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.

You may have surmised that Americans have held the copyright on turning out awful movies about serious musicians (especially musicians with physical or mental afflictions), but along comes the high-gloss weepie.

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.

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

Baumbach is obviously a bright man, but this material is too thin for anything more than a slight New Yorker short story about thoughtful screw-ups.

Quickly degenerates into a grueling piece of unpleasantness.

Trouble is, it's too close-up.

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

Underscores everything that was utterly wrong-headed about the original material.

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.

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?

The best-looking bad movie in years.

It's too cryptic and unfulfilled to serve as a tool for anything beyond its own obfuscation.

Several times during this film, you wish you were a bottle rocket so you could explode out of your seat and leave this tedious mess behind.

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

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.

Schnabel can't decide whether he wants to tell a traditional rise-and-fall morality tale or make an art film. His attempt at telling Basquiat's story straightforwardly collapses under its own banality.

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

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.

The entire film rings totally fake and the resulting dishonest sentimentality makes you fidget in your seat and count the seconds until the sweet but completely predictable ending.

Most of American Psycho just sits there, looking at trouble, rather than looking for it - complacent, overjoyed in fact to exist at all.

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

Most of the movie seems stilted and uncomfortably girdled by efforts to work around the cumbersome Brando, who is shot mostly from above the waist, where the full effects of gravity and avoirdupois do not seem so egregious as they do at belt level.

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.

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.

The movie is a big fumble.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Neeson simply has no spark here. He is good and honest and honorable until your face turns blue. He's just no fun.

What a cast! What a waste!

The jokes run hot, cold and tepid.

Unsalvageable B-movie junk.

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.

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

It just doesn't work.

Unfortunately, the contemporary horror movie has ceased being an individual work full of surprises and fresh manifestations of the Gothic imagination - it has, instead, been reduced to the level of an inflexible, repetitious, ritualistic event.

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

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

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.

Opening with a wearying series of nasty and violent episodes attesting to Bill's predilection for solving problems by shooting at them, and his nearly comic indignation at having his hat touched (men have died at his hand for committing that transgression alone), the movie quickly establishes a pattern of bad decision-making on the part of the writer-director.

And once, just once, I'd love to see a teen flick that doesn't send out a message to young girls that to be acceptable, you have to conform. I liked the artist girl much better before.

Like "Rocky Horror Picture Show," Heavy Metal makes most sense as a midnight weekend feature, when many of its viewers are likely to be herbally and chemically addled. Without the help of intoxicants, Heavy Metal comes across as what it is - a wildly sophomoric and stupid cartoon celebrating gore, rape and bad music.

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

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.

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.

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

I HATE to whine, but if Michael Douglas is half as tired of playing yuppie scum as I am of watching him do it, then he must be napping on a regular basis by now.

Ludicrously written and appallingly directed by ex-film critic Rod Lurie, seems to pride itself on the fact that it never (ever) leaves the greasy-spoon milieu in which the president and his staff are trapped by heavy snowfall.

The sudden cranking of the volume that makes us jump, even if we're just watching a cow chew on its cud.

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.

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.

Even the most vigorous tear-duct manipulation, and a few funny scenes, cannot save Dumbo from its dominant tone of stilted corniness and prefab sentimentality.

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

If only it wasn't such bloody nonsense.

Ideological disaster!

A slick, supercharged popcorn flick of the erstwhile Bruckheimer-Simpson brigade in which the only thing more shameful than the proceedings is a very well-paid male star assigned to make you less aware of that sucking sound.

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.

Grumpier Old Men certainly isn't relying on its mawkish and hokey story to put warm bodies in the seats. There's no reason to see the picture - a sequel to their 1993 hit, “Grumpy Old Men" - other than to relish the talents of these two veterans, plus Sophia Loren, a newcomer to the series.

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.

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.

My question is, why has director Costa-Gavras taken it upon himself to dissect American cultural foibles when he has so clearly proven himself unequipped for the job?

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

As bad movies go, Gregg Araki's Nowhere is right up there with the best of them.

With the exception of a couple of inspired moments, Mary Reilly is merely a curious variation of an often-told story.

A scary example of bad movies happening to good people.

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.

The movie itself simply misses the mark.

Dante's Peak expands the concept of badness in movies.

It's a tale of two missused Academy Award winners trying to justify their participation in a moribund, noisome redux of any disposable prison movie you care to remember by lobbing Oscar clips at each other.

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.

It's also troublesome that Murphy, a generally charismatic actor, is downright dull here. He and Goldblum are curiously flat in their line readings; they don't seem convinced by the story they're asked to act out, and with good reason.

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

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.

I wouldn't say this movie is actually harmful, but skipping it is probably the wisest policy.

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

The plot twist is clever, but it's way too little, too late, and too implausible (whence comes this doggie amnesia?) to redeem this maudlin tale.

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

It is a traffic jam of broken hearts, fluxing racial identities and deplorable outfits that has everything but a salsa overhaul of "I Will Survive."

A complete misfire.

One long offensive treatise on just how vile two human beings can be.

A lot of noise and nothing to justify it.

This movie is bad on a galactic scale.

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.

Muddled futuristic thriller.

It's mesmerizing nonetheless for its flagrant disregard for narrative, character, pacing, performance and good lighting.

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

Stupid.

The closest this movie comes to delivering any titillation are a few open-shirted shots of Grammer that display major chest fur. You know you're bored when you have to devise a comparative body hair study to amuse yourself.

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