfocused, and fussy mess, in which director Darren Aronofsky manages to make Hugh Jackman unattractive and unsympathetic… Even fans of Aronofsky's incoherent, flashy “Pi” and somewhat more coherent, flashy “Requiem for a Dream” will be scratching their heads.

Hughes invokes the classical unities of time, place, and plot symmetry, yet he trashes his careful structure every time he needs a gag - destroying the integrity of his characters, shattering the plausibility of his situations.

Absolutely nothing funny happens during their drive to Georgetown for an interview, even with Donny Osmond along for the ride.

A dearth of game footage and a wealth of inspirational platitudes contribute to the sense of a powerful tale having already faded into yellowed newspaper clippings.