There's not a moment in it that feels fresh or authentic or inspired. But neither is it offensive.

An exercise in cynicism every bit as ugly as the shabby digital photography and muddy sound.

Contains much more prosaic ingredients. Like props and sound effects that could have been borrowed from an off-off-Broadway play, a host of painfully strained performances and a plot that's almost unbearably stupid.

The filmmakers' smug Bay Area bigotry is all too obvious in gratuitous, mocking swipes at Heidi's Southern background.

All the elements are in place for an entertaining murder mystery, but as Bigelow meanders aimlessly back and forth through time, the plot becomes increasingly water-logged.

A yawn-provoking little farm melodrama.

Hollywood's Thanksgiving turkey arrives today - 27 days early - in the gobbling guise of the heavily hyped, brain-dead comedy, I Spy.

It's not surprising to learn that the story -- which the press notes assert is loosely based on fact -- has been kicking around Hollywood for 15 years. It's that bad.

Thanks to Scott's charismatic Roger and Eisenberg's sweet nephew, Roger Dodger is one of the most compelling variations on "In the Company of Men."

Has a promising start. But it quickly becomes tiresome and cliché-ridden - not to mention depressing and pointless.

Does briefly sizzle in the scenes between Newton and French actress Christine Boisson, as the bisexual French police commander assigned to the case.

Some solid performances and pretty scenery don't do much to conceal that there's a whole heap of nothing at the core of this slight coming-of-age/coming-out tale.

The most effective moments in Taymor's gorgeous, surprisingly romantic Frida are those that evoke the visual world from which Kahlo's work was formed or the paintings themselves, often using clever animation and other special effects.

Despite a crafty premise and a clever kink in the tale that almost saves it, Connolly isn't dexterous enough to achieve the Hitchockian level of suspense the movie needs.

Apart from the slightly sanitized look of Reagan-era Harlem, this raw ghetto drama rings true, from the smooth dialogue to the unaffected performances of the central actors.

A big, incoherent bore, interesting only as an example of assembly-line movie-making gone awry.

To call Jackass: The Movie the worst movie of the year is practically a compliment. This plotless, crudely videotaped collection of moronic stunts is a movie in the same sense that those hideous, velvet depictions of Elvis are paintings.

Leigh's uncanny ability to mine emotional truth packs the usual punch. And the trademark flashes of humor sprinkled throughout ease the bleakness of the landscape.

The result puts a human face on Derrida, and makes one of the great minds of our times interesting and accessible to people who normally couldn't care less.

The episodic film makes valid points about the depersonalization of modern life. But the characters tend to be clichés whose lives are never fully explored.

Generally delightful, and reminiscent of two vanished ages: when men were men, and when movies were movies.

A confusing mishmash.

No light leavens the ashen wash of writer-director Tim Blake Nelson's relentlessly downbeat Holocaust drama The Grey Zone. None.

Less of a "You go, girl" manifesto than its title would suggest.

Desperately unfunny and unexciting.

Who needs mind-bending drugs when they can see this.

A stylish but distressingly generic and not particularly scary American remake of a phenomenally popular Japanese supernatural thriller that spawned two sequels and a TV miniseries.

Schrader's strongest movie since "Affliction," is another meditation on American masculinity powerfully told with great wit and style.

Makes a convincing argument that the decades-old Cuban blockade has outlived its usefulness.

A well-intentioned, semi-autobiographical pastiche, is trapped in a straitjacket of political correctness, self-conscious acting and spurts of try-hard dialogue that come off as precious.

Most troubling is just how easy it is to sell nuclear secrets with the help of large corporations and the acquiescence of governments.

Technically competent. What it needs is an original script.

Represents a kind of progress. Where once only a few ultra-talented, lucky black filmmakers got to make big studio movies, now we have standard-issue Hollywood schlock that happens to be made by, about and for African-Americans.

A substandard attempt to outfit a World War II submarine with every haunted-house cliché known to man and filmmakers.

Ambitious, guilt-suffused melodrama crippled by poor casting.

Looks and feels like a bad imitation of "Trainspotting" without any of that film's wit or charm.

Any one episode of "The Sopranos" would send this ill-conceived folly to sleep with the fishes.

Another big, dumb action movie in the vein of "XXX," The Transporter is riddled with plot holes big enough for its titular hero to drive his sleek black BMW through.

Loving but overlong meditation on movies and the people who make them.

Solid family entertainment, a handsomely crafted and well-acted new film version of Natalie Babbitt's classic 1975 children's book.

A not particularly revealing documentary.

A rote exercise in both animation and storytelling.

Not as bad as rumor would have it. It's worse.

Some of the year's most arresting female performances justify White Oleander, a highly episodic melodrama.

Essentially a weird series of nonsequiturs. I'd rather be watching a sequel to the much-maligned "Little Nicky" -- a Sandler film that was at least trying to do something interesting -- than this failed experiment in fusing high and low culture.

Dong, who is gay, does his best to stay objective. Just how these families interact may surprise you.

Probably the most definitive portrait of Johnson that we are likely to get.

Doesn't have the polish of "Ocean's Eleven" - but it does have George Clooney.

Turns out to be an exercise in flatulent pretension, puffed up with a bogus, empty "spirituality" and dependent on a plot filled with implausibilities.

A stinker.

Enough SpongeBob-meets-Monty-Python silliness to give adults a kick as well.

An astonishing re-creation of the Londonderry massacre of January 1972.

It's frightening enough, to be sure, but too often it feels like a well-executed but rote exercise.

Director Francisco de Lombardi fills his sensual film with plenty of gorgeous shots of the lush landscape and its equally exotic, miniskirted "fauna."

Stevens has a keen sense of the absurd, but the whole thing is too forced - and his use of "rotomation" (last used in Richard Linklater's "Waking Life") to give a Timothy Leary-swirl to key dramatic moments winds up looking incongruous.

The spaniel-eyed Jean Reno ("Ronin") infuses Hubert with a mixture of deadpan cool, wry humor and just the measure of tenderness required to give this comic slugfest some heart.

The script is so overstuffed with painfully obvious clues (the constant patina of sweat on the cocky doctor's face, for one) that we don't need the ominous rumbles on the soundtrack to tell us where we're headed.

Has a desolate air, but Eyre, a Native American raised by white parents, manages to infuse the rocky path to sibling reconciliation with flashes of warmth and gentle humor.

Suffers from an air of frosty detachment and a disappointingly stiff performance from Jagger, who also provides an unnecessary voice-over narration.

The documentary is much too conventional -- lots of boring talking heads, etc. -- to do the subject matter justice.

The material in this spy spoof is, pardon the pun, awfully frayed.

This time out, Broomfield comes up with maybe enough halfway decent material for a 10-minute segment on a second-rate tabloid TV show.

It's only when you're leaving the theater that her spell wears off and you realize just how bad the movie, directed by Andy Tennant, really is.

Quirkily likable comedy-drama about a family trying to coping with loss, contains three of the best performances you're likely to see in an American movie this year.

This brisk, British-American co-production is one of the better political/historical documentaries to come out in some time.

The story doesn't break any new ground, but the movie has energy.

A tightly drawn, propulsive thriller with some pleasingly unexpected kinks in the tale and a couple of believable performances from Charlize Theron and Kevin Bacon in the leads.

Director Ferzan Ozpetek's film doesn't break any new ground; rather, it recycles every cliché about gays in what is essentially an extended soap opera.

For the most part, it's both sitcomishly predictable and cloying in its attempts to be poignant.

Splendidly spectacular, intelligent and very well-acted.

In execution, this clever idea is far less funny than the original, "Killers From Space," which was directed by W. Lee Wilder, the vastly less talented brother of the great Billy.

Against all odds, director Steven Shainberg has managed to craft an oddly compassionate -- and often very funny -- tale of an emotionally symbiotic affair.

It's depressing to see how far Herzog has fallen.

Amply demonstrates how even a movie with wall-to-wall action can be a crashing bore.

The result is inept, tedious kitsch that even at its best feels like John Waters minus the joie de vivre.

A Japanese cross between "Alice in Wonderland" and "The Wizard of Oz" -- is such a landmark in animation that labeling it a masterpiece almost seems inadequate.

Enough to give you brain strain -- and the pay-off is negligible.

One of those all-too-rare cases in which a riveting premise is expertly executed.

At 52, Elvira (Cassandra Peterson) still looks a treat and, more important, effortlessly wields her double entendres like a Romanian Mae West.

Despite a contrived ending that brings together all the film's characters, Alias Betty is inventive filmmaking.

It's just another discordant note in this tone-deaf movie -- a trashy, exploitative, thoroughly unpleasant experience.

Juliette Binoche and Benoit Magimel have great chemistry together as the lovers, and the scenes of their lovemaking and frequent battles bring the movie to life. Outside of those moments, however, the film is too stagey, talky - and long - for its own good.

Culkin is superb - he makes you forget that Igby is a spoiled brat who actually deserves the beating he gets.

Combines big laughs, a big heart and thoroughly winning characters to become the first big surprise of the fall season.

If only "reality" TV was as realistic as Quitting.

Stinks even by the standards of late summer movie garbage.

A riveting documentary.

Instructive, cathartic or just too painful? You decide.

A game and often quite funny attempt with an expert cast.

A murky, vaguely fact-based melodrama that quickly sinks into the same swamp as such recent De Niro mistakes as "15 Minutes" and "Showtime."

Think of it as the rantings of a grouchy old man (he's 71) who for half a century has resisted all efforts to dumb down his movies, insisting instead on making them HIS way and no other.

About two-thirds of the way through, a stupid, hyperbolic sensibility takes control of the project, running it screaming off the rails.

Compelling but self-undermining documentary.

Vivid visuals can't save an insipid plot.

A low-rent, slow-witted horror flick notable chiefly for its hilariously unsuccessful attempt to pass off Luxembourg City as New York City.

Pleasing to the eye, with lavish sets, ravishing costumes and two great-looking stars. Unfortunately, there is little else to recommend this overwrought, melodramatic bodice-ripper.

A challenging experimental film that will never play in a commercial movie theater and is settling in for a two-week run at the ever-venturesome Film Forum.

Basically the Mike Tyson saga reduced to its B-movie essence.