A muddle—not amiably ambling, not affably shaggy, just a mess that gets messier till, at times, the whole thing looks improvised by amateurs more concerned with being clever than something resembling affectionate.

Freedomland manages a seemingly impossible feat: It's both turgid AND overwrought, eliciting the shriek that fades into a yawn without anyone ever noticing. It's a wholly dreary piece of work.

Its execution is stultifying, laughable and ultimately a little offensive.

If you really want to live life to the fullest, step one is to avoid wasting an hour and a half of your life in a theater showing Last Holiday.

Stay away: Everything about the movie is rinky-dink, from its phony, lifeless dialogue to its drab, shabby sitcom look to its choppy editing, all of which can wear on you after 95 minutes that come to feel like an eternity.

Rent plays as a very long joke with no punch line, an exercise in mawkish sentimentality that's embarrassing to watch. Kudos to the actors for truly committing to their roles, but with this material, it might have been better if they hadn't.

Witless, terminally irritating remake.

The Dying Gaul becomes so overwrought in the last act that it ends up as pure histrionics.

Less fun than "Cry_Wolf" and "Venom," if that's possible.

This highly sanitized, heavily costumed, dramatically inert nonsense makes last year's dreadful golf biopic "Bobby Jones: Stroke of Genius" look like a masterpiece.

Is there anything more tedious than the guy who complains and complains about something he knows nothing about? Danish cinema auteur Lars von Trier has never been to the United States because he's afraid of flying, yet he seems determined to keep making movies about how horrible this country is.

This was a better movie back when it was called "Gossip" . . . oh, wait, no -- that one sucked too.

Any goy, too, can fall for this tripe, especially if they've a fondness for mawkish cliché, sitcom pacing, popcorn psychology, and lousy cinematography.

The final showdown between sole survivor and killer is sufficiently well done that you wonder why the rest didn't measure up.

Indeed, this is the very kind of lame-brained folly Levy and his SCTV cohorts used to mock on their old show; now it's how he makes rent.

It has but one thing going for it: a cast filled with Oscar nominees.

Shoddy and ridiculous.

It's easily the ugliest film Gilliam's ever made, a movie shot with a lens someone forgot to wipe. It's also his loudest: Every scene is amped up to 11, and every line of dialogue is delivered as though it's a cry for help from the bottom of the well.

There's no reason to see this film in a theater -- you'll hate yourself for paying full price. Plus, you'll need beer, and lots of it, to appreciate the movie properly.

The movie's so unfunny, it almost appears to be that way on purpose, kind of like an Ingmar Bergman film.

Stripped of every major scary moment and restructured in what feels like a deliberate attempt to remove all suspense, this "horror" movie is now a domestic soap opera.

This hackneyed, hapless and utterly useless redo of an overrated 1960s sitcom is excruciating to sit through for a dozen reasons.

To damn Herbie: Fully Loaded as soporific crap, as lazy profiteering, as yet another needless and cynical remake in a season populated by such con artists, would be as pointless as the movie itself.

It's a lame Heather Locklear romantic comedy and a lame Hilary Duff romantic comedy all in one!

This all-star Euro-indie is stultifyingly torturous.

Proves an absolute chore to sit through.

It's chatty when it wants to pretend it's deep and spiritual, messy when it's striving for chaotic and thrilling, and boring when it has no other options left.

Billed as a comedy, this low-wattage sitcom is both ill-tempered and mean-spirited.

D is for Dreadful. And Duchovny.

A stunning piece of work--stunningly inept, stunningly incoherent, stunningly awful in every single way imaginable.

It's a mess, but it isn't as bad as you think.

Part female revenge flick, part Saturday Night Live skit, part courtroom drama, and part religious tent revival, this movie never congeals into anything worth watching.

One presumes the only thing worse than making this disaster is actually watching it; wouldn't wish either on anyone.

Here is the horror-action genre at its silliest and most uninspired.

May steal from the best, but it does it so badly and obviously that it has to depend upon gratuitous shock-cuts and soundtrack stings to elicit any kind of reflex-action fright from the viewer.

The performances of the Anglo cast are closer to catatonia than Catalonia.

Runs two hours and 20 minutes and plays like 10 days in the county jail.

As the year stumbles toward its conclusion and critics begin penning their best-and-worst compendiums, here's a holiday contender fit for the all-time Naughty List.

Isn't any fun at all, which is ultimately the most damning thing you can say about a Bruckheimer movie.

The witless inanity of After the Sunset is so numbing that the sole reason for any living creature to sit through it--man, woman or household pet--is to marvel at the speed and variety of actress Salma Hayek's costume changes.

Has all the charm of a canceled CBS sitcom.

You're almost tempted to laugh at Birth by the end, but by then you're too busy cursing it to bother.

Wrenches paltry giggles and cheap warmth from a screenplay that makes "Son in Law" seem like Sam Shepard. But wretched Affleck is the real liability.

Succeeds in scaring you and boring you at the same time; unlike Moore's movie, it's agitprop bereft of artistry, porn for Republicans.

Feels like a quirky sitcom -- "Arrested Development" without the development.

It would take the ghost of Stanley Kubrick to get great performances out of Jimmy Fallon, Queen Latifah, and supermodel Gisele Bündchen, and Tim, you're no Stanley.

Russell, a former student of Buddhist monk-philosopher Robert Thurman's, is reaching too far, straining too hard, saying too much that adds up to so little after all the mumbos and jumbos tallied up by film's end.

The very best thing about A Dirty Shame, a giddy sex farce from John Waters, is the credits.

September Tapes, with its torturously high-minded narration and ludicrously low-road shenanigans, uses the terror attacks of 2001 as the setup for an infuriating gotcha finale.

It wears out its welcome well before its halfway point, by which time you're either so tangled up in plot points you're strangling, or so bored you just wish you were being strangled.

Andrew Litvack, whose inability to direct is outweighed only by his inability to write anything remotely witty, enlightening, or engaging. Calling this a farce would be, well, a farce.

It's unfortunate that, nudity and all, this is one of Toback's absolute worst efforts.

If Alfred Hitchcock were retarded, lobotomized, and freshly dug up, he might possibly c--- out a movie like this one.

There might have been a decent comedy here if someone had remembered to insert some actual humor.

The first Baby Geniuses, released in 1999, was one of the most inane, humorless, ill-conceived, poorly acted comedies of the year. As difficult as it is to imagine, the sequel is even worse, earning an F.

The movie, which feels as amateurish as a student film made for cable access, doesn't deliver the goods; the gotcha moment never comes.

It's the solipsistic, obvious, misogynistic, and occasionally redeeming tale.

Every situation, every bit of dialogue, comes straight out of the Big Book of Movie Clichés.

It plays like a parody of suspense movies, then occasionally becomes serious, then boring, then makes a jarring 180, then frustrates, then gets vaguely interesting again.

The only thing worse than second-generation Guy Ritchie is fourth-generation Quentin Tarantino, and this movie has the musty smell of 1995 all over it.

Well, Sanaa Lathan's in there somewhere as the smart and sexy ass-kickin' chick, but it's really all about the monster disembowelments, which happen often.

It's a self-satisfied, self-loathing mess that demands you adore and cheer for the very person you come to hate well before its 105 minutes are up. Little Black Book will leave you feeling skuzzy.

Every once in a while, a film comes along that so blatantly disregards emotional authenticity that one fears for the sanity of its director. She Hate Me is just such a film, and Spike Lee is its director and co-writer. Artless, sensationalized, didactic and often downright silly.

So awful it's hypnotizing.

Duff isn't exactly known for complex fare, but even "The Lizzie McGuire Movie" was way better than this.

Highly commercialized teenybopper fluff, likely to please the tweenie girls but sorely lacking in anything original or even interesting.

Instead of satire, we're treated to diarrhea jokes, dogs dangled from the windows of speeding SUVs and tasteless sobriquets bestowed upon anyone who looks vaguely ethnic.

There's way too much schmaltz in the mix. Even the musical score bombs: Throbbing, eerie techno simply does not suit a character trapped in the 1940s.

Among the several iterations of Jules Verne's novel about the inventor's adventures whilst traipsing through England, Asia and the Wild West, this new one is the least impressive and most depressive. Even the 1989 made-for-TV version starring Pierce Brosnan possessed more spark and steam than this lazy, lackluster take.

Lured to the project with John Cusack as her original co-star (cruelly replaced by Matthew Broderick), Nicole Kidman phones it in.

Connie and Carla doesn't just do violence to the memory of Wilder's brilliant sex farce (Some Like It Hot); it's so clumsy, it might give cross-dressing itself a bad name.

The Punisher would be almost offensive were it not so inconsequential. There's just something terribly off-putting about a movie in which every gruesome death is a punch line, where a villain's homosexuality is used to lure him to his death and dozens of innocents are gunned down just to launch a film franchise.

Alas, the film has good intentions, but it's a failure. Just try to stay awake.

The entire enterprise was directed by first-timer Christopher Erskin like a would-be Max Bialystock; one can only assume it's supposed to be this bad, because nobody sucks this hard on accident.

Should make about $750, which is how much they need to save the farm, but a little less than Disney CEO Michael Eisner needs to save his job.

It's flapping its wings so desperately in pursuit of artistic heights that it nosedives directly into the ground. The relentless exertion makes the film a chore to watch.

The film's finale is truly egregious, a laugh-out-loud combination of ludicrousness and sadism that someone somewhere probably found scary, assuming they never saw a thriller before.

Rent a porno instead; it'll be less exploitative. God help us, two more of these things are planned.

Silly, misguided, formulaic and largely a piece of trash, but it's not quite a disaster. There's the dancing and the music and the sunlight.

Ryan never quite convinces us she's seen the inside of a fight gym, much less that she's worthy to be Rocky in a miniskirt. On the other hand, her director here was not Campion but actor Charles S. Dutton, whose behind-the-camera skills, developed via cable TV, tend toward the cartoonish.

Welcome to Mooseport... is intended to be a comedy; that hypothesis is a generous leap of faith, given the fact that "House of Sand and Fog" contains more moments of mirth than this rather joyless exercise in waste and torpor.

Lackadaisical feel of the film; Freundlich is unable to generate much suspense.

Every bit as pathetic and unfunny as it looks.

Pretentious yet devoid of poetry, left-of-center yet artless, this well-intentioned trudge does not exist to be enjoyed or appreciated so much as to be coddled and patronized as one would a retarded child.

Nothing happens. At all. Ever. Remember when Steve Martin was funny? Apparently, neither does he.

Paycheck is a terribly muddled mess, a Hitchcock homage (with generous, obvious nods to The Birds, Strangers on a Train and North by Northwest) by a great filmmaker trying to say a great deal with so very little.

Such a remarkable rift between its charming source material and its heinous cinematic realization that the producers may as well have skipped the hassle of securing licensing rights and simply called this mess Mike Myers: A--hole in Fur.

Hackman, playing it gleefully amoral, walks away with the film, for what that's worth...which is a video rental for fans of the actors involved. Yes, that's video, not DVD -- four bucks at Blockbuster is more than you ought to be paying.

Prochnow rocks; nothing else does.

Deafeningly dull movie.

Cornier than the cornfields spread out in front of the dilapidated rural Texas manse inhabited by Robert Duvall and Michael Caine, playing grumpy old brothers with mismatched accents.

If any further indication were needed of the fact that gay has gone mainstream, this flaccid farce provides definitive proof, for it's as forced and unfunny as subpar Sandra Dee.

When the movie's not playing stupid, it's aiming for sickly sweet sincerity. It's such a jarring and inevitably juvenile juxtaposition it comes off like a Hallmark card parody written by the staffers at "Cracked."

The pseudo-mystical nonsense in Brian Helgeland's supernatural thriller far outweighs its scare factor.

Bernal can't decide if he's making a Tarantino homage or an Almodovar riff or an Albert Brooks tribute...and the wobbly sensibility finally knocks the movie's legs out from beneath it altogether.

LaBeouf's got the beef, and his inevitably bright future may be the only reason anyone will ever look back on The Battle of Shaker Heights.

A romantic comedy with neither humor nor sparks between the leads, Marci X attempts to lampoon gangsta rap clichés so obvious they feel ten years old -– “Malibu's Most Wanted” brought more to the table.

Director David Zucker has fallen a long way since the days of “Airplane” -- here, he seems to think endless hilarity can be milked from an animatronic owl and a running gag about urination that even the French would reject.