You can't call W.E. a total disaster; it's too pretty, too nonsensical and finally too insignificant for that.

The high-concept premise of Death taking a long weekend off to mingle with us mortals brings out the worst in filmmakers.

Sells itself as a traditional Hollywood riches-to-rags comedy -- overdressed brat gets taken down a peg, falls in love with a hunky prole, and learns that love is more important than shoes...So why is Hollywood returning the favor by making such dreadful movies for Latino audiences?

Lars von Trier is a mechanic, not an artist. And his movies are meat grinders he feeds his characters through.

You need a pair of huge, hairy ones to make a picture this bad and call it Flawless.

Becoming Jane would have been more honest if it had been called "No Sex in the Country."

Too heavy on applied charm and too flimsy when it comes to plot. The picture has a hapless, meandering quality that's tolerable at first but ultimately becomes maddening, as if it were a cartoon narrative recounted by a distracted 4-year-old.

Van Helsing wears its price tag on its ruffled lamé sleeve. And yet it gives off an aura of what I can only call lavish cheapness.

An extended metaphor for the condition of man, and boy is it extended. In the course of two hours that crawl by like four and a half.

There's no energy, no spark, in Made of Honor. Even its clichés -- including a dashing rescue on horseback -- are trotted out with bland indifference.

Moves along, taking two steps backward into crassness for every clever or just plain sweet moment it offers. Although many of the movie's problems seem to be rooted in the script, Columbus has such a heavy touch that he sabotages nearly every scene.

Had Payne the grace or generosity to present the vulgarity and naiveté and tackiness of these characters as something vital and endearing and delightful, the movie might have been explosively funny.

Sure, sex and drugs can take you to a higher plane. But not if a movie crushes your will to live first.

This extremely stupid movie, with its recycled Batman/Spider-Man-style plot involving a dead father, an evil scientist-tycoon (played by the reliably terrific William Fichtner) and a massive criminal underworld of masked thugs, also features the best action sequence of the summer, bar none. I’m not kidding!

Despite the fact that The Day After Tomorrow is harnessed to the very real threat of global warming, it's still just a big, dumb movie, another Hollywood entertainment that, instead of tweaking and teasing our brains for fun, leaves us feeling thick and stupid.

The biggest disappointment of 27 Dresses is that it inhabits a Harlequin romance New York City, one remarkably short on homosexuals and divorce.

The Myth of Fingerprints is only 90 minutes long, but watching all this tasteful torment, you can't help thinking that if you were watching a Jewish family or an Italian one, the air would be cleared -- and you'd be out of the theater -- a hell of a lot quicker.

Might be entertaining for those who like seeing a terrified teenage girl watch a loved one get beaten to a pulp while she slides into a diabetic coma. For the rest of us it's both stagnant and vaguely unpleasant.

The whole thing seems so perfectly good-natured that you settle in for some harmless, silly fun. But Dukes runs out of gas early on.

Anger Management is so almost-but-not-quite funny that it feels like one colossal gyp.

Reasonably good fun. If you're a 12-year-old boy riding an intense Cherry Pepsi buzz and totally devoted to destroying some brain cells, that is.

Finally, at the risk of seeming provincial, why is it OK that some Canadian has made a movie set in Ireland with no Irish people among the principal cast?

The filmmaker brings the audience to a precipice of discomfort, implying that the discomfort is itself the point.

30 Minutes or Less features about half of a decent idea, which works out OK since it ends up as half a movie.

The picture is so drab and listless that it often feels like punishment, even though Rickman gives a fine performance, one that's heartfelt as well as characteristically elegant (not to mention sexy).

You can't BECOME a character if you want to BE that character: Desperation isn't the same thing as acting. Spacey's mimicry is so precise, it's exhausting.

Best described as not too bad. Much of the time, though, it's pretty terrible.

Will Smith flies like a butterfly, but what director Michael Mann does to the greatest fighter of all time just stings.

The most dispiriting thing about Kiss of the Dragon, is that it's another example of how Western filmmakers fall on their faces when they try to evoke the feel of Hong Kong action films.

There are so many problems with Norbit that when you try to pin one down, another one splooges out elsewhere.

Jonze's ideas, visual and otherwise, spill out in a faux-philosophical ramble that isn't nearly as deep as he thinks it is; at best, it's a scrambled tone poem. Even the look of the picture becomes tiresome after a while -- it starts to seem depressive and shaggy and tired.

A glum, listless affair that springs to life now and then, only to sag back into its saggy, depressive cushion.

The movie is a garage-sale conglomeration of anecdotes and oddballs.

As is generally the case with Hollywood movies that use Asian horror films as their inspiration, the Guard brothers seem to have glanced at the original, borrowed a few images and then made the movie according to some preconceived template of what makes audiences jump -- instead of burrowing into the stuff that haunts our dreams.

Never have a great historical hero's accomplishments seemed so inconsequential, or so damned hard to figure out.

To his credit, Langenegger keeps things relatively simple instead of resorting to lots of fast cutting and fancy camera angles. To his detriment, the picture he has made barely moves at all. This no-style style isn't restraint; it's a kind of indifference to filmmaking.

Too jumbled to become the major pop hit it wants to be. But it's not an entirely bad film despite its lack of coherence. Horror aficionados and other midnight-movie fans shouldn't miss it.

Mamet's trademark artificial, mutual-incomprehension dialogue and con-game plotting are ineptly matched to the action genre (and feel stale in any case), while the jiu-jitsu scenes are so incoherently shot and edited you can't tell if the fight choreography is any good or not.

Both oversimplifies and overcomplicates Moore's and Lloyd's vision, but it never cuts to the bone. It's a movie drawn with big, bold strokes and very little feeling -- a tracing-paper exercise masquerading as a masterpiece.

The plot is so convoluted that missing even five minutes at a stretch won't make any difference in your comprehension of the story.

Robert De Niro and Frances McDormand almost rescue this lifeless, clichéd cop drama! Close isn't good enough!

Bale gives a remarkable performance in a movie I can recommend to no one, because the sight of him is more distressing than any of the allegedly deep themes of the picture.

The doggie in Darling Companion is a big, warm bundle of puppy love; his owners are lost forever in a big chill.

A movie that wants to be "Speed" so badly that it runs roughshod over the essentials, including a decent script.

The most dispiriting thing about Gloria is that it's further evidence that filmmakers just don't know what to do with Sharon Stone.

Amelia is a stunted epic, an ambitious and handsome-looking picture that tells its story in the dullest, most confusing way possible.

Needs much more energy and kinetic flow -- less dolor and more dolomite.

An offshoot of a popular computer game, is really all about inducing visual awe. And for the first few minutes, it does.

An awkward and distinctly unsexy farcical misfire.

What I see in The Avengers, unfortunately, is a diminished film despite its huge scale, and kind of a bore.

Toback's method of presenting the evidence without judgment backfires, finally appearing just as shapeless as the movie's structure.

For the most part "Inception" is a handsome, clever and grindingly self-serious boy-movie, shorn of imagination, libido, spirituality or emotional depth. Nolan establishes a fascinating world, loaded with trapdoors, symbols and hidden secrets, and then squanders the opportunity on an overpriced "Twilight Zone" episode.

Given the debased standards of action cinema these days this might be enough to make The Town a hit. But almost everything else about the movie is badly off balance, starting with Affleck's decision to cast himself as the implacably sexy and good-hearted Doug.

Proceeds at such an amiable pace and features enough creepy-crawly effects that many viewers won't quite notice or care how rickety and second-rate it is.

First Sunday is simply a case of wasting gifted performers on material that feels slapped together and unshaped.

The Hunger Games has some cool moments here and there, and is never entirely dreadful. Lawrence is both radiant and triumphant. They haven't screwed it up badly enough to kill it, although they've tried.

Todd Solondz's newest debacle drips with contempt for his audience, his characters and his critics.

As it is, it's too restrained, too often -- too eager to gallop toward postcard sunsets on the beach when tequila shooters and lap dances are what the moment calls for. You'd think the combination of Diaz, Kutcher and Vegas would be good for at least a little sexy, silly fun. But don't bet on it.

A dispiriting and thoroughly ineffective romantic comedy, with some juicy morsels provided around the edges by a great supporting cast but no heat whatever in the central coupling between Lopez and Aussie TV hunk Alex O'Loughlin.

If Enduring Love doesn't make sense as a thriller, it's equally nonsensical as the parable it wants to be.

A filmmaker's personal connection to the material doesn't necessarily mean that the resulting picture will be any good, and Stop-Loss is so dramatically tedious that it feels remote instead of resonant.

The movie has some sex in it, and yet it's as unsexy as a rusty old olive oil can (minus the olive oil).

Begins as pseudo-realism before descending into weird and mangled wank-job fantasy.

I can admire the professional flexibility that leads Van Sant from slow-motion, half-experimental works like "Paranoid Park" or "Last Days" to an inspirational, Oscar-season package like Milk, but I wish he could split the difference between his two modes more effectively.

What Picture Perfect sells as romance is a junior high school health class morality lecture we all got years ago. And it was a crock then, too.

Too conventional to capture Kaufman's insanity and too haphazard, too shapeless, to recapture Kaufman's energy in any meaningful way.

Somehow Kutcher and Heigl and Tom Selleck and Catherine O'Hara (as her parents) are all fun to watch a fair amount of the time, without the movie they're in being any good at all.

An exercise in edgy tedium, and even though it's only 90 minutes or so, it seems to last longer than an actual transatlantic flight. If you bring an eye mask and a few sleeping pills, you should get through it OK. A magazine or book wouldn't hurt, either. It'll be over before you know it.

Does neither of its leads any favors. But they fill their roles admirably, and then some. Time and again, in a movie that repeatedly threatens mawkishness, you can sense them gently steering away just in the nick of time.

The hit-to-miss gag ratio is atrocious, and we spend most of the movie hanging out with these borderline-agreeable characters, waiting for something to happen.

Boyle's Beach lacks imagination and energy, two things that might have distracted us, at least occasionally, from the material's tepidness.

This one has its technical virtues, but it’s frankly kind of a muddle, and may have been doomed from the outset. I would divide the potential audience for Oldboy into two groups: Those who will be disappointed and those who will be bewildered.

Might have been a lavish, silly entertainment. In places it comes close, but no sheaf of tobacco.

Lost the friskiness and wildness and charm the movie might have had.

Just a bad movie, with more bits of good acting and flashes of director's invention than you get in most bad movies.

The movie is a lumbering load of hokum, but unlike those other recent pop star white elephants -- it's at least watchable.

Everything about it, except the valiantly lifelike Lopez, feels stiff and robotic and mindlessly crowd-pleasing, as if it were a comedy made by a committee instead of a human being.

The Wolfman isn't crazy enough to be fun or multilayered enough to be touching. It's impossible to have any real feeling for this anguished beastie.

The frustrating thing about Catwoman is that Berry does her damnedest to make the character work. Some of her physical moves are astonishing: Her offhanded grace is exceedingly catlike.

iIt sits on the screen in the flattest way imaginable, and the brightest colors in the world can't make up for all that's missing. 8 Women is perfumed kitsch, and it reeks.

Isn't particularly offensive, except in its total mediocrity.

The scenes with Johnson and Wallace, although intrinsically interesting, drag down the drama somewhat, and...every minute we're away from the firecracker atmosphere of rural Alabama detracts from the overall impact.

A wildly uneven and sloppily directed movie, full of clashing tones and undigested bits of superior films.

O'Connor chucks away everything that was interesting or dark or subtle in Warrior and replaces it with a pseudo-individualist, sub-Freudian, Tea Party-friendly fantasy.

The problem with Kate & Leopold is that although this is supposed to be a romantic comedy, the best scenes are the ones in which there's no Ryan.

But in the end conventional sentiment, rather than any actual morality, is all that the script for The Family Man (by David Diamond and David Weissman) has to offer.

What results is a patchy, uncertain motion picture, full of incidents and images but fundamentally unfocused and superficial.

I can't recall ever having seen a single bad Ice Cube performance, and his utter charm even in flimsy material like this only reaffirms his gifts.

A relentlessly gruesome, visually impressive and ultimately not very interesting movie with some pretensions to seriousness.

Elephant is not as bad as the National Rifle Association's decision to hold a pro-gun rally near Columbine High School shortly after the killings. Unlike the NRA, Van Sant doesn't have blood on his hands. But he shares something of its callousness.

The bigger question to ask about 300 is why, for a supposedly rousing tale of heroism, it's so curiously unaffecting.

For a while, at least, this one feels like Iñárritu’s masterpiece, until that familiar too-muchness begins to take over.

It gets much more watchable in the last half-hour.

The Loss of Sexual Innocence is a failure to be sure, but if it's not exactly a brave one, it's one whose foolhardiness deserves at least half a salute.

There's an entertainingly ludicrous movie lurking somewhere inside of the ludicrous, mediocre one this actually is.

Spins toward its glum, dishwater-gray whirlpool of an ending, which doesn't have nearly as much emotional punch as it should. It doesn't leave you feeling spent -- only soaked.

I'd rate Bubble at no better than a C-plus for artistic achievement and a D-minus for audience appeal. In one sense, it accomplishes its goals efficiently by making you feel, in less than 80 minutes, as if you've gotten permanently trapped in the dead-end, trailer-park lives of its working-class characters. I've never been so grateful to get out of a theater, turn my cellphone back on and plug myself into a $4 Starbucks latte.

Singleton's words are no fitting match for his visuals, and his metaphors are so heavy-handed -- they undermine the smart subtlety of the direction.