Drowns in its own preciousness.

The latest demonstration of the impossibility of making a good movie from a bad script is provided by When in Rome, a romantic comedy approved by the previous regime at Disney.

The single location and emphasis on dialogue gives the film the feeling of filmed theater. Pacing can be slow and it is only at the end that an exciting use of music helps the film reach an artificial climax of sorts.

This earnest but painfully clunky film, though professional in tech respects and seemingly well financed, plays like the work of an ambitious high school history student.

Discerning viewers will recognize The Music of Silence for the tediously sentimental, rote exercise that it is. It's the cinematic equivalent of listening to opera in an elevator.

This is a second-rate special effects-dominated 3D entry that will join several prominent would-be blockbusters that need not be mentioned on the summer junk heap.

Utterly lacking in imagination or suspense, this inane effort is strictly for hardcore Argento cultists.

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

Garcia has his moments as a wild man but the script never really allows him to plumb the artist's emotional depths.

Well-shot (by Luc Besson regular Thierry Arbogast) but otherwise entirely forgettable.

This misbegotten horror film deserved to go direct to video. Or cable. Or oblivion.

Offering a silly conceit that requires either finesse on screen or a cast whose magnetism overrides disbelief, Mind has neither.

Dull, talk-heavy snoozer that most closely resembles something that would show up on the CW network.

Ultimately comes across as a soporific costume drama featuring a gallery of miscast stars.

Rings finds a couple of nice, if inconsequential, little chills.

There’s nary an amusing or unpredictable moment in the film.

Though clumsily enacted, the eventual revelation at least avoids the sick-punchline feel afflicting some dramas sharing this theme.

The story makes 94 minutes seem as long as a season of Lost and as fresh as the seventh viewing of a Gilligan's Island rerun.

Smiley, is unfortunately less scary than, say, the prospect of your significant other accidentally discovering your search engine history.

With jokes that fall flat so often, the film’s cardiograph flatlines before the first five minutes are over.

Wearing its multiple influences heavily on its sleeve, Monday at 11:01 A.M. is too déjà vu for its own good.

Exploiting the serious issue of homelessness for the purpose of cheap romantic melodrama, Other People's Children squanders whatever potential it might have had.

The film's pretentious style and fractured storytelling preclude any audience involvement in the coy melodrama.

A shrill, garish hodgepodge of familiar elements from other animated vehicles (most evidently 2013’s Epic), there’s virtually nothing about this forced, fractured fairy tale that feels remotely fresh or involving.

This bloodthirsty comic-book fantasy is let down by its infantile humor and derivative, incoherent plot.

Singleton's action thriller has a decent sense of propulsion but, after a faintly intriguing start, the convoluted plot mechanics overwhelm everything else, making you feel you're watching a detailed blueprint for a movie, and an increasingly far-fetched one in the bargain.

The lurid and unconvincing Shut In should have lived up to its title.

Playing the emotionally shut-down driver for an escort service, the actor provides what little interest there is to be found in this otherwise aimless depiction of urban alienation.

Banks succeeds in mining a few laughs from the otherwise strained, contrived proceedings.

Annette Haywood-Carter’s slow-paced film features a plethora of colorful characters and incidents that register with little dramatic impact.

This overstuffed, witless and bloated stillborn $140 million epic is unlikely to spawn the studio's intended franchise — unless, as is so often the case, international audiences come to the box-office rescue.

Not only is this film's form clichéd, so is its content.

Playing like a white-trash Greek tragedy, Dawn Patrol squanders the good will that budding screen heartthrob Scott Eastwood earned for his recent starring turn in "The Longest Ride."

It's the sort of by-the-numbers, forgettable thriller, starring actors whose marquee days are behind them.

Erotic thrillers are a time-tested genre, but this effort, scripted by Wesley Strick, is neither erotic nor thrilling.

There's absolutely nothing fantastic or transporting about London, an endlessly ponderous relationship picture that also has zilch to do with the British city.

Veering heavily into sexual territory, the film is more a gothic melodrama than a horror film. It certainly feels like a waste of not only Cage's talent (although the actor has a climactic, literally fiery scene that will forever change the way you think about the pop song "Leader of the Pack"), but also Potente, whose potential has been sadly underrealized in American films.

Playing With Fire strikes strictly predictably beats. Key and Leguizamo, comic talents who are wildly overqualified for this sort of thing, work hard, very hard, to infuse the tired material with laughs. But they're mostly hamstrung by their one-note characters

A gloriously lead-footed excursion into time travel with all the accoutrements of 1950s science fiction: an absurd plot, cliched characters, corny effects and a race against time to save mankind.

Redline is the cinematic equivalent of a sports car ad in Maxim magazine.

Bangkok won't be making any appearances at the Oscars, but it is executed with skill and -- a severed limb or two notwithstanding -- without too much bloody excess.

Things spin swiftly out of control with uneven acting and misfired physical gags.

A lame comic idea poorly executed dooms Sex and Death 101 to failure.

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.

As ineptly directed by Robby Henson, the violent (but not too graphically so) goings-on are largely incoherent, with matters not helped by subpar performances, laughably inane dialogue and cheap CGI effects.

As sequels go, Piranha 3DD has barely enough heft to squeeze out 83 minutes of ho-hum entertainment, although it faithfully delivers plenty of menacing fish and bouncing boobs, as amply advertised.

Mixing soap-opera melodramatics with pithy one-liners, the film never achieves a coherent tone, with the uneven performances by the ensemble adding to the problem.

Making her feature directorial debut at the tender age of 70, veteran actress Connie Stevens delivers an obviously heartfelt but sadly unfocused melodrama in the form of Saving Grace B. Jones.

If it was still the 1980s, then Dumbbells might actually be a hit.

This sentimental French farce unsuccessfully strains for laughs while lurching towards its all too predictable denouement.

A few zany and well-deployed turns of phrase generate some laughs, and the cast is game. But the pieces don’t all fit in this loose assemblage of showbiz spoof, family comedy and on-and-off love story.

If a film's opening credit reads "Presented by Larry King," run screaming for the hills. The venerable talk show host and his wife, Shawn King, are among the producers of this cinematic trifle that proves yet again that Christmas is responsible for more bad movies than any other holiday on the planet.

A film about ordinary people doing nothing is a tricky thing, quickly numbing the audience to sleep unless the screenplay is electrifying and the actors greatly appealing. Unfortunately, neither of these is true of Rafael Nadjari’s A Strange Course of Events, which is anything but strange and eventful.

Writer-director Kelker never establishes a consistent tone, eventually aiming for a tragic conclusion that feels hopelessly unearned.

Unfortunately, despite his obvious passion for the genre, Luke doesn't yet have the cinematic chops (or clearly, the budget) to effectively put his vision onscreen.

The most problematic aspect of the film is that Hogan displays none of the cheeky charm and charisma that made him an international star. Although still obviously in great physical condition, he mainly walks through the film looking tired and pained, as if embarrassed to be taking part in such a labored self-reflexive exercise. On the other hand, you can't really blame him.

Travolta is a lively presence in some scenes, talking in a rowdy New Yawka accent and tossing off a few good lines early on. (The highlight being: "If I robbed a church and had the steeple sticking out of my ass, I would deny it.") But he can do little to bring this tedious and episodic chronicle to life.

Breaking News in Yuba County features a pitch-perfect Janney at the center of a game cast of well-knowns. Yet as it fumbles through its unwieldy mix of crime-caper farce, social commentary and black comedy, the genre it most solidly nails is the one that poses the burning question "Why did so many accomplished actors sign on to this?"

Never gets off its high-concept stool long enough to explore what makes weddings so exciting and nerve-racking and treacherous. It flounders instead in juvenilia and bitchiness.

The film falters when it ham-fistedly attempts to detour into sensitive drama.

A deadly earnest polemic whose good intentions are smothered by its inept execution.

The problem with The Pyramid is that it doesn't have a single new idea in its arsenal. All the shocks are cribbed from the likes of Alien, The Descent and a ghostly host of other horror films, but they're not even very effectively done here.

The direction is uninspired, acting is lifeless, and the script borders on the inept.

The end result doesn't even satisfy on its own sleazy terms. Not only does it lack the satirical nihilism of the "Hostel" films or the admittedly clever torture machinations of the "Saw" series, it doesn't even provide its target young male audience with the requisite nudity.

Despite a fine cast featuring numerous screen veterans, this is a cliché-ridden effort that quickly runs out of gas.

Well-intentioned but heavy-handed ... To be fair, while Parker's film lacks finesse and the writing too readily slides into bullet-point didacticism and self-righteous speechifying, it does go to some lengths to give both sides a voice, even if it inevitably stacks the deck.

This lame comedy about a big doofus who enters the fight game manages to take every cliche in the book and render them even more cliched.

An overwrought and undernourished drama.

Making their previous vehicles Step Brothers and Talladega Nights seem the height of comic sophistication by comparison, Holmes & Watson features the duo parodying Arthur Conan Doyle's famous characters to devastatingly unfunny effect.

A passable horror-thriller for the young crowd, assuming a movie can lure them away from PlayStations.

This thin concoction of domestic drama and thriller suspense won't hold up after the curiosity factor runs its brief course. Neither Robert De Niro nor a phalanx of a dozen producers can deliver Godsend from unintentional comedy.

This seventh installment does at least provide a reasonably satisfying conclusion to the series in the unlikely event they choose to give it a rest.

On the surface, the doc makes some compelling arguments, although most of its power is emotional rather than informational.

The movie, which bills itself as a crime-thriller-mystery, doesn’t come close to fulfilling even the lowest of expectations; it neither takes its characters seriously nor commits to its superficial attempt at topicality.

Not only does the film stumble badly from one skit to another, the skits themselves have too much dead air.

Although the Tarantino influence still is tangible, this time around Duffy reveals himself to also be a big Francis Ford Coppola fan, but the cartoonish end result plays like "Godfather III" meets the Three Stooges.

Concerned with both physical and psychological hazards of the job, Life on the Line manufactures a pileup of looming disasters to which director David Hackl lends no cadence.

Every bit as frantic, frenetic, groan-inducing and all around grating as its two predecessors.

Kellogg, though he handles the musical numbers in energetic, if unexceptional, music-video style, has trouble with some of the early dialogue scenes, reverting to hyped-up visuals to get through some of them before finally settling down. [21 Oct 1991]

Berenger uses his weathered visage and trademark intensity to good effect, but his efforts are undercut by the overwhelmingly cliched script.

Fouad Mikati's tawdry psychological thriller features the talented actress in a film that bears no small resemblance in theme, if not quality, to the hit movie version of Gillian Flynn's best-seller.

Strictly for the small-fry set, lacking the visual style, wit or imagination necessary to entice adult viewers.

A collection of feeble jokes in the service of green themes. Sustainability never looked so stupid.

Every bit as vulgar, sophomoric and thoroughly tasteless as 1999's Deuce Bigalow: Male Gigolo. But what is most annoying is the sequel's capability of inducing laughter even as one hates oneself for so easily succumbing to the total silliness of it all.

Audiences who enjoy smiling through tears, and don't mind having their buttons pushed in the most obvious ways, could probably do a lot worse.

While it has a few incidental felicities to admire, by and large Music is a sentimental atrocity so cringe-inducing it should come with an advisory warning for anyone with preexisting shoulder or back injuries.

Exposed mainly serves to expose the often torturous process of moviemaking and distribution.

For all its high-caliber talent mix, The Snowman is a largely pedestrian affair, turgid and humorless in tone. The cast share zero screen chemistry, much of the dialogue feels like a clunky first draft and the wearily familiar plot is clogged with clumsy loose ends.

A dreary indie ensemble drama about six thirtysomethings coping with the emotional aftermath of their friend's suicide, the ultra-talky and static Walking on the Sky would barely pass muster as an Off-Off-Broadway offering.

Temple comes off as more of a half-hearted attempt at exploiting typical J-horror themes than an actual homage to the Japanese genre.

To their credit, the directors aren’t afraid to take things way too far — which could be considered a quality in and of itself, but not one that’s sustainable for nearly 90 minutes of action.

Jack and Jill is witless and sloppily constructed, getting by on fart gags, homeless jokes, Latino stereotypes and that old favorite, explosive chimichanga diarrhea -- and no, not in an inspired "Bridesmaids" way.

A good idea for a sophisticated comedy lurks within the latest Jon Favreau-Vince Vaughn collaboration, Couples Retreat, but the filmmakers lack the courage of their convictions. So the payoff is mixed at best.

Manages to be insulting both to slasher movies and lesbians. Where's the gay rights movement when you need it?

When a movie is so dire you begin to suspect you’re in for a bad time before the title card drops, you cling to what tiny scraps of fun are to be found like shards of wood in a shipwreck.

It’s especially sad to see such notable actors as Caan and Patric reduced to appearing in this sort of bottom of the barrel, direct-to-video fare.

Its Hitchcockian aspirations are sabotaged by a tendency towards lurid melodrama that is more laughable than chilling.

Gus Van Sant’s sticky, gooey side — previously on display in the likes of Finding Forrester and especially in the 2011 Restless — oozes out once more in the woefully sentimental and maudlin The Sea of Trees.