Aside from a few well-shaped moments from some of the actors, the editing is about the only thing that keeps your mind occupied in Full Frontal -- and any good editor will tell you that's a problem.

Works if you just give yourself over to its exuberant silliness.

It's a lot like a '70s exploitation movie, with its determination to seduce and shock the viewer with alternating currents of electrical stimulus, and its weird combination of arty arch-decadence and neo-Victorian moralizing.

I'm not sure Mean Machine is any worse than "The Longest Yard," but it lacks the nihilistic '70s background that lent the latter's combination of humor and brutality an air of (arguably bogus) social commentary.

Perfectly acceptable entertainment in the Mouse Factory's most familiar vein.

Seems best suited to all the couch-potato swinging dicks who get off watching the police on "Cops" keep the public safe from people in possession of marijuana.

There's a pleasantly malevolent ridiculousness hovering around How to Lose a Guy. But the movie would have been so much better if it had jumped into its mean-spiritedness with gusto and passion, instead of just splashing around in it halfheartedly.

The Scorpion King, so far from perfect it isn't funny, is nevertheless one of those movies that catches you up in something bigger than yourself, namely, an archetypal desire to enjoy good trash every now and then.

This is a really lively, fun and high-spirited comedy. If you leave after half an hour.

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.

Saying that Raimi’s trip to Oz is adequate eye candy with a good heart isn’t the same thing as saying it’s actually good. I was charmed at some moments, profoundly bored by others and almost never felt genuinely excited or emotionally engaged.

Crass, stupid and crudely made. It's also, in places, weirdly brilliant, a picture that plays to the largest possible audience with mechanical efficiency but also, here and there, betrays glimmers of self-deprecating cleverness, as if it were striving, perhaps even unconsciously, to transcend its own dumbness.

While the whole thing feels weirdly miscalculated to me, A Million Ways to Die in the West tweaks the formula just enough, delivers a few laughs and keeps the guest stars coming.

The penalties for drug trafficking in Thailand are very, very stiff. If there were any justice in the world, the penalties for saddling fine actors with terrible dialogue would be even stiffer.

Amusing, ultra-deadpan entertainment. The director was lucky enough to have a cast who were in on the joke and tuned in to his wavelength.

It's sharply chiseled but not cynical, and that's a delicate line to walk.

"Pearl Harbor" is exactly the kind of prestige project you'd expect from a director like Bay, hitting all its targets with plodding precision and never once achieving surprise.

A disappointingly blunt, monochrome work.

New Moon, on the other hand, merely follows a dictated formula. It's a cheap, shoddy piece of work, one that banks on moviegoers' anticipation without even bothering to craft a satisfying experience for them. Its pandering is an insult.

Thanks largely to its cast, however, it's transmuted into an utterly puerile 90 minutes that fit the brain-dead zeitgeist of Labor Day weekend in a snug and mostly pain-free manner.

The picture never quite finds its footing.

Haneke's new Funny Games has a current of bleak humor that comes through more clearly when you're not reading subtitles. It remains a horrifying, implacable mind-fuck, liable to be widely misunderstood and widely despised.

The air leaks out of Gaudí Afternoon gradually but steadily, until all we're left with is a limp rag of a balloon.

An excruciatingly amateurish production.

Instead of effervescent and mercurial, the movie is simply muddled. Lee has far too much skill to be delivering work that so often degenerates into incoherence.

We’re the Millers has just the right stupid, humane vulgarity for the dog days of August.

It's a dumb, ugly and, most of all, painfully unfunny movie.

For everyone who's been waiting for a love story between an anal retentive and a flake.

Isn't a great work of horror, but it's admirable simply because it serves the genre so serviceably. It's nicely constructed, and it doesn't have one of those ridiculous extended endings.

It hovers somewhere in that never-never land of movies that try to do too much and don't quite live up to any of their ambitions.

By the movie's numbingly predictable end, the notion of a visually unleashed cinema seems like a monstrous mistake -- we've handed over the atom bomb to the Teletubbies!

One of the best American movies of the year and one of the lushest movies in recent memory.

This movie isn’t nearly as terrible as I was expecting, largely due to Snyder’s OCD-level attention to the visual details. And, yes, due to Wonder Woman (played by Israeli actress Gal Gadot), who brings in a badly needed dose of “Dragon Tattoo”-style female energy.

Frequently irritating and occasionally insulting.

Isn't really a movie but a blatant girls' night out vehicle.

The real mystery at the heart of M. Night Shyamalan's latest: How does he persuade actors like Sigourney Weaver and Adrien Brody to act in his supremely lame movies?

So clumsy and crass that it makes you doubt the pleasure of the first movie.

Don't ask for much, and your expectations will be met. Why invest anything as extraneous or irrelevant as "thought" into such a transaction?

If it arrives in final form as (still) a total mess, it's such a passionate and ambitious mess -- overcrowded with extraordinary images, incomprehensible ideas, literary and pop-cultural references and colliding subplots -- that it transcends its adolescent awkwardness and approaches being magnificent.

It's mostly terrible. The movie has no sparkle, no charm, nothing to sweep us off our feet.

It's a generically enjoyable action film with a bit of hardboiled based-on-a-true-story-ness about it, and since it's set in the '80s and feels like an '80s movie, it seems a lot like something you must have seen years ago.

Enough flickers of Jay Ward's gloriously subversive sensibility to make it watchable, but it also has enough lengthy stretches of pure triteness to make it easy to skip altogether.

An engrossing, gem-hard little popcorn-cruncher.

If only Malibu's Most Wanted had been a little more daring, it might have managed to satirize the playacting ludicrousness of gangsta style.

LaBeouf shambles through the movie with an endearingly lost quality -- his savoir faire is of the hangdog kind, but it pretty much works. And Monaghan, with that upturned nose and those mischievous eyes, always looks like a woman in search of trouble.

Considered as pure spectacle, San Andreas is gripping and effective.

One of those movies where the small pleasures stack up high enough to dwarf the disappointments.

Her (Taymore) interpretations and interpolations range from brilliant to indifferent to extremely silly; as Taymor surely knows, there's nothing especially revolutionary in asking Helen Mirren to play the central role of Prospera.

If The Animal -- co-written by Schneider and Tom Brady -- never quite gets fired up, at least it chugs along efficiently on its mildly inspired ridiculousness.

The entire movie looks as if it were processed in the toilet of a Tijuana jail cell. Shot by Dariusz Wolski in colors that are bleached out, over bright and flat, The Mexican is the ugliest-looking major studio release in recent memory.

As an ode to fatherhood, Jersey Girl is sweet without being particularly deep; but Smith is really onto something when he nudges against the ways in which the geographic landscape of a life merges with the genetic one.

While 9 Songs is sexually explicit in the basic sense, its DIRECTNESS is what's most fascinating, and ultimately most moving, about it.

A well-acted little thriller of the sort sometimes called a "twisty" -- I wouldn't call it a great movie, but it'll keep you guessing about its characters and it has an intriguing mean streak.

MacGruber dutifully rehearses the genre's standbys -- so dutifully, at times, that the joke disappears altogether.

Of all the characters in American Pie 2, male or female, Michelle is the only one who feels completely rounded and whole. She moves with unerring grace and subtlety through this feeble minefield of a movie, unharmed by the tepid jokes that flop and fizzle around her.

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

Anything Else isn't just the latest Woody Allen movie; it's also the smallest. His pictures seem to be getting tinier and tinier, and after you've seen them they leave nothing but a tinny echo and a bad taste. Anything Else is misanthropy writ small. Allen is too stingy to be generous even with his contempt.

If you liked “Garden State” — or if you hated it, for that matter — you pretty much know what you’re in for with Wish I Was Here.

Total Recall is a doggone good time, with a bunch of nifty technical and visual flourishes, competently managed plot twists and elegant, Wachowski-esque action choreography that eventually becomes deadening because there's just too much of it and it's dialed up too high.

Deadly dull.

Every scene is coated with Marshall's thumbprints, ultimately connecting into a manhandled, mangled, misshapen whole, its themes written out in thunderously obvious cues.

The ABCs of Death is one-stop shopping for deviant cinema, a Pu Pu platter of perversity. It made me laugh hysterically, shout with outrage, wince with discomfort and yearn to hide under the sofa, all by the halfway mark.

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.

I'm fully prepared to hear people write off Dear John as corny, sappy, a movie for chicks. But I'd counter that Hallström's old-fashioned idealism about art and emotion is the more important quality shining through Dear John.

It's merely nutty, a picture that appears to have been made by an individual who has fallen off the edge of reason. Watching it was misery.

Much of the argument Navarro assembles in Death by China is unassailable as to its basic facts, even if the tone and manner of presentation leave much to be desired.

It's easy to hate movies that are abundantly terrible or immoral or stupid, but I almost feel like a jerk telling you that Fernando Meirelles' globetrotting drama 360 is a mistake from beginning to end.

Freedomland, overall, could have been so much better. But Moore, even in a performance as patchy as this one, is something to watch. She's an echo of the movie that might have been.

It's a good-natured if flimsy comedy that, at the very least, suggests that Murphy hasn't completely lost whatever made him funny in the first place.

Forget the heat of passion: The movie never breaks a sweat.

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

A dreary, humorless affair, with no real feeling for the rhythms of either baseball or love.

It isn't a masterpiece; there are occasional clunkers in Jelski's dialogue (adapted from a play by Wolfgang Bauer) and the acting, although superior to maybe 85 percent of Hollywood movies, is a little uneven.

For sheer ineptitude, crassness and unwatchability, American Wedding takes the cake.

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.

Disjointed and disorganized, and it meanders when it needs to gallop.

It's not much fun, and it's not particularly edifying. Even people who are curious about Holmes (he was better known by his screen name, Johnny Wadd; here, he's played by Val Kilmer) won't find out much about him.

Statham moves with such easy grace that you don't have to work hard to believe him. And if he can stand up to Joan Allen, melting her predatory stare with his own molten gaze, then it's clear he's not just the prettiest guy on the prison block, but also the toughest.

Although Instinct is strictly a Hollywood formula picture, it's such an efficiently executed one, built around two such outstanding actors, that for the most part you won't mind.

Begins as a perfectly reasonable thriller and ends up rather an inane one.

A middling little movie that tries to trespass on Bergman-Renoir territory and simply isn't adroit enough to pull it off, and because in its weaker moments it's overheated and silly.

Mackenzie delivers that story as a blend of sex comedy, dark satire, and morality tale that recalls various aspects of "Shampoo" and "Less Than Zero" and "The Graduate," but has a couple of nifty surprises and a poisonous sting in its tail that's all its own.

An agreeably chewy, pulpy work of old-fashioned crime cinema, a fair bit overcooked and overlong, but worth catching for its acting, its atmosphere and its action set-pieces.

Punishingly dull.

This is a highly enjoyable summer thrill ride with an action heroine who likes to be on top, literally and figuratively.

A perfect storm of a movie disaster: You've got good actors fighting a poorly conceived script, under the guidance of a director who can no longer make the distinction between imaginativeness and computer-generated effects. The result is an expensive-looking mess that fails to capture the mood, and the poetry, of its source material.

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.

The Time Machine is, for the most part, a handsome, pleasant entertainment.

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.

A thoroughly inept piece of moviemaking. You're more likely to find a ham sandwich at a Passover seder than to find a laugh in this picture.

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

Whatever his faults as a filmmaker may be, Cameron would never make an adventure flick that felt this bland and generic.

Home of the Brave isn't exactly a subtle or a delicate picture -- it's an old-fashioned Hollywood movie, at least in tone, that's being released like an indie -- but it has some terrific acting and comes straight from the heart.

So teachers' unions don't care about kids. Oh, and luck is a foxy lady. This is what I took away from the inept and bizarre Won't Back Down, a set of right-wing anti-union talking points disguised (with very limited success) as a mainstream motion-picture-type product.

Alone among the cast, Farrell seems to understand that this movie -- which is lazy and stoned, for all its loud music -- needed somebody to go ape-shit, to pretend to give a crap or at least to have fun.

What makes The Internship especially unfortunate is that there are pieces of a better, funnier movie lying around here, pretty much unnoticed.

Lazer Team is a pastiche based on a beloved pattern; it understands its own limitations but seeks to maximize its potential. All the characters are presented with immense affection and offered the chance to grow and develop, by which I mean to be gifted with inexplicable superpowers, to be repeatedly struck in the groin area by projectiles and to be mocked by others for their moments of vulnerability.

The kind of little indie you'll either hate or find impossible to resist. I fall into the latter camp, but can appreciate opposing views.