Though it isn't so much funny as clever, the parody will hopefully discourage some aspiring teen-movie makers from doing the same old thing.

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

This drama, about the three days leading up to the murder, never overcomes its inherent ghoulishness, largely because Chapman, like so many mentally ill people, is a huge bore.

Gamely running through parodies of TV commercials and shows, not to mention Spielberg, Schwarzenegger, Stallone, Selznick, and Gandhi, the movie proves to be awful by any standards--feeble, corny, and labored in script as well as direction--although the Capracorn of the basic premise occasionally manages to convey a certain sweetness.

Even when his work is at its most contrived, which it certainly is here, writer-director Ron Shelton is the best purveyor of jock humor around.

It's slight but likable, and diverting enough as light entertainment.

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

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.

For all its pretensions and avant-garde narrative dislocations, the star-studded cast...keeps this buzzing.

It might have looked good on paper, but the results are mixed at best; despite a few early chuckles, the whole thing gets tired after 20 minutes.

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

A superior soap opera, evocative at times of Warren Beatty's "Reds."

Ridiculous but occasionally fun.

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

The labored storytelling in this movie about displaced ambition diminishes the impact of the powerful performances.

Overlong, neither funny nor scary movie about a big lizard.

The actors make this fun if you can overlook the ludicrous view of Jeremy Leven's screenplay.

Schmidt works the slasher formula for all it's worth, but the repulsive stereotype at the center of the movie dampens the fun.

Wretched yuletide comedy.

A so-so romantic comedy.

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

Proof positive that comedy is hard, this debut feature by Hue Rhodes offers a wealth of skilled players and admirably offbeat gags yet seldom manages to generate any laughs.

By now the hypocrisy of simultaneously condemning and exploiting the audience's sadism has become so commonplace in American movies it hardly seems noteworthy.

Beautiful story of doomed love.

Jamal (Martin Lawrence), starts trying to make the best of a bad situation, which becomes our job too.

There's so little urgency to the plot that one eventually feels not even the actors and filmmakers believe for a second in what's going on.

Whitney frames this as the pilot for a reality TV show, but if that doesn't pan out he can pitch it to al Qaeda as a recruiting tool.

Has exactly the same premise (Repo! The Genetic Opera).

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.

The color-coded cinematography is nice but the jokes are obvious and the dialogue drags whenever metaphysics gets brought up.

The pretty-pretty visual style is evidence of a close study of Days of Heaven, as well as a complete misunderstanding of it. With Leo McKern and William Daniels; photographed by Nestor Almendros, forced into garish effects far below the level of his talent.

Ugly Americans in Paris have run-ins with the native werewolf culture in this horror-for-laughs story, in which the characters' stupidity and the deadpan acting are out of sync--instead of being campy or clever, the plot and performances are just unconvincing.

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.

Horror maestro Christophe Gans ("Brotherhood of the Wolf") directed this feature, worth seeing for the zombie nurses who gyrate like a Bob Fosse chorus line before slicing each other to ribbons.

Plays a bit better than it sounds. I miss the show's mangy, minimalist sets, but the slapdash narrative construction and good-hearted schmaltz survive intact.

Pretty funny caper comedy.

This stupidly contrived thriller is all the more disappointing if you admire previous work by Berry and director James Foley (After Dark, My Sweet).

Unwatchable-and, thanks to its high-decibel action sequences, barely listenable-this misbegotten medieval fantasy/stoner comedy marks a new low for David Gordon Green.

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.

The picture isn't bad, really—it's just a little too soft and eager to please, like the family films (circus pictures and suchlike) that John Wayne made in the 60s to soften his image.

It settles uneasily on the back of a verbal comic like Hanks—the movie keeps setting up gags that never quite materialize, and Hanks, unable to fill out his underwritten part with slapstick, is left stranded. Without any big laughs to even out the film's tone, the balance gradually shifts to the grim paranoia of the basic conception, and the movie that emerges seems oddly bleak and melancholic.

Pine, who expertly approximated William Shatner in the Star Trek reboot, seems to have picked up some of the actor's air of self-serious buffoonery, and it suits him well; as Witherspoon's best pal, late-night TV comedian Chelsea Handler holds down what might be called the Nora Ephron part, dispensing an endless stream of bawdy man jokes.

Despite their assorted vulgarities and lack of polish, the films of Adam Sandler are remarkably consistent in their own particular way. This one's no different.

The dearth of ideas is exemplified at the end by a Mary Tyler Moore freeze-frame of Graham leaping in the air.

The message must have got lost somewhere in the plot twists of this would-be topical thriller about the power of hearsay on a college campus.

The shtick based on whether other people understand him is subtle enough for 79 minutes.

On the very edge of coherence -- but I find its decadent erotic poetry irresistible.

Silly but fairly harmless.

The filmmakers seem to think they can also manipulate us by combining the erotic with the disgusting. And they can--it's a foolproof tactic.

It almost goes without saying that Harlin is the wrong man to direct a docudrama about the Russia-Georgian conflict of 2008, which displaced tens of thousands of people and left hundreds of others dead. Lacking political insight or sympathy for real people (as opposed to action-movie types), Harlin can offer little more than tasteless spectacle.

A bewildering slice of southern gothic hokum, it suffers from a weak script.

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

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

Reynolds turns the emphasis from the action scenes to the depressed emotional state of his strangely disengaged protagonist, and the result is a film haunted by an unstated, largely undramatized sense of melancholy, very personal but almost completely inarticulate.

Rowlands and Unger deliver sensitive performances, Shields is surprisingly good.

In the hands of Preston Sturges, this could have been the basis for some snappy mordant comedy, but Stephen Herek (Mr. Holland's Opus) sees only fields of corn, winding up with one of those pseudodeep stories (e.g. American Beauty) that Hollywood takes for spiritual.

Despite some amateurish moments, Pulido displays genuine visual intelligence, using repeated static angles to emphasize the blandness of the family's anonymous tract house and moving with the characters as they try to individualize themselves.

Whitaker directed this flaccid romance from a script by girl-power hacks Jessica Bendinger.

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.

Viewers have almost two hours to become thoroughly disgusted.

The plot is astoundingly senseless.

If Frank Capra had directed the Three Stooges in a Disney Christmas release, the results would have been considerably better than this godawful Fox comedy (1994) by writer-producer-director George Gallo.

Nothing to see here, keep moving.

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.

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

A new low for director Alan Parker, this trite mystery thriller does for capital punishment what his "Mississippi Burning" did for civil rights: with its muddled message, liberal piety, and slick Hollywood plot mechanics.

Involves a team of divers exploring a vast cave system, an appropriate setting given the hollowness of the story and acting.

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

This awful sequel dispenses with any such pretense, its cartoonish characters running an endless gauntlet of hypergruesome violence.

Playing a competitive schemer not unlike her "Desperate Housewives" character, Parker doesn't generate much heat, while Rudd is squandered in a bland role.

Maxwell continues his textbook emphasis on military maneuvers, but despite literally thousands of Civil War reenactors recruited for the film, the wide-screen canvas fails to map the tactics or evoke the terror of battle.

A stiff. I don't know the comic book series, but it could hardly be as lifeless as this leaden adaptation, in which the weapons have more personality than the characters and the nonstop action often feels like no action at all.

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

Stylish but insubstantial thriller .

The result is an exploitation movie that seems like it's about something -- though what exactly I couldn't say.

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

Muddled and boring.

The serious Catholic themes that made the original film genuinely disturbing have been flattened out into a cartoonish backstory.

More or less restages Tobe Hooper's 1974 original, including its much-loved family dinner scene.

Directors Gerard Ungerman and Audrey Brohy don't provide much analysis, instead telling the familiar stories of the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq.

Beneath all the forced hilarity lies an awful fear of aging--and Sandler is only 43! This is gonna be rough.

Those who deem the gentle comedies of Christopher Guest (Waiting for Guffman, Best in Show) cruel to showbiz dreamers should be subjected to this ugliness.

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.

Suitable entertainment for boys too young to shave.

Abysmal thriller.

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.

It's a pleasure to see Jill Clayburgh on the big screen in a story about middle-aged love and sexuality, but she can't rescue this alternately trite and implausible comedy.

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

This programmatic male-bonding comedy doesn't even borrow well.

Writer Philip Stark ("That '70s Show") and director Danny Leiner ("Freaks and Geeks") apply mature comic instincts to an adolescent genre.

Inept script delivers a series of juvenile gags.

Moving in fits and starts, mawkish in its sincerity, and at times disjointed in its lumpy structure.

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.

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

A real air ball, this lethargic drama by Preston A. Whitmore II is so poorly scripted that most of the major plot developments occur offscreen.

One of the film's most poignant moments comes when he and his father discuss his compulsive attraction to young boys.

Offers so much frenetic fast cutting to so little purpose that it becomes an ordeal.