The first Hollywood feature from Danish filmmaker Jonas Elmer, New in Town is so choppy that it would seem to have been edited with a pickax.

Cheesy and loads of fun.

Driven is in both its script and its execution a paint-by-numbers affair.

So stupid, so stupefying, so stupendously bad.

An enjoyably cheesy teen melodrama with a touch of indie edge.

In the future, in the past, at all points along the space-time continuum, the Theory of the Teenage Male Mind throws everything out of whack.

It's nothing if not predictable.

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

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

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

No doubt conceived as an underwater version of "National Treasure," Andy Tennant's film plays like a Three Stooges movie with scuba gear.

Seyfried holds the camera's attention, playing this storybook business pretty much straight, although David Leslie Johnson's script puts the actress sorely to the test.

Some projects are just too misguided for the star to mug and shrug his way out of. Consider Rock the Kasbah at the top, or the bottom, of that list.

Filled with embarrassing gosh-golly moments about non-Western cultures, it's a staggering, and insulting, example of cultural myopia.

Lohan is superfluous to the qualities that elevate the film above other Clearasil comedies.

Snow Dogs? "Snow Job" is more like it.

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.

A handsome Holocaust melodrama hobbled by a transparent and cartoonish script.

An unlikable and excruciatingly unfunny comedy.

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.

Begins with a scene of mass repentance, but the real sin here is a profligate waste of talent.

If you strip away all the gunplay, Hitman: Agent 47 would be about 10 minutes long.

There are a few nice scares in The Colony, and the female lead, Rookie Blue's Charlotte Sullivan, looks really, really cute in blond dreadlocks. But she can't save the movie, nor can her impressive costars, Bill Paxton, Kevin Zegers, and Laurence Fishburne.

For all its mayhem, for all the smashing windows and kabooming fireballs, the grenade launchers and giant helicopters, A Good Day to Die Hard not only fails to top its predecessors, it also forgets the basic Die Hard rules.

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.

A smart aleck-y kidnapping caper that whooshes around to a thumping electronic beat.

An odd mix of stiff and sumptuous.

An impossibly enjoyable live-action cartoon that plays on our real-life anxieties about vengeful cadres of foreign radicals blowing up people - and places.

It's too gauzy, and - with its Ron Bass script - too goopy by half.

This mostly vulgar, but never explicit, comedy resolves itself surprisingly, revealing depth just when you think it's going to continue its skip across the shallows. In other words, Just Married might not be good, but it's just good enough.

Highlander: The Final Dimension is exactly what it seems - drivel. [30 Jan 1995, p.D01]

No one is bad in The Big Wedding, but no one is remotely believable, either.

I could make a joke here about the new Pokemon movie.

Happily N'Ever After carjacks "Cinderella" and puts her wicked stepmother behind the wheel.

Speechy and preachy and just a teeny-weeny bit naughty.

Cage appears as a knight of the Crusades, slogging across the continents, slaying infidels and unbelievers and anyone else who gets in his way. There isn't a minute when it looks like he's having fun.

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

Can be described as whatever is the opposite of a Christmas classic.

Teeming with socially awkward misfits, Gentlemen Broncos is not without its absurdist charms, although Hess (who co-scripted with his wife, Jerusha) pushes the envelope in ways it doesn't need pushing.

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

Slapdash, with dialogue and plot points that were cliches in Dickens' era, the pic sends up, then reaffirms, all the values the media sell us each holiday: compassion, forgiveness, tolerance.

A bubble-brained comedy with as much bearing on the real world as a Pokemon cartoon.

Once upon a time there were made-for-television movies. Now there are made-for-television movies for movie theaters. The Perfect Man, another anemic Hilary Duff vehicle, is a case in point.

If Sweet November were a puppy, it would have rabies.

Lame and misguided homage, which reduces satire to vulgar silliness for kids.

However terrific Murray is, if Antonio Banderas, mellifluous voice of Puss-in-Boots in "Shrek 2," went paw to claw with Garfield, Puss would definitely triumph.

Now that Nina has finally arrived in theaters, revealing itself to be a listless, oddly constructed tale that does a poor job of capturing Simone's star quality or indomitable racial pride, it makes you wonder: Was it really worth kicking up all that controversy for a movie that's this bad?

This is not the plot of your typical Ice Cube movie. It does, however, combine the plots of at least three John Hughes movies.

Sex and the City 2 is a champagne cocktail on a runaway train -- fizzy, sparkly, giddy-making, and splashing all over the place.

Here is a movie with everything going for it and nothing working.

This is a star vehicle that stalls.

Never going to be remembered as a tying-the-knot screwball classic (it probably won't be remembered past March), but one could do worse.

If only I liked The Majestic half as much as I liked Carrey in it.

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.

Isn't as jaw-droppingly awful as its trailers suggest.

The plot may be forgettable, but the execution is frantic and funny. The Spy Next Door is a movie that will bring smiles to kids - and their grandparents.

English wrangles her talent like a virtuoso. Best is Murphy Brown herself, Candice Bergen.

This saga of a former soccer star coaching his son's team in order to worm his way back into the heart of his ex-wife aims to be warm and funny. Alas, it is mechanical and exhausting, like a windup toy of a monkey crashing together cymbals for 106 minutes while incrementally winding down.

Director Tim Story's film has two speeds: pedal-to-metal and screeching halt. The former is guaranteed to make the audience carsick, the latter to give it whiplash.

What a stupefying thing it is.

The question is not whether Murphy can do anything. He can. The question is why he would want to make a movie as squirmingly unfunny as Norbit.

Modest, unassuming fare for younger children.

Mike Myers, responsible for the picture's one, or possibly two, laughs.

The million-dollar cast doesn't make the vulgar penny-ante jokes any funnier.

Every time Problem Child gets an interesting edge, it loses it.

It's overstating things to say the stars of Fantastic Four are Miles Teller, Kate Mara, Michael B. Jordan, and Jamie Bell, because I can't remember the last time four actors appeared less invested in a movie for which they've teamed up.

By Twisted's final twist, though, it's all Judd can do to keep a straight face.

An extremely broad and sometimes crude comedy.

Because I Said So might have been sharper if it had focused on the mother/daughter relationship and didn't blunt its story with romantic comedy.

Full of clunky humor, battle-of-the-sexes musings and spicy accordion music, Everybody Wants to Be Italian is relentless - but not necessarily relentless fun.

Wastes an A-list cast in a sorry send-up of B-movie private-eye cliches.

Aloupis is not untalented as writer or helmer. But his first outing is an unsurprising, paint-by-the-numbers picture.

If you're looking for a reason to watch pretty people and cry, then, by all means, head to the theater. But it pales in comparison to other Sparks works, especially when it gets into medical-ethics territory.

The result is a movie that is both laugh-out-loud funny and cringe-worthily silent.

Basic Instinct 2 is supposed to help Stone show it's possible for a woman to be sexy in her late 40s. But it's Rampling - who is 60 - who comes off as the more provocative and alluring. Stone's purring, snarling, bedroom kink is embarrassing.

A mix of "Alice in Wonderland" and William S. Burroughs, "Psycho" and the psychotic. It's pretty much a squirmy experience all around.

Impossibly arty and, at times, narratively incoherent, Filth and Wisdom still has its goofy charms.

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.

Nothing gets taken here except your ticket money.

Obama, it is implied, is deliberately making America more vulnerable to attack from Muslim extremists. No mention is made of the fact that it was under Obama's watch that Osama bin Laden was killed.

Despite all the stock characters and scenarios, Fox and company manage to bring things to life. And cut some hair.

While it misses the mark most of the time, director Hilary Brougher's film has a promising story, an impressive cast, and occasional moments of grace.

Nothing wrong with the syrupy romance Here on Earth that a megadose of insulin couldn't fix.

A stunt that fails.

The American public likes nothing better than a tragedy with a happy ending, William Dean Howells observed. But Marshall so cautiously downplays the tragic elements of his plot that the sweetness and light left a sour taste in my mouth.

It can be broadly funny when it does not lapse into lazy "Dukes of Hazzard" caricature, which is often.

As a western, American Outlaws is an utter failure. As the basis of a "Mad TV" parody, it is an unintentional hoot.

Contrived story lines and an altogether phony resolution erase whatever energy and wit the film displayed, leaving the viewer with an empty, disappointed feeling.

A mostly charmless affair.

An inert comedy starring Kristen Bell as a workaholic unlucky in love, When in Rome is a rom-bomb.

While Stealing Harvard may be a chucklehead comedy, Lee is oddly touching and funny. Mostly because, unlike Green, he's not aggressively trying to make us laugh.

This insipid take on the teens-in-peril formula, with a snake-bit ghoul chasing kids around the bayou, is truly a fangless task.

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.

A syrup-thick New Age ghost story of the same sappy stripe and mawkishness as another Costner foray, "Message in a Bottle."

Director Rob Meltzer, who made the kind-of-amusing meta short "I Am Stamos," directs things in shameless, let's-get-this-thing-over-with style, throwing in some gratuitous topless (female) nudity and allowing the usually amusing Kristen Schaal to let loose with a barrage of potty-mouthisms.

Eye for an Eye's filmmakers have climbed on some high horse of social commentary, pretending this stalk-or-be-stalked suspenser is a meaningful drama about a wayward justice system where the rights of criminals supersede the rights of victims and their families. But what about the rights of moviegoers? We deserve better than this. [12 Jan 1996, p.05]

Guy Ritchie's Revolver premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival two years ago September. That's 26 months on a shelf somewhere, depriving moviegoers the thrill of jaw-droppingly awful Ray Liotta line readings, of bloody shoot-outs, bags of money, cutaways to frosty babes sucking on lollipops, and even a bit of violent anime.

Snappily written and even more snappily directed.