Other than an impromptu spectacle in a downtown record store, little of the chops and charisma Buckley fils had in spades is channeled; this is still the usual Let Us Now Praise Famous Men karaoke session, wrapped up in some extra-discordantly warbled notes.

As its title suggests, this is more of a self-conscious attempt to court quirky cult-film status. Nice try.

By the time this modest microindie noir starts laying its cards on the table, your attention will have already folded.

It’s just blinkered middle-class pandering at its most shameless.

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

Kari Skogland’s flashy yet dead-on-arrival drama turns Belfast’s backstreet battlefields into music-video backgrounds.

Even if Women in Trouble didn’t keep bringing to mind a superior artist, the film would still be badly written (DOA tangents about cunnilingus and kink don’t make dialogue edgy, only vulgar), not to mention unevenly paced and an embarrassment to all involved.

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

The only thing that remains a mystery is why anyone thinks they can pass off a poorly made, predictable-to-a-fault movie as inspiring entertainment.

Those of us who dig the comedian's hyperactive persona may feel that the meter is now officially running on his amiable rocker-doofus act; everyone else will simply marvel that a Christmas season could produce such an unfunny, unentertaining lump of coal.

We've come to expect diminishing returns from the once-promising Mexican director who then gave the world "Babel," but the combination of wallowing humanistic-cinema overkill and outright ridiculousness he lays out here represents a new low. Biutiful is not a tragedy. It's a straight-up travesty.

Fess up: You want to see Los Angeles get blowed up real good, and it's a measure of this movie's incompetence that it can't even deliver that vicarious thrill properly.

Even if you ignore the bad acting, dogmatic dirty-talk dialogue so wooden it'd put a Redwood forest to shame and director Phillippe Diaz's total lack of visual sense, you'd still have to digest a junior-collegiate lecture with less savvy than a horny 14-year-old.

As for parents: Are you cool with feeling like you're having artificial sweetener sandblasted into your eyeballs for 87 minutes?

Performances barely meet a junior-collegiate theater-troupe level, the narration hits maxi-fromage heights, and just when you think it can't get any more derivative, out comes a glowing suitcase à la "Pulp Fiction." Rock bottom has now been firmly established.

This haphazard "exposé" only proves that hackery plus hot air [time] does not equal skillful muckraking.

This bloody, messy action film devolves into a plain ol' bloody mess.

A veteran of the Saw franchise, Darren Lynn Bousman trades torture-porn antics for an old-fashioned Euro-horror vibe, complete with old dark houses and creepy maids; he then wastes what little suspense he generates with endless dorm-room philosophical debates about faith versus atheism and religio-conspiracy theories so far-fetched they'd embarrass Dan Brown.

The "bumpkins are people too" message will certainly please the Appalachian Anti-Defamation League; midnight-movie fans, however, will recognize that this mess misses the mark by a country mile.

Once AIDS rears its head, this nostalgic look back goes into melodrama mode - and quickly descends from bad to much, much worse.

A completely incoherent mess.

Jones may be a charismatic comedian, but no amount of her skilled mugging, Britpop tunes or help from supporting stars (Brooke Shields, Bill Nighy) can transform this derivative ugly duckling into a comic Anglophile swan.

Director Michael Corrente has delivered decent petty-criminal movies before - see 1994's "Federal Hill" - but every aspect here smacks of faux-street toughness at its worst.

No matter; this aggressively humorless farce would play like a dead rabbit pulled out of a hat, regardless of the casting choices.

Not one single character strikes you as being anything but a mouthpiece for writer-director Matthew Leutwyler's simplistic views on socio-emotional problems (racial self-hatred! post-rehab guilt!) or an excuse for self-satisfied, back-patting acting exercises. The title is an understatement.

Such pitiable incompetence isn't charming, it's embarrassing - and simply inexcusable.

They've taken an intriguing story about female neuroses with gothic overtones and turned it into a graceless, butt-ugly attempt at Twilight-lite.

What really hurts is seeing Jamie Travis's name attached; for those of us who love his extraordinary "Patterns" trilogy, watching the talented Toronto filmmaker add his characterically kitschy touch to such a witless, faux-edgy movie can only be described as a Travis-ty.