A dumb, by-the-numbers children's movie.

A serial-killer flick told like an art lecture, Anamorph manages to be gruesome yet dull.

This movie fails so spectacularly - and on so many levels - that it's like watching a train plummet off a bridge.

Ang Lee's Taking Woodstock achieves an amazing feat: It turns the fabled music festival, a key cultural moment of the late 20th century, into an exceedingly lame, heavily clichéd, thumb-sucking bore.

It's bone tired.

Though Fiennes has done (far) better work, the blurry story seems almost profound when seen through his eyes. To the extent the movie works at all, it works best when it's just the camera and Fiennes in a bleak white room.

None of the actors has the heft to elevate this rote material, though to be fair, the task may be impossible. The dreamy shots of a poisoned sea in Little Birds show an imagination sorely missing from its drab plot and characters.

[Director Kaye's] dedication to the material is admirable, but his tactic of following one dismal development with an even more depressing one comes to seem monotonous and pointless.

Hossein Amini’s script leaves good actors like John Cusack, Ken Watanabe and Chow Yun-Fat flailing.

It isn't as ridiculous as this year's other version of a local best seller set during WWII ("Captain Corelli's Mandolin"), but it's arguably even less entertaining.

Can a series of irritating events make a movie? Yes, but an irritating one: Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day.

Harper and the film's director, Jeremy Kagan, try valiantly, but they are unable to bring Meir to life or hold viewers' attentions.

Under Mark Palansky's uninspired direction, magic eludes Penelope in scene after scene.

Rent "Enchanted" with Adams, and watch Goode as Colin Firth's boyfriend in his other current movie, "A Single Man."

One of those painfully earnest -- and pretentious -- little indies in which a pair of emotional cripples neatly resolve all of their problems within 48 hours of meeting each other.

Relentlessly mediocre cartoon.

The scenes are either too heavy (the climax is the downer of the year), too sedate or too gross.

For all its promise to be a wry commentary on the savagery of office politics, The Belko Experiment is more like an experiment in how many cracked-open skulls can be crammed into one movie.

For starters, it wasn't a great idea to basically borrow the premise of "The Blues Brothers'' and turn these quintessential Jewish characters (something that's not even hinted at) into the bumbling would-be saviors of the Catholic orphanage where they were raised.

A real crock.

A noisy, amateurish mess that doesn't work on any level - an extended, clich-ridden MTV video set to anachronistic bad music.

This rehash of familiar pacifist arguments offers neither heat nor light. It's "Fahrenheit: Room Temperature."

For a 99 percenter movie, then, Elysium is kind of a head-scratcher. It throws away its best opportunity for drama. It’s as if Han and Leia parked on the Death Star and started asking, “How much is a two-bedroom around here?”

Spits out enough scares and twists to maintain our interest, but the film's psycho-sociological layer is almost as cheesy and unconvincing as its low-rent action scenes.

Misses everything that made the first one eat into your spine like meningitis.

This future looks awfully passé: The stimulus didn't work out. Neither did 1917 Russia.

Do these stylistic and narrative departures constitute a smart shake-up of the old mummy formula, as Cronin’s movie promises to do? Eh, not really. The director mostly reshapes what a mummy actually is to suit his lackluster whims.

I've seen a lot of rip-offs of "The Truman Show" and a lot of rip-offs of "Scream." I guess I have to give credit to The Cabin in the Woods for ripping off both at once.