Sentenced its audience to a maudlin death.

Strains our patience with overacting and photography so sumptuous you can't help but ponder why so much bloodshed and mayhem is being so expertly prettified.

With the dependably compelling Freeman present, even its worst moments are not unwatchable.

Captures the embarrassment of foreplay, but it could use a few lessons in the art of seduction

Bossa Nova has no beat.

Never better than middling, despite its best intentions.

Every time the movie seems poised to veer into watchability, however, Turteltaub is there, like a beat cop for the Fun Police, reminding us to laugh, sigh, or tear up.

Crammed with interesting ideas, visuals, and people, but Stone buries it all in a s--tstorm of technique.

Few other 1999 films are as filthy with tantalizing elements as Agnieszka Holland's The Third Miracle, and of those that come close, none other is as pointless, confused, or unsatisfying.

The picture, a would-be thriller, is a mechanical exercise from the get-go, one that positively defies suspension of disbelief with each succeeding twist of a plot no one would ever hatch in real life.

A pale, derivative little Brit ditty that will be forgotten almost as speedily as it was dumped...into theaters.

Whatever extraordinary ingredients are necessary to fashion a 1776 home run, this movie doesn't have them.

"Footloose" meets "The Full Monty" in Bootmen, a cliché-ridden tap dance drama.

Isn't terribly revealing, and though it is interesting to watch Condo paint, it's only interesting for so long.

It's gibberish, but when X works at all, it works not on the brain, but on the gut.

A full-throated shout-out to the lowest common denominator.

A movie interesting enough in its conception to appeal to adults winds up being best suited to preadolescent sensibilities.

A thoroughgoing mediocrity that musters up just enough low-down chuckles to remind you that you're not watching another Freddie Prinze Jr. yawner.

An empty, affected exercise, executed with just enough style to make you wish McQuarrie had a motive beyond his own career.

Provocative but lame-brained polygamy comedy.

The characters and their dilemmas are never convincing.

Has only its actors to keep it afloat.

The satisfaction of watching it essentially boils down to seeing whether or not Reeves can pull it off.

Aims low and cheats on an ending, but meanwhile it's a bottom-shelf hoot.

McKenna's script is a frayed string and a contextual nightmare, peppered with puzzling references to the first film in a lame attempt at homage.

Hardly a ripping, inspired children's film.

Exhausting and fruitless: Having seen it, you know nothing more about strippers or the stripper mentality than you did going in. What's the point?

Like its accordion-filled score, it's nothing but a golden moldie.

The only constant is the violence, which assaults rather than amuses.

Wacky, vividly conceived but mundanely executed cartoon fantasy.

Apart from the historical eminence of the poetry itself, Pandaemonium is about nothing much at all.

There's really nothing more to this by-the-numbers, ailment-of-the-week fodder dressed up with a classy cast.

Watching this movie go through its simplistic dramatic motions, you begin to understand why some actors stick to summer stock and live Ibsen revivals.

Whenever the movie's not in the midst of a cinematic spoof it loses considerable steam.

McDonald makes for an appealingly befuddled bloke, and the sprightly Montgomery would turn any blighter's head. In a better movie, we'd care about what happened to them.

Demonstrates that even if you live in a country intimately familiar with fascist occupation, you might still not have the least clue how to communicate that experience on film.

The actors playing the team members have stereotypical roles, but these kids have got game.

A watery cocktail of second-rate, Ab Fab-style bitchery and shameless schmaltz.

Gay jungle sex (gasp!), gone-native intellectuals, tribal rituals (gulp!), cannibalism (none of which the film shows, by the way) -- it sounds like a "Weekly World News" front page, not the thematic fodder of a highbrow non-fiction film.

Folks who are desperate to ogle Hewitt and Weaver probably can't be warned off this turkey.

The most disappointing aspect of Planet of the Apes is that, despite its presentation, the film is so very ordinary, without urgency or revelation.

A punishing tragedy that could best be described as the anti-"Shine."

Swordfish is exactly the kind of nominally high-octane actioner that breeds legions of apologists who will encourage you to "check your brain at the door" before seeing it.

For all its pretense of critiquing our tabloid culture, it amounts to much ado about nothing.

Vapid, humorless, screeching, and utterly suckworthy.

Far from creating a pungent portrait of a society gone mad with blood and greed, Schroeder's movie strives for political points while it's whiffing on simplicities like character, motivation, and believability.

The only reason to sit through On the Line is for some entertaining, if fleeting, musical moments.

Kids deserve better than this. They deserve more respect than P2K is willing to give for the price of a Saturday matinee.

Oddly, Bully's only moments of power come at the film's end, after the crime takes place.

A big disappointment. It's toe-tappin' tripe aimed squarely at the undiscerning Britney Spears set.

Whenever we're not at the ballpark, the film falls back on teenage relationship clichés. That's most of what's wrong with it, actually.

One more attempt to pass off chopped liver as foie gras.

It's dull, two-dimensional, and totally toothless.

A mockumentary about small-town beauty pageants that's so confidently unfunny it's DOA.

An absurdist semi-romance between two traumatized somnambulists.

This predictable romantic comedy outing has occasional flickers of ingenuity.

Messy, frantic, and repetitive, Everybody Famous! takes on both vapid pop culture and the mindless hoi polloi that consumes it.

Even Foxx's lively comedy is lost in the noise.

This one's all labor pains, and, in the end, nothing gets delivered.

Pie 2 has neither undercurrent, and hence what was passably cute the first time seems much more puerile and shrill here.

This is nothing more than one more run-of-the-mill, surprise-free, suspense programmer.

Struggles for any kind of movement and cohesion -- and most of all for any kind of humor.

Reitman has truly lost his gift for comic rhythms, cluttering up the film with running yuks that aren't that funny the first time and certainly don't improve with repetition.

By the time Rock Star reaches its cop-out, "All About Eve"-ish ending, the only thrashing that should be going on is of the filmmakers, for bungling such a promising premise.

Indulges in enough grubby histrionics and costume-adventure cliches to give you fifth-grade flashbacks.

What comes before and after the sound and fury of the bombing raid are reams of banal dialogue.

All that this really amounts to is a lot of hot-headed, hairy men threatening each other -- whenever they're not dancing on table tops, that is.

The most obvious casualty ends up being Jennifer Jason Leigh, an actress known for her fearless choices, who is literally pissed on for her trouble.

A matted hairball of a kiddie flick that's alternately maudlin and slapstickishly violent.

Game boys and girls will be disappointed by this fast-paced but shockingly dull adaptation.

Offers nothing but tired "Red Shoe" Diaries-style sexploitation for the art-house crowd.

Opting for this refried mash over Lee's rentable beauty is like choosing canned beans over an Asian feast.

The worst thing about The Animal -- is how frequently it becomes boring.

Relevant message aside, there's no good reason to sit through photographer Neal Slavin's directorial debut.

Ultimately, Grateful Dawg will only be of real interest to musicology students and diehard Deadheads.

As its plot is entirely negligible, whether or not you enjoy One Night at McCool's probably depends on how funny you think the performances are.

It's all well-acted and eerily compelling, but the shocker ending is patently implausible.

That's just not enough to recommend it, though it does have one moment of real justice: The person sentenced to jail has truly bad hair.

About Lustig's direction. Badly employing all kinds of tricks like alternating film speed, jump cuts, and various color tints, she ultimately overpowers her actors and does in her own film.

Whatever the amount on Roth's paycheck was, it's the only truly charmed sum Lucky Numbers has to offer.

Plays out like a raunchy episode of "Felicity."

An orgy of bad decisions and cheap ideas.

Why waste the price of a movie ticket when you can see wildebeests cavorting for free from the comfort of your own recliner?

The characters aren't convincingly written, rarely if ever behave like believable humans, and consequently don't matter to us in the least.

This saga of one robot's determined quest to become human is so coldly calculated it could give you frostbite.

Offers little in the way of splendor in the grass.

Pearce is shot in such distorting closeups that he looks like an overdeveloped athlete who's been getting steroid injections in his cheeks.

80 minutes of comic mistiming and missed opportunities.

A chronic snore. My advice: Roll a fatty and re-rent the first one.

Fuhgeddaboutit.

Pushes the standard tropes of gay romance movies a few more steps toward full-blown cliché-dom.

A film without mirth or magic.

Black, who is creatively marooned in the thankless Chris Farley fat-boy role, deserve better, and so do we.

So desperate to be rebellious and cool, that it's impossible to see it as anything more than one big case of "been there, done that" -- even if your drugs have already kicked in.

None of the movie's abundant humor is better than faintly amusing.

The film's greatest flaw is its miscast leads, who conjure up zero dewy-eyed, wish-fulfillment magic.

The total lack of sexual chemistry between them doesn't help. Frankly, I'd rather see Scott Thomas play a nun than sit through another one of these turgid romancers.

The narrative disjointedness is not at all relieved by confusing editing, an uncertain tone, and a dragging pace that makes the film a progressively dreary experience.