Only the extremely naive will be shocked, shocked by director Morgan Spurlock's dissection of product placement in movies.

The deepest chord is hit by Cattrall, who almost manages to wipe away the memory of "Sex and the City 2."

Shares a spiritual link to the Japanese works of Hayao Miyazaki but lacks his films' narrative drive and magical overlay.

Dour animated adventure that aspires to holiday joy, but is as enjoyable as a sock full of coal.

All banality, though it delivers some goodwill even as it pulls a muscle trying to get its premise going.

The biggest fault is that comparatively little attention is given to the monsters.

An earnest but undeniably eye-rolling documentary about the denizens of this odd pocket of show business.

Dominic Cooper gives a riveting dual performance in The Devil's Double, but the movie is a relentless one-note drama that loses its momentum halfway through.

Unfortunately, despite the sweaty, tense atmosphere, Viva Riva becomes derivative of the duller scenes in other gangster flicks.

Full of unenlightening snippets and blithe but banal asides, what the movie is missing is edge.

Unfortunately, its present-day tale, involving a career woman seeking to mend her 20-year bond with a girlfriend injured in an accident, is lax and clunky, and its story-within-a-story - a tale of two laotong, or soul sisters, in oppressive mid-1800s China - is gorgeous but simplistic.

This sweet if limited film has an agreeable attitude.

If only this Eddie Murphy flick had taken its own advice and spent a little more time being reflective instead of hyperactive, it might have overcome a trite script and awful, obvious excuses for comedy.

A dramatic tale of survival and horrific memories struggles against distracting melodrama in Sarah's Key, and unfortunately, melodrama wins.

Riding in to save almost every scene, though, are recent Tony Awards host Harris and the wild and woolly Sedaris, who goes too far, but in a good way. Shelov could learn from them.

Director Larysa Kondracki's fictionalized account of a true story is underserved by a melodramatic script; the result is like a film of a "60 Minutes" segment. Still, Weisz is strong and smart. And David Strathairn shows up in is-he-good-or-evil? mode.

There's a climactic putt, of course, but by then you wish Duvall would get one more "Tender Mercies" under his belt so you can forget about this tin cup of a family flick.

Writer-director David M. Rosenthal fills this dewy road-trip movie with too many cliches. From the glimpses we get of Shue's character, that may have been a more rockin' story.

What keeps the movie afloat, though, is Seann William Scott as Steve Stifler.

The 12-year-old boys who go to see ParaNorman - and who are the only ones who might enjoy it - should double up on the sugary treats to stay awake during this gorgeous-looking but zombi-fied stop-motion animated creep show. It's as slow as a corpse, and half as interesting.

A lot of gleeful audience members are interviewed in Glee: The 3-D Concert Experience, though the source of their happiness could be a lot of things.

The G.I. Joe team is back, and most of their sophomore movie adventure, G.I. Joe Retaliation, is as bland as their name and as subtle as an exploding tank.

Director Sue Bourne belabors the judges' final decision to such an excruciating length, it makes the whole movie feel a bit more cloddish than it should.

Kosinski’s ultimately underwhelming film leads nowhere. As its palpable sense of dread — well-sustained in a gently cascading first hour — gives way to dead ends, this Omega Movie shoots itself in the foot.

Maddeningly mundane, this Romanian drama aims for an antiseptic look at random violence and, unfortunately, achieves it.

The result is far too high-and-mighty to truly be moving.

There's a funny movie scratching at the edges of This is 40. Unfortunately, writer-director Judd Apatow sees himself as the John Cassavetes of Comedy, so every time that funny movie starts to emerge, Apatow tramples it with scenes of domestic irritation.

George Lucas produced this candy-coated, fictionalized drama, and while its cast is first-rate and its flying sequences sharp, the movie is as glazed and wide-eyed as a 70-year-old comic book.

The result is that, as with Hanks' performance, what's missing - subtlety, truth, an earned sense of rebirth – is stronger than what's here. Despite all the connections in Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, it never connects to us the way we need it to.

Kurt Cobain, TicketMaster and the tragic concert in Roskilde, Denmark, are addressed through plentiful backstage footage. If only it was about something other than rockers almost irked they got famous.

Westby's nervy story is like "Desperately Seeking Susan" played straight. Let's hope O'Grady's next film meets this one's potential.

Unlike last year's superior "Judy Moody and the Not Bummer Summer" - which put its grade-school heroine through similarly seasonal woes - "Dog Days" squanders several chances to find something magical in the mundane.

Like Stallone, director Walter Hill is also far from his heyday ("The Warriors," "48 HRS.," "Streets of Fire"), but the old-guy camaraderie behind the scenes is evident. Despite the movie being based on a graphic novel, no one adds extra flash here just to appease the kids.

This drama, as traditional as its subject was epochal, is earnest and studious to a fault. Rarely has a film about upheaval felt more like a textbook.

The cast gives it all a good go, and pip-pip and all that for noticeable intelligence and a bit of the old British satire. Yet Salmon Fishing takes patience and rewards with no bite.

Taken 2 has a plot that could have been written by a GPS program, and contains all the technical charm that conjures up.

Much of the young cast - especially a miscast Page - make the oft-repeated mistake of saying Allen's dialogue as he might say them; the result is a lot of hyperarticulation, stammering and gesturing.

The movie lumbers, and Loach and screenwriter Rona Munro's affectless approach winds up tamping down the movie's good intentions.

Unfortunately, director Joe Maggio's film, despite showing real promise and an ear for threats delivered with a smile, runs out of gas.

Its young heroine is proud to be herself; there's just not much for her to do beyond that.

Apparently, it takes a village - or the collection of villages known as Los Angeles - to go nowhere slowly.

It's the same movie town we've seen many times before, with dingy mechanic's shops, barren parking lots and a greasy-spoon diner where all the clichés come together.

Though it eventually gets down to more serious business, this Glasgow-set apocalyptic romance-drama seems, at first, to be most concerned about whether restaurants will survive the end of the world.

Weitz – who did a great job adapting Nick Hornby's "About a Boy" into an affecting 2002 movie – can't bring the pieces together here.

It's nice to see righteous anger in a movie. If only the education drama Detachment knew what to do with it.

Feels stagy and anti-visceral.

The tricky camera moves that fill up Silent House make for one-half of a nerveracking horror film – before the movie's obviousness just gets on your nerves.

While its tone and humanity offset the futility of each side's need for one crucial hill, much of this intense, honorable film is too drawn-out.

While we're meant to feel claustrophobic, we're not supposed to fight boredom, which kicks in quickly.

The idea of Willem Dafoe, one of our most watchable actors, playing a man stalking a thought-to-be-extinct animal in the wild is gripping in theory. In execution, however, The Hunter loses its way.

Unfortunately, "modern" additions (like the soldiers' YouTube videos and some social media moments) feel clunky, and a necessarily shortened approach trips the movie up, though leads Matt Doyle and Seth Numrich - accomplished Broadway actors - are intense, engaged and appropriately tragic.

Director Danis Tanovic never undersells the anger and tension in the family, yet while the emotional underpinnings feel raw, much of "Cirkus" also winds up spinning 'round to obvious, if uncomfortable, places.

If "Ice" never really solidifies, it's nonetheless the work of a filmmaker whose seriousness is worth watching out for.

Winds up feeling like a form of emotional tourism. The images recall Terrence Malick, but the film fills "atmosphere" into dry narrative holes where a story should reside.

All In lays down some interesting hands but sometimes can't raise the stakes, though "Rounders" star Matt Damon lends a bit of celeb flash.

The movie as a whole falls victim to a dewy kind of Tennessee Williams-itis, as Black plops too many wanna-be, colorful twists - imminent illness, botched robberies, fake pregnancies - into what is at heart a gently heartbreaking rendering.

Liberal Arts is at its most nauseating when we hear Jesse and Zibby read their oh-so-self-aware love letters.

Bloom's watchfulness and brittle seriousness anchors The Good Doctor, even as it wanders away from reality and into its own bizarre world.

Sadly, Hit & Run, for as much sporadic fun and genuine heart it has, runs out of gas. But it's not for lack of trying, and that counts for something.

Boasting perhaps the most bored-sounding voice-over ever, this unexceptional drama imagines itself - much as its young heroine does - to be far more noteworthy than it actually is.

The film doesn't play games; it's basically just Lucas going through a short story-like period of reflection and redemption almost entirely without dialogue. It's not enough, but it is what this underappreciated actor does best.

Scenes of the director as a school-age boy in a Varda film are haunting, but end up simply sparking a desire to see Varda's work.

If Deadfall had more life, it might have been about more than just its wannabe edge. Ruzowitzky, whose 2007 film "The Counterfeiters" won a Best Foreign Film Oscar, understands the movie's simple plan. But it nonetheless puts us into a big sleep.

For all its strengths, the film is cursed by an ADD-style structure and a flashy but inevitably ineffective casting stunt.

Becomes too melodramatic and bleakly obvious. Weaving, though, as always, is never less than magnetic.

A high-concept goof that’s hard-pressed to surmount its twee preposterousness.

Stoker is like the baby David Lynch and Tim Burton had, then left on the doorstep of the Addams Family. Full of heavingly gorgeous images that envelop a viewer before smothering them, its maddening elements eventually become too much to bear.

It's a naive example of the transformative powers of a 23-year-old let loose amongst the dullards. Whoa.

This earnest, at times touching, reach-for-your-dreams doc about musical hopefuls in middle age gets sidetracked quickly. When it should focus on a reunited R&B group, it wallows in the self-aggrandizement of an L.A. producer and, most awkwardly, a New York cabaret singer.

This stately chiller owes a lot to 1960s British flicks like "The Innocents" and "The Haunting," but unfortunately heads towards cliches with every step.

If you're going to have a ghost in your movie, it might be a good thing to present a viable alternative to that ghost. Mama, however, presents a battle between two not very good options before crumbling like a sheet on a string.

Mood is more important to Not Fade Away than anything, but writer-director David Chase, who turned mood into masterpiece with every season of "The Sopranos," allows nostalgic feeling to be the sole reason for this, his first feature film.

Janssen's affectionate, almost-1970s-style view of innocents-at-large may not be polished, but earns points for being from the heart.

Though Rust and Bone aims for a blasé attitude toward disabled drama - in a far more artificial way than another French film, "The Intouchables," did earlier this year - it's underwritten characters and hoary approach plunk it into mediocrity. As wheelchair-bound Stephanie practices her whale-training motions to Katy Perry's "Firework," it's eye-rollingly obvious.

Certainly, the West Memphis 3 deserve more chances to detail how the justice system went nightmarishly awry. But take this as ultimately more personal journal than investigation.

Despite the presence of Jet Li, only the last half-hour of this chatty epic truly flies.

Snitch is like watching an elephant on ice: inelegant, but you admire the effort.

A mopey indie family drama like In Our Nature can't quash "Mad Men" star John Slattery's charm no matter how badly it tries.

This is an odd little directorial debut from Matthew Lillard - the onetime Shaggy from "Scooby-Doo," now a solid character actor thanks to "The Descendants" and "Trouble with the Curve" - but it has its rewards.

Amiable but ambling.

John Cleese, Michael Palin and Chapman himself (courtesy of interviews, skits and various recordings he made before his death from cancer in 1989) chime in. It's an odd little trip, but if it weren't, one would have to ask, "Well what's all this, then?"

Yen, who also choreographed the fights, is a natural hero, and the large canvas and pseudo-superhero tactics work for a bit, but then the action gets sidetracked in place of myth-building.

Director Travis Fine gives his period details flourish and lets Cumming and Dillahunt create well-rounded characters, but Any Day Now winds up treacly.

While Messina and Ireland are fine company, writer-director Matt Ross' conceit tires you out.

Barrymore is a delicious opportunity to watch the great Christopher Plummer perform the role that won him a second Tony Award. But it's also a lesson in the pitfalls of personality-based minimalism. While Plummer acts his heart out, the script becomes one punchline after another.

This well-intentioned but clumsy attempt to get into the head of one of the 20th century's most famous women remains full of hot air.

Aiming for lightness but landing with a thud, Frances Ha is a well-meaning blunder. Director Noah Baumbach’s ode to Brooklyn twentysomething life is a flibbertigibbet fable that, like a self-absorbed flirt you meet at a party, grates on the nerves despite being easy on the eyes.

It feels like a high-end perfume ad.

Now Bell can break out of the genre. She's served her time.

Stripped of his former pretty-boy image, the Texas-born actor is snarly and gnarled, and understands what Nichols is aiming for. That’s crucial, as Mud needs something to stick to.

Director Peter Webber (“Girl With a Pearl Earring”) fills the film with conciliatory emotion and jarring vistas of post-atomic landscapes. Unfortunately, Emperor needs more good ol’-fashioned swagger.

The result was remarkable, but the story of it, while true to the moment, needed — ironically — much more dynamism.

All of that ends up making this movie — originally titled “Jeff,” in a telling bit of overpersonalization — feel like a late-night cable-news hack job.

Sadly, the film gets mired in traditionalism, something the man himself always railed against. But worth a look for seeing intellectual bravery (still) at work.

The film works better as an uncomfortable character drama than as a murky family mystery, which Karpovsky deepens with some psychobabble. Still, a nicely sinister and shuddersome effort.

The cutesy energy is just too much in this Aussie comedy that’s overly bemused by its quirkiness.

Lutz, who was a boy when his family fled the Long Island home, is full of belligerence in this chronicle of his family’s alleged run-in with a ghoulish home where a murder had occurred.

“Um” winds up as empty as its mean streets are phony.

There’s a good chunk of info for those eager to know how the sausage gets made, as well as the facts of life and death surrounding what we consume. You just have to pluck the PR feathers and find the good parts.

Cathy Moriarty and other Scorsese alums pop up, but these mean streets feel too derivative to thrill.

Feiffer sometimes gets snagged on the look-at-me nature of her meta-performance, veering from pathological to pathetic, and not always in the best way.

Such a lazy action-drama underachiever, it seems unfair to target stars Jamie Foxx and Gerard Butler for bringing their C game.

Brothers tries to delve into how war can tear families apart, but only succeeds in showing how miscasting and melodrama obscure good intentions.

Gets old fast.

There's an art to making a good spoof, but good luck finding it in Dance Flick, not only because the movie goes for easy toilet humor, but because it often relies on it to stay afloat.

If Marmaduke achieves anything, it's that it makes this past spring's "Furry Vengeance" look like a masterpiece by comparison.

This empty, immature romantic comedy ultimately feels as if it's filled with all the hot air that separates New York and San Francisco, yet still manages to be a suffocating bore.

Less the opulent retelling she (Taymor) intended and more like a high-minded midnight movie, filled with Ricky's-style costumes, black swans, sprites that flit across the screen and a cave filled with boiling beakers.

This pseudo-punkster hybrid of "Heathers" and "Thelma & Louise" loses its way almost immediately, veering from wannabe-shocking social indictment to stultifyingly obvious yawner.

This sock-it-to-'em souffle falls very quickly, unless watching Travolta trying on another faux-hip look is considered fun.

Peter Jackson siphoned out all the soulfulness that made the author's combination thriller/afterlife fantasy a best-seller. In its place is a gumball-colored potboiler that's more squalid than truly mournful.

The film is an exasperating bore.

A cringe-inducing, self-consciously kooky indie comedy that's best enjoyed for its taste of Rip Torn.

The movie soon turns into only a production-designed run-and-chase game, and our curiosity about what happened to Earth and the crew is teased and teased again until the movie’s big letdown of a reveal.

What the movie needs more than anything else is a fast-forward button.

Von Trier ("Breaking the Waves," "Dogville") has no barriers, which absolutely can be a good thing. Here, though, his uninhibited nature is an omen of the pretentious butchery to come.

Since Bullock coproduced this masochistic venture, it seems she buys into the idea that fluffer-nut ditziness is what she does best. Except it isn't.

The cozy sentimentality in The Time Traveler's Wife is the only thing that grounds it. Mostly it's just featherheaded.

Tis embalmed drama is a ghost from the '80s, a decade that regularly produced surprise-free, caramelized biopics. The airless Amelia is missing practically everything.

One we wish we hadn't seen

Where on the evolutionary scale of wacky-dudes-learn-to-grow-up movies does Role Models fall? Certainly less evolved than "Meatballs," but head and hairy knuckles above "Daddy Day Care" or "The Benchwarmers."

It takes a really bad stupid comedy to make you appreciate well-done stupid comedies. And boy is Miss March a stupid comedy.

What this heavy-handed film mainly has to endure is a clunky story structure and an ending that wasn't original when it was seen four decades ago on "The Twilight Zone."

Stein's schlumpy presence is disarming, though his know-it-all nature is at odds with his free-speech posing.

An atrocious, idiotic 88 minutes of anti-entertainment. To borrow word-shtick from the guru Pitka, it's AWFUL as in, "Anyone Watching Feels, Um, Loser-ish."

At 67, maestro Argento's taste still runs toward bloody entrails and eye-gougings, but Asia's sexy sour-lemon smile is underused in his movies.

So that's three snickers, not counting the Bush quote, 'cause including that one ain't fair, man.

And then there is the most annoying animated sidekick in a long time: a bulb-headed, trying-to-be-cute glow creature called Kilowatt (Kristen Chenoweth), who sings an ear-piercing, high-pitched note when it's scared, which is often.

Another preachy, overacted message film that owes its out-of-time structure to "21 Grams" and "Babel," except writer-director Charles Oliver uses the idea of restorative justice.

The latest indignity.

Jamie Bell gives a watchable performance in this self-conscious, coming-of-age drama, though the film's overall effect is best described as David Lynch lite.

Adds to the sad realization that this once-vibrant and witty actor (Cage) is completely controlled now by his inner teenager.

Ball knows one trick, and it's sure over.

Well-intentioned but as earnest as a college freshman discovering campus politics.

See, everyone complains about humans in movies but no one does anything about it, so it fell to Eagle Eye to make everything laughably, ridiculously fake.

Problem is, this movie is all surface - to quote one character, it has hidden shallows.

Willing as Campbell is to Shatner-ize himself, his movie will appeal only to true believers.

Only natural spitfire Spacek, as the pickup-driving mom of the land, feels fresh. There's even a mouthy kid Garity is "taking care of" - guess whose son he is?

Like a worst-case-scenario, indie-movie cliché, Wendy and Lucy throws every bone it can at the screen.

If there are Nazis fighting other Nazis in a movie and it's still boring, something's gone wrong. Valkyrie has a coterie of problems, and represents a whole new front in Tom Cruise's public relations war, but first and foremost there's the tedium.

A romantic comedy that's neither romantic nor funny.

Unfortunately, the whole movie seems constructed just to get the singer/actress into a knock-down catfight, shoehorning one of show business's sexiest entertainers into a scorned-woman role. And even then, the pay-off feels cheap.

Tries waaay too hard, just like its motormouth jock-snark heroes.

The movie doesn't try for "Airplane!" or even "Scary Movie"-type ribbing, but its adherence to the genre isn't quite pure, either. Despite McCormack's good-natured efforts, this is "MADtv"-quality satire.

"Wolverine" is silly and typical, not in spite of but because it bonds an undeveloped family feud onto the main character's renegade story.

The end result is like Quentin Tarantino reworking a Charles Bukowski story.

During all of the film’s oh-so-long 97 minutes, Year One, barely earns a snicker.

This lumbering, ha-ha-look-what-we-remade action-comedy is a high-concept disaster.

Unpleasantly icy film based on a true story.

Flashbacks show samurai shenanigans, but it's all cluttered and rambling. Watch "True Blood," "Let the Right One In" or "Twilight" instead. Or wait for "Thirst" or "New Moon" or "Daybreakers" or ...

As ineffectual police work and broken feet stack up, the silliness gets out of hand.

Early scenes set up the tragedy, but the majority of Oliver Hirschbiegel's movie is set in a TV studio where the two eventually face each other, and the tension, unfortunately, quickly becomes stagey.

Motherhood's litany of complaints and trite comedy-drama comes off as thin, and targeted, as a flyer for The Children's Place.

These actors know how to liven up a room, yet here they're forced to perform in Miller's Theater for the Overwritten.

It's also suffocatingly stagy, especially when the husband's new love (Kristen Bell) and a violent thief (Justin Long) show up.

Director John Polson's elliptical storytelling style quickly becomes an irritant.

Frozen is good for five minutes of "What would you do if?" games. Then it's just stiff as a board.

Has warmed-over chills and a muddled, zombie-like execution.

Would like to think of itself as an extension of its lead character -- gangly, a bit uncouth, but ultimately sweet. Unfortunately, it's more like the best friend in a movie like this -- irritating, unfunny and something that hangs around longer than it should.

Can't overcome mythic stupidity.

I Love You Phillip Morris not only blasts gay stereotypes back decades, it could actually make people wish for a third "Ace Ventura" movie. Both of those are an accomplishment, though neither is a compliment.

Robert Luketic's bland action comedy focuses on the uninteresting relationship between its two bland main characters, and that's the deadliest thing in sight.

An epic example of muddled storytelling, chintzy excitement and scatter-brained execution.

To call MacGruber"a total bomb is a bit much, but this comedy-action flick sure feels like it was put together with gum, shoelaces and a couple of sticky Twizzlers.

Kick-Ass - based on a graphic novel - thinks it's so brave and bold. But it's more like the title character, a dweeb who just thinks he's tough.

The Losers is simply a lot of low blows, telegraphed each and every time.

The Tracey Fragments is a grating stunt that plays like a film-school project, cutting a bland story into a million tiny irritating pieces.

This is one of those films in which almost every element is done in such an embarrassingly amateurish way, you want to put it out of its misery.

A documentary with too much dead time between the arduous tasks at hand, never grabs a viewer because -- sad to say -- it's too dull.

Throughout, Davidson's intentions are honest but become lost in a haze of overly familiar story beats.

Writer-director Sebastian Gutierrez seems to think his characters are oh-so-edgy, and maybe they would be -- if it were 1982.

The overlapping stories, the emotional disconnect, the heavy-handed symbolism -- no, it's not a movie from the makers of "Babel," its a mumbling, stammering copycat drama from Swedish director Lukas Moodysson.

John Peaslee's Screenwriting 101-style script has merely left everyone floating on their own.

Only viewers wondering if James Van Der Beek has finally outgrown "Dawson's Creek" will be at all satisfied by this dreadful police procedural that contains good history lessons and bad TV-cop-show drama.

The connection they share is clear; the reason we're invited to sit in is foggy at best.

The title of The Misfortunates ­really applies to any audiences unlucky enough to sit through it.

This fawning appreciation wears thin, despite the good-natured clowning of Alabama dentist/would-be actor George Hardy, who's like a poor man's Bruce Campbell (our apologies to Bruce Campbell).

Unfortunately, its positive attributes are thrown out of balance by its abundant negatives - including chintzy effects, lumbering storytelling and an overstylized, earnest incompetence that evokes "Speed Racer."

The Last Exorcism trods on previously stomped ground and has almost no good jump-outta-your-seat moments.

Has raw action and urgent performances, but loses power due to an amateur approach.

A chatty little bore.

The father is the only one who can leave the house to go to his factory job, and that seems like a paradise for viewers trapped watching this clinically shot claptrap.

Likely to draw a range of responses. Many will be transported by its gorgeous construction and breathless emotion. Others will find it patently ridiculous.

The James Bond parodies and genre riffs feel at least 20 years past their prime, and most will fly right over the heads of audience members 7 and under

This dour, hyperactive family film is joyless, overly busy and starchy.

Most of the acting is amateurish at best, and the tone is vintage "Afterschool Special." But it does aim to be family-friendly, and at least it succeeds there.

Johnson is convincing as a swaggering, jokey Lennon, but the photos of young John, Paul and George that end the movie ultimately have more punch than this bubblegummy montage.

It's finally here: The most boring alien-invasion movie ever.

It doesn't help that Eastwood's laconic style is as torpid as it was in such misfires as "Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil" and "Changeling."

Half-assed, halfhearted attempt to copy the Farrellys' out-there style is missing both their jackassical riffs and their heart.

This tonal mishmash cripples The Dilemma almost immediately, though there are many other speed bumps, including Vaughn's irritating, fast-talking prattle.

Terminally silly, even more so for being "inspired by actual events."

This is perhaps for Shakespeare completists only.

I Am Number Four, with its gangly title, seems like a dimwitted cousin to those hipper properties - a Superman-come-lately tale of puppy love, extraordinary powers and puberty that's duller than a chalkboard and less powerful than an extraneous Jonas brother.

At least "Witch" offers Perlman's easy, early-hominid charm, and a semi-suspenseful rickety-bridge scene.

This Arthur is missing a soul.

Director James Keach's movie is so annoyingly dipsy-doodle that TV veteran Bilson, trying hard to look haunted and angsty, is boxed in.

There's a reason potboiler paperbacks don't make good movies - there's too much outlandish plot, even for Hollywood.

The amazingly awful dramatic thriller Red Riding Hood could, with tweaks, be enjoyably bad in a "Plan 9 From Outer Space" kind of way. Instead, it's M. Night Shyamalan-style bad, which means despite all the unintentional snickers, you feel trapped.

A children's comedy about talking animals that feels as if it were written by children or, perhaps, by talking animals.

The Sitter is not only an atrocious shout-out to bad '80s comedies, it's also the kind of movie Jonah Hill should look at as a crass blast from his past.

Faith-based audiences may find comfort here, but the film's heavy-handedness is a burden it can't overcome.

With the most growling and grunting of any movie this summer - and that includes those apes perched atop the box office - Conan the Barbarian seems at times to have actually been made by barbarians.

Sadly, for 99% of its running time, this muddled sci-fi drama is filled with enough overplotting, bad acting and riddle-speak dialogue to stop a clock.

A ridiculously cheesy confection filled with unthrilling thrills, bored-looking adults and a comically overstuffed backstory.

Rote, dull and point-blank obvious.

This wannabe Sherlockian thriller is like a night spent at Madame Tussauds, watching mannequins strangle other mannequins.

Trust - a drama about the dangers of teen sexting and online predators - plays as prurient, ham-handed and amateurish.

Directors James Mather and Stephen St. Leger stage a few good action set pieces, but unlike the 1981 midnight movie classic it imitates, the blandly titled Lockout never busts out of its cheesy concept.

Madagascar 3 can't upgrade its own shtick, becoming a craven example of a fast-buck, no-fun family film.

As awful as most of That's My Boy is, it's sort of mesmerizing to see how Sandler - in a script credited to David Caspe - keeps his touchstones in place.

This insipid mashup of history lesson and monster flick takes itself semi-seriously, which is truly deadly.

There's something sadly poetic about a movie dealing with disappearing memories that vanishes from your mind while you watch it.

"Dopey" is too good a word for it.

Alba certainly tries her best at portraying not just a beauty but also a beautiful mind, yet very few things add up despite director Marilyn Agrelo's efforts.

Any way you slice it, writer-director Spencer Susser's movie is bad company, full of wanna-be-outrageous anecdotes from the fringe.

Well-meaning but dreadfully executed movie.

This is what happens when the Norwegians try to make their own "Blair Witch Project": We get three-headed trolls that hate Vitamin D and references to "Deliverance."

Rois has moments of desperate urgency and depth, but Twyker's love of parallels is finally done in by artsy shots of the threesome au naturel against stark white backdrops.

Safe arrives filled with bombast and sneers but barely any thrills.

What you don't expect is how bad almost all of it is.

Thuddingly awful.

Director Michel Leclerc's comedy plays like one of those foreign-movie spoofs Jerry and the gang would go to see on a "Seinfeld" episode. Only here, there's no "young girl's journey from Milan to Minsk" - just from madcap to moronic.

Act of Valor is like watching the wrestlers in dramas produced by the WWE: They're great at what they do, but being in front of the camera isn't part of that.

Luckily, folks like Snoop and good sports like Sheen and, yes, Lohan, break up the monotony. Until, like an undead beastie, the boredom and dumb jokes come roaring back.

Carpenter's economical but mundane chiller is possessed more by previous ghoul-friend flicks than it is by his better work.

Texas Chainsaw 3D sees itself as over-the-top and knowing, but what we ultimately get is simply eyes without a face.

Though Julia Leigh's surprisingly dull debut is meant to present the mysteries of a troubled young woman, you're more likely to wonder why its star, Emily Browning, is drawn to such demeaning roles.

Alas, this learned woman of letters - her expertise became the work of Dostoyevsky, whose major novels Geier nicknames "the five elephants" - is ill served by a trudging approach and dry-as-dust, procedural style.

The drug that Ma-Ma trafficks in, Slo-Mo, slows its user's brain to 1% of its normal speed. Dredd unfortunately makes you feel as if you, too, have partaken.

The result is a dull, high-minded soap opera.

Even young would-be botanists will find this charmless animated adventure as exciting as watching grass grow.

The Big Wedding lets them all down with bottom-rung sitcom shtick and an undercurrent of squareness masquerading as absurdity.

As clichés trot through their sessions - it's like "In Treatment" as bedroom farce - we check out. Huppert, though, is as fearless as ever.

It should surprise no one that visually quirky, graphic-novelish, pulp-noir action flicks rarely come through the sausage machine intact.

Broomfield's point that Palin followers threaten her enemies, though, is worthy of a different documentary - perhaps one about American fanaticism.

These World Wrestling Entertainment-produced movies are a world unto themselves: Cliché-ridden B-flicks anchored by monstrously huge grapplers giving acting their all.

Ridiculous and mannered, Loosies is light-fingered but heavy-handed.

Finding a fresh setting for a comedy is difficult, but a Renaissance fair is too broad a target.

Though this family film is slick and well-intentioned, it comes off as shallow as a prom committee meeting.

A dumb thriller starring Dennis Quaid as a weirdo mortician taunted by high school kids into revealing what he did with his wife and her lover years before - and look at the movies it rips off...

The acting and general schlockiness make "Friday the 13th" look like "Macbeth," but it's clear D'Onofrio just wants to hang out. And actually, a lot of the music is really good. Let's hope next time, he decides to make something like "The Commitments" instead.

PA 4's best idea, besides reintroducing the slow-walking, statuesque Katie, is a strange video trick involving lots of little lights filling a darkened room. It's tough to describe, but the cameras, of course, capture a figure the characters can't.

It would be easy to say that the final minutes of this mixed-up thriller make everything before it meaningless, but that would indicate the odd conclusion has meaning, too.

Director Mary Harron ("American Psycho") can do little with this bloodless drama.

Appearances from Jeff Goldblum, Zach Galifianakis and John C. Reilly help some, but all the mincing from Heidecker and Wareheim, the wanna-be, gross-out humor and THE CONSTANT SCREAMING get tiring.

It's an unfunny Spanish movie that worked best as a two-minute trailer.

Ultimately, even more than 2007’s “Live Free or Die Hard,” “Good Day” never lets McClane be McClane. Gone is his taunting snark and quick-witted preparedness; instead he seems like a jerk with a thing for guns.

Still, in movie terms, Warrior's Heart makes curling look like gladiatorial combat.

Add two more stars here if zoning out to weirdo-dreamy, '80s public-access TV with a synthesizer soundtrack is your idea of midnight fun. Because this ambitious, but not uninteresting, failure has that in its DNA.

The folksy shenanigans are well-intentioned but frankly interminable, with Kline's wry efficiency the best relief from all the yowling and whining.

It winds up just being annoying.

This slovenly, self-indulgent riff on Charles Bukowski-like fringe-livers has all of the naked harshness of Bukowski with none of the poetry. At least Haas gives it a good shot.

Everything that goes around comes around, but the roundelay in 30 Beats comes off, well, a little square.

A ghost-busting drama set in a world of mystics, mind-benders and various and sundry fake-psychic gobbledygook. But the weirdest thing is how all the fun gets lost in a bottom-drawer "X Files" story.

The charmless but harmless A Cat in Paris hits theaters yet doesn't enchant.

After much fumbling, the snicks and giggles of adolescence grow wearying yet again.

It is likely to become an unintended camp classic, something we haven't had since "Showgirls."

Filled with enough clichés to be broken up and sold in pieces as junk material.

This comic drama tries too hard to serve up a slice of manic life, but Eisenberg, along with Tracy Morgan and Isiah Whitlock Jr. as the affable druggies, provides some spark.

By the middle of the second hour, you'll be wishing a zombie would just chomp off your head to end the pain.

It's the same-old flesh-chewing. Like vampires, this genre is getting deadly.

The bad news about Admission is that this thin envelope of a comedy checks all the boxes for being a phoned-in, phony, padded rom-com.

Irritating and clichéd.

Atrocious dreck that feels sitcomish, only without the polish or panache.

Black Rock is as dingy and dirty as the genre thrillers it appears to want to one-up. All it does, though, is bring everyone down.

Swan is so eager to be a trippy comic lark that it ends up resembling a clown trying to fit through a pea-shooter.

Unfortunately, the rest of writer-director Eran Creevy’s film just shows that the Brits, too, make good-looking but empty thrillers, just like in Hollywood.

Okay, y'all, the never-ending appeal of the Southern-fried crime caper for filmmakers hungry for flavor is back with The Baytown Outlaws. Only here, the drawling accents, screeching tires and sawed-off blasts that rise again don't amount to much.

With a bit less grisliness, it could have been a mystery dinner-theater performance.

Muddled and inert despite the best intentions, this inescapably dull thriller plays like a Middle Eastern take on Liam Neeson’s “Taken.”

Sort of “An American Psycho’s European Vacation,” this indie dramatic thriller mixes sex and violence and still winds up dull.

The movie’s gimmick is having the actors visually superimposed over sets created from actual Civil War photographs. But this collage effect, while striving for truthfulness, comes off like a View-Master version of a tale already told.

Hemsworth has presence, but he also represents this film’s biggest problem: It feels like a bunch of good-looking kids putting on a show.

Hardworking Oscar winner Harden and beguiling Spanish star Watling do nothing for this haphazard film, which belatedly decides it wants to be a stage satire as the women lark into a ridiculous avant-garde production of “MacBeth.” Bloody awful.

Points for niche audaciousness, but that’s all.

A lot of Aftershock predictably involves screaming or shock cuts, and the movie features a blink-and-you-miss-it cameo from Selena Gomez.

This would-be satire earns an E for Effort for wanting to be to the advertising world what “Being There” was to television.

The loping pace, inconsistent tone and lack of imagination are all deadly.

There's a way to do this kind of thing (Just witness Hasbro's other toy-turned-dumb movie franchise, "Transformers"). G.I. Joe, though, hasn't got a kung fu-grip on what it is.

This god-awful, unfunny, stinkingly putrid sketch-comic movie has exactly one snicker-worthy moment, involving Kevin Nealon and a stolen grape. But watching the rest of it will make you whine.

By the end of its way-too-long 98 minutes, there are four things audiences will be haunted by: Jovovich's annoying, whispery monotone; silly closeups of owls; Will Patton's Z-movie turn as a grizzled sheriff, and dialogue like "It's too late to forget what you already know." Ain't that the truth.

Isn't prophetic ... just pathetic

This slimy, slug-minded mystery thriller starts out dead on arrival and then, like three-day-old fish, gets really bad really fast.

An atrocious mess.

Filled with second-rate Brian DePalma twists, noirishly blurred lights and usually solid actors mouthing potboiler brine, The Lodger resembles bottom-shelf '80s dreck.

One sickening piece of garbage.

This unfunny, unoriginal, charmless teen comedy is so stunningly awful from start to finish, it's amazing to think its director has made a single film before, much less a dozen.

Splice is an unholy mess because it fuses together the worst parts of every bad medical-monster thriller, and then boldly cranks up the ridiculous.

The whole thing is such a tedious, foul-mouthed mess that it isn't even worth discussing as a riff on the Bob Dylan doc "Don't Look Back" or a meditation on slovenly semi-madness.

This one isn't original, or even bearable. By its thudding end, audiences may wish they could be zapped from the theater to escape the buzzing in their ears.

Has no thrills, no chills, no scares and contains a villain, or several of them, actually, that will turn you to stone -- from boredom.

Latest, dreadful entry in the vampires-battling-werewolves franchise.

The worst humans-fighting-aliens movie I've ever seen. And I've seen a lot of humans-fighting-aliens movies.

Every summer needs a super-turkey. So barring anything in the next 30 days that's the second coming of "Howard the Duck," the witless, completely terrible "comedy" now called The Watch should win hands-down.

Harlin even makes poor Kilmer go running about. Just like that image, "5 Days" is embarrassingly clumsy.

Hollowface, like Intruders (which ought to be just the singular "Intruder," as Hollowface works solo), is all about empty scares. Director Juan Carlos Fresnadillo does include perhaps the most half-hearted exorcism ever filmed, which only seems fitting.

Ah, perfect: A banal story to go with intermittently banal porn.