Herman Boone was no doubt a terrific football coach, but the lessons to be drawn from his success in Alexandria are ambiguous, and Remember the Titans is too wrapped up in its weepy macho sentimentality to address them clearly.

Some viewers may find this movie sexist or misogynist simply based on its premise, but it's a mistake to take Greenaway's symbolic narratives too literally.

It's a sloppy, fun, late-'80s style Hong Kong action flick full of pogo-dancing zombies and voracious vampires who look vaguely like Siamese cats with spoiled cottage cheese cooked onto their faces.

It's long. Long movies almost always mean the audience member has time to think, and in this context that's not a good thing.

Alone among the cast, Farrell seems to understand that this movie -- which is lazy and stoned, for all its loud music -- needed somebody to go ape-shit, to pretend to give a crap or at least to have fun.

It's not merely that these subjects have already been satirized to the point of ultimate tedium; more importantly, Simone just isn't very funny.

Basically brings home the bacon for horror fans -- it offers decent special effects and a nice array of those moments where you shriek and jump and nearly pee your pants but it turns out to be Mom or the cat after all.

But imagination and energy are often not enough. On balance, this is the dumbest of the entries in Hollywood's anti-consumerist new wave.

This is a highly enjoyable summer thrill ride with an action heroine who likes to be on top, literally and figuratively.

Add Christopher Walken, giving one of his patented demented performances as a Kurtz-esque mining tycoon deep in the Amazon jungle, along with some vague Hollywood politics about labor exploitation, and The Rundown is far too cheerful and good-hearted to be terrible.

Isn't a terrible movie, but it is a tremendous disappointment.

Thoroughly enjoyable, but not because it's any good.

When you watch Greenwald's barrage of pirated Fox News footage -- his filmmaking techniques are clearly testing the outer limits of the "fair use" doctrine, and may yet land him in court -- it's an overwhelming experience well beyond the hoot-inducing moments.

The satire doesn't go far enough.

If a movie can be fascinating and tedious at the same time, Inside Deep Throat -- which more or less depicts the America I have just described -- is that movie.

I'm always grateful to practice a little affirmative action on behalf of grade-C sleaze movies with a budget you could probably locate in your sofa cushions or your dryer, and Tim McCann's digital-video opus Nowhere Man is a fine example of the species.

I feel prodigious emotion underneath the pretty, preserved features of The Ballad of Jack and Rose, channeled into a vehicle that's a half-successful imitation of "You Can Count on Me" or "In the Bedroom."

The good news is that Duchovny has an undeniable feel for this medium, and a fine rapport with actors.

In addition to possessing the most confusing title of the year, Canadian filmmaker Michael Dowse's high-energy dance-club saga It's All Gone Pete Tong arrives in an elaborate package of spoof and deception that should win the admiration of any practical-joke connoisseur.

Amid the infoglut that surrounds us, Gibney's film feels too much like more noise. Is it telling the most important business story of our lifetimes, or is it just another fantastical yarn, crammed into the schedule after Scott and Laci Peterson, but before Charlemagne and the ancient Peruvian astronauts?

It's pretentious highbrow trash, but as far as that goes it works pretty well.

Setting such larger aesthetic questions aside, there isn't much to dislike about The Longest Yard, at least once you've gotten used to the pervasive fear of homosexuality that seems to ooze from the film's pores.

Horror fans should see this, at least in geeky admiration for what it pulls off, but in the long run it's no more than a crisp footnote to genre history.

Wild Side is sometimes maddening to watch, but will haunt you for days afterward.

As enjoyable as Close is, Heights as a whole is a mannered simulation that only occasionally and accidentally feels like real New York life.

It's a meticulous nest of interlocking elements, not at all haphazard. But in its unrelieved bleakness and singularity of vision, it supplies very little in the way of conventional movieness.

If the resulting film doesn't work equally well at all levels, Wood (who starred in "Thirteen") gives an astonishing performance that pushes it most of the way there.

This is one of those movies destined to be watched by family groups who can't agree on what to see: You'll all get a few chuckles, and then it's home for dessert.

Isn't exactly bad and isn't exactly good. It's raw in some places and overcooked in others.

I'd have no problem with the element of rampant, half-wacky speculation at the outer edges of physics in these movies if they came labeled as such.

Of course, the very existence of someone like Willmott -- a black university professor who can make an angry, ruthless satire about American racism with impunity -- suggests that we're still a long way from living in the CSA.

Perhaps understandably, these artifacts of a vastly different ideological and economic era -- have become kitsch objects, the focus of a half-horrified nostalgia, in the midst of the feverish Chinese boom.

It's kind of a mess. An agreeable, even lovable mess, but still a mess.

Mediocre raunchy comedy.

The hectic, sprawling Fanfan la Tulipe eventually feels like too much -- too many goofy asides, too much Comédie Française hambone acting, too much gallantry and villainy, too much forced good cheer.

For me, Franken is funniest at his least guarded and his most incorrect, and as he inches toward becoming a politician himself, we get less and less of that.

A trashy thriller of the kind that used to make up the second half of double bills in crumbling downtown theaters, circa 1977.

It's a glimpse into a world most secular, metropolitan liberals never see, and it's likely to induce howls of both terror and hilarity from big-city audiences.

I suspect this guy can make a good movie if he learns the right lessons; he's made about half of one here. But the praise heaped upon A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints is way too much, way too soon.

It's a compact and symmetrical picture with all its plot points in the right places, but I never found it convincing in the slightest.

A winsome, charming and irresistibly romantic picture, and also a profoundly self-involved one that has nothing whatever to do with Iraq or war or much of anything else besides the butterfly-like spirit of Roberto Benigni. But I guess that combination makes it a great holiday selection choice for certain disheveled, liberal family groups. Mine, for instance.

An uneven but impressively ambitious picture.

Puccini for Beginners may divide individual audience members. It divided me; rarely have I seen a film simultaneously so good and so bad.

It might be too slow and morbid for American viewers without an existing interest in the subject.

Whole New Thing comes unglued toward the end, spiraling into melodrama without ever escaping its whiny, indie-rock soundtrack.

I found the interlocking bitterness of Ayckbourn's play irritating and overly neat, and these people don't seem to belong to Paris or London or anywhere else, at least not anytime in the last 20 years.

So stylized and slow-moving (even at a spare 75 minutes) that you may have trouble adapting to its hypnotic rhythms -- but if you can, there are sumptuous visual rewards to be found, plus the faintest emotional uptick right at the end.

Evening feels like one of those devil's-candy productions that aim to bring artistry to a large audience, specifically a large audience of adult women who don't often go to the movies. Even considering it in that light, I found it miscalculated and overcooked.

The whole thing is handsomely mounted, with plenty of Goya paintings and supposed observations about the ironies of history and the cyclical nature of life, etc. Forman's always been a huckster, but I never thought I'd see him waste this many good actors on a movie this bad.

The movie never fails to be crisply written and cannily delivered, but it's way too steeped in TV-culture inside jokes for its own good, and August's attempts to suffuse the whole thing with ontological or theological meaning are ultimately pretty dumb.

The evident strengths and laudable intentions of Before the Devil Knows You're Dead (and even the appeal of Marisa Tomei in her undies) are overwhelmed by an implausible plot verging on unintentional comedy and a panoply of Noo Yawk dirt-bag supporting characters who might've seemed awkward on a 1993 episode of "NYPD Blue."

It's the film's reassuring, almost hypnotic visual rhythms, along with its Hollywood-like narrative structure -- which is closer to "Drumline" or "Bring It On" than to most documentaries -- that make it bearable.

The film has moments of goofy delight, some pseudo-David Lynch spookery and a couple of comic supporting turns.

There's almost no such thing as an entertaining holiday trifle anymore -- the kind of casual, cheerful little picture that you might see on a whim and end up enjoying, even beyond the breadth of your modest expectations. The Perfect Holiday is an attempt, at least, to resurrect the idea of the trifle

If you liked "Rocky Balboa" you should be in good shape, since it's exactly the same movie, just aimed at a teeny-tiny-bit younger demographic and with an affectless leading man who avoids hambone acting by not acting at all.

My Blueberry Nights may not quite be what fans of either Jones or Wong Kar-wai -- directing his first film in English -- are expecting. It's a late-night, lovelorn mood piece in a minor key, not complicated or convoluted, finally more confection than substance.

I'm not big on those Pauline Kael-style encomiums to great actors in mediocre material, but that's exactly what we've got here. Stevenson is so incandescent -- so funny, so vulnerable, so awkwardly sexy.

It's an exceptionally well-made example of the kind of delirious, semi-Gothic, overcooked melodrama filmmakers from the Boot have long specialized in.

Deliciously dumb, reasonably well-made.

Alternately winsome and irritating documentary.

This isn't a boring movie or a dishonest one. But it's a relentlessly literal-minded one, light on vision and atmosphere, that moves through the history of the Germs with a checklist.

A charming but silly love letter to a vanished era of urban bohemia?

Van Damme's remarkable performance -- I say this in all seriousness -- comes pretty close to redeeming the picture's murky and overly complicated artistic intentions.

A self-indulgent and icky film, but reasonably well made and undeniably addictive.

This Friday the 13th is glossy, good-looking garbage, acted out by a cast of big-chested androids (male and female alike) and with the original series' rough edges smooved over. It's reasonably entertaining.

High-style goofballing and globetrotting can get you pretty far, but maybe not as far as Johnson wants us to go.

Actually, the problem with wunderkind director Shane Acker's "stitchpunk" animated fantasy 9 isn't so much that it bears a sped-up, dumbed-down resemblance to "The Lord of the Rings," although it does. It's more that Acker's dark and whimsical creation, so clearly in the tradition of his mentor Tim Burton, is wondrous to behold but offers only an indifferent and generic mishmash of quest fantasy and post-apocalyptic science fiction when it comes to story.

Beyond that educational element and the delicate performances of Dancy and Byrne, I found Adam dramatically limp, predictable and in a curious way even retrograde.

Gandini makes it seem as if the nation of Dante and Fellini has been conquered by "Girls Gone Wild." As hyperbolic cases go, that's a pretty delicious one, but it's not quite true yet.

It's too convoluted by half, and turns what ought to be an idiosyncratic, delightful folktale-film into a baffling personal psychodrama with a nasty sting in its tale. Still, Breillat wouldn't be Breillat if she made movies that were easy to like, or to get your head around.

Yes, yes, yes, Downey is blasé, intelligent and hilarious as Tony Stark -- what do you expect me to say? -- but I'm convinced that sticking with this character much longer won't be good for him.

Roy is like a meta-Cruise or a Cruise pastiche; even the disturbing, stalkerish aspects of his character seem as if they were constructed from tabloid stories about the actor's marriage, his religious affiliation, his sexual identity.

An uneven but surprising movie, often outrageously funny and just as often completely flat.

A very mixed bag. Despite some faint gestures in the direction of journalistic balance, it plays a lot like a two-hour infomercial for the Playboy publisher's historical importance, philosophical depth and personal greatness.

Taken on its own terms, it's a light, sweet, curiously enjoyable misfit romance, whose real star is not Aniston but her magnificently awkward Lothario, Jason Bateman.

So some good acting and decent scares get entombed within too many dull postmodern iterations.

I don't mean that this movie is strikingly good or strikingly bad, in cosmic terms -- it's a solid but totally forgettable entertainment, redeemed somewhat by Barrymore's loud, horsey laugh and some agreeably racy comic situations.

A middling little movie that tries to trespass on Bergman-Renoir territory and simply isn't adroit enough to pull it off, and because in its weaker moments it's overheated and silly.

A very mixed bag. It's an oddly dry fusion of documentary and narrative film that arguably doesn't quite click on either level.

Ultimately, though, it's a little schizo, like a depressed dude in a clown suit, or a Theodore Dreiser novel hopped up on not enough happy pills.

Paranormal Activity 2 suffers from the excessive expository blah-blah that's so common in horror-movie sequels.

If Client 9 plays a lot like a murky, gripping political thriller, it lacks a fully satisfying ending -- or a fully satisfying hero.

Made in Dagenham offers girl power in a can, lightly seasoned with swinging London and topped with cute-clumsy Sally Hawkins charming us to pieces. But the real women of Dagenham deserve better, and so do their sisters in the audience.

It's difficult to make this mediocre adaptation of perhaps the best-loved book in C.S. Lewis' Narnia series -- seem particularly interesting.

This is a pale simulacrum of those high-style travel-porn thrillers of the '60s and '70s, which only serves to remind us that those aren't as easy to pull off as they look, and also that maybe they weren't so great in the first place.

Her (Taymore) interpretations and interpolations range from brilliant to indifferent to extremely silly; as Taymor surely knows, there's nothing especially revolutionary in asking Helen Mirren to play the central role of Prospera.

An oddly listless and downbeat affair, setting these two beloved eccentrics adrift in a road movie that's rarely funny enough to connect as absurdist comedy and rarely compelling enough to work as recession-era male-bonding melodrama.

But when people have sex in a movie -- that wasn't, you know, made in Hungary and meant to convince you that life is meaningless -- isn't it a good idea to make it seem kind of hot? Because on that score, No Strings Attached is a near-total failure.

I'm not sure whether Howard and screenwriter Allan Loeb are to be commended for aspiring to something odd and original, or condemned for a result that's so messy and miscellaneous.

Bastardizes the source material to no good purpose, ending up with a strained combination of rah-rah, boy-bonding adventure and p.c. cross-cultural exploration.

Reasonably effective.

It isn't the shifting narrative focus of Miral that's the problem, nor is it the purposefully provocative pro-Palestinian perspective. It's Jebreal's screenplay, which uses every scene as a vehicle for delivering news headlines or condensed political rhetoric, and seems incapable of capturing a specific emotion or an individual personality.

Mostly it's got a barely tolerable level of metaness.

Misfires on multiple levels but isn't all that terrible.

I was startled to look up the running time and discover that X-Men: First Class is only 104 minutes; the second half is so clunky it feels much longer.

I'm not quite saying that the unabashed squareness and silliness of Larry Crowne are negatives. They're almost admirable in themselves, and certainly constitute a selling point.

The movie never makes much of a case for its own existence; it's a mediocre western clumsily welded to a mediocre alien shoot-'em-up, and if you allow yourself to think about its treatment of history for as long as one second, you'll feel insulted.

It's a charming if conspicuously unfinished film, a half-riotous, half-idiotic send-up of the teen horror genre with a vaguely hip political twist.

I really don't understand why anybody thinks the wispy, bittersweet tale of long-distance love in Like Crazy is any big deal. Seriously, I liked this movie better last year, when it had Drew Barrymore in it and was called "Going the Distance."

It's kind of fun to watch Pacino and Liotta and Tatum and James Ransone, as Jonathan's foulmouthed partner, as they roar at each other and suck the marrow from the hambone. You can see why actors want to work with Montiel, but actors are notoriously bad judges of whether good scenes will ever add up to a worthwhile movie, which is exactly the problem here.

Humor is notoriously subjective, of course, but I didn't find Young Adult especially funny. It's an intermittently engaging fable of American homecoming that's both intentionally and unintentionally awkward, and flavored from bitter to sour all the way through.

It's almost a great war movie in one direction, and almost a piece of irredeemable cheese in the other, and there you have it.

If anything, Think Like a Man, the awkward but intermittently amusing black-centric ensemble film built out of comedian Steve Harvey's self-help bestseller "Act Like a Lady, Think Like a Man" deserves a gold star for its generous portrayals of Caucasians.

It's kind of endearing and kind of asinine.

It's mediocre and half-baked, with flashes of a potential good movie showing through here and there.

Much of the argument Navarro assembles in Death by China is unassailable as to its basic facts, even if the tone and manner of presentation leave much to be desired.

I'm not sure V/H/S is brilliant cinema or anything – indeed, I'm not sure it's appropriate to call it cinema at all – but it sure is an ingenious hybrid: part Godardian art film, part abstract video experiment, part sleazy shocker, and all self-castigating interrogation of what film-theory types call the "male gaze."

Slowly but surely, Flight degenerates from a tale of moral paradox and wounded romance into a mid-1990s after-school special about addiction and recovery.

I felt like I'd been invited to a seven-course dinner, and all seven turned out to be cake – and then the host insisted on delivering a lecture about how cake would bring me closer to God.

I'm afraid that whoever it was in the New York Film Critics Circle who voted for The Hobbit as best animated film had a point. And so did the people who suspected that this whole thing was a bad idea.

I'm not sure whether to recommend The Baytown Outlaws as a guns 'n' glory time-waster or warn you off it as a piece of mendacious trash. So I'll do both.

As a capable imitation of better movies by Martin Scorsese, Brian DePalma and Roman Polanski – it's reasonably successful entertainment.

Warm Bodies is more a mild-mannered, emo-flavored romcom than a zombie movie. It has some tepid action scenes, a few swatches of genuine humor and a general spirit of cheerfulness, especially considering it depicts a future in which civilization has been destroyed.

Saying that Raimi’s trip to Oz is adequate eye candy with a good heart isn’t the same thing as saying it’s actually good. I was charmed at some moments, profoundly bored by others and almost never felt genuinely excited or emotionally engaged.

This is a really lively, fun and high-spirited comedy. If you leave after half an hour.

The movie’s just too boring and middlebrow.

This movie feels a little half-baked to me in the sense that it carries an exceedingly complicated intellectual agenda below the surface of a conventional thriller, and doesn’t execute either level as well as it might.

A wildly uneven and sloppily directed movie, full of clashing tones and undigested bits of superior films.

Too jumbled to become the major pop hit it wants to be. But it's not an entirely bad film despite its lack of coherence. Horror aficionados and other midnight-movie fans shouldn't miss it.

Mechanical plot that seems dull even before it laboriously clanks and screeches into motion.

An intermittently engaging thriller.

You're just sitting there, somewhere between mildly amused and fairly bored, watching the filmmakers squander Hollywood's most eccentric character actor and a lot of very fine specimens of the order Rodentia.

But in the end conventional sentiment, rather than any actual morality, is all that the script for The Family Man (by David Diamond and David Weissman) has to offer.

As drama it feels forced and highly conventional.

Utterly predictable, thoroughly sentimental and -- worse -- not all that funny. It makes your average episode of "Third Rock From the Sun" look like the edgy mutant offspring of John Waters and Ingmar Bergman.

Robert De Niro and Frances McDormand almost rescue this lifeless, clichéd cop drama! Close isn't good enough!

It gets much more watchable in the last half-hour.

Unless you like boob jokes and preachy sentimentalism, this comedy isn't funny at all.

For all its grandeur, Gladiator is a canned experience, a film that flails around awkwardly trying to find a reason to exist, or at least a compelling story to tell.

Proceeds at such an amiable pace and features enough creepy-crawly effects that many viewers won't quite notice or care how rickety and second-rate it is.

Whatever it is, it's simultaneously on speed and Quaaludes; I don't know if any movie this profoundly insane has been seen in general release since Antonia Bird's Gold Rush cannibal comedy "Ravenous."

Gets off to a great start and then simply shuts down, like an awesome vintage car on an ambitious road trip.

This might have worked if the director and lead actress had the kind of intense mutual understanding that, say, Ingmar Bergman had with Liv Ullmann, or John Cassavetes had with Gena Rowlands.

Almost utterly defeated by its subject's sardonic stonewalling.

Forster and Benioff are able craftsmen who apparently thought it might be interesting to seal themselves into a narrative box with no way out. Sorry about that, guys -- I hope it was a growth experience.

I'd rate Bubble at no better than a C-plus for artistic achievement and a D-minus for audience appeal. In one sense, it accomplishes its goals efficiently by making you feel, in less than 80 minutes, as if you've gotten permanently trapped in the dead-end, trailer-park lives of its working-class characters. I've never been so grateful to get out of a theater, turn my cellphone back on and plug myself into a $4 Starbucks latte.

I don't think any of it really hangs together as anything resembling drama, or that Michael is ever a remotely likable character, before or after his day of reckoning. But Adam Sandler didn't get where he is today by making movies for me and Roger Ebert to like.

Babbit is skilled at creating atmosphere and mood, all of it creepy or sodden, and actresses Elisha Cuthbert and Camilla Belle put their hearts into their roles, which are, unfortunately, encased in a sleazoid TV movie of the week tarted up in art-school clothes.

It's an unholy mess, simultaneously too Gothic and too sarcastic, that preaches liberation and delivers only puritanism. It's a craftsmanlike but robotic imitation of "interesting" filmmaking, only in patches, and by accident, the real thing.

A relentlessly gruesome, visually impressive and ultimately not very interesting movie with some pretensions to seriousness.

There's a gloomy quality to The Good Night I sort of appreciated -- much of it was shot in London, although it's supposed to occur in New York -- but after the initial acerbic setup fades, Gary becomes less and less likable and the movie evaporates into nothing.

What results is a patchy, uncertain motion picture, full of incidents and images but fundamentally unfocused and superficial.

A limp and dreary experience, at least after you get past its intriguing premise. It's poorly written and woodenly acted, completely formulaic and hopelessly imprisoned by both its genre and finally its form.

There's virtually no context provided here, about Lennon or the Beatles or New York or Chapman himself. To put it another way, the film's entire context IS Chapman.

Even if the actual movie is an awkward, uncinematic mishmash. Waters has at least tried to write a sex comedy that isn't aimed at titty-fixated 17-year-olds, and at its best Sex and Death 101 has a fast, clever rhythm that almost sings.

Dark Matter has neither the technical command of an art-house film nor the manufactured intensity of a grade-B thriller, yet it's also too cheap and dirty to feel like a Hollywood-scale drama.

Mamet's trademark artificial, mutual-incomprehension dialogue and con-game plotting are ineptly matched to the action genre (and feel stale in any case), while the jiu-jitsu scenes are so incoherently shot and edited you can't tell if the fight choreography is any good or not.

Matsumoto isn't the first Japanese director to go all meta on the superhero tradition (consider also Takashi Miike's 2004 "Zebraman"), but this work of improbable lunacy may well max out the genre.

Pontypool is something like a claustrophobic, locked-in-the-barn zombie movie, only almost without zombies.

This film's dithering, handsome, morally ambivalent Hamlet, is a profoundly unsatisfactory character.

Finally, at the risk of seeming provincial, why is it OK that some Canadian has made a movie set in Ireland with no Irish people among the principal cast?

A dispiriting and thoroughly ineffective romantic comedy, with some juicy morsels provided around the edges by a great supporting cast but no heat whatever in the central coupling between Lopez and Aussie TV hunk Alex O'Loughlin.

Reasonably good fun. If you're a 12-year-old boy riding an intense Cherry Pepsi buzz and totally devoted to destroying some brain cells, that is.

Somehow Kutcher and Heigl and Tom Selleck and Catherine O'Hara (as her parents) are all fun to watch a fair amount of the time, without the movie they're in being any good at all.

For the most part "Inception" is a handsome, clever and grindingly self-serious boy-movie, shorn of imagination, libido, spirituality or emotional depth. Nolan establishes a fascinating world, loaded with trapdoors, symbols and hidden secrets, and then squanders the opportunity on an overpriced "Twilight Zone" episode.

A minor and superficial summer diversion that offers female viewers not much more than a two-hour escape fantasy, but that's not a crime.

Given the debased standards of action cinema these days this might be enough to make The Town a hit. But almost everything else about the movie is badly off balance, starting with Affleck's decision to cast himself as the implacably sexy and good-hearted Doug.

A movie that opens with a sensational bang and then proceeds to pursue the Big Questions about life and death in lovely, lugubrious and increasingly off-putting fashion, until all its drama has been frittered away in a dreamy, drifty haze.

Whatever his faults as a filmmaker may be, Cameron would never make an adventure flick that felt this bland and generic.

It's strange and stupid and half-compelling and sometimes beautiful.

Begins as pseudo-realism before descending into weird and mangled wank-job fantasy.

The hit-to-miss gag ratio is atrocious, and we spend most of the movie hanging out with these borderline-agreeable characters, waiting for something to happen.

It's occasionally funny and a lot painful.

30 Minutes or Less features about half of a decent idea, which works out OK since it ends up as half a movie.

A movie so addicted to the crack pipe of delirious cinematic badness that it has real potential as a camp classic.

O'Connor chucks away everything that was interesting or dark or subtle in Warrior and replaces it with a pseudo-individualist, sub-Freudian, Tea Party-friendly fantasy.

You can't call W.E. a total disaster; it's too pretty, too nonsensical and finally too insignificant for that.

The Hunger Games has some cool moments here and there, and is never entirely dreadful. Lawrence is both radiant and triumphant. They haven't screwed it up badly enough to kill it, although they've tried.

The doggie in Darling Companion is a big, warm bundle of puppy love; his owners are lost forever in a big chill.

What I see in The Avengers, unfortunately, is a diminished film despite its huge scale, and kind of a bore.

Its shameless and nonsensical combination of ingredients finally won me over, after a fashion, when I realized that its gung-ho Navy-recruitment propaganda and retrograde gender politics shouldn't be taken any more seriously than the ZZ Top, AC/DC and Billy Squier songs on the soundtrack.

It's easy to hate movies that are abundantly terrible or immoral or stupid, but I almost feel like a jerk telling you that Fernando Meirelles' globetrotting drama 360 is a mistake from beginning to end.

So teachers' unions don't care about kids. Oh, and luck is a foxy lady. This is what I took away from the inept and bizarre Won't Back Down, a set of right-wing anti-union talking points disguised (with very limited success) as a mainstream motion-picture-type product.

So to call this a good movie is really a stretch; it's more like 38 percent of a good movie. But it probably has just enough dumb fun and pointless violence and car chases to seem like a highly viable option for large numbers of people this weekend.

Whether or not Luhrmann’s “Gatsby” will go down in history as a legendary flop is not for me to judge (though all signs currently point toward yes), but it surely belongs to the category of baroque, overblown, megalomaniacal spectacles dubbed “film follies” by longtime Nation film critic Stuart Klawans.

Ludicrous trash, but it has style.

Familiar and profoundly unoriginal.

Edward Norton's dopey directorial debut gives interfaith romance a bad name.

Doesn't work at any level, but the total lack of chemistry between its central couple is fatal.

A pallid, mediocre tale that treacles its way through well-worn channels.

You get the feeling that everyone was in a good mood and the margaritas were pouring, but neither Gallo nor anybody else ever found a bottom line for this movie or its characters.

A dreary, humorless affair, with no real feeling for the rhythms of either baseball or love.

Stupid, empty and -- worst of all -- fantastically boring.

An academic exercise driven by adolescent ideas that never shape themselves into a narrative: in short, a movie that can never dislodge the art fatally wedged up its butt.

Between the 12th floor and the 14th floor, boredom awaits!

What we've really got here is a tame screwball adventure dressed up with some desert scenery and some awful computer graphics.

This is a movie full of now-you-see-it, now-you-don't plot points.

What makes it so disappointing is that the movie is just another sub-Farrelly-brothers collection of miscellaneous gags.

This might be the edgiest film of the year -- if the year were 1982.

Shot after shot photographed at wobbly, off-center angles for no particular reason, weigh every action sequence down with super-slo-mo in lame imitation of "The Matrix" or end every single scene with a vertical wipe.

I don't even care that there's no plot in this Antonio Banderas-Lucy Liu faceoff. It's still terrible!

Pretty much everything in this high-space war yarn has been swiped from other, better movies.

No wonder Arlene (Hunt) keeps a bottle of vodka in the chandelier. You would too with this demonic, passive-aggressive, New Age munchkin (Osment) trying to run your life.

A movie that's laughable without, alas, even being enjoyably awful.

It's not merely that Dear Wendy was shot on Danish and German locations that don't look quite right; it's that almost every decision made by the production designers is wrong, or at least discordant.

There's so little sexual chemistry between the actors in this film that it seems like a kind of accomplishment. I've seen shows on C-SPAN that were hotter than this.

It sometimes produces moments of unexpected power. It also produces a bizarre and fatally uneven movie, veering from black comedy to utter stupidity to maudlin religiosity, which seems to have been made in total defiance of both narrative conventions and emotional logic.

Director Cook and screenwriter Anthony Frewin were both intimates of the real Kubrick, which I guess counts for something. But for what, exactly? Does it uniquely qualify them to make a mean-spirited, trashy and intermittently funny film about a guy who wasn't Kubrick?

The story sounds great, on paper: It''s got interracial romance and betrayal, political and ethnic violence, and a faint feminist undercurrent. But the resulting movie is so pretty and so utterly lifeless you can almost smell the embalming fluid coming off the screen.

His scattershot and ad hominem attacks against many different forms of religious hypocrisy don't add up to a coherent critique, and he's not qualified to provide one.

Scorsese is pushing, I guess, for something that combines a '40s horror-thriller with a contemporary psychological tragedy. What he ends up with is more like a Hardy Boys mystery directed by David Lynch.

For all the filmmakers' talk about reinvigorating the franchise for a new generation, and all their attention to technical details, this is a sloppily conceived remake with no passion for the genre or this story behind it, a movie that assumes its audience is brain-dead and likes it that way.

It's a challenge to take a comic-book adaptation that stars Josh Brolin, John Malkovich and Megan Fox and drain nearly all the fun out of it. Jonah Hex is one of those movies that combines a certain amount of being ridiculous on purpose with a great deal of pseudo-profound silliness.

It's a little bit Tolkien, a little bit Lucas, a little bit "Matrix," a little bit "Dune" and rather too much Philip Pullman, all stuck together with some powerfully expensive effects and lots of cute kids doing tai chi.

This well-crafted example just piles imaginary atrocities on top of real ones, and then halfheartedly claim that it means something. Well, it doesn't.

Off the top of my head, I'm guessing that Season of the Witch claims a place in the top five all-time bizarre and pointless homages to art cinema.

An Adam Sandler comedy, which means it bears only a superficial relationship to the customary conventions of moviemaking, and also that there's no use getting all worked up about that.

A would-be tween-oriented hit so scrubbed and sanitized and not worthy of paying attention to that it can barely be said to exist at all.

It's all just an embarrassment, the kind of pointless slog you'll encounter on Netflix in two years and wonder, How the hell did that get made?

You could definitely call it awful, and I'm about to do so, repeatedly and effusively. In fact, One Day is an appallingly bad movie made by talented people who could and should have done much better, but somehow all drove off the cliff together.

Rarely has a film with such a great cast and so many moments of terrific writing and such high dramatic goals been so messy and disorganized and fundamentally bad.

Renders Jonathan Safran Foer's best-selling 2005 novel into unconvincing Hollywood mush.

It's exactly the sort of movie that Hollywood specializes in, the kind which seems on paper as if it ought to be entertaining, but winds up a massive and chaotic drag.

That whole aspect of October Baby creeped me out a lot more than the blood-curdling failed-abortion story did, honestly. I've seen a lot of movies where crazy and impossible things happen, and you just have to roll with them. Real life is much more frightening.

Luc Besson and Liam Neeson and the rest of the furriners who made the inept and offensive Taken 2 don't seem to have gotten the memo from Jason Bourne: Americans don't think our spooks are good guys anymore.

Stoker, which plays something like a remake of “The Addams Family” mixed with “The Paperboy” — but without the laughs of either – belongs in a special category of movie badness, or perhaps two different but overlapping categories. It’s a visually striking but fundamentally terrible film made by a good or (some would say) great director.

Fitzgerald’s influence could have crept in there by osmosis, and whatever other charges you want to level against Spring Breakers – such as incoherence, plotlessness, salaciousness and mind-numbing monotony – it has no lack of high concept.

Quickly plunges into boggy terrain from which it can never extricate itself.

I felt like dropping to my knees in the theater and praying for this smug, irritating fake-reality-TV show to go away, leaving these three terrific actors (and characters) in something resembling a real movie.

Dragons torch the earth as manly men with weird hair battle them in this colossally misconceived dud.

How do you screw up a family movie that has a cute bull mastiff, a cute 6-year-old and David Arquette playing a mailman? Apparently by unleashing half a dozen writers to gnaw it to pieces and entrusting the result to a TV director (John Whitesell of "Cosby" and "Roseanne") with little sense of how to tell a story longer than six minutes.

If The Cell were six minutes long it would blow your mind. At two hours, it's a disordered muddle of hellacious highs and pedestrian lows.

This premise could, just maybe, make for a decent thriller, but everything about Murder by Numbers is so flavorless and rote, so devoid of real suspense and human interest, that you never suspect for a moment that the answers are likely to be engaging.

The fact that its sound and photography are gracefully crafted, or that fragments of a tolerable film are visible here and there, only makes its dumb-ass, romance-novel version of tragedy worse. This is one of the most badly botched mainstream movies I've seen in years.

Portman and Judd aren't responsible for the mendacious and finally repulsive sentimentality of Where the Heart Is, but by the end their wholesome glow seemed contaminated by it, and that's a shame.

Martin Lawrence, no Eddie Murphy, takes a reheated cross-dressing shtick and turns it into something to elate your inner fourth-grader.

I've never seen anything crazier than Palindromes. You can read that as praise if you're that sort of person, but I don't mean it that way.

A jumble of spare parts and leftover dialogue, as if it had been assembled out of unused bits of every movie where an unknown whatzit threatens our way of life and the government goes into full institutional pants-crapping panic mode.

Disposable crap.

A Garry Marshall movie has to be funny in order to be anything at all, and this one is so deeply involved with its pseudo-meaningful roundelay of beautiful but inexplicably lovelorn people as to be teeth-grindingly, mind-warpingly boring.

The guys abuse each other in what's meant to be fraternal affection but feels more like the discomfort of being stuck together in a terrible movie.

Saw 3-D is in 3-D. Really, really bad 3-D.

That's the culture we live in, where the once-proscribed Pleasure Principle has become iron law and where the recycled, bloated, fish-belly emptiness of something like TRON: Legacy carries boredom to extravagant new heights.

It was boring and silly but not atrociously bad. No, that's much too glowing; allow me to back up and rephrase. It is atrociously bad, basically.

Can someone explain what Nicolas Cage and Nicole Kidman are doing in a chaotic and sadistic home-invasion thriller, shot in digital colors so radioactive they appear to have leaked out of the Fukushima nuclear plant?

J. Edgar turns out to be one of the worst ideas anybody's ever had, a mendacious, muddled, sub-mediocre mess that turns some of the most explosive episodes of the 20th century into bad domestic melodrama and refuses to take any clear position on one of American history's most controversial figures.

One could and perhaps should use scare quotes around "intellectual" when it comes to someone who would crank out a piece of campaign-season partisan hackwork this crude and sloppy. (By this standard, James Carville looks like Immanuel Kant.)

Seriously, this is one of the strangest and most painful films in recent memory.

Pretty much three well-staged action sequences strung together with the dumbest imaginable connective tissue.

Startlingly inept from start to finish -- it's atrociously written, poorly shot and edited and fatally unfocused.

This awkward fable of ghetto redemption mixes painfully earnest message-delivery with occasional scenes of brutal violence.

Classic Rudolph: a tone of sweet-edged, slightly kooky melancholy, a terrific cast mostly left to its own devices and a few intriguing moments. Not, I'm sorry to say, a movie.

This one's a pile of crap that won't start.

Let's be real clear about this: You've got to be suffering from some major trash-culture brain damage to enjoy a movie like Ready to Rumble.

A lugubrious sub-"Exorcist" demonic possession film that's absolutely no fun at all.

A dumb and sloppy movie.

This fantasy crap, fake-o effects and all, betrays princes of dice, masters of graph and wielders of bong.

There's nothing scarier than a group of hormone-crazed 20-somethings, but this sequel isn't much more than a footnote of a footnote.

The movie is terrible, but made with verve and sincerity, all of it pointed in the wrong direction.

The misanthropic nadir of the director's crash-and-burn career.

Indeed, this movie's offensive on many levels, but Arabs and Muslims don't get to feel special. It relies on stupid stereotypes because it's a stupid movie that's offensive to virtually everyone.

They kill me, these guys. No, seriously. If they make any more of these movies, they might as well kill me.

Inside of five minutes I felt an urgent, blinding hatred for almost all its grotesquely overprivileged characters.

Gingival surgery would be more fun than watching this brain-draining, spirit-sucking attempt at a stoner spoof, which combines the cutting edge of frat-boy wit, the excitement of a mid-'80s made-for-TV action flick and the authenticity of a Renaissance Faire held in an abandoned field behind a Courtyard by Marriott.

It's a dumb, ugly and, most of all, painfully unfunny movie.

A fourth-rate Hollywood thriller that bungles a lot of thievery from better movies, is entirely bereft of suspense or excitement and features a leading man who absolutely, positively cannot act.

The worst movie of the new millennium.

Summer's most shameless piece of trash since "Wild Things."

Almost as degrading as any unmarked video you can buy in the back alleys of Manila, and, in its pseudo-significance and arty pretension, it's a lot less honest. I'm heartily sorry I had to poison an entire evening with it.

What's really depressing is that some viewers may be deluded into thinking there's something of substance in "Centipede II," when it's more like a DC Comics version of Pier Paolo Pasolini's notorious "Salò, or The 120 Days of Sodom," with the sweeping condemnation of Western culture stripped out and the mean-spiritedness cranked to 11. If you want to check this out for a stomach-turning giggle, don't let me stop you. But please, let's not pretend it means more than that.