This pastiche of sitcomy episodes never gels into a plot.

In the pantheon of James L. Brooks films, “Ella McCay” is far from as good as it gets.

This kids' cartoon from France is such a surreally demented attempt to connect with children that it's the equivalent of foie gras breakfast cereal or a bleu cheese milkshake.

A protracted piece of schmaltz, P.S. I Love You looks like a hand-me-down from Sandra Bullock and Drew Barrymore.

It’s a little less cute these days to watch his Jack Sparrow swish about drunkenly, knowing the actor’s an abusive lush. Equally wearisome is the spectacle of a once-entertaining franchise staggering around, devoid of purpose.

Lumpy, preachy and soporific.

The Queen biopic “Bohemian Rhapsody” had plenty of issues, but the electricity of the re-creation of the Live Aid concert was not one of them. While “Michael” shares the same producer as the Freddie Mercury flick — and a nearly identical performance from Mike Myers as a jokey music exec — it boasts none of the nostalgic thrills.

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.

It strains belief that nuclear weapons couldn't kill off the dragons, but three people with crossbows could.

Which is scarier: a maniac in an orange ski mask wielding a hunting knife - or Jon Bon Jovi as a journalism teacher? Cry_Wolf gives us both, and though Bon Jovi is livin' on a prayer if he thinks he's an actor, the movie is a find.

Stage Fright starts out as a funny musical mashup — “Glee” meets“Friday the 13th” — but winds up indulging slasher-flick clichés instead of spoofing them.

Yet the moral at the end is that we should all be more tolerant of different cultures. Is that really true, though, if the culture you're trying to tolerate is trying to open your skull with a circular saw?

As usual, Hartnett exhibits the acting ability of linoleum; his performance would not be measurably changed if he lapsed into a coma halfway through. Only an amusing cameo by David Bowie enlivens things, but he's onscreen for just about two minutes at the end.

Often less really is more, and that’s why I can recommend Planes, a charmingly modest low-budget spin-off from Pixar’s “Cars’’ that provides more thrills and laughs for young children and their parents than many of its more elaborate brethren.

The two young actors are very engaging, but the chemistry between Pearce and Bonham Carter is less than zero and there's altogether too much heavy-handed, watery symbolism for comfort.

I'm beginning to think writer Nicholas Sparks isn't one person at all, but a roomful of ladies doing Harlequin-romance Mad Libs. Occasionally they'll hit a winning combination, as in the Sparks novel "The Notebook." More often, you get eye-rollers like "The Lucky One."

In The Runner, the latest Nicolas Cage film to roll off his one-man assembly line of shoddy cinema, the star looks almost as tired of acting as I am of watching his acting.

A mildly raunchy comedy that might be more accurately titled "Love: Canadian Style."

An uplifting story to be sure, but director-producer David Swajeski doesn't do it justice.

Yunus would seem to be a prime candidate for a movie about his work. Unfortunately, director Holly Mosher's by-the-numbers documentary Bonsai People isn't the answer.

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.

Not unpleasant, but you've seen it all before.

Painfully sincere. But it wrings almost no laughs or tears from this seemingly idiot-proof premise.

Sweet but not especially original.

You gotta give credit to any first-time direc tor who attempts an homage to classic screwball comedies on a shoestring budget, even if Kettle of Fish ends up not exactly being the catch of the week.

You know a movie's got problems when the most memo rable thing about it is Sienna Miller's mustache.

It’s one of the worst movies I’ve ever seen at Sundance.

A genially silly gay date movie.

A cringeworthy, unfunny example of a culture-clash romantic comedy.

Significantly more gruesome and noisy than its predecessor, and boasting more nasty-looking fluids than all the works of David Fincher combined, this version leaves few corpses unturned in its unstinting campaign to please gorehounds.

Smarter than your average serial-killer movie, thanks to unusually fleshed-out characters inhabited by a high- pedigree cast.

Riddick-ulous.

Director Gaby Dellal gets respectable performances all around, especially from Dekker as the hapless, grief-stricken father, but they can't elevate Angels Crest, beyond its one obvious and depressing note: It is very sad when a small child dies.

The Entourage formula feels warmed-over, played-out, spent.

Flash Point comes loaded with cliches and immediately starts blasting them in every direction.

[JK Simmons] provides a little comic relief, and sums up my feelings on this whole outing: “Goddamn time-travelin’ robots!”

If you don’t think “All About Eve” was a documentary, you’ve never dated an actor. That classic show-business paranoia is the subtext that drives Gemini Man, an action flick with a twist.

When the studio tells us that parental guidance is suggested, does it occur to them that they should have taken their own advice?

There are bachelor and bachelorette parties, as well as much misbehavior, in this glossy and unconvincing little flick, receiving a vanity booking on the way to video.

Panders to its audience by glorifying drug dealing and violence in all-too-depressingly familiar ways.

This is a by-the-numbers rehash that will leave anyone much over 5 enormously grateful that, if you duck out before the lengthy end credits, it lasts just over an hour.

It's basically the longest (a butt-numbing 21/2 hours), the most expensive (a reportedly obscene $150 million), most vulgar and by far the stupidest episode of "Miami Vice" ever.

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

Its images came from a dusty box in the horror-movie attic, and the attic is where the entire picture will be in a month.

I love musicals, but I'd be hard-pressed to recommend this curiosity, sort of a shoestring version of Francis Ford Coppola's "The Cotton Club."

A cautionary tale for the age of reboots, “International” takes over from a perfectly good comedy film series, and turns it into witless, generic space debris. It is the “Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull” of “MiB” — but somehow the aliens here are even worse.

Mostly unfunny, extremely silly pingpong comedy.

A strange Gallic imitation of a Woody Allen comedy, replete with a neurotic older hero.

Don't even think of visiting this French fiasco.

It's hard to say what's more offensive about the out-of- tune Radio - Cuba Gooding Jr. trying to ingratiate himself by mugging up a storm as a mentally challenged man, or the mawkish narrative surrounding him like so much syrup.

What dooms Never Die Alone even as amoral pulp entertainment is the screenplay by neophyte James Gibson, which combines clichéd characters and a contrived plot with stale dialogue.

Burning Annie has funny moments, but it suffers from an overflow of characters.

An overwrought and patently offensive anti- abortion drama from the director of the accomplished "House of Sand and Fog."

The stalker-enabling menace of Facebook is largely abandoned by midpoint, and Brief Reunion won't even prompt most people to change their privacy settings.

It’s endearing how this glorified haunted-house movie tries to reclaim all the old tools, and do so with a straight face and a PG-13 level of violence.

What keeps the movie nervy and kinetic is that, for a good hour, it never seems that Jack and family are anything but average people who somehow manage to survive one hellacious trial after another, even when it comes to having to kill another human being.

The slacker comedy-drama-romance-whatever Gigantic will fulfill all your alterna-movie weirdness requirements.

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.

Confessions of a Shopaholic -- a "Devil Wears Prada" for Chico's customers.

This one resembles a James Bond film about as much as Belgrade resembles London.

First-time director Christopher Neil (a Coppola cousin) scores points for scenery: The treks in the Arizona desert are shot beautifully - as is Duchovny's chiseled, oft-naked bod.

Frears has a lot of fun with the bad tempers and high spirits of this crew of adrenaline junkies, and though the story falls a little flat, the script is sprinkled with dry wit.

The sort of misfire that Hollywood has long buried in January.

This inferior sequel is doomed by a lousy - and extremely vulgar - script.

An amateurish, pointless exercise in filmmaking.

Easier to sit through than the typical, earnest Christian movie.

What the filmmakers do to the splendid Moore is simply criminal.

Doesn't press all its obvious lessons, and there are actually a few surprises -- and even a couple of moving and interesting moments -- before an all too predictable resolution.

A throwback to the kind of '80s action flicks that had titles like "Adrenaline Force," is enlivened by a raft of celebrity cameos, including a blink-and-you'll-miss-it appearance by Gibson.

A kid unversed in other name-brand fantasy movies might go for The Seeker, but in 2007 it's redundant, a puttering Potter without wit and whimsy.

Completed four years ago, Seeking Justice is dutifully directed, with an absolute minimum of thrills, by Roger Donaldson, whose credits include the terrific "No Way Out" (1987)...That film's title is a pretty good description of where Cage's career seems to be headed.

Bad Santa 2 is vulgar, nasty and offensive, but it has flawed aspects also.

Douglas Langway's middling comedy is sort of a "Sex and the City" for big, hirsute gay guys and the younger cubs who fancy them.

Nearly two hours of New Age hooey.

A dull, by-the-numbers psych-ward horror thriller that's sadly a lot closer in quality to "Sucker Punch" than "Shutter Island."

If Think Like a Man Too was a man, he would be the world’s worst date: humorless, shrill, speaking primarily in clichés (“what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas!”) and absolutely terrified of women.

This is the sort of movie that requires you not only to suspend disbelief, but to check your sanity at the ticket counter.

At best a sporadically amusing sketchbook of theater types.

The cinematography and sets look great, but the script is a bummer. It's overlong, overwrought and overblown.

A forgettable — and occasionally borderline offensive — animated tale of turkeys trying to take back Thanksgiving.

I only laughed once, and it was when Whit Stillman made a cameo to be snubbed by the newly self-actualized Imogene. But it was mostly in disbelief; pretentious or not, Stillman represents a caliber of smart writing that’s wholly absent from Girl Most Likely.

Things rapidly go downhill in this pinch-penny production.

Could have been written by a computer programmed to cannibalize previous sci-fi films.

A lark for anyone who's willing to check their brains at the concession stand for 100 minutes.

The good news about I Don't Know How She Does It is that it's so bad that it's another ovary-punch to the formula chick flick. Bring on more films like "Bridesmaids."

Danny Huston looks and sounds like his celebrated father, John, more and more each year, so I enjoyed watching him play a flamboyant and womanizing legendary director not unlike his old man in Bernard Rose’s modest little comedy.

Two decades after his last film, the legendary Jerry Lewis performs a truly unfortunate encore playing an elderly widower in writer-director Daniel Noah’s morose and thoroughly unconvincing drama.

And So It Goes appears to be targeting an audience segment that rarely goes out to the movies — while providing them a cringe-worthy incentive to never do so again.

Nestled inside that warm setup is cloying dialogue, condescending voice work and confusing story tangents.

A film that parents can confidently and with pleasure take their little ones to see - but which is not quite a good movie.

Given the complete lack of chemistry between Chan and Forlani, their rather awkward lip-lock isn't worth $10 to see. Sadly, neither is anything else here.

Heartlessly efficient kidnap thriller.

So off-the-wall that it may well ultimately acquire the cult status of Resnick's earlier Chris Elliot vehicle, "Cabin Boy."

Harmless, if slightly hyperactive, fun.

Occasionally works and has a handful of great moments.

Lame family filler.

Director Gabe Torres lobs a twist you'll likely see coming, and another you may not - neither satisfying enough to justify an hour and a half of Dorff-in-a-box.

Paul Haggis’ Third Person has nothing to say and spends 2 ¹/₂ hours not saying it. Its combination of pretentiousness, vanity and vapidity suggests Alain Resnais directing a triple episode of “Guiding Light.”