Squeak(s) by to make Loser justify the price of admission.

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.

Loud, chaotic and largely unfunny (veteran actors John Witherspoon and Anna Maria Horsford seem at best indifferent to the material), Friday After Next is the graceless sodomizing of a cult classic.

iInstead of a buoyant, imaginative superhero movie on the order of Sam Raimi's "Spider-Man" films or Bryan Singer's "Superman Returns," we get a lumbering, paint-by-numbers origin story.

While the length and ridiculous finale are a drag, the only thing that stinks about Sphere is its pervasive boys-club snarkiness, especially since Stone is actually good. Levinson has always been a better director of men, but it would be nice if Attanasio could learn how to write a role for a woman that wasn't an embarrassment as well as an insult.

Between spy training and sensitivity training, the two (Murphy/Wilson) prove nicely matched comic foils.

Are the little ones really getting anything more out of this slightly flashier, exceedingly louder 75-minute version of their usual 30-minute dose of anime hijinks?

This Hannibal is a stick-in-the-mud altogether lacking in the wit, gourmet appetites and romantic flair required of any surrogate for Sir Anthony Hopkins. By the end of two full hours, it's only Harris' head you long to see on a plate.

Otherwise fine actors such as Don Cheadle and Gary Sinise spend nearly two hours of film time stand-ing around like department-store dummies mouthing dialogue so wooden it's petrified.

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

A fun movie. Not scary-fun. If you're a male over 10 years old, that should be enough.

One feels sympathy for the ensemble, which, absent full-bodied characters to inhabit, mug furiously, as if big gestures conjure big themes.

The film's funny for 15 minutes as it skewers Hollywood and prowls block after block of familiar L.A. scenery.

Yep, it’s Keyser Soze time.

The end result looks heavily doctored: The Sam Raimi-produced feature is a badly acted, nonsensical patchwork of fake scares, crow attacks and wall-crawling CGI spooks, capped by a DVD extra of an ending that must have the real resolution gagged somewhere in a closet.

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

When you don't find yourself wondering about dialogue that's drowned out by rushing rivers and footfalls in the brush, something is very wrong.

Bass isn't a gifted actor, but he retains his dignity, mostly by keeping his head down and avoiding the eyes of the idiots around him.

Moves slowly and deflates completely when the over-hyped family secret turns out to be a dramatic dud. Still, it's an awfully pretty movie. Let's all summer in Maine.

Tamara simply doesn't cover all the bases in its drive to be both a grubby teen splatter flick and a more high-minded thriller.

Lamely engineered and thoroughly exploited tragedy.

Isn't just rotten -- badly acted, badly written, badly conceived -- it's dead inside.

The movie is a funereally paced downer.

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

Unbearably painful from shrugging start to outtakes-laden finish, Harold Ramis’ half-assed, hare-brained return to writing and directing makes Mel Brooks’ equally muddled, soporific "History of the World, Part 1" look downright majestic by comparison.

Seems stuck in reverse.

Fans of the TV series will again be happy to see some of the old Saturday-morning villains, and Bill Boes' excellent production design outdoes his work in the first film.

Baffling too is The Rock's choice to follow up his acclaimed performance in "Be Cool" with a role that requires him to do little more than widen his eyes and grunt lines.

A dud.

What really sink the film are the script's reductive, outdated psychological implications (molestation leads to queerness/transsexualism) and its clumsy melodramatics.

The cutesy opening of writer-director David Moreton's Testosterone (co-written with Dennis Hensley) turns out to be a crippling miscalculation.

What keeps the film afloat (barely) is the sheer charisma of Eugene Levy and the young Alyson Stoner, who manage to find emotion and laughs in the tritest of dialogue and the flimsiest of scenarios.

By the end of this mercifully short excuse for a horror movie, you'll be wishing the beast had chowed down on the entire ensemble.

Pretension, in its own way, is a form of bravery. For this reason and this reason only -- the power of its own steadfast, hoity-toity convictions -- Chelsea Walls deserves a medal.

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.

Lame comic-strip excuse for a biopic.

The movie can’t always keep its many moving parts in lockstep, what with its hinted-at mythos that obscures more than it elucidates and its cast of enigmatic characters whose precise dealings with one another are never made entirely clear, but its World War II backdrop, ravishing synth score by Tangerine Dream and Third Reich mysticism make for a poppy but brooding atmosphere.

Mercifully free of excess mania, sexual innuendo and fart jokes, this sweet-natured comedy, ably directed by John Whitesell (Malibu's Most Wanted), has some nice bits of business.

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

Director Roland Emmerich (Godzilla, Independence Day) knows his money shots: any time he throws some mastodons or giant dodos on the screen for a little beast-battlin’ action, he has our attention. But his lack of skill with actors really shows during the long moments of downtime in-between.

Fortunately, everything comes together splendidly in the last act, and the kids and grown-ups are all first-rate.

Like the film's characters, the city of Paris has been made faceless, as if it too were merely the pawn in a representational hell where light and color and shading are forbidden.

Audiences will probably be miles ahead of the plot, but may not mind, since the cast bring a committed, lived-in quality to their performances.

This is high school fantasy straight outta Compton. As such, it has a certain compelling enthusiasm.

The clash between a winning cast, a witty script and Lansdown's technical weaknesses produces a pleasant, if not memorable, film blanc.

There's a nice reunion of Martin Mull and Fred Willard as beleaguered Ohio parents, and a spacy turn from Henry Gibson, but the tentative muddle of the interlocking stories makes you wish that Craven could live up to his ambitions.

Despite the claw-baring premise, this comes off as a tame, lame female cousin of "Barbershop," due to a maddening absence of storytelling momentum, editing continuity, fresh humor and even a modicum of detail about such a rich cultural topic as urban hair trends.

No matter how “real” things appear, scenarios and story arcs are relentlessly imposed upon the partay-cipants so as to finesse a narrative as crudely overdetermined and howlingly predictable as any studio-manufactured fiction.

Flesh-eating fish notwithstanding, Peter and Michael Spierig's low-budget schlock-horror parody brings precious little new to the undead genre.

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.

Shawn is clearly meant to have deep feelings, yet the filmmakers have saddled her -- and Blair -- with a shallow angst that bums out the whole movie.

When a movie makes you wish you were watching Halle Berry in "Catwoman," something is most definitely wrong.

Tank's whole shtick is taking advantage of stupid women's desire to live in banal romantic comedies, but the film he's in is just as bad as any other Hudson movie.

Bracingly inept.

A pretty decent action picture.

Kirk Douglas turns 83 this very week, and surely the fact that he's pulled a rabbit out of the hat at this late date deserves a deep bow.

Ultimately, Jolie's efforts to establish a character are dashed against the film's increasingly inane dialogue.

Duff, who became a teen-set role model portraying Lizzie McGuire for Disney, has sold over four million records and toured to packed houses, yet screenwriter Sam Schreiber and director Sean McNamara, both making feature debuts, set her up to sing just one song through to completion.

The fun here is not so much in the solid if stolid performances from Bale and co-stars Taye Diggs and Emily Watson (gussied up to resemble the Jefferson Airplane–era Grace Slick) or in Wimmer's overpolished plot devices as it is in the production values.

This is a sick flick. Sick, but satisfying. A cartoonish parable in the mode of Cronenberg's "A History of Violence."

Full of It abandons the de rigueur hot pastels of the average high school caper in favor of distressed browns and greens, but in the end, all the funky style masks little more than a Pinocchio retread for the adolescent grunge set.

Sandler crony Allen Covert, the star, producer and co-writer of this stunted-adolescence classic, hilariously explores a previously untapped nexus of stoner humor, joystick geekdom, elderly women and a martial arts-taught chimp.

Generating gore-free unease through sound effects and scary faces is the specialty of director Takashi Shimizu, who helmed the original series (known in Japan as Ju-On). He creates some unsettling moments here, particularly a well-staged scene involving a body under the sheets and a man in a shower, but the evil ghost itself is a predictable, one-trick pony.

Remarkably, it took four writers to concoct this tin-eared, slighter-than-slight farce.

Writer-director Caroline Roboh's moralistic paean to Jewish self-knowledge is so solemnly high-minded that one almost feels bad admitting that the film's only spark comes from its occasional tawdry ludicrousness.

The kickoff is good -- the finale effectively literalizes the expression “broken home” -- but director Nelson McCormick doesn’t keep things “taut” in between. Rather than do scenes right the first time, he tends to déjà vu them (this usually involves Amber Heard, wearing not-too-much).

Built-to-shock anthology film.

If you care a thing about your evening's entertainment, you'll walk out of this howler before you ever buy a ticket.

David Duchovny’s debut as a writer-director puts little flesh on the bones of the roguish tricks he got up to as a lad in Greenwich Village in the 1970s.

This thoroughly unhip, unfunny political comedy is the kind of movie TV actors like Ray Romano make on hiatus from their successful series, and movie actors like Gene Hackman and Marcia Gay Harden make on hiatus from taking their careers seriously.

What's meant to be a colorblind story, plays up age-old stereotypes.

These bantering would-be heroes mostly live at the tops of their voices.

Black, looking like an unwashed clothes pile and capering in familiar "Uncle Jack" style, is a good babysitter, his cross-dressing turn in a doll's house a highlight.

Harold’s glum overplotting squashes the sick humor and the innate fear of hospitals that gives the premise what kick it has; not even Craig McKay’s clever editing can defibrillate the preposterous ending.

Eckhart has even less chemistry with Aniston than he did with fellow narcissist Catherine Zeta-Jones in 2007’s "No Reservations," going soft and gooey only when he and Martin Sheen, as Burke’s father-in-law, share a big cry.

It could have been a hoot in a bad-movie way if the laborious pacing and endless exposition had been tightened. As it is, only LaSalle's sizzling performance makes Crazy more than a by-the-numbers psycho-horror thriller.

A parade of missed opportunities.

In RV, the downwardly spiraling career trajectories of Robin Williams and director Barry Sonnenfeld intertwine like the ropes of a tangled parachute, and all the helpless viewer can do is look on aghast as the whole abortive fiasco plummets toward Earth.

The only thing more boring than a vampire with moral issues about biting people in the neck is a werewolf who’d rather become fully human than howl at the moon once a month.

Much meaner remake, starring Ryan Reynolds (quite good).

Predictable, flat, full of name-dropping, tragically unhip, and likely to make a decent amount of cash.

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

The director belabors every moment, forgetting that pulp tales need to be told quickly, lest the viewer have time to second-guess.

One almost pities the unnervingly twitchy Murphy, whose shiny makeup is dreadful, and who doesn't stand a chance alongside the focused intensity of Fanning, who commands the screen with the precision of a 30-year veteran.

While decidedly green, at least isn't mealy or tasteless. And if the juice in tyro screenwriter Erica Beeney's witty dialogue can't quite flow through the hard tissue of underripe gimmicks and derivative set pieces, there's enough sweetness in the performances, and tautness in the direction (by Efram Potelle and Kyle Rankin), to forestall any serious bellyaching.

It's Boyar who’s the find here, though, a gently magnetic presence who's all the more impressive for being thoroughly riveting despite spending most of the movie face-down on a counter.

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.

That we are supposed to find something to admire in this callow crew is insufferable.

Annoyingly fourth-hand -- scraped from the shoes of "The Full Monty," mixed with Michael Caine's "Little Voice" hair-smarm and salted with "Billy Elliot's" dandruff.

Cedric gets some help from a butt-kicking babe (Lucy Liu) who may or may not be his girlfriend, and if you believe this pairing could plausibly happen, you might be gullible enough to buy a ticket to this movie.

Starts out as an inspired test case for the continued necessity of the Second Amendment, and only near the end does it lose some of its tightly concentrated focus.

Director Shankman has diligently studied the forms and reproduced the moves of the screwball romances he so clearly loves, but he simply hasn't the chops to put together even a decent rip-off of those glittering jewels of the '30s and '40s, which depend on great writing, classy situation comedy and, above all, chemistry.

Yo momma so fat, when she gets in an elevator, it has to go down. Had enough?

This one’s for connoisseurs of the “totally preposterous crap” school of fantasy cinema.

Miss Conception's dim view of women soon transcends unexamined and goes straight to offensive.

Pitched as a black comedy, the film thus far seems to have divided audiences between those who think it unaccountably hilarious and those who see it as the latest manifestation of what might be called the new nihilism.

Jackson and Levy strike only damp sparks off each other, and they seem to have been introduced to each other --without benefit of rehearsal -- mere moments before the director cried "Action!"

Director Jay Chandrasekhar (Super Troopers, Club Dread) does a fine job with the car jumps. Just try to wake up whenever you hear "Yee-haw."