No cliché is unturned, no "dog duty" pun avoided (get it -- dog doody), no creepy gay-panic subtext unplumbed in this family comedy.

Misbegotten mess.

It's all mean-spirited, foulmouthed sniping.

Folks watching any movie that opens with a shot of a butt crack (with the possible exception of "Lost in Translation") can't claim they weren't warned.

Ghostbusters II is such a lazy effort that the formula machinery is laid bare for all to see. It suffers from writing that is obvious, sloppy, and unimaginative.

Gone is the joy and wide-eyed fun of the original; in its place is a hokey, ho-hum story that might have come out of a computer.

Hopelessly muddled film cries out for the firm hand of a dyed-in-the-wool cynic like Billy Wilder, who would have put some teeth in its jabs at amoral politicians and blindly ambitious journalists.

There are no two ways about it: A chubby-cheeked dummy doing stuff it shouldn't be doing is spooky stuff. But Wan isn't on such sure footing with his actors -- Wahlberg is stilted as the tough-guy cop, and Kwanten is blandly uninteresting.

The sad thing is that Arnett, Shepard and McBride quickly establish a loose, easy camaraderie that's a real pleasure to watch. The shame is that they're working with such unrewarding material.

A stale rehash of Woody Allen-style "he's a neurotic Jew, she's a flaky shiksa" gags.

That the 27-year-old Usher isn't much of an actor is no surprise, but he's strikingly uncharismatic for someone who's been in the spotlight since he was six.

The story vacillates between broad, kid-friendly gags and a series of oddly sour riffs on the theme of adult sibling rivalry.

Sacre bleu! Bumbling French police inspector Jacques Clouseau is back, and he's never been less funny.

This trashy, overwrought thriller gets itself worked up into a fine, sleazy lather that recalls the matricidal glories "Die! Die! My Darling!" and "You'll Like My Mother", then wimps out at the end.

The trouble is that Turturro's reach considerably exceeds his grasp.

Lawrence is a comedian with talent who rarely uses it for anything worthwhile, and here he makes a halfhearted, paycheck-collecting effort that's actually in perfect keeping with the rest of the movie's tired, recycled tone.

It's familiar stuff if you've sampled the vast body of work devoted to LA-dammerung.

Though Verow attended the American Film Institute and has made more than a dozen shorts and features since 1994, his low-budget gay-themed films are characterized by phenomenal indifference to framing, sound quality and performance. If his relentless amateurishness is deliberate, it's self-defeating; if not, it's inexplicable: Most people who do anything for more than a decade get better at it.

This live-action cartoon tries to walk the line between pleasing the faithful and appealing to a broad-based action audience. It fails on both fronts: It's too lifeless and watered-down to stand on its own high heels, but commits the cardinal sin of messing with the original.

In what can only be described as a throwback to the awkward "gay" farces of the 1970s and '80s -- think "The Ritz" and "Partners -- this painfully uncomfortable buddy comedy trips all over itself to say something positive while still managing to offend. Worse still, it's just not funny.

The major irritant is the hyperactive direction by Joe Pytka, a near-legendary helmer of TV commercials who films each scene as if it were the last, with everybody in the frame strenuously choreographed and overly busy.

Though less offensive than its predecessor, Rambo III -- which is dedicated to "the gallant people of Afghanistan" -- is still a mindless and uninspired effort.

Horror of the glossiest, safest kind. It's a boring bubblegum shocker that loses its flavor faster than Fruit Stripes.

The film's major draws are R-rated gore and some nice physical effects, proof that a man in a top-of-the-line monster suit can still be more effective than CGI.

Forgetting that French New Wave directors often turned to Hollywood for inspiration, cinema snobs will doubtless be outraged that Hollywood would dare remake such a beloved Rohmer masterpiece, when in fact, tone aside, "Chloe In The Afternoon" isn't all that different from "The Seven Year Itch."

With nothing in the way of performance to cling to, the audience is left to marvel at the mounting inanity of each scene.

For all the sex and slicing, the most shocking thing about it is how dreary it is.

Ironically, Faris' Samantha is the most convincing personality in the mix: She's a grotesque caricature of Courtney Love by way of Nancy Spungen, a vulgar, selfish monster of unbridled id, but you always know where she's coming from.

An ugly, unfunny frat comedy.

The loose, rambling conversations that substitute for action might be more interesting if any of the characters were capable of real introspection. But they're so shallow and distracted they can't even manage sustained navel-gazing, which makes their so-called relationships profoundly uninteresting.

A film that pays lip service to some interesting ideas, but is far too concerned with pleasing a large crowd to be anything more than another instantly forgettable fright flick.

Bill Forsyth's films are always idiosyncratic, but Being Human is so steeped in the director's interior dialogue with himself as to be incomprehensible to anyone who doesn't happen to be Bill Forsyth

Marvel-man Mark Steven Johnson, who wrote and directed "Daredevil" (2003) and scripted "Elektra" (2005), continues to demonstrate the wrong way to make comic book movies: Make sure special effects overwhelm the characters, let campy mannerisms go unchecked and be sure dialogue is declaimed rather than spoken.

A ludicrous mishmash undermined by ghastly performances and a hopelessly convoluted screenplay.

It's hard to pinpoint what's most insulting about this obvious propaganda piece.

It's a one-gag film that rises or falls on how funny you find the sight of fat, grease-slicked Jack Black crammed into spandex pants and capering like an epileptic lamb.

It goes without saying that the humor is vulgar and juvenile.

Just know there's a whole lot more great stuff out there than just what Evolution has in store for you -- namely, the anime that it was based on.

Thinly conceived and thoroughly shallow.

The whole film is plagued by a sense of false, desperate cheerfulness.

Pride and Glory would be a pretty cool movie if it were made in 1982.

Spin it however they like, the troubled but talented Lohan isn't what's wrong with this misbegotten mess.

Pays backhanded homage to Woody Allen via the travails of college loser Max (Gary Lundy), who fears that years of wallowing in "Annie Hall" have permanently poisoned his love life.

If anyone is to blame for this bomb it's Forte: He wrote the thing, and one would assume he's the one responsible for those uncomfortable silences where jokes are supposed to be.

Noisy, derivative and thoroughly preposterous even by the standards of 21st-century action movies.

Tedious and obscure where it was apparently meant to be atmospheric and tantalizing.

Larry Bishop's painfully self-conscious homage to biker films of yesteryear is a carefully crafted pastiche that doesn't miss a wild-deadly-angels-devils-sadists-revenge cliché and can't hold a candle to the down-and-dirty likes of "The Glory Stompers."

Odd, quasi-mystical movie that’s too silly for adults to take seriously and frankly too weird for kids.

Not much action or excitement here.

The film pulls off a couple of "gotchas!", but the subtle creepiness of its predecessors is gone, replaced by a sense of numbing predictability.

We already knew Hudson and McConaughey weren't exactly Gable and Lombard from their first romantic pairing in "How To Lose A Guy in 10 Days," but director Andy Tennant's complete lack of inventiveness comes as a surprise.

Postal's touches of wit are lost in the flying body parts, gross-out gags, and the full frontal spectacle of Foley's no-longer-private parts.

However deep the divide currently separating the Middle East from the West appears to be, there's at least one thing we can all agree on: Albert Brooks isn't all that funny anymore.

Ironically, one of the film's best-developed characters is a mouse: The four-legged "Chizzler" actually has a legitimate story arc with a genuine payoff.

The movie's film-studentish navel-gazing wears thin long before its over.

A crude, artless bogey tale.

Steve Austin is conspicuously inarticulate and uncharismatic. Former soccer lout Vinnie Jones, whom no one will ever mistake for Laurence Olivier, acts rings around him.

It's cheap, sloppy, and too jumbled up to know what it should be.

Welsh-born actor Roger Rees bares body and soul in director/cowriter Eric Werthman's handsomely photographed examination of the dynamic that unites a masochist and the sex worker who caters to his desires.

Huge in scope and beautifully shot on location in South America, this ambitious production is undone by terrible casting choices.

What a waste. Check out "Breakdown" or Aldo Lado's 1971 Italian giallo "Long Night Of The Short Dolls" for a far better treatments of the same subject.

Bummer, dudes. Longtime fans who expect the fun lingo and pizza-gobbling Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles of the past may be shocked by director Kevin Munroe's reimagining of the popular kiddie series.

It's all a pretentious bore that feels twice as long as it's two-hour running time.

It's hard to believe this shoddy, dishonest mess is Clark's sixth feature film, and not the unpromising debut of a rank amateur.

This terrible sequel to a bad movie was directed by Fred Savage, the now-grown star of "The Wonder Years," though there's no evidence of any behind-the-scenes adult supervision.

This formulaic mess of sports-movie cliches and self-esteem claptrap contains a couple of funny bits, but you have to slog through a lot of done-to-death bodily function jokes to get to them.

First-time writer-director Robert Edwards is nothing if not ambitious, attempting to encapsulate the history of totalitarian oppression and misguided revolutionary zeal into a broad, blunt, black comedy.

M. Night Shyamalan's sixth film mines a rich lode of end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it clichés, but while the set up is spooky, the development is heavy handed and marred by Shyamalan's inability to write natural-sounding dialogue or convincing characters.

Rip Torn, Linda Hunt and Jerry O'Connell mark time in minor supporting roles.

It's by no stretch of the imagination a good film, but it delivers what it promises: naked girls whaling on each other, flesh-ripping zombies and genre stalwart Todd growling and glowering satanically from beneath a mane of dreadlocks - the He-Who-Kills teeth are a nice touch.

A shameless puddle of romantic slop.

The occasional eerie moment can't elevate this routine piece of by-the-numbers J-horror above the pack.

Who will survive and what will be left of them? If you don't have a pretty good idea, this is not the movie for you. If you do, rest assured you've seen it all before.

Morgan borrows Christmas-specific nastiness from a wide range of fright flicks, but the result is less than the sum of its parts.

Though Keaton is convincing as a smarmy narcissist who secretly thinks he deserves to fail because writing plays isn't REAL work, he's also thoroughly unlikable -- a problematic trait in a protagonist.

If the characters were more interesting, the long, long buildup to their night of ghostly reckoning might be suspenseful rather than tedious.

It's tough going relieved only by some lovely Irish scenery. -

No one seems to be having any fun, including the normally masterful Van Sant, whose direction is unstructured, confusing, and lackadaisical.

The film is really little more than an array of sometimes imaginative images.

The most shocking thing about this ludicrous serial-killer shocker, released the week troubled 21-year-old former child star Lindsay Lohan was arrested on DUI and cocaine-possession charges, is that it's the kind of film actresses generally make when their careers are well and truly on the skids.

Proof that the US has no monopoly on white-trash humor.

This ersatz jungle adventure is really a thinly disguised Sunday School lesson in faith, charity and the savagery of life without Christ.

Nielsen's schtick is getting pretty threadbare by now -- his movies used to wring laughs from assaults on his silver-haired dignity, but after years of screen buffoonery, he has no dignity left to assault.

John Gulager's directing debut is horror at its most reductive and least resonant.

Benigni's artfully composed images are as empty as his political convictions.

The action has more to do with digital effects than true martial artistry, and is targeted squarely at adolescent boys too young to rent porn and gamers too lazy to yank their own joysticks.

The films of writer/director Francis Veber are a bracing reminder that French comedies can be every bit as broad, unsophisticated and cliched as their American counterparts.

There's a fine line between subversively transgressive and just plain gross, and this coming-of-age-movies parody from Todd Stephens, who wrote and directed the charming and underrated "Gypsy 83," crashes right over it.

A slack combination of faith-based inspiration and broad 'hood comedy.

There's no meat on this film's borrowed bones: They're polished to an exquisitely tasteful shine, but efforts to class up exploitation are pointless.

For all its crudeness, Phillips' tale of men behaving badly is remarkably toothless.

The outtakes that accompany the end credits suggest that making the movie was a blast; it's a shame the same can't be said for watching it.

Too elliptical to be convincing.

Herman fails to journey beyond the surface-level realities of his central perspective, which makes his film feel half-developed and poorly conceived, and drives it into sensationalism.

Insipid, formulaic and suitable for the dumbed-down sensibilities of lowest-common-denominator couch potatoes.

This teen drama may be filled with some great-looking dancing, but its hackneyed, predictable script is a giant step in the wrong direction.

Bean carves out his own modest variations on the theme of John Ryder-on-the-storm, but Bush and Knighton are so blandly forgettable that it's hard to believe that they're the protagonists and not Victims 1 and 2.

Plummer's fearlessness is awesome -- just try to imagine another actress willing to bare so much bony flesh wrapped in clanking chains -- but her character is nevertheless a ranting bore.