It's young-Hollywood-driven business as usual in this derivative, nasty, and ultimately empty drama.

Mostly about slapping together a bunch of clichés -- outdated clichés at that -- regarding the loneliness of ambitious women.

Unlike in ''Freaky Friday,'' no magic spells are involved. Nor is there any of ''Freaky'''s marvelous charm in this ungainly Manhattan fairy tale, directed by indulgent sentimentalist Boaz Yakin.

Labored miscalculation of a teen-trend comedy.

Plays out like a variation on an old design dictum: If you can't make it good, make it big.

A parent-and-kid-oriented comedy about the adventures of men doing the hard work of mommies, which couldn't be more timely -- or less delightful.

This condescending story wastes him (Douglas).

A sodden drama of filial conflict that dares the audience to confuse the characters with the players. P.T. Barnum couldn't have come up with a better hook, but he would have rewarded his suckers with more ''On Golden Pond'' entertainment bang for their buck.

Isn't a movie, it's Gorgonzola, a crumbly summertime stinker veined with pop-cultural fungus.

Even in the summertime, the most restless young audience deserves the dignity of an action hero motivated by something more than franchise possibilities. Movies like XXX -- a big 000 -- don't deserve our $$$.

A tuneless variation on the working girl-captivates-Mr. Big formula that has propelled fairy tales as old as Cinderella.

The film squanders every opportunity (and international-coproduction cent) on by now imitative Nine Inch Nails-video-style visual Goth-goo, and, scarily, forgets to input a plot or script that makes any sense.

A desert of shrill juvenile jokes and clanging chase sequences.

Eventually, the senses jam and a mental lube job is in order.

Another depressingly empty action thriller.

Just because A Walk to Remember is shrewd enough to activate girlish tear ducts doesn't mean it's good enough for our girls. They're willing to buy tickets; why not honor their wits as well as their wallets?

Each man's shtick swells into a frenzy of overacting.

A very low grade romantic drama indeed, a love story with all the life and death intensity of a heat rash.

A cheap cut-glass tiara of a booby prize goes to Drop Dead Gorgeous for messing up so utterly.

If, as Fincher has said, this movie is supposed to be funny, then the joke's on us.

Processed comedy chop suey.

Preposterous-for-no-good-reason supernatural tale.

The movie is so littered with clichés of genre, as well as clichés of artifice in Reeves' pained performance, that any semblance of social reality goes foul.

Pushes and pushes and pushes the emotional throttle without respite.

It's a gussied-up sorority-of-rising-stars project produced, I fantasize, by baby-boomer studio guys whose younger spouses articulately defend a woman's right to stay home and raise the kids.

The movie's mortal failing is echoed in the religious medal Pita gives Creasy in a gift of innocent, uplifting love: Finding heft or coherence within all the lugubrious agitation is a lost cause worthy of St. Jude.

The movie may be more bogus than a Gucci bag for sale on a Fifth Avenue sidewalk, but at least the backgrounds are real.

The only metatwist missing in the twittering self-regard of this indulgent home movie is the participation of a documentary video crew -- ideally helmed by some TV exec's USC-grad son -- shooting the filmmakers shooting the play within the play.

Stripped of the pleasures of terror, flattened of grandeur (with a tacked-on coda that fairly groans with storytelling defeat), the movie sinks from the weight of its own heavyhandedness.

Director Stephen Herek (Mr. Holland's Opus) and screenwriter Tom Schulman (Dead Poets Society) offer no clues, no challenges, nothing to provoke the smallest bubble of curiosity in an audience that waits 40 minutes only to realize Oh, I get it, this isn't going to be Eddie Murphy Funny!

Sends comedy backward in time, and we're in the 1970s, ethno-sitcom style: These Andersons in their out-of-date white, snooty gated community apparently confuse themselves with their forebears on The Jeffersons.

What willful streak of perversity inspired Kevin Costner to take on this wacky tale of a letter carrier-turned-postapocalyptic hero?

This is a deeply unpleasant movie masquerading as a heartfelt social commentary on life in these United States.

Lowest-common-denominator humor.

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.

What Emily doesn't do, though -- what this slow-moving, sour, sloppily assembled teen drama doesn't allow her to do -- is make her predicament of any emotional interest.

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.

The mangy joke in the defiantly homemade documentary 95 Miles to Go is that Ray Romano on a business trip is no different from any other schmo, minus the autograph signing.

Tedious.

In a feat of dullness quite powerful in its own way, this lifeless family comedy sucks the joy from every joke it touches.

A crappy thriller gussied up with a chrome-plated veneer.

An immediately forgettable action pic directed with a blowtorch by Lee Tamahori.

This garbled American remake of Takashi Miike's already staticky 2004 exercise in J-horror is a wrong number.

Neither grand enough to be impressive nor antic enough to be charming, the movie settles for bland and frantic, climaxing in a showdown among decadent pyramid builders. How bad are these guys? They're sadists...and, wink wink, sissies.

A failing-grade comedy about the wishful triumph of high school dorks over high school bullies.

Everything is wrong pretty much from the start of this misbegotten adventure.

An unintentionally ludicrous drama of repentance.

A painfully miscast Parker nervously flips her hair and waves her hands, sitcom-style, as a do-gooding dean of students.

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

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

The answers he strings together are babble in this superficial vanity documentary. Nice shots of awesome, God-approved scenery, though.

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

WDIGMT? serves up speeches about trust and fidelity and rolling with the punches and blah blah blah. But it does so with so little energy that the actors might as well be saying the words blah blah blah.

The steady drip-drip-drip of nothings like this are killing us all.

As for the splendid Spaniard Javier Bardem, now knocking socks off in "No Country for Old Men," his lot is worst of all. He's miscast as the romantic Florentino.

A bummer - slack rather than loose, tired rather than fun.

The music screeches, the actors vamp, the knives and weapons and bombs and fireballs fly around the screen. Meanwhile, the well-prepared moviegoer slips into her or his own private fantasy of a world in which movie effects are themselves locked away in an institution for the criminally insane until such time as those effects are really, truly necessary for the story.

Killing looks ridiculously easy in this dispensable exploitation picture, directed for maximum impact of head-cracking pain by ad-trained Irish director Gary McKendry in his first feature.

It's a tragedy, really: According to the hapless team who made the movie, Our Paige is a relatively interesting young liberal who knows her own mind before the accident and a rather tedious, girlish conservative who fusses about keeping her hair smooth afterwards.

This inauthentic teen tale, with its cosmetically softened edges, serves neither the young people nor the Mendes fans for whom it might be intended.

In the face of such junk, the idea that Fox would proudly put himself on a punishing regime of severe diet and exercise to get prisoner-skinny-yet-crazy-muscled for the job of make-believe is vanity at best, obscenity at worst.

The title Addicted to Fame hints that Giancola knows enough to count himself among the hooked. But the crappiness of this documentary about a crappy parody of a crappy B movie suggests that he hasn't kicked the habit.

Maybe the worst thing that can happen is that every other movie at the multiplex will be sold out this weekend.

An awful, stillborn comedy assembled out of rusty spare parts from secret agent movies and run-of-the-mill ''Saturday Night Live'' skits.

A crude, silly supernatural thriller.

To a character, every man in this faux-homey burg has been castrated! They're all impotent buffoons!

Becomes yet another lame sports farce.

The cast itself is weirdly overqualified.

A Scottish weepie of such bathos and balderdash that it deserves a drinking game in its rotten honor.

The movie wants so badly to be mentioned in the same breath as "Heathers" or "Election" that it's not even funny. Really, I mean it, this charred-black comedy is not even funny.

All I know is that something has gone terribly, drum-beatingly wrong in Congo (Paramount, PG-13), and you can sense Jungle Trouble brewing from the git-go.

Firewall is a witless entertainment, and a derivative one, too; it's everything listless about Hollywood in February, everything discardable about the genre in general.

When you watch this failed horror thriller -- which has been under studio doctors' care for some two years, undergoing futile title changes and reshoots -- there's no respite from the odor of flop sweat stinking up the screen.

An appalling, jaw-dropping movie that will cause serious nightmares.

The audience may have bought the act in "Napoleon Dynamite." But this time, the act bombs.

Each actor appears to have received the script to a different movie, while Allen adds his own directorial touch of sexual vulgarity.

It's a toss-up as to what's the worse sin in this graceless piece of tragedy porn.

There's something about Holly: She's the most ridiculous, irritating, two-dimensional rom-com heroine since...Katherine Heigl's last rom-com.

Witless, insultingly derivative, muddy-looking, and edited in the hammering epileptic style that marks so many films produced, as this one is, by Michael Bay.

Under the direction of Entourage's Mark Mylod, the movie not only makes cheap sex jokes but looks skanky, too. Lighting, camerawork, and editing are all a slapdash mess, one that further hinders the actors trying their best to get through this failed hookup of a comedy.

Terminal colon cancer has never looked more fetching than in the critically ill romantic-disease comedy A Little Bit of Heaven.

An appreciation that the pain is personal doesn't compensate for the picture's self-absorbed need to alienate.

Abysmally stupid drama.

A half hour in and still, the plot, tone, and setting are incomprehensible.

There is not one honest moment, not ONE, in Hanging Up.

Rancid, misogynist comedy.

In one rotten production -- all involved have managed to create the most unlikable, man hating, woman hating, unfunny idiots since ''Whipped'' ended up on worst movie lists last year.

It's a puzzlement how so many pros could have so wrecked one of the most beloved, hummably familiar movie musicals in the Rodgers and Hammerstein repertoire.

Had the ghost of Paul Lynde swanned by in a caftan-clad cameo, you couldn't find a more outdated, miscalculated collection of stale, queen-size stereotypes than those trotted out on this ship of fools.

This ill-fitting movie was mail-ordered from an out-of-date catalog of teen-com stereotypes.

Oooh, this is toxic.

There are no survivors here.

A huge pile of horsefeathers is being peddled as fairy dust in Bigger Than the Sky.

A stinker, the more so for the thespian excesses of the accomplished cast.

Fanning is remarkably collected and even dignified. As for the rest of the gang, they ought to be returned to sender.

Exhausted as the premise already is -- hapless boomer learns that real manhood is a function of committed fatherhood -- Old Dogs nevertheless finds ways to make the lesson even less tolerable.

How you feel about Valentine's Day may depend on how you feel when someone really, really cute -- and someone you're really, really fond of -- gives you a nasty box of cheap chocolate on Valentine's Day, picked up at the corner Rite Aid and delivered with the price tag still attached.

This nadir of equal-opportunity raunch forces viewers to spend time with a needy yeast-infested adult who doesn't know how to go on a date with a man; her grating, neurotic monster of a best friend; and a third, random younger chick, who's crazy-upset about some tedious thing that happened with her boyfriend.