There's too little dog and too much fire house in Firehouse Dog, a mild kid comedy that turns into a flaming arson mystery with some scenes that could be too scary for little ones.

Prasad has a hard time keeping her bulging narrative straight; the twitchy editing, jarring close-ups and bobbing camera only muddle the audience.

Can be summed up by the fact that Ashton Kutcher, making a glorified cameo as a narcissistic model-slash-actor, is the best thing in it.

Fake documentaries annoy me — why not put in the effort and deliver the real thing? — and this one is not only aimless and stiff, it also rings false.

Turn off your frontal lobe, and you just might enjoy it.

It's unfortunate that the people DuBowski profiles tend to be self-indulgent or otherwise unappealing. It's still more unfortunate that the film focuses more on relatively easy issues of acceptance.

The Aggressives has plenty of character but no story; it would have done better to structure itself around a competition it briefly visits in which lesbians, in costume, compete to win prizes for looking masculine. That way the film would have had a direction.

In “Raging Bull” and “The King of Comedy,” Robert De Niro did stand-up comedy badly. In The Comedian he does it badly again — there’s that same air of menace and gracelessness — but this time the movie want us to think he’s brilliant.

The result is like an hour and a half listening to someone bellyache about her landlord.

The real coup de grace for this would-be serious-minded drama is the sledgehammer-subtle direction of Paul Weitz (who is also the screenwriter), who enabled his star's paycheck mugging in the execrable "Little Fockers."

Best watched while doing a crossword or reading the paper.

If you insist on seeing Soul Men, stick around during the closing credits for the best part of the movie, an interview with Mac.

Slick as a pig and reeking of phony sympathy for recession-wracked consumers, The Joneses is a black comedy about stealth marketing made by a filmmaker who's evidently much too close to the subject to bite the hand that feeds him.

Solid performances can't save Melissa Painter's pretentious teen drama Steal Me, which plays like a cross between "Dangerous Skin" (without the gay sex) and "Picnic" (without the production values or credible situations).

A screwball farce that pulls off a pitifully low percentage of its gags, even with a star-crammed cast.

A lot more stupid action - and a lot less heart - than the character-driven original, as Stuart ends up rescuing Margalo from Falcon.

This movie, cynically and patronizingly aimed at Seagal's predominantly "urban" audience, is sad, tedious proof that even violent exploitation isn't what it used to be.

There are more misses than hits among the myriad plot strands that make up the sweaty Spanish sex comedy KM.0.

First-time director Ed Solomon has corralled a stellar cast for his indie drama Levity -- and then put them through paces as plodding as a draft horse's.

Nothing But the Truth is like listening to the fourth-best debater in middle school present a term paper called "Politics, Power and the Media."

Shot through with ’60s London energy, illuminating on several fronts and featuring bits of many great Who tracks, the film is nevertheless a mess that should be taught in film schools to illustrate how not to edit a documentary.

Janet McTeer, Octavia Spencer, Diane Kruger and Jane Fonda brighten the screen momentarily, all in too-small roles.

With thinly drawn characters, uneven performances and tin-eared dialogue, Stonewall plays at best like a musical without the songs.

Sitcomish, stereotypical and sporadically funny romantic comedy.

Mostly an unfunny, rather dull affair.

It's all interspersed with strange attempts at comedy that fail on two levels: They're not funny, and they puncture what little drama there is.

Finish your popcorn early if you’re going to The Green Inferno, and save the bucket to barf in.

Some ideas are auto-stolen (from Coupland's last novel, "JPod"), but those quirky atmospherics aren't enough to sustain a largely plotless film.

Helplessly clichéd, predictable and unaware of its own lameness, it could easily become a camp classic on the order of "Grease 2" and "Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band."

You wouldn't call The Boondock Saints II: All Saints Day a taut thriller. More like a fleshy, messy, jangled frenzy of shootouts and much discussion about the mechanics of romantic entanglements that bloom between prison inmates.

I wanna feel the HEAT … but I don’t. On the contrary, the animatronic new Whitney Houston biopic “I Wanna Dance With Somebody” left me shivering from a gust of arctic air as it so clinically and lazily examines the tragic life of the famous singer.

Skip it, and rent "The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert" instead.

Milks the very real problem of "organ tourism" for all the melodrama and car chases it's worth.

The pretentious and unrelievedly glum first feature from music-video and advertising director Nenad Cicin-Sain, The Time Being looks sharp, but it’s about as dramatically satisfying as watching paint dry.

The effects are cheesy, the photography is murky, the sets look like leftovers from a Las Vegas stage spectacular -- and the flick appears to have been edited with a roulette wheel.

If you’re looking for a poverty-porn fix, Donnybrook ought to hit the spot. If not, you’ll likely find this a pointless exercise in gratuitous violence that imagines itself deep because it’s got an opera-heavy score.

A few magic rocks and tepid battle scenes do little to inspire interest in the goings-on as Malcolm McDowell and Eric Idle spout villainy and punch lines, respectively.

Abysmal performances, limp direction (Will Gould) and a heavy-handed script drive a stake through a semi-interesting idea about the persecution of gay werewolves in a remote English village.

Who let this dog out?

Slow-witted and occasionally unintentionally hilarious.

This excruciating adaptation of the innocuous '70s cartoon show makes the film version of "Josie and the Pussycats" look sophisticated by comparison.

A 2010 movie that could have been made in 1940.

The cinematic equivalent of a paper plate with macaroni and glitter haphazardly glued onto it, Mother’s Day is a film only its creators could love (and even they must be having some misgivings).

Director Andy Fickman (“Paul Blart: Mall Cop 2”) favors poop jokes and the cringe-humor of watching little kids court danger with a nail gun, kerosene, an ax and sometimes literally fire.

Dull yet contrived drama.

None of this is remotely funny or interesting.

Brainless and pointless.

The low point of the new Shall We Dance comes when Miss Paulina finally confesses why she's so sad.

An amateurish, pointless exercise in filmmaking.

The undercaffeinated middle of the film consists of dopey twists, slow-burning gazes and dialogue that aims for “heartfelt” but comes out “unfortunate.”

The dullness of this writing is more than matched by the dull look achieved by director Allen Coulter, who appears to have shot the film through a piece of yard-sale Tupperware.

The transformation of the girls from winsome wisecrackers into whiny bling-obsessed chuckleheads is complete.

At least there is a happy ending — DeChristopher, for wasting the government’s resources, properly served 21 months in federal prison. Now, he has moved on to Harvard Divinity School, where his sanctimony will serve him well.

A lame teen comedy.

There's plenty of material here for a dark comedy, but director Martin Curland isn't up to the job. His film - like Luke - plods along, unsure of exactly what it's supposed to be.

Slow-moving, yawn-inducing remake.

Parental Guidance kicks off with a mean-spirited joke about an overweight woman and heads downhill from there.

The best thing about the Escape Room film series is that it gives audience members clear directions in the title about what they should immediately do: Escape. Room. Get out of that theater and go see Black Widow instead. Run for your lives — and sanity!

Like its subject, a lawsuit that is expected to go on for another 10 years, Crude has no ending. This is the perfect ending for this Goliath versus Goliath documentary about powerful personal-injury lawyers taking on a powerful corporation.

This is an exhausting, eyeball-gougingly ugly 90-minute assault of non-stop action, with an all-star voice cast shouting witless lines and a wide variety of objects lobbed at the audience in the crudest 3-D fashion.

Wal-Mart's home office in Bentonville, Ark., can rest easy: Greenwald, as usual, is hysterically preaching to the choir.

Politics aside, Trudell plays like an infomercial for its subject rather than a serious examination of the man and his beliefs.

The film is only 91 minutes long, but it seemed to stretch out for days.

It’s a scrappy, unpretentious movie, with nicely calibrated pacing, but there’s no logic, little motivation and above all, no personalities.

This reverential documentary, crammed with insidery art-world anecdotes, seems unlikely to convince the average viewer why it was so important that several male artists ventured out of New York at that time to push dirt around with shovels and bulldozers.

A formula flick that should have tapped out in the script stage.

The film is an exposé only of a filmmaker's senseless contempt for the military.

Despite much effort, neither Johnson nor director George Tillman Jr. ("Notorious") can make this preposterous tale, live up to its title.

Though Freddy is basically the same guy as in the 1984 original, his back story is different. For a few minutes the movie threatens to become interesting -- then retreats.

The source material explodes with wit, but this hackneyed screenplay has swapped the crackling repartee for bargain-bin joke book lines delivered at a snail’s pace.

The audience, if any, for Chaos Theory is going to be hit with a little puff of celluloid flatulence. The movie won't linger in the air, but that doesn't make it any less embarrassing.

There's certainly a good movie to be made about Muslim punk musicians in the US, but this isn't it.

For all of its homicidal aliens and toothy beasts, I Am Number Four did contain one element that genuinely unsettled me: the line "produced by Michael Bay." Nooooooo!

What's Vincent to do? Will he come out of the closet? Will he lead the swim team to victory at the big match? Will he find happiness with Noemie? Does anybody care?

One big cliche.

If the once red-hot Vin Diesel's overhyped career wasn't finished off by last summer's mega flop "The Chronicles of Riddick," the alleged family comedy The Pacifier ought to do the trick.

Elaborate vanity production.

I'll grant that the film has many layers. All of them are terrible.

Eckhart’s another matter. He’s adequate, but there is something about his raspy voice and WASPy body language that’s more in tune with being the bad guy at the board meeting than the hero racing through the train station.

Would that somebody had fired Gurwitch before she could have finished Fired!

This mess was directed with no skill whatsoever by Jesse Dylan, whose father, Bob, once urged us all to get stoned.

I don’t mind Diesel and Cena starring in movies like this, because it helps keep them out of other, better movies. But to see folks such as Helen Mirren (doing her weird cockney accent again), Russell and Theron’s talents wasted on such schlock is a shame.

Un-magical, unfunny and un-romantic alleged comedy.

It features well-below-par writing, acting, direction, special effects and music, while oozing a nauseating New Age sentimentality that undermines any tension in the underlying story.

Indulges in some of the crudest Jewish stereotypes seen in a recent movie, right down to the crack about every Jewish girl having a nose job.

Despite solid contributions by vets such as Michael Lerner and Daniel Stern, Caleo isn't able to sell The Last Time - not the affair and especially not the ludicrous twist ending.

The script is obvious and cliched and the action is more disgusting than frightening.

A surprisingly nasty fable about a particularly silly, very English brand of animal-rights extremism.

The stars' utter failure to create sparks is only one of the problems with this Labor Day weekend dump job.

Hot Rod started to go wrong at about the time someone in casting said, "You know what? I'll bet America's just about ready for the comedy stylings of Sissy Spacek."

There's little action in this snail-paced bore, you'll need a high-powered magnifying glass to spot the comedy and the "buddies" have about as much chemistry as a pair of wet socks.

Imagine “Moby-Dick” rewritten in crayon, and you’ll get the idea.

Disliking this film feels churlish, like rooting for the Yankees to crush the Little League champs. But amiability, and the natural affinity most people have for David over Goliath, can't substitute for skill and imagination.

The sort of lowbrow sports comedy best enjoyed on a 50-inch screen with a six-pack, a bucket of wings and a fast-forward button.

Vanessa Redgrave spends Evening dying, and so does Evening.

While that winding, buzzword-filled title sounds like a cheap-o parody of a science-fiction epic, this is about as unfunny and unadventurous a movie as you could possibly imagine.

As might be obvious, I’m not a gamer, so perhaps all of this will be thrilling for fans who’ve played it. The rest of us, I imagine, may come out of this film invigorated with a creed of our own: Avoid movies based on video games.

Marlene Rhein has directed 40 music videos, including ones for Tupac Shakur and Amy Winehouse. Judging by this, her feature debut, she should stick with the music.