Without the humor, the stereotypes that define these characters aren't satirical; they're just mean-spirited and dull.

Such a catalog of missed opportunities, it probably makes sense just to list them.

What's Your Number? trades in the sort of hard-R crudity that's become standard since "The Hangover," but the added explicitness doesn't make it any less artificial a contraption.

Like the decent B-movie director that he is, Hyams tosses in two gripping car chases and blows up a few more vehicles for good measure. But otherwise, there's little in this pointless rehash to distract audiences from the pleasure of watching Tamblyn.

If what audiences are looking for is a thrill ride, or even a pervasive eeriness, The Happening's just not happening.

We're supposed to be awed, but a more reasonable response is to giggle. How does a Kevlar tie kill? And if it can, why hasn't the CIA sent a Kevlar scarf to Osama bin Laden?

Motherhood doesn't really need a recession to call attention to its flaws. The movie's a perfect dud on its own terms.

When he divides the screen into quadrants for his big finish, the effect is just laughable -- but then by that point, the movie is too.

Playing like a mashup of tropes from far superior small- and large-screen entertainments (Scandal, House of Lies, Ides of March), this clunky feature from Bill Guttentag is satire at its most soft-bellied and toadying.

If Marshall is an unrepentant Tory on some issues -- Valentine's Day stumps for teen abstinence and marrying your best friend, and warns that career women may end up alone -- he is open-hearted and generously conciliatory on gay rights, and he implies quite casually that multi-culti coupling may be the surest way to dispose of racism.

Shot in New Mexico on a limited budget, Boys of Abu Ghraib is a credible depiction of the tedium, frustration and humiliation of wartime service. (Jack gets coated in human excrement not once but twice.) Naturalistic scenes of boxing, bantering and masturbation, set to a rap and hard-rock score, emphasize that these boys are young American everymen.

Connelly, Harris and Amy Madigan, as Tipton's devastated wife, all do their best to bring a measure of soul to Black's creations, but there's something fundamentally synthetic about Virginia, which lays bare its influences without doing much to reanimate them.

If that's the best Hollywood screenwriters can do, maybe they should sign up for a self-help seminar. Nothing focuses the mind like a little firewalking.

The shame of it is, all this ridiculousness might have worked under surer hands. After all, farces are supposed to be a little silly, and the audience, for lack of a better phrase, can be trained to just go with it. The trick? Don't treat us like a bunch of Palmers.

A disastrous father-son endeavor about a calamitous father-son expedition, After Earth doesn't play to the strengths of any of its major participants.

Aside from the giggles induced by the romance-novel bits, the movie's principal hazard is exhaustion. There are too many characters, and too many of them spend too much time morphing into something else. Five more like this? That would be demonic.

Lumbering comedy, adapted by Larry Doyle from his own novel.

The overused homages and a tacked-on twist ending are just failed attempts to save Repo Men from its own shallow blood lust.

With the material they're given, they mostly just seem foolish for showing up to the movie to begin with. Audiences would do well to avoid the same mistake.

Neither innovative nor profound, but it is kinetic, visceral and sometimes moving.

Hard to say what's dumber, the premise or the characters in William Olsson's trashily preposterous An American Affair.

The new Red Dawn's body count is as high as its predecessor's. But the fatalism in all of Milius' projects - even the silliest ones - has weight. That's not the case with the remake, whose portrayal of violence derives more from video games than from history.

Olek never decides what his film should be, and the result takes wild stabs at slasher gore, supernatural horror, black comedy and even social commentary, thanks to a zero-hour attempt to tie things up with a morality tale about the damaging effects of organized religion.

Tedious to watch and torture to listen to.

The effect eventually becomes that of about a dozen story pitches all strung together. Any one of them might have the potential for greatness in isolation. Try to mash them up into one movie, though, and much like Jack, they fall to pieces.

It's a strange sort of film that casts Gallic tough guy Jean Reno as a clean-fingernailed mogul while employing cross-dressing comic Tyler Perry as a guy capable of hand-to-hand combat with someone called The Butcher of Sligo.

Rickman is too theatrical, and too British, to vanish entirely into the person of Hilly Kristal. But he's entertaining to watch, and ultimately one of the more persuasive actors in a movie that suffers from as many odd casting decisions as Lee Daniels' The Butler.

Indeed, despite occasional attempts at plot and character, this is basically a roast with scenery.