The violence is bloody, nonstop, and as pointless as the script.

Hugely smug and annoying.

It all amounts to something less than an 80-minute Calvin Klein advertisement.

Ruthlessly efficient and utterly predictable.

Parts of the film are nasty enough to grip the audience, but a large portion is muddled and sometimes laughably pretentious.

It begins with a stale Hitler joke and ends with a miraculous quick-save that demonstrates just how poorly the Holocaust is served by the life-affirming requirements of Hollywood features.

Cocky, vulgar and very noisy picture.

While the transgressive trappings (especially the frank sex scenes) ensure that the film is never dull, Rodrigues's beast-within metaphor is ultimately rather silly and overwrought, making the ambiguous ending seem goofy rather than provocative.

Corny and irritatingly simplistic though this fast-paced biography of 16th-century German religious reformer Martin Luther may be, it's undeniably entertaining.

This lowbrow romp doesn't even have the courage of its own infantile grossness.

Simply exhausting; it wants to be funny and sad and lighthearted and serious all at once.

This intermittently interesting symbolic tour through European history once again places ideas over aesthetics and technique.

The jokes tossed into this feeble effort involve Cheech and Chong in drag, herpes, and an S&M porno adventure featuring the comedians' real-life spouses Shelby Fiddis and Rikki Marin.

Executive produced by B-movie veteran Samuel Z. Arkoff and indifferently directed by TV-trained Stuart Rosenberg, the film's reputation exceeds its achievements, and the true story angle has been vigorously disputed.

The script originally began life as a stage play, but still feels underwritten.

Not everyone will be comfortable with a story that's as geared toward recruitment as any Army film, be it God's or Uncle Sam's.

The film is never dull.

A shamelessly derivative, if basically likeable, kid's picture.

It's got turns, it's got an attractive cast that gets shish-kabobed with ruthless regularity. It's just tired.

A protracted piece of whimsy.

Dull, humorless, and thankfully, the last of the Dracula films produced by Hammer.

The film will mostly be remembered for Bisset's wet T-shirt sequences.

The amazing thing is how dull a movie crawling with gunfire, psycho tantrums and stuff blowing up can be when you just don't care what happens to anyone.

Filled with tremendous stunts and well-shot racing sequences, director Steve Boyum's loud, down-and-dirty ride through the world of Supercross motorcycle racing comes to a screeching halt for its many pit stops for Hollywood clichés.

While billed as "an intimate look" at Jay-Z, the film reveals next to nothing about him beyond the fact that he possesses a formidable ability to spin and remember lengthy rhymes, however vulgar and reductive their content.

Pinup appeal alone does not a compelling movie make.

The offbeat cast and gorgeous Barcelona locations can't quite make up for the thinness of the mystery and forced quirkiness of the characters and their tangled relationships.

The story is a bit predictable and the characters given to restating the obvious (presumably for the benefit of very young viewers), but overall this third Pokemon sequel is surprisingly entertaining.

No character development, ridiculous situations, and a miserably written script attempting to indict corrupt legal and judicial systems add up to a tiresome and pointless film where Pacino is wasted as a witness to a parade of lunatics.

Were it not for Kumar's luminous charisma, the film would be unwatchable.

The story is painfully familiar, and McIlhenney regularly stops it in its tracks by indulging the actors in arty monologues that sap the movie of any suspense or sense of momentum.

The moral message gets a bit too preachy at times, and the performances are somewhat wooden.

There is nothing original or especially interesting about this film, though in-jokes abound.

SHE'S OUT OF CONTROL would have done far better in the TV ratings than it did at the box office. It has all the production pluses of national ad campaigns: smart art direction, lighting, and costume design; a catchy mix of old and new rock'n'roll on the soundtrack. Unfortunately, SHE'S OUT OF CONTROL also resembles commercials in that it hopes to appeal to everyone and basically endears itself to no one.

For every inspired bit -- Templeton playing chauffeur to 40 I Love Lucy-era Lucille Ball impersonators -- there's one that falls spectacularly flat.

Golan barely touches on the fundamental conflicts that created the situation there and simply offers a pack of wild-eyed, swarthy Arabs preying on passive, middle-aged Jews represented by the likes of Winters, Balsam, Bishop, and Kazan. Such horrors do happen, but they do not have to be presented as a cartoon.

Despite all the props, costumes, and music, the film conveys no feel for the city, the period, or the seedy gambling milieu.

A kitchen-sink realist coming-of-age story in the venerable British tradition, with all the good and bad that entails.

A surprisingly shoddy affair that abandons the unabashed romance of its predecessor for a rudimentary action-adventure plot involving guns and drugs.

Long, lumpy and sadly charmless, this adaptation of John Berendt's nonfiction portrait of Savannah, GA, refracted through the prism of a scandalous true-crime story, tramples all over the silkily seductive voice that makes the book so compulsively readable and eerily haunting.

Given the film's focus on the importance of hip-hop, its soundtrack -- crammed with current artists though it is -- doesn't make the impression it should.

Stone Cold is a stupid, no-stakes movie, and no manner of high jinks can hide that fact.

Generally amusing -- if occasionally overly sentimental.

This heist flick is far more likely to drive audiences away than catch and keep anyone's interest in the title kid -- or more accurately, kids.

Despite the sluggish opening, Kutcher and Bernie Mac ensure that this predictably plotted comedy of preposterous misunderstandings is occasionally quite funny.

The film's flashy visuals (apparently geared to engaging video game-impaired attention spans) are entertaining, but its cynicism is distasteful.

On the positive side, Coscarelli makes ingenious use of the clips from the original film, and comes up with the occasional creepy moment. But more often, PHANTASM: OBLIVION is extremely slow-paced and works only on a scene-by-scene basis rather than as a coherent whole.

A bit more violent than the average spaghetti western.

A gloomy-doomy ghost story that gets off to a creepy start and then spirals into flat-out preposterousness.

Only the sheer force of Sandra Bullock's apparently ingenuous charm keeps this sodden romantic comedy afloat.

Director Donen takes us for a few romps in the green countryside to ease the claustrophobia, but this gratuitous meandering only serves to make us realize how hidebound the story is.

Derivative, predictable and entirely forgettable, the sort of low-expectations genre picture that generally goes directly to video.

At best, this is a kiddie movie with a few laughs for the easily pleased adult.

The cliched plot and unconvincing action sequences -- don't blend well with the comic scenes and make the film look painfully cheap.

A numbingly stupid actioner, Invasion U.S.A. has one of the most laughable villains ever committed to film.

As for the performances, Moore doesn't bring anything special to his role, but Hannah's slightly awkward and befuddled demeanor works to her advantage, since she's playing someone with a tenuous grip on reality. The other performers are generally left adrift by the simpleminded, juvenile script, which, devoid of comic inspiration, resorts to gratuitous profanity and crude sex jokes.

It can make for entertainingly silly viewing, but it should come as no surprise that the film's plea for tolerance and unexpectedly tragic ending -- an unfortunate throwback to the Dark Ages of gays in films -- rings equally hollow.

There's much amiss here, with a long catalog of contrived situations that make this film a tough act to swallow.

The music is lavishly overproduced pop pablum of the first order, and there's a deeply shallow irony in the fact the film's most memorable tune, KC and the Sunshine Band's 28-year-old "That's the Way I Like It," is easily twice the age of its target audience.

LOVERBOY's "comedy" is a blend of genre-cliches and slapstick, and, not surprisingly, the film delivers few laughs.

The play for the heartstrings is so cold and calculated that the movie's sentimentality feels as synthetic as its hero, and the philosophy is simpleminded and lazy.

Costner's ponderous post-apocalyptic morality tale feels every minute of its nearly three hours.

A deep waste is more like it.

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.