With its starkly contrasted visuals (fierce blacks, Clorox whites, a dash of unholy crimson), The Spirit may resemble a comic book more than any live-action film yet made, but it makes "Max Payne" look like a gleaming jewel of storytelling by comparison.

Edward Norton plays Ray, a (possibly) honest cop wearing an unexplained scar positioned just so on his cheek. It looks like it was bought in the markdown aisle of Halloween Mart on Nov. 1.

Boring movie.

Everything is predictable three scenes in advance, and it's all stale, stuck, stolid.

CHOKE tries to be dirty but manages merely to be dingy.

Transporter 3 is made for airplane viewing, and not just any airplane: an Eastern European one, on the flight from Hrubbishnik to Slutnya.

There is also something surgically sterile. The movie sounds as though it was recorded in a padded chamber instead of a bustling school, and it looks like it came from some alternate world, one that basks in the eternal sunshine of the spotless skin.

The film is Beverly Hills Chihuahua. The audience is the fire hydrant.

Combines a sketch-comedy premise with pacing like a philosophy seminar.

There probably aren't enough futuristic Goth rock musicals, but Repo! The Genetic Opera is weak on a couple of things a musical needs: music and lyrics.

Goldblum's wobbly German accent and the staginess of the script doom this effort by Paul Schrader ("American Gigolo").

You can't spell cliché without Che. And as I endured this mad dream directed - or perhaps committed - by Steven Soderbergh, I wondered where I'd seen it all before. The booted stomping through the greensward, the jungly target shooting? It's a remake of Woody Allen's "Bananas," right?

The first time I saw Yes Man, I thought the concept was getting kind of stale toward the end. As it turns out, that was only the trailer.

Nothing But the Truth is like listening to the fourth-best debater in middle school present a term paper called "Politics, Power and the Media."

We watched a story of a Labrador. Who eats the couch and disobeys. I said to Lady, "It's a labra-bore."

As bland as the Kenny G-style smooth jazz its hero listens to in moments of distress.

The movie hopes to be regarded as childlike too, but there's a difference between kid-friendly and just regular old dumb.

Is the Crystal Lake PD really doing such a good job? You'd have to go back to Phnom Penh in 1975 to find a place with a higher per-capita rate of unprosecuted homicides.

The only possible interest the movie will inspire in anyone comes when Paltrow flashes a breast toward the end, far too late to pump any excitement into an aggressively boring film that gurgles with self-indulgence.

UH-UH. Non. Nein. Negative. Sept. 11 is not to be used as the setup for a cheesy disaster prophecy flick.

Not very haunty.

It all leads nowhere. There are pull-the-rug-out endings, and then there are pull-the-floor-out endings. The Escapist leaves you standing on nothing, like Wile E. Coyote, wondering why you bothered to come this far.

Every Little Step shows only this: It hurts to flunk an audition, and it's nice to get hired. Everything it has to say about Broadway was said better in Bob Fosse's movie "All That Jazz" -- in its opening five minutes.

The potential for suspense is dropped (there's a subplot about the receptionist's flight from her violent husband, but he appears in only a couple of scenes) in favor of lots of hushed interludes in which nothing happens.

Picture "Fargo" played with no sense of comedy, and you'll get some idea of the absurdity of this drunken floozy, clicking and wobbling on high heels, often with bits of her anatomy hanging out, trying to pull off the perfect crime.

The film is a failure if it can't convince us that these two people belong together. It can't, and barely tries.

Its script isn't worth the papyrus it's inscribed on.

The film mangles its twist and fails to deliver an interesting coup de grace or a sharp line of dialogue.

An icky S&M thriller.

The movie offers very little that food radicals don't already know.

The movie doesn't really begin or end. Whether the lights have just gone down or the credits have begun to roll, things are pretty much the same for Henry.

Sherlock Holmes dumbs down a century-old synonym for intelligence with S&M gags, witless sarcasm, murky bombast and twirling action-hero moves that belong in a ninja flick.

The movie is neither an affecting romance (Coco even considers marrying Balsan because "I'd achieve social status") nor an inspiring success story. Chanel sold herself to one guy, happened to get customers through him, and took a start-up loan from another lover.

New Moon is supposed to be an exciting love story plus monster action. So where’s the excitement? Where’s the action?

You wouldn't call The Boondock Saints II: All Saints Day a taut thriller. More like a fleshy, messy, jangled frenzy of shootouts and much discussion about the mechanics of romantic entanglements that bloom between prison inmates.

Matthew Broderick graduates from "boyish" and lurches straight into "curmudgeonly" in the would-be indie heartwarmer Wonderful World.

A popcorn picture that thinks it’s “The Last Emperor,” The Karate Kid is about as likely to grab your youngster’s attention as any other propaganda film made by the Chinese government.

Even for a horror movie, The Crazies is a bore, and we're talking about the most boring genre this side of dysfunctional-family indie drama.

It'll be a real miracle if anyone manages to stay awake throughout this extravagantly dull film.

Much of this footage might have been illuminating, even fascinating, in 2003. But seven years on, it's ancient history lacking insight, hindsight or a fresh take.

Even I realize that other people's babies are boring. So is Babies.

A comedy that forgot to install the funny.

This loopy farce has the feel of a wacky off-off-Broadway play with more energy than wit, but it has its moments. And the laid-back acting of Hoffman (son of Dustin) just about holds it together.

As portrayed by Anna Mouglalis and Mads Mikkelsen, Coco Chanel & Igor Stravinsky weren't exactly Rhett & Scarlett.

The Concert is an art-house trap, the cinematic equivalent of one of those salads that turns out to have more calories than a Big Mac. And for the same reason: gobs of thick, sweet dressing.

It feels as shopworn as a dusty VHS tape of "Less Than Zero."

The movie is still a mess, stumbling from comic-relief scenes that aren't funny to a job-training interlude in which we learn that, among other things, owls make excellent . . . blacksmiths?

A movie steeped in sin that squats awkwardly in a cinematic purgatory between tawdry and talky.

A sour, plotless and witless comedy-drama based on the final Mordecai Richler novel, wants to remind you of "Sideways" and its forlorn drink-moistened soul search. Giamatti is an ideal casting choice, but even this talented actor can't sell a lovable-jerk

It raises tangled questions about whether it is better to live humiliated or arm yourself, yet for the most part it's dramatically inert, talky and directionless, and it ends quietly without saying much of anything.

Porno plus Parkinson's don't quite add up to sexy fun.

not so much a movie as an "act," one that belongs at a club called Shenanigans or maybe Chuckleheads.

It contains no poetry. It simply conjures up a horrible feeling -- and then sits back awaiting congratulation.

Cavanagh, the always-engaging former star of "Ed" (with whom I am friendly), and the adorable Faris (whom I don't know -- but feel free to look me up, Anna!) make the non-animated scenes amusing, as the ranger and the documentarian fall in love and fight to save the park. But the script doesn't give them a lot to do.

A movie that appears to have been shot entirely on leftover sets from "Monty Python and the Holy Grail."

It sounds like it was written by the star pupils at the Cameron Academy of Screenwriting.

A long slog through ancient muck, so-so sword fights and dumb luck.

This "Alfie" meets "Boogie Nights" bio fizzles because, although Sassoon never stops talking, he never says anything.

Plotwise, the movie can (like many a Brooklynite) barely be bothered to comb its hair. Just when the pace needs to pick up, everyone sits around discussing fruity drinks.

Hop gives us . . . a bunny who poops jelly beans. That idea doesn't fill you with seasonal joy? Neither will the rest of the movie.

Attempting to fill Dudley Moore's top hat in Arthur, Russell Brand rapidly descends the rungs of the comedy ladder from "unfunny" to "irritating" to "vulgar" to the bottom one - "Andy Dick."

At best a sporadically amusing sketchbook of theater types.

Seldom does The Bang Bang Club show much interest in the big picture of South Africa. When moral issues do come to the forefront, the big worry seems to be not questionable behavior but bad publicity.

If you're wondering why this movie must stretch past two hours, it's because it takes that long to read every item in the cliché dictionary.

The movie has the feel of a weary business trip.

This mild drama plays out like one of those dull message movies that TV networks used to crank out almost weekly, but the earnestness is at times almost appealingly old-fashioned.

For a noir, the film is way too talky and convoluted, yet for a physics lesson, it's trash.

Their '50s-style comedy mugging not only don't come across to Americans, it's hard to believe even New Zealanders would care.

Only rarely does the film present a genuine insight, such as the observation that many black people loved to dress up in their finest for church because, during the week, they were so often dressed as servants and manual laborers.

Appalachian mountains get blown up to extract coal in the documentary The Last Mountain, a film in which activists are at least as hot as the TNT.

There's no way to put this gently: Watching people slam their heels and toes on the boards while drifting around the floor is about as fascinating as watching the carousel rotation in your favorite microwave oven.

Things are so dull, rote and humorless that when signboards in a European scene read "Mondiale Grand Prix," I at first thought they said "Mondale Grand Prix," which sounds like an unwanted award this movie could easily win.

Sarah's Key belongs to the Holocaust for Dummies section of Harvey Weinstein's History for Dummies series of mer etricious glossy dramas that ransack global events and turn them into middlebrow women's weepies to fill his trophy case.

Fine for fans? Sure. This stuff is crack for fans. Crack is really bad!

Feeble comic one-liners and slow pacing combine for a routine fangfest in this remake of the 1985 film.

A cheap exploitation picture wrapped in miles and miles of stale would-be Oscar scenes.

In Machine Gun Preacher, Gerard Butler says, "I've done a lot of things I'm not proud of that hurt a lot of people." But enough about "The Bounty Hunter," "The Ugly Truth" and "P.S. I Love You."

Real Steel is to action what the Anthony Weiner habit was to sex: It's so virtual, so distant from the thrill, that you wonder what the point is. Do you really want to pay to watch an actor playing a kid who in turn plays what amounts to a video game?

The shtick movie Paranormal Activity 3 is the horror equivalent of vaudeville comedy: a little patter, a little pie in the face, repeat.

This future looks awfully passé: The stimulus didn't work out. Neither did 1917 Russia.

"Happy Feet" was one of the greatest and most original animated films, but the sequel can't even decide what it's about for the first 40 minutes.

True, the stars are very good at what they do, but so what?

So moron-friendly they should have called it "Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Checkers." The skill level in the script is elementary school, my dear Watson.

The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo is, as you'd expect, rubbish, but the word is slightly too kind. The David Fincher film (like the very similar Swedish one - released in the US just last year! - and the book) is not even good rubbish.

Banal at the beginning and preposterous at the close, the British horror film Kill List jumbles together wildly incongruous ingredients to create a dramatic mush.

With great power comes the responsibility to make a decent movie, but the mysterious force running through Chronicle is the power to supersuck.

Demonstrating the limits of being too clever in a genre movie, the art-house chiller Silent House lets the tenseness of its first act trickle away.

[Director Kaye's] dedication to the material is admirable, but his tactic of following one dismal development with an even more depressing one comes to seem monotonous and pointless.

The script suffers from blandness and aimlessness.

I've seen a lot of rip-offs of "The Truman Show" and a lot of rip-offs of "Scream." I guess I have to give credit to The Cabin in the Woods for ripping off both at once.

It makes "Top Gun" look like the work of Orson Welles. At least the Tom Cruise movie remembered to cast actual actors.

Sheen's throwback portrayal is appealing enough, but flat characters, dull revelations and uninvolving complications make this deliberately small film feel nearly microscopic.

The considerable talents of Banks make the movie bearable.

As for a villain, you could do worse than Bryan Cranston as the evil political overlord who is trying to stamp out the resistance -- When he goes mano a mano with Farrell, it's not spine-tingling. It's embarrassing, like watching a dude beat up his dad.

Spits out enough scares and twists to maintain our interest, but the film's psycho-sociological layer is almost as cheesy and unconvincing as its low-rent action scenes.

Liberal Arts comes to us produced by Josh Radnor. Written by Josh Radnor. Starring Josh Radnor. Josh Radnor is much like Woody Allen, except for the talent.

The film as a whole goes from intriguing to irritating.

The dull, predictable direction is the perfect match for a watery, nondescript cast.

The movie is trying to do far too much and doesn't do anything well. "Ambitious" isn't the word here; "random" is more like it.

I don't think he (Apatow) did enough research on his topic. Because no one could be as whiny, spoiled, tasteless, combative and reliant on annoying stand-up comedy riffs as the entire cast of this film, the most disappointing one of the year.

Much has been made of the fact that Promised Land was partly funded by the enemies of our domestic gas industry - the foreign oil nabobs in the United Arab Emirates. But the film gets so cheesy that I suspect it was also secretly funded by Velveeta.

The tone of The Playroom is one of soppy moroseness. This imitation “Ice Storm” is as refreshing as a step into a puddle of slush.

No, which has been nominated for this year’s Best Foreign Language Film Oscar, is largely a gimmick picture: At all times, it looks like hastily assembled news footage shot on grainy videotape in 1988. That means light flaring up to spoil the image, bumpy camerawork, a nearly square picture and all-around grubbiness.

Fake documentaries annoy me — why not put in the effort and deliver the real thing? — and this one is not only aimless and stiff, it also rings false.

Argentine writer-director Juan Solanas’ fantasy romance Upside Down is such a gorgeous wreck that I could almost sense Terry Gilliam somewhere muttering, “Wait a minute, I should have been the one to screw up this idea.”

A great writer deserves a more penetrating and inquisitive documentary: Reverence is not the path to understanding.

Argentina’s noir Everybody Has a Plan is as sludgy as the river delta in which it takes place.

I’m probably more intrigued than 99.3 percent of the American public by the idea of deconstructing the hidden symbols in Stanley Kubrick’s “The Shining,” but the theories proposed in the doc Room 237 aren’t eye-opening. They’re laughable.

The villains are all wrong, the motivations are muddy, even the gadgetry is off. And the swaggering genius at the center of it all has become a preening fool.

Has the aroma of an autobiographical confession by someone for whom life hasn’t been overly difficult.

I had the sensation of sitting through a fourth-grade school play that contained no children of my own: the very definition of a nightmare.

You must lead a dull life if it would be enlivened by 76 minutes' worth of Old Joy.

School for Scoundrels teaches one important lesson: Avoid any thing carrying the banner of The Weinstein Co., which is to the multiplex what bagged spinach is to the produce aisle.

Halfway through, the jokes stop - the laughs never began - and give way to a tiresome thriller.

The movie's prideful silliness makes it semi-watchable in the manner of Saturday afternoon cable flicks like "Delta Force."

There are a couple of grams of interesting stories about Miami's drug traffic in Cocaine Cowboys, but the good stuff is cut with 50 kilos of cinematic baking soda.

Though nothing much happens, all of the actors get to do lots of teary close-ups.

If your film is as downbeat and deflated as this one, you had better be leading up to a more interesting insight than, "The older I get, the more I know that I don't know anyone."

Dull and dreary prequel.

The movie's last words are "This is how legends are born." Make that stillborn, because when the makers of this one pitch the sequel, the only answer is going to be, "Ah HA HA HA!"

They go on a biker trip from Cincinnati to the West Coast because they are tired of being bored and would prefer to bore us instead.

All the film provides is this bulletin: Lefties are angry about the things Lefties are angry about, chiefly corporate profits.

The movie takes us on a journey to an ugly, contentious period in our misty, ancient past - all the way back to four months ago, when "Apocalypto" came out.

In the Land of Women is one of those films informed by intimate personal experience - the experience of seeing "Garden State."

A depressing and tedious movie.

A wan effort at "Annie Hall"-style comedy, has about as much Manhattan sophistication as a gas station in Chippewa Falls, Wis.

Larry the Cable Guy channels both Moe and Curly in the Three Stooges-go-to-war comedy Delta Farce.

The silliness of Moore's oeuvre is so self-evident that being able to spot it is not liberal or conservative, either; it's a basic intelligence test, like the ability to match square peg with square hole. His documentaries are political slapstick that could have been made by a third Farrelly brother or a fourth Stooge.

Vanessa Redgrave spends Evening dying, and so does Evening.

Watching Robin Williams as a pastor giving premarital counseling to lovebirds John Krasinski and Mandy Moore in License to Wed is like having a laugh chastity belt cinched up tight around your funny bone.

The movie isn't insulting to homosexuals but to comedy.

Hot Rod started to go wrong at about the time someone in casting said, "You know what? I'll bet America's just about ready for the comedy stylings of Sissy Spacek."

Remember how "Double Indemnity" featured smart criminals and a smarter investigator? The indie film If I Didn't Care, with its dumb criminals and dumb cops, is a sort of "Double Stupidity."

Say hello to my leetle dagger! Shakespeare meets "Scarface" in an Aussie adaptation of "Macbeth" gone gangsta.

Apart from a heart-tugging plot twist, some lesson learning and more random football talk ("no more buttonhooks in the kitchen"), that's about it. Oh, except for the scene in which Kyra Sedgwick - who plays Joe's agent - farts. Be sure to update your résumé, Kyra.

This movie's heart is in the right place, which is one way of saying it's terrible.

The movie approaches the final scene with a straight face, but it left the audience giggling spasmodically. This script probably should have gone all the way and thrown in a few quips: If your movie is a joke, at least be intentionally funny.

In the mood for some dead-child entertain ment tonight? Reservation Road has what you're looking for. It's "In the Bedroom" crossed with, um, "Fever Pitch."

There isn't enough revealing material in the tedious documentary Jimmy Carter Man From Plains to sustain an 800-word magazine profile, let alone a two-hour film.

The only conceivable reason for Warner Bros. to (barely) release this mush is as a favor to Clint Eastwood, whose daughter Alison directed.

This is one of those thrillers where the person on-screen is often the only person in the theater who can't guess what'll happen next. Lots of laughable moments provide camp value, though, and Bentley ("American Beauty") makes for a charismatic creep.

The movie falls into all the usual rhetorical traps.

Most of the comedy comes from dull situations like a fat guy trying to put on a fat suit for no reason.

Holmes, with Alice Cooper hair and crazy Jim Carrey eyes, looks terrible and acts worse, unless this movie is unintentionally a lobotomy documentary. Whatever could have happened to her in the last couple of years to zap the talent out of her like this?

The movie chides us for being a sick voyeuristic society, hungry for the sight of violence. The purity of this moral stance is somewhat clouded by the movie's habit of staging sick violent acts.

Great actors make the craft look easy. In the Paris Hilton comedy The Hottie and the Nottie, acting looks very, very difficult.

A 2 1/2-year-old collection of mediocre stand-up routines and dull backstage chatter, Vince Vaughn's Wild West Comedy Show demonstrates why comedy clubs require you to have a couple of drinks.

Goes up for the dunk and misses the hoop, the backboard and the point. Instead, it manages to both strike out and get sacked. Whose idea was it to remake "Slap Shot" a la Jerry Lewis?

Flash Point comes loaded with cliches and immediately starts blasting them in every direction.

A formula flick that should have tapped out in the script stage.

Proves that what might be (but probably isn't) worth five minutes of your time while you're passing through the Times Square subway station really isn't worth a 1 1/2-hour movie.

This boring, torpid movie notices its own flaws and unwisely underlines them.

As phony as a re-enactment with finger pup pets.

Lazy, shallow and repetitive, Phil Donahue's Body of War is one of the most incompetent documentaries to emerge from the Iraq war.

The audience, if any, for Chaos Theory is going to be hit with a little puff of celluloid flatulence. The movie won't linger in the air, but that doesn't make it any less embarrassing.

Occasionally there is a striking image or a moment of wounded sweetness, but mainly the film provides ample proof that it's possible to be bizarre and boring at the same time.

The film is an exposé only of a filmmaker's senseless contempt for the military.

I'd call it a depressing soft-core porn flick, but that overstates its titillation factor. Mainly it's just icky.

At last: Uwe Boll has made his first intentionally funny film.

The Love Guru is even funnier than "Wayne's World" or "Austin Powers." Not.

The misleading documentary Trumbo paints a golden nimbus of holiness around the onetime highest-paid screenwriter in Hollywood, Dalton Trumbo, an on-the-record hater of democracy, defender of authoritarian rule and avowed Communist.

If Young ever converses with the gentlemen from al Qaeda, I expect his comments to be along the lines of "Please don't cut my head off."

Sounds like a great idea for a gay porno, but the soapy Save Me actually takes itself seriously.

Cheap, ignorant, tone-deaf and condescending, but what's strangest about it is that it actually thinks it's pro-soldier even as it portrays vets home on leave as foolish (Rachel McAdams), desperate (Tim Robbins) and dishonorable (Michael Pena) while playing all three situations for laughs.

Watching the film, I did manage to retain my empathy for the narrator, though: I was as desperate as he was to escape the situation I was in.

The entire script, which boils down to a hopelessly embarrassing lesson about "this beautiful place that can make people live again," seems to have been written within arm's reach of a bong.

A documentary that uses against Atwater images of lynch mobs, decades-old racist comments of his onetime boss Strom Thurmond, and a clip of Bryant Gumbel calling him "the architect of the evil campaign."

Rickman has fun playing a lecherous old bastard of a professor in Nobel Son, a pulpy would-be comic thriller, but the movie doesn't deserve him.

One of those Deep Dark Secret movies, the dull indie Lake City combines a wholly uninteresting family mystery with a wholly unconvincing crime drama.

A few magic rocks and tepid battle scenes do little to inspire interest in the goings-on as Malcolm McDowell and Eric Idle spout villainy and punch lines, respectively.

What's Spanglish for "oy"?

Sandler's bizarrely clunky kiddie flick, is a sort of upside-down "Princess Bride."

Confessions of a Shopaholic -- a "Devil Wears Prada" for Chico's customers.

Bears all the signs of having been composed by an inferior race of alien screenwriters from the Hackulon System.

Yet the moral at the end is that we should all be more tolerant of different cultures. Is that really true, though, if the culture you're trying to tolerate is trying to open your skull with a circular saw?

The thing is a virtual remake of the fusty oldie "Sweet Home Alabama," which came out back when movie scripts were written on stone tablets.

Plodding drama.

Last week I thought watching women take their clothes off was sexy. This week I saw A Wink and a Smile.

Aggressively ugly and intergalactically boring, the dismal sci-fi kiddie cartoon Battle for Terra is too weak to be shown anywhere except maybe on the next flight to Saturn.

The movie is as lumpy and misshapen as a giant booger.

Time for another of Steven Soderbergh's "experimental," i.e., half-assed, films.

At 86 minutes, the film spends exactly 86 more minutes with its subjects than can possibly be tolerated. Coincidence?

Cutesy? My pain was acutesy as the entire plot yawned before me.

Few kinds of art are more boring than the insistently transgressive, and few movies are more boring than Humpday.

If we can agree on anything in this great divided land of ours, it's this: Mischa Barton can't act.

Brutally banal chitchat about life and love ensues.

Demonstrating that an hour and a half of stunts doesn't make a movie, this feature is X-treme only in its multidimensional dullness.

Shouldn’t Moore run his yellow crime-scene tape around the White House instead of Wall Street? Anyway, President Obama said this month that in cases where the government has fully sold its TARP bank holdings, it has gotten back its money plus 17 percent. Damn those capitalist barons, breaking into our treasury and filling it with their filthy money.

Old Dogs does to the screen what old dogs do to the carpet. It's unfortunate that only the latter can be taken out and shot.

At last, the missing link be tween "Phantom of the Opera" and "Saw." Welcome to the gonzo revenge saga Law Abiding Citizen.

Like its subject, a lawsuit that is expected to go on for another 10 years, Crude has no ending. This is the perfect ending for this Goliath versus Goliath documentary about powerful personal-injury lawyers taking on a powerful corporation.

Like one of those five-minute featurettes on star athletes deployed to soak up time on the pregame show -- expanded to a paralytic length.

The movie (Untitled) is a tinny satire destined to go "(Unwatched)" because it is "(Uninteresting)."

At the end, as I stumbled back onto the street as disoriented and grateful as a released POW, I thought I'd need a calendar to calculate the length of time I'd been away.

The similar Kevin Bacon HBO movie "Taking Chance" got there first. Worse news: The earlier movie was sober, meticulous and quietly convincing, not a shouty, shoddy bore like this piece of flummery.

The makers of The Spy Next Door should give 50 percent of their profits to James Cameron for ripping off "True Lies." Let's see, what's 50 percent of nothing?

Aheroin-stuffed hipster buys a dog, eats Vietnamese food and sells drugs to pay for rehab in Fix, the latest piece of cine-junk stamped out by the indie fakedocumentary factory.

A wink of self-awareness might have made this a guilty pleasure; instead it's a howler along the lines of this fall's "Law Abiding Citizen."

Giving Mrs. Tiger Woods a run for her money as the most humiliated celebrity of the month, Russell Crowe accepts a third-banana role in the laughable weepie Tenderness.

John Travolta's From Paris With Love assassin/ superagent Charlie Wax is the master of whatever the opposite of wisecracking is. Fooljoshing? Lametalking? Flatlining?

Rolls out stiff clichés to tell a familiar story of racial injustice in the South.

The dullness of this writing is more than matched by the dull look achieved by director Allen Coulter, who appears to have shot the film through a piece of yard-sale Tupperware.

Their conversation is so insipid that watching this movie is no more interesting than talking to any random New York couple about what makes them tick.

Though Freddy is basically the same guy as in the 1984 original, his back story is different. For a few minutes the movie threatens to become interesting -- then retreats.

The transformation of the girls from winsome wisecrackers into whiny bling-obsessed chuckleheads is complete.

Tired? This series is as exhausted as Shrek after a day of baby wrangling and diaper changing.

A girl with relationship woes can hardly set foot in Europe these days without finding herself hip-deep in yummy food and tasty men. The latest iteration of the story is Letters to Juliet or, as I like to think of it, "Eat Pray Hurl."

I suppose it's nice that Romero has a hobby, but he couldn't be more of a bore if he were showing off his pine cone collection.

When Grown Ups star and co-writer Adam Sandler repeatedly slapped Rob Schneider in the face with a dehydrated banana, I was jealous of Schneider, who suffered less than I did getting slapped upside the head by this rotting fruit of a comedy.

The ever-excitable Martin Scorsese, who is listed as a producer and who pops up, bizarrely, to talk about how he decided to stage the last shot of "The Departed," concludes things by saying, "Cubism was not a style. It was a revolution!" Yep. And not in any way a fad.

Stone praises Latin America for turning toward "government of the people" (yet ignores Castro's lack of interest in democracy). But it's no wonder he's in such a sunny mood: We see him grow increasingly giddy while chewing coca leaves with Morales (a coca farmer who wants to make cocaine legal).

A two-hour trailer: explosion, shape-shift, chase, wisecrack, repeat. Its most amazing trick will be how it vanishes from your memory before the seat you vacate has stopped moving.

Darlings, there's nothing quite so tragique as a boring eccentric.

It's condescending, it's vague, it's unfair and, ultimately, it's pointless.

Almost without exception, the men are either sickening deviants or wise mentors while the ladies tend to be kickboxing hipsters or victims of sexual abuse (many are both).

Step Up 3D is strictly 1D. Tired choreography and moldy hip-hop gestures accompany insipid characters.

A pretentious Euro-snore that should occasion a fraud prosecution for any marketer who calls it a thriller -- and which stars an actor who seems to wish his name were Jorg Clooné.

Name names, please. Or shut up.

A 2010 movie that could have been made in 1940.

Never amounts to anything more than a rambling, studenty exercise in undergraduate cinema vérité. Some expressive, arty photography and a mildly satiric attitude toward stage poseurs do little to make the picture bearable.

If Swedish villains are this dumb, put me on the next plane to Stockholm. Just don't make me watch these idiotic movies on the flight.

Let us return to reality (all this happened less than three years ago; do documentarians think we don't read the papers?).

The laziness of this filmmaking (which assumes you know that Gray killed himself in 2004) is of a piece with the emphatically uninteresting tales told by a classic dinner-party bore who once referred to his ramblings as "creative narcissism." He was half-right.

To compete with the quintessence of nullity that is Sofia Coppola's insufferable Somewhere, imagine a film called "Wanna See Me Crack My Knuckles?" or possibly "Let's Learn How Long It Takes This Shallow Dish of Liquid To Evaporate."

A 42-minute TV soap has more story than this limp and familiar tale of domestic woe.

A drippy romance that makes Nicholas Sparks look like Leo Tolstoy.

Wind power plus solar power equals hot air in the propaganda piece Carbon Nation, a documentary so disconnected from reality it could have been produced by President Obama's speechwriters.

For all of its homicidal aliens and toothy beasts, I Am Number Four did contain one element that genuinely unsettled me: the line "produced by Michael Bay." Nooooooo!

With its poky pacing, thin characters, obvious message and predictable plot, the movie amounts to a cinematic sermon that, like many of those given in houses of worship, has a good-hearted message that will be difficult to deliver to a snoozing audience.

I have no idea how to blow up a two-page fairy tale into 100 minutes of blockbuster, but frankly I was hoping for more backstory about the titular cape in Red Riding Hood. Thread count? Machine washability?

The movie, a sequel to 2009's much more sprightly and amusing indie "Women in Trouble," seems to be reaching for Robert Altman territory. Instead of offering many intriguing stories, though, it can't come up with even one.

Combining narrative heavy-handedness with an airy disdain for the details of the situation, director Julian Schnabel gives us a one-sided view of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in Miral.

Far too childish to intrigue adults yet too slow and dull for kids.

The script is blaring and obvious at all times, and in his second directorial effort, David Schwimmer doesn't have a clue how dull it is for the audience to endure scene after scene of anguish, crying and screaming matches

At its best, the movie is an unbearably precious slice of stale imitation Wes Anderson. But at its worst, it's dull and strangled by its own would-be jaunty deadpan.

This genre flat-lined a long time ago. Why won't it stay dead?

The American Muslim comedian Ahmed Ahmed does lots of jokes about how he isn't a terrorist. How odd: As I sat through his tepid act, I could have sworn he was bombing.

In the appalling documentary If a Tree Falls, a narrator referring to an arson attack by the Earth Liberation Front solemnly intones, "In one night, they had accomplished what years of picketing and writing had never been able to do." Well, yes -- terrorism does make short work of red tape, doesn't it?

Really it's just a trashy bid to be the "Scarface" of Mesopotamia.

A pointless drama that trafficks in cliché.

The real mystery is this: Even if you find this guerrilla art project utterly fascinating, why would anyone bother to release an incomplete film about it?

The good news about I Don't Know How She Does It is that it's so bad that it's another ovary-punch to the formula chick flick. Bring on more films like "Bridesmaids."

Jane's Journey is an exceedingly graceful and dignified sleep aid.

Recalling the lesson about bringing a knife to a gun fight, a British documentary filmmaker brings a spoon to a hatchet job in the film Sarah Palin: You Betcha!

This is essentially a student film offering nothing but absurdly contrived coincidence.

This film is narratively inert (we spend a lot of time listening to the same questions being asked over and over) and, like virtually all docs in its genre, less than vigorous in its pursuit of truth.

Sorry, but if your sensibility is pure trashy camp, don't expect anyone not to laugh when you try to be earnest.

This time the execs are lobbying us, yet the public grows increasingly furious as our tax dollars fund corporate welfare, bailouts and dumb ideas like the $41,000 golf cart that is the Chevy Volt.

The indie road movie Janie Jones is billed as "inspired by the true story" of its writer-director, David M. Rosenthal. Impossible. No one's life is this boring.

Even at a supposed celebration, the well-bred and well-off aren't really happy at all. So the title is ironic. Thanks for that profound insight.

Moreover, in attempting to update the play to a buzzing CNN world, Ralph Fiennes proves that as a director, he makes a fine actor.

The French affection (affectation?) for conversational film reaches absurd proportions in the talkathon Domain.

How cheap-looking is the modern-day romantic tragedy Private Romeo? Take a couple of friends to see it, and the amount you spend may exceed the amount the filmmakers did.

This indie documentary is egregiously Hollywood in spirit. That a take-charge white football coach can buck up a place like Manassas HS with some gridiron grit is a lie we want to believe.

The only part of this movie anyone's ever going to remember is the pair of scenes in which Ghost Rider pees flame.

The Lorax is awful, like chronic disease.

When they came in to pitch A Thousand Words, no doubt by calling it "Jerry Maguire" meets "Groundhog Day," a studio exec should have raised the palm of rejection and said, "When you stop being sadly derivative and write an original idea that's as good as those two, come back."

May be well-intentioned, but it's as obvious and inert as a spoonful of mashed potatoes.

Fails to draw much humor from farcical situations.

Maybe DVDs of "Buried" and ATM will be sold in the same package someday. You could call it a trapped-in-a-box set.

Nesting is a sitcom, but a really slow and dull one that barely grinds out 22 minutes' worth of plot to fill a 90-minute hole.

A decent idea for an episode of "Everybody Loves Raymond," The Do-Deca-Pentathlon falls short as a movie.

At first glance, Grassroots doesn't seem like much of an idea for a movie. Nor at second, third or fourth glance. Your fifth glance will be at your watch, and at sixth glance your eyelids will be getting very, very heavy.

The danger of dreaming up a predictable adventure for a group of nobodies you hold in contempt is that the audience will see your indifference and raise you.

A sort of "Babel" of bonking, 360 gives us much in the way of international anguish, frustrated coupling and longing stares, but there's very little plausibility or genuine emotion in its egregiously contrived story of ardor gone amiss.

Corny action scenes and borderline-hilarious direction by Isaac Florentine mark the film as an obvious straight-to-video item that somehow took a wrong turn into a movie theater.

A Walmart "Wall Street," the hedge-fund drama Supercapitalist is junk merchandise stamped "made in China."

The climax is as dull as reading the dictionary of a language you do not speak.

Dire musical interludes are sprinkled throughout the sprawling mess Beloved, an uninvolving would-be romantic epic that spans 45 years in the life of a mother and her daughter, starting in the early 1960s.

Stakes aren't the only problem with this sloppy thriller, which combines careening images with turgid storytelling.

Biehn has appeared in dozens of B-movies and evidently had no greater ambition than to come up with a grindhouse movie full of sex, gore and cheap thrills, but there is far too little of any of these to maintain interest in a straight-on story that reserves its only surprise for the final 30 seconds.

Sundance Mopey Alienation Flick No. 4,228 is For Ellen, an empty angst-athon that proves 90 minutes of close-ups of Paul Dano looking wounded can be even less interesting than it sounds.

There may be a lot left to say about Hurricane Katrina, but if so, I'm Carolyn Parker doesn't say it.

All I wanted to do was escape from this aggressively ugly world and its equally unattractive characters. It's not that the movie is in bad taste or cheesy (though it is) but that all of its hyperviolence adds up to nothing: This thing is dedd.

This is just a slow-moving skin flick broken up by lots of boring discussions about Cherry's future.

The Paperboy can't decide whether to be an unfunny sex comedy, a half-hearted detective story or a woeful race drama - so it decides to be all three, then becomes yet another movie (a swampy "Heart of Darkness") in the final act.

Directed by journeyman actor Matthew Lillard, this tame and by-the-numbers effort never succeeds in making the outcast situation cinematic or interesting.

It's another in the bicoastal indie industry's endless series of self-congratulatory comedies about the alleged dopiness of middle American hicks who do things like read Parade magazine and decorate with flags.

There needs to be a 12-step program for movie people to stop sharing their "deeply personal" yet insight-free stories of addiction.

The parallels between the kids' war and the real one are made far too obvious by Christophe Barratier, who made the equally treacly "The Chorus" and infests the movie with nonstop musical goo.

Even if you overlooked the production values from a 1986 porno and special effects like something your nephew cooked up on his Mac, the movie's "Yay, money!" zingers are just a big bag of sad.

None of Dunham's humor comes across, except when someone says, "And when you speak, your words are snakes I swat at with swords," which is hilarious, but not intentionally.

I'll grant that the film has many layers. All of them are terrible.

Cancels itself out by being too campy to take seriously and too tragic to laugh at.

At 96 minutes it is exactly 93 1/2 minutes too long. If they're going to put this artifact in theaters, they'd better charge 1973 grindhouse prices: a dollar a ticket.

A low-watt, low-wit comedy.

This infomercial for Helnwein's work as designer for an Israeli opera called "The Child Dreams" doesn't tell us a lot about how opera comes together, but it is accidentally revealing about its subject.

Painful, misshapen and a little gross. It's an enlarged prostate of a movie.

If the poor really interested such filmmakers, these movies would have something to offer other than lugubriousness masquerading as seriousness, and clichés presented as hard truths.

Among gay Jewish French postman movies, Let My People Go! may be a Hall of Fame entry, but alas, by any other standard this would-be sex comedy is a dismal failure.

A supernatural horror-comedy that's frighteningly lacking in wit, John Dies at the End thinks it's "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" for dudes. But in its randomness, its vulgarity and its level of humor, it's more like the collected writings on the walls of a roadside men's room.

There was a time when the climate-change alarmist movement was like a guy with a megaphone at your ear, but now it’s more like a squirrel at your shoelaces.

I’d like to take back all those times I said Nicolas Cage was one of the most annoying actors on film. It turns out he’s equally terrible when he’s only on the soundtrack. And yet Cage is the least of the problems with The Croods.

A preposterous supernatural thriller that inexplicably managed to sign up Julianne Moore to star.

This is a horror movie that’s really a supposed comedy; she’s (Lohan) a supposed comedy actress who’s actually scary.

Just because two people are miserable doesn’t mean they’re interesting.

A weird mash-up of disaster, horror and dystopia genre pictures, Aftershock fails to make the Earth move.

The terrorism thriller Java Heat sure is violent. I don’t even want to tell you how viciously Mickey Rourke mangles the French accent he’s trying to do.