It would seem that Allen and screenwriters John Quaintance and Jessica Bendinger couldn't decide between making a movie about the summer that 'tweens become teens or "Scenes From a Mal"l for the MTV set.

So achingly empty, it's nearly existential.

If you are unlucky enough to stray into the presence of Bats, I strongly recommend you follow their wise example. Hang from the ceiling and go to sleep.

Like a grade-school version of an Indiana Jones adventure.

Hoffman's turn as the drag queen has its endearing and comically catty moments, but Flawless' utter phoniness subsumes all efforts at honest acting.

Feels like it's been homogenized and Hollywoodized to death.

Laughably predictable and lamentably unfunny, Laws of Attraction practically creaks from the effort exerted by its cast, straining to bring snap and panache to a hackneyed exercise. Sno Ball, anyone?

This low-budget, high-gore sequel can be effectively frightening at times, and just plain boring, too. The suspense builds, the blood gushes, the momentum dissipates. It's an unsatisfying mix.

Painfully cute drama.

To paraphrase one of the few memorable lines in the movie, "Even stink would say this stinks."

Judah Friedlander and Lindsay Lohan are striking, respectively, as a Lennon paparazzo and a fan creeped out by Chapman.

Instead of paying homage to these creepy creatures of bygone Hollywood, Sommers seems to be unwittingly lampooning them. The first few minutes of Van Helsing, shot in black and white, look like outtakes from Mel Brooks' gagfest "Young Frankenstein."

The Best of Me is neither worse than his other films nor particularly better. At 118 minutes, it is, however, one of the longest. Interminably long, dragging out its molasses heart through what seem like three different endings.

Another high school vixen movie, this one with a potty mouth (the vixen) and pretensions of social commentary (the movie), Pretty Persuasion brings to mind a number of other titles, all better.

The film has been directed in a murky, rhythmless fashion by Niels Arden Oplev.

Clare Lewins' dizzyingly disjointed documentary, I Am Ali, has one thing going for it: its subject, boxing immortal Muhammad Ali.

This heavy-handed muddle of a cop thriller is just impossibly bad.

Surrogates, which borrows tone and content freely from "I, Robot," is all windup and no pitch.

One of those what-were-they-thinking projects in which good talent is on very bad display.

Rarely has a film so equally balanced macho and nacho, but Wrath does leave us with a few valuable lessons: a.) fratricide is a nasty business, best left to the Greeks and b) fighting fire with fire may sound good, but it turns out to be a really stupid idea.

Predictable, tired, formulaic, it makes up for its lack of originality with a bigger budget, louder jokes, louder costumes, and louder music.

Duplex's tenant-from-hell scenario is as predictable as it is tedious -- a tinny, unsatisfying throwaway farce.

The film quickly turns unintentionally, and unrelentingly, awkward.

The "Golden Girls" with gats.

It doesn't help any that Wahlberg, looking perpetually dumbstruck, is among the clunkiest line-readers working in movies today.

Anyone with a sizable role in Dodgeball gets mired in the script's dissipated tone. Two of the climactic jokes involve "Happy Days" references. How tenuous is that?

Like moussed hair and inverted-pyramid shoulder pads, this sloppy, sloppy slapstick is an artifact from the 1980s.

There isn't an original frame or line of dialogue in Rage. It's strictly paint by numbers. Or in this case, plasma.

Ice Cube possesses real screen presence, and it's a shame to see him squander his talents here. He and Epps made me laugh in "Next Friday." They made me squirm here.

If Fleming had played everything as a black comedy with a satirical send-up of high school life - like Heathers - he might have had something. But The Craft has no consistency and certainly no art as it drifts into an unprepossessing display of special-effects magic. [03 May 1996, p.08]

The execution is so dumbed-down, so dumbfounding, that sophisticated moviegoers might confuse it for outtakes from "Spy Kids 2" and "XXX."

The film would be a moth-eaten mess without the wisecracking animals. Not that it's funny with them.

Trapped between edgy art flick and exploitation psychothriller, The Quiet manages to be neither, and manages to be pretty awful in the bargain.

An abhorrent cyberthriller starring a compelling Diane Lane.

A casualty of its own clumsy storytelling.

Maybe Waters set out to prove Karl Marx's observation that all great events happen twice, first as tragedy and the second time as farce.

Just call this movie "The Hangover: AARP Strikes Back."

The kind of glossy, Hollywood-forged waste of time that would depress even the most happily lackadaisical retiree.

An embarassingly unfunny, stumblebum adaptation of Toby Young's memoir.

A flat-out cynical attempt to launch a new Lethal Weapon-like franchise.

Another tale of Tinseltown drugs, sex and excess - has transferred itself to the screen with mind-boggling, laugh-inciting horribleness.

The violence is plenty, and pointless.

There is a funny movie to be made from the outrageous egos and excesses of rap music. Death of a Dynasty is not that movie.

As artistic achievements go, Mona Lisa Smile is strictly a paint-by-numbers affair. No shading. Little in the way of perspective. To call it one-dimensional would be an act of charity.

A pointless modern morality play set in various sleazy locales that offer sex, drugs, assorted perversions, bare-knuckle fights, and even Russian roulette where lives are wagered for money.

Awesomely ridiculous thriller.

Really lost in space.

Completely unappealing people.

What Never Die Alone is is a hackneyed tale of vengeance set in the 'hood, teeming with stock characters, slo-mo gunplay, and rampant misogyny.

Overall, the effect is closer to a Monty Python skit or a Village People music vid than a serious film about civil rights.

Identity theft and credit-card fraud never looked as exciting or sexy as in Plastic, a frothy little heist movie from Britain that starts off with great promise, only to devolve midway into an empty derivative shell of a film.

Michael Lembeck directs with the subtlety of a sledgehammer, pounding every joke and cliche until they are flat, flat, flat.

Viewers get very little about Madoff himself. While the film is primarily about Markopolos, it makes little sense without much insight into his nemesis.

A mercifully fleet and lamentably uninteresting adaptation of the DC Comic about a war-weary Confederate soldier.

Mostly, Dinosaur 13 is far too long, slogging along without momentum or suspense. These events would have been better handled in a single installment of Dateline.

Faced with the script's weak humor and feeble stabs at irony, Schwartzman and Stiller turn it way up, setting the dial at "hammy."

The Frighteners approaches the mysteries of near-death and out-of-body experiences with a script that is - even by this summer's prevailing standard of dumbness - out of its mind. [19 July 1996, p.03]

So stupid, so stupefying, so stupendously bad.

Often incomprehensible (a combination of jumpy editing and lots of thick British Isles accents) and hardly ever entertaining - even unintentionally.

The Man on Her Mind, a mirthless, stagy romantic comedy about a pair of New York loners, isn't so much a story as a threadbare concept - a one-liner, really. An old, used-up one at that.

Hollywood's latest entry in that tried-and-true genre, the disaster movie, is . . . well, it's like . . . a totally gnarly roller-coaster ride!

Unrelentingly grim, plodding, and close-to-incoherent adaptation of Tom Rob Smith's best-selling mystery.

13 Ghosts is the type of project that all parties concerned will have to live down for the rest of their lives.

A generic oven-stuffer that wants to be a stocking-stuffer, is a turkey, despite the foil wrapping and some artfully deployed tinsel.

Looking for plausibility in a farce is like looking for a million dollars in a box of breakfast cereal, but elements of real life can make a comedy resonate instead of thud. Little Black Book does the latter.

In the annals of sequeldom, Kick-Ass 2 has to be one of the lamest follow-ups ever.

The film's one realistic performance is that of Dakota Fanning as Lucy, whose child's shame, fear and resourcefulness ground the movie in recognizable behavior. She breathes air into this suffocating enterprise.

Drawing comparisons to "The Wire" may be unfair, but taken on its own, this anemic vehicle for Ice Cube and Tracy Morgan to mug and jive through is just weak, weak stuff.

Laughably bad adaptation of a Guy de Maupassant novel.

Although there are several truly jolting scares, there's also an abundance of hackneyed dialogue and more silly satanic business than you can shake a severed limb at.

Bobby Jones plays out much like a round of golf - slow, old-fashioned, tediously long, and lacking in drama.

Getting Even With Dad desperately panders to the youth it hopes to attract. [17 Jun 1994, p.03]

Screenwriters Nicole Eastman and the "Blonde" team of Karen McCullah Lutz and Kirsten Smith provide dialogue that has the propriety of the locker room.

A movie so dumb it raises serious questions about our place on the evolutionary ladder. [12 Jan 1996, p.12]

The greatest lacrosse movie of the 21st century - and, unless I'm mistaken, the only lacrosse movie of the 21st century.

Evolution devolves to the sight of a colossal alien expelling flatus over Arizona. So that's why this movie stinks. Play that flatulent music, white boy.

A groaningly awful romantic comedy.

It would better to call it Two Actors in Search of a Story.

Alas, this eternally sunny character's mantra, "I don't have a problem, I solve problems," makes for paltry dramatic tension.

Nostalgia for the '80s - big hair, Madonna, cocaine, big hair, Duran Duran, more cocaine - is all well and good. Unless it's practiced with the charmless ineptitude of Take Me Home Tonight.

The sort of generic crime thriller - stick-figure characters, pointless muddle of plot, people entering and exiting SUVs and Lear jets with a sense of urgency - that feels like it could drag on forever, and drag us down into a purgatory of stupefaction with it.

"The Godfather" without Brando, "GoodFellas" without Scorsese, "The Sopranos" without Gandolfini - 10th & Wolf is all that, and less.

Williams, going full throttle as the desperate deposed kiddie icon Rainbow Ralph, is, well, simply exhausting.

Sgt. Bilko, from the late, great Phil Silvers sitcom about an incorrigible con artist scamming the daylights out of the U.S. Army, has been turned into a not-very-funny film vehicle, just as The Flintstones was transformed into a not-very-funny film vehicle, and The Beverly Hillbillies, and Dragnet before them. [29 Mar 1996, p.05]

The aquatic and surf scenes are spectacular. The story, a clichéed climb to inspiration. Soul Surfer is more parable than plot.

Sadly, Annabelle, a cheap, sleazy, low-budget prequel meant to explain the origins of that particular doll, is as undistinguished, uninteresting, and unscary as the worst of the Chucky films.

Anderson gets style points for the pyramid, though. The building - a combination of Aztec, Egyptian and Cambodian elements loaded with sophisticated gadgetry - totally rocks.

Dark and murky, grainy and grim.

Catwoman, which talks about the "duality" inside all women (wild vs. docile, rapacious vs. cuddly), does have its guilty pleasures. Most of these come courtesy of ice queen Stone.

Beastly offers a thoroughly dopey reread of the "Beauty and the Beast" fairy tale.

An overblown hodgepodge of volcano-baked desertscapes, Egyptoid-gone-baroque architecture, and gladiator-geared storm troopers with goofy headpieces, The Chronicles of Riddick bears no resemblance to the movie that spawned its namesake.

What distinguishes The Dilemma in this genre is its resounding unfunnyness, its emotional dishonesty, and the general unlikability of its cast of characters.

Hobbled by a laughably bad script and a uniformly uncharismatic cast.

Never again let it be said that an action movie is just like a video game. Hardcore Henry, a frenetic, dizzying, and ultraviolent actioner from Russian rocker-turned-director Ilya Naishuller is one - a first-person shooter writ large for the big screen.

The overwhelming sci-fi action spectacle is a merciless sensorial assault that leaves you with something akin to post-traumatic stress disorder.

Hiring this sensitive fantasist (Gondry) to make the superhero saga The Green Hornet is like hiring satirist John Waters to make "Rambo." Hard to think of a more mystifying mismatch of filmmaker and material.

On the evidence of Palindromes, the most misanthropic, depressing, hopeless film in memory, I'd hazard that for Solondz, childhood is a problem without a solution.

Scary Movie 2 has something for potheads and the potty-mouthed alike. Anyone looking for a true sequel, however, will be disappointed.