Visually sumptuous but intellectually stultifying.

It's bad enough that Australian writer-director Pip Karmel feels she must attempt the alternate-reality gimmick.

Nice try, guys . . . now give me back my 97 minutes.

The booty here is 100 percent fool's gold.

Surprisingly few insights from the quintet, and after 90 minutes we're more familiar with the furniture of their rooms.

The predicaments of this whiny, unprepossessing crew inspire about as much sympathy as a celebrity divorce.

First-time director Bryan Johnson's failure to resolve the film’s two moods -- psychopathic sexual brutality and light social satire -- proves fatal.

Occasionally the Woo-inflected action sequences - particularly a horse stampede through town on hanging day, and an escape from a moving train - rouse the film from its anti-historic, even mythophobic torpor.

It's impossible to find an iota of aesthetic worth or an ounce of pleasure in this sludge.

The movie layers its fatalistic drama with absurdist horseplay and a few moments of Lynch-ian mysticism, but it's an awkward mix at best; even when The Perfect Sleep is trying to be funny, it's far too self-conscious to really be much fun.

Meet the Spartans is a mild improvement over their "Epic Movie," which is like saying that a debilitating fever is more fun than appendicitis, but what’s shocking is how lazy it is, which is a shame for former UK child star/pop singer Sean Maguire, whose Gerard Butler impersonation is spot-on.

Screams straight-to-video.

The fault lies mostly with the writers, who consistently come up short on wit and imagination enough to finish, let alone flesh out or polish, a joke.

The freak show of druggy squalor and the wired sexuality of hardcore kink and flaccid cocks float by solely for our carnivalesque amusement.

Given the passivity of computer use, the "hacker thriller" is film history's great running joke, but special attention should go to Echelon Conspiracy's authors for conceiving a climax that tries to juice tension out of someone using a search engine and staring at a download countdown.

A big-screen reality show that flashes plenty of t-- and d--- but little integrity.

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.

Bruckheimer shifts from high-concept historical romance "Pearl Harbor" and high-concept T&A "Coyote Ugly" to a first attempt at high-concept light comedy, yet only his fondness for dragging acting talent down with him carries over.

How fortunate that the J. Lo bod, majestic butt and all, finds itself in excellent working order in Gigli: There is precious little other consolation in this formless windbag of a romantic comedy.

If you've never seen the original, you may have no idea what's going on.

The film's failings are only highlighted by the fact that while, occasionally, we're granted real glimpses of interior lives, largely emanating from de Leon, Davao and Picache, those lives are never given the chance to take shape.

Basically a TNT Western with Tom Berenger in the lead.

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

Suggests that we're supposed to take this love story as something more than farce. Please. Tom Hanks fucking that volleyball would have been more convincing.

Cuba Gooding Jr.'s unrelenting energy can be galvanic in good films, but in lesser efforts it reeks of frenzied futility.

Idiot plotting and dialogue are what you'd expect from a genre that typically rewards narrative development with a skip function. But the rote fight scenes are a disappointment.

Writer-director Jon Gunn and co-writer John W. Mann can't fashion a meaningful parable from their knot of dangling plotlines and absurd scenarios.

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

The best parts of the movie occur during the outtakes, which are genuinely funny. The movie proper is insufferable.

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

A truly dreadful sequel.

No, this isn't an adaptation of Don DeLillo’s great 1985 novel, but a muddled talking-ghosts movie.

I can find nothing nice to note about this excruciatingly slow, overly tasteful piece of whimsy.

The pits.

Cute and smarmy are nothing new for writer-director Tom DiCillo; what is new is the crushingly unfunny fusion of the two he's hit upon for this film.

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.

Lazy, infinitely silly cartoon.

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

A hodgepodge of psychosexual horror gimmicks, from the virginal psychic artist to the impotent psychotic actor.

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.

A pretty miserable time at the movies.

The only time the actors appear to have accelerated their own heartbeats is in two paintball scenes, as well as -- professionals all -- the fart-lighting contest. It's pretty pathetic.

So tedious is Fascination that the plot, the embittered characters and, yes, the sexuality are merely insipid.

The picture is an enormous disappointment... The result is one of the most self-consciously grimy movies on record - it looks as if the negative were developed in a mud bath.

A brutish affair replete with sliced bodies, a diced storyline and enough clanky dialogue to wake the dead.

No one ever turns into a real character, and none of the scenes have either dramatic or comedic resonance.

A movie bloated with character cliches and a bullying score that bludgeons us into whatever emotion composer Marc Shaiman thinks we should be experiencing.

It’s hard to know what’s more depressing -- a senseless remake or the idea of a once-great director doing such shockingly slack work.

Never quite gets up to speed, lurching its way through a glossing, superficial take on street life and teenage sexuality.

Overproduced, psychologically muddled, and burdened with an enchantingly overheated screenplay.

In keeping with the film’s giddy superficiality, what’s revealed is a series of sexy poses passed off as character depth. All the backstabbing, shifting alliances and dark motives are held together by adolescent, innuendo-laden dialogue and thick Sapphic overtones.

The cast, which includes Cloris Leachman as the sisters' mother and Paul Sorvino, Jamey Sheridan and Mark Harmon as their various men, emote like pros, even as they deplete any audience goodwill left over from past triumphs.

Intriguing for a while, then steadily more confusing and finally just incoherent.

It is, however, Tortilla Soup's cultural transposition that feels most phony. Where Lee brings depth and subtle observation to his middle-class ensemble piece, Ripoll has simply added a thin Latino glaze.

Why Crop Circles now, if not to ride the hype of M. Night Shyamalan's "Signs" to some quick cash? The movie’s rambling, slapdash, repetitious nature suggests as much.

What this turkey produces in the way of hang-ups is a transparently phony class conflict.

A sappy love story wherein nary a gun or action sequence is seen after the first 10 minutes.

The execution is actually worse than the premise. Nonstop racial, sexual and cultural stereotypes parade across the screen with little wit or real humor to guide them.

As for anyone else who may experience a sudden need for therapy after sitting through this, you're on your own.

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.

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

As numbing and depressing to watch as suits hammering out a film-packaging deal one venal clause at a time.

The movie is a funereally paced downer.

Hyams ("End of Days," "Timecop"), who is his own cinematographer, has no idea how to shoot or compose Xiong's wired choreography.

As bad as the movie is, when it tries to be funny -- a hired killer who sings to his victims, a fat man named Bumpo, and an interminable fight scene choreographed to “La donna è mobile” -- it somehow manages to get several degrees worse.

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

If your child forces you to go to Yu-Gi-Oh!, remember that there's no law against iPods in movie theaters.

Preposterous and tedious, Sonny is spiked with unintentional laughter that, unfortunately, occurs too infrequently to make the film even a guilty pleasure.

The humor stays on one low level throughout, and thus fades fast.

Shandling comes off as a sleazebag -- all that's missing are the gold chains, tufted chest hair and English Leather.

This feeble remake offers little more than two pretty and willing leads who nonetheless can't hide their embarrassment over being set up as distractions to hide the film's thorough lack of coherence and appeal.

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.

For trashing a classic, Tunnicliffe and his writing cohorts deserve a Grimm-style fate -- perhaps a long, slow boil in the witch’s vat?

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

Full of shuttery jump cuts set to music cues so loud your heart can't help but convulse, Darkness should have been left to molder in Miramax's vast vault of horror-movie stiffs.

The limp title says it all.

Miserably unfunny, wholly unnecessary affair.

So why not a sequel that subtracts the only good thing about the first movie, Ryan Reynolds? When Tara Reid won't even come back, you know things can't be good.

Catalog of ugly female stereotypes and rotten jokes.

Levy, Luis Guzman, Cheri Oteri -- utterly wasted. At 82 minutes it feels longer than “Lawrence of Arabia” -- and a lot less funny.

What could have been a fascinating exploration of geographical mayhem becomes instead an exercise in tedium.

Schumacher has gone into the cinematic heart of darkness and emerged with his own peculiar kink on the war movie: Vietnam beefcake.

So dull, a road-trip movie that's surprisingly short of both adventure and song.

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

The story sinks, along with any deeper laughs, under boringly formulaic motivations and plot twists.

Terrible movies about trivial subjects are commonplace and inconsequential, but a terrible movie that grapples with potentially inflammatory subject matter is far worse, because its aspirations are higher - which makes the failure of Varun Khanna's moralistic drama all the more spectacular.

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.

Unfortunately, none of the characters -- despite the film's strong cast -- ever seems worthy of the attention.

Bad photography, bad acting and bad dialogue.

Shakily cobbled together from stock footage and new interviews with authors and family, Stalin’s Wife is nearly barbarous in its denial of aesthetic pleasure. The whole thing looks like a late-night-TV infomercial.

Dull, tacky docudrama

Sandler is -- à la "The Wedding Singer" -- in his washout romantic mode here, and no amount of spastic-colon jokes, cartoon violence or good-buddy cameos (Al Sharpton, John McEnroe) can distract from the fact that Gary Cooper he ain't.

British director Eric Till’s ghastly Euro-pudding co-production (with all the international accents and badly post-synchronized dialogue that implies) manages to make a travesty of its title subject.

Mike Myers wrote the abominable script, plays both leads and is miscast in each.

Especially disappointing that Lemmons, who in "Eve's Bayou" gave us insightful glimpses into the emotional world of black adults, has lost her balance, elevating formula over revelation.

An excruciating no-brainer blend of “Starship Troopers” and “Top Gun,” without the former’s guilty-pleasure concoction of gory F/X and dark humor or Tom Cruise’s megawatt smile.

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

(Lawrence)'s not just unfunny, he's coarsely anti-funny. The film just lurches from one dull skit to the next without bite or much of a point.