Instantly forgettable caper comedy.

Flatly directed by Mark David, tediously paced and melodramatic.

And whenever the film shifts from spunky "let's put on a show" fun to overly earnest drama, it slows to a crawl, with mawkish performances that fail to rise above the soggy material.

If you can be satisfied with only Wayans' Tourette's syndrome bit, or his perfect timing in the scene where he just kisses a girl and creams his pants, you'll go home happy.

It's a dud. To be fair, the source material (to which the film is unfortunately faithful) is itself a wan assemblage of creaky one-liners, overly familiar gay ghetto types and sitcom-inspired shenanigans.

Still and all, the makeup special effects are as over the top as anything in Hooper and L.M. Kit Carson's 1986 Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2, and -- for those of us without the sense to steer clear of this sort of thing -- that's saying something.

Notable actors such as Thandie Newton, Judi Dench, Keith David and Colm Feore are little more than stiff-necked toy figures jostled around to accommodate Twohy's Wagnerian spacescapes, crappy dialogue and CGI-dependent action.

In a time of darkness, under the evil reign of John Malkovich -- who sits upon a throne in a different sound stage from the rest of the cast -- a hero shall rise. But lo, there will be little rejoicing, for this dragon rider (newcomer Edward Speleers) is but a nancy boy, about as imposing as Lance Bass, and somehow in possession of the only soap and clean clothes in all the land.

The script (by Matthew Perniciaro and Timm Sharp) is trite, and the direction so flat that every scene looks like it was shot in a broom closet, but the bright young cast makes things more bearable than they should be.

There are gruelingly unfunny gags, an unspeakable soundtrack featuring BTO and Billy Ocean, and Victoria's Secret mannequin Heidi Klum as a model who demands that her pussy hair be styled into a bushy red heart.

Reyes' fast-paced tale soars on the pedigree of its cast, all of whom are clearly having a ball -- Both poignant and wickedly amusing, Empire sets high standards for a subgenre that's rarely had any.

Bounces through the bush in search of good will and comes up with recycled charm as it reintroduces most of the original's major characters.

The bigger-than-big, rambunctious spectacle is way too much of a questionably good thing.

Despite their appeal to patriotic horror fans, the makers of An American Haunting end up doing more harm than good to domestic fright production.

1. Balls of Fury is a movie about: a. A former table-tennis prodigy enlisted by the FBI to infiltrate the underground pingpong tournament of a legendary Chinese criminal. b. Suppository jokes.c. Little worth discussing and even less worth seeing.

A happy vulgarity still reigns.

Harris tries his best to make something more out of his one-dimensional white-knight character, while Gooding plays his vaudeville Rainman routine to the rafters.

An electrifying modern-dress noir, directed by Ernest Dickerson with a tough, terse, unapologetically brutal attitude that evokes the heyday of Sam Fuller and Robert Aldrich.

The Last Time seems even more hapless than the Midwestern rube it's skewering.

The bloom is off the rose due to cynical rehash.

A fine specimen of clean-cut Mormon family entertainment, but it may also be a step in the wrong direction for the fledgling production company.

Raising Helen is the kind of movie you watch on a plane while muttering “utter crap” under your breath -- and then burst into tears.

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.

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.

In DiNovis’ butterfingery hands, the movie tumbles into a pedantic anti-death-penalty rant that's about as funny as a firing squad.

This is the kind of amiable time-killer that belongs on a basic-cable weekend afternoon.

Praise be to director Corey Yuen (The Transporter) for delivering one of the year's purest entertainments -- the best butt-kicking PG-13 bikini jiggle fest since the first Charlie's Angels flick.

In the age of creationism, a sympathetic mix of science and religion sounds like a promising premise. But in this genre-blending cocktail of drama, documentary and computer-graphic animation, quantum physics is so subordinated to the service of an anything-goes mysticism that little remains of the science except the terminology.

Some of the most heavy-handed, laughless, uninspired attempts at comedy since prime time. But I still dig “South Park.” Let’s forget this ever happened.

Those viewers who found anti-Semitism lurking under every stone in The Passion of the Christ may rejoice in this celebration of Jewish heroism; all others should rest assured that falling asleep in the cinema is not a mortal sin.

This hypersleek film is surprisingly lax for its first half... The ending is dumb.

This shaggy-dog sequel is ultimately satisfying for the most low-tech of reasons: The competitive bond between the two central characters.

Brodie assembles a grab bag of themes formulaic to films about poverty.

While the premise does lead to a few moments of inspired physical comedy -- the movie repeatedly falls back on poorly staged, choppily edited fight scenes between Chan and a gloomy, power-mad villain.

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.

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.

Paramount Pictures proudly informs us that the PG rating is for “mild, crude humor.” Too mild, too crude by far. If I were you, I’d take the wee ones and run for the vastly superior “Finding Nemo.”

With the exception of one scene with an accent coach, his (Martin) Clouseau is flabby and obvious, like your dad doing an impression at the dinner table.

Likable (if not especially funny).

A fine cast of unknowns in a story of faith -- lost, found and continually challenged -- that neither romanticizes nor condescends to its milieu.

If you can't count on a British con movie to deliver at least a few moments of entertaining color, well, then what can you count on? Director Richard Janes' slight and wobbly Fakers comes close to shattering one's faith in a just and orderly universe.

By and large, the jokes fall flat, and the entire film often seems as fatigued as its star.

A trite teen comedy burdened with lofty aspirations of rallying adolescent audiences to political action.

The Return gets this year's award for most misleading poster, with its image of an empty-eyed, gray-skinned zombie/ghost that appears nowhere in the movie. You might, however, feel a little empty-eyed and zombie-like yourself after emerging from this languid story.

Juvenile, sloppy and frequently, idiotically hilarious.

An easygoing work of unforced humor built on gags that should be stupid, but are ultimately too ridiculous to resist.

Has spread itself so thin between plot, subplots and great scads of floppy pop-psych, it has nothing else to do but lie down and die of exhaustion.

Assante, restrained and thoughtful, reveals Vinnie's midlife bewilderment as much as his bred-in machismo. His performance is too delicate, though, to stand up to the rigidly formulaic schemes

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.

Given her (Halle Berry) biggest part since winning Oscar, she responds with a zeal that's more than the movie deserves.

Slight but immensely enjoyable charmer.

A cleverly plotted, cleanly crafted matinee item -- pure entertainment on a romping continuum with Frankenheimer's "Ronin."

Drawn from two Earhart bios, Mira Nair’s dull hagiography comes in about 111 minutes too long.

Like the best pulp, though, it gets its hooks into you faster than you can start to wonder why you should possibly care about what happens to any of its despicable characters, and, before you know it, you’ve been pulled deep into its Dantean vision.

Even the promising team of Peter Dinklage’s mad scientist Simon Barsinister and Patrick Warburton’s henchman Cad turns out to be a bust.

A stunningly lethargic, uninvolving piece of crap.

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

Second-rate sword-and-sorcery saga.

Annapolis succeeds only in the difficult mission of making charismatic actors like James Franco and Tyrese Gibson seem bland and surprisingly unsexy.

Making a gay film only slightly less intolerable than its straight counterparts isn't much to be proud of.

Quite unintentionally, director Luis Llosa and screenwriters Hans Bauer, Jim Cash and Jack Epps Jr. have crafted a howler; Anaconda, meant to be a nail-biting thriller, is a laugh-out-loud comedy.

The sentimental novelty of watching two childhood antiheroes have at it dissipates once you realize the lugubrious lengths to which the screenplay must go in order to make that happen.

Comes off as a desperate attempt to breathe life into dull proceedings.

Despite the lack of zing in Hogan's frequently self-deprecating zingers, director Simon Wincer repeatedly lets scenes dribble on until an awkward silence engulfs everyone onscreen.

Tatou evinces that innate self-possession in which Frenchwomen specialize, and lets it fly here. That, in turn, keeps this flawed movie aloft.

The film reduces a complex social environment to a trifling spectacle of fakery, peopled by faux-hemians who offer up trivial confessions as if they're earth-shattering.

Writer-director Mick Garris has a real feeling for the horror master's melancholy worldview - love is loss - but he's too reverent toward the original story, the ending of which, both on the page and, now, on the screen, lands with an overly elegiac thud.

Scott's lack of faith in the script is all too evident -- in most scenes, the lines are so dull, he has to up the ante of his already-infamous attention-deficit style.

What's fun is that the road to that climactic Capitol showdown is paved with one ridiculous and relentlessly edited set piece after another.

What makes the film transcend its limitations is Carell, whose square, "Father Knows Best" demeanor belies a supreme comic self-confidence and whose implacability in the face of the movie's CGI-intensive animal antics can be marvelous to behold.

Gibson and Good deliver such emotionally honest performances that we wish them a happy ending, no matter how many movie clichés have to be trotted out to get there.

Deft, funny and intelligently scary.

There are moments that suggest the comedy that could have been.

Remains short on charm, purpose or laughs.

The film takes on unexpected weight when Christian cops to his intense personal loneliness. That's not the stuff of high comedy, but it's brave and, in these days of rah-rah, everyone's-in-love gay media, rather refreshing.

If nothing else, Chuck & Larry should open up a whole new career path for the ineffably funny, unselfconsciously buck-naked Ving Rhames as an übermacho firefighter who’s been sitting on a little secret of his own.

Only Chris Klein, as the lovesick live-in boyfriend of Becky's sister, is given anything like an active emotional arc to play, and he runs with it so beautifully that he steals the movie.

I'd take almost any colorful-character shtick over the gloomy gravitas that settles over All the King's Men early on and never leaves.

As a director, newcomer Frank E. Flowers shows a flair for visuals and characters, but as a writer, he needs work. The Tarantinoesque nonlinear structure he employs would be risky even in Quentin's hands, and is downright self-sabotaging here.

Antiwar, anti-Bush, anti-corporate, yet neither as progressive nor half as funny as the "Harold and Kumar" sequel, War, Inc. squanders some top-tier talent (Marisa Tomei, Sir Ben Kingsley) as well as our patience.

Now that's exploitation.

While moderately entertaining, the film also captures another old dynamic: The “ew” factor dissolves into the yawn factor with surprising quickness.

It's clever, vulgar and fully committed to making us howl with laughter. If only all sequels were this much fun.

A debut film that's more well-intentioned than funny.

Murray's gift for imperious indifference is the only reason to sit through a second for-kids-only movie about Garfield the lasagna-loving cat.

Gores certainly seems to be enjoying himself, and diplomacy and plain old good taste prevent one from saying much of anything about his screen performance. Arnold doesn't merit such kindness, nor does producer and director Penelope Spheeris, whose work barely rates above the level of rote competence.

Hinges almost completely on the taut body and delectable beauty of Jessica Alba, but is otherwise so riddled with limp clichés that it doesn't even qualify as a guilty pleasure.

Cold Creek Manor's prime reason for being seems to be a set piece involving poisonous snakes, directed by Figgis with a drunken gusto the rest of the film could use, and as a comeback vehicle for Stone, who tries hard at motherly warmth, but can't quite wash the Catherine Tramell out of her hair.

Those seeking anything resembling a real discussion of the issues had best seek elsewhere.

Kids will probably enjoy the sight of huge, bumbling teddy bears -- Parents will exit wondering why this piece of unnecessary cross-promotion wasn't released straight to video.

The wet blanket of undigested autobiography lies all over Rob Reiner's excruciating new opus about a marriage winding down into terminal atrophy.

What’s striking about John McKay's feature debut is how much contempt toward his female characters the writer-director manages to pack into 115 minutes.

Has the crisp pace and bright-eyed facetious tone of a blackout-comedy sex farce.

Seems stuck in fad mode, a showcase in search of a movie.

Placing gay characters front and center in big Hollywood movies is supposed to inspire cheers, not the case of the creeps that comes with Three To Tango.

Callahan's feature debut is a one-way ticket to Palookaville.

Throws in a lot of detail but withholds the real secrets of Abbie Hoffman. His life was no fairy tale. Why should it be filmed to end like one?

Coury has made a technically polished first film, but her sense of comic timing and sexual politics is strictly borscht belt.