The pervasive gore overpowers the few clumsy attempts at wit here, though the film does have one funny line. As one of Poe's literary rivals watches a razor-edged pendulum slice into his abdomen, the man screams in protest: "But I'm only a critic!"

Unfortunately, the script, based on Deborah Moggach's 2004 novel "These Foolish Things," might better be described as pure British stodge: high-starch English comfort food of more sentimental than nutritional value.

The result is an offence-free, mild entertainment in which everyone from cast to scriptwriter seems to be winging it.

This Means War is a Valentine's date dud: Think wilted roses, squashed chocolates and flat champagne.

Once again Anna Faris manages to be the best thing in another not very good Anna Faris movie.

A potentially appealing story about a rescued disabled dolphin gets smothered with inspirational family values guff.

A movie with a double-crossing intelligence plot that's so generic it's an irritating intrusion in a lively chase through the streets and shantytowns of Cape Town, South Africa.

This parade of admiration is almost as exhausting as the experience of a Motörhead concert.

From time to time, as Alexandre Desplat's insistent score surged yet again while the characters rushed by, I found myself wanting the movie to slow down. Some of these images are too beautiful to disappear so quickly.

A try-anything, fitfully amusing muddle that wears its mocking cynicism a bit too proudly.

Where this PG-rated adaptation of a hit Broadway show, adapted by Adam Shankman falls down is by being far too mild for its supposedly outrageous subject.

While it’s fine for a director to explore his childhood inspirations, you hope he would bring something a bit more personal to it. Instead, Jack the Giant Slayer, while well-crafted, feels entirely generic.

Ultimately, his (Silver) film settles for a queasy mix of high-toned intentions and commercial compromises.

While a lot of geography is covered, as a concert film, Conan O'Brien Can't Stop is decidedly thin entertainment.

A lot more cutting would have made this movie much funnier – but it should have taken place in the editing room, not on the screen.

None of it rings true, except perhaps the presence of an ambitious local TV news reporter (Kyra Sedgwick) who begins recording every macabre moment with relish.

Though the script takes pains to paint George as a passive boy-man, there's just not enough lovable here and too much of the thoughtless lout. Butler beware: In acting as in soccer, if you keep taking dives, sooner or later you pay the penalty.

So why does Savages feel so calculated, cutesy, free of suspense and trashy only in the uninteresting sense? No doubt, Stone is trying... but it all feels more like flexing atrophied muscles rather than creating a believable experience.

The Iron Lady is a performance in search of a film.

By the time we reach the climactic ending, the script clearly calls for an exorcist with a chainsaw to trim back this metaphor run amok.

Plays precariously close to an unfunny sociopathic case study.

Kenneth Lonergan's new film, Margaret, finally released six years after it was shot, now seems destined to become part of film history as one of the more stunning examples of a filmmaker's sophomore slump.

As anodyne as it is, Timothy Green may represent the last gasp of a genre, the live-action family fable, that has been an entertainment staple for a couple of generations of moviegoers.

5 Days of War feels low-budget in everything except its battle sequences.

A sporadically amusing, occasionally off-putting French farce.

Parental Guidance is one of those intergenerational embarrassment comedies in the "Meet the Fockers" line, where children can enjoy seeing grown-ups looking ridiculous.

Performances, over all, are a mixed bag; Zeta-Jones does a fair, if incongruous, impersonation of a forties vamp, while Chandler and Pepper do well with limited screen time. As usual, Wright, as a Machiavellian police commissioner, transcends so-so-material to establish himself as the most complex character in the film.

It attempts to take local history of the illegal whisky trade and raise it to the level of myth.

While Bale speaks in an anachronistically modern American vernacular, the Chinese cast recite grammatically perfect, phonetic English so stilted you find yourself wishing the film would stick to subtitles. This is not so much a question of a story being lost in translation as a movie that never finds the right story to tell.

As a movie trying to make the case for parental management of the education process, Won't Back Down, doesn't make an entirely convincing case.

A mixed bag of old-school and contemporary horror tricks that occasionally raises a hair prickle of intrigue.

What promised to be a teen screwball comedy with a supernatural twist soon descends into special-effects overkill and camp acting from the overqualified supporting cast.

World-weariness is not really the energetic star's best driving gear. Nor are declarations of menace intended to identify Jack Reacher as a modern-day mythic avenger. When he tells an enemy, through his clenched choppers, "I mean to beat you to death and drink your blood from a boot," the effect is, unintentionally, popcorn-spitting funny. Talk about overreaching.

As long as Chbosky sticks to the story of surviving high school, Perks has a modest charm. But a melodramatic last-act bombshell about Charlie's troubled past, is jarring – like the giant foot of Godzilla descending to squash tender Bambi. It's a case of too much, too late and, ultimately, from a different kind of movie.

A good-looking but anecdotally slight dramedy about life and lifestyles in Los Angeles's hip Silver Lake district.

A comedy about a middle-aged dad who has an affair with his neighbour's daughter, The Oranges does not taste freshly squeezed.

Promised Land is a low-budget effort, far too awkward and contrived a drama to change many hearts and minds.

For all the talent involved, The Eye of the Storm is an incident-stuffed but lacklustre affair – a case of lots of sturm, but not enough drang – that reaches for a satiric sting and emotional depth it never achieves.

The script’s occasional gestures toward making this an allegory of the failed American dream are extremely unconvincing in the context of a movie that revels in the excesses of macho culture while laughing at the hapless and stupid who can’t get it right.

The film only really has a pulse when it switches to live action in a few brief archival snippets, most memorably in John Cleese's appropriately outrageous eulogy for his late friend, an offering in the name of "anything for him, but mindless good taste."

Lewy’s script doesn’t cop out with any sentimental redemption, but neither does it establish why the self-destructive Lachlan deserves our sympathy.

For its last third, the entire thing gets a Frankensteinian head transplant, and turns into derivative serial-killer nonsense.

Aside from Jones’s broadly entertaining performance as the egotistical Supreme Commander, the movie, directed by Peter Webber (The Girl with the Pearl Earring), is a dud.

What remains “indie” about At Any Price is that this is an unabashed social-message film – one that plays out like a cross between the agribusiness exposé "Food, Inc." and Arthur Miller’s "Death of a Salesman."

On the downside, Rosebraugh’s own film is too self-righteous and his attempts to play a humour-challenged, lightweight version of Michael Moore in front of the camera is a misfire. The climate-change deniers are comforting, though obviously wrong. Greedy Lying Bastards is grating, even if it’s right.

There's an easy familiarity and charm in the creased, middle-aged faces of Nimoy, Shatner and DeForest Kelly (the perpetually irascible Dr. McCoy), all of whom now play their parts with an ever-present twinkle. Their behavior rarely has anything to do with the motives provided by the plot; rather, they wear their characters like old habits, as they boldly go where they've always gone before. [26 Nov. 1986, p.C5]

The problem is that director Wayne Wang seems deaf to the tonal differences between coming-of-age, magic realism and children's comedy.

Director Adam Shankman pushes together scenes with little rhythm or flow. Writers Thomas Lennon and Robert Ben Garant ignore credibility, throw in pointless sight gags, treat humiliation as comedy and use tiresome ethnic stereotypes. In short, Diesel doesn't get the help he needs.

The results are so listless, dated and characterless.

None of this is funny enough to justify stealing 90 minutes of your viewing time.

An Adam Sandler movie without Adam Sandler, it turns out, is not necessarily an improvement.

The lower orders seem to have been left out of The Lost City -- there just aren't any poor characters -- which for a movie about a workers' revolution seems downright slipshod.

Just my luck that I saw the trailer for the film several times and already knew all of this, which made the long-form version of the movie redundant.

Norbit is pretty much a bad-taste sinkhole.

Call it Nancy Drew and the Case of the Confused Adaptation.

The result is as off-putting as biting into a confection in which the sugar has been replaced by salt.

Distinctly humdrum, The Last Legion, a boy's adventure story that seems to have been dragged out of the vaults of some early-sixties TV series.

The problems with First Sunday extend well beyond the hokey premise and predictable performances to the fundamentals of script, direction and tone.

If you thought "300" was silly, think of 10,000 BC as 33.333 times sillier.

The movie's dated, stereotypical comedy often contradicts its wholesome intentions, coming across as laboriously cutesy and occasionally perverse.

You leave Stolen Summer with the feeling that you have watched acrobats stumble on a tightrope with no net below. Not a great show, but at least nobody got badly hurt.

The script is definitely mediocrity mixed with complication.

This briefly inspired bit of surreality quickly descends into gratuitous bondage, mayhem and dumb humour, marking the usual progression from mildly absurd premise to gratingly idiotic conclusion.

A twisted, but not particularly clever, black comedy.

A determined romantic comedy with a theme, and damned if it won't see it through.

For about 20 minutes, Phantoms, based on Dean Koontz's bestseller, keeps you guessing. After that, it barely keeps you awake.

Serving Sara, which often feels more like serving time, is one of those tortured Hollywood romantic comedies that starts with a passable premise and turns into an inventory of flat gags and weak lines set against a travelogue backdrop.

The most disturbing aspect of Cold Creek Manor -- a predictable, disjointed "Cape Fear" knockoff -- is that a script this disjointed and unoriginal could actually get the Hollywood green light.

Though Lillard's excitable tone keeps promising wild comic adventures, the sequences are uniformly flat and humour-free.

A plot so preposterous it could only have emerged from the underground comic world.

This time the action takes us out of the usual campgrounds and girls in underwear into the realm of outer space, where no one can hear you screaming "Enough already."

It's the sort of visual joke you would wince at in a 1940s movie; to see it nowadays, you're tempted to dismiss it as unintentional.

Reign of Fire never comes close to recovering from its demented premise, but it does sustain an enjoyable level of ridiculousness.

A lazy, hasty effort that offers little beyond a few jack-in-the-box startles and a high body count, including Hewitt's bouncing about in a shirt half-unbuttoned over a bikini top.

Before immediately handing the movie an F and sending it off to summer school, give the filmmakers, and especially co-star Jason Schwartzman, credit for their anarchic willingness to try anything to shock a laugh loose from an audience.

The plot's not so hot -- it feels like it was jotted down by someone on an after-dinner napkin.

General Boredom meets Major Tedium on the Civil War fields of Virginia.

Talky, crude and sexist, Mallrats is significantly less funny, a flatulent sequel to the director's small start.

Mostly, the plot is busy and incomprehensible and the action sequences directed with all the art of a detonation.

They are singing the jingle in the bath, in bed, in the car, ready to send you, like George, smack into a tree.

The devil is back in Exorcist: The Beginning, and he is more disgusting than ever. Not more scary, just really yucky, in a kind of maggots-on-a-pizza-slice way.

Very little of it works.

Both syrupy and scatological, this is a typical family-dividing Sandler comedy: Parents will hate it but the kids will delight in its rudeness.

There's no doubt the cast is driven and talented; some day, it might be interesting to watch a film about what such kids are really like.

A semi-intriguing abomination, the movie The Cat in the Hat takes a piece of classic childhood Americana and turns it into something garish, dumb, ugly and senseless.

The United States of Leland has a resonance of "Elephant" without the visual poetry or structural sophistication, or "American Beauty" without the leavening comedy, but it's neither an insightful nor well-made film.

A vigorously cross-marketed product, with comics, collectable cards, games and a television series.

Dull Blade just doesn't cut it.

Is Kazaam racist? In effect, yes. But it'sracism linked to bad marketing: You can't really mix a black-pride rap film with a revamped version of "Free Willie" and expect them to magically jibe.

It's difficult to say who is more misguided here: the men (director, screenwriter and producer) who made the movie, or the women who signed on to play the parts.

[Lange] does give the movie the only excitement it possesses -- the frisson of a hideous thrill -- but it's still an excruciating embarrassment.

Through it all, actress Posey strikes attitudes and preens across the glib surface of the film, and though her campy excesses are tolerable for a brief time, the performance becomes an exercise in overkill. [13 Oct 1995]

Stallone's sequel has almost nothing to do with the original film except that it's about dancing; otherwise, it's Rocky IV with legwarmers. [16 Jul 1983]

The movie seems much, much longer than its 90-minute running time. [15 June 1998]

The intriguing thing about The Peaceful Warrior is that nothing else in the movie feels haphazard.

The high point might be the opening scene, before the stars arrive on screen.

The filmmakers have altered the premise from the unlikely to the ridiculous.

Some of the most memorable performances from great actors are also their worst: Add to that list Anthony Hopkins's turn as a sinister old Jesuit.

By comparison to this effort, "Pineapple Express" seems like a model of thoughtful maturity.

With its stilted dialogue, fragments of voice-over and over-busy camera, Red Riding Hood feels off-kilter from the start.

All the borderline pantomime acting and wigged buffoonery is deliberate and silly, but The Three Musketeers remains charmless, a romp brought down by its lead-footed script.

Feels like a five-year-old with a megaphone, excitedly yelling about his latest bulldozer-soldier-dinosaur smash-kill-squash-everything game.

After six years in development, this comedy starring and produced by Adam Sandler feels as slapped together one of the comedian's live-action buddy movies.

The one thing that’s briefly enjoyable about From Paris with Love is John Travolta’s appearance. In a black leather jacket, with a shaved bald head and a goatee and a perpetual scarf to hide his jowls, he looks like a well-fed pimp or a gay bear.

At least Adams and Goode are always watchable, even when you occasionally feel embarrassed for them.

If you are expecting a pleasant evening of escapism, you will be cruelly fooled. The editor responsible for the trailer is clearly a genius.

Old Dogs is offensive mostly because it wastes time.

A funereally unfunny comedy.

This one is headed straight for star Tommy Lee Jones's career-blooper reel.

The most gratifying thing about xXx: State of the Union is that nobody wastes much time on character, motivation, plausibility, dialogue or sex -- all that slow stuff that drags down ordinary movies.

The filmmakers have also advertised that their new movie eliminates the "Pow! Right in the kisser!" threats of spousal abuse that permeated the original series. The question of audience abuse has yet to be addressed.

Cohen (The Fast and the Furious, xXx) is no stranger to cornball excess but Stealth is his chef-d'oeuvre, a movie so audaciously preposterous and jingoistic it plays like a parody of the genre.

Grade Underclassman an "Unacceptable effort," and "D" for derivative.

This one's just painful.

Compared to Al Gore's new global-warming documentary, "An Inconvenient Truth," The Omen makes the Apocalypse look comforting and child-friendly.

Crazy as this might sound, it turns out that self-indulgent ramblings designed to put your children to sleep are pretty much the opposite of art.

There are a couple of minutes of unscheduled surgery to put this in the sadistic fantasy genre of "Saw" and "Hostel," but mostly the movie plays out like a cheap survivalist copy of the television series "Lost."

Not quite repellent enough to avoid tedium, Hannibal Rising is both too familiar in portraying Hannibal as a Dracula-like aristocrat monster, and crud in its exploitation of wartime atrocities.

So what's Hanson exploring this time? His boring side, apparently.

This is a no-cable, no-wake-up-call, cash-only dump of a film, where you breathe through a hankie and bring your own Lysol.

Forget about "Saw," "Hostel" and all the other films in the new, notorious torture-porn genre. If you're looking for a really sick movie, check out License to Wed.

The film moves from cliché to cliché and hemorrhages blood and logic at an alarming rate.

Fool's Gold starts flat and then deflates because of torpid pacing and flailing performances.

Every actor and actress involved seems to have been instructed to act as guilty as possible and, in this at least, they're entirely convincing. Not guilty of murder, perhaps, but of a really unfortunate career choice.

One of those non-stop jabbering cartoons in which most of the lines sound like the spontaneous riffs from a couple of comics sitting around a diner.

Reportedly, the movie began life as a short film, and if it actually ran for 22 minutes with a few commercial breaks, like a good sitcom should, Filth and Wisdom could be bearable. At 84 minutes, the movie feels both overpadded and underdeveloped.

The movie is so relentlessly self-congratulatory, you can't help becoming thoroughly sick of it.

Veers between crude and cloying.

The movie feels like a form of aversion therapy designed to take the fun out of dumb.

Isn't just ordinarily lame, it easily exceeds any normal requirements for witless sleaze.

Perhaps the best that can be said for Year One is that it aims low and hits the mark.

Land of the Lost is one of those films so caught up in its concept it has forgotten its audience.

Every character is like the hyperactive rat-squirrel Scrat, and the audience is bounced around like his elusive acorn.

There's a lesson behind Gentlemen Broncos , the new film from director Jared Hess: Don't try to mock above your talent level.

The obvious question about Repo Men: Why bother?

A painfully contrived romantic comedy/thriller that may (or may not) have brought Gerard Butler and Jennifer Aniston together as a real-life couple.

Dopey.

Fewer heads in the film and more evidence of one on the director's shoulders might have squeezed a legitimate laugh or two out of this contrived juvenile carnage.

The only pressing burden in this deep interior world is the question: What in or on Earth is a cast this good doing in a movie this ridiculous?

Some movies just bring out your inner Matlock: a desire to grab young punks by the lapels, smack them against a wall, knock their cigarettes to the ground and wipe the sneers off their faces. Such is the case with the callow and cynical The Rules of Attraction.

Pretty limp, and works far better in theory than practice.

A hypnotic, black hole of a movie that sucks reputations, careers and goodwill down its vortex. Rarely has a movie that doesn't star Madonna achieved such a skin-crawling mixture of deluded preening and bungled humour.

One of the most preposterous efforts by any major director in recent memory.

After 90 minutes of diligently searching the premises of ACB2, no evidence of mass entertainment can be found. Recommend cancellation of all future similar missions.

Somewhere between cartoonishly bad for comic effect and bad because the filmmakers didn't really give a damn, The House of the Dead is, at least, unpretentiously dumb.

About as endearing as unanesthetized gum surgery.

There are people who find treasures in celebrities' garbage cans so it's a reasonable gamble they might want to buy tickets to watch their throwaway home-movie projects as well.

In the life-is-too-short category, file Kangaroo Jack as a sub-Farrelly Brothers, dumb-plus-dumber buddy picture.

Here's the kind of movie thriller that can make you scream (in annoyance) and bite your nails (to pass the time) and sit on the edge of your seat (ready to bolt the theatre).

As coy sleaze goes, the new Olsen twins' movie doesn't match Britney Spears's "Crossroads," but it comes close.

There is no tonal consistency from scene to scene, swinging from domestic drama to farce. Most of the actors -- especially Matthew Broderick -- look lost.

Phantom still an auditory lobotomy.

Horror at Christmas might work, but tedium doesn't.

At 70 minutes, this groin and groan comedy seems almost dismissively short, but don't believe the myths you've been told: longer is not always better.

Without Spielberg's technical pizazz, and with a gummy mixture of homage and spoof, Congo chokes on its own tongue in cheek.

There's are nagging problems with the script, which feels like it has lost a few pages during its rewrites. Instead of an orderly, inexorable pressure of events, we get a surfeit of red herrings, followed by the rather uninteresting killer simply stepping out of hiding.

The film is a howler of illogical, overwrought emotion, inexplicable actions and sudden bursts of bloody violence. [03 Mar 1984]

Mostly though, The Back-up Plan feels like a movie aimed right at the funny bones of four-year-olds.

The paradox here is that the message of respect for animal life is outweighed by the lack of respect for human beings.

What "serious" means for young actors, as we know from Miley Cyrus's "The Last Song," is maudlin, and Charlie St. Cloud is no exception.

Unlike Sacha Baron Cohen's rude semi-documentary satires (Borat, Bruno), I'm Still Here never finds a satiric justification for all this grotesque behaviour.

So intent are the Strausses on showing off their visual chops, they leave the film's story, dialogue and acting in shambles.

The film is a mawkish mess, only occasionally alleviated by the performances or Shange's poetry.

Anything but a seasonal treat. This special-effects-heavy, big-budget musical from expatriate Russian director Andrei Konchalovsky (Runaway Train, Tango & Cash) ranks as one of the most misguided children's films ever made.

Listlessly directed by Julie Anne Robinson (Miley Cyrus's The Last Song) from a script written by a trio of writers (Stacy Sherman, Karen Ray and Liz Brixius), One for the Money is tepidly glib throughout.

Taylor Lautner puts the abs in Abduction, but not much else.

It's outstandingly obnoxious.

The film can't be accused of taking itself seriously. Shot in 3-D, with lots of choppy action, a rudimentary plot, and plenty of CGI-shape-shifting, it comes in at a brisk, disposable 88 minutes.

The Art of Getting By is distinguished by a dullness that's almost akin to being in high school again.

For a comedy about the quest for inner peace, A Thousand Words reeks of desperation.

Unfortunately, it has the model of the 1939 film to remind us how lacking in delight this version is.

Ronan, youthfully elegant as always, tries hard, but the material defeats her.

Contrast this to "The Iron Lady," a film which managed to be both obnoxiously condescending and flattering to the divisive British leader Margaret Thatcher, and left those of all political stripes irritated. The Lady, devoid of either iron or irony, is merely forgettable, a much deeper insult to its subject.

Like Jerry Springer, it's loaded with class bias, offering a condescending fantasy that sees the poor as exotically grotesque, promiscuous, violent, and spiritually doomed. [17 Oct. 1997, p.D9]

The Real Cancun is no crime; at worst, it's a kind of staged tribute to "Porky's" done by amateur actors.

Mary Reilly comes across as too much brooding atmosphere and too little story. [23 Feb 1996]

The film is significantly inept even when Crawford is not on the screen. [03 Nov 1995]

Just when you thought this movie had run out of bad ideas, this last-minute outpouring of sanctimony feels like a whole new way of being slimed. Some movies come with parental warnings; this one feels as though it should come with a mandatory biohazard suit.

Date Movie is a good date movie in one sense: If you're still speaking to the person who brought you to see this, you just might have a future together.

Director Marshall ( Pretty Woman) has created a comic drama so confused in tone, the actors often seem to be acting in different movies.

About as much fun as being given a wedgie and hung from the camp flagpole, Daddy Day Camp is an unnecessary sequel.

A flawed fraud, a youth movie so disjointed, witless and condescending that it's painful to watch.

Just how dumb is Senseless? So dumb it even takes the fun out of stupid.

Brain-melting, head-spinning rank toxicity that shows no evidence of intelligence as we know it.

The product of a first-time director and writers who have no sense of scene structure or shape, or even a discernible sense of humour.

Campy costumes can't disguise the incoherent plot, confused performances and lame script that send this star vehicle spiralling downward.

Mind-numbing, soul-testing, character-defiling experience that offers not one nanosecond of comic relief.