Rebound is a sports comedy so by-the-numbers that you don't really have to watch it -- you can just check in on it every once in a while between trips to the concession stand and the bathroom.

The plot frequently resets/realigns itself in the fashion of "Lost" or "Alias," as good guys become bad guys, friends become enemies, and combatants become lovers. To portray confusion and uncertainty is one thing; to make a film this unsure of itself, wracked by its own faulty footing and reticence, is quite another.

With its mixture of high-profile talent and low-watt comic inspiration, Smother feels like the sort of misbegotten curiosity Comedy Central uses to fill its Sunday afternoon programming.

This remake seems to exist only to zap the original of its minor pleasures.

There's not a believable moment in all of it, but for a while the film chugs along on Ryan's innate charisma. Even so, no amount of movie-star twinkle could lighten screenwriter Cheryl Edwards' bizarre character arc, which finds Jackie turning, overnight, into a callous, possibly racist, ninny.

Aiming to elicit a last-minute shiver from the audience, Gaghan is likely to get instead a mood-destroying giggle.

There's greater consistency to it, and considerably more humor, with macabre slapstick and fun-house ghoulishness that, at their best, recall early Tim Burton.

Within a few minutes of the film's frenetic opening set piece, however, it's obvious that director David Kellogg and screenwriters Kerry Ehrin and Zak Penn have no idea how to capture the spirit of the source material.

Orlando Jones, buff and commanding, steals the film as Soul Train, a lawyer-biker, while Lisa Bonet, a sexy, enigmatic earth mother, is stranded in a movie that has no idea what to do with her.

The film needs strong characters and snappy dialogue to carry it through. It has neither.

Silly, derivative stuff.

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.

What is it good for? Absolutely nothing. Offering neither the enjoyably preposterous auto-heroics of the Transporter movies nor the lithe, legible athleticism of even second-tier Hong Kong thrillers.

Life goes far past the boiling point for most of the characters in this hilariously overwrought ghetto soap opera from cult writer-director Buddy Giovinazzo.

The entire movie is an object lesson in diminishing returns: of nagging shock cuts and blaring sound cues used as indiscriminately as joy buzzers; of “look out behind you!” scares that wouldn’t make a Cub Scout flinch; of a blurry visual scheme that was far more terrifying in "The Diving Bell and the Butterfly," where it sought empathy rather than empty sensation.

Remember the Daze has the irony-free, instant-nostalgia earnestness of your high school yearbook, but watching it is not likely to conjure your own youthful emotions -- it’s more like flipping through the generic memories of a complete stranger.

Don Calame and Chris Conroy's script is witty and peppered with good laughs, but cops out a bit at the end with an overly conventional resolution. As for Jessica Simpson... her character is virtually irrelevant, as is her acting ability.

Mo’Nique's character here is so underwritten that the actress doesn't get a chance to really capitalize on her extra screen-time. Her sassy forte may be talking so straight-up she sounds crazy, but she seems a little advanced to be doing "yo mamma" jokes.

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.

Old people are made to look ridiculous; clowns are brutalized; characters talk in rapid-fire vaudeville shtick.

It's supposed to be post-feminist breezy but ends up as tedious as the chatter of parrots raised on Oprah.

A nearly affectless Christian Slater, who carries a co-producing credit and seems to have lost his charisma along with his sneer, plays Tom, an armored-car guard who plays hide-and-seek with a gang of thieves, all of whom, outside of ringleader Jim (Morgan Freeman), are instantly forgettable.

Thunderbirds is devoted to the principle that character and story are but rude interruptions to the real order of business, an endless display of profound vehicle fetish.

This is efficient, soul-numbing moviemaking, diverting enough for blistering September afternoons when what's onscreen is secondary to how high they've cranked the air conditioning.

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.

Scottish director Michael Caton-Jones continues to fritter away the last traces of his talent with this ugly variant on Fred Zinnemann's 1973 original, The Day of the Jackal.

It doesn't help that the level of acting in the film brings nothing but accidental humor to the mix.

The animation, incidentally, is half-a--ed, like they ran out of the $292.96 budget halfway through. Rip-off indeed.

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.

With her long, black coat and midair karate-chop skills, Selene is more Matrix-y Neo than Count Dracula, which may explain why this movie is so brutally un-fun.

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

The film staggers under its own didacticism. Too often we're told of men who were professionals back home and are here reduced to driving cabs, waiting tables or vending ice cream.

This Thing of Ours is infatuated with the romance of gangsterism -- with an absurdly straight face, it asks us to feel mournful for the loss of “respect” and “integrity” in the mob community.

It's a sad state of affairs when the best news about Righteous Kill is that it isn't awful.

As powerfully as the film lingers in the mind, one can't help wishing he were led just a bit more by his heart.

Relentless, infantile and impossible to dislike.

Lady in the Water feels very much like something its author made up as he went along; and, if it weren't so damn weird, it would most certainly put you right to sleep.

The only things anyone’s likely to remember, besides Bacon’s crazy-eyes act, are John Goodman’s soon-to-be-legendary turn as a bilious bug-eyed gun dealer and a hellacious back-alley/parking-garage chase shot from a careening fender-level camera. Like much of the movie, it’s as hammily dynamic as it is impossible to swallow.

A little bit "pi," a little bit "julien donkey-boy," a little bit "Eraserhead," Buddy Boy doesn't equal these, but offers bizarre pleasures of its own.

There's really only one reason to see Party Monster, and that's Seth Green's scene-stealing performance as former (and somewhat reluctant) New York club kid James St. James, the boy who would be queen.

To be fair, it's not solely Cage's fault that his new film, Captain Corelli's Mandolin, is lousy -- director John Madden (Shakespeare in Love) deserves most of the heat for this listless dud.

What should have been a smart, stylish crime caper that nourishes film buffs with its multiple cinema references feels more like force-feeding.

The film's power lies in the fact that the façade is crumbling on the actress even as she clings to it. That this is not a pathetic sight is due to the grit that we glimpse through the cracks. It's Barbie, becoming human.

Occasionally funny, cameo-speckled marshmallow.

First-time director João Pedro Rodrigues' unwillingness to define his hero’s background or motivations becomes more and more frustrating as the film goes on.

Inane uplift tale for teens.

Working from a preachy, clumsy script that's full of gaping holes in logic, plot and character development, director Zak Tucker is also handicapped by a cast filled with actors who seem to be in their first year of acting school.

If there's any reason to watch this otherwise inept romance, it's to witness the late Nell Carter nail a Louis Jordan tune, and to see master comic Jonathan Winters downplay his more manic tendencies and effortlessly spin gold from straw.

This is a shameless mélange of plot elements from already generic Disney knockoffs.

Lawrence's descent from hyperactive foulmouth to G-rated father figure has been in evidence for years now, but watching director Roger Kumble move from flawed but juicy projects like "Cruel Intentions" to pap like this is a depressing career development.

With Woody Allen's "Celebrity," Altman's "Prêt-à-Porter" and MTV's "House of Style" predating it by half a decade, this is kind of like clubbing harp seals in a meat locker.

Offers no perverse philosophical conundrums and no eye-popping visuals. It's a dull, lifeless bore.

The stars, despite having only a fraction of the charm and talent of classic sparring-but-meant-for-each-other duos, know how to mug for the camera and well up on cue, and somehow that turns out to be enough to carry this trifle.

And yes, you are supposed to take this all extremely seriously; it probably sounded layered and complex when the writers were stoned.

Fails in so many respects, even die-hard constituents may have trouble learning to like it.

The Anarchist Cookbook drops a few scant sparks onto a torch that, hopefully, some other filmmaker will come along and run with.

As the characters mix and mingle, pouring out their tales of woe online and fumbling real-life connections, Weintrob leaves no cliché unturned in getting to root causes of behavior.

A promotional gimmick that's being slipped into theaters with the sort of stealth accorded only the unprofitable or the unwatchable.

Like the movie’s mysterious Jigsaw doppelgänger, Saw IV is itself a poor substitute for the original.

Branagh has cut, pasted and aggressively abridged Love's Labour's Lost, and piled it high with fancy visuals to make sure we get the drift.

The interchangeable males all resemble Freddie Prinze Jr., and Anderson's direction is no less anemic, making one yearn for an Escape/Quit button that, sadly, doesn't exist in this medium.

A dark, biting comedy-- funny, smart and full of unpredictable twist and turns.

Even Cohen can't dull the loony romanticism of the movie’s finale and, to his credit, stages one truly spectacular bit of action midway through, when Biel bails out behind enemy lines and narrates each harrowing moment of her earthward plummet.

There is a great divide between a film about people in the throes of aimless, meandering lives and a film that is simply aimless and meandering. Smokers Only never acknowledges, let alone bridges, that gap.

If first-time writer-director Julián Hernández lets his knotted narrative get away from him too often, he nevertheless shows a miraculous sense of style for a 31-year-old.

The Clone Wars is minor to the point of irrelevance, nothing more than a stylized direct-to-DVD shrug projected onto a big screen while Lucas launches two more TV series filling in prequel blanks better left empty.

It's a feature-length teaser for a never-to-be sci-fi franchise.

This Rob Reiner comedy jogs along pleasantly enough to the finish (Costner is charming as always in over-the-hill-ruin mode), which entails a less-than-shattering insight about love and marriage.

Ultimately neither freewheeling enough to work as a diverting entertainment nor barbed enough to strike home as any sort of social commentary.

Perhaps it is simply impossible, even with affection in your heart, to craft an evocative homage to the expansive musical melodramas of Bollywood on a small-scale indie budget.

Director Raja Gosnell apparently doesn't even try to pump life into this wan film version of the beloved Saturday-morning cartoon.

While the final revelation is laughably absurd, DeNiro and Fanning are so far inside their roles that one can't giggle for long.

Written in 60 Seconds would be a more appropriate title.

West delivers the emotional goods when tragedy strikes in the final reel. If 17-year-old pop star Moore isn't a skilled actress, she's at least unassuming.

She is known as one of the great muses, yet director Bruce Beresford, Wynter and screenwriter Marilyn Levy are never clear if this is by design or chance.

Honoré never gets beneath these characters' sunburned skins, and well before the end, the film tips irretrievably over into the realm of absurdity.

This time, Zombie doesn’t appear to have many deep thoughts, so Michael doesn’t just stab his victims, he slices and chomps them into gooey pulp — an overkill motif that actually feels false to the character and quickly becomes a depressing bore.

The worst thing about Event Horizon--written by Philip Eisner, directed by Paul Anderson--isn't all the gore decorating the 21st-century space ship that gives the movie its name, but the filmmakers' reliance on shock edits and headache-inducing sound F/X to obscure the fact that this is one of the most derivative movies to hit screens in memory.

It's all cliffhangers, with no downtime in between.

The film works, cleanly, without any tiresome reliance on computer graphics.

A Rumor of Angels beats its wings furiously, only to sink back into spiritualist goo.

It's cheap thrills all the way, served up with the kind of situational purity that only Carpenter seems to care for these days. It's that simple and that much fun.

A small revolution tucked inside clichés and willful artistic ineptitude.

Just because the filmmakers have their roots in the Midwest doesn't give them a pass when it comes to their stereotypical rendition of small-town people and ways, chock-a-block with sadistic cops, shotgun-toting locals, and strippers from up in Des Moines.

Stuck with flat material and a star more adept at responding to humor than generating it, director Stephen Herek, in a vain attempt to generate laughs, enlists Cedric the Entertainer, as a convict-turned-preacher.

All in all, a striking, memorable disappointment -- not unlike so many first loves.

When you're working with clearly conventional material, it helps to attack it from a cockeyed angle or at least adopt a gritty, lived-in urgency, but Deal is fatally earnest.

What really hamstrings Sinner, though, is the hetero narcissism beneath its enlightened posturing.

Both character and metaphor have gone to the dogs, leaving a slew of fart and burp jokes and laying bare Dreamcatcher's driving purpose, which is to make multiplexes full of little boys yuk it up, then gross them out, creep them out.

Let's call this "rethinking" The Abysmal.

Ironically, for all the paranoia, York's Defiler and his henchman, an always game Udo Kier, are an oasis of wit in an otherwise parched, self-serious script.

When will Hollywood learn that a genre trend can last for years if itís nurtured with decent scripts? No time soon, apparently.

This film may never attain a critical mass of satiric understanding about its milieu or time, but at least its individual moments provide plenty of harmless laughter.

An unnecessary remake.

Disfigured by flabby dialogue (“You can't put a number on my dreams!”), unfunny pratfalls and criminally slack pacing.

If the contrast between Marine life and blue-blood luxury sometimes pulls the film in awkward directions, Anselmo's perceptive fondness for all his characters -- parents, children, grunts, even drill sergeants -- more than compensates.

Beyond a lack of enthralling characters or convincing plotting, though, what's most glaringly missing in this self-promotional marketing tool is, of all things, God, who gets only a bit role as Walsch's muse in a few scenes.

It's a mystery why Sutherland attached himself to this dour, muddled thriller.