Woody Allen's naive notions of art--he thinks it means a story with a moral--might have some primitive charm if he didn't put them forward so self-importantly.

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.

Slow, arty thriller.

Despite the sophistication of the source material, this 1984 film isn't particularly successful: Petersen insists on forcing the superficial moral lessons, and the half hour removed from the film by its American distributors leaves it with a harsh, choppy rhythm.

Whatever you think of her, Madonna’s a veteran video star with a well-developed ability to use a camera as a blunt instrument. A good or honest director would see that, and take steps to compensate for it, but Keshishian is a collaborator, not a journalist. With a child’s self-absorption, Madonna thinks everything she says or does is endlessly fascinating.

This movie feels like it was made by a bank rather than a person.

It’s a heart-tugging scenario undermined by a striking hypocrisy: obscuring a hot-button issue in casting, some actors with Down's syndrome have minor roles, while Penn plays the lead -- and chews the scenery.

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

Allen doesn't get us to care much about any of the characters here.

The word "raunchy" doesn't begin to describe this.

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

Ritchie may be skilled at generating controlled chaos, but his surprise-a-minute strategy ultimately holds no surprises; Snatch is even more frenetically boring than his 1999 "Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels."

Ponderous, predictable, and unfunny, this gangster comedy was directed by Brian De Palma, though apart from a few of his characteristic symmetry gags in the opening sequences, it's indistinguishable from the work of any average TV hack.

Most of the action in this 2001 indie drama takes place on computer screens, with grainy faces framed by sharp little boxes; the 21st-century conceit is topical enough but the characters and their problems couldn't be more stale.

Director Paul Morrison forfeits any meaningful statement about art for a pedestrian coming-out story, based in part on Dali's unreliable, self-aggrandizing memoirs.

The result, messily directed by Jimmy Hayward, begins affably enough as a random slew of Leone-style squint-a-thons and shoot-outs but then loses it way in a dopey, anachronism-happy sci-fi plot.

Too slavish in its devotion to 50s sci-fi conventions to work as parody or camp, this indie comedy by "The X-Files" alumnus R.W. Goodwin sinks under the weight of its homage.

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.

Though praised when it came out (1930), Alfred Hitchcock’s film of Sean O’Casey’s play, with some of the original Dublin cast (including Sara Allgood as Juno), is a fairly deadly case of canned theater that’s pretty close to what Hitchcock many years later would refer to as “photographs of people talking.”

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.

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

Although their love is undeniably a blessing, I was disconcerted watching the elderly couple smile and chuckle today as they recall their daily letters and secret meetings in the midst of such wide-scale death.

Cowriters Luc Besson and Robert Mark Kamen (Gladiator) saddle Neeson with indigestible dialogue and preposterous situations.

You want misery? he gives you misery—dark, drear, suppurating medieval oppressiveness; monotony? he gives you that too, lots and lots of monotony; subhuman grotesquerie and primitive superstition? not to worry: this guy didn't direct Quest for Fire for nothing.

Tedious mockumentary.

Compels questions about Kinski's bravado and artistry, and suggests that it might not always be easy to distinguish his from Herzog's.

This comedy-thriller that has no particular motive for changing tones.

The movie occasionally makes an unexpectereference -- though with more desperation than wit.