One of those strained caper movies that's hardly any fun to watch and begins to vaporize from your memory minutes after it ends.

The worst movie of the new millennium.

Jackie Chan is thoroughly wasted in a bad suit and a witless comedy.

Portman and Judd aren't responsible for the mendacious and finally repulsive sentimentality of Where the Heart Is, but by the end their wholesome glow seemed contaminated by it, and that's a shame.

The problem with She Hate Me is that there's no playfulness in Lee's provocations. He doesn't have the style or the naughty joie de vivre that you need to make a sex farce.

Premonition doesn't know when to stop. The picture can't decide between cheap scares or deep thoughts, so it goes for both.

It's clear from the outset that a thriller is going to be big and dumb -- as opposed to tight and smart.

The direction on Johnson Family Vacation is numbingly slack; the synapses between the scenes don't spark effortlessly, as they should, and the whole enterprise feels dragged-down and belabored.

On second thought, maybe just about everyone should stay away from this drearily cheerful little picture that isn't nearly as funny or as heartwarming -- or even as topical, given the economic climate -- as it thinks it is.

Such a blatant imitation of Adrian Lyne's Reaganite thriller that the only thing you can be grateful for is that it's far too clumsy to get people arguing about it or taking it seriously.

Babbit is skilled at creating atmosphere and mood, all of it creepy or sodden, and actresses Elisha Cuthbert and Camilla Belle put their hearts into their roles, which are, unfortunately, encased in a sleazoid TV movie of the week tarted up in art-school clothes.

Shows about a third less craft than its all-too-lame predecessor, and it's only half as funny. If those are figures you can deal with, enter the theater at your own peril.

Sutherland is the only actor in Fool's Gold who isn't trying too hard, perhaps because he doesn't have to. He's the movie's only treasure, hidden in plain sight.

It's strange and stupid and half-compelling and sometimes beautiful.

There's something almost maniacally heroic about packaging the fourth sequel of a superhero action series without resorting to the old standbys of good writing, capable acting or inspired directing.

The surprise of Anatomy of Hell is that Siffredi's character is ultimately more vulnerable than the woman

Penn's portrayal strikes me as equally insensitive. It's the nightmare performance of 2001.

A leaden exercise in what can go wrong when movies attempt to explore mysterious forces with dated special effects and easy symbolism...a soggy mess.

Pretty much three well-staged action sequences strung together with the dumbest imaginable connective tissue.

The groom is a doofus, the bride has genuine screwball talent -- It's too bad that the movie is so disappointing.

With little more than table scraps for a budget, Surf Nazis Must Die features rotten acting, cheesy action and effects, a grainy picture and poor sound. It is, in short, a typical Troma film -- not quite in the same league as "Toxic Avenger," perhaps, but no less a treat for fans.

So genuinely, viciously funny you can't help laughing -- even when you feel really bad about yourself for doing so.

I would rather feed Jesse Helms a rancid peanut butter sandwich, and then have him slowly lick my face off, than sit through House on Haunted Hill again.

Seriously, this is one of the strangest and most painful films in recent memory.

Off the top of my head, I'm guessing that Season of the Witch claims a place in the top five all-time bizarre and pointless homages to art cinema.

Until that final, inevitable kiss, we have to listen to them, and the clatter of their crude, brainless exchanges is unbearable.

For a movie that’s supposedly about delivering weightless, uncomplicated fun, Pixels is an overwhelmingly sad experience.

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.

This well-crafted example just piles imaginary atrocities on top of real ones, and then halfheartedly claim that it means something. Well, it doesn't.

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.

Indeed, this movie's offensive on many levels, but Arabs and Muslims don't get to feel special. It relies on stupid stereotypes because it's a stupid movie that's offensive to virtually everyone.

"Morgans" does bear the distinction of boasting the sourest cast ever assembled outside of a Lars Von Trier production.

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

Stumbles along laboriously, its jokes following one after another in a sloppy, flat-footed walk.

One of those movies that makes you feel as if the national IQ was dropping while you're watching it. It's the return of all the homiletic clichés about an America that never existed.

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.

The movie is terrible, but made with verve and sincerity, all of it pointed in the wrong direction.

There's nothing wrong with Chan's making a silly comedy for kids. But he's got more in him than grinning, nodding and falling down a lot. All he needs is a filmmaker who's ready to let him to make that leap.

A weaselly little thing.

The whole vibe is so shrill and frantic that the truly accomplished actresses, like Bening and Bergen, are left to flounder. The less nuanced ones -- that would be you, Debra Messing -- are, to use the idiom of the movie, as pleasant to watch as a bikini wax is to feel.

There isn't a frame of The Musketeer that's believable even as a Hollywood re-creation of a fantasy world. It's conventionally picturesque, except in the nighttime and interior scenes, which are dark to the point of glaucoma.

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

There's a good chance that it will make you laugh, but even if it doesn't, you have to give Barreto credit for respecting his audience. The movie's jokes have a light, springy touch; if one doesn't tickle you, it sails by quickly to make room for the next one.

When the enchanted crab is the most appealing character in a movie, you know you're in some serious metaphoric hot water.

They kill me, these guys. No, seriously. If they make any more of these movies, they might as well kill me.

Totally unwatchable if it weren't for Ashley Judd.

It's tempting to write off Because I Said So as just another dumb, bad comedy, made yesterday and forgotten tomorrow. But no matter how negligible this particular picture is, it's time to look a little deeper. If these are the only kinds of roles we can conceive for actresses who have grown into their faces, as Keaton has, it's no wonder so many younger performers are seeking the knife.

Classic Rudolph: a tone of sweet-edged, slightly kooky melancholy, a terrific cast mostly left to its own devices and a few intriguing moments. Not, I'm sorry to say, a movie.

If you're trying to reinvigorate the art of the stylish thriller, the movie you come up with needs to be stylish and it needs to be thrilling. Basic Instinct 2, is neither.

The misanthropic nadir of the director's crash-and-burn career.

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

A charming but silly love letter to a vanished era of urban bohemia?

One could and perhaps should use scare quotes around "intellectual" when it comes to someone who would crank out a piece of campaign-season partisan hackwork this crude and sloppy. (By this standard, James Carville looks like Immanuel Kant.)

There's a vacancy in The Million Dollar Hotel, and it's between Wim Wenders' ears.

[Georgia Rule] is clearly intended to be an uplifting multigenerational drama about abuse, healing and forgiveness. Yet there's something unsavory about the way it uses a character's emotional and psychological scars as a gimmick.

One unbelievably crappy movie.

The movie is flat-footed, and the pacing gives you time to rest between laughs.

No drama, no lyricism, just cornpone. It's too bad, because outlaws are, by their very nature, glamorous movie subjects.

They don't even look as if they're having fun. Their stint as cross-dressers is simply an endurance test for them, and for us.

Takes so many wrong turns it's barely an also-ran. It isn't the next best thing at all. Not even close.

When in Rome may fall flat in places, but at least it hasn't had all the personality manicured out of it.

Takes far too long to get cooking, and it works so hard at NOT being exploitation that it loses sight of its reasons for existing in the first place.

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

Dragonfly wants desperately to be the spiritual heir to "The Sixth Sense," but it's not even as effective a thriller.

You get the feeling that everyone was in a good mood and the margaritas were pouring, but neither Gallo nor anybody else ever found a bottom line for this movie or its characters.

A fourth-rate Hollywood thriller that bungles a lot of thievery from better movies, is entirely bereft of suspense or excitement and features a leading man who absolutely, positively cannot act.

I think you'd have to be comatose or mentally incompetent not to find Enough ludicrous.

Who cares about old guys and young girls? This handsome romantic slop finds other problems.

This one's a pile of crap that won't start.

Even if the actual movie is an awkward, uncinematic mishmash. Waters has at least tried to write a sex comedy that isn't aimed at titty-fixated 17-year-olds, and at its best Sex and Death 101 has a fast, clever rhythm that almost sings.

Stallone returns in a gangster remake that wears itself (and the audience) out trying to be cutting-edge stylish.

Utterly predictable, thoroughly sentimental and -- worse -- not all that funny. It makes your average episode of "Third Rock From the Sun" look like the edgy mutant offspring of John Waters and Ingmar Bergman.

It's both slack and bloated; I've been to Catholic wedding masses that had more zip. I think it clocked in at fewer than 90 minutes, but it seemed to last longer than most marriages do.

Despite all their seamed stockings and Wonder Bras, the Reagan High girls are as far removed from their sexuality as Jawbreaker is from comedy.

How do you screw up a family movie that has a cute bull mastiff, a cute 6-year-old and David Arquette playing a mailman? Apparently by unleashing half a dozen writers to gnaw it to pieces and entrusting the result to a TV director (John Whitesell of "Cosby" and "Roseanne") with little sense of how to tell a story longer than six minutes.

Speed 2 is such an inept piece of direction that it's anybody's guess whether De Bont understands how to convey where two characters are in spatial relation to each other or in relation to the action.

I haven't had a worse time at the movies this summer.

Saw 3-D is in 3-D. Really, really bad 3-D.

Offensive to Hindus. Never mind the Hindus; The Love Guru is offensive to pretty much anyone with a brain.

Neither funny nor honest. The exact opposite of a retreat, it's merely exhausting.

Let's be real clear about this: You've got to be suffering from some major trash-culture brain damage to enjoy a movie like Ready to Rumble.

If explosive defecation is your idea of a laff riot, this picture -- and the Headrillaz soundtrack, by extension -- should be perfect fun.

Basically brings home the bacon for horror fans -- it offers decent special effects and a nice array of those moments where you shriek and jump and nearly pee your pants but it turns out to be Mom or the cat after all.

A comedy of remarriage that makes divorce look like a state of grace.

I was laughing myself sick over Saving Silverman, a sublimely idiotic farce in the "There's Something About Mary" tradition.

Director and co-writer Jonathan Glatzer handles his talented cast well, and the movie is dark, droll and sentimental in roughly the correct proportions. Worth a look.

A winsome, charming and irresistibly romantic picture, and also a profoundly self-involved one that has nothing whatever to do with Iraq or war or much of anything else besides the butterfly-like spirit of Roberto Benigni. But I guess that combination makes it a great holiday selection choice for certain disheveled, liberal family groups. Mine, for instance.

It's hard to discern exactly whom this holiday tripe is for.

It stinks pretty bad, but not so bad you'd go out of your way to avoid it.

The movie is like a well-intentioned designer knockoff that doesn't know when to quit.

A self-indulgent and icky film, but reasonably well made and undeniably addictive.

Almost as degrading as any unmarked video you can buy in the back alleys of Manila, and, in its pseudo-significance and arty pretension, it's a lot less honest. I'm heartily sorry I had to poison an entire evening with it.

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.

It's a movie barely fit for a cretin, much less a King. If you hear a door slam in the theater, you'll know that Elvis has left the building -- in disgust.

This is a movie full of now-you-see-it, now-you-don't plot points.

Pretty much everything in this high-space war yarn has been swiped from other, better movies.

It's a little bit Tolkien, a little bit Lucas, a little bit "Matrix," a little bit "Dune" and rather too much Philip Pullman, all stuck together with some powerfully expensive effects and lots of cute kids doing tai chi.

What makes it so disappointing is that the movie is just another sub-Farrelly-brothers collection of miscellaneous gags.