Sympathizing with Moreau would be difficult in any case. But with Brando in the role, there is the added obstacle of needing to suppress laughter every time he opens his pursed mouth.

Most of the time the audience is two steps ahead of the characters.

I suppose Kusturica can justify the 167-minute length by the historical breadth of the movie, but it simply doesn't sustain one's interest, significant or not.

Demon Knight may be a good career move by director Ernest Dickerson ( "Juice" ), proving that he can work with a reasonably large budget on a genre film. But the picture breaks no ground, and in terms of his own development, it's hardly a step forward.

Here and there, a good idea or scene erupts, as when the antagonists accidentally switch cellular telephones and start taking each other's emergency calls. And Jack keeps his shrink appointment but must speak in code so his daughter won't understand. But these are anomalies and subside just as suddenly as they appear.

Between fights, the film can't even rely on the luxury of Lindo, Isaiah Washington, Russell Wong, Rottweiler rapper DMX or the scary Henry O as Han's father to make it watchable - the dialogue is wreaking more havoc than Li.

Not even his gap-toothed charm and willingness to make fun of his usual take-no-prisoners persona made it easier to swallow the mess of pottage that is Jingle All the Way.

Most of these scenes are long, boring shots of the men aiming their rifles nervously into the mist. Truth may be stranger than fiction, but fiction is more artfully arranged.

The movie is an ill-advised work of egomania by someone who clearly has some talent, but not as much as he seems to think.

Once you've embraced a show for its stupidity, you might as well go all the way and applaud its dullness, triviality and bad taste.

SORRY, SALLY. I didn't like it. I really didn't like it.

No amount of excellent period costuming and brilliant set decoration can substitute for a good story and decent acting.

It has the distinctive look of a Walter Hill picture, but in the end boils down to little more than a Bruce Willis action vehicle.

Spoof both of P.I.s and independent filmmakers is languidly paced and not very funny.

Big swirls of computer-generated dirt, a bickering couple and the dead certainty that the fiancee will leave and the bickerers will get back together. An exciting night out, or what?

Two points save "Lousy 2" from the absolute abyss. One is a couple of imaginative touches in the art design: Cori drives an old Citroen, and a couple of Vespa-like motor scooters are briefly glanced. The other is the performance of Frewer, who played the lead in TV's "Max Headroom." He endows the character with more sardonic humor than we have a right to expect from the junky script by TV-oriented director Farhad Mann.

Hytner uses 360-degree camera turns and strange angle shots to inject this largely lifeless business with some drama. Ryder tries to do the same by nearly working herself into cardiac arrest in several monologues. Day-Lewis is acting so hard you can see his lower teeth, which, by the way are sometimes horribly decayed and other times white enough to blind a dental hygienist...See this movie at the peril of your soul.

Unfortunately, it stars Keanu Reeves and Cameron Diaz, so it has, more than anything else, a sense of ridiculousness.

Brainless thriller.

A loathsome, quite unterrifying and mercifully brief entry in the ongoing series about that homicidal doll, is the best argument I could cite for planned puppethood.

In tackling 1000 A.D., (McTiernan)'s suddenly an unwieldy, clunky filmmaker.

If the idea is to teach us something about the 37th president of the United States, then you would think Stone would resolve to stick to what can be proven about the man's life, or at least indicate when he's speculating. But Stone is the Great Explainer, and facts have an annoying habit of mucking up his explanations.

Despite heroic efforts of four promising young actresses in the starring roles and a nifty premise, the movie is a mess: so incoherently plotted that dramatic tension doesn't have a chance to build.

The title is exactly the sort of juvenile joke the entire movie leans on.

The intention is there, but the needed emotional maturity isn't.

The jokes run hot, cold and tepid.

A hokey summer entertainment that is full of big machinery, satellite dishes du jour, long embarrassing close-ups and gaps in logic through which large UFOs could hurtle. No need to go into that here. Anyone who might enjoy The Arrival would be impatient with logic.

What a cast! What a waste!

Too dumb to realize that the senselessness is viral.

As titillating novelty turns into tired cliche, the dyke-psycho-killer genre may soon burn itself out, but in the meantime, we have the grim Brit art-film variation on the gruesome genre, Butterfly Kiss.

Something in Hutton's wounded puppy look always communicates an untapped intelligence or wasted potential, both of which are perfect for this role.

Chain Reaction is one explosion after another, none of which seem to advance the . . . uh . . . plot. But, of course, in a movie this lead-footed you spend more time wondering what the filmmakers were thinking, or if they were thinking, than about the few plot-like fragments that do present themselves now and then.

Trouble is, it's too close-up.

Stupid.

The boredom of the temporary office workers of the title was nothing compared to the boredom I experienced as this movie dribbled on before my eyes.

Second-banana material.

The Phantom is a spiritless affair likely to vanish quickly from first-run screens.

Miserable as it crawls for two eternal hours toward being "life-affirming."

Just another in a long line of blue-collar-kid-at-prep-school movies, and it may be the worst of the lot. Nothing, absolutely nothing, is original in this movie.

In Total Eclipse, directed by Agnieszka Holland, they fail to persuade us that their versions of the 19th century French poets Arthur Rimbaud and Paul Verlaine were great artists. They just seem like rattle-brained hedonists with superiority complexes. Genius ought to be as alluring as any other well-developed human attribute, like beauty or sexuality. If this is genius, we are in trouble.

A salacious mess of a film written and directed by rapper Ice Cube.

If only it wasn't such bloody nonsense.

Legends of the Fall never makes you think too hard; its woes-of-a-proud-family formula takes a back seat to a self-conscious visual style that strains toward the level of myth.

There are some semi-funny bits, but few are worth repeating and none will make much sense on paper. The only time when the film truly clicks is during a staged concert featuring the veteran Seattle grunge band Mudhoney. Suddenly there are wacky camera angles, wild editing, actual ideas. Despite her low-brow comedy rep, Spheeris still excels at capturing the intensity and drama of live rock music, which she did so well in both editions of "The Decline of Western Civilization."

The best-looking bad movie in years.

DENIS LEARY may be a funny guy when he's standing on stage spraying invective at a live audience, but as a movie star he has a lot to learn.

Has no intention of taking a more sophisticated path to make its point.

Wields its Middle America values and moralistic flogging of idiosyncratic lifestyle choices like a flipped bird.

Hush, which is an absurdly bad mixture of "Rosemary's Baby" and any Bette Davis movie from the 1960s, seems to be a classic case of a grasping mother trying to possess her beloved son.

In order to like Striptease, you have to be a pretty serious Moore fan because although director Andrew Bergman's script (based on the book by Carl Hiaasen) has a few funny lines, this is otherwise one of the dumbest movies I've ever seen.

A scary example of bad movies happening to good people.

An artificial and hypocritical effort to escape the artistic limitations of teenage slasher flicks.

Moore can't help but be rotten. She has no grace and little nuance, which is why she's always best as a hard-ass in movies.

This is the most-off-the-mark adaptation of a novel since Brian DePalma's what-was-that "Bonfire of the Vanities."

Lacks genuine magic.

It's a movie so foul even the folks at the NAACP Image Awards would have to look the other way.

Offers nothing new, and a lot less. It's a hollow shell of a film, rife with plot twists that go nowhere.

The new version has been speeded up and dumbed down, which does not reflect well on the mouse factory's view of its audience these days.

It's simply terrible.

There are episodes of "Rugrats" with stronger sexual suspense.

Unfortunately, this movie needed an attractive, irresistibly charismatic performer to give us some reason for watching. Madonna is made up to look like Eva, but this is hardly enough to carry the movie.

Particularly because unlike so many other boring movies one sees, Jarmusch films require many more words to explain the boringness than less certifiably artistic films would.

There are enough mullets to win this movie a Stanley Cup.

While the original conception of The Saint gave us a debonair, sophisticated and roguish detective, the new movie, directed stiffly by Phillip Noyce ( "Clear and Present Danger" ), gives us Val Kilmer as a greedy high-tech daredevil thief with the moves of Batman, the clunky disguises of Tom Cruise in "Mission: Impossible" and the morals of an alley cat.

The movie equivalent of the fruitcake you get every year from the folks back home. It's brick-heavy and full of nasty bits you don't want to put in your mouth, lovingly wrapped in pink cellophane.

It should be renamed "Drop Dead Ghetto" and hauled off to the "Jerry Springer" hall of shame.

It took four people to write the screenplay for The Relic. All I can say is that I hope these people have not quit their day jobs.

Imagine if "On the Road" ended with Sal and Dean settling down in the 'burbs. Or if the carnal encounters in Henry Miller's "Sexus" were prefaced with admonitions to the reader not to "objectify" women. The Basketball Diaries is a similar travesty: It turns a celebration of outlaw life into a just-say-no cautionary tale that Nancy Reagan would love.

In stupidity, this movie ranks up there among the greats.

Not much of a plot, but the trouble is that Shana Larsen's script, as directed by Risa Bramon Garcia, isn't very deep. Worse, none of the self-absorbed characters are that likable nor are they funny.

A football epic on performance enhancers that may be more flagrantly flawed, more shockingly predictable and just plain cornier than its rickety predecessors.

Quickly degenerates into a grueling piece of unpleasantness.

Dead Man on Campus, a supposed black comedy produced by MTV, is simply awful.

A particularly egregious array of Kodak moments.

So it's hard to know who gets the blame for Payback. I say we cut Mel some slack and put the hex on Helgeland.

Trash is trash, even if it used to be in French.

A dimwitted, fill-in-the-blanks horror opus that slanders a fine and useful mammal.

The movie is a dismal and misguided special-effects romp featuring two of the deadest performances recorded this year so far.

Unsalvageable B-movie junk.

Things to do in the movie theater until you mercifully die of boredom sums up this witness' response to the ordeal of sitting through this movie.

If there is a reason anyone would voluntarily agree to make this movie it probably dwells somewhere in a realm only accessible to the thinking of ambitious actors.

An amusement park special, screaming from start to finish with no brakes, no plot and no acting to speak of.

An hour into the picture, Spade offers a pretty funny imitation of belter Neil Diamond, but it's a long 60 minutes for such a pitiful payoff.

This is right up there with the dumbest pictures of the year.

Gray is more interested in hobnobbing with thespian greats than he is in making a good movie.

Korine's trying to offer a radical vision of rotten America, but the whole thing feels warmed over.

Flawless is what happens when a filmmaker has no sense of naturalism, no sense of realism and no real natural sense.

The movie is a turgid, swollen, wheezing old contraption, a crashing bore of special effects in which the most exciting moment gives us two ships sitting in water sending cannon balls at each other for what seems like hours on end.

Half-comedy, half-coming-of-age movie with another half or so of sports film and maybe another quarter of soundtrack that adds up to 175 percent of a bad movie.

What we get are quirky characters who are such cartoons that they undermine the effectiveness of the scare scenes (Brad Dourif's turn as the weird doctor is an example) and well-composed camera angles that mean nothing.

A way-below-par golfing comedy.

Maybe there's a real use for Carrie 2 after all. Stand it up against the original, and you have a pretty good lesson in what's happened to the movies in the last couple of decades.

A wildly dull, predictable script whose holes seem to be courtesy of random sniper fire.

My guess is you'll probably have more fun watching a game at the ballpark than you will at The Fan.

Tedious, unfunny.

Ineptly written and shot like a fashion mag, rings hollow throughout. It's a long, long way from "Jules and Jim."

About a moron - oxy and otherwise.

Clooney's stiff cornball delivery and tendency to smile during the most tragic moments bring this as close to the cartoonish Batman television series of the 1960s as any of the movies have come.