Even as the subjects detail the processes of grieving, healing and moving on, Whitaker continually strikes a tone of reverent mawkishness, further contributing to the notion that 9/11's legacy continues to be one of easy, knee-jerk sentiment rather than wider understanding.

De Palma is not a director one looks to for conscience, and his track record on the issue of rape has been innocent of moral debate. It's odd to find him dealing with both, and the non-sensationalist approach seems to have taken a toll on his energies: Casualties of War is dull.

The jokes are relentlessly crass and objectionable; the song'n'dance routines have been created in the cutting-room and have lost any sense of fun; Fellini-esque moments add little but pretension; and scenes of a real open-heart operation, alternating with footage of a symbolic Angel of Death in veil and white gloves, fail even in terms of the surreal.

Everything is tainted by a sneering sense of superiority. It’s like washing down Christmas dinner with rancid eggnog.

Which would be fine, were the characters not a punchable quintet of overdrawn saps, the acting (Ringwald and Hall excepted) overplayed and unsympathetic, and the script the wrong side of the line that separates smart from smart-arse. Its continuing cult popularity is mystifying; as teen movies go, this is a long way off, say, Fast Times at Ridgemont High or Pretty in Pink. Hughes: stay behind for detention afterwards. And write me four sides on why this, uh, sucks.

Very little seems to happen in this social vacuum, and none of it is memorable.

The public appetite for high-school high jinks may be limitless, but the pretentious camerawork and empty ideas of this feature-length mope yield little pleasure or insight.

The whole movie aches from tired blood.

I'll respect the studio's wishes to abbreviate all plot description. God knows, they're marketing it like the second coming of "The Crying Game," though the revelations that await Nev are only shocking if you believe P.T. Barnum was really in possession of a genuine Fiji mermaid.

Heavy-handed, humourless and patronising.

Technically cruddy and tiresome in its we’ve-seen-a-lot-of-movies dialogue.

The "bumpkins are people too" message will certainly please the Appalachian Anti-Defamation League; midnight-movie fans, however, will recognize that this mess misses the mark by a country mile.

You can practically taste the grime in Jorge Michel Grau's art-house horror show-the film looks like it's been slathered with gooey discards from a backyard barbecue.

A ridiculously infantile film, one that flatters itself by intimating a deeper comment about suppressed masculinity or romantic passivity.

It’s a film that’s about as funny and/or scary as a lump of sod.

Puiu offers zero insight into his character; only suckers will find the pose artful or nourishing. Skip it.

By the end of Pray’s skin-deep love letter, only one sweeping reaction seems appropriate: “A pox on all your houses.”

Excruciatingly embarrassing at the time, it now looks grotesquely pretentious and pathetically out of touch with the realities of the life-styles that it purports to represent.

The funny thing about all these sub-"Matrix" shenanigans is that they’re genuinely meant to stoke thought and reflection. Frankly, though, few movies have left me feeling as shorn of gray matter.

Tiresome.

Nothing jells at all - least of all the central conceit of the hero becoming shaggy (sometimes the dog's a dog, sometimes a man with fur). It's also not much fun seeing Jones, Pleshette and Wynn getting older and older, staler and staler, playing the parts they've been stuck with for years.

As is, this semi-improvised feature comes off as a willfully vague exercise that, like its dimwit protagonist, presumes that profundity and enlightenment will emerge from the morass eventually. Er, maybe - or maybe not. Kinda like "Signs;" only much, much worse.

Schwimmer is so committed to telling grim truths about modern living (whither goes humanity in the age of Twitter and sexting?!?) that he abandons the film's tantalizing slide into B-movie exploitation.

Berg may be adhering to the basic facts, but his movie’s childish machismo is a disgrace to all involved.

After decades of endless policy debates, you’d think fixing America’s schools would be a complex endeavor. But apparently not--at least according to this tunnel-vision editorial.

It's a bloated two-and-a-half-hour mess. An endless patchwork of weightless, computer-drawn blah and fake out ‘deaths’ that underline the total lack of stakes.

We've come to expect diminishing returns from the once-promising Mexican director who then gave the world "Babel," but the combination of wallowing humanistic-cinema overkill and outright ridiculousness he lays out here represents a new low. Biutiful is not a tragedy. It's a straight-up travesty.

Dropping on top of the heap is Lucky McKee's barely competent domestic thriller, bound to make you groan more than think.