The acting is stiff, the pacing sluggish, the framing uncertain, the music an intrusive mush and the scenario schematic. But it’s an interesting schematic, at least, complete with thoughtful/exhaustive discussion of the difference between justice, revenge and forgiveness.

Today's street-smart moviegoing kids don't need to be so shamelessly pandered to.

The glitch, beyond the rote story, is that while she's an infectiously upbeat screen presence, Latifah is not, inherently, a major laugh generator, and neither, it would appear, is Fallon.

Bracingly inept.

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

Tim Allen returns to lowest-common-denominator comedy as the star of his own ill-advised, irritating directorial debut.

Other lumps of coal in this celluloid stocking include director Joe Roth's leaden pacing - like trudging through heavy snow - and screenwriter Chris Columbus' tireless affinity for pain gags.

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 mindless muddle.

Jennifer Lopez's butt? Alas, the moment is over all too soon; the movie, sadly, is not.

The ultimate test of one's tolerance for King's self-aggrandizing postulations about writer's block, obsessive fans and the potentially frightening manifestations of the writer's id...It's just plain lousy.

These are pitch-perfect impersonations rather than performances.

A soulless affair.

A tiresome, hammy and ultimately annoying portrait of the artist as a young drunk.

One wonders what exactly Richard LaGravenese and the late Ted Demme thought they were doing in this documentary, which doesn't so much look at the period as genuflect before it.

What the movie needs is a director, and what it gets instead is Pitof, a French visual-effects maestro so much fonder of technological wizardry than of human flesh that he manages to turn even his slinky, sinuous star attraction into a digitized synthespian frolicking about endless CGI cityscapes.

Intentionally blurs fiction and reality.

A lurid, overheated Southern Gothic that wallows in its own unpleasantness.

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.

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

That leaves little to fill 83 expendable minutes, which barely register as a movie even with snazzy KNB gore effects, critic-baiting clips from "The Birds," a splattery variation on the '86 "Hitcher's" most notorious scene, and some out-of-place Bruckheimerisms on loan from producer Michael Bay.

And like, the movie's got all these bright colors and shit, so it's not some fuckin' boring art film, and the new wave soundtrack is awesome.

Buried beneath Silent Hill’s hyper-stylized stupidity (the film looks like a collaboration between David Fincher, Trent Reznor and music video director Mark Romanek) is the hollow effort to bottle something of the zeitgeist unease surrounding religious fundamentalism.

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.

Most of the animated sequences, capably mixed with live action, leave a bad aftertaste, particularly when the ultimate fate of one beaten and battered human bystander after another is left callously unresolved. In other words, parents beware.

Bier's portrayal of the brothers' interplay holds few surprises, and the exploitation of the war between East and West is vulgar, contrived and borderline racist.

This rancidly exploitative movie is redeemed only by canny performances by both leads, as well as Sandra Oh in a supporting role as Phoebe’s friend.

The makers of Lisa Picard Is Famous -- having mastered the obvious early on, set their sights on the unfunny and repetitive.

The uneasy meeting of cultures is mirrored all too well in the stiff and clumsy direction.

Relies almost exclusively on the gushing exuberance of Gooding Jr., and the aw-shucks factor of his digitally expressive, face-licking canine co-stars, leaving such potentially game actors as James Coburn and M. Emmet Walsh out in the cold.

Marks no discernible improvement on its predecessors "Deuce Bigalow: Male Gigolo" and "The Animal," though the sight of the deeply unprepossessing Schneider all dolled up for girlie business is good for a few shallow chuckles.

Now, Soderbergh has made a movie so cool it's practically comatose. Sputtering along from one half-cocked gag line and self-satisfied in-joke to the next, Ocean's Thirteen is as slapdash and slipshod a three-quel as any in this summer's box-office sweepstakes.

All might have been forgiven were it not for a needlessly Shyamalanized ending that deserves to earn Wyatt at least 25 years for grand-theft cinema.

Tim Allen gamely brings some humanity to the role of the retired, powerless hero Captain Zoom, but is thwarted at every turn by bad special effects, slapdash editing, interminable pop-song montages, and a goofy performance by Courteney Cox.

Ladies in Lavender oscillates between scenes so relentlessly nice they make you want to scream and others - particularly those depicting the crush Dench develops on her new housemate - creepier than anything in "The Amityville Horror."

A movie that’s full of sound, fury and unintentional camp -- and is still bafflingly inert.

By the last third, one is sick to death of seeing people tortured, no real catharsis is offered, and stupid is how one feels.

Consistently undermined by a script that swings between the duller side of quirky and facile sentiment.

This new feature has replaced the original's benevolence, taste and wit with cynicism, armpit humor and manic, desperately unfunny padding.

Trimmed to an hour, and tucked between a documentary on snails and an episode of Coronation Street, writer-director Mark Herman's Brassed Off could prove lively watching indeed. As it is, however, his pedestrian if sweetly well-meaning inspirational about a coal-mining town done in by Thatcherism is too long, too laborious and 15 years too late.

Whatever ghost-story intrigue the film musters gives way to a tedious cycle of fighting, screwing, shouting and storytelling stuck together by two hours worth of hard-boiled dialogue gone gummy.

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

The script is painfully underbaked, and director Bille Woodruff (Honey) continues to raise a question: How can someone from a music-video background have absolutely no sense of rhythm, timing or pacing?

The Zodiac regurgitates a lifetime of police-thriller conventions, adding an aura of laughable solemnity in the hope of making the plot seem less banal.

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 obvious, cliché-ridden visual style of this probe into the life, work and legacy of Carlos Castaneda ends up working very much against its subject.

Fails because it takes itself both too seriously and not seriously enough.

Essentially a single-gag movie: Namely, trailer trash are funny; we laugh at their bad taste and social ineptitude.

Dreary romcom-with-guns.

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.

Barely competent. The pacing never accelerates beyond sluggish, and Lesnick's script is an awkward pile of gag lines.

What comes off as clever at first quickly wears out -- even the sudden cutaways to spectacular surf footage can't save this wipeout.

Cage's avenger is named Milton; this reference to the author of Paradise Lost is the sole hint that Old World culture ever existed in Drive Angry's convoy of hyperbolized-unto-parody Americana: bad drawls, obese gawkers, roadhouse demonology, coochie-cutter shorts, and engines revving under guitar stomp.

If the teen in your life drags you along to this movie, act like you're doing him a favor -- and try not to let on that you sort of liked it.

Its tone is as disjointed as if this were a first effort.

At times, both swans and humans appear oddly out of sync with their flat backgrounds, while the film's few musical flights of fancy never achieve visual liftoff.

Still, it’s hard to despise the movie, especially when Peter Stormare shows up over-enunciating the most brilliantly awful English accent of all time.

Like a lot of recent queer-themed cinema that aspires to be politically charged, Maple Palm takes a hot-button issue (here, it's homophobic U.S. immigration policies) and reduces it to dry sloganeering and shameless emotional manipulation of the audience.

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.

There's no excitement or terror in watching the 3-D execution of 2-D actors giving 1-D performances, just the steadily diminishing returns of the same eye gouge delivered ad infinitum.

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.

Lame comic-strip excuse for a biopic.

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.

The one saving grace is a sweet, affecting performance by Werner de Smedt.

Rather than simply releasing the uncomfortably amusing clips on DVD as a "Jackass"-style compilation, executive producer Vin Di Bona and Gold Circle Films president Paul Brooks have spliced them into the umpteenth unfunny cinematic variation of the "sensitive guy and obnoxious womanizing best friend try to get laid" story, with nary a laugh to be had unless you're one of those who finds toilet scenes and prison-rape jokes to be automatically hilarious.

Singleton has neither the emotional nor intellectual depth to do justice to his thesis. He is too in awe of the stereotypical hood lifestyles and macho posturings that he's trying to critique.

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.

It's a mean-spirited exercise in stilted outrageousness.

Quickly reveals itself to be a hyper-stylized flick (lots of odd angles and studied production design in the service of flashbacks and dream sequences), but the glossy sum effect is that of a film student straining for a weightiness he can't pull off.

Cerda's striking creep-show atmospherics, desaturated palette and off-kilter editing rhythms are a style in search of a movie: The muddled "Twilight Zone" payoff here is hardly enough to justify a sluggish two-character round-robin of "Don't look in the basement!" The last thing a filmmaker named Nacho needs is more cheese.

Is there a Razzie Award for worst casting? If so, it’s one of several that can be reserved early for this fourth, spectacularly lousy screen version of Jack Finney’s 1954 novella "The Body Snatchers," which some bright light envisioned as the ideal starring vehicle for the Cold Mountain herself, Nicole Kidman, and for Daniel Craig, last seen as the most poker-faced James Bond on record.

The movie’s cumulative idea is that, forgetting the delusions of midlife panic, this is all there is, you’re already living the best possible life -- a message of sedentary wisdom betrayed when the actual film is as undeniably dreary as a plate of gummy Chicken Parmesan Tanglers.

The tediously convoluted plot involves the foursome’s attempt to pay him back, a labored venture that involves crooks with names like Dog and Plank, a man on fire, some fine cinematography, plenty of gore though no real point.

Why the devotion to such dull material?

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.

Amounts to an assault of jarring music cues and peek-a-boo scares that starts off mechanical and ends up utterly desperate.

By the time a not terribly surprising tragedy hits and these crazy kids get theirs, the movie doesn't so much end as finally keel over.

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.

With stronger actors and real writers, this might’ve been a vintage comedy you could sink your...nope, not going there.

This spineless feel-good nonsense means to warm the cockles of your heart. Somebody check the oven: My cockles were charred.

Black Snake Moan is, at its core, a fairly straightforward variation on George Bernard Shaw -- "Pigsfeetmalion," if you will. One day, when he outgrows his terminal adolescence, Brewer might be the perfect filmmaker to tackle Faulkner or Tennessee Williams.

Irish director David Caffrey and English screenwriter Jeremy Drysdale have, respectively, zero sense of pace and a tin-eared grasp of period speech, and together fail either to let us care about their characters or to create any sense of a living era.

Though Green is engaging, the rest of the cast are unlikable and tediously self-involved, especially Mattison, who, not surprisingly, wrote this tripe.

Directing seems an unduly elegant term for what Hollywood hack du jour Tim Story (Barbershop, Taxi) does here -- the action scenes are so choppily constructed that their excitement disappears faster than the Invisible Woman.

A kind of declawed, inside-out "Final Destination" -- with none of the sense of showmanship, and all the looming malice of a mawkish condolence card.

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

The drama is unintentionally humorous, the humor incredibly labored and the acting rarely better than one might find in a Chi Chi LaRue XXX production.

Among its other sins, the disposable romantic comedy Music and Lyrics fluffs a golden opportunity to make hay with Grant's dark side.

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

Just about the only good thing you can say about Spike Lee's pointless, didactic The 25th Hour is that it's filled with strong performances, albeit of stock characters.

The role requires Wahlberg to run the gamut of emotions from A to A.

Without serious political and ethical stakes, the story limps to a halt, shrouded in platitude and faux drama.

About as unremarkable as a film about talking animals organized into competing intelligence agencies can be.

An orgy of bloodletting and dismemberment that's more monotonous than shocking. Aja and Levasseur are to splatter what Liberace was to rhinestones: practitioners of gaud.

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

Director Mel Smith (Bean) struggles to make up for the lack, clumsily juggling screwball dames and criminal elements, and trying to disguise the film's marked lack of vitality with split-screen tricks, jokey camera angles and a limp musical montage.

If, as it appears, Rosenthal is competing with the knife-wielding Myers for the title of biggest hack, he wins by unanimous decision.

Fails to allow the talented ensemble time to develop "Sunshine State’s" fine, Altmanesque ensemble feel, again and again missing the human and leaving cartoons that satisfy only as agitprop.