Someone has driven a stake through the heart and ripped out the soul of the 1980 original. The responsible parties, make that irresponsible parties, should be found, thrown in movie jail and not allowed within 50 feet of a set again. Ever.

Invites the kind of judgment it condemns.

Satire aside, what the oddball folks here never feel is real, despite the filmmakers' claims of autobiographical parallels.

What are in very short supply, though, are the central chords of Dickens' carol: Crachit's generous spirit, Tiny Tim's sad plight, Scrooge's emotional arc as he finds his humanity. Oh, the scenes are there amid the action, but they are fleeting. By the time A Christmas Carol finishes piling its many shiny presents with their many bells and whistles under the tree, there's no room left for tears for Tiny Tim. Bah humbug indeed.

One can't help experiencing the same dread about the exhausting flood of lackluster horror films that swamp our screens and, as Case 39 unfolds, realizing we're enduring one more.

It's doubtful that records are kept about this sort of thing, but consider the possibility that Clash of the Titans is the first film to actually be made worse by being in 3-D.

With so little trust and even less dialogue to back him up, it's no wonder Li rarely takes his left hand out of his pants pocket. His fists aren't furious; they're on strike.

They never generates any real fear until its last minutes, by which time it is too late to redeem the dull events that preceded them.

While adapting accomplished fiction such as this is a lure Hollywood can never resist, some characters breathe better on the page, and that is the case here.

Too often we feel that left-out-in-the-cold draft that blows over the shoulder whenever actors appear to be having more fun than the audience.

A dreary title for an even drearier picture.

Can never rise above the melodrama of a past era, despite a splendid, impassioned portrayal by Willem Dafoe and an affecting one by Luo Yan.

Might work on the stage but is merely tedious on the screen.

If you think that Martin Lawrence dressed up as a hefty grandmother is funny, be gone with you .For the rest of you, you'd be better off just taking a ride on the bus. The script.. .is off and stumbling over unfunny one-liners.

Like a hall of mirrors, casting back at us distorted images from other movies. It even calls to mind "The Sixth Sense." It isn't engaging in the least.

Typical of this movie's cluelessness is the way it cavalierly traffics in stereotypes.

So uninvolving it scarcely matters what it looks like.

Opens and closes on a jaunty note: It's the tedious, relentlessly talky 80 minutes in between that's the problem.

Though there's a thin noir line between lust and hate, Lansdown delivers nothing to stir the passions of filmgoers one way or the other.

An undernourished romantic comedy-drama that's especially short on that most essential ingredient: credibility.

Misfires badly as both an entertainment and a message movie.

Leaves us with a heightened appreciation of the bold and personal films made by a number of filmmakers of the former Yugoslavia.

Doesn't have the courage of its conceit, only an abundance of bad ideas and worse taste.

There are any number of aspects to The Invisible Circus that simply don't ring true.

Goes into a tailspin after its impressive setup. Its dramatic tactics become so tangled and diffuse that, by the end, you get the feeling that everything gets tied up too hastily.

One Night at McCool's is one night too much.

By the time Duets faces the music, hardly anyone is going to care.

Affleck and Paltrow, who've been excellent elsewhere, display less chemistry than they've shown in magazine photo shoots. Even Woody and Bo Peep had more going on between them in "Toy Story" than these two manage here.

All strained artifice, inhabited by individuals who either lack dimension or are merely stereotypes. The result is a movie not nearly as amusing as its makers may think.

Not the kind of unwatchable mess you might assume a film withheld from reviewers' scrutiny would be. It is, however, something equally unfortunate: a mess you'd rather not be watching.

Ready for a singing and dancing "Reservoir Dogs"?

So mild, so benign, its humiliation-to-vindication are so predictable and its old-folks jokes so feeble.

Not even the strong, reflective, world-weary presence of Reno or Cassel's energy can make a dent in a movie in which suspense and tension dissipate quickly, with action sequences not spectacular enough to compensate. All that's left is gratuitous gore.

Kept in check by his character's neuroses, Pearce holds our attention throughout, but it isn't until near the end that he manages to break free of his character's and his director's inhibitions.

Certainly, Malkovich's portrayal of mob lieutenant Teddy Deserve (!) and his lacquered swagger represent the only thing here that you haven't seen a hundred times before.

It's too labored and ponderous to qualify as a so-bad-it's-good amusement. Original Sin is merely an old-fashioned bore.

Begins as a captivating romantic comedy and then, at the very moment it's most involving, takes a wholly gratuitous and disastrous swerve and just keeps on going from bad to worse.

Has plenty of warmth, affection and conventional wisdom, but too much of the time it plays out in routine fashion with moments of contrivance.

Dust is a bust, a big bad movie of the scope, ambition and bravura that could be made only by a talented filmmaker run amok.

Begins on a mildly entertaining note, with each successive vignette the film grows increasingly tedious.

An L.A. neo-noir raised to an insufferable degree of artiness.

It's too bad this Rollerball veered off-track so swiftly, derailed by bad writing and possibly also by some of that extensive post-production reworking.

Looks sensational, moves like lightning. But its script (by Joel Soisson) makes no pretense about being logical or even comprehensible.

Isn't for teens, it's for the kids who aspire to be teens.

The best the makers of Down to You can hope for is that girls in their early teens--clearly the film's target audience--will be so carried away by its charismatic stars that they'll overlook the film's various flaws.

A painfully contrived and artificial exercise in futility.

It's a portrayal so unconvincing it makes it close to impossible for the rest of the film to function as intended.

Without complexity to its characters, with little balance and without a hint of the personal, family or community issues involved, Colors becomes a movie that never has to ask "Why?"--a vivid, noisy shell of a film filled with eager young actors rattling along on the surface of a lethally important subject. [15 Apr 1988]

All the sound and fury in the world can't disguise the fact that yowling music, typing montages and computer animation do not a gripping finale make. This movie megabytes.

Cast adrift with vague, improbable characters and a plot that's at once under-and overcooked, the actors struggle to find a steady tone, lurching from somber to silly as the director tries to figure out what he's doing.

You can't help but feel that Disney has delivered a turkey for Thanksgiving.

Peel away the layers of contrivances, however, and the leftover plot barely fills a doggy bag.

Too often is as garbled as Pootie's own jargon.

Even Phoenix, an actor who can make an incestuous-minded Roman emperor seem sensitive, can't smooth over political nihilism this unsavory.

This documentary-like realism, alas, only underlines the preposterousness of its plot with its torrent of contrived, credibility-defying cliffhangers.

Buried under the miscalculations, the shamelessness, the off-putting and inappropriate broadness are sporadically visible souvenirs of a good project gone bad, hints of the unusual, bittersweet story that got away.

Melts swiftly...don't expect a shred of credibility.

A trite psychological thriller -- all buildup and no payoff, a mystery that essentially offers only two alternative solutions, which diminishes the element of surprise and strings the viewer along way past caring which possibility proves to be true.

Low comedy doesn't get any lower than Love Stinks.

Gadget instead ends up as another mindless, noisy thrill ride that gorges its audience on bright effects and leaves it queasy from overconsumption.

Far from great, and this off-putting French romantic comedy is sure to test severely the indulgence of fans of "Amélie."

There's some technical dexterity in melding the various formats and capturing some impressive surf footage, but the shaggy dog nature of the story proves exhausting.

Just the ticket for girls in their early teens.

A tedious comedy... It's not the worst premise for humor dashed with a little wisdom, but the script, written by the film's star Eddie Griffin and others, is less than inspired and tends to blur the line between immaturity and just plain stupidity.

Whatever his intentions, Clark, in his third outing as a director, has come up with a film that is seriously flawed.

More a 99-minute public service announcement about the plight of illegal immigrants than a fully formed drama, the film finds itself in a no-win situation not unlike that of its protagonist.

Pretty dreadful.

More travesty than tragedy.

That rarest of all genre hybrids, the screwball-romantic-action-situation-black comedy. Rare for good reason. Who'd want to see a thing like that?

Implausible at every turn, it offers a dab of quirkiness and edge from writer-director Finn Taylor, but otherwise has nothing for audiences to embrace.

Writer-director Steers has chosen to overload "Igby" with phony archness and forced black humor, making it not the place to look for satisfying acting.

Psycho Beach Party is, from the start, in dire need of the electroshock therapy that Florence ultimately undergoes.

The emotional aspects of the story are treated with such a heavy hand, the supernatural aspects are so vague and uninvolving, and the group dynamic is so unconvincing that one can't quite imagine why anybody bothered.

Irritating, childish and more frantic than funny, Cats & Dogs does manage some few pleasant moments, but they are not worth waiting for.

By the time the heavy-handed Solomon & Gaenor is over, it has become such a punishing exercise in the self-evident that one is left numb and eager for escape.

Scattered, phlegmatic and an all-around weak effort, Celebrity turns out instead to be one of Allen's periodic misfires.

Given the polyglot nature of the cast, with actors from at least five countries taking their best shots at the English language, it's unclear why Cage felt he needed an accent or, stranger still, why it took him a reported seven months to come up with this one.

The three leads go through the motions with goofy geniality, and director Chris Koch has enlisted some consummate character actors -- to help hold up the sagging jokes and story line.

Severely marred by a plot device so ludicrous it turns a serious drama into something silly.

The problem is that it doesn't find a lot of laughs in much of anything, referential or otherwise. [7 Jan 1994]

The best thing that can be said about this lethargic coming-of-age tale, noticeably undernourished at 78 minutes, is that it's better than the even more pathetic "Stolen Summer."

The astonishing thing about Raising Arizona is how it can move so fast, be so loud, and ramain so relentlessly boring at the same time. [20 Mar 1987]

Every generation is entitled to its dopey, sticky junk and, deep into the winter blahs, they don't get stickier or dopier than Snow Dogs.

Johnson, on his maiden voyage as director, treats every scene as if it were a bonbon, almost too precious to consume, and Marc Shaiman's score is a running series of mood cues.

A weakly comic splatter movie oversupplied with jokey, cartoonish violence.

Such a classic combination of feckless dramaturgy and rampant excess that giving way to giggles is the only sane response.

Unlike Tracy and Hepburn, the loving and loathing here are absent music and wit and tend to imply that what Moore's character really needs is a good frolic.

Nothing works, except perhaps the sight of Julia Roberts' lean, well-tempered midsection and her roughly eight yards of legs that, in this frail comedy, are worked until they're almost a story point of their own. [23 Mar 1990, Calendar, p.F-14]

Lacks even a vestige of subtlety and is rarely so much as amusing. Viewers with fond memories of the brothers' wildly funny "There's Something About Mary" will be astonished at how few laughs the current venture has.

Rather than steep his story in dread, ideas or something, anything, fresh and different, first-time director Eli Roth just pours on the blood, along with some recycled surrealism and plenty of giddy movie allusions.

A low-voltage drive-in movie, made strictly by the book.

Embedded between all the sex and sunlight are some woefully underdeveloped ideas about American militarism and masculinity. Dumont doesn't bother to develop these ideas, principally because he seems to think it's enough to arrange his characters like puppets and tear off their heads.

A film that means to be seductive but merely progresses from the contrived to the manipulative.

The voyeuristic indulgences of a middle-aged filmmaker playing out his most deep-seated and unresolved sexual fantasies and anxieties.

a freefall into urban hell that doesn't give us The impetus to jump or the awful gratification of the ride.

Despite the occasional topical reference to President Bush and Sen. Clinton, this movie is, like, so eight years ago, it isn't funny.

It might even have made a good film, but it hasn't. In the hands of stars in denial about their stardom and a director who can't be bothered to take things seriously, it has come out implausible and unsatisfying, a comic thriller that is not especially funny or thrilling.

Good-natured but it's a dud.