To be fair, Sandler deserves some credit for bringing us the first mainstream movie about Chanukah. Too bad it's completely idioticah.

The martial arts are well represented, the gentler arts -- like, for example, acting -- are not.

There is no reason a film with an agenda can’t also be engaging or thought-provoking. But what we have here is not so much a movie as a blunt Sunday sermon.

Not just unromantic, it's unfunny, too.

You know how sometimes you have to listen to the boring problems of acquaintances you don't really like? And all the while, you're silently wondering if you remembered to pay your rent? Well, writer/director Alan Hruska has very kindly recreated that experience for us all.

Even if he's slumming, Renner gets it best: his dry delivery fully acknowledges the movie's ridiculousness. If you're planning on entering this fractured fairy tale, you'll want to follow his lead.

While Shepard and Tuck earn a few laughs spoofing the celebrity/enabler relationship, the high points come from the game cameos: Ashton Kutcher, Jon Favreau, and Bradley Cooper are drolly entertaining as A-listers who make it perfectly clear that they're doing their buddy a big favor by appearing in his movie.

A dumb thriller starring Dennis Quaid as a weirdo mortician taunted by high school kids into revealing what he did with his wife and her lover years before - and look at the movies it rips off...

The story itself is fairly straightforward, but lands with a thud.

This synthetic comedy is instantly grating.

A guilty pleasure, right up there with "The Water Boy."

Awkwardly plotted drama about a runaway child in Central Park.

Screenwriters look to many sources for inspiration. In the case of Saving Silverman, they looked behind them, and liked what they saw.

Filled with enough clichés to be broken up and sold in pieces as junk material.

Kids will love it.

This will qualify as a spoiler only for those who have never seen a really bad movie before.

Where the first film was a seminal forerunner of early stalker classics like "Halloween," this version feels as stale as old gingerbread.

"If you don't want something," Twelve informs us, "you've got nothing." Well, I wanted to watch a good movie. But Joel Schumacher's shallow teen drama gave me nothing, instead.

An inferior retread of Marshall's equally contrived "Valentine's Day," only dressed up with coats and confetti.

Where Boll's movies were once amusingly atrocious, Postal is so aggressively tasteless and knowingly idiotic, there's just no fun to be had.

A dark comedy that isn't funny and a marriage satire that doesn't break new ground.

Glatzer's self-consciously quirky indie is misguided on every level.

With a plot laden with mistaken identities, voyeurism, marijuana-laced brownies and even a cameo by Vanessa Redgrave playing herself, "Merci" tries too hard to be madcap.

This ludicrously written, buffoonishly acted, irritatingly filmed sword-and-sandals epic hasn't half the sand, sweat or saltiness of other titles in the genre.

What Getaway needed most is enough juice to get to the finish line, narratively speaking. Because while jumping into the car is great, the fun dies fast if there’s nowhere to go.

The one crime a B-movie should never commit is boring its audience. By even these low standards, Shark Night 3D is dead in the water.

A good-natured, gleefully juvenile comedy in the tradition of such classic snowbound fare as 1984's "Hot Dog: The Movie."

The script and the performances are all fine, but it's very slow going.

Benigni clearly intends to make some impassioned statements about the futility of war, the power of romance, the enduring strength of optimism. However, the once-appealing innocence of his exuberant persona has become curdled over time.

It's not just the sexist humor that makes this tired businessman's fantasy so offensive. The real shocker is that the basic plot has been shamelessly lifted by screenwriters Charlie Peters and Larry Gelbart from "One Wild Moment," an equally skimpy French comedy by Claude Berri about two middle-aged pals who get into the exact same predicament in the South of France with their two nubile daughters. [17 Feb 1984, p.5]

When is a holiday stocking more like a smelly gym sock? When it's the malodorous Christmas With the Kranks, a so-called comedy stuffed with bigotry, intolerance and bullying.

The movie is paint-by-numbers with several numbers skipped.

This ill-advised romance from director Andrew Fleming is the sort of indie lark that nearly drowns in its own whimsy. Wade in at your own risk.

Another preachy, overacted message film that owes its out-of-time structure to "21 Grams" and "Babel," except writer-director Charles Oliver uses the idea of restorative justice.

Just because a movie can exist doesn’t mean it should.

She's (Heigl) disastrously miscast as a character beloved by fans of novelist Janet Evanovich.

With an appealing lead in Cameron, and a nicely brisk pace, there's a decent, midlevel Apocalypse movie here. But be aware that you will have to peel away several pages of the Bible to get to it.

The concept itself is bafflingly empty. We’re never given any reason to respect Teddy or his work — which is built on tired, self-help clichés — so we hardly believe in his rapturous fans.

Stanze is to be congratulated on raising the bar for horror avant-garde filmmaking on a shoestring.

Derivative to the point of distraction.

It has incest, sweaty armpits, nipple rings, drool, an amputee, a stroke victim and an engagement ring stuck in a sticky place. And Heather Graham. All that, and it's not very funny.

The movie’s gimmick is having the actors visually superimposed over sets created from actual Civil War photographs. But this collage effect, while striving for truthfulness, comes off like a View-Master version of a tale already told.

Phil Alden Robinson’s overheated dramedy feels disconnected from reality in every emotional way.

Just about every race and creed come off badly in this small-scale thriller.

Having written, co- directed and played the lead in this awkward, ego-driven memoir, Hayata has turned a genuinely compelling life story into an embarrassing vanity production.

Larry offers enough scatological humor to fertilize the wheat fields in the star's home state of Nebraska.

Heavily influenced by Guy Ritchie, director Mo gets most of his comic mileage from a Hasidic Jew and an angry dwarf -- which should tell you everything you need to know.

Ain't exactly the Bahama Mama of all horror pics. [13 November 1998, p. 56]

Points for niche audaciousness, but that’s all.

If you liked "Van Wilder," which starred Ryan Reynolds and Tara Reid, be warned: The only person returning from the cast is the boring Indian kid Taj Mahal Badalandabad (Kal Penn).

This movie has almost nothing redeeming. And it’s flat out gross.

Robert Luketic's bland action comedy focuses on the uninteresting relationship between its two bland main characters, and that's the deadliest thing in sight.

A classic case of good intentions and bad filmmaking.

Made in 1998, the picture sags beneath the leaden weight of its pre-millennial theme.

Certainly a dark spirit is hovering over this inane production. Something has sucked the life out of it.

As generic and forgettable as its title, this half-hearted attempt at a teen comedy feels like a term paper you might buy online: poorly written and cribbed from a million other sources.

It's a movie that should have been called on account of boredom.

The best that can be said about the big-screen Bratz is that they are not nearly as appalling as their toy-shelf twins.

As ineffectual police work and broken feet stack up, the silliness gets out of hand.

Showcased in 3,000 Miles are two of the longest, noisiest, bloodiest and most ludicrous shootouts ever staged.

If you haven't had enough of the Central Park rampage videos showing human nature at its worst, you could always pay to see Boricua's Bond.

It's strictly amateur hour.

John Peaslee's Screenwriting 101-style script has merely left everyone floating on their own.

The movie is played fast but lacks wit. The script, written by Kristin Gore — daughter of Al, and author of the book on which it’s based — mistakes frantic for funny.

If freshman film students were assigned to make a movie on race relations, this contrived attempt is probably what they'd come up with.

Irritating and clichéd.

Ellis' stamp is immediately apparent, from the absurdly vapid characters to the undercurrent of barely repressed anger.

Everything that goes around comes around, but the roundelay in 30 Beats comes off, well, a little square.

A failed experiment in magical realism that makes you wonder where the magic went.

With a bit less grisliness, it could have been a mystery dinner-theater performance.

This year's installment is as disappointing as a Halloween bag filled with nothing but raisins.

Stein's schlumpy presence is disarming, though his know-it-all nature is at odds with his free-speech posing.

What the filmmakers missed in assuming the mask from the earlier film is that it was Carrey's astonishing physical comedy that made that film a hit, not the animation.

Unfortunately, its positive attributes are thrown out of balance by its abundant negatives - including chintzy effects, lumbering storytelling and an overstylized, earnest incompetence that evokes "Speed Racer."

Talk about waste products; think of the time, effort and money that went into this movie.

A teen comedy so stupid that a long nose -- perhaps with a red bulb on it -- actually would have helped.

The writing, directing and acting are all so sketchy, it's a mystery that Kattan didn't just try out this material the way he should have -- in a three-minute sketch.

It's nonsense. Even when its big secret is revealed in the final moments, it adds up to nothing more than a dizzy, dark, hysterical waste of time.

What starts as a creepy, original conceit — mysterious Caesarean-section abductions during hospital stays — devolves quickly into standard talk-to-the-camera, jump-at-the-sounds, found-footage banality.

Everything to treasure about that magical, slightly malevolent feline of childhood verse is obliterated in the coarse, charmless Dr. Seuss' The Cat in the Hat.

Something of a mess.

A remedial comedy for idiots.

Heartening, and yet, a year after being filmed, unintentionally aggravating.

Travolta, who delivers an impressively enthusiastic performance, seems to have no idea that he's stuck in one of the year's worst movies. The perpetually pained expression on Williams' face, however, suggests he knows otherwise.

There's still time, but for now, Fogler gets my vote for the worst performance of the year.

Here's one for the Sick Voyeurs Club.

You know what you’re going to get, and that is, indeed, what Sandler delivers. It’s juvenile, it’s obvious and it’s crass. But with Sandler at the helm, at least it’s as easy to like as it is to forget.

Suckers for romance likely won’t complain, but this Josh Hartnett time-travel epic is nuts.

Profoundly mediocre supernatural thriller.

Virtually plotless, the movie does its best to be offensive, but not in the service of any particular theme. The use of mentally impaired youngsters as actors is cheap and exploitative. You can only wonder about the emperor's new clothes, and how much Hollywood paid for them. [17 Oct. 1997, p.52]

The movie's really about the impressions of the original performances by newcomers Eric Christian Olsen and Derek Richardson. Olsen does an uncanny Carrey, and Richardson vaguely resembles Daniels.

The Prince isn't just awful, it's depressing.

As for Jackson, he strolls through the nonsensical story so casually, one suspects his mind is on other things — like what he’ll do with his paycheck. He has probably already moved on. We’ll happily do the same.

Unpleasantly icy film based on a true story.

To pay for all the explosions and stunt work, the filmmakers must have decided to skimp on the screenplay. The rule of thumb is that one page of script equals one minute of movie, but there is so little dialogue in Ballistic that it could have been written on a matchbook.

If you only want a sequence of slashings, impalements and head-squishings, you'll get your money's worth. But if you like a little movie with your mayhem, you're out of luck.

Ben Affleck's goose is cooked with Surviving Christmas, a movie that makes "Gigli" look like one of the crowning moments in his career.

Phelan makes nice use of the New York locations, but all the trees in Central Park can't make up for a clichéd script and characters who speak entirely in platitudes.