Cannonball lacks its predecessor's dramatic tension, and by the middle of the film Bartel's disregard for narrative in favour of a series of jokes leaves no dramatic resolution.

More of a formulaic Katherine Heigl joint than a femcentric "High Fidelity," this breezy challenge to post-Cosmopolitan gender politics boasts little in the way of surprises but plenty of offbeat charm from its daffy lead.

Even on the level of unintentional humour this fails to entertain: the mark of a truly dreadful movie.

And that’s the major problem here. When the first Scream hit, it had a ball deconstructing ’80s and ’90s horror movie tropes. Six movies and three decades on, it’s become the very thing it was built to deconstruct, trapped in its own lore and fumbling about for its old smarts. The genre has moved on. Scream needs to get with the times.

This film will make you cry tears. They won’t be happy ones.

The gang-war intrigue is strictly formula, and too much of Mary’s character development is delivered through expository dialogue.

If mean-spirited snarksters had set out to trash the reputation of "Juno" screenwriter Diablo Cody, they couldn’t have done a more vicious job than the Oscar winner herself does with her directorial debut.

Simply casting doubts isn't the same as making a compelling counterargument-or crafting a coherent film.

The scam is so crazy, it just might work…for a throwaway episode of "Law & Order."

Yogi Bear on the big screen feels not just needless, but wasteful.

Resnikoff fails to sustain the tension established in the opening sequences, and the plot quickly degenerates into a repetitive pattern of possession and exorcism for the victims requisitioned by Channing's soul to do its bidding. With the exception of Phillips, the performances are remarkably unconvincing.

Muskets and swords are a bit old-fashioned for the director of "Resident Evil" - Paul W.S. Anderson has added flying battleships and elaborate diamond heists. (With material as shopworn as this, an anachronizing approach seems as valid as any.)

The biggest disappointment is Danson, who created an exquisite satire on the American superstud in TV's Cheers; his extension of the role here, as Sex Machine Spence, is a downright embarrassment.

The late Douglas Adams summed up Earth as “mostly harmless,” a description that also applies to this eminently tolerable animated time-filler.

This is a sassy little comedy of wit and intelligence from the director of Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure. As Swell, Applegate is appealing and resourceful, while Coogan's dope-head Kenny contributes to a wonderfully dry, on-going marital spoof. Getz is the unctuous boardroom chauvinist to a tee, and Cassidy rounds off the picture's relaxed Cosmo-feminism as Swell's scatty boss.

Watts’s work is extraordinary, sometimes keying off the same illicit register as "Mulholland Drive"; she risks being goofy, awkward and bratty.

Whenever things get boring, which is often, the double-crossing factor is increased, which complicates the plot without adding substance to the two-dimensional characters or to the mechanical suspense.

However one rates the bosom as an erogenous zone, it takes the talents of a Russ Meyer to make it interesting for eighty minutes. Watching the unflagging, unfunny efforts of five callow youths to see the homecoming queen's breasts, one only wonders if ever in the field of endeavour so much has been done by so many for just two.

Everything from the script to the film’s score seems stock, and echoes of past victories--Eyre’s dissection of infidelity in "Notes on a Scandal," Neeson and Linney’s chemistry in "Kinsey"--only remind you of what these talents are capable of when the stars actually align.

The only aspects marking The Back-Up Plan as modern (not fresh) are its skanky wallowings in hormonal urges and an equally sour penchant for potshots at the target audience: women who want to be mothers.

Mottola has made some brilliantly idiosyncratic pictures: Superbad, Adventureland, The Daytrippers. But as Joneses’s director for hire, he’s allowed zero personality.

The movie’s nagging inconsistency goes from merely grating to flat-out jaw-dropping, courtesy of late-game plot twists that squander whatever benefit of the doubt may remain.

Given Maxwell’s dry style and fixation on 19th-century vernacular, the result is less like a peering examination of the turbulent political environment than a reenactment of a Ken Burns documentary—or a museum tour.

Onscreen, The Dark Tower serves up a generic, half-baked scenario no different from a slew of better-known YA properties in which young, wide-eyed protagonists discover their connections to a hidden fantastical world.

From a character conceived by Mel Brooks', reads the blurb, and there are various nods to his style of humour throughout this bitty spoof. But the rest relies more on technology than style, and on mediocre effects that can't carry the plot.

The Bricusse songs (including If I Could Talk to the Animals) have their charms, and the pre-CGI spectacle of some 1,500 live animals often works its magic on very young viewers, but you're mainly left with sympathy for Fleischer and his crew, since the whole thing was evidently a nightmare to shoot.

Cunningham apes Ridley Scott and James Cameron competently enough, and there are scary moments, but he has not got the 'vision thing'. This simply rehashes the phony trappings of countless TV shows, to baldly go where we have been before.

Julia (in his final role) hams it up shamelessly as the camp commandant, but not even his suave presence and throwaway quips can save this noisy, brainless mess.