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What really sink the film are the script's reductive, outdated psychological implications (molestation leads to queerness/transsexualism) and its clumsy melodramatics.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