Improbable and generally unfunny comedy.

It plods along at a sluggard's pace through a weak premise with crude execution and even cruder characters to arrive at an unearned sentimental ending.

In short, No. 4 is one big snore.

Sacrifices the quietly creepy qualities of the original in favor of ramped-up horror film techniques that by now seem distressingly familiar.

Rudd is an underappreciated comic actor, and his line readings are the best thing in the film, but the bland role barely taps his talent. Amid the rest of the cast's one-note posing, his scenes with a parrot have a spontaneity and wit otherwise in short supply.

A soggy, listless affair, this would-be fun-in-the-sun sunken-treasure frivolity starts taking on water from the get-go, thanks to drawn-out exposition and languid pacing.

What is puzzling is the incompatibility of the two leads with their roles. Raven is supposed to be a high school senior on a road trip to check out prospective universities. But she acts like a adolescent on a sugar high during a weekend sleepover.

Even if the movie takes you to some dark places you would rather not visit, at least you will remember the actors who navigate the tortured journey.

Genuine scares are few and far between, and the climactic explanation for the ghost's appearances comes as something less than a revelation.

By-the-numbers screen parody fails to resurrect an increasingly tired genre.

Without the gore, this old school slasher rehash is one anemic bore.

Why Hugh Jackman was so excited by Mark Bomback's script to star and produce the film is as big a mystery as why such talents-on-a-roll as Ewan McGregor and Michelle Williams joined the cast.

Despite its intriguing premise, the movie is a disappointing misfire.

The ambitions and intentions of War, Inc., co-written by and starring John Cusack, are laudable, but the film is a nearly complete misfire.

The only thing that can explain middle-aged men acting like 6-year-olds is mental retardation, and there's nothing funny about that. The idea of middle-aged actors playing adolescents isn't much funnier. Put it this way: Such an idea does not make for an inexhaustible source of comedy.

Another among this year's crop of features that demonstrates that having a cast with indie cred can sometimes do little to buoy a film's miscalculated execution.

The best you can say about the movie is that it isn't boring. It's fast-paced, but it isn't really well made.

Every triumph registers low on the emotion meter, and most of the supporting characters are two-dimensional at best.

This remake of a South Korean movie ultimately provides fewer scares than the average aging baby boomer feels every time they look into a reflective surface.

Someone else's vacation photos are never much fun to watch, and this beach party is a drag for onlookers.

The film, absent a sense of place and populated by repellent or weak characters, soon devolves into an increasingly foul litany of events.

A shrill, far-fetched thriller.

For much of the way, the film just feels like it's pressing too hard to make an impression.

Less sex comedy and more Seth comedy would have made for a much livelier excursion.

The sole laughs are scored by Robert Davi, amusingly playing it straight as a Muslim terrorist who wants to hire Malone to make a suicide bomber recruitment film.

Simon Pegg is likably smart and obnoxious as the fish-out-of-water Brit in high-gloss Manhattan, but he's swimming upstream in a feature that substitutes slapstick for scathing wit.

The film is a misfire, which you feel more acutely given the talents of those involved, including director Rodrigo Garcia ("Nine Lives," "Things You Can Tell Just by Looking at Her") and rising star Anne Hathaway.

Great comics from Jerry Lewis to Peter Sellers have turned pathetic into comedic. But James never seems to able to get beyond pathetic.

Inkheart goes crazy with fairy tale characters popping in and out, all sorts of fantastical creatures materializing and so many rescues one loses count. Yet the movie fails to involve the key constituent: the audience.

Given how insultingly fanboys are portrayed, even the fan base could be put off.

This war-horror movie basically plays like "Blair Witch" in Afghanistan.

Every move is telegraphed well in advance thanks to desultory writing, routine direction and ample musical cues.

The movie is almost rescued by the wonderful 1930's style songs (written by Reinhardt Wanger and Frank Thomas) that populate its final act.

Wears its righteous indignation and good intentions on its sleeve but its simplistic, heavy handed treatment of a complex issue gives it the weight of a contrived movie of the week melodrama.

A Wink and a Smile tries to tame burlesque, make it something to laugh at -- or worse, something that requires no skill.

The movie clumps through one witless if not wince-evoking sequence after another without the relief of laughter.

The lack of charisma exhibited by leads Jesse Metcalfe and Amber Tamblyn doesn't help matters, and not even the stalwart presence of Michael Douglas fails to provide the proceedings with sufficient gravitas.

Has its moments, especially when lithe, beautiful bodies twirl themselves around the dance floor with appealing athleticism. But as a movie trying to deliver comedy, drama and romance, you might want to sit this one out. It's not terrible, mind you, but it just isn't very good.

There's a serious miscalculation when the lighthearted hijinks suddenly give way to a climactic scene of brutal violence.

A lot of comedic talent founders in this new Harold Ramis comedy that doesn't exactly recall his glory days of "Caddyshack" and "Groundhog Day."

An innocuous -- to the point of blandness -- look at the "hardships" of a recent college grad.

It comes off as an unpleasant, unrealistic morality tale. Loaded with music and pretty bodies, the film has a chance to lasso a young, indiscriminate audience of Kutcher fans.

A dreary dramedy of a road film that starts off ploddingly and proceeds to only grow more so as it crawls along.

There's little to distinguish this from the rest of the entries coming down the horror film assembly line, though the presence of Carrie Fisher as a shotgun-toting housemother who taunts the killer by shouting "Come to mama!" offers some camp value.

Has little to offer besides unrelenting strangeness.

This is the perfect illustration of the banality of most scare movies.

Here, due in large measure to a highly derivative screenplay, the director allows several reckless, unprofessional cops drive the movie into utter nonsense.

The mishmash ends up as a thoroughly unfunny adult cartoon.

Manages the difficult feat of being simultaneously sordid and tedious at the same time and is ultimately surprisingly tame despite its unrated status.

The film ultimately fails to satisfy because of the limitations of both the format and subject.

The romantic comedy, is the weakest of the trio. It stands as something of an interlude, detailing the paranoid obsessions of Cecile and her husband.

This feature glimpse into the Bell Jar is an exercise in drudgery, with nothing particularly insightful or revealing to say about the charter member of the Suicidal Poets Society and the artistic endeavor in which she would make her indelible mark.

There is certainly talent on display here, but their work fails to come together into a coherent entertainment.

Ultimately too sluggish and disjointed to have much cumulative impact.

A bizarre exercise in perversion that will well test even the most jaded art house audiences' appetite for the offbeat.

At roughly the halfway point, the movie turns into a low-budget gangster picture, which sacrifices character and themes to the kind of action mayhem all too commonplace in studio thrillers.

In the depiction of this unlikely journey -- it is supposedly based on a real-life story -- the film awkwardly veers between naturalism and a striving for poetic myth.

Ultimately involves a highly contrived, melodramatic ending that wouldn't have been out of place in a '40s-era film noir.

Although cheap looking and amateurishly acted, Flesh for the Beast, which features a music score by the eccentric guitarist Buckethead, doesn't invite huge critical derision, if only for the palpable enthusiasm of both the cast and filmmaker for their gory shenanigans.

Legally bland.

Has the feel of a home movie of greater interest to its participants than to an audience.

Contributions of the accomplished cast notwithstanding, this period drama takes a few too many spins around the downward spiral, making it hard to believe as well as unpleasant.

Not only doesn't provide any real information, it barely manages to convey why we should care. It represents a true squandering of a potentially fascinating subject.

Ethnic and sexual stereotypes receive equally clumsy treatment in this Canadian comedy.

Unfortunately, Love Object, which uncomfortably totters from psychological suspense to black comedy to pull-out-the-stops horror, never quite lives up to its bizarre premise, and despite its audacious subject matter, it will even have difficulty attaining future cult status.

Unlike such similar efforts as "A Mighty Wind," this would-be satire isn't funny enough to be entertaining, nor is it clever enough to fool us.

Where the first film was something of a teen horror film, the follow-up, again from writer-director Stefan Ruzowitzky, is more of an unintentional comedy.

The story is flimsy, and when the dialogue touches on controversial issues regarding the SAT and its fairness, the slacker tone turns abruptly melodramatic.

Augurs well for dazzling visual work but struggles mightily on the storytelling front.

Starts out as an exuberant romp but soon gets trapped in a holding pattern of dumb sex and toilet jokes.

An unfortunately muddled portrait of a teenage girl going through a moral and spiritual crisis.

Achieves the dubious distinction of featuring a large gallery of nearly all unlikable characters.

The cast, which includes Alfre Woodard and Debra Winger, manages to give thoughtful performances that salvage the film's integrity.

After a while, the extremely limited camera movement and languid pacing take an exacting toll, resulting in a viewing experience that is considerably less than idyllic.

The finely observed moments in Stateside accumulate little emotional power. The promise of something startling and compelling goes unfulfilled, and the arc of the central love story isn't interesting enough to sustain the drama.

A highly awkward blending of gay porn and political satire, this latest effort from cinematic provocateur Bruce LaBruce ("Hustler White," "Skin Flick") is the sort of film John Waters would make if he were more political, less funny and completely willing to shed all aspirations of mainstream respectability.

Ryan and the rest of the cast are forced to slug it out with the kind of trite dialogue that seems to have been lifted straight off of those corporate inspirational posters.

Instantly forgettable.

Ironically, what the comedy lacks is the sly imagination and satirical underpinnings of the best sex comedies from that (Doris Day) era. Instead, exposition is poorly executed, genuine laughs come infrequently and you quickly lose confidence that the filmmakers even understand what their basic joke is.

Unfortunately, it conveys the sense that the machinery has already started to wear down, and the inventiveness to wear thin. To be sure, the film abounds in action. Some new peril besets Luke Skywalker, Han Solo or the Princess Leia almost too regularly every 10 minutes. But there's a kind of desperation about it, a feeling that Lucas and co-writer Lawrence Kasdan are simply trying to figure out what they can do next to amuse the kiddies. The stuff of legend that inspired and elevated the earlier episodes has here been replaced largely by the stuff of comic books.

Noisy and giddy, the film makes a stab at "Moulin Rouge" territory but ends up as a very trite story of boy loses girl, boy finds girl. It is also stridently camp -- not so much roaring '20s as screaming.

It uses numerous hoary techniques -- including tabloid-television-style editing and ominous background music -- that tend to detract from the seriousness of the issues being addressed. Morgan Freeman delivers the portentous narration.

What might have achieved a degree of cult status across the pond when it was aired in 10-minute installments, struggles to pass big-screen scrutiny.

Although not exactly original in its aspirations or execution, the film's engaging performances and occasional funny moments lift it a notch above the pack of similarly themed fare.

The latest example of a distressing wave of undistinguished theatrical versions of Saturday-morning kid shows.

Both the anticipation factor and writer-director Mick Garris' slick adaptation fail to live up to the old hype.

This too-sentimental drama does feature a sterling performance by Giovanna Mezzogiorno as a love-struck housewife dissatisfied with her lot, thus providing the only watchable element of an otherwise disappointing movie.

The filmmakers are clearly most interested in re-creating the murders in a gruesome and repugnant fashion. It's a shame the film is so exploitative, because Howell and especially Turturro deliver chilling, all too convincing performances.

A tone-deaf muddle that shifts moods more often than its lone wolf vigilante rubs out bad guys, clocking in at a punishingly paced two hours and change.

An overly ambitious, overly complex and overly long opus that bites off more than it can chew.

One of those infuriating comedies that practically nudges you in the ribs while you're watching to remind you how cute and funny it is.

The naturalistic style of the film is completely at odds with the hokey melodrama.

Effectively creates a menacing atmosphere within the gleaming white halls of the hospital in which it is set, but its story line and characterizations lack the sufficient originality to lift the film above its many better predecessors.

The problem once again remains an inability to sustain those de rigueur elements of tension and suspense much beyond those first 20 minutes.

Essentially sleepwalks its way through a strictly by-the-numbers premise.

It's an unusual idea but fails -- Sun spends so much time on the mood and atmosphere that he forgets about the story.

An unremarkable romantic comedy that gives short shrift to both romance and comedy.

Earns an A for effort but a much lower grade in the entertainment department.