The perfectly acceptable shtick executed by Williams--whose I-know-you-better-than-you-know-yourself seduction techniques ought to make him a hotter leading man--occasionally justifies the relentlessly light tone of this preachy 1998 comedy-drama.

Enter this diseased Lewis Carroll universe at your own risk.

Two obnoxious, swaggering brothers -- whose sexual naivete is supposed to make them endearing as well as pathetic -- find happiness in this more schmaltzy than funny Saturday Night Live spin-off.

Like the drive-in classics of Roger Corman and Samuel Z. Arkoff, this develops the principal characters and conflicts with just enough depth and keeps the narrative moving at a brisk pace.

All the movie's free-form horror phenomena might have been more interesting if the plot didn't keep insisting on a systematic explanation for them.

Cassavetes's “Gloria” may have been action-packed nonsense, but it was enjoyable precisely because it was all of a piece. This Gloria is simply pieces--a few of them enjoyable, most of them not.

Madonna, making her directorial debut, aims for the romping irreverence of Richard Lester's 60s comedies, and though she lacks the formal control to pull it off, this is a charming mess.

An intriguing noir whose conceptual sophistication is partly undermined by naive execution.

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.

Visual-effects wizards Greg and Colin Strause directed, showing more affinity for the city's steel and glass than for any of the characters.

The villainous turns by Jon Voight (as a hard-hearted Mormon bishop) and Terence Stamp (as a bloodthirsty Brigham Young) would have been more fun if they weren't part of such a clumsy campaign to lay this tragedy at the church's doorstep.

Neither the love nor the loss in this tear-jerking romance contains much drama.

No laughs here, just the dull ache of seeing Heder slotted into a standard piece of Hollywood twaddle.

Another flabby big-screen sitcom from "Happy Days" creator Garry Marshall.

The narrative is murky and ludicrous, the action violent and nihilistic, the contemporary western ethos painfully pretentious.

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

I didn't laugh once.

Jas lots of action, drama, comedy, and corn -- and few pauses, which is striking.

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.

Someone should tell these guys you can't score a touchdown throwing lateral passes.

The whole thing becomes a very rickety and contrived tearjerker.

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.

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.

Alternates between chunks of opaque exposition delivered by cardboard characters and eruptions of colorful and highly imaginative action.

Director Bruce McCulloch, an alumnus of the Canadian TV show "The Kids in the Hall," lacks the sense of scale and timing needed for a feature film, and Lee's voice-over about fate that brackets the narrative only highlights its shapelessness.

Here suspense is abandoned, and Jason is on-screen so long you get sick of seeing him -- and sick of the poorly staged slasher-film tricks.

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

The panoramic backgrounds have a silky beauty, but the characters are cheaply rendered with doll faces, enlarged musculature, tiny joints, and clunky movement. It's like watching Max Headroom lead his people out of Egypt.

[A] really awful, hysterical thriller...If you thought Schlesinger’s Pacific Heights was egregious, you ain’t seen nothin’ yet.

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

The cynicism of the writer and director smacks of such self-hatred (fully acknowledged in the film's closing shot) that their disgust spills over onto all their characters (and their audience too), and inasmuch as everybody here is one kind of whore or another at virtually every moment, the fine moral distinctions this movie insists on making sometimes seem about as arcane and as loony as medieval theology about angels dancing on the heads of pins.

Poorly paced action comedy.

More interested in standard thriller effects than in giving us human beings to contend with. The audience I saw this with seemed to want to feel insulted, and this piece of crap delivered.

This isn't at all scary, but the rough images can be weirdly compelling, the movie's conspiratorial jive enhanced by the fact that the lunar surface looks like someone's backyard.

The inevitable isn't worth the wait.

It isn't very good, but it doesn’t seem to care, which turns out to be rather refreshing.

The awful crank comedy "Spun" (2002) still ranks as the most dehumanizing youth picture of the decade, but this New York drama by first-time director Hunter Richards is a close second.

The movie's repeated attempts to combine seriousness and humor as in a blender give it a dysfunctionally earnest tone.

By ordinary movie standards it's awful, but fans of cinematic dementia should have fun for about half an hour.

This is supposedly a big-budget production, though on several occasions the scientist hero (Edward Burns) seems to be walking in place before a rear-projection screen.

The whole thing is pretty stupid, but Angus Macfadyen is watchable as the villain.

While the film includes several exciting, creatively shot action scenes, the drama is otherwise so shopworn that the violent climax is a relief.

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

Initially tolerable but increasingly stupid thriller.

I don't know the novel, but judging from the script by Crichton and John Patrick Shanley, this must be scraping the bottom of the Crichton barrel.

It's almost always night and almost always raining.

Sandler adapts his sweet-natured doofus shtick to this remarkably faithful remake of Frank Capra's 1936 rube-in-the-big-city comedy Mr. Deeds Goes to Town--which suggests that Capra may have invented dumb movies before their time.

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.

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

This derivative concept movie is tiresomely slick as well as shamefully sloppy, and someone should issue a restraining order requiring writer-director Darren Stein to stay at least 100 yards away from irony.

The pranks are as bland as Macdonald’s demeanor, which is supposed to subvert expectations about the role of the straight man in a comedy duo; the subjects of running gags range from anal rape to anal rape.

It's not scary because not one second is believable.

The idea of transposing the story to the macho, greedy world of big-time sports is promising, but director Jesse Vaughan delivers only flat dialogue and predictable situations.

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

Away, away with all of you and your sorry master, director Alan Johnson, whose every prospect for future employment in this darkling realm of TV pilot failure must be waning by the hour.

The result is TV flavored, less a narrative than a haphazard succession of vignettes populated by crude stereotypes instead of credible characters.

All of this comedy's jokes are old.

"Speed" made millions on mindless, empty thrills; this laborious sequel is just as mindless and empty but lacks the thrills.

There's a gothic backstory to all this, which makes no sense but looks pretty cool.

It's not terribly interesting on the subject.

As in most bad thrillers, the number of pointless shocks increases in direct proportion to the drama's decreasing vitality, like defibrilator paddles jolting a dying man.

Strange, dumb, and sometimes even fun.

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

After nine years, Duffy has coughed up a sequel, and like the first movie it's energetic, proudly juvenile, and reverently derivative.

Overwrought indie crime drama.

The results are flat-out tedious.

What seems more problematic is the virtual exaltation of Dirty Harry vigilantism, the storm trooper mentality and behavior on Nolte's part that the film breezily takes for granted; if there's any irony about it, it's carefully designed to wash over the storm trooper types in the audience and not give offense to them--only to the rest of us.

Penis jokes fly fast and furious, and while they're hit-or-miss they're occasionally very funny. Schneider always plays a variation of the same put-upon schlemiel, a formula that worked fine for, well, Buster Keaton and Harold Lloyd.

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

All I saw were unimpressive digital effects; artless, quick-cut abstracted gore; and a last-ditch attempt to evoke a visceral response by heaping the climactic scene with bat shit.

This gross-out action comedy gets good mileage from its high-energy music and World Championship Wrestling characters, and leads David Arquette and Scott Caan are expertly pathetic.

The material is nothing but a mass of programmed emotions and bumptious rabble rousing, but that isn't enough for Clark—he's got to make it even dumber by filling it with gross caricatures, incoherent action, and Irish music. And what this man does to actors, I wouldn't do to cockroaches.

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

As an actor Austin is still a lightweight, but Rick Hoffman (Hostel) fleshes out a recognizable character.

Christian E. Christiansen directed this stinker, which lacks even unintentional humor.

Sally Field's direction is pedestrian, though she does manage to get winning performances out of Driver and Eisenberg.

This moronic horror movie has the earmarks of a disastrous shoot patched up in editing.

A holiday film for the whole family, provided the whole family is obsessed with human waste.

Dismal.

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

Inexplicably, Butler continues to get work in romantic comedies despite his limited range and boorish persona.

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.

Insulting to audience and cast alike.

It's doubtful that the haste with which two actors of the same sex break away from a kiss in this comedy was in the script, but otherwise everybody stays in character, which is impressive given the manic range of some of the roles and the comic monotony of others.

Landis never bothers to account for the friendship that springs up spontaneously between these two antipathetic types, but then he never bothers to account for anything in this loose progression of recycled Abbott and Costello riffs and fumbled Strangelovean satire.

The crude technique of director Sean Cunningham borrows whatever sophistication it has from Halloween's precise and elegant point-of-view shots of the killer, though Cunningham often cheats by using the ploy inconsistently. For all its shoddiness, the film manages, just barely, to achieve its ignoble goals--it delivers what it promises.

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

It exchanges the police subplot that gave the earlier film its steady pace for a lot of pointless backstory about the mother-fixated stalker.

Even with the bar lowered, this seems appallingly bad, a lazy assortment of weak punch lines, sentimental music cues, and trite situations.

The thesis-driven story precludes much dramatic discovery, and the looming shuttle disaster only exacerbates the sense of heavy-handedness.

As if to justify a serious discussion of this comedy before dissing it, some reviewers have pointed out that it evokes Casablanca. Maybe that's why the plot seems imposed on the characters.

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.

This thriller largely succeeds in putting quotation marks around its use of genre conventions, mixing subtlety and overkill to create a pensive mood that transcends the plot.

Indie moviemaking reaches some kind of awful zenith of self-indulgence in this scriptless drama, entirely improvised and shot on cellphones.

Seems perfectly timed to coincide with the ascension to office of George W. Bush. It's a clunky effort Bush could have written and directed.

A cringe-inducing flop.

As silly as it sounds, but strangely dull.

Though some of his one-liners are pretty good, his shtick can't sustain this dutifully scripted comedy. Megyn Price, who's done time on the sitcom Grounded for Life, is a welcome distraction as the waitress with a crush on Larry.