The always-watchable Bologna is the adhesive holding together this slight and gentle romantic comedy, lending it perhaps more conviction and authority than the material warrants.

Might make a fun Lifetime TV movie -- if it weren't quite so morose.

Strangely drab.

Dillon doesn't yet possess the directorial chops to give his story the necessary snap; the action too often feels poky and muffled. But he does have a strong sense of place, and the movie's almost worth seeing just for Jim Denault's exquisite cinematography.

Make sense? No, it doesn't. But if you manage to endure the exposition, you'll get what you paid for: popping chests. Invisible stalkers. Nicely paced chases through corridors that constantly reconfigure in interlocking stone puzzles.

A broad, braying yuk fest that revels in coarse jokes, lacks the courage of its own cynicism (things keep wavering into sentimentality) and refuses to develop its own premise.

Mostly, Shafer and co-writer Gregory Hinton lack a strong-minded viewpoint, or a sense of humor, about a world in which the DJ has the power to unify, if only for a night, men of godlike beauty and the mortals who worship them.

Lukewarm melodrama disappoints.

Queasily parked between halfhearted satire and overcooked melodrama, this adaptation of a well-received 2003 novel by British writer Zoë Heller offers the unhappy spectacle of a raft of acting talent trying to do right by slimy material.

Surely the only thing more excruciating than being trapped in a car with a bratty child is having to sit through a road-trip movie that features two of them.

Domestic farce always has a potentially compelling dark side when it reveals the tenuousness of love and the fragility of all human relationships, but Belvaux seems far too busy orchestrating the copious action to pause for anything approaching insight.

Turgid, melodramatic travesty of Thackeray's gimlet-eyed satire.

Ordinarily it's kind of hard to screw up a Richard Price story, but the writer is his own worst enemy here, with a screenplay so filled with bromides and object lessons from God, you can't tell what he's trying to say.

Those expecting a reunion with Jackson, Travolta's “Pulp Fiction” co-star, should be prepared: They don't interact at all, which is a bit like casting Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers and not letting them dance together.

Though he’s known for his mildly edgy standup, someone in authority has decided Cook would be well-suited for fluffy romantic comedies, but like last fall’s Employee of the Month, Good Luck Chuck is so undistinguished that it feels like an extended screen test.

Curiously flat and immobile.

The movie is prettily shot by Almodóvar collaborator Affonso Beato, but no amount of tastefully desaturated color or imaginary friends going whoo-whoo in the deserted apartment upstairs can save this lumbering echt-thriller from fatal tedium.

If Spawn had anything close to a script, it would be a pretty nifty fantasy about conspiracy, apocalypse and a fat killer clown.

In spite of its aspirations toward enlightenment, Naked in Ashes leaves its audiences bewildered.

One expects neither subtlety nor surprise from a scenario boasting a household pet named Freud. If there's any reason at all to see Running With Scissors, it' Bening.

Unfortunately, syrupy music, reductive characterizations and bland cinematography turn her case into an earnest feminist fable that plays like an afterschool special for grown-ups.

Kazantzidis struggles for the flavor of classic romance, with a string of standards on the soundtrack to little avail.

Paymer is the key to this mild-mannered comedy built on easy setups and borscht-belt one-liners.

Not too long after the knockout opening, all that's left of Snake Eyes are Cage's wild eyes, the dregs of David Koepp's rotten script, and De Palma's restless, anxious camera, on the prowl for something, anything, to hang on to.

For those turned on by the thought of such “sexually charged” scenes as men describing techniques for picking locks to women while drawing on their bodies with mascara pencils, Erosion may provide some pleasure. Everyone else though, will be worn down by the film’s tedious hand-wringing about infidelity and bursts of unerotic sex.

In many ways, Marshall and Barrymore are an equal match -- while both have a flair for the small touches that build a good comic scene, each lacks the complex layering of motive and emotion that make a human life believably real.

Heartfelt yet overly schematic debut feature.

Undertow seems to be straining to say something at once tragic and heartwarming about fathers, sons and brothers, but I'm damned if I know what it is.

Even by the low standards of high-concept Hollywood rom-coms, this charmless, prophetically titled stinker stands apart, suggesting that the recent mass firings at studio Paramount may not have been such a bad idea after all.

Parkhill's heart seems to belong to 1940s film noir, where a lonely man could be driven half-mad by the sight of a mystery woman performing a hot flamenco dance, a scene Parkhill stages here to unintentional titter-inducing effect.

The sex-comedy-for-girls idea never quite takes off.

Never really gets across the essence of who the band members are and why they inspire such fidelity.

Not for the squeamish (a guy rips out his own arm, for goodness' sake), the film is nevertheless more than just a gonzo gross-out. But not by much.

Complete predictability is avoided only thanks to its openness to the fluidity of sexual identity -- which isn’t enough to make this anything more than the most ignoble outing in bi-curious screen hijinks since France produced Poltergay.

Merkin tries too hard for stylistic flourishes (as the hyper set-designed, claustrophobically seedy hotel underscores) and winds up almost sinking the noir-ish tale he’s telling.

It's finally a hilarious and cuddly flashback from the dog's point of view, to his training as a pup, that marks the moment when the film finds its sweetly moronic legs.

Myers is the movie's fatal flaw, squeezing out the other characters who fatten the plot, mostly with an eye to parents.

Skip the movie, stay home, read the book and say three Hail Marys.

Although a few moments are hilarious, this would-be romp remains laboriously earthbound when it should be swinging gaily through the trees.

The Legend of Zorro is a Saturday matinee entirely lacking in Saturday-matinee thrills or brevity -- what's passable for the first 80 minutes or so becomes intolerable as the movie ticks past the two-hour mark.

Ends up a flabby vehicle for the most banal of road-movie messages: The journey's the thing; the goal inevitably disappoints.

There are also strong flickers here of a film that might have been.

The cast of the original looks Shakespearean in comparison to Cook and her hapless cohorts, but to be fair, those first dead ducks had a real script to explore, which this bunch does not.

It's a shame no one gave the three voice stars of this appealing animation -- Ray Romano, John Legui zamo and Denis Leary -- a shot at the script.

This film is lean, tight and irredeemably vile. People are gonna love it.

This should have been Beatty's "Wonder Boys," but the filmmakers don't seem to realize they've sent their hero on a sexual adventure that neither his heart nor his dick needs to take.

It’s the sort of performance that announces itself with the subtlety of a lit-up highway construction sign. Caution: Actress at Work.

Director Glenn Gordon Carron's movie is far more bearable when Kate is spinning lies and sticking her tongue in Kevin Bacon's desiccated bad boy.

While there is something to be said for a movie that aims to grapple with some of the “big questions” about the very nature of existence and reality, Down the Rabbit Hole makes teen sex comedies, action-chick sci-fi and the other usual multiplex chum seem like high-minded discourse.

Can never quite decide whether it's after the humor implicit in what seems conceived as satire, or the agitprop frissons of race and class theory.

The young filmmaker clearly needs to experience a bit more of la vraie vie before his own observations can take in more than the clumsy romantic feints and parries of early adulthood.

They have succeeded in establishing conservative ideologue Ken Starr as one of American prosecutorial history's biggest heels and Clinton loyalist Susan McDougal as a bona fide hero and martyr. The problem, of course, is that the president himself was neither, and no amount of hand wringing -- however justified -- can make him one.

Under the charmless direction of Mark Rosman, the actors seem to be frozen at the rehearsal stage, with the blessed exception of a sublimely funny Jennifer Coolidge as the Botoxed horror of a stepmother.

The story is so flat and transparent in the telling, so empty of psychological mystery and depth, it skates dangerously close to condescension.

It's a case of persona overwhelming presence, and the butterscotch smoothness that was such an asset opposite George Clooney's glittering cool in "Out of Sight" is all but lost in the sheen of this high-gloss production.

This schizophrenic mess zigzags all over the place, trying to figure out whether it's a dysfunctional-family drama, a slapstick comedy or an angst-ridden coming-of-age movie.

It's no doubt rude, and perhaps irrelevant, to point out that John Waters still doesn't know how to make a movie.

A creepy clinical voyeurism and condescending empathy that can't help but alienate its intended audience.

As they pursue their goals, no movie cliché is left unturned. The streetball scenes offer some nifty trick plays, but the rest of Crossover features poorly dressed sets, cheap-looking costumes and locations, and silly histrionics.

Evans is a fascinating character, and deserves a better vehicle than this facetious smirk of a movie.

A baffling subplot involving smuggling drugs inside Danish cows falls flat, and if you're going to alter the Bard's ending, you’d better have a good alternative. Boyd does not.

Bruni-Tedeschi is her usual radiantly libidinal presence, but channeling Bette Midler doesn't become her, and even she can't redeem all the redundant vaudeville carry-on.

Lounguine’s biopic is chilly and convoluted, too eventful to be boring, but never taking the time to immerse us emotionally in Makovski's world.

The satirical jabs at celebrity culture smell like rotted leftovers from "The Fantastic Four." The token ruminations on the tension between a superhero's public and private lives seem flown in from Bryan Singer's "Superman Returns" (to say nothing of Raimi's own, superior "Darkman"). Most egregious, though, is the way Raimi and the writers reduce Spider-Man 3 to the very sort of abject distinctions between virtue and sin that the series has heretofore studiously avoided.

Cheesy crockpot of a film.

Begins as a refreshingly subversive departure from the Hollywood studios' cookie-cutter romances, but the thin script can't sustain that initial charge, and it soon flattens out, like a punctured comic balloon.

The Intended is unintentionally risible from frame one to last. But don't just blame Levring: The script was co-authored by none other than McTeer herself, and the result suggests the sort of self-flagellating, anti-vanity project that can occur when perfectly capable actors start taking themselves way too seriously.

There's no real story and that would be fine, if Rogers and screenwriter Adam Herz could keep from pretending otherwise.

Ledes shows promise, but truly, this would have been better left to Todd Haynes.

Written by a team of three, the script is more plagued by groupthink than is the film's future Earth.

From its less-than-special effects to its rushed ending, this whole endeavor is a lazy, wasted emasculation of a beloved series deserving of more thoughtful treatment. Guess they have four more books left to get it right. Oh, joy.

Scenes stop and start abruptly, and the sub–"Lord of the Rings" action is more dulling than rousing -- and yet it can be funny.

The film is sporadically amusing, especially early on. But as the gross-outs dwindle, one is left to contemplate if Stiller has always been this neckless and to wonder just why Aniston wastes her summer vacation on junk such as this.

A tiring exercise in time-biding sadism (versus wit or suspense), inflated with shock editing, noisy effects and an angry score, like a thriller with road rage.

Transcends its video-box-shelf-filler pedigree only when it's actually indulging in guy stuff, mostly of the frat-boy, beer-commercial variety.

In producer Mel Gibson's second crackpot persecution-complex film of 2004 -- heat-blast directed by first-timer Paul Abascal -- it's obvious who Bo is supposed to represent.

Ludicrous but not quite the howler it could and should have been.

Jabberwocky is not a Python film, a fact most obvious in its marked lack of humor.

Torem drifts into formula and his initially promising film goes unbearably soft.

It’s as not-unpleasantly amateurish as the regional genre movies that four-walled rural theaters in the days before video. But do-nothing Sarah may be the dullest, most featureless and inactive protagonist in recent movies.

The flabbiest of cop-outs. Moore gives a flat, spiritless performance, almost matched by that of Anthony Hopkins, who, notwithstanding the Armani threads, shuffles around like a pensioner in bedroom slippers.

Bad in such a bizarre way that it's almost worth seeing, if only to witness the crazy confluence of purpose and taste.

The only thing remotely resembling a character arc is handed to Regina King, the ferocious Margie Hendricks in "Ray."

The road to moviegoing hell is paved with well-intentioned queer cinema, and Hate Crime is a red stone on that path.

There's no question, though, that the Wayanses have dialed down the outrageousness to nearly sub-PG-13 levels.

More of the same -- only less so.

If Lies were better, the most obvious point of reference would be "In the Realm of the Senses," but the filmmaking isn't good enough to warrant such comparison, and the ideas are half-baked.

Comes so freighted with tragedy and sensitivity that I left dreaming of converting the abject misery of one and all to everyday unhappiness with free drinks and a raucous sing-along down at the pub.

The whole thing is kitsch of the most pricey sort, and it's a good guess that it will be a smash.

The cast of the Disney Channel's Lizzie McGuire romped strenuously through a plot that would be old hat as a two-parter on a sitcom.

This wasn't a horror film the first time around, and LaBute makes sorry feints at effective creepiness, letting the story roam in circles just like Cage.

Director Gary Fleder can only fling the camera about and indulge in some familiar screen sadism (and no wonder -- his last feature was "Kiss the Girls") as he tries to squeeze a few thrills from material as desiccated as his leading man.

It's perhaps Greendale's greatest flaw that, rather than stirring the blood, its heartfelt call to arms comes off as a sentimental, even trite, notion from an increasingly distant past.

Every "twist" is so telegraphed that there's little suspense here. Phillips' performance is an enjoyable change of pace, and the gratuitous sex scene with Middendorf is fairly hot, but the story's just an aggravating wait for the inevitable double-crosses. For it to be a true lowbrow pleasure, more sex would be needed.

Any resemblance to Cassavetes, intentional or not, only makes the film's flaws all the more apparent.

A Man Apart isn't awful, but it is almost reflexively rote, evoking countless other outlaw-cop films that are smarter, tighter and more fun.

As with "The Blair Witch Project," one must swallow one's irritation at paying yet again for big-screen video -- but even so, the spectacle of an America falling apart is acutely and hilariously embodied by Dawn.

Juliette Binoche is the only reason to see Diane Kurys' florid, incoherent movie.