Cuba Gooding Jr. is the kind of guy who does ten minutes of shtick every time the little light in the fridge comes on, and for years I've been waiting for him to just go away. If this dud comedy is any indication of the scripts he's getting, I may not have to wait much longer.

Schmaltzy comedy.

Writer-director Howard McCain bids fair to dethrone Uwe Boll as the king of crap action flicks, and every second feels like time on the cross.

The indifference of the proceedings and the hero's slapstick behavior to the everyday realities of the camps borders on the nauseating.

The whole thing becomes a very rickety and contrived tearjerker.

Costner has an uncanny aptitude for gravitating toward the dopiest projects in sight, but this time he's outdone himself.

An extravagant mess.

Seems like a miscalculation on multiple levels.

Failed romantic comedy.

But it's also Howard's and his audience's misfortune that a good time can be had by all only if nothing of substance gets said.

The witty title aside, this is a miserably dull exercise in stingy-Jew humor and post-Jarmusch nonreaction.

Until the diverting special effects take center stage, this story, about an alien intelligence that builds an army out of flesh and metal, pathetically exploits genre conventions without generating self-reference, camp, or thrills.

It's clear that writer Akiva Goldsman and director Joel Schumacher are bereft of ideas and using the MTV clutter as a cover-up.

Almost no plot here and even less character--just a lot of pretexts for S-M imagery, Catholic decor, gobs of gore, and the usual designer schizophrenia.

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.

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

This mildly moody SF thriller belabors standard dramatic conceits involving jealousy and sexual betrayal.

The results are flat-out tedious.

A better name for it would have been the Herschell Gordon Lewis: the godfather of gore himself couldn't have topped this succession of grisly deaths.

Bloody gangsta crap.

The characters seem both reduced and idealized, and the plot has turns a dispassionate dramatist would avoid.

You get the plot, all right, but that's all you get - no body, no texture, no rhythm, no shading.

As with many R-rated studio comedies, the transgressive humor isn't nearly as offensive as the phony sentiment that's supposed to redeem it, supplied here in stale scenes of the sitter bonding with his little charges.

A geek festival that mainly invites us to hoot at a bunch of alleged crazies.

A numbing combination of sloppy writing, vulgar art direction, high school acting, and bungled special effects—in short, par for the course for venerable hack Michael Anderson.

It's as if Russ Meyer had made "Death Wish III" with an adenoidal cast, though it isn't that good.

What's left is a curiously disconnected illustration of American racism, which nevertheless fails to realize the power and irony inherent in its pop-Marxist analysis.

Dismal.

Without the grandiose narrative structure of the six live-action releases, this feels even more pointless, a mechanical attempt to milk the kids for every last dime.

Writer-director Peter Greenaway never uses narrative lightly...references to the act of filmmaking exhaust their impact pretty quickly.

A limp, cheaply made version of the Broadway. Director Randal Kleiser shows no real sense of how a musical is constructed: the songs are bunched together, the production numbers don't move, and the whole project shifts awkwardly between naturalism and stylization.

Its ponderous explanations about why there are vampires in Arizona in the new millennium (blah, blah, blah).

A major washout.

A career low for Mark Wahlberg and director John Singleton (Boyz N the Hood), this ridiculous mean-streets adventure starts out like a Hell's Kitchen melodrama from the 30s and eventually spins off into a series of gunfights, beat downs, and trite Motown numbers.

The story is painfully slow.

Directors Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor were responsible for the delirious "Crank" and "Crank 2" but left the magic behind when they threw together this tedious mash-up of "Tron," "Rollerball," "The Matrix," etc.

The film's a swell way of torturing yourself for 108 minutes.

At first I thought I was watching yet another version of "A Christmas Carol"; then I wondered if it was a remake of "It's a Wonderful Life"; finally I gave up trying to find anything at all in it that was unfamiliar.

Once again, the overall premise is milked for some mild titillation involving the hero's sexual innocence, making one wonder if the genre's popularity might involve some deeply sublimated form of kiddie porn--arguably the distilled ideological essence of squeaky-clean Reaganism.

At least (John) Waters cares about most of his freaks; for Lynch they're basically exploitation fodder for a puritanical "dark vision of the universe" that seems to come straight out of junior high, complete with giggles.

A festival favorite in 1992, this flamboyant Australian crowd pleaser and first feature by Baz Luhrmann ("Moulin Rouge") struck me then as one of the more horrific and unpleasant movies I'd seen in quite some time.

A promotional tool that establishes its superfluousness simply by existing, this clumsy, smirking movie has a bitter soul.

Not particularly sensitive or funny comedy-drama.

Ill conceived or badly handled.

Corrupt warden, sadistic guards, new inmate debauched by her surroundings, prison-break hostage drama--could have come straight from an old George Raft vehicle.

This is gold-plated navel gazing in the worst 60s style.

A very bad film--snide, barely competent, and overdrawn--that enjoys a perennial popularity, perhaps because its confused moral position appeals to the secret Nietzscheans within us.

This is mostly a listless hodgepodge of half-improvised whatever, the seven lead characters so flatly conceived they're like the Keystone Kops (without the chops).

Isn't absurd enough to be funny.

Full of odd notions and interludes, the movie never really comes together, but fitfully suggests a cross between Boys Town and Greaser's Palace.

The best thing I can say about this limp prequel to the Farrelly brothers' Dumb & Dumber is that it obliged me to check out the original, which I'd been studiously avoiding for years. If you haven't seen it, it's pretty funny, and mercifully light on the scatology and cheap sentiment of later Farrelly efforts.

At least it has the decency not to pretend it's aspiring any higher than the toilet.

The result is an insufferable academic cocktail party of declamatory speeches coaxed to life in its middle stretch by the incredible Maria Bello, who wades in like a paramedic at a disaster scene.

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.

Every joke is stretched to the breaking point, and no one seems to be having any fun.

It seems almost impossible that someone could vulgarize and coarsen Tom Wolfe's best-selling novel, but leave it to director Brian De Palma, working here with a script by Michael Cristofer, to plumb uncharted depths.

After making their two best features to date, "Fargo" and "The Big Lebowski," the Coen brothers have surely come up with their worst.

Seems more theatrical than cinematic, needing the kind of direct address that only a stage can provide.

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

Excruciatingly earnest yet convictionless movie.

An exceptionally feeble entry whose ideas, visual and otherwise, consist of hand-me-downs from 2001, Star Wars, Blade Runner, and Superman III, and whose special effects, despite the hefty budget, look strictly bargain basement.

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.

The plot is astoundingly senseless.

A loud and often stupid action thriller in which director Thomas Carter (Swing Kids) has every screaming psycho killer and every hysterical hostage behaving identically. Lots of car crashes, one superb explosion, and the fleeting charms of Carmen Ejogo (Absolute Beginners) hardly compensate for the overall unpleasantness, in which sadism is taken for granted and no character is allowed to develop. The idiotic script is by Randy Feldman.

Stone's all-purpose conspiracy theory, built like a house of cards, rivals "Mississippi Burning" in its sheer crudeness and contempt for the audience.

The glorification of the FBI, the obfuscation about Jim Crow laws, and the absurd melodramatics may all have been well-intentioned, but the understanding about the past and the present of racism that emerges is depressingly thin.

Poorly paced action comedy.

Stylish but insubstantial thriller .

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

I can think of only one bit of Tin Cup that's beautiful, imaginative, and different, and it lasts for only a few seconds: a speech delivered by Russo, before her character is transformed into the standard-issue cheerleader, is broken into fragments by jump cuts.

This is thoughtful nihilist provocation at best.

The filmmakers uphold an unfortunate tradition in movies based on TV shows by busily adding superfluous plot elements.

The writers must have racked their brains for the formula: two parts other movies to one part childhood revenge fantasies

Nearly toothless 1998 existential drama.

About eight minutes of this comedy is devoted to some terrific breakdancing; the rest consists of wall-to-wall product placement and politically incorrect bad-taste comedy.

Tacky in the extreme, this self-congratulatory 1988 film is an exercise in hypocrisy, indulging every form of Christmas exploitation that it pretends to attack, and many of the laughs are forced.

Using blasts of shrill, high-decibel noise in place of actual scares has become a common horror-movie tactic, the cinematic equivalent of botox, silicone, and penile-enhancement surgery. Producer Michael Bay and director Samuel Bayer deploy the tactic so regularly in this remake of Wes Craven's 1984 classic that after a while I just plugged my ears.

Maybe writers Josann McGibbon and Sara Parriott were thinking of Tracy and Hepburn--assuming they were thinking of anything--but not even Roberts's smile can put this one over.

It's not terribly interesting on the subject.

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.

This tired action comedy is the usual weave of over-the-top violence and cross-cultural shtick.

This silly, contrived video--plays like a student work.

Self-conscious camp, the lowest artistic category known to man.

Indescribably awful—a serving up of Beatles tunes by Peter Frampton and the Bee Gees with the ugliest visuals imaginable, directed with more glitz than good sense by Michael Schultz.

Two of MTV's stupidest programs, "The Real World" and "Spring Break," have been rolled into one staggeringly dumb feature film.

Sitting through this barrage of all-purpose insults aimed at obvious targets was an unenlightening chore.

This 2005 feature offered me my first taste of Guy Ritchie's macho-centric artiness, and I hope it's my last.

All this is supposed to be as cute as bugs and chock-full of worldly wisdom, but even with lead actors as likable and as resourceful as these, the material made me alternately want to gag and nod off.

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.

Thanks to writer-director Michael Patrick King, I now have a fair idea how it might feel to be stoned to death with scented candles.

The writing and directing of Jonathan Darby, a British TV veteran and Hollywood executive, make the proceedings neither believable nor compelling, so what might have been another "Rosemary's Baby" isn't even a halfway decent genre exercise.

If I were a Christian, I'd be appalled to have this primitive and pornographic bloodbath presume to speak for me.

Adam Sandler displays no virtuosity and stirs no pathos in this special-effects comedy.

Not even D.W. Griffith, Steven Spielberg, and Stanley Kubrick working together could succeed in making this pandering piece of nonsense work dramatically on any level except the most egregiously phony.

Like many artists today, Grisham and Schumacher exploit racial tension without understanding it.

Director Jeannot Szwarc strains hard for spectacular visual effects, though he's barely able to compose a competent close-up.

This one follows the depressing pattern of "Surviving Christmas" and "Christmas With the Kranks": enforced holiday cheer gives way to bilious hatred, then hollow forgiveness.

It's especially doomed by a strained script that recalls certain bottom-of-the-barrel Bob Hope vehicles of the 50s in its attempts to be brittle and self-mocking in its humor.