The problem with Wendigo, for all its effective moments, isn't really one of resources. At its heart, the story seems confused, as though the director has given it one too many twists.

The problem with Secretary isn't that it is offensive or unnerving -- although you get the idea the filmmakers hoped it might be at least one of those. The problem is that the story is slow-moving and dull.

The real star of the film is the food, which is sliced, diced, shredded, rolled, sautéed and fricasseed to mouthwatering perfection.

A film you can dump your kids off at the mall to see in order to get peace and quiet for an hour and a half.

Austere little creep-out.

Hilarity should ensue, but it doesn't.

Mangold gets stuck in the gooey sweet spots of his tale a little more often than he breaks loose with a bracing jolt of perversity.

Unless you count "Lilo & Stitch," this is the first of several surfer-girl movies out of the gate, and it seems clear that in the rush to put it out there, a script was the last thing on Universal's mind.

I liked when they had the paint fights and the pillow fights.

For better or worse -- plenty of both, in fact --it's a movie that has a coherent vision. It's a shame that vision just doesn't happen to be very interesting.

Crowe renders David's dream (and its accompanying nightmare) so literal we can't help but leave the theater feeling as though we've been lectured to, told how to feel and what to think. And for an audience, that's a bit of a nightmare.

The film was shot with six cameras simultaneously and the images are projected on six split screens, à la Mike Figgis' "Time Code." While the subject's appeal is limited and the film's 106-minute running time excessive, viewers who do respond to the pic will find it raw, real and cathartic.

The underlying theme constantly changes shape, not in a way that seems rich in ambiguity, but in a way that seems poorly worked out.

Thing is, movie's 100 percent mystery-free, but mildly creative, mixing Psych 101 with cynical Hollywood in-jokes with Tylenol-sponsored grainy-cam footage. Best revelation is source of Myers' superhuman strength: eats big rats, apparently.

Either a put-on or a straight shooter; that you can't tell the difference underscores its small but ultimately overwhelming flaws.

With no aspects of the personalities represented outside of their music, Grateful Dawg ends up feeling dry and incomplete; its two subjects are stripped of all other characteristics and come across as not very interesting.

It's far more than merely disappointing that Spy Kids 2: The Island of Lost Dreams lacks the charm and wit -- and humanity --of its predecessor. It's dispiriting.

Leguizamo is all twitches and spasms; there's not a bit of subtlety in his high-wire performance. By the time you get past it, the film bogs down in dime-store potboiling.

Goes by relatively swiftly and painlessly, despite the completely ragtag nature of its construction, but there is not an inspired moment in it.

A vicious, hard-core version of "Thelma and Louise," going nowhere near the Grand Canyon but leaving a trail of carnage in their wake.

If sudden loud noises, relentless strobe lights, digital hallucinations and mutilated corpses make you jump, and you feel that nothing more is required for a good time at the movies, welcome to Feardotcom.

For a general audience the entertainment factor is quite low. The project may best serve us not on the screen, but in a time capsule.

The budget is low and the acting grade C at best, but director Lorena David stages one or two genuinely impressive stunts, and the script, by newbies Scott Duncan and Ned Kerwin, manages to skillfully maintain the plot's central mystery all the way to the end.

Of all the various low-budget documentaries chronicling the Star Wars phenomenon, Tariq Jalil's is certainly the most recent. There's not a whole lot else to say about it.

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.

Renders it a cross between "Three Men and a Baby" and "Monsters, Inc." But it's bereft of the charisma of the former and the energy of the latter; stuck in a frozen wasteland, it possesses all the vigor of a Popsicle.

While the whole is diverting, the ending's utter repudiation of reality seems like pissing on the audience; -- we feel like we've been suckers for bothering to care about the characters at all.

Any cassette of "Millennium" would serve up better thrills and chills.

Reasonably well-made and all, but it's simply too familiar, too derivative and too inferior to its predecessors to have any reason to exist.

Amid a rather routine plot and standard cop-show stylings -- just doesn't add up to much entertainment value.

Turns out some folks just don't know Philip K. Dick about making movies.

The fleeting moments of dry wit are too sparse to hold the movie together, so instead McAbee takes the kitchen-sink approach, hitting us with whatever he's got.

Marsh's flat-footed recitation of Believe It or Not crimes grows tedious, and his condescension to present-day citizens of the town (implying they're as grotesque and doomed as ever) rings false.

This movie is every bit the mess its title makes it sound.

Lurie's politics aside, it's astonishing that a man who once reviewed films keeps churning out movies full of cinema's most hollow clichés; indeed, he turns out stuff that's even more disjointed and improbable than the most mediocre fare.

Too bad very few of these high jinks are actually funny -- the outtakes at the end of the film suggest a more relaxed ensemble vibe that the film proper was unable to retain.

If you have any desire to see this movie, you really should go rent "The Longest Yard" instead. It's available on DVD, and the '70s hairdos alone are worth the rental price.

Every plot point is obvious a mile away to anyone who's ever seen a film, and made even more obvious by the fact that the camera blatantly points out clues shortly before they're put to use.

An amusing trifle. There are few comic staples less convincing or more timeworn than charming lunatics in love, and the only thing that lifts this film beyond TV-movie quality is Jones' performance.

Marshall is the very definition of a hack; his one and only desire is to play to the lowest common denominator. This is the secret of his success: He aspires to mediocrity. With Runaway Bride, he has scored another bull's-eye.

What it offers at its shockingly sappy core is a familiar view of adolescent rebellion as a goofy but inevitable phase.

Anyone who expects a little drama with their screen sex will have to go elsewhere.

The film is overwrought, slow, and portentous, with confusing surreal elements and a narrative time scheme that's impossible to keep track of.

Who wants to pay to see a movie so bad the actors and writer-director feel the need to keep reminding us of how bad it is?

Mostly this happy train wreck feels like a longer, better movie that was chopped up and reassembled by retarded monkeys; what should have been a rush instead feels rushed.

Its most redeeming quality is that it's so inoffensive parents can feel OK about taking kids.

OK, so you can't afford women who'll bare flesh for what you're paying. Then don't make an exploitation film!

This pallid little ditty, like the rest of Lance Bass and pals' oeuvre, is soulless, banal and derivative.

There's little evidence to suggest Schneebaum was one of the great explorers of the 20th century, or even that he was particularly curious.

Obnoxious, transparent cornball comedy.

The film was cut down from an R rating to get a PG-13, but even if it had full-on Eliza Dushku nudity -- and it doesn't have anything close -- Soul Survivors would still suck.

With virtually no interesting elements for an audience to focus on, Chelsea Walls is a triple-espresso endurance challenge.

There is something distinctly self-satisfied about Amy's Orgasm that rubs the viewer the wrong way. The film should come with a warning label: Vanity project ahead!

When emotion is called for, Cassavetes drags out every tear-jerking moment beyond the point of tolerability.

Say what you want about Hollywood losing its way in recent years, there's something beautiful about moviemakers who paint themselves into corners this tight.

With a movie like this, there's no risk of spoiling the ending, because the entire plot is merely a formality trudging toward a foregone conclusion. The viewer's biggest challenge is to survive fits of yawning so violent they could disrupt ornithic migratory patterns.

Nearly every attempt at humor in this witless, completely reprehensible "movie" is mean-spirited and stupidly conceived at the expense of some group that deserves better.

This limp gender-bender-baller from a first-time director and rookie screenwriter steals wholesale from that 1982's "Tootsie," forgetting only to retain a single laugh.

What it lacks are solid performances, save Slater's game attempt to take everything seriously.

The lack of profanity or even alcohol (when in Mexico, the gang downs shots of hot sauce, not tequila) makes the film suitable for all ages, except for those old enough to want actual content in their movies.

Boll uses a lot of quick cutting and blurry step-printing to goose things up, but dopey dialogue and sometimes inadequate performances kill the effect.

But there is a saving grace: Seemingly aware of how weak the material was, the filmmakers have filled it with wall-to-wall beautiful naked women in every other scene, complete with a little gratuitous lesbian action. It can't save the film, but it'll keep you from dozing off.

Feels like an in-joke, a party where everyone on the screen's having a better time than anyone in the theater, and they all couldn't care less. And that's just no fun at all.

It punishes rather than entertains; it condescends, it offends, it loathes its audience.

If this it supposed to be comedy, why isn't it ever, for one second, funny?

The film feels like what it is: an improvised comedy bit that two friends came up with.

It's a paint-by-numbers job of the worst sort, stuffed with more tired old baseball baloney than Harry Caray and about as dramatic as shagging flies in St. Pete.

A shame, this frenetic mess, as there were loads of reasons to be hopeful.

Loquacious and dreary piece of business.

The predominantly amateur cast is painful to watch, so stilted and unconvincing are the performances. Poor Roth has nobody to play against and flounders in trying to keep the ship upright. Herzog aims for a kind of operatic sweep that he fails to achieve.

There is nothing particularly interesting about either the people or the situations. Barrial might as well have filmed ANY body.