Argentine writer-director Juan Solanas’ fantasy romance Upside Down is such a gorgeous wreck that I could almost sense Terry Gilliam somewhere muttering, “Wait a minute, I should have been the one to screw up this idea.”

Here the characters aren't compelling enough to ask viewers to give their brains a workout to determine exactly what's going on.

The acting, camera work and writing are all crude and amateurish, even by the standards of student films.

Is the Crystal Lake PD really doing such a good job? You'd have to go back to Phnom Penh in 1975 to find a place with a higher per-capita rate of unprosecuted homicides.

Just Before I Go is a “Garden State” retread in which filthy jokes gradually cede ground to sentimental slush.

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

Predictable and uninspired romantic drama fizzles like a wet squib.

This film should be reliably filling as pizza for dinner. But the deliveryman is an hour late and has dropped the box.

UH-UH. Non. Nein. Negative. Sept. 11 is not to be used as the setup for a cheesy disaster prophecy flick.

Kalem's grasp of dramatic storytelling is no firmer, and the disorderly film merely chases its tail for the second half, going nowhere fast.

A great writer deserves a more penetrating and inquisitive documentary: Reverence is not the path to understanding.

At best a sporadically amusing sketchbook of theater types.

It's very sad to watch Keaton here. In the most excruciating scene, she gets drunk in a bar, staggers up to a microphone and starts to sing, or rather squawk. For those of us who still revere Annie Hall and her blissfully unaffected rendition of "Seems Like Old Times," this is sacrilege.

What follows is a jumble of cop- and heist-movie clichés, dotted with appearances by actors you liked in something else.

It sounds like it was written by the star pupils at the Cameron Academy of Screenwriting.

Colin Firth plays a real-life investigator whom the script renders as noble as Atticus Finch. Reese Witherspoon does haunting work as a victim’s mom. But the stately pace and the faultless art direction add to the impression that truth was not only stranger, but more dramatic.

Sort of "West Side Story" set in 1958 Brooklyn -- minus the music or competent storytelling -- is clearly not dealing from anything close to a full deck.

One of those thriller-comedy combos that never get the balance quite right.

An uninspired recycling of themes that were far more gripping in "The Lion King" and countless other earlier Mouse House classics.

F-A-I-L-U-R-E.

Picks up steam when it finally arrives in Cannes just in time to wreak yet more havoc at the big film festival, but getting there is pretty tedious. A little of the wildly mugging Atkinson goes a long way.

Blockers is the latest example of the millennium’s most dispiriting film trend: Stupid drunk people making stupid drunk decisions for two stupid hours.

Solid cast notwithstanding, 10th and Wolf is a generic, direct-to-video-grade gangster movie.

De Palma fools around with split screens and slo-mo, but no amount of cinematic artifice can varnish over the fact that this is simply a bad film.

Satire is merciless; it demands that mocker be superior to mockee.

The plot, however, comes with twists you can spot as far off as a Himalayan peak. The dialogue is heavily expository, and the actors are not up to the task of breathing life into characters meant to symbolize the Spirit of the Afghan People or the Nature of Evil.

Director Jacob Rosenberg makes heavy use of family photos and talking heads, but the person we want most to hear from, Way himself, is largely missing. Go figure.

After Fall, Winter would play better minus at least half an hour of flab.