Almost insufferably sufferable. It's a chick flick of the tallest order, with schmaltz galore and the sort of ongoing romantic hubris that practically screams, "This is codswallop, right?"

There's not much more to this poorly scripted thriller than exactly one well-done shock moment and Michael Keaton's eyebrows, but, to be fair, Keaton's brows have carried three Tim Burton films nearly on their own, so don't let this dissuade you from seeing the film.

It's never wise to try to one-up a classic.

It all falls apart at the end, however, and in such a loud and abrasive way that it makes Brian De Palma's "Raising Cain" look like a model of restraint.

All we're left with is a second-rate J-Horror entry that bores rather scares.

10 times too much, a nonstop orgy of bullets, bombs, and booty that aims low and hits the bull’s-eye with enough firepower to sink the Bismarck.

Roughly as entertaining as watching your neighbor's kid's soccer game, not because you want to, but because you have to.

How much better this would have been had someone like Brian De Palma stepped behind the camera.

It's inoffensive and sports a positive "be yourself" message that’s obvious enough to be seen from space without benefit of hero-vision, but really, there's very little that's super about it.

Like the infamous Japanese water tortures of WWII, Dahl’s film is a steadily mounting series of pesky nonevents paced with all the frenetic, action-packed verve of a wounded lawn sprinkler.

Derrickson's staid direction, coupled with Wilkinson’s sad-sack priest and a general air of dreariness make for a courtroom thriller that’s somewhat less apocalyptic than the "L.A. Law" episode involving the death of Benny's mom.

Isn't teen heartache confusing enough without adding into the libidinal mix a bunch of buff scullers nicknamed the Queerstrokes?

Go for the gore (there's lots of it), but stay for the immortal line: "Now let's go find the body this arm belongs to."

The script, by Adam "Tex" Vegas, ricochets between over-earnest romantic comedy staples and a noticeable lack of any consistent tone for Reynolds’ character.

Its kooky hybrid of slapstick gender jokes already had whiskers on 'em in Shakespeare's day.

Sandler is a post-Catskills goldmine of potential, he always has been, and when he's willing to break with tradition (a là Punch Drunk Love), he's downright revelatory. Not this time, though. This time he's just dying.

Perhaps vice isn't what it used to be, or maybe Crockett and Tubbs just aren't all that interesting when removed from their appropriate time slot, but this may well be the dreariest and most monochromatic time you'll have at the movies all summer.

It takes so long to get going and fails to generate the necessary suspense to keep viewers engaged, that the horrific final act is too little, too late, while at the same time nearly being much too much.

There are moments in Idlewild that resonate with the painful "if only" of missed opportunity, and more than a few that just make you scratch your head. It's like some wildly overlong music video, minus the sexy thump 'n' grind. It's all blow, no pop.

Neither as adroitly funny as Franken's comic routines, nor as notable as his conversion to the fine art of politics, this is a 90-minute "What If?" with no discernible answer.

Forty-five minutes in, I was already glancing at my watch and wondering why the only lively actress in this film was playing the dead girl. Go figure.

Co-writers Don Calame and Chris Conroy utterly fail to notice the wealth of black-comedy gold inherent in the very notion of sprawling supercenters and instead go for the dumbest gags they can find.

Only good old Leatherface literally mirrors the festering cultural and political corruption of the era, and to the film's vast discredit, this hideous echo is never even noted.

Has all the sugar-injected horsepower of a 6-year-old on a Big Wheel.

It's no "Dellamorte Dellamore," but neither is it "Uwe Boll," a smallish favor we should all be thankful for.

Relentlessly dull and curiously bombastic.

A mildly entertaining reworking of the Farrelly Brothers' superior micro-sport parody "Kingpin."

The Nines is the feature-film-directing debut from screenwriter John August (Go, Big Fish), but it feels much more like some Bizarro World collaboration between Jean-Paul Sartre and Charlie Kaufman, and not in a good way, either.

For the most part, this is strictly kiss kiss, bang bang, yawn yawn.

This South Korean pseudo-epic is some of the most ambitious cr-- I've ever seen.

With a running time of 78 minutes, Awake is relatively painless, playing a little like a lesser story from one of EC Comics Shock SuspenStories – or a lot like Joseph Cotten's "Breakdown" episode of Alfred Hitchock Presents – updated for the Fangoria generation.

Far from perfect and about as much fun as a holiday in Cambodia, this is lightweight yuletide fluffery, offensive neither in tone nor spirit but entirely unnecessary.

Much to my dismay this is not an unauthorized sequel to Abel Ferrara's 1979 East Village art-world freakout "Driller Killer." This is instead a dispiritingly mediocre tweener comedy from some very talented people who appear to be experiencing a delayed sophomore slump.

There's more story, heart, and – cutting to the chase, the quick, and the dead – pure, unadulterated fun contained within a scant five minutes of Rockstar Games' new Grand Theft Auto IV video game than there is in the whole of Speed Racer.

War, Inc. is neither all that interesting nor all that cool.

The Happening is both too incoherenly weird and too narratively ambitious for its own good.

A godforsaken (possibly literally) mess.

Ultimately, it's a long, incoherent mess of a film, enlivened only by the sure knowledge that the great Will Eisner's original is available to one and all at your nearest comic-book shop.

I'm beginning to suspect there's some sort of ancient, or at least post-Pearl Harbor, curse in play that stops genre-oriented Asian filmmakers from creating anything of all but the most negligible merit once they hit the California shore.

Pixar this isn't, but neither is it "Mary Shelley's Veggie Tales." If only.

Truly, the greatest torture of all is boredom.

You come away from Splinter feeling it would have made a far more effective short than the feature-length drag it is.

A dull, tired mess.

Delgo is a dud.

It's chop-socky vindaloo, pleasing on a platter but awfully difficult to swallow whole.

It's a testament to Bill Nighy's cadaverous panache that this third entry in the ongoing exsanguinators vs. lycanthropes franchise (that's vampires and werewolves to anyone not weaned on Famous Monsters) is as tolerable as it is.

Why remake Craven's original at all? Oh, yeah, I forgot: Reheated depravity sells. To avoid existential despair, keep repeating: It's only a remake; it's only a remake; it's only a remake.

In the end, it's much ado about nothing. Oh, the ennui, the ennui.

Wolverine is a noisy mess, an origin/prequel that's nicely full of Jackman's ace glare as Wolverine and seriously killer snarl – The Boy From Aaarrrgh! – but utterly devoid of any of the borderline subversive smarts that made Bryan Singer's "X-Men" outings so contemporarily resonant.

Ends up as little more than a recursive footnote to the infinitely better up-all-night teen comedies of, you guessed it, John Hughes.

The real problem with this Aliens encounter is that it's patently a Nick at Night midweek movie that inadvertently got greenlighted for a big-screen opening.

The Collector feels like the final, welcome nail in the bizarrely popular torture-porn coffin.

Less a traditional martial-artistry marathon than it is an exercise in filmic frustration, lovely to look at by small degrees, but a mud-spattered mess of a movie overall.

Consider this yet another nail in the Eighties coffin.

The few gags that hit their mark only serve to point up how flaccid the rest of his material is, and that spells doom for a comic, no matter how much his hometown crowd cheers him on.

Apart from the fang-restraint of the nosferatu, however, there's precious little that's altogether new or for that matter shocking about this by-the-numbers thriller.

Sitting through the film was an exercise in confusion.

The most lackadaisical thriller I've ever seen, overly infatuated with not only the inexplicability of random evil, but also its mundanity.

A limp and lackluster affair that telegraphs its feel-good smarm miles in advance.

It's the type of film that begs to be called “charming” and by doing so instead ends up grating.

At it's best, it's a wishy-washy treatise that fails to elicit much of any reaction.

A character-driven piece with a character who seems somewhat hollow.

An exercise in unintentional farce.

Selick is widely and rightly regarded as a master of surreal, dark humor, and wildly inventive animation technique, and Monkeybone is the first tarnish on his otherwise spotless reputation.

The bottom line with the film is that there's just no damn mystery about it.

The finished product is as predictably dull as a newborn's soft spot.

Prinze, Lillard, and Biel are all pleasant enough to look at, but the film's Romeo and Juliet tropes are shopworn by now, and the movie gives us nothing else.

It's a pleasure to watch, but I found myself wondering if having a story here even mattered to the director at all.

By the time the closing credits roll, you're wondering if anyone else noticed that nothing made much sense.

Sporadically funny, the film seems weighted down, literally, with bulging, bulbous Murphys flatulating endlessly.

Can barely limp to its final CinemaScope sunset shot.

The script by S.S. Wilson and Brent Maddock (Ghost Dad) is so jumbled and the direction so chaotic that it's often hard to tell what's going on -- where, when, and why.

Director Chappelle lays on the spook factor heavy in the first 30 minutes or so, but the film quickly devolves into a simplistic slash 'n' bash shoot-'em-up which goes nowhere fast.

Home may be where the heart is, but I kept wishing this poor silly girl would up and move.

From the swooping aerial shots of downtown Miami, to the long, long-legged beauties that seem to crop up every time the action threatens to slow down, to the nonsensical lack of logic that permeates the film like the acrid odor of wasted cordite, Bad Boys oozes Eighties Hollywood clichés like no film since "Top Gun."

Herzfeld also wrote the screenplay, and so its leaden and obvious tone and the resulting dearth of delicacy rests squarely on him.

Surely something more original than this could have been mined from the history of North America’s largest and most professional police force. As it is, though, Johnson’s film is just firing blanks.

Director Irwin Winkler and his cast obviously hope to shed light on the boundaries of love, and instead come up with a walloping case of the preachies.

Works just fine for the first half hour or so, but quickly devolves into a case of too much affection and not enough affliction.

Bad as it may be, though, the film falls that one precious inch shy of being quite so awful that it achieves cult status; in short, it's just not bad enough to be any good.

About as thrilling as cleaning out your garage.

As middling comedies go, this is neither as smart as it ought to be nor as dumb as you'd expect.

Barely even worthy of a straight-to-video release, as simplistic and silly as it is.

An inoffensive, eminently forgettable bit of fluff.

It's mediocrity at its most unremarkable.

At its core the film is as standardized as the exam it seeks to debunk, and nearly as tedious.

Spottily directed and lacking the dubious merits of even the Friday the 13th franchise, this is one slasher film that should die a quick and lonely box-office death.

The emotions are turbocharged and the topic is eternally relevant, but that's not enough to save Two Girls and a Guy from being a whiny, snoozy bore.

Jawbreaker has all the heart and soul of last week's mystery loaf (a dish that made the weekly rounds at my alma mater, sadly). And like that unidentifiable bovine by-product, the film is a chilly, messy anti-treat, sweet on the outside, sickly on the in.

The film itself is an effective enough metaphor for out-of-control bullshit that frankly, Koepp aside, was part and parcel of King’s novella from page 1.

Feels more like Barry Levinson's "Tin Men" on Prozac.

Remains little more than a briefly fascinating curiosity, a travelogue for those of us who can't actually attend.

Like rocky road ice cream, The Rundown is chunky stuff, full of calories and easy to take in small doses. Also like rocky road, it’s bound to attract flies if you leave it lying around, and, more to the point, too much of it is likely to make you gag.

It works only sporadically, and more as a comic outing than as a vicious battle of sexual predation.

Torpedoed by its own overarching idealism -- the film targets the new star system, the media, the studios, digital technology, and pretty much everything else you might care to think of -- and not enough script to back it all up.

A dead-chamber misfire, a hollowpoint dud.

At its core, a very manipulative piece of work.

Fumbles on so many levels it's just plain silly. To paraphrase the film's tagline: The Thirteenth Floor: You can go there, but why would you want to?

A less cohesive action-comedy than its predecessor, Full Throttle is instead a freewheeling collection of random action sequences strung together with little or no discernible rhyme or reason.

This new film version, sad to say, is a hollow shell of the original series.

A boisterous, gooey miscue.

Eager to please, but it’s so lacking in real-world skate politics that it more resembles the chugging PG-13 mediocrity of Top 40 pop-punk-lite than the hard-core Black Flagisms of Peralta’s scathingly real doc.

The script, written by the three brothers, is ludicrous and incomprehensible, and plays cat-and-mouse games with what could have been some deeply funny comments on race, wealth, and, in one inspired changing-room scene, eating disorders.

A 119-minute trailer.

Just watching the trailer for Oliver Stone's new football epic a few weeks back left me with a grating headache; watching the whole sweaty film practically put me in the ICU.

In all honesty I'd advise you to go rent the stunning (and brand-new) DVD of the director's great "Le Mépris (Contempt)," which seems to me to be much more Godardian and much less hopeless.

Saw has its moments, and most of them are brutal in the extreme, but ultimately it's one tremendous misfire that will either leave you laughing or, possibly, gagging. Not what I'd call a winning combination.

It's exasperating watching so much top-drawer talent wasted in a film that wraps itself up with one of the most preposterous (not to mention obvious) endings the genre has ever seen.

Possibly one of the dullest takes on a real-life murder mystery, this gutter’s-eye-view of the waning days of Los Angeles porn king John "Johnny Wadd" Holmes is barely as interesting as one of the big man’s films, and a lot less revelatory.

My advice? Grab Mr. Peabody’s Wayback Machine and recast with Jimmy Dean.

Neither as good as its direct ancestor (Michael Schultz's great 1976 hood masterpiece Car Wash) nor as clever as the original Friday, this is, to put it bluntly, all seeds and stems.

This might not matter so much to the youngest members of the audience, but for anyone over the age of 10, it’s strictly a colorful bore.

Just as clichéd as its predecessor, and lacks the old-school charm of films like "Wild Style" and "Breakin’."

It’s Brisseau's penchant for the flamboyantly perverse and the perversely flamboyant, however, that might have been best left secret.

Fans of the video game will doubtless love it all but for true fans of the gnashing dead – and we count ourselves among them – this is strictly second-tier terror.

It's all a bit of overkill.

Crucial to the nature of the disaster film -- and something that Irwin Allen knew so very well -- is that films of this sort depend on an emotional hook, a peg of normalcy to hang the chaos from. Volcano offers no such hook, and as a result it plays like some La Brea dinosaur risen from the tar, all effects and no heart.

Indeed, the biggest acting coup here comes by way of Courtney Love, whose cameo as an obliging waitress is the best thing the film has going for it.

It's a mess, and one that even the pickled cowboys behind me found yawningly tedious, and that's not something I ever thought I'd be saying about a Sam Raimi movie with the word “dead” in the title.

Despite some briefly breathtaking, computer-generated special effects, Virtuosity is 95 minutes of unsubstantial firefights and meandering plot twists.

It's confused and confusing, by turns hilarious and off-putting. In short, it's awfully hard to love I Love You Philip Morris.

The resulting film makes Sam Raimi's "The Quick and the Dead" look like a stone cold neo-Western thoroughbred.

House has a few moments that ring genuinely eerie, but the cluttered, unconvincing dialogue – not to mention Moseley's ongoing penchant for crazed overacting – make it more of a genre curiousity than anything the "Fangoria" gang would likely want to sit through.

Although it's great fun for the under-8 set and for those of us monitoring the chaos theory that is Nolte's career of late, this film is otherwise mediocre and features some of the most uninvolving 3-D CGI since "Clash of the Titans" earlier this year.

Fans of the series, if there are any left and I'm not too certain that there are, will enjoy the usual smorgasbord of lower intestines spilling out from the screen and onto their laps (via the profoundly crappy 3-D) as well as an above-average opening slaughter involving two men, one woman, several buzz saws, and a crowd of gawking onlookers.

Gondry's update of vigilante crime fighter The Green Hornet's escapades is above all an exercise in frustration.

It pains me to say it, but Afterlife, the latest installment in this seemingly eternal zombie apocalypse franchise, is considerably more entertaining than George A. Romero's most recent exhumation.

It's manic and wearyingly predictable, and as soon as it begins, you know exactly how it's going to end: with a hard, fast crash (and the requisite yakkety epilogue).

"When you race with the devil, you'd better be fast as hell." (And you, angry driver, are not that fast.)

West (Con Air) saturates his imagery in a sickly, sulphurous stew of rotten-egg yellows and oranges, making a mediocre picture downright repellent at times.

In short, the character is a lot like the way Stan Lee first envisioned him, but the trilogy's screenwriter Steve Ditko would probably loathe this new, unsatisfying, and hollow-feeling entry into the new cinematic Marvel Universe.

The result is a somewhat functional blood feast for the exploitation crowd, but it's hardly a bead of sweat on the original's battered backside. Oh, and the score? Basil Poledouris' bombastic brass is still No. 1.

The result is a goofy-weird mishmash of some pretty swell CGI creatures and some downright lousy screenwriting.

It is, in a word or two, everything that Poe's tales and poems were not: interminable and picayune.

This time out, the action is in 3-D, which amounts to a few shots of flaming motorcycle parts comin' at ya, but little else.

This crass and hugely dumb aliens vs. multiple earthling navies should thrill the hyperactive 10-year-old inside you. Adults, on the other hand – and especially genre-fan adults – will be bored to tears and wishing Bay (or at least Jerry Bruckheimer) had something of their own on the marquee out front.

Director Munroe (TMNT) is clearly a fan and attempted his best on an admittedly limited budget, but some things just don't translate that well. Throw this dog a bone? No need, he's already got a closetful.

Less extraordinary and considerably more banal, given the sci-fi/comedy subject matter, is Men in Black 3's story, which jumps the ectomorphic shark in high style but with a deficit of actual belly laughs.

I've always said, "If you've seen one god, you've seen them all," and Wrath of the Titans only serves to underscore my point.

For one thing, Seven Days in Utopia feels an awful lot like Victor Salva's 2006 New Age uplifter "Peaceful Warrior." That film at least had the appeal of watching Nick Nolte play Yoda, whereas here Duvall simply seems to be playing Duvall.

Seyfried acquits herself admirably in the panicky, hysterical mode, if that's what you're looking for, but by the time the final, goofy revelations roll around, you're slapping yourself for not having just taken a nap instead.

It's a courageous but misguided move on Perry's part; he has none of Freeman's soulful, nuanced subtlety, and watching him display the gamut of emotions called for in Marc Moss and Kerry Williamson's script is like watching the Hulk attempt Swan Lake.

As for Legion, well, if you've seen one plague of flies and death and angels at war with each other, you've seen 'em all.

The Squeakquel might be appreciated by filmgoers aged 10 or younger.

While expertly executed animation-wise and passably entertaining for very young kids (less so, their parents), is still as dull as the hull on Rocketship X-M.

This space invaders stuff is, like, so 1981.

Not stupid enough to qualify as good, dumb fun.

Even the should-have-been-triumphant revelation of the Boogeyman arrives as a CGI letdown of epic proportions.

Inexplicable Fantasy Romances for the Harried Modern Gal 101 is a more fitting title for this shameless mediocrity.

Genre fans and newcomers alike should skip this monstrosity and go rent "Ginger Snaps" instead.

It's only at film's end that you realize the whole soggy, overlong mess isn't going to go anywhere.

Ultimately, it's a bore. Don't see the movie – read the book, play the game.

The overall emotion the film generates is one of moist, enervated ennui. Who cares if the apartment is haunted when the best the ghost can do is get things a bit damp and run laps on the floor above?

Despite an ambitious script from Wadlow and Beau Bauman, it's extremely difficult to care, seeing as how these tropes have already been recycled enough to make Greenpeace proud.

Daltry Calhoun's saving grace comes in the form of a snappy compilation soundtrack that spans from Johnny Cash to Serge Gainsbourg, a feat of all-inclusiveness that renders the film a moot point at best.

There are precious few things for a Zorro fan – or a film fan, for that matter – not to loathe about The Legend of Zorro.

Best never to have left dry dock with this one.

It's not just a bad movie it actually manages to suck the very hope out of the air, leaving behind a cinematic vacuum populated by mobsters, sadists, pedophiliac demon-people, and an overwhelming sense of futility that just makes you want to run in the other direction.

It's all so much blood and brine signifying nothing, not even a good time. Now somebody do us all a favor and cut that albatross from around Petersen's neck already.

Do yourself a favor: Go rent Hardy's original film, watch it, and then try and get it out of your head. You never, ever will.

Americans are befuddled by the inexplicable, and they demand explanations. With The Grudge 2 Shimizu delivers them and thus defangs the horror, leaving us in a well-lit room, pining for the shadows.

Dear George Lucas: What gives with this Eragon jazz? I mean, gee whiz, did you seriously think that we wouldn't recognize you, the Great Man, as the guiding, um, FORCE behind this dull retelling of "Star Wars"?

It just signals a series that's plainly out of gas.

To be sure, Hitman is a lousy film, but like the video game that inspired it, it's also great fun, drawing as it does on everything from James Bondian Eurotrash panache to Vin Diesel's moribund XXX character.

They shoot rodents, don't they?

Tepid, borderline offensive cyber-serial killer thriller.

Most unforgivably, this Eye culminates not with the mounting dread and spectacular tragedy of the original film's decidedly downbeat vision, but with the trademark LASIK laziness of Hollywood's stylistically blank remake factory.

If you can work your way past Vantage Point's goofy casting that places a bland, blank-eyed Hurt in the White House, then I suppose you can manage to forgive this "Rashomon" rip-off's other glaring idiosyncrasies, of which there are many.

The very Thai-specific charms that made the original Shutter such an unforeseen, unpredictable delight when I first saw it – and when I screened it again, last night – are almost entirely absent here, eclipsed by the annoying blonde highlights of Taylor, ex-Transformer babe and forever, as the Thai say, farang.

It's a tonally confused comedy which, for once, doesn't go far enough comedically.

As it stands, The Ruins is about as interesting as a pile of old stones and a monkey-dumb yanqui falling prey to the horrors of globalization. And that's pretty dumb.

Attica! Attica! Everyone involved in the creation of this muddled, joyless, and deadly dull serial killer-meets-forensic psychiatrist snoozefest should be forced to spend – at the very least – 88 minutes behind Attica's bars.

The story is a shambles, incoherent throughout, veined with tirelessly wearying flashbacks, hallucinations, and just plain old lousy storytelling.

Adding to weirdness is a tacked-on, live-action appearance from the real Aldrin, who reassures kids and terrified X-Files fans that there weren't, in fact, any houseflies on board Apollo 11.

There's nothing righteous about this tired and tiresome good cop/bad cop NYPD procedural.

Dull, unnecessary film.

Calling The Unborn a dull, plodding, exposition-crammed slog through a twilight of barely maintained tedium is like calling "Valkyrie" a yawn. It's too easy.

Loud, abrasive, and featuring performances seemingly calibrated to be heard over the cacophonous roar of Travolta's mad, bad overacting.

The only people who should be peeved enough to raise hell about Year One are the viewers who had to pay to sit through it.

It's all noise and flash and chaos, but it lacks virtually everything that made the original television series so memorable.

Shamlessly dumb movie.

Brings absolutely nothing new to the autopsy table that wasn't previously covered.

A dull, plodding remake.

Neither so awful as to be enjoyable nor eerily artful enough to be anything other than a snoozy also-ran in the perpetually poor plotting machine that is the demon-child cinematic subgenre.

Promises thrills galore but delivers only limp non-frights and predictable yawns.

It sounds as ridiculous as a "Pokemon" episode gone horribly awry.

It's a hockey affair at the best of times.

The film is a TKO before it even had a chance to get off a decent hook.

To make a bad movie worse, even Ballistic's fight scenes, which ought to be the film's strong suit, are poorly edited, slice 'n' diced into incomprehensible blurs.

Why the Pokémon fad hasn't died off yet is one of the great mysteries of the universe, right up there with the Pyramids of Gaza and the white stuff in Twinkies.

Well-intentioned but hardly well-executed.

A moribund Harrison Ford vehicle, stodgily dull, and seemingly endless in its monotony.

Eminently resistible, an unclassifiable cinematic leftover best left untasted.

A forgivable error, but an error nonetheless.

Fails chiefly because it's senseless. How it even managed to bypass the straight-to-video route boggles the mind and is a speculative fiction far more engaging than any to be found onscreen.

It's a huge, bloated, hulking movie.

I Dreamed Of Africa...and all I got was this lousy movie.

Plays like a bad adolescent revenge fantasy on Ritalin, all jagged editorial edges and silly, pumped-up testosterone.

Belongs in the histrionic comedy genre, packed as it is with just plain silly situations that fail to elicit grins, much less guffaws.

Tired and formulaic.

Simply a lousy film from start to finish.

A storyline that makes less sense than the current state of tech stocks on the Nasdaq.

A smallish cast peppered with a pair of bullish performances by both Platt and the lesser-known Gleeson. The two spark some chemistry between them, which is more than can be said for Pullman and Fonda's moribund performances.

This newest laff-riot from the once and future director of The Decline of Western Civilization documentaries is a lamentable mess, chiefly made up of stale gags that went bad sometime during the Kennedy administration and a stunningly unengaging romance that has all the snap of a moist cotton swab.

For all the swords 'n' sandals hoodoo that makes up the wilting backbone of Jonathan Hale's script, the Rock is, nevertheless, fun to keep an eye on.

Kaplan's lustily awful film is to be avoided if at all possible, and if not, well, don't say I didn't warn you.

De Palma's film is a mess from its anxious start all the way through to its new-agey end, relying heavily on cribs from Kubrick and Cameron and even the recent "Apollo 13."

It keeps you off balance, all right, but not enough to obscure the sad fact that Ghosts of Mars is a muddled, derivative disaster straight on through.

Shoddily plotted and unimaginative, Species II is a slapdash effort at best, creepily unaffecting and minus the T&A this sort of film so desperately hinges on.

A dark comedy caught in a white-light washout, it's neither mean enough to be funny, nor funny enough to mean much.

Instead of true grit and gutshot black-hatters, director Les Mayfield has crafted what may well be the world's first Tommy Hilfiger Western.

Feels so depressingly vacant that it registers less as a film than as a pointed lesson in what not to do in the wacky world of non-traditional dating. Hasn't anyone in this film heard of Friendster?

This was already tired stuff when cult fave "Sleepaway Camp" came out in 1983, and it’s downright comatose by now.

It's not quite as bad as "Cutthroat Island," I'll grant you, but it's woefully close.

Charmless, unfrightening, and even devoid of the requisite gratuitous nudity, Anaconda just plain bites.

Toils in high school hell and doesn't even manage to come up with one good shock.

Get out your handkerchiefs. No, scratch that -- get out a pair of windshield wipers and staple them to your brow. Perhaps they'll obscure the screen.

Stupendously dull and infuriatingly obtuse.

Maybe it’s time for Woo to finally make that musical he keeps talking about.

Ridiculously overwrought.

Mitchell's film would be another example of why former SNL cast members should choose their scripts wisely, except that Schneider wrote this one.

It’s as deadly dull as the blunt end of a rifle.

Just plain dismal, an inexplicable mining of old, mid-level programming that has all the raging excitement of continental drift.

Meandering, sub-aquatic mess: It's so bad it's good, but only if you slide in on a freebie.

Neither very scary nor very interesting, Godsend is an unresurrectable muddle.

Sad, sorry remake.

Envy feels like a comedy in search of a drama in search of some sort of lugubrious existential meaning; it never quite seems to know where it's going to head next, and neither will the audience.

Dull and meandering documentary.

Quite possibly, this could have been a hit back in 1975 or so, and almost certainly for Blake Edwards, but here and now it's just a puzzling aberration.

Amid the endless stream of catch-a-rising-star movie clichés that Honey screenwriters Alonzo Brown and Kim Watson throw up and out are a few new ones, notably "skinny girls always win out in the end" and "hootchie bad, faux hootchie good."

Would have made a hell of a short -- but falls flat on its hyperstylized face as a feature.

Batman & Robin fails to engage the spirit of Batman, Robin, or decent marketing in general, and instead ends up as a limp, excruciatingly shallow knockoff that leaves viewers cringing at the unavoidable one-liners that make up the better part of the script.

Enough already.

The man behind the "Rush Hour" franchise proves that dropping sly nods in Alfred Hitchcock's direction does not necessarily a fine caper make.

With its eye-popping color palette and surreal sense of ever-heightening melodrama, Thunderbirds comes across as "Spy Kids'" poorer British cousin.

A colorful mess, all style and substances and little else.

It’s all very nice to look at, sure, but pretty colors and molten intercoolers aside, 2 Fast 2 Furious is about as exciting as a Yugo in quicksand.

I came out of Beyond Borders with the gnawing feeling I'd just been subjected to some sort of ghastly prank, Punk’d by the director of "GoldenEye" with Lara Croft as his willing confederate.

Michael Lehmann's "Heathers" followed the same sort of story line to much better effect in 1989, and Clueless leaves you itching to race over to the video store in search of just that.

Absurdism taken to a new extreme.

It's a dull, unremarkable comedy.

Of all the missteps made and absurdities offered, the most glaring is the casting of what appears to be a steroidal Eurotrash pimp as no less than Dracula.

Darby and co-screenwriter Michael Cristofer ("Breaking Up") telegraph every available bit of plot seemingly hours before it's necessary, resulting in a tawdry, boring mish-mash of genre clichés and arched eyebrows.

Unfortunately, the film rests heavily on the shoulders of Murphy, who seems to wander aimlessly from scene to scene, searching for a laugh. The joke's on him, though: There are none.

Grown Ups is exactly, beat for beat, what the previews would have you believe: a depressingly predictable, two-chuckle deconstruction of what Sandler sees as the modern American male.

Those audiences who have complained about the clunky exposition and mawkish emotional dialogue in Cameron's films will discover the "King of the World"'s own dramatic talents to be on par with the Bard in comparison to the shouty, over-emoted hokum on display here.

It's a helluva comic book, to be sure, but it's a godawful mess of a movie.

A slight, facile, and ultimately yawn worthy romantic comedy, and one of the most obvious if unexpected missteps in Hanks' career.

This is exactly the sort of film I wasn't expecting from either Gorak or his producers. In many too-obvious ways this is just a formulaic riff on Spielberg's "War of the Worlds."

Colombiana is one long megayawn; I'd have garnered more titillating thrills rewatching freckle-faced Russkie sexbomb Natalya Rudakova strut her leggy, sassy stuff in Megaton and Besson's "Transporter 3."

All of this is fair "can you take it?" territory, but in he end you find yourself wondering where Nineties-era German cinema-transgressor Jörg Buttgereit is, and when he might deign to make "Nekromantik 3." As for Human Centipede 2, well, frankly it kind of sucks ass. And we mean that literally.

Dream House is neither haunting (as the marketing appears to promise) nor all that original. But it does, thank goodness for small favors, have Elias Koteas.

"Here Comes the Bomb" would've been a more fitting title, but props to Henry Winkler for rising to the occasion and turning in a sweet, idealistic performance in a film that otherwise feels like a tawdry commercial for the UFC and MMA.

If ever America needed Hollywood to crank out a comedic antidote to the toxic political madness that has engulfed our nation, now is the time. Unfortunately, this loopy, muddled, and ultimately insulting Campaign isn't it. It feels more like an extended Saturday Night Live-meets-FunnyOrDie.com castoff than an actual comedic commentary on American politics.

There are some moments of blessed levity to the otherwise mordant melodramatics...That's not enough to sustain interest in the Taylors and their toxic emotional foibles, however.

In short, it's nothing you haven't seen countless times before and, while it's not offensively bad, it also adds zero to the same old routine. Meh.

The cynic in me notes that the whole, dismal enterprise is just a cheap steal from Roger Corman's 1955 film "Day the World Ended." At least that single set-bound cheapie had a three-eyed mutant to enliven the otherwise stagy proceedings.

The film is an ingenious, deranged, bloated, and just plain batshit crazy riff on advertising and the mad men and women it creates and/or consumes. Heady stuff, but it's no "How to Get Ahead in Advertising." This film is absolutely mental, and not in a good way, either.

Shoddily constructed out of bits and pieces of previous genre triumphs, She's All That is as dull and droning as the fluorescent lighting in your old study hall.

Isn't for everyone, obviously; it might not be for anyone, come to think of it.

But for anyone who assumed Kennedy's experiment couldn't sink any lower than "Malibu's Most Wanted," there are, it appears, ever deeper depths in the realm of comedic misfires.

Awash in the obvious and sports a patently predictable outcome. Somewhere, Stanislavsky is shrieking as well.

Bonuses all around, but a double one for Perabo, the only cast member to survive this dull-as-dirt Cave with her actorly integrity intact.

This vehicle for hip-hop star Usher is no blinged-out Beamer rough-riding it over to Jay-Z's joint to wallop some cheeba up off'n the Zeezer's haid; it's more of a Yugo, as in "You go to this wannabe straight-to-video tripe, you deserve what you get."

It's a curiously dull Americanization of one of the finest examples of subtle, moody J-horror out there.

The first film was near-mythic in its tone and treatment of its characters, while this remake barely serves as a primer in how not to generate suspense.

The movie feels mechanical all the way through, leaving Sadek's debut an inauspicious and ill-lubed affair.

Shapeshifters-lite. Fangs but no fangs.

It's the pod people's version of a great, contemporaneously resonant cinematic fable, created by apparent committee, and utterly devoid of both meaning and feeling. The tagline warns: "Do not trust anyone. Do not show emotion. Do not fall asleep." Yawn.

The Last Legion offers guilty-pleasure fun in a cheesy, very De Laurentiis way (much like 1976's Mandingo rip-off Drum), but, in the end, it's just not a very inspired or well-conceived film, despite Kingsley's strangely endearing turn as the proto-Merlin.

Do yourself a favor and go rent any Miike film other than this one.

Who among us can explain the enigma wrapped in a riddle surrounded by fierce, ravening, razor-toothed conundrums that is German director Uwe Boll?

They've become deadly dull, these two once-keen buckers of bureaucratic BS, and watching them interact on screen is akin to having your pleasure centers removed by knobby little aliens whose only knowledge of mankind comes from Jack Webb's stoically unvarying television incarnations.

Little more than a cluttered, noisy, and unsatisfying thrill ride to nowhere.

The real shocker is how hellishly yawn-inducing this utterly pointless and forgettable Haunting turns out to be. It's enough to make you scream.

I saw the original version of this same story 28 years ago. It was called "Scanners" and it blew my mind for real. Push just blows.

Koteas' overearnest performance almost makes The Haunting in Connecticut worth a look, but ultimately even the star of Cronenberg's "Crash" can't salvage what is essentially a substandard rip-off of "The Amityville Horror."

Might make a terrific double bill with the equally inane (but considerably more entertaining) "Con Air," with the French electonica duo Air chirruping in the background. But, you know, only if you're stoned out of your head.

As mesmerizing as watching bread toast. Death, be not proud, indeed.

Dull and unfunny claptrap.

The film is a mess, going all over the graveyard but never finding the grave. It's the work of a fan with too much time (and money) on his hands, eagerly awaited but best forgotten.

There is a line between gallows humor and tastelessness, but Very Bad Things apparently doesn't have a clue where that might be.

As Timeline so adequately proves, not every bestseller will render a good film.

Sloppy, confusing, and dull as a dented crucifix.

A muddled mess of bad-lad clichés, and Jackson's obvious talents only serve to point out how godawful everyone else seems to be.

It is, in a word, boring, and that's the most un-Oliver Stone adjective I can think of.

They've taken a classic and they've battered it senseless and, boy, does it stink. It’s so bad it’s amazing it's being released, and box office-goers might soon end up fleeced. And annoyed and bewildered, perhaps even creeped-out by this cacophonous mess which is awful throughout.

A Life Less Ordinary fails on so many levels it's nearly a textbook case of What Not to Do.

Things do not end well, least of all for the audience.

The comic, his career now apparently in total free fall, tackles the (dual) role(s) so broadly (no pun intended) that it's just plain annoying.

Disappointingly, Piranha 3DD, the inevitable sequel to the remake, has none of Dante's wit, Aja's directorial skills, or Greg Nicotero's grotesqueries.

I'm not sure which is more freakish: the fact that this savagely unfun and relentlessly generic Adam Sandler comedy has spawned its own (infinitely more entertaining) Internet meme or the realization that something has gone seriously awry with the decision-making process of Al Pacino's agent.

Shue, to her credit, looks like she's trying to crawl out of her skin, but hey, anything to get away from this hell house, right? Right.

As for Hotel Transylvania,, no need to put a stake in it, it's deadly dull already.

A work of near-existential pointlessness. It's true to the anarchic, silly spirit of the original clowning, but there's very little else to it.

This is one horror franchise that's burned itself out, and then some – not even the rare shock cuts to nothing much at all will startle anyone over the age of 8.

The film strives so much to have heart, it comes across as heartless and mean-spirited. Bah, humbug!

Nobody of Chan's legendary stature should ever have to play second banana to George Lopez, and certainly not in a film that was already made five years ago with Vin Diesel (see: The Pacifier).