An adventure in mediocrity that brings together some of the worst current techniques and trends.

The result is that rare movie specimen, a completely intentional, expertly guided work of art that fails almost completely.

In its second half, Outlander falls apart completely, becoming nothing but a violent, mindless monster movie along the lines of "Alien vs. Predator."

Friedkin is steeped in gore, like some cinematic Macbeth, and it's obscuring his artistic vision.

Vantage Point has nothing going on. There's no artistic, philosophical or even jolly entertainment reason for adopting this strategy. It's just arbitrary, a gimmick.

A useless film in every possible way.

It's a strange thing, this type of whimsy. Kari offers us ideas in place of characters, and yet he expects us to see through these ideas to the real-life conditions they represent - and then to respond to them in kind.

The movie is a mess.

A movie like this depends on clever bits and incidents, but there's little invention here to disguise the film's formulaic nature.

They take on special powers that the filmmakers are incapable of making interesting, partly because the characters are ciphers, and partly because the story is listless and uninventive.

An attempt at a beautiful film about renewal -- about past love, love lost, longing and rediscovery -- but it has no emotional truth.

Butter is a misfire. At 90 minutes it feels inflated, and though clearly intended as funny, it's difficult to locate, except in the most general terms, the focus of the movie's satire, and there's not a laugh to be had.

Credit the director for one thing. He could have stretched it to three hours, but he gets in and out of this mess in less than two.

There's nothing here but a concept and a marketing and merchandising strategy, at the center of which somebody - oh, no - had to come up with an actual movie.

This is strictly formula stuff, made worse by an utterly careless depiction of the characters.

The presence of Washington lends the picture a much-needed dose of authenticity. But in the end Virtuosity is disconnected and uninvolving, despite -- or maybe because of -- a climax that comes in three distinct waves. One section seems to be a half-hour sound-and-light show.

Dreary movie.

Stone tries to make us like Alexander because he's good, when he should have made us want to watch Alexander because he's amazing.

Truly awful.

Just about everything in The Chronicles of Riddick is impenetrable, from the convoluted story to the dark and baroque art direction. It's an inane film rendered sometimes laughable by an atmosphere of dead-serious reverence.

Nora Ephron directed it and had a hand in the screenplay, but without Travolta this film would have no reason for being.

Inert, incompetent and emotionally fraudulent.

A graceless, embarrassing effort.

A mess.

This is a story that should have been, at the absolute most, 20 minutes long.

What we have in this film is a whole lot of nothing, and the little that's there is irritating.

So desperate and silly that here and there, it's a lot of fun.

There are all kinds of bad movies in the world, but it's really only stardom that can create the exact variety of cinematic abortion we find in The Tourist.