Does have its share of bona fide chuckles, but it falls shy of its possibilities.

What we have here is a small story in an oversized setting.

It's blatantly manipulative pairing of an adorable young boy and a selfish, honesty-challenged older woman [is] so calculating that I could never get emotionally involved.

This is basically a movie about one neurotic woman and her neurotic L.A. life. .

With any luck, Body Shots will quickly slide into video obscurity.

It's a notch above average, but Whatever It Takes can't get too far above that notch.

You'll laugh, but you'll hate yourself by the time you're out of the theater.

The only thing moviegoers will hate more than the phony, faux-felt conversations of About Alex at its worst is the unfulfilled promise its high points suggest when it’s at its best.

The film looks horrendous, poorly composed and staged, and the rhythm staggers.

It limps, not gallops, across the screen for what seems an interminable stretch of time and leaves the viewer with precious little to show for the experience.

Just because you can make a movie in a day doesn't necessarily mean moviegoers should take an hour and a half to watch it.

The scene doesn't amount to much more than a logical extension of its lightweight premise.

Obvious in its observations, predictable in its conclusions, and a little dull in the telling.

What on earth is Stockard Channing doing in this mess?

The sex we see in Lies does not feel in any way enticing; the protagonists are left seeming pathetic by the end of the film, and few viewers are likely to go scavenging for sticks after leaving the theater.

Regretfully, the beginning of this movie is as good as it ever gets.

This much-anticipated but terribly underwhelming black comedy represents a seriously squandered opportunity.

The heart of this movie isn't two sizes too small; it's just slightly misplaced.

The adherence to specific facts and actual events hampers the film, as it often does biographical movies.

Maladies is at least watchable, though just barely.

Breaks no new ground and is tedious in the extreme.

It's only when you see the movie that you discover how completely the film misses opportunities to develop these ideas into anything like movie comedy.

It's all quite precious, just not in a good way: "Postmodern" to a fault, deeply shallow, infuriatingly trite.

Even on its own terms, it stays sluggish.

Eastwood, who once upon a time was a flavorful director, is working in movie-of-the-week mode here. Cheesy, direct, bland.

Rob Schneider's stab at an "Ace Ventura"-like gamble for stardom.

The execution of that script – is so clumsy and over-written that nothing in it sticks. There’s a symphony of visuals here, and big strange ideas, but when it comes to the actual characters, we get automatons sleepwalking through clichés.

Wrought with pretension -- and a blind eye to its own exploitation.

A skim-milk version of a yuppie romance.

Atrocious bit of by-the-numbers screen filler. And anyone who easily lapses into sugar comas is advised to stay far, far away.

Unfortunately, whenever the story quiets down for exposition or to move the plot forward, it all becomes a grinding and often confusing bore.

Steadfastly conventional.

The film is confusingly and sloppily put together, edited down to the point that the few genuine jokes of Let’s Be Cops are given precious little time to breathe, before zipping into the next sequence of increasingly irrational events.

Tina Fey is in the film, for heaven’s sake, and I love her to pieces, but by now we know to expect something humdrum when she’s on a movie screen.

A slumming Spike Lee is still better than most directors at the top of their game, but Oldboy isn’t just Lee’s worst movie, it’s practically his “Wicker Man”.

While the art of action filmmaking depreciates, Harlin remains steadfast in his classicism, even if the movie doesn’t have the foundation to support him.

Even the love story doesn’t work, because Moretz and Blackley exhibit zero romantic chemistry, and it’s never exactly clear why the pair love each other so much.

The absolute antithesis to the pioneering punk spirit it tries to portray.

In fact, The Internship rivals the aggressively bland “Larry Crowne” for sheer tepidness, if not worse due to the exhaustive product placement for a company whose real-life presence is unlikely to soon wane.

There is a legitimate film in here somewhere, buried deep beneath the rubble of its terrible script and editing.

Not every book should be made into a film and, as appears to be the case with Winter’s Tale, not every book can be (especially this one).

Hollow, uninteresting and false.

The Smurfs 2 is not so much of a film as it is a collection of images and sounds that bludgeon you.

A shapelessly propulsive mess of pop psychology and poor drama.

The first sixty minutes of Pompeii are awful, bordering on unwatchable... The final forty-five minutes of the movie however are, by sheer force of will, irrefutably entertaining. At least there’s raining death in the form of fireballs smashing up the place.

A film that inserts banal plot devices and endless cutesiness in place of where the “good parts” should be.

The sound is great, the explosions are great, the look and feel could have been turned into something special. It’s the words and plot that are huge negatives here.

Thanks for Sharing can’t quite find its footing as either a drama or a comedy, and near the end it’s actively sliding off the rails.

Sound nonsensical? It is.

Not recommended for anyone but the hardiest of animation completists, this one is a definite skip. There’s nothing to note, nothing to grasp, nothing in which to find mirth. You could Escape from Planet Earth, but you’re better off just ignoring it.

An active affront to logic, placing us in a world we firmly know doesn’t exist.

Like a swollen boxer's eye, it should have been cut.

Embarrassing and weird.

The Wolverine reveals itself to be a film in desperate need of a point, in dire need of consequences and in a wandering search of any semblance of emotional weight.

Not a very good movie; it's sentimental, pandering and psychologically anorexic.

Too self-consciously dark, too aware of its long, murky, art-designed descent into the underbelly of America's addictive personality.

Limp direction, laughable production values, accent-heaving acting and dialogue and more lumps than three-day-old oatmeal.

Stardom just doesn't have enough anger or conviction to carry it to a satisfying finish.

Nymphomaniac Vol. 1 is the worst thing Lars Von Trier has ever associated himself with.

The fact that isolated bits are amusing shouldn't keep us from strongly noting that this movie really is pretty awful -- not at all worthy of guilty pleasure status.

Afailed attempt at a hipster screwball comedy. Very failed.

So relentlessly vanilla that it never springs to life.

Loses touch with its characters.

Seems to be an exercise not unlike the phone-booth stuffing of the '50s; namely, let's see how much plot we can fit into a movie before it bursts.

Full of sound and fury, signifying absolutely nothing, End of Days is the loudest and least of the year's end-of-the-world movies.

Ephron is still a director whose movies veer uncomfortably between the good -- make that adequate -- "You've Got Mail", the bad "This Is My Life" and the ugly Lucky Numbers. Pity.

Mangold ultimately can't displace memories of "An Angel at My Table," "Lilith," "The Snake Pit," "I Never Promised You a Rose Garden" and other, stronger accounts of young women placed in mental institutions.

A dud. Neither sweet nor low-down enough by half.

Lurches on for the better part of two hours with a ludicrous plot and even worse dialogue, interspersed with what look like excerpts from a music video made by some naughty Catholic-school graduates.

It's very much like a porn film without the porn, and that's about as bad as it gets.

It's insulting and devalues the experience of watching not just this film but all films.

Drop Dead Gorgeous eventually shows that it doesn't like anybody -- in the movie or in the audience.

About an hour after you've seen it, you'll already be fuzzy on just who was screwing who, and why

Vatel is really about production design, so if you're not absolutely passionate about 18th century table-settings, wigs and bodices, you might as well just stay at home and watch the Food Channel.

Stretched too thin, looks cheap, and can't quite go the distance.

Gun Shy can't rise on wobbly legs, and its real potential is lost for good.

The film isn't very good. The Million Dollar Hotel is an uneasy melding of Hollywood shtick and art-house sensibilities.

Appears to be several different movies spliced together, with unfortunate results.

But as objectionable as its subject matter is, the most objectionable thing is that it's not funny.

The movie is a mess.

A big disappointment.

Simplistic and non-controversial, and thus is virtually guaranteed commercial success.

Recycled "Steel Magnolias."

Utterly unnecessary sequel.

Looks plain silly without an appropriate tone or sustaining context.

Hopefully, the next time around, Chadha's imagination will be in the service of not just excellent casting and directing, but a script to match those other cinematic components.

The screenplay is far too obsessed with the setup, and not at all concerned with making the villains even the least bit believable or scary.

An amazing compendium of dumb behavior, bad dialogue, and incoherent direction.

Overpraised, intellectually soft, narratively unfocused, and thematically ambivalent.

Derivative, cliché-ridden and old hat.

In all, this film is a major disappointment with a few powerful highlights.

There is no obvious reason for the film's meandering existence: it's a series of beautifully photographed postcards of Africa.

It has every element necessary to be a classic, and it never comes anywhere near achieving that potential.

Never more than a dull, paint-by-numbers, overly literal transcription of the book.

Misbegotten comedy-drama.

Mud-stained, blood-soaked and completely useless.

Computer technology may be the actual phantom menace, after all.

The humor is, at best, thudding. At its worst, it's breathtakingly stupid and offensive.

The prolific 76-year-old British creator of character-rich, social dramas steeped in natural realism (usually) has whiffed it and whiffed it hard with this one. It’s not that it’s just “lesser Loach.” It is, in my opinion at least, humiliating.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles isn’t a movie; it’s a brand re-launch that’s going to satisfy stockholders far more than it’s going to entertain the people who paid to watch it.

Floating this material slightly above the assembly-line level is the energetic cast and the efforts of writer-director Kris Isacsson.

A standard morality tale, and looks especially weak in the shadow of "Eyes Wide Shut" and "Fight Club," which it resembles.

Visually stunning but emotionally shallow.

A nonsensical mishmash.

Has some good throwaway gags -- but far too often, the moviemakers don't throw them away soon enough.

An often gorgeous, dizzying assault of ideas and visual flourishes...it's just not very good.

It just doesn't work. Worse, it's downright offensive.

An excruciating misfire.

One of the least endurable films of 1999.

So very general in its characters and story that it actively keeps you from enjoying the simple pleasures of a movie like this.

Cripplingly lifeless.

I can't imagine why De Niro, who is a fine comedian, is still coasting on his gangster act, and surely Crystal can do something other than play himself...it feels a little like an exercise in laziness.

A painfully unfunny movie.

The whole picture is lifeless and without consequence.

The real problem is that it's not a very good Hollywood film, and its flaccid style, cardboard characters, and paint-by-the-numbers plot make watching it a chore.

The visual fireworks and catchy score just underline the extreme superficiality of the material.

A long portrait of someone who outstays his welcome fairly early on.

Doesn't have the courage or inclination to go inside of Dick's ideas, or offer any kind of structured or detailed approach to his thinking or writing.

We all have childhoods to remember. Art needs to do more than just remind us.

As with most non-Disney animated features, Trumpet of the Swan does make the Mouse look like a genius.

This overdone project dissipates its energy in strange ways (sudden shifts to black-and-white, as though hailing the spirit of Oliver Stone and that other Costner JFK movie), and makes you wish its makers had shown the same restraint the government did during the crisis.

Little entertainment value.

The new dud from Miramax's Dimension label.

It may have a good liberal conscience, and genuine sympathy for the rare perspective of a homeless person, but this movie is a fundamentally sentimental exercise.

A terrible, tired piece of filmmaking.

It’s just boring – and boring in a way that apparently has no endgame.

Charlize Theron has charm and skill, but no actress could survive this role, which has the gravity and verisimilitude of a sketch from a late-sixties Nancy Sinatra TV special.

A largely unenlightening work.

A One-Joke Show.

Quite shameless in imitating its predecessors.

Naming aside, Epic could have been good, except that it wasn’t, it was stone cold terrible, something even a six-year-old might scoff at. I know, I’m just as sad as you are about the whole thing.

Gets my vote for the summer's most offensive movie.

In trying to avoid moralizing or cheap sensationalizing, Didier sidestepped any energy force altogether and his film snoozes because of it.

The collapse of Office Space's second half is so egregious that one can't help but suspect Judge's Achilles heel may be his writing. It's not that he can't write -- it's just that his ideas tend to shine better within a pool of fellow scribes, as proven in his television career.

By any measure, 'Temptation' ranks amongst Tyler Perry's worst.

The small reward is the cool, confident presence of DMX, who shows signs of being a great leading man. But only in a much smarter, more original movie.

Appalling because it never transcends its adolescent-boy glee at being allowed entry to the highly sexualized arena of prostitution.

Plainly unfunny.

The best word to describe it is strange, though it could have been halfway decent (yes, all the way up to halfway decent) if the third act hadn’t succumbed to the crescendo of craziness that had been building for the first hour.

The Lifeguard is a painfully dull (alleged) drama utterly lacking in originality or self-awareness.

This is a story that has everything you’re looking for, provided that you’re looking for absolutely nothing.

“Expendables 3” has fewer nauseating clichés than The Judge.

Even when compared against other films that have been adapted from Nicholas Sparks novels, Safe Haven is terrible.

The most frightening thing about the franchise at this point is that it just keeps on going, undaunted by the characteristics by which the first film made its name. Family is still family and a brand is still a brand, but the blade… well, it’s only grown dull.

Assisted by passionless central performances and dull dialogue, Mungiu succeeds only in exhausting our patience, not in conveying a message.

Yes, surely for them, the lucky few and probable many, 21 and Over will be the Best Movie Ever. For the rest of us, though, it’s something of a chore.

A relentlessly unfunny, charmless send-up of better films with better ideas.

The film blinks too fast to maintain a coherent vision.

Everyone will be indifferent, as indifferent and uncaring as the characters the film portrays.

Fading Gigolo wants to be some sort of sunny tapestry about New York’s social groups, but it’s impossible to see past its absurd premise.

A frenetic spoof of 1961's disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion, Company Man is likely to be forgotten quickly by audiences.

Nearly incomprehensible story.

There's a lost opportunity here.

Watching Left Behind's plodding screen adaptation may make you feel the Deity has already abandoned us to a shockingly dull post-apocalypse.

Sarandon prostitutes her blazing talent and sharp political sensibility to the service of a pile of misogynistic bullflop.

Mr Kumble: Keep your hands off the classics! You don't deserve to read them, let alone paraphrase them.

Mostly dreadful.

Are two Demis better than one? How you answer will determine the level of patience you'll need to sit through this bizarre pet project.

If you're already a huge fan of any of these artists, this film will be a lovefest. For all others, it's a mild diversion at best.

If you've seen one "Scream" rip-off, you really have seen them all.

A crap film that's steeped in liberal paranoia, but it's also so ludicrous that it falls under the guilty-pleasure category.

One imagines what the failed farce Drowning Mona would have been like in the hands of the Coen brothers.

Lyonne, as usual, does her best...but she's running uphill.

Chaotic, peurile, loaded with sniggering commentary and obsessed with breasts, Saving Silverman is like a 90-minute walk through a 13-year-old boy's head.

Despite this chance to experience something thrilling and new, her life is just as dull the second time around.

Dumb and irritating.

I just really, really, really, don't like this movie, and I don't care who knows it.

Sly, slick and slow.

Has its - very - occasionally funny moments, so does a car crash.

A bad movie about a great man.

15 Minutes is simply a bad movie.

Despite a lead performance by the always welcome Julianne Moore it is rudderless in its presentation and outright stupid in its central conceits.

A clumsy and tone-deaf comedy.

The worst thing you can accuse an unutterably bad movie of is sincerity.

Looks and moves like a film whose vital organs were yanked before shooting commenced.

A dismal film, a flop as both 21st-century romantic comedy and gay "Kramer vs. Kramer."

Self-conscious clunker.

Pandering and tired, Down to Earth lurches from one dead gag to the other, in search of both comedic rhythm and a dramatic pulse. It finds neither.

It probably helps to be loaded while you're watching this movie.

This anti-narrative screwball comedy, a sort of police-drama re-enactment of Fellini's themes in "8 1/2," keeps most of the jokes off-screen.

Horribly slapdash affair.

It's just not funny.

It's hard to think of a single memorable line from Restaurant, even a memorably bad one.

Borderline incoherent.

Slouches in as a weightless, instantly forgettable picture.

It's little more than a loose assemblage of Hollywood action movie formulas: "Dirty Harry" and assorted cop/buddy flicks are the clear models for the movie.

Good vs. Evil For Dummies....and I, for one, dislike being treated like a Dummy.

In the end, Butterfly is an infuriating film because it's so very contrived, so annoyingly phony.

It does... apply Kitano's black-comic style to a different setting, and individual scenes sparkle with unexpected jokes, twists, and occasional cruelties.

I don't like Say It Isn't So, but I understand its karmic inevitability.

For a movie with the ostensible mission of spreading the Gospel, it does a poor job of speaking to anyone except the faithful.

Tired, overcomplicated mix of macho bullshit.

These are good people, yet the director has them carrying on like community theater actors playing to the balcony. It isn't fair to them, and it isn't fitting for Shakespeare.

It's sporadically funny but often unfunny, the latter worse than not being funny enough.

Dreadful suspense piece that has "Mystery Science Theater" appeal written all over it.

Slow-moving and violent mess...feels slow even at a scant 82 minutes...Even by the slack standards of Van Damme's oeuvre, "The Return" is a letdown.

Maybe Kevin Bacon can use the Twinkie defense to explain Hollow Man.

Could have afforded to be a little loftier and still be quite funny. Instead, it's a waste.

John, John, John -- one more bad-guy role in a bad movie and you're going to need another comeback.

Exists in some kind of limbo, between hard-core porn and European art film, and it's not likely to satisfy fans of either.

The entire enterprise is a bewildering mess, put in place only to frustrate and alienate anyone who buys a ticket. Every action scene is telegraphed, and most of the dialogue is irrevocably stupid.

Ti West’s pointless new film The Sacrament, an exercise in talking loud and saying nothing, isn’t just bad, it’s infuriating.

After Earth stupefies us with nonsense, such little thought and logic went into this idea that it can’t even be considered a rough draft, this is a movie almost daring an audience to emotionally detach throughout. For shame!

Relentlessly awful.

Disgusting and humorless mess.

A dismal new serial-killer thing.

Almost unbearable.

I just wanted to rail against the casual homophobia, the senseless violence and the sociopathic cruelty that Ready to Rumble treats as good clean fun.

We're forced to listen to misogynistic rantings devoid of wit, entertainment value, or even authenticity.

Some things just don't translate . . . not with Lipnicki attached, at any rate. Stick with the books.

Do not bring children to this movie unless you want them to have nightmares for weeks.

An assault on brain cells.

A black comedy that never gets black enough to inspire Farrelly-style decadence.

Does this mean that Sabotage is a rich, morally complex story about the gray zone between good and evil? Hell, no. It just means it is a bungle.

Silly teen thriller.

Flawed at its very core.

Another droning formulaic thriller.

Has even less directorial initiative than it has romantic spark.

It's just another bad horror film with inadequate young actors chased around a big house by something.

Merely reconfigures the same predictable gross-out jokes, sentimental platitudes, and decorative sex that figure into half the screenplays in circulation.

A sequel from hell.

In the end, Malena is an unlikable and foul farce, unworthy of Tornatore's previously gentle touch.

The film is Travolta's baby, but indifference and boredom is everywhere.

Atrocious comedy.

Valentine simply mines the same tired, predictable slasher-movie vein as everything else he's (Blanks) done thus far. Send this one back unopened.

So you'll laugh during Big Momma's House -- but the laughs are so negligible you'll probably forget them before you get to the parking lot.

The animation is only marginally better than the TV show, which means it stinks, and the story is pretty trite.

Lost its chance to be anything but an endurance test for the viewer.

There isn't a moment of wonder or poetry in its very long 69 minutes.

An almost total waste of time.

Kids -- may like this movie. But kids like green ketchup, so what do they know?

In the running for worst film of the year... and it's only April.

If you're looking for something child-appropriate that'll actually keep the little darlings awake for two hours straight, you'd do better...and cheaper...to just stay at home with the Discovery Channel.

God-awful.

Where's the comedy?

I see Austin Powers as Myers' desperate cry for help -- a plea to stop him before he does schtick again.

This reprehensible and deeply unfunny film is obviously critic-proof.

Insufferably boring, culturally hegemonic, and profoundly ugly.

Scary Movie 5 is so massively un-enjoyable, a hate crime against cinema, a ringing indictment of the depths commercialism will go to in search of the lowest common denominator.

An epically miserable viewing experience, go ahead and skip this one unless you’re seeking to answer the riddle of what happens when people don’t try at their jobs.

The film isn't merely bungled. It's starved and battered by Lichtenstein.

A Haunted House, its despicable bigotry aside, is also a not-very-good comedy.