Much of Dreamcatcher just doesn’t make sense.

When is a horror movie not a horror movie? When it’s a strained, by-the-numbers production that limps to an unlikely conclusion like Godsend.

About as anachronistic and generic as an action sequel could be.

I just found it really difficult to follow – not completely believing the motivations of certain characters, nor how some characters would just completely vanish, seemingly without a trace. This film made my head hurt.

None of it is remotely frightening or original, the admittedly good-looking film adding nothing new to this unfortunate horror subgenre.

Campion and company may like to think they've made something provocative, moody and new but it's really just "Looking For Mr. Goodbar" with extra nuts.

Unfortunately, Brooks errs badly by having his film centered in India. Yes, India - which, as most people know, is not a predominantly Muslim country. Rather than look for comedy in the Muslim world, Brooks uses this film to make fun of contemporary Indian society.

The only reason to watch The Kindergarten Teacher is Ms. Gyllenhaal’s performance, whose quality makes us resist until it’s possible.

Aside from a few routine battle scenes, the movie's action consists mostly of people slogging slowly through non-stop rain. This is not interesting, much less exciting. The dialogue is hokey hero blather.

Figgis has spent too many years crafting thoughtful, innovative films to have much of a knack for storytelling this mechanical and many are the moments when he does indeed seem to have been asleep behind the wheel.

Madame Sata may be based on real events, but it's certainly not a very pleasant introduction to Rio's bohemian scene, circa 1931. Nor is it a very pleasant movie to endure in its own right.

Bratt's fast-talking, all-attitude interpretation is showboating without soul -- which can be said of the entire movie.

While it might have made a good short, as a feature film The Illusionist comes across like a magician whose tricks are transparent.

Sometimes whimsical, at others quaint, flirting with darkness but brimming with childlike naivety, the plot provides a hell of a tonal whiplash, never finding its rhythm.

Content-wise, Cruise is dull, with a script that brims of potential but is done injustice by uninspired leads.

Cash Out contains flashes that give a wistful look into what this could have been. But the truth is that the title tells you everything you need to know: this action-thriller is nothing more than a paycheck for Travolta, Davis, and everyone else involved.

Repetitive interaction between characters in an aimless story can't hold up the film's weight, and it eventually collapses on its noble attempt to capture life's frustrations and compromises.

Doesn't do much besides giving original "Ringu" and "Ringu 2" director Hideo Nakata the chance to strut his stuff in front of a wide-release audience.

Ultimately sinks beneath the waves of the Caspian Sea.

Despite some brief nudity and much swearing, the whole endeavor feels like some sort of half-assed Christian "Adventures in Faith" story I might have endured in Sunday school.

What may have seemed energetic and innovative four decades ago is fairly enervated today, and only the most rabid Godard fanatics will find reason to seek out its new theatrical re-release.

Billed as a comedy but it would be every bit as accurate to categorize it as science fiction or a World War II drama. It is simply not a funny film.

This moves along pretty quickly and has a lot of over-the-top action and explosions. There’s a whole Missing in Action trilogy, but I can’t see how someone could sit through a second one.

All Mr. Woodcock gives us is mediocre comedy at its finest.

There’s something fundamentally unconvincing and contrived about the story. Forget the fact that O’Connor hauls out every cliché in the bad cop handbook and the dialogue is more boilerplate than hard-boiled. The premise itself is just plain preposterous.

The best way to describe Callie Khouri’s Mad Money is as “Ocean’s Eleven” if it were geared to the drones at the Oprah Winfrey book club.

A clichéd and painfully formulaic little film.

A two-time Oscar winner playing a crazy person in a big studio film released in late October. Can't you just smell the pretension? Probably not, given the other ways in which this film stinks.

BRILLIANT and WITTY. Those are two words that will not be used to described this film.

Ultimately, Hurry Up Tomorrow is an example of style over substance. Its visuals try to shock and awe while leaving its narrative a confusing mess.

Watts is extra-watchable and, as I say, the filmmaker does achieve a style and tone the script never comes close to living up to. Otherwise, Verbinski's adaptation of the 1998 Japanese hit "Ringu" misses the mark almost completely.

From what I can tell, the film is generally accurate regarding the events of Dec. 8. But I got as much out of it as I did by looking up Chapman on Wikipedia.

ANIARA has plenty going for it — a great concept, a coherent tone, an uncompromising vision, and an ending that’s the ballsiest thing I’ve seen since AI. Sadly these virtues are undercut by some unforgivable sins — it is boring, has underdeveloped characters, and has a childlike understanding of the scientific concepts supposedly undergirding the plot. One of those could be forgivable, but all together they spell doom.

Could have been a beautiful and suspenseful thriller, lukewarm performances make the film just another movie to add to one's "rent-it-when-it-comes-to-DVD" list.

The bottom line is the movie's a mess. Friedkin would like one to believe there's more than meets the eye to his tale of two trackers.

A spot-on homage/parody of bad 1950's sci-fi movies.

Dead Trigger isn’t the worst film ever, but it oddly plays things safe. The characters have no discernible personalities, the story threads are very familiar, and the action is as generic as you can imagine. There are still only three good video game movie adaptations, and this is not one of them.

In throwing hatchets at Murdoch and his silly Fox network while pretending the rest of the media world is fine and objective, the film comes across as a shrill, one-note slam against a very easy target.

The fact that it purports to function as a not-so-thinly-veiled parable about the limitlessness of sexuality, gender fluidity, and the marginalized makes it that much more unbearable.

This is easily the smallest-scale of the sequels, and it has the feeling of a massively shrunken budget.

The 1956 film, which adds Raymond Burr as reporter Steve Martin, feels like watching the original version through a foggy window. The end result is the feeling that something is missing.

Georgia Rule isn’t serious enough for a drama and not funny enough for a comedy.

Almost unforgivably sentimental.

Does it have its moments? A few, but those alone put it head and shoulders above similar offerings featuring, say, Julia Roberts.

Predictable and tiresome.

Although it's possible to enjoy the first act and third act carnage without paying attention to the plot mechanics, the storyline itself continuously reminds us of the fallacy of Castle’s quest.

While it sounds interesting on paper, the follow through is less than entertaining... unless you like unintentional humor.

Perhaps Planet 51 should have added a dash of Pedro Almodovar, one of Spain's preeminent directors.

The most painful part of seeing this movie is not the fact that it fails to deliver but that it actually came close.

There are a handful of intense sequences and a few scenes of squirm-inducing gore in The Ruins, but not much else.

Unfortunately, the problems with Jedi cannot be fixed even with the best digital software in the galaxy: the weak story (another death star assault, another visit to Dagobah, the exotic planet of the trees, annoying teddy bears), the bad performances..., the burp jokes (three in the first half hour--I guess I missed the toilet humor in the first two) and Luke's bizarre-looking hair mop. It's sad. [Special Edition]

Caught Stealing is a plodding meander that flagrantly overestimates its appeal.

Is the film fun? Yeah, in that campy kind of "The Mummy" way, but it is also weak as a sequel in that very campy "The Mummy Returns" type of way.

Unfortunately, despite its good intentions, Mary Magdalene boils down to another story about a woman watching a man talk.

As impatient as I was with Loggerheads, I can't hate it. The sincerity of its performances is too real; its compassion for its characters is too strong. On the other hand, I haven't mentioned yet that the loggerhead is a species of turtle.

The entire production is odd, and it never gives off the intended thriller vibe. Rather, the whole affair comes off as depressing and sad. Unfortunately, sparse dialogue and subpar acting do not help The Inheritance in what it lacks in story and mystery. It’s too cold and simple, leaving viewers unfulfilled.

Tedious talk-fest.

Falls into the category of the contrived and forgettable cop drama.

The biggest thing wrong with this mess is its whole attitude. The film tries to condemn all these shocking things, but if you're not shocked, just wait a couple of minutes and they'll try again.

Bottom line, the white chicks scare me. Seriously. They’re freaky looking. They are the stuff of nightmares.

Throughout Sick, Williamson decisively proves that breaking all the rules sometimes breaks the movie.

A horror movie that starts off decently but quickly falls victim to cliché. It is, ultimately, a disappointing genre entry, and one that falls far short of the original’s greatness.

Through the Fire is a fraud masquerading as a documentary.

A decidedly sharp drop in quality from the first film. It’s still a somewhat decent horror flick if you’re looking for cheap scares and eerie imagery.

A mess on every narrative and technical level.

I’m being overly harsh with Climate of the Hunter because it was frustrating to watch. I had to work hard to follow the story and figure out what was really happening between the characters and I find myself replaying various scenes to see what I missed.

I expected to see the triumphant return of my childhood favorites, yet I feel like this wasn't the answer.

Despite the involvement of some skilled filmmakers, Portals is a cinematic black hole – vacuous and barely perceptible in the vastness of space lit with far brighter stars.

Fails to make use of its clever dialogue and concepts as it attempts to become something more profound.

Carpenter oscillates between high horror and lowbrow camp, which is more unsettling than the scenes of decapitation and dismemberment, and drives a steak through the heart of Woods' fine performance in the process.

Had Lucky You played strictly as a father-son drama set against the background of competitive Texas Hold 'Em, it would've been a much better movie based on the strength of Hanson's direction and Duvall's performance alone. But no, somewhere along the line they had to make this a romance, and that's the movie's fatal flaw.

Everything that made the original Chainsaw a classic is ground into the dirt in this new version.

The nine characters aren’t machines, exactly, but they aren’t people or animals either. They’re little cloth pouches that can move, communicate, and make facial expressions that range from ornery to cute. At some point during the movie I began mentally referring to them as the Owlish Beanbags.

Is love a disease, as Marquez possibly wanted us to believe? Maybe, but in the case of this adaptation, it’s more of a laughing sickness.

After watching this movie, you get the feeling that there’s a lot of people at Harvard who’ve done worse things than rob a bank to get in.

The film's screenplay is thick with major lapses in logic, resulting in a story that ultimately makes little sense.

Filmmaker Hany Abu-Assad, who helmed the excellent "Rana's Wedding," missed the boat on this one. He may have hoped to give a human voice to the suicide bombers, but instead he gave them a misfired movie.

Not exactly screwball, and not exactly sentimental, but an uneasy and uncertain mix of the two.

The whole film appears over-blown and pumped up on marketing steroids.

The biggest problem with Elizabethtown isn't in its shopworn theme, but that it's perhaps the first of Crowe's movies (though "Jerry Maguire"comes very close) that really feels forced.

Davis and company need to be taken to task for giving us a movie that makes rescue divers, arguably among the most death-defying of professionals, boring.

Demonlover would have probably been plane insufferable without Gina Gershon. All the other actors are doing an outstanding job of playing essentially dead souls, and it's a saving grace that Assayas allowed her, at least, to have some fun.

If there is one high point to be found, it's that Julie Andrews sings for the first time since her 1997 throat surgery.

It's just dumb.

In the end, Surveillance is a puzzle box film that has nothing to offer except the various puzzle pieces. The characters do not stand out, the drama is not compelling, and the screenplay is light on even remotely interesting dialogue.

Despite obvious tension between the two groups of characters and the considerable bloodbath that follows at the lakeside, Camping Trip does not formulate a dark, horrifying atmosphere or a psychologically-heavy tension.

Quite frankly, the film looks terrible and moves with painful slowness, while the voice performances by both the juvenile and adult actors are so lacking in character that one could almost assume the cast performed their lines phonetically.

Spoof or tongue in cheek update, the movie squanders the lion's share of its time on tired, cartoon-quality sequences choreographed around ho-hum chases and explosions. None possess the satiric zip of Austin Powers-style parody.

There isn’t much story before the shooting starts, so watching the stuff that doesn’t blow up adds nothing.

B movies are fun because they're rinky dink. I got the joke and just didn't like the joke even though I respect Gunn for doing what he wanted to do.

With “Chamber of Secrets,” all we get is a f____ "Scooby Doo" episode. Boo on everyone involved...BOOOOOOOO!

While one can detect a genuinely amusing screenplay somewhere under the flat direction and mysteriously stiff performances, the film is tediously slow.

Achieves the impossible in taking a genuine socio-political tragedy and turning it into an anvil drama which will fray the patience of the most sympathetic audiences.

While the setup is intriguing, the film quickly loses steam, becoming a muddled chase interspersed with concert footage.

While Fryar is a charming man and his work clearly deserves recognition, A Man Called Pearl is an obvious case of building a three-story house on a one-story foundation. Really, can you make a feature-length film about a man who carves unique shapes out of trees, shrubs and bushes?

Deserves credit for beautiful sets and the obvious care that went into reconstructing the old town of San Antonio de Bexar, as well as for Thornton’s performance. Unfortunately, the stultifying dialogue and lack of real tension sink the film.

It’s stale, a relic from another time that’s strenuously updated and forced into 2024.