It starts as enjoyable B-movie pulp, degenerates to camp, then turns into laughable lunacy.

If you have a strong stomach, a weak sense of disbelief, an active interest in Denzel Washington or Angelina Jolie and a temporarily inactive brain, you may enjoy it awhile.

A fairy tale full of fascist, Bible-thumping straights, self-deluded and pathetic gay people who deny their impulses, and two honest lesbians who triumph.

Flat as a Moravian cookie, flat as a sailor's wallet after a month in port, flat as the average European's impression of the Earth in A.D. 800.

Writers Pamela Falk and Michael Ellis aim for the soufflé-style comedy audiences ate up greedily 40 years ago, but the film falls flat.

Has the sex appeal of a Road Runner cartoon, one-tenth the laughs and equal plausibility.

Punch-Drunk Love buries a terrific performance by Adam Sandler under a heap of faux cleverness, meaningless symbolism and irritating mannerisms.

This film might have been daringly funny 10 years ago, even with its broadest elements intact. Now it's comfortable as old slippers and unthreatening as a sleeping kitten.

The film's as chaotic and heavy-handed as "Summer of Sam" without the same sense of harsh reality.

The Truth About Charlie...is that this "Charade" remake is a lumpen bore.

Ambiguity can enrich a movie, but artists abdicate their responsibilities if they don't take a stance of any kind.

The outcome is alternately unsatisfying, meaningless, contradictory and laughable.

As lame as a three-legged mule.

Since there can be no suspense, the point is to enjoy the hewing of limbs and the severing of necks, to delight in chopped-off fingers and gouged-out eyes. The title characters are embodiments of utter evil, right?

Solaris is a film where people...often...speak... like... this, and the camera moves slowly across sterile interiors.

Just a great, empty wind machine.

A miler trying to run a marathon, a fair middleweight idea trying to deliver heavyweight thrills.

As in most cheap futuristic movies, everything is dark or illuminated by a drab bluish glow. The buildings look grubbily similar to each other, so every location has to be identified onscreen. Of course, that saves the audience the trouble of paying attention.

What a riveting movie The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen might have been! And what a rickety mess it turned out to be when the people responsible lost faith in the origin of the material!

The picture brims over with ideas - good ones, silly ones, maudlin ones, witty ones, absurd ones - and they bump up against each other like ingredients in a vast stewpot that never comes to a continuous boil.

Epps emerges mostly unscathed, and Dutton gives an excellent performance; he's as able before the camera as he is inept behind it.

Should appeal to anyone who likes films as mushy and unsurprising as baby food.

It took four years to come up with this? Someone needed that long to assemble this patchy, recycled collection of gags about stinky butts, superfreaks, finger-wide blunts and racial cliches?

Director Richard Donner finds a few startling images for bloody battle scenes, but awful dialogue prevents the actors from giving performances of any depth.

Speaking of sounding Southern, I have to admit that the accents didn't match, and half the actors couldn't even do accents. But since we all sound alike down here, that's no big deal.

Has any movie this millennium had less reason to exist than First Daughter?

Isn't a bad movie, until John Woo remembers that he's John Woo and we remember that Ben Affleck is Ben Affleck.

No one associated with the film tries very hard, from cinematographer Peter Deming -- San Francisco has never looked so drab -- to composer Mark Isham, whose watery jazz score is meant to summon melancholy but merely relieves insomnia.

Ghost Ship, which can best be described by altering one consonant in the second word, sustains the stylishness of its opening for exactly three minutes.

The shreds have vanished in Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle, which runs at that speed during its stunts but is utterly out of gas in every other way.

The Girl Next Door is to "Risky Business" what near-beer is to beer. If you're desperate for a mild buzz, you might make it do.

I don't know if the new movie is Smith's weakest. It's certainly his most disposable, a warmed-over hash of jokes that will have Mewes fans rolling with laughter and the rest of us rolling our eyes in disbelief.

After five minutes, Christopher Walken vanishes. We wait vainly for the next 90 minutes for someone, anyone to bring that kind of danger, unpredictability and vitality to a story as drab as army fatigues.

De Niro wears a shamefaced look most of the time, as if doubly embarrassed: He agreed to a movie he knew was worthless, yet he's too lazy or indifferent to give us his best.

It's not only an ultraviolent, ludicrously inconsistent rip-off of Bradbury's idea, but it poisons the well for future efforts.

Looks as if it were thrown together as carelessly as slum housing.

Long before this interminable film reaches its bogus finale, you'll realize that the people in it aren't real.

As Disney-fied as "Pinocchio," barely challenging the images Americans have treasured for 150 years.

Without a philosophical payoff, without characters whose relationships resonate in our hearts, without explanations for situations that beg for explanations, what are we left with? To quote another great writer of battle scenes: "a tale full of sound and fury, told by an idiot, signifying -- nothing."

A frenzied, cacophonic cartoon.

Interesting and idiotic elements almost exactly balance each other.

When the film stumbles to its last and silliest conclusion, you realize much of the plot line was unnecessary -- or couldn't have happened at all!

Passed as slowly as if I'd been sitting naked on an igloo, Formula 51 sank from quirky to jerky to utter turkey.

Where "Wedding" introduced us to a Greek family most of us had never seen before, "Connie" plays out like a clumsy episode of "Laverne and Shirley:" familiar, phony and forgettable.

Abbott, Petroni and director Michael Rymer do exploit the visual and aural cliches of vampire movies from the last 20 years: The creatures wear tattoos, shave their heads, listen to blistering rock and dress in black leather. For a band of societal outsiders, they're pathetically conformist.

Might have been funnier if it had been put together with more care.

Heavy-handed symbolism permeates the picture, down to the leading lady's name.

Cowardice and cliché - not a tasty combination.

If they decided not to give us Camelot, did they have to leave us with so Camelittle?

The opposite of memorable.

Sometimes seems longer than a rainy Super Bowl.

Man on Fire is as ludicrous as "John Q," "Virtuosity" and "Out of Time," yet substantially more violent, artificial, self-conscious and dull.

It's theoretically possible to make a fascinating film about a thieving, self-indulgent, freebasing, treacherous scumbag who pimps his girlfriend to a gangster and contributes nothing to society. Wonderland isn't that film.

Without a plausible script, crisp dialogue or rounded characters, the majority of the picture will sag gracelessly.

A mediocrity at any time, because of its implausible script and bland characters.

M. Emmet Walsh and Elizabeth Franz enliven the film as a couple across the street...These wonderful old actors briefly raise the level of the picture to the kind of warm but honest drama it ought to have been.

The problem isn't that Tarantino's in love with death; it's that he's deadly dull. Even "Natural Born Killers" made a stab at social commentary and satire of America?s celebrity-mad media. Kill Bill merely giggles through gore and asks you to smile at its style.

This picture has an ugly habit of humiliating Bridget, which "Diary" did not.

Like so many sequels, The Chronicles of Riddick demonstrates Hollywood's law of diminishing returns: Its quality is inversely proportional to its budget.

A Frankenstein's monster of a movie: clumsy, patched together from parts that don't align properly, desperate to be loved, destined to be chased by mobs with pitchforks - those will be the critics - until it stumbles into its grave.

It's ploddingly directed, indifferently acted and insufficiently frightening.

The filmmakers find "laughs" in sadistic violence.

What's the message: that women must remain vigilant about poundage to keep husbands from chasing taut-thighed secretaries? That's a charitable Christmas thought.

Everything about the film seems to have been done on the cheap. The music sounds like it came from a high school band.

Angelina Jolie is definitely worth her salt as an action hero, but Salt is never worth its Angelina Jolie.

An unmemorable, frenzied, characterless hodgepodge that delights the eyes while numbing the brain.

The Critic's Code of Honor forbids me from explaining in detail why the storytelling is so inept, because I'd have to spoil the silly surprises. So I'll say only this: You can interpret the climax two ways, and both will probably infuriate you.

The sequel doesn't develop the characters, interject any warmth into its frenetic story or take us anywhere we haven't been.

The worst thing about the picture is that the people involved all seem to realize it's generic.

The movie that's meant to be his (Apatow) most personal turns out to be his most dully generic.

It begins as energetic, clichéd nonsense and ends as irritating, clichéd nonsense.

The film's filled with inconsequential scenes and supporting characters who add useless atmosphere or by-the-book diversity.

I hope his life was less dull than the movie he's made from it.

Slater narrates as if reading a restaurant menu. Reid seems to have learned each long sentence in segments, so she wouldn't be overtaxed.

Messing may simply be one of those actresses who's the right size for TV and the wrong size for the big screen.

Everything here has been done better in other books, other movies. The lone remarkable thing is the level of violence, which exposes the cowardice and hypocrisy of the Motion Picture Association of America's ratings system.

Weak, obligatory stabs at humor make it more generic than it might've been.

Even if we leave aside the obvious time travel paradoxes, we can have a good horse laugh at the rest of the plot's inanities.

Not even the repeated sight of Jessica Alba in a bikini, the camera caressing her like the eyes of a strip-club patron, can lift this leaden refuse off the ocean floor.

Goes awry within moments and never gets on track. The scripters and director Harold Ramis have no idea whether to aim for cynical humor, film-noir romance or post-crime tension, so they miss all three targets completely.

Babbit clumsily underlines emotional moods.

Its main feature is incessant, unimaginative profanity...Take out the cursing, and you're left with a plebeian drama about angry, aimless potheads, sloppily directed by the man who wrote it.

As close to perfectly unwatchable as it can be.

Once again, something that might have been a faintly amusing sketch on "Saturday Night Live" -- maybe even a tolerable 30-minute short, had the writing been more clever -- gets tortured into the shape of a feature film.

Bertino directs at a funereal pace. Speedman remains comatose, though Tyler flickers fitfully to life. The mournful look on her face suggests she's remembering the days when she was given more psychologically complex scripts, such as "Armageddon."

I'm afraid it just stinks.

Designed to appeal to people who thought "She's All That" was too mentally demanding.

Atmosphere goes only so far in a story where the major characters fade from memory.

The picture lasts 111 minutes, partly because of numerous false endings. Now, that constitutes cruel and unusual punishment.

Totally underwhelming.

Affleck simply wasn't meant to play action heroes or tough guys. He's about as tough as tapioca pudding.

It's the cheapest looking, least exciting, least funny Chan project I've ever seen.

Mostly, you get a pain in the head from the assault on your senses and déjà vu as thick as heartburn after an anchovy pizza.

It's a fable that descends rapidly into nonsense.

"I didn't write this." In heaven, Graham Greene is mumbling those same words over and over right now.

It's the poster child for bad taste, not to mention bad construction.

Embodies all that's wrong with the sellout culture of Hollywood.

Let me say, in my desire always to be positive, that Serving Sara is the funniest film I know where a man sticks his arm up a bull's rectum to massage its prostate.

Studios can release movies even more insultingly dumb, crudely assembled and cheaply produced than this one, though such an achievement will require some effort.

The movie's weirdness isn't organic; it's imposed, like barber-pole stripes painted on a prison wall.

Director Ivan Reitman used to know how to tell a silly story, back around the time of "Stripes" and "Ghostbusters."

And what of Roger Avary, the writer who shared the Academy Award for writing with Tarantino? He continues to plummet toward oblivion with The Rules of Attraction, which ranks with the Great Pyramid of Khufu as a monument to self-indulgence.

Like the Big E himself. It starts out fast, dangerous, sexy, confident, funny with an edge. It ends up confused, bloated, unable to leave the stage when it should.

You won't see a single joke here you haven't encountered before, all in funnier forms.

I don't know if Nispel and Scott Kosar, who make their feature film debuts here, are the worst director and writer in the world, though they might well represent the United States if anyone holds a competition. I do know they deliver a total of zero laughs, scares or surprises in this remake of the infamously creepy 1974 picture.

It's as French as a half-smoked Gauloise and, like a half-smoked Gauloise, it stinks.

I think this camp classic is an accident along the lines of "Showgirls": howlingly funny, filled with gratingly earnest performances, riddled with dialogue that will be quoted at parties.

The plot's as thin as a debutante's cigarette case.

Writer-director Reverge Anselmo has created a movie of ineptness so perfect and unified as to boggle the mind.

Pitof can be blamed for the 89-cent digitized sets, the jerky or rubbery special effects, some clunky performances and more continuity errors than I could count.

Does David Arquette have a career? If so, what's he doing in this unintentionally hilarious gangster movie?

Campion has no clue how to sustain suspense and no actress of the caliber of Holly Hunter, Nicole Kidman or Kate Winslet (her recent leading ladies) in the main role.

Spike Lee's films have been provocative, blunt, thoughtful, misguided, daring, sentimental, funny, honest and silly. But 25th Hour earns the director two new adjectives: irrelevant and tedious.

A three-hour-and-10-minute exercise in slight characterization, pointlessly showy editing and vapid plotting.

A painful bore.

Represents everything that over-budgeted Hollywood can possibly get wrong in a period piece: It feels both long and slow, it's unfocused and self-contradictory, its generic characters are played too broadly, it's anachronistic..

Birth, which should never have been conceived, is obscure in every way: visually, philosophically and psychologically.

Self-respecting filmgoers will find this a "Walk" to dismember.

This movie is an act of hubris so huge that, in Alexander's time, it would draw lightning bolts from contemptuous gods. Today it will get sniggers from stunned critics and a collective yawn from a public unlikely to share Stone's egomania.

As a British politician said of a corrupt but articulate peer, "The Cat in the Hat" is like a rotten mackerel seen by moonlight: It shines as it stinks.

Emotionally stultifying and brain-dead.

This script by the husband-and-wife team of Leora Barish and Henry Bean is hopelessly contrived and takes forever to get to the point. (I warn you: The film does not absolutely identify the killer.)

The most catastrophic misfire in a dreadful movie season.

Zomboid, convoluted excuse for a thriller is among year's worst.

I do have one overpowering Y2K fear: that Hollywood will keep belching out movies as excruciatingly dull, brutal, mindless and overlong as End of Days.

It's an uncoordinated, flailing hodgepodge of music videos, chases, crashes and moronic plot twists.

About 45 minutes into Swordfish, the picture degenerates permanently from drivel to sleaze (only a short drop).

Whenever the music subsides and the characters speak the Coens' lines, the film turns back into mush.

Just when the story reaches its idiotic nadir, Neil (Diamond) shows up to save the day with a song and a smile.

The worst horror sequel of this or many another summer.

It's bombastic, chaotic, plodding, visually dreary and patchily written.

Director Vondie Curtis-Hall has managed to top (or should I say "bottom"?) his last theatrical release, Mariah Carey's "Glitter," with a movie that offers not one praiseworthy moment: not a scene, not a performance, not a technical achievement, not even a line of dialogue.

It's well-shot and well-edited by Hollywood standards, though special effects don't reach the top Hollywood level. The stars have their hearts in their work: Cameron and Johnson don't have great depth but give their all. Currie makes a subtle villain.