Moviegoers might have preferred a little more care with the characters. As it is, Alma comes off not as a courageous trailblazer but as an indiscriminate adventuress.

You probably saw this film the last time around, when it was called "Sleeping With the Enemy." This one merely adds a better car chase and more ass-kicking.

What saves the film from utter forgettability are the strong supporting performances, especially from Peter Caffrey as the town atheist, and Tony Doyle.

Which leaves Witherspoon, that delicious pastry, to heave the movie on her small shoulders and carry it home. The load is light -- the movie weighs no more than a glass of flat champagne -- but even she can't withstand the burden.

It's a bad sign when you're rooting for the film to hurry up and get to its subjects' deaths just so the documentary will be over, but it's indicative of how uncompelling the movie is unless it happens to cover your particular area of interest.

It's Tommy's job to clean the peep booths surrounding her, and after viewing this one, you'll feel like mopping up, too.

Final is one big hunh? barely worth the effort; just because it doesn't make any sense doesn't mean it's art.

History buffs will find this film lacking, and it isn't really deep enough to educate the rest of us as thoroughly as it should.

Like the recent "Baise-moi," Bully is a whole lot of shock and titillation trying to pretend it's saying something. Unlike the French import, however, there's no awareness of its own absurdity, nor anything for the audience to care about in the slightest.

What's particularly scary about Hollywood Ending, however, is that its flaws are exactly the sort of problems that often afflict aging directors, flaws that we've never seen in Allen before -- bad comic timing, slack pacing, an unsteady control of tone, a reliance on jokes that have long since become clichés.

The best way to watch it is with a loaded bong, the volume turned down and the Orb cranked up on your stereo.

Not just another disposable romantic comedy, but an ambitious, overreaching mess.

So desperate are the filmmakers to create a "hip" western that they try to cram it with action sequences that aren't very exciting.

Merely labeling National Lampoon's Van Wilder "sophomoric" or "vulgar" doesn't do justice to the perpetrators' dedication.

If only director Walter Hill and his coscreenwriter David Giler had scribbled a punch line for all these punches, this rage-in-the-cage redux would be more than merely a limp showcase of machismo so passé as to embarrass your average Australopithecus.

Ultimately, the film amounts to being lectured to by tech-geeks, if you're up for that sort of thing.

The moviemakers have eliminated the finer points of the novel in favor of broad strokes. Very broad strokes.

It's utterly frustrating: What could and should have been biting and droll is instead a tepid waste of time and talent.

Most obvious crime is first-degree dullness, giving us a thriller without thrills and a mystery devoid of urgent questions.

It's as light on its feet as a dead elephant. It's never clever or smart, nor is it terribly thrilling or engaging during its numerous fight sequences.

What do you get when you cross a passé "swinger" (Will Stewart), an exhausted "lost in L.A." setting, a sloppy "screenplay" and dull "direction" (by Paul Duran)? This!

Plays like a knockoff of Michael Bay's already derivative and much more fun "Bad Boys," only with even less plot. It also recalls the worst qualities of John Singleton's mean-spirited "Shaft."

If it had anything that even approached the vaguest vicinity of a plot, The Wash might be a cool diversion for a Saturday afternoon at the mall.

The urge to laugh is superceded by the urge to slap everybody and command them to stop embarrassing all of humanity.

Mandel Holland's direction is uninspired, and his scripting unsurprising, but the performances by Phifer and Black are ultimately winning.

This bloody stab at William Castle's 1960 gimmick flick substitutes chaos for chills.

The actors labor long and hard to bring some semblance of reality to the proceedings, but the whole affair has a distinctly faux '50s feel to it.

If you peel away the surface of this movie, one is left with not much at all.