There's a lot of yelling, cracking wise, and cooing in this creepy rom-com.

Ellen Barkin provides unexpected diversion in a madwoman cameo as the PD's brassiest brass. But otherwise the clichés keep coming.

While much of The In-Laws feels stuck in time, what really does it in is the script's boring, modern sensitivity to fatherhood, and bonding with one's kids, and all that enlightened parenthood crap.

Overstyled pseudo-thriller.

Dopey, not dope.

Written by Mr. ''Full Monty'' himself, Simon Beaufoy, and, like ''Monty,'' sprinkles pixie dust over the heads of worn out local folk.

Commits sins of romantic comedy as well as sins of spiritual tragedy.

Rachel Griffiths...is the best reason, nay, the only reason to pay attention to Me Myself I.

You can forget about veracity, since this gauzy and sometimes dopey romanticization can't be trusted.

Gillen can't make good on his gaze's search and destroy capabilities.

A drama about corruption in the city's transit system that's not only hard boiled but also dipped in egg batter dialogue and deep fried.

The enterprise might also be called ''Picket Fences on Ice."

The antics are wacky -- but far from Wilde.

For women who smoke and drink like fiends, the trio of pre-owned babes in this weirdly rotten femme-porn romance have awfully good, unwrinkled complexions.

Exceedingly blurred rendering of a simply told, artful novel.

It's sort of an ursine ''The Last Waltz,'' with more costumes and no direction from Martin Scorsese.

No maid, and no fancy lady either, would swoon for a fellow as damp as the hero so grudgingly coughed up by Fiennes. In the words of Cinderellas everywhere, no effin' way.

The hero himself has been denatured for a young, late 1990s audience with little appreciation for real suavity or sex play.

Like many of the worst pop-referential parodies of the post-''Scream'' era, this one stalls on laughs once the big joke has been established.

The director has said that the plot was influenced by a real English thief named Valentin who showed up at his door one day to repay money stolen a decade earlier.

A frustratingly inert story, a bookend to last year's wooden ''Captain Corelli's Mandolin.''

Lacks confidence in its own much bigger, potentially fascinating story -- an American tale of pageantry and history.

Excitement trumps incompetence as one colorful loser recruits another. Pretty soon, the screen is filled with hip actors playing clueless lowlifes, pretending they're in a Bizarro World production of ''Ocean's Eleven.''

A pompous and garbled parable about how terribly, terribly difficult it is to make it as a creative artist, and how important it is to maintain high standards of haberdashery.

It turns out that Joe ends up liking the old Joe better too. Who just so happens to be the kind of average-Joe character that continues to make Allen such a tidy, non-Joe bundle.

As a Balanchine-like martinet, Peter Gallagher is a hoot, whispering to his minions about good and bad feet.

The Hunted stalks the masculine psyche with sharp knives, but it tracks its audience too noisily to bag us.

Malty brew of heroics and minutiae.

While Robbins has a good time playing the boyish devil, the rest of the principals transmit on an awfully low baud rate.

Stock farce characters and stale scenes of mayhem fill the downtime between the Martin-Latifah skirmishes.

This voyage is strictly one for the disposable present, however quaintly old-fashioned the hand-drawn work that the animators have blended with 3D effects. (Tots will twitch during the grown-up relationship parts, and teens will groan at the kiddie sops.)

The punchlines are as tired as Hogan looks.

The orgasm, it turns out, is low on the list of Amy's issues. The title is faked.

Jammed with banner-ready political rhetoric, and the relentlessness of the lectures is wearying. The plot, on the other hand, is a standard contraption built on enduring urban anxieties and involving a nasty hotel-room trade.

Costner's determination to avoid change keeps this baseball movie at a low line drive when it might have knocked one into the bleachers.

Well-meaning but hopelessly lost little comedy.

An out of date 1950s movie.

Spike Lee noisily attempts to place the hunt for real-life serial killer David Berkowitz at the center of a hotheaded sociological fantasy linking disco glitz, punk rebellion, ethnic insularity, sexual craving, and sizzling heat into one rattling chain of urban hysteria.

That's the moral nut of this highly unexceptional episode, a midlife production in which each Enterprise crew member does his or her vaudeville act.

The energy is sapped by clinging condescension in the guise of compassionate liberalism.

Drips along about as slowly as a polar ice cap and leaves both those who know the international thriller on which this creepy-doings-off-the-coast-of-Greenland yarn is based and those who don't out in the cold.

It's no accident that portions of Six Days mildly echo some of Ford's most popular films, from "Raiders of the Lost Ark" to "Working Girl."

Operates on such outdated, unimaginative conventions of movie chemistry that Moore and Brosnan end up appearing older and stodgier than necessary.

A conflicted entertainment, compromised by trying too hard to impress the restless, self-referential adults in the audience.

Hoffman acts the hell out of the role.

Only pretends to care about good people who sometimes do bad things. In fact, it hasn't got time for the pain.

Any random episode of Law & Order would be more sophisticated than this heavy-handed, moralistic Southern-lawyer corn pone, directed by Francis Ford Coppola.

The actors more eager to goof around in schlumpfy costumes on a low-budget lark than to play their trashy characters with the seriousness such farce requires.

With Intolerable Cruelty, though, something scares me: I cannot detect a heartbeat of feeling, no matter how close I press a stethoscope against the star machinery of George Clooney and Catherine Zeta-Jones.

Unbearable were Witherspoon not such a genuinely attractive performer.

The magnolias in Callie Khouri's fried green movie look limp.

The movie implodes, with each actor less vivid than he or she ought to be and each character less connected to the others than necessary for such an arbitrary plot.

Between cycles of gunfights and glowering, Yun-Fat displays some of the dignity and suave good looks that account for his star status (without much chance to show his wit).

TV's ''I Spy'' knew how to swing. The movie 'I Spy knows only how to scramble and string together moments of Murphy braggadocio and Wilson stoner-ocity, and the sweat shows.

The truth is, the freakiness kinda turns the director on, and he nearly strangles Suspect Zero with love.

The balance of inspired idiocy to hackneyed buffoonery is out of whack.

While we can agree, for the sake of Iberian-American cinematic friendship, to go along with the whole simplified 1960s swinger premise and ''The Jackie Gleason Show'' choreography, we can also long for the comparatively nuanced 1990s swinger premise of ''Friends.''

A comedy that might have made Butch and Sundance jump off a cliff.

A ripe psychosexual compost heap of a drama that emits a provocative scent of rot and nonsense.

Creator producers Paul Germain and Joe Ansolabehere have come up with some unexceptional children and underdeveloped adults.

Enough to anesthetize the living.

Requires tremendous restraint not to conclude that this entertainingly apocalyptic mess is about nothing, since it may well be about everything. But I doubt it.

Guy Ritchie's second feature, is a faux tough caper modeled lock, stock, kit, and caboodle on his earlier film ''Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels.''

Comes from the same jolly homage-to-schlock-shock producers who remade ''House on Haunted Hill,'' and the emphasis is shamelessly on ornate scares. But with its high-gloss cast and French art-house actor and director Mathieu Kassovitz (''Hate'') in charge, the movie also shoots for class.

Want Jesuitical fineness of argument? Look elsewhere. This one merely answers the prayers of those looking for an argument.

At the Lethal Weapon plant, what you see, after 11 years, are the rusting remnants of a once innovative model.

There may be nothing more fun for actors than experimental exaggeration, especially when filming on a Caribbean island. But there’s nothing that makes an audience feel less welcome than not being in on the joke.

When Bebop's anime characters stand still, chirping their strangely stilted, dubbed talk and not moving their strangely blank faces, I feel lost on Mars myself.

The movie never gives its heart freely and honestly to the satiny whirl of post-"Chicago" showbiz spectacle it so clearly wants to be.

Weirdly moving.

The number of levels on which these pros trade on their diminished reputations makes the movie an inside joke rather than a funny one. If Spade thinks otherwise, he's nucking futs.

The character of a scruffy computer nerd, played with might-as-well-enjoy-myself charm by little-known actor Justin Bartha, steals the picture from glossier players.

At no time do the men -- that is, the straight ones -- believably hold the upper hand. In the new town of Stepford, there's no bitterness, no struggle, no competition, none of the scars of the sexual revolution. There's just gay apparel.

The sermonizing on behalf of good clean fun and hard old effort (Cosby co-wrote the script) is as faded as Big Al's sweater after too many days on earth.

The result is a pageant long but not deep, noisy but not stirring, expensive but not sumptuous.

A slick, synthetic, self-important drama that thinks it is saying more than it is simply because of its subject matter.

Watch for the ''Mrs. Doubtfire'' syndrome: In Santa drag and padded for laughs, Scott demonstrates how to be a more sensitive, more funsy parent than boring old Mom.

Everything is aces about this lineup's pedigree. But Devil never lets loose. It's a jazzy composition about sex, sleuthing, corruption, race, and cheap liquor that's a half step out of tune.

The big underachiever turns out to be DeVito, who is incapable of exhibiting believable warmth and complexity, or, indeed, of playing anyone who is not a cartoon.

No schmucks were harmed in the making of Dinner for Schmucks. That's the problem.

A histrionic mess.

Still, it's refreshing that the animals don't talk.

Feels staged and exoticized in the way stories about insular communities often do when told by outsiders.

The movie, by Dutch director Jan Kounen, is all surfaces, set pieces, Significant Looks, and voguing -- the same strictures Chanel and Stravinsky sought to bust.

What feels enjoyably outré in the 1998 coming-of-age novel by Jonathan Ames (creator of HBO's Bored to Death) feels oppressively outré in this deadened, literal adaptation.

I'm confounded by the fact that, aside from the Pevensie siblings and their nicely obnoxious cousin, absolutely everything and everyone aboard the Dawn Treader looks one-dimensional.

Waving a dubious flag of feminist inclusivity, Cole and screenwriter William Ivory turn cartwheels insisting that girl power, even in the 1960s, trumped class divisions.

The cast, though, includes a great bunch of Brit faves who have all done better work elsewhere.

Thor's Chris Hemsworth leads the pack as a high school football star-turned-Marine, while Josh Peck plays his stubborn younger brother. There's also a collection of junior guerrillas, including The Hunger Games' Josh Hutcherson and Friday Night Lights' Adrianne Palicki. Take that, screaming North Koreans with no agenda!

Annabel and Enoch learn from each other, even as time ticks away and the end draws near. Weeping is invited, but by no means required.

Opportunities for bad behavior abound in Waldman's novel - the author's prerogative. Roos, though, hasn't cracked the puzzle of how to explore that behavior on screen in such a way that the characters behave badly in interesting, rather than arbitrary, ways.

An earnest, lumpy macramé of a personal nonfiction project.

Nothing is new, which is a problem. Nothing is particularly funny or endearing, which is a worse problem.

Soon enough it's back to stale jokes about spousal date nights.

A needlessly frenzied, pseudo-raunch comedy that whips up a whole lot of R-rated antics only to arrive at crunchy PG-13 lessons in love and tolerance.

There's something and nothing for everyone in Conan the Barbarian 3D.

Irksome dither of an indie drama.

The movie can't be saved from its own vices of manic pacing and tediously pro forma pop culture jokes.

With no thriller cliché left unused, the gaily outlandish plot is matched by tin-eared dialogue, ripe tough-guy overacting from the very game Pearce, and best-that-she-could acting from Grace.

The best stuff: Wow, can those kids hoof - and so, even past his half-century mark, can the preening, Chicago-born Mr. F.

The comedic slaps are too limp to leave a mark. Director George Ratliff applied a much clearer eye to "Hell House," his chilling 2001 documentary about a real church.

As for the concert itself, it's a generically big, loud, overchoreographed, over-mic'ed, post-Madonna production.

As the groom's brassy-babe stepmother, Demi Moore does her own share of scenery chewing, but at least she looks like she's having fun.

The resentments acted out at the dining table by the rest of this miserable family - gathered for a graduation celebration that turns into a wake - are so oppressive that Eugene O'Neill might ask, ''Too much?''

The biggest surprise in Shame is how distanced, passionless, and merely skin-deep the director's attention is - how little he cares about the subject of his own movie.

This steam-driven military weapon of an enterprise is a sobering reminder of just how tinny a musical Les Misérables was in the first place.

You know what happens in Taken 2, don't you? The same thing that happened four years ago in Taken, but different. (But the same.)

Her (Harron) torpid adaptation of Rachel Klein's novel about female sexual desire, jealousy, death wishes, and vampires at a girls' boarding school defeats Harron's talent for exploring darkness on the edge of kinkiness.

In the way of workaday flicks built around long-in-the-tooth badasses, Die Hard 5 leaves room for McClane to make a few jokes about his thinning hair and to rue that he wasn't a better father when his kids were growing up. Oh, boo-hoo.

A crotchety, alcoholic, wheelchair-bound coot played on cruise control by Morgan Freeman learns these recycled lessons in a pastel-colored, embroidered wall-hanging of a drama directed by Rob Reiner.

The two stars appear to be as bewildered by the turn of events as we are.

The editing in Battlefield America is super-speedy: Each shot lasts about three seconds, and then it's off.

Gandhi tries to dodge criticism of his mocking scam by rationalizing that even a phony wise man can offer real solace.

Killer Joe throws down a dare by expecting its audience to be the cool connoisseurs of the story's "comic" outrageousness, then rubbing viewers' faces in close-up scenes of brutality that reasonable people ought not to be able to watch. That up-close experience, however effectively done, is a movie specialty that's its own kind of mean.

The cockeyed C-quality B movie, shot on location with a Balkan supporting cast and crew, mixes a precarious pileup of visual clichés with over-staged action sequences.

Everyone in the cast (including Geoffrey Arend, Mark Webber, and Caplan's Party Down colleague Martin Starr) is talented enough to deserve a stronger story line than this.

No less sweet for being unoriginal: A guy (Charlie Sheen) mourns a bad breakup with the woman he loves (Katheryn Winnick). The execution, on the other hand, is perilously self-absorbed.

You should hear instead about Sam Elliott and Mary Steenburgen, who whip up cowboy fun as married U.S. marshals assigned to protect the pair in Wyoming.

The message that comes across is: We're all screwed, and then we die. Ba-DUM.

A charmless rom-com.

The movie is rotten the way that only a denatured made-for-export slice of Gallic nostalgia can be.

So many body parts from other engineered romantic comedies have been crudely harvested and stitched together in the making of this weird robotic lark that "Maid of Honor of Frankenstein" might be more useful a nickname.

The movie is in love with its own story loops and fancy, pop-dream cinematography from Almodóvar associate Affonso Beato, which is fine; it's also in love with its own indie-culture cleverness, which isn't.

Peculiarly coy feminine-empowerment fable.

An overly picaresque first feature written and directed by David Duchovny, who also co-stars.

Director and co-writer William Bindley engages every move in the underdog playbook, including, but not limited to, the time the good citizens of Bedford Falls chipped in to make up George Bailey's shortfall in "It's a Wonderful Life."

As for Monster-in-Law, it's tripe on a plate.

Like choral singing and travel photography, this adventure is more fun for participants than it is for spectators.

Anderson's adaptation is heavy on production numbers in which jingles come to life and light on conveying any real feelings of Eisenhower-era darkness the prizewinner herself might have felt during her decades of marriage to an abusive, drunken man.

A junky thriller that mistakes brute-strength plot twist, showy violence, and the against-type participation of Jennifer Aniston for earned excitement.

As an overwrought, overacted drama, Kill the Poor is negligible.

Buscemi is stymied here by the inertia of his material.

As Williams ricochets between playing submissive soft-drink executive tethered to the whims of a hysterical boss and pathetic dad at the wheel, trying to cajole his family into vacation satisfaction, we can be excused for getting carsick.

The only real magic in The Lake House is that Kate and Alex have never heard of e-mail.

Can these banal relationships between undifferentiated lovelies be saved?

Writer-director Steven Zaillian's version stultifies, especially when compared with Robert Rossen's fiery 1949 Oscar winner. How could such dullness defeat the retelling, when Willie Stark is one of the most vivid characters in 20th-century American popular culture?

Williams turns out to be exactly the wrong candidate for the job, a comedian singularly uninterested in letting anyone else get a word in, but with nothing to say.

Nothing more than a bad harvest.

Every character in The Architect is crazily stuccoed with crisis.

I just don't know any chick who will make sense of this flick -- it's that blitheringly out of touch with present psychosexual (never mind feminist) time and space.

Nothing about this sputtering midlife-crisis family comedy is natural except the timeless notion that even the most latte-tamed baby boomer has the power to reclaim his inner Iron John. Ray Liotta provides the one true blast of comedic energy as the leader of a real, more pugnacious head-butting gang who tangles with the four amigos.

Be prepared to collapse into a hoot and a howl of hilarity at all the wrong moments.

One piece of advice in trying to make sense of it all: Follow the sleepwear, since Bullock cycles through a few garments that clarify which day is which. Another suggestion? Ignore the two-bit psychological and spiritual doggerel with which screenwriter Bill Kelly tries to deepen the meaning of the game.

Pathfinder's moody, muddy look is courtesy of music-video director Marcus Nispel, who doesn't distinguish between people and tree trunks when it comes to emotional content.

An overstructured, overacted indie drama about gambling, addiction, and the sawdusty romanticism of old-time magicians.

Myself, I felt victimized by the stereotype shtick of reliably grating Rob Schneider as a Canadian-Japanese wedding-chapel minister from SNL castoff hell. But maybe that's just because this movie encourages sensitivity by hitting everyone over the head with its humor hammer.

Wan, generically pretty adaptation of Alessandro Baricco's 1996 novel.

So shameless is The Kingdom, ignoring consequence and treating its audience like cash-dispensing machines with buttons to be pushed rather than thinking individuals willing to consider the reality of America's entanglement with the Middle East.

Rudd's talents as a thinking woman's charmer are wasted -- as are those of amiable Jason Biggs in a weak variation on the pop theme of being a gal's gay best friend.

The big goofball relies too much on the funny hair and swingin' postures of the era as punchlines in themselves.

An only-in-the-movies mother hustles pool to raise the money to abduct the son she's been forbidden to see since her divorce.

Long before the second hour of Australia (which feels like the fifth), it's clear that Luhrmann hasn't found a satisfactory way to make a movie nearly as ballsy -- or coherent -- as he wants his creation to be.

A brain-squandering thriller.

Lane and Gere mime adult courtship with the efficiency of synchronized swimmers. Yet in this ocean of emotion, they look like they're drowning.

A Smith production is always noisy, shambling, and liberally smutty on the outside while conservatively gooey on the inside.

The story is as impersonal as it is labored.

The result is a slack do-over fantasy in which Zac Efron, as a basketball star, looks baffled as to why he hasn't been asked to sing and dance.

The Other Man is self-conscious, overproduced, overacted Euro-marital hoo-ha.

Be prepared to swallow a lot of empty-calorie jokes in which blacks and Latinos insult and misunderstand one another in a spirit of vigorous buffoonery.

It's the showy story, script, and even staging that wear a fella out in this relentlessly precious feature debut by writer-director Jordan Roberts.

Along comes Two Can Play That Game to demonstrate that antifeminist silliness is color-blind.

Reeves is a stiff dancer and he delivers his lines in a full leather jacket monotone.

This trip down The Road to El Dorado proceeds under the speed limit all the way.

Director Chris Columbus...seals this comedy in an impenetrable bubble of hollow humanism.

The most frightening sight, though, is that of Theron and Bacon, good actors trapped in the muck of making a living.

Manages to take great characters and a great plot and leach them of all blood, terror, and excitement.

Petroni takes the poem at face value, turning diaphanous literary imagery opaque and literal.

This unexceptional 1970s coming-of-age story is neither outrageous, new, nor comedic.

A gaggle of hip actors squander their gifts in this unfunny, out-of-control comedy.

Union, who looks so chic and can talk so bitchy-funny, doesn't so much establish a character as roll out a series of attitudes. That's all she's called on to do. That's all anyone is called on to do: Be very tame, and make much ado about zilch.

Something puddles to nothing in this relentless Miami sun.

What slays them in the second balcony, though, flattens on the screen.

Love means never having to say you're recycling plot material.

Politics is almost an afterthought in this balky, attenuated film.

Runs into construction problems, maybe from too many foremen. DeVito favors pushy slapstick; Stiller prefers hotshot sarcasm. Barrymore's comic talents are wasted; she's there for decoration.

Here's a romance without a spark of excitement.

In the presence of profound questions, the filmmaker goes profoundly shallow.

It's not the homosexuality that's dubious here, it's the chicken.

Cotton candy story with an acrid aftertaste.

Strands Cedric the Entertainer behind the wheel and forces him to motor a collection of laugh-and-learn wacky situations by sheer force of his outsize charm.

In theory, Zoolander is ''Pret-à-Porter'' on laughing gas. In practice, however, the movie is an ill-fitting suit of gags, too long in the crotch even at 90 minutes.

With every recycled piece of business -- which is to say, every scene in Anything Else -- the distance widens between Allen and the elusive audience he pessimistically chases. He has never seemed less in touch with his own real, pulsing, 21st-century city.

As ungainly in its jammed-together East-meets-West-ness as Steven Seagal in a yoga pose.

It allows for little of the dark and funny in Irving's picaresque morality fable. No room! Not with the buckets of bathos thrown our way, substituting for mass-market spiritual uplift!

Brooks guards the movie from overheating in a surfeit of warmedy.

Bassett's natural dramatic fierceness, so powerful when incited to action, is at odds with the knee-weakening sexual surrender required by the story.

The pond is so shallow in this wan romance that there's no room for anything to float.

A characteristically engorged and sloppy coming-of-age movie from the filmmaker (''Harvard '66'') who, in his body of work, indulges his fantasies as fetishistically as other men finger their cigars.

The result is a stilted culture clash and a lot of monochromatically conflicted facial expressions from Perry before he's thawed by the love of an ethnic woman.

The whole movie turns into a violent, pointless, torture-or-be-tortured chase.

A comic-book superhero has seldom squandered so much screen time being conflicted about his heritage and destiny -- and I don't mean conflicted in a sexy, Wolverine-y, ''X-Men'' way, either; a big-budget comic-book adaptation has rarely felt so humorless and intellectually defensive about its own pulpy roots.

The role of a poised daddy's girl is a dull one for Holmes, who looks pained, in a nonspecific way, throughout her capers; the movie itself, with a screenplay by Jessica Bendinger and Kate Kondell, is a dull one for director Forest Whitaker.

Taylor does that thing she does when she whispers as if she has just discovered speech; Pearce enjoys himself doing his own singing, and embracing grunge.

The lame-o aspects of the whole campy setup are still lame-o.

The antics involving ghosts, chases, and burping that divert the small fry don't mix with the jokey, tribute-band dialogue spouting from the Mystery, Inc. gang.

The ethos of the Chelsea Hotel may shape Hawke's artistic aspirations, but he hasn't yet coordinated his own DV poetry with the Beat he hears in his soul.

Any grown men and women who pay to see the movie face a harrowing ordeal.

The goons themselves, though, look rather chic, flying through the air in Galliano-goes-to-hell garments straight out of Vampire Vogue.

Because the talk never gets beyond statement making, and because the characters emit none of Chekhov's radiantly lived-in soulfulness, there's plenty of time to appreciate the sun-kissed landscape.

This wan, formulaic teen movie from ''Metro'' director Thomas Carter is afraid to pump up the volume on its own interracial, hip hop Romeo and Juliet story, lest it challenge even one sedated viewer or disturb the peace.

No excuse for the bitterness and crudity in America's Sweethearts -- a noxious combination that erodes the 1930s and '40s screwball-comedy armature on which this mirthless movie is based.

The nightmare is that the live guys in this Dreamcatcher lose the battle the minute the mechanical worm turns.

For some four fifths of its length, Jersey Girl is as square as a turnpike-diner place mat.

Maybe in a few years the incoherent gaudiness of this underperforming sequel to ''Interview With A Vampire'' -- will have transmuted into a kind of appreciable camp. Until that time, however, we're stuck with this damned production

The incisive, close up photography by ''The Sixth Sense'''s Tak Fujimoto outclasses the story by yards.

With no Jamie Lee Curtis as a volleying partner, though, Lohan's chipper energy is, like, so totally out of proportion given the colorless pliability of everyone around her.

Bale exists all too large under the circumstances, a well-fed actor playing at emaciation for the sake of a fiction about a character whose torment is as unreadable as his vertebrae are countable.

We, the people, are meant to cheer in response, but the spirit isn't willing. War is hell, but so is peace -- at least when it comes to movies in a no-man's-land like this one.

A poky dawdle of a Southern-style indie that would pass without notice but for John Travolta and Scarlett Johansson.

When not unnecessarily bland, synthetic, and indistinguishable from undistinguished teen TV, A Cinderella Story is unnecessarily coarse and dumbed down, with every character except Sam and Austin subject to perfunctory ridicule.

The sides to consider in Taking Sides are all but obscured by cinematic pomposity at best, Holocaust porn at worst.

Filmmaker Jared Hess (who cowrote the script with his wife, Jerusha Hess) installs Napoleon front and center as a punchline in and of himself -- and as that dispiriting product of narrative defeat, a symbol.

This puffed-up Western set in Big Sky country becomes a small-screen horse opera.

As Carrie might type on her laptop while giving one of her girly little shrugs, When did Sex and the City become so long and mean so little?

The result is a naughty throwaway in all senses of the word.

The makers of this mediocre comedy about dorky guys who work in a cut-rate electronics store probably hoped that "40 Year-Old Virgin" lightning would strike twice. It doesn't.

Requires Neeson to stare coldly and talk to corpses, but Ricci has the greater dramatic challenge: She has to operate, unfazed, in close-up nakedness much of the time.

Twelve ogles the lost boys and girls as they make their mistakes. But unlike the novel, the movie never really gets inside these kids, who aren't in the least all right.

Now it's just some thin chick in her underwear, kicking butt.

Milla Jovovich slinks cartoonishly as Stone's seductive wife, on a mission to compromise the lawman. Lordy.

Earnestly ersatz down to every spangle, dance move, plot turn, and line of hokum dialogue, Burlesque is a showbiz pic for these American Idol times - a time when we agree to pretend that mediocre mimicry of better artists is good enough to keep us entertained. We agree to pretend that quality is in the eye and ear of the undemanding beholder.

Comedy has changed. Jack can only give his son-in-law the stink eye so many times before the whole "I'm watching you" pantomime gets stale.

In a last-minute tweak, the production has also been meaninglessly 3-D-ified - never mind that there's nothing whatsoever 3-D-ish going on. Maybe those clumsy 3-D glasses are meant to let moviegoers mimic the superhero mask-wearing experience?

Clumsy camera work adds to the pre-wedding jitters in writer-director Galt Niederhoffer's pashmina-thin drama about attractive self-congratulatory Yale alumni gathering for the nuptials of two of their own.

Perry has taken Shange's feminist word-and-movement portraits of disenfranchised African-American women and turned those howls into...a maddeningly choppy mess of a Tyler Perry movie.

What's shocking this time is how tame Sacha Baron Cohen's newest wild man is, for all the kerfuffle the comedian can stir up on the ­promotional trail.

What we learn in this all-pain/no-pleasure episode is that marriage feels like a life sentence, weddings are miserable events, honeymoon sex is dangerous and leaves a bride covered in bruises, and pregnancy is a torment that leads to death in exchange for birth.

Thumpingly silly yet self-serious period-piece what-if.

A drippy, uninvolving movie adaptation.

A cloddish, harmlessly drecky comedy from the Sandler factory of crude mush.

The movie is a folly, a desultory vanity project for its director and co-writer. But for those very reasons, W.E., by world-renowned personage and lesser-known filmmaker Madonna, is not without twisted interest.

If this amateur justice league spent as much time analyzing clues as they did analyzing their junk, in every slang variation available in the Urban Dictionary, the murder mystery in The Watch could have been solved on the first night of surveillance.

The movie is a morals-free procession of bang bang bang! and blood blood blood!, and men slamming each other with blunt objects and slicing each other with blades.

Even those who don't know a foul tip from a chicken wing will be able to spot the desperate plays.

It's tastelessness like this, served up as fair-game dish to a Downton Abbey-loving audience, that sours the flavor of this tittery production.

As with his previous film "Fireflies in the Garden," writer-director Dennis Lee scratches the skin of family bonds until it bleeds. This time, he uses whimsy as a salve.

What's ultimately shocking about Kika is how empty mayhem can be made to look.

Subplots go nowhere, and characters -- many played by well-known actors -- barely get screen time. Willem Dafoe, Salma Hayek, and Jane Krakowski are among those who are there and gone.

FYI, there's zero chemistry between P.S. I Love You's two commodified headliners. P.S.: The plus in the harsh grade goes solely to the divine Lisa Kudrow, delivering desperately needed laughs as the twitchy widow's husband-hunting best friend.

Just as all regular models can't be supermodels, so all action chicks can't be superheroines. Elektra Natchios turns out to be walled off rather than mysteriously alluring; blank rather than deep.

This is strictly substandard stuff, with imitative creepy noises, vertiginous camera angles, and long pauses.

An Unfinished Life is inert, kaput -- a middlebrow mush of platitudes rather than an okay corral of distinct characters with heartbeats. It's awful not in an exciting, uncontrolled way but in an overly controlled, narcotized way.

A mess -- all high concept, stranded performances, and no laughs.

British director Mike Barker and magpie New York screenwriter Howard Himelstein, have taken "Lady Windermere's Fan" - Wilde's first big stage success, written in 1892 - and pulped it senseless in the name of puttin' on the charm.

A notorious opinion divider last year at Cannes, Battle in Heaven is less about heaven or battle, or hell on earth, or the soul of Mexico, and all too much about gawking. And so, for all the ''shock'' of the movie's clinical carnality, this battle is lost.

Insistently sullen, nihilistic, and successful to the point of smugness at transmitting buzzkill, Art School Confidential is the second collaboration between art-house cartoonist Daniel Clowes and director Terry Zwigoff.

Yes indeed, Pirates 2.0 is a theme ride, if by ride you mean a hellish contraption into which a ticket holder is strapped, overstimulated but unsatisfied, and unable to disengage until the operator releases the restraining harness.

Terminally muddled crime drama.

Holland's empurpled bio-fantasy is hooey with an anachronistic feminist slant from start to finish.

I don't know if it's ickier to assume that writer-director Brad Silberling (Moonlight Mile) thinks the culture-clash jokes he pushes in 10 Items or Less are charming because they're earnest, or because they're tongue-in-cheek. Either way, this sale is void.

This slapdash, charmless, baldly boomer-chasing romantic comedy, directed by Michael Lehmann (Heathers) from a clunky, orgasm-obsessed script by Karen Leigh Hopkins and Jessie Nelson, is the lazy studio's answer to a call for more age-appropriate entertainment for "More" magazine readers.

Really, all this movie is about is the joy of checks, calls, folds, rivers, and the acquired thrill of knowing what those words mean.

The gooey sanctity of the bond between fathers and sons all but nullify Jackson's zesty performance.

Robin Williams (yes, I'm afraid so) plays a kind of Manhattan-based Fagin with a touch of Midnight Cowboy to his wardrobe. And ants will play havoc in any cynic's pants as this loopy, goopy fairy tale about a kid looking for his parents oozes to its predictable finish.

Perelman pays such cooing attention to surfaces that our response to violence carries no more importance than our response to the delicate jewelry around the adult Diana's neck.

This Debbie Downer of a drama is a bitter slog.

The scenery (prettily captured by There Will Be Blood cinematographer Robert Elswit) is littered with heavy symbolism (fire! rain! dead birds!); the performances are merely heavy.

As a shameless contraption of ridiculously sad things befalling attractive people, the engorged romantic tragedy Remember Me stands tall between those towering monuments to teen-oriented cinematic misery, Love Story and Twilight.

McCarthy's rawhide has become movie Naugahyde, a substance unknown in literature or in nature.

This toothless thriller...feels like a strained reworking of ''The Fugitive.''

Not one female character escapes mockery or patronizing.

Nobody's got a clue. Enquiring minds don't even want to know.

If your allergy to comedies bred from British style mugging crossed with Disney style prancing has, like mine, flared up in recent years, this hybrid from writer director Joel Hershman (''Hold Me, Thrill Me, Kiss Me'') will make you wheeze.

Silly, undone by lack of faith in its own subject.

Every porridgy inmate in this instantly forgettable romp warbles in the prison's amateur musical, and one of them demonstrates a rather extreme devotion to the tomatoes he grows in the on-site greenhouse.

The endless, numbing sameness of it all.

A recitation of woes doesn't constitute a plot, and panoramic shots of migrating wildlife don't convey enough African flavor.

The characters who cross paths here in the hard shadows of late-'90s New York City are meant to convey loneliness, bitterness, neediness, loss, and bad karma. Mostly, they convey bad Sundance.

Ultimately, the talented cast -- among them M. Emmet Walsh, Faye Dunaway, Skeet Ulrich, and Viggo Mortensen -- play to their easiest star turns rather than their most interesting strengths.

Features the dullest, least lifelike collection of pals this side of "Eyes Wide Shut."

The few jaunty, ''Friends''-inflected lines Perry does get off are lost among the cow pies.

No worse than any disease-of-the-week TV movie, and no more moralistic than any Lifetime drama. But it's no better, either, and it ought to be.

A film not even a star as foxed and foxy as Johnny Depp himself could save.

Empty jokes hang heavy.

The film values quips and declamations over natural conversation (or an explanation of how such intelligent women could have been so blind to world events).

Garish, squeal-pitched preteen comedy.

Without any of the patented Farrelly insight into the insecure, horndoggy teen in every man, and without a grown-up setting in which Harry and Lloyd can transgress like dum-dum geniuses,Dumb and Dumberer is dumberest.

There's no enjoyably outlandish hiss to this variation on the formula, and no Ice Cube or Owen Wilson, either. This time, a ship of capitalist fools (and no movie stars, unless you count utility player Morris Chestnut as a headliner) steams along the river in Borneo.

What's on screen is lazy, second-rate, phoned-in -- a heist in which it's the audience whose pockets have been picked.

Yet Speed 2 is as slow-moving as a garbage scow. Those blinking lights might as well be emanating from a vital-signs monitor. The story is dead in the water.

Nightwatch is a horror for reasons that have nothing to do with suspenseful moviemaking.

Washington is wasted here. Kelly Lynch is wooden. Crowe has a ball going over the top, but how much taunting and eyeball popping can a performer do?

The star is done in by the deathless mediocrity of the production, an assemblage of random camera shots, messy editing, redundant scenes, and witless dialogue as haphazardly stitched together as the flesh on Jonah Hex's face.

A demented, orgiastically gory vampire/sex parable.

A portentous and goopy Dutch drama.

Soul-sucking romantic comedy.

Red Riding Hood goes from trite to triter, a plot collapse that overtakes any of the visual prettiness from cinematographer Mandy Walker (Beastly).

Self-righteous and smug in its use of heartland stereotypes, the movie backfires by assuming that its intended liberal audience is just as intolerant and condescending as the conservative opposition insists it is.

In one form or another, you get exactly what you pay for at an Adam Sandler comedy. Otherwise the man wouldn't have earned zillions.

The second insurmountable problem is the difference between Parker's performance as a fortysomething banker, wife, and mother musing (in voice-over) at her computer and her previous performance as a single, thirtysomething girl-about-town in "Sex and the City": There is none. I don't know why she does it.

Old Holden would call the whole movie phony, and I agree, if you want to know the truth.

So let's hear it for the giant wig of Pre-Raphaelite gray corkscrews planted on the noggin of Jane Fonda as a glamorous hippie grandma. The hairdo meets its match in the dull Ann Taylor togs encasing Catherine Keener: That's how you know Granny's daughter is an uptight lawyer.

A creepy, humiliating ''comedy,'' playing to Bullock's worst instincts for demonstrating the lovability of women who don’t fit in.

Calculatedly soppy, seasonally phony Americanized remake of Giuseppe Tornatore's 1990 "Stanno Tutti Bene."

No authentic emotion of any kind happens in this damp, Seattle-based romance, a fizzle for both stars.

Because the script, riddled with verbal ugliness by David Elliot and Paul Lovett, sends the movie to a series of arbitrary nowheres, the final showdown for the Mercer boys and their enemies is just as meaningless and sense-deadening.

The loserville teen comedy Underclassman is like a student project sloppily cribbed from other kids' notes -- kids who have seen "Rush Hour" and still can't get over how funny it is to stick a noisy black guy in a distinctly nonblack setting.

When a Stranger Calls is ba-a-a-a-c-k, in frightless form, updated for the age of anytime minutes and caller ID.