The slapstick is funnier for the nifty CGI, and the script gets in some sly digs at racist cops and multitasking soccer moms.

Playing a competitive schemer not unlike her "Desperate Housewives" character, Parker doesn't generate much heat, while Rudd is squandered in a bland role.

The insipid gags fail to exploit Murphy's gift for physical humor, Elizabeth Banks and Gabrielle Union are merely decorative, and Ed Helms (The Office), playing a character called #2, looks appropriately constipated.

It loses steam once the wraiths become fully visible: they're just not scary enough.

The movie is essentially a pastiche, as musty as a flea market.

The exotic plant and animal life is enhanced by the 3D process--which makes the two-dimensional screenplay all the more disappointing. With its weighty dialogue the movie becomes depressing well before the final violent showdown.

Bloated with visual effects, this sequel to the 2006 hit starts off slowly, reintroducing the original characters.

Queen Latifah's warmth has boosted middling movies like "Beauty Shop" and "Last Holiday," but she and costar Common can't strike enough sparks to ignite this weak romantic comedy.

How can a romantic drama tailor-made for Julia Roberts from Elizabeth Gilbert's best-selling memoir about self-actualization--shot against alluring locales in Italy, India, and Bali, and directed by the acclaimed Ryan Murphy (TV's Nip/Tuck and Glee)--go so ass-numbingly wrong?

Bitchy cheerleaders and swimming pool catfights are just two of the tedious cliches propping up this brittle comedy.

The movie relies on the notion that postponing sex heightens arousal, but its lovers aren't any better matched post-coitus than they were before.

Thankyoubutnomoreplease.

Too low-key and amiable to match the lubriciousness Jim Carrey brought to the original.

"Soppy" doesn't begin to describe this 2004 drama by Quentin Lee.

Platinum-selling singer Usher is one hell of a clotheshorse, but he's too amiable to be convincing as a leading man--not that anyone is particularly believable in this feeble comedy.

Just when you thought camp was dead, along comes this bizarre cross between a Tarantino knockoff and a Hammer horror film.

With its hypnotic pacing, blatantly nonsynchronous sound, clunky robot costumes, and graphic but unconvincing violence, the movie falls flatly between camp and art-house pretension.

Even likable star Zach Braff can't salvage this clunker.

Throughout most of her career Diane Keaton has shown sound instincts, so it's a mystery why she failed to sniff this false, brittle comedy out as a waste of her gifts.

Pretentious and dull, this Uruguayan exercise in magical realism takes place during the annual carnival in Montevideo.

As an actor Austin is still a lightweight, but Rick Hoffman (Hostel) fleshes out a recognizable character.

A romance between Fox and the attorney trying to force her out (Darrin Henson) taxes belief and leads to a sappy ending that doesn't come soon enough.

Stunning vistas of New Zealand's rolling countryside aren't enough to carry this lame 2006 horror spoof.

Not a movie, just one gigantic commercial for Hasbro.

It's not scary because not one second is believable.

The set-up is tediously slow, while the later murders are packed so tightly it's like watching a blender on high speed.

This bloated 2006 historical epic flatlines early and never regains a pulse.

Although their love is undeniably a blessing, I was disconcerted watching the elderly couple smile and chuckle today as they recall their daily letters and secret meetings in the midst of such wide-scale death.

Williams's overacting, Russell's pinched melancholy, and Highmore's unflagging chirpiness would be trying enough on their own, but the convoluted story, with its pileup of obstacles and coincidences, makes this sophomore effort by director Kirsten Sheridan (Disco Pigs) an exercise in dissonance.

Overblown and stupefyingly dull.

Absolutely nothing funny happens during their drive to Georgetown for an interview, even with Donny Osmond along for the ride.

The movie not only indicts the country's embrace of capitalism by showing how low people will sink to make money, it also denigrates the agrarian class--once celebrated as heroic under Mao--by portraying its members as illiterate barbarians concerned only with continuing their family lines.

The kids are impressively plucky, but Weihenmayer comes off as an egomaniac, arguing with his team and endangering the youngsters' lives. Lucy Walker directed this cloying and manipulative 2006 documentary.

Al Pacino chews up so much scenery it's surprising there's any left by the end of this fetid thriller.

Andy and Larry Wachowski barrel through this adaptation of the 60s animated series, hoping perhaps that no one will notice the story is as flat as roadkill.

Wahlberg turns in one of his worst performances ever, but then he's saddled with preposterous scenes.

This Mike Myers vehicle exemplifies American comedy's continuing slide into infantilism.

For a movie about the undead, this lacks any supernatural chills, and by the time its obligatory final showdown arrives, it seems as hollow as the terra cotta soldiers brought to life by CGI.

Paul Bartel's "Death Race 2000" is a beloved camp item, but this slick, loud, violent remake is pitched at the video game crowd.

Ryan, barely refining her "When Harry Met Sally" persona, is a dud; Annette Bening, playing the best friend who sells her out to a tabloid, is better in the scenes she doesn't share with her.

The little heroes and their families are surprisingly ugly, with faces resembling skulls, and the colors are so faded and muddy the movie feels tired and bungled.

Cringe-inducing when it's not cliched, this brassy, vulgar 2008 comedy from Australia mines mental disabilities for laughs.

With artifice as layered as the tiers of a marzipan cake, this resembles nothing so much as a stale Rock Hudson-Doris Day comedy.

To call this Kevin James comedy fatuous might be misinterpreted as an attack on the star's girth--so how about inane, tepid, lazy, puerile, phony, and unfunny?

Cowriters Luc Besson and Robert Mark Kamen (Gladiator) saddle Neeson with indigestible dialogue and preposterous situations.

Costars John Cleese, Jean Reno, Alfred Molina, Andy Garcia, and Jeremy Irons look either bored or desperate, gasping for laughs in an airless screenplay.

Too slavish in its devotion to 50s sci-fi conventions to work as parody or camp, this indie comedy by "The X-Files" alumnus R.W. Goodwin sinks under the weight of its homage.

Director Paul Morrison forfeits any meaningful statement about art for a pedestrian coming-out story, based in part on Dali's unreliable, self-aggrandizing memoirs.

The high school is so sanitized that there are no drugs, cutthroat competition, or--inconceivably for a theatrical milieu--no gay students.

The special effects are better and the dialogue slightly more humorous than in the first movie, but the anti-Arab subtext is repugnant.

A more helpful title for this date movie would have been Couples, Retreat!

The dialogue is often grating, and some of the situations are distastefully cute, although John Carroll Lynch (Fargo) has a strong supporting turn as a grief workshop client.

In middle age Jackie Chan can't keep coasting on boyish charm, as evidenced by this dreadful family comedy that does him no favors with its opening title sequence.

Josh Duhamel plays the smitten sports reporter who helps her mount her big art show, "Pain"--a fitting title, given the agony induced by this godawful comedy.

Inexplicably, Butler continues to get work in romantic comedies despite his limited range and boorish persona.

Allen Coulter (Hollywoodland) directed this morose and sluggish drama, which gets more mileage from Pattinson's anguished profile than from Will Fetters's thunderously overwritten screenplay.

Years on the Hannah Montana TV series have not adequately prepared Miley Cyrus for screen acting.

Bob DeRosa and Ted Griffin wrote the script, whose plummeting one-liners leave no actor unscathed.

As usual, Cage alternates between leaden line readings and thunderous outbursts, making his accomplished costars Ulrich Thomsen and Stephen Campbell Moore look even better.

Loosely adapted from Alex Flinn's young-adult novel, this "Beauty and the Beast" update is a pallid, formulaic teen romance that might have benefited from a little snark.

This movie is too pedestrian for camp, and too scattershot for an action comedy.

The resulting mix of hagiography and war epic is so muddled that characters keep addressing each other by their first names, the better to tell them apart.

Equally as offensive as the movie's smorgasbord of smut and violence is the lingering whiff of colonial-era orientalism, a Western predilection for regarding Eastern cultures as innately idle, lascivious, and irrational, and thus ripe for intervention.

Grating romantic comedy.

The story unfolds briskly in the polished mode of a classic horror movie, then tanks after a plot twist at the midpoint alters the mood and slows the pace. Jim Sheridan (My Left Foot, In the Name of the Father) directed an ill-conceived screenplay that could have worked only as camp.

The results are flat-out tedious.

Romantic comedies should never be this exhausting. Despite a few good zingers, Mars Callahan's vitriolic take on the sexes sinks under the weight of its secondhand psychobabble and smug apercus.

The narrative is murky and ludicrous, the action violent and nihilistic, the contemporary western ethos painfully pretentious.

Like its methane-filled outhouse that explodes right on cue, this sequel to "Daddy Day Care" (2003) smells.

Almost every note in this insipid comedy is strident or false, from the child's prodigious talent for deception to the jock's chaperoning her and her classmates at a Corolle doll boutique.

Frenetic and self-conscious to the point of tedium.