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

I can't say I warmed to the results, but I was solidly held for the film's two hours.

Sweetly mediocre.

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

Awful light drama.

This atrocious comedy doesn't have an idea in its head but still screams at the top of its lungs.

To my mind, this is one of Robert Aldrich’s worst films, but clearly not everyone agrees.

At first Costner seems to distrust the hokey character he plays, but his performance and the movie's slanted humor, rash melodrama, and ludicrous action soon become riveting.

Excruciatingly earnest yet convictionless movie.

Repulsive 80s flashback.

A straightforward account of the debate between evolutionists and ID proponents might have been both entertaining and enlightening; instead this follows the avuncular Ben Stein (who cowrote the movie) as he jet-sets around the globe trying to prove that a cabal of Darwinians has conspired to destroy academic freedom.

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

The current national priorities should be as follows: reduce carbon emissions and stop funding the films of M. Night Shyamalan.

This underdog comedy and its title character have considerable charm.

Disingenuously naive romantic comedy.

It's no masterpiece, but I found it consistently good-hearted and sometimes hilarious, and the sparse crowd I saw it with was laughing as much as I was, especially at the outrageous rap numbers.

Corky never becomes sympathetic, and without this fundamental irony the movie doesn't have a leg to stand on.

The Griswolds, headed by Chevy Chase, are taking what could be one of their last family vacations.

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).

The plot keeps switching tracks.

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.

There are fascinating moments... but these are overshadowed by an endless stream of sound bites and pep talks to volunteers.

A total train wreck.

It was like a Farrelly brothers gross-out without the laughs.

Schmaltzy comedy.

Crushingly dull teen horror flick.

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.

To her credit, Bello makes a real commitment to this spiteful, self-absorbed character, though the credibility she generates through sheer force of will is no match for the gimmicky plot twist that arrives at the story’s midpoint and sends the movie spinning off into stupid-land.

Before seeing this film I couldn't understand why the producers had given it a subtitle; afterward I realized "Ecks vs. Sever" was probably the full script.

Rosenthal observes all the ritual elements -- a veteran of the series, he seems to understand that its fans crave certainty over shock.

Most of this is silly, dim-witted stuff, but a few of the shocks carry some of the crude power of Jack Arnold's low-budget horror films of the 50s.

Another go-round for the premise of an overaged kid insinuating himself into a stranger's family.

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

Lightweight slasher.

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

Director Kurt Wimmer has an eye for jackboot chic (Equilibrium), and the images here have been digitally polished so that the characters' skin is smoother than porcelain. It's a cool effect--I spent most of this interminable actioner wondering if one could bounce a quarter off Jovovich's bare midriff.

The unfunniest comedy I can recall seeing in ages.

For the most part I was able to accept this thesis and enjoy Lopez in her usual superwoman role, but the script does get awfully preachy in spots.

Schizoid romantic comedy -- The first half of the movie is full of broad but capable comedy, but the original film's sexual and class politics are clumsily handled, and the mood turns serious with all the subtlety of a falling guillotine blade.

The players appear to be having a good time, though the situation is too sitcom-familiar to be funny.

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.

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.

Almost competent but not quite watchable.

Pesci proves he can act his way through anything.

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.

If you really hate your kids, pack them off to this slapdash farce, whose only funny moment is the PC disclaimer at the end about the Disney company's humanist concern for blind people (which even literate toddlers will have trouble understanding anyway).

A nauseating, stridently phony rom-com.

They must've been working overtime on the Xerox machines at New World Pictures, since this 1986 women-behind-bars exploitation spoof sounds like a literal remake of 1983's Chained Heat (which was itself a remake of a remake of a remake).

Al Pacino chews up so much scenery it's surprising there's any left by the end of this fetid thriller.

The gilt-and-grime setting is eerily atmospheric, and screenwriter Dan Madigan has a nicely sick sense of humor.

Painfully unfunny comedy.

It doesn't have the polish or the momentum of an Indiana Jones adventure, and isn't too engaging on the plot level, but at least the filmmakers keep it moving with lots of screwball stunts.

Even the action sequences are poorly executed, with lots of choppy editing meant to conceal the fakery.

Horrendous dialogue and horrific directing dominate this thriller.

Packaged as a romantic comedy but devoid of comedy or romance, this baffling train wreck stars Sandra Bullock as a tediously kooky constructor of crossword puzzles for a Sacramento newspaper.

The cinematic equivalent of a tapeworm, this delivers few laughs beyond the initial chuckles of recognition. Seltzer and Friedberg (who also directed) have another script in development called "Raunchy Movie"; apparently one idea they haven't yet considered is "Watchable Movie."

An exercise in robotic filmmaking.

The troubled star writhes her way through a red-lit pole dance in the opening credits and shrieks her way through a prolonged torture-porn sequence; after those lurid turns the movie settles into an indifferent mystery plot as the cops pressure the girl to help them find the culprit.

A euphemism for the right of anyone to make movies just as awful as those of big studios.

What emerges is oddly ineffectual and uninvolving.

Doesn't do much with its pseudosavvy characters.

I kind of liked this slow, stoner comedy.

Shameless exercise in high-tech sadism.

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.

The plot exposition gets laborious in spots, the period flavor is only occasional and approximate, and the direction tends to be clunky, yet the strong secondary cast helps to take up some of the slack.

Likable but negligible.

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

This is one dull party.

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.

A straight exploitation story.

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.

Angry fish travels to the Bahamas for the Christmas holidays, plotting revenge against the family of a vacationing New England widow (Lorraine Gary). Noel, noel, a charming gift idea with suggestions of inverted seasonal myth—until director Joseph Sargent swamps it all in antimythical literalism and predictable lunchtime theater.

Romantic comedies should never be this exhausting. Despite a few good zingers, Mars Callahan's vitriolic take on the sexes sinks under the weight of its secondhand psychobabble and smug apercus.

The plot somehow manages to be both hackneyed and convoluted.

Formula thriller that exploits homosexuality better than murder-mystery clues.

Like its methane-filled outhouse that explodes right on cue, this sequel to "Daddy Day Care" (2003) smells.

The earnestness of some of the drama in the only deceptively unsophisticated narrative may be more shocking than any of the gross-outs.

Prinze and Stiles regularly talk to the camera, but that doesn't make their characters self-aware.

The grasping novelty of the visuals doesn't rival the uncharismatic leads or the hopelessly, unironically banal plot.

Aside from the waste of a talented cast, the only thing that really caught my attention was the tomblike silence of the audience--at least until the bong jokes started.

Very, very stupid.

Imagine combining bad imitations of the "Ace Ventura" and "Austin Powers" movies and you'll have a rough idea of this feeble Dana Carvey farce.

The performances are convincing, and director Gene Rhee does a good job of outlining the messiness of human affections here, showing how we don't always know what we really want or how to get it.

For every jab at hypocrisy in law enforcement or in the media's crime coverage...there's a scene's worth of uninflected scatology or misogyny.

But the most stimulating, satisfying aspect of this action fantasy is the theme music.

The recut American version is truly awful, but a good 75 percent of the awfulness is attributable to Miramax, the film's distributor.

This gross sex farce actually has a point, though about half the population won't like what it is.

Seems like a miscalculation on multiple levels.

This excruciating sequel tries to squeeze a few more bucks from the "Spy Kids" espionage formula.

This inept 2003 melodrama has become a Rocky Horror-style cult favorite...As someone who's watched more bad movies than you can imagine, I'm mostly immune to the so-bad-it's-good aesthetic, though I can see how, viewed in a theater at midnight after a few drinks, this might conjure up its own hilariously demented reality.

Brain-dead adaptation of a popular video game.

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

The current vogue for all things vampiric is ripe for a satirical drubbing, but this repulsive comedy is part of the problem, not the solution.

The hokey dialogue and witless physical gags keep everything painful and hectoring.

The meanest and least inspired kids U know.

First-time directors Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski must have written the script for this comedy when they were about 12--and not changed a word.

Nothing's quite so painful as failed comedy, and this atrocity is equivalent to a compound fracture.

Revolting exploitation feature.