The most that can be said for Slackers -- aside from the unqualified pleasure of Schwartzman's unfaked, puppyish weirdness -- is that it doesn't abandon its putrid ideals for the sake of a neat finish.

Cynically accumulates plot twists while showing little regard for suspense or audience sophistication.

Rifkin milks the generic Bukowski-land setting for all its melodramatic potential, but what little grace his tale of precarious skid-row dignity achieves is pushed into the margins by predictable plotting and tiresome histrionics.

Stupefyingly benign.

It has Adrien Brody in his last pre-"Pianist" role, leading one to assume that the film -- which veers torpidly from antic humor to mortifying sentimentality -- would have remained shelved were it not for his Oscar coup.

To call this action gambit formulaic is to sell it short: The Rundown runs down more formulas than a month's worth of complimentary premium cable service.

It all becomes little more than feel-good-about-feeling-bad window dressing, like an issue of "Utne Reader" in Dolby Surround Sound.

Like the action movies of yore (you know, the 1980s), Catwoman is simultaneously overstuffed and undernourished.

Laughably unscary.

John Schultz's wan, unfunny The Honeymooners is unlikely to tickle devotees of Jackie Gleason's archetypal yuk-fest.

Comes off as an overlong, overstuffed promo for an "industry" that hasn't needed promoting since the movie's target audience was in diapers.

A clumsy graft of Chekhovian high dudgeon and harsh, Albee-esque psychological realism that probably worked better onstage.

What's unexpected is how thoroughly The ABCs of Death's ample duds overshadow its treasures, and how uninspired it feels as a whole.

Wanders all over the map thematically and stylistically, and borrows heavily from Lynch, Jeunet, and von Trier while failing to find a spark of its own.

Cloaks a familiar anti-feminist equation (career - kids = misery) in tiresome romantic-comedy duds.

About as threadbare as a favorite childhood plushy. What's more, trying to keep the story line of strained meta-sequel Freddy Vs. Jason straight requires too much of a cogitative investment.

It's nauseating, unfunny stuff, unmitigated by the revelation that Griffin's mom physically abused him.

Good intentions or not, ineptitude and cloying sentimentality don't do anybody any favors.

Despite a couple of inventive CGI effects (one involving mass evisceration), the results are more predictable and less frightening than a Con Ed bill in mid August.

Danny Provenzano's mafioso melodrama is the immoral vanity project to end immoral vanity projects.

The pivotal plot twist isn't hard to predict, and Brit theater vet Hamm and screenwriter Mark Bomback rely on jolts that date back to the silent era.

Burt Reynolds turns up as scruffy mountain man, sparking unfulfilled expectations of some primo Deliverance jokes.

This Dick & Jane is precisely the kind of social-problem comedy you'd expect from well-intentioned millionaires unaccustomed to putting their money where their mouths are.

Rote sequel that surely no one was waiting for: Like the serially thwarted Death (the only "character" to return from the first two Final Destination movies), audiences are required to endure banal exposition and junior-high-level foreshadowing before being treated to the nauseatingly detailed scenes of CGI slaughter.

It's the summer's most disingenuous movie -- a real achievement in a waning season that included Tim Burton's "Banana Splits" remake.

Griffin and Solvang's obliviousness, and the filmmakers' habit of mugging condescendingly while conducting interviews doesn't help either.

A valueless kiddie paean to pro basketball underwritten by the NBA.

Suited only for unwitting under-twelvers (though even they may not outlast the midpoint evaporation of Lawrence's shtick).