How appealing is Muniz, taking a break from ''Malcolm in the Middle,'' a day job he should by no means let go of?

As anyone who has peered in on the actual WNBA for five minutes knows, professional women basketball players are as tough as men. That the film treats this as a joke isn't funny -- it's the height of lame condescension.

If any of these characters were half as resonant as Wenders appears to think they are, the film might have seemed charming instead of merely stranded.

It's a dismal mess...What's most grating about Hackers, however, is the guileless way the movie buys in to the computer-kid-as-elite-rebel mystique currently being peddled by magazines like Wired.

The cruddy, shot-in-a-warehouse settings are especially depressing, since the computer-generated special effects seem to be taking place in another movie entirely (a far livelier one). [9 Jan 1998, p. 47]

God-awful?Gooding screams out lines like ''I'm about to get in yo' ass like last year's underwear!''

Doesn't contain a single scary or imaginative moment.

Simply put, it may be the lamest movie ever made about poor white... Southern characters.

Is less an end in itself than an excuse, a jumping off point for showy, contrived, borderline exploitation sequences that fail to tie together because they're not really there to do anything but sell themselves as money shot thrills.

Instead of rooting for Pullman and Fonda, we end up praying that the crocodile is hungry enough to put them out of their misery.

A sodden ''feminist'' vulgarization.

Allen is no more convincing than the writer-director, Chris Ver Wiel, who strings together faux-QT, faux-Elmore Leonard clichés like so many necklace beads and pretends that's the same thing as making a movie.

Jason Lee seems to have been bitten by a vampire who sucked out all his prickly charisma. You see the promise of stardom dribbling through his fingers.

A witch comedy so slapdash, plodding, and muddled it seems to have had a hex put on it.

If you've been longing to see the worst family entertainment of 1966, A Dog of Flanders may be the movie for you.

The movie, which strains to be hip in a faux-1985 beat-the-system way, takes such a light view of cheating that it has the ironic effect of rendering the heist that follows utterly innocuous.

Starts out as a neo-Pygmalion comedy, but the film is slow, earnest, and rhythmless.

The entire movie has the meaninglessly burnished, sunglasses-at-midnight glow of an early-'90s car commercial -- a visual scheme guaranteed to leave the audience squinting between yawns.

It's an utterly fake nostalgia piece -- stupid and pandering, a bad-boy teen flick that plays less like a loving look at the late '70s than a terrible movie from the late '70s.

A cheaply made piece of ''psychological'' occult schlock, subjects you to that depressing stop-and-go rhythm that defines inept fantasy thrillers.

A convoluted ''dweeb meets the Mob'' farce in which everyone is trying to kill everyone else, but it's the movie that's the real corpse -- albeit a busy, twitching one.

Has Brian De Palma finally lost his mind? Ever since "Carrie" (1976), his one true masterpiece, this director has evolved into a cinematic serial killer of common sense.

Watching Pecker, his rickety new comedy about a teenage Baltimore shutterbug, it becomes clear that Waters has grown color-blind to his own sleazo-shock aesthetic.

If you were looking for an actress to play a tempestuous, schizophrenic movie-slash-rock star, you might go for Courtney Love or Angelina Jolie, or maybe even Jennifer Connelly. But Rachael Leigh Cook?

It barely boasts enough funny material to fill four minutes.

The only performer I enjoyed watching was Martin Short, who plays a bitch dandy music teacher with a smile so fake that the comedian seems to be acting with his gums.

Just when you're sure that Deuce Bigalow: Male Gigolo can't get any less funny, the movie douses the trailer's best gag, as that prosthetic leg turns out to be attached to Deuce's true love.

Another racial cartoon buddy movie that eagerly flogs its best laugh -- indeed, its only laugh -- in the trailer.

Leaves you with the dismaying sensation that Levinson, who should probably be off making his own version of ''The Player,'' has instead crafted a comedy of self-loathing, burying himself in a movie that deserves to be Vapoorized.

This ''satire'' of triple-X raunch and ''Jerry Springer'' sleaze starts off at a pitch of preening dementia and just grows more hysterical from there.

It's doubtful that even a real actress could have triumphed over the rusty tinsel of Glitter, a hapless, retro-'80s ''Star Is Born.''

An action-choked dud in which even the closing outtakes barely deserve to be left on the cutting-room floor?

Just a lumbering, poorly photographed piece of derivative sci-fi drivel, full of grunting extras scampering around in animal pelts and more dank, trash-strewn sets than I ever care to see again.

Critics tend to fawn over the Japanese director-star Takeshi Kitano (a.k.a. Beat Takeshi), but am I the only one who finds his films impossible to make heads or tails of?

Isn't up to much of anything besides pretending that swearwords and snot-nosed insults, served up by Santa with an almost institutional monotony, aren't just naughty. They're -- big joke! -- incorrect.

Someone (Myers?) came up with the bright idea of turning the Cat in the Hat into the worst Vegas nightclub spritzer of 1958. He's become a furry version of Rip Taylor: a walking, talking vaudeville idiot box.

The United States of Leland is tedious yet infuriating, since its characters, all of whom seem to have emerged from a screenwriter's manual, are like exhibits in a thesis meant to indict the middle class for the crime of its collective dysfunction.

Homophobic, sex-phobic, maybe even human-phobic.

Silver City may be the mustiest political-conspiracy tale ever filmed; it's like "Chinatown" rewritten by Ralph Nader.

Darkness was clearly tossed together like salad in the editing room, since it's little more than the sum of its unshocking shock cuts.

Feeling Minnesota suggests Sam Shepard trying to be Quentin Tarantino. It makes even gun battles seem pretentious.

By the end, you feel like a drill sergeant-you want to wipe that stupid grin off Sandler's face.

Vampire in Brooklyn is a horror comedy that mixes lame blood-pellet effects with lame gags, and it clunks along on a series of interchangeably deserted streets that manage to look dank and overlit at the same time.

Last Action Hero makes such a strenuous show of winking at the audience (and itself) that it seems to be celebrating nothing so much as its own awfulness. In a sense, the movie's incipient commercial failure completes it aesthetically.

The most irritating thing about Hoffa is that even after you've sat through Danny DeVito's turgid, meaninglessly sprawling account of the Teamster boss' rise and fall, you still won't have any idea who Jimmy Hoffa was.

It's like a film-school thesis gone disastrously wrong.

You'd think that the film would ask you to be appalled at this scenario of forced servitude -- but no, it's treated as harmless and cute, like an Israeli ''Chico and the Man.''

The backstories keep piling up, with nods to "The Shining," "The Ring," and a dozen other gothic supernatural chillers, yet the result doesn't remotely scare you.

In Trash Humpers, the latest slovenly, haphazard, is-it-a-travesty-if-it's-bad-on-purpose avant doodle from director Harmony Korine, three figures in rubbery old-age makeup do indeed mimic intercourse with Dumpsters.

Taylor Hackford, fails to squeeze the tiniest bit of juice, sexy or comic or otherwise, out of the chintzy-libertine locale.

I wish I could say that the film is half as intriguing as it sounds, but A Woman, a Gun... lacks the Coen brothers' precision, their diabolical game-board cleverness. It's a remake in shaggy outline only.

The Rite commits the supreme sin of making the devil dull.

Except for the relentless, jittery way that the film has been photographed, there's nothing of interest going on in it. It's all fractious guerrilla-newsreel "style" masquerading a void.

It's "Alvin and the Chipmunks" with only one chipmunk, and (if possible) even less fun.

Anderson has made a zombie movie without the zombies.

It will have you groaning between yawns.

Nothing in John Carter really works, since everything in the movie has been done so many times before, and so much better.

It's one of those stultifying aftermath-of-
a-car-crash movies.

The title, Machine Gun Preacher, makes it sound like a piece of grindhouse kitsch - and by the time it's over, you'll be thinking, ''If only!''

The result is a dead pile of information in search of a movie.

Selma Blair, the one vibrant actress in a cast of colorless screamers (including Tom Welling from Smallville and Maggie Grace from Lost), takes Adrienne Barbeau's old role.

The Zodiac has been made with the dunderheaded flatness of bad '70s TV.

Shainberg reduces this most disturbing of all photographers to a portraitist of Halloween.

The gimmick in The Abandoned is that people battle their zombie doubles, whom they can't kill, since they'd be killing themselves. But the movie sinks so deep into deathly atmosphere that there's no life to it.

Angel-A shows how director Luc Besson can be French in a way that even the French might despise...Quel ick. And très tedious.

The hilarious diminuendo of that title is such that the movie might as well have been called ''Wes Craven Presents: Not a Hell of a Lot.''

It has that vintage Polish pace, their signature arch pomposity and rhythmless weirdness, only this time the brothers had to go and make a cosmic allegory of American dreams.

The movie, a shoddy mess, is a bargain-basement rip-off of ''Ronin."

Serves up the sort of shrill ''satire'' of middle-class Jewish vulgarity in which the mere mention of words like ''brisket'' and ''klezmer'' is automatically presumed to be hilarious.

It will come as no surprise that the movie isn't scary. But here's the real damn: It isn't funny, either.

Schaeffer's howler of a romantic comedy, which presents itself as a valentine to Clayburgh even as it keeps dreaming up fresh ways to humiliate her.

The Punisher is a moronically inept and tedious piece of death-wish trash.

Nothing in Imaginary Heroes rings true, least of all a plot that lightly combines domestic abuse, adulterous pregnancy, teen bisexuality, job abandonment, and a possible case of Mysterious Movie Disease. These are not ordinary people. Or real ones.

The definition of aiming low is when the John Hughes film you're ripping off is ''Weird Science."

Fragmented and monotonous, without a semblance of the gymnastic cleverness that at least made the first Mortal Kombat film into watchable trash, Mortal Kombat Annihilation is as debased as movies come.

Confined to just a few sets, the movie is like the pilot for a sitcom you never want to see. Yet Ephron seems to think she's making a feel-good holiday classic: She floods the soundtrack with old pop versions of Christmas standards, trying to render stale comedy appetizing by drenching it in syrup. [23 Dec 1994, p.50]

Stops time, all right -- it stretches 94 minutes into something that begins to feel like infinity.

In theory, A Thousand Words should draw on its star's abilities as a physical comedian, but Murphy, miming his order for a triple latte at Starbucks, comes off like Charlie Chaplin on crystal meth; he's strenuously unfunny to watch.

This is the rare horror film so bad that you almost wish it had turned into a good old connect-the-gory-dots slasher movie. The only mystery at work is how Lawrence's agent ever let her sign on to this.

A magical-realist sitcom war farce that ends up being about nothing but its own slovenly smugness.

Parts of the film play like the world's slowest and most insensitive reality show (Who Wants to Be an Octogenarian?).

The movie has no wit, no charm, no cleverness, no traction. Simply put, it is no fun.

What sin did Heather Locklear commit to deserve her role in The Perfect Man?

On the level of a no-budget student film in which the shots barely match up into sequences. It's about as much fun as watching blood dry.

Stupefyingly tedious and annoying.

The Libertine is such a torturous mess that it winds up doing something I hadn't thought possible: It renders Johnny Depp charmless.

Manderlay is turgid and hollow.

A fractious fiasco: whiplash camera movement set to raging blasts of death metal, a story so incoherent it made me wish I was watching, instead, the collected outtakes from Van Helsing.

As the killer, who plucks out his victims' eyeballs, Kane, the seven-foot bald WWE wrestler who's like a modern Tor Johnson, is so inept he's more cuddly than terrifying.

It doesn't take long to figure out that Shadowboxer 's Helen Mirren, as a cancer-ridden hitwoman, and Cuba Gooding Jr., as her doting stepson, are the most unconvincing team of hired assassins in movie history.

Dour, absurdist, gruesomely awful.

Fragmentation can be an artful method; it can also be the last refuge for someone who scarcely knows how to make a film. In the no-budget fantasia Wild Tigers I Have Known, the fragments are like a borrowed collage of gay coming-of-age tropes.

Combines hugs and ''pain'' and dialogue so fakey-cute it makes your ears hurt.

A grisly piece of torture porn.

A joke of a title in search of a movie with a single good joke.

Mr. Magorium, who is 243 years old (so are his jokes), is a cross between Willy Wonka and Geppetto, but Hoffman plays him with little more than a goofy dumb lisp, achieved by tucking his lower lip under his upper teeth, so that he looks just as rabbity-stoopid as he sounds.

The movie is one soporific, depressed, deadeningly vague scene after another.

Is there anything more dull than an ineptly cynical fairy tale?

A soporific dud, which should have been tossed out of Sundance.

George Lucas is turning into the enemy of fun.

The filmmakers even manage to turn seamy Bangkok into the least exotic setting imaginable.

This remake is merely vile (and dull).

It's like a pastry that's been sitting on the shelf for 60 years.

As an actor, Raymond is whiny and annoying, but not nearly so much as the film.

As bumbling and mindless, as naively misconceived, as that clapping-through-tears moniker.

This may be the first talking-animal movie in which the critter hero seems to have been body-snatched by a commentator from C-SPAN.

A movie so unhinged it practically dares you not to hate it.

Just... bad. As in BAD bad.

It appears to have been modeled on the worst revenge-of-the-nerds clichés the filmmakers could dredge up.

Even Snow Day's winter wonderland looks fake.

For the audience, it's like watching the dreckiest of teen puppy courtships trying to pass itself off as ''Annie Hall.'' La-de-blah.

Benigni's Pinocchio is meant to be adorable, but he comes off as less an enchanted puppet than as a harmlessly deranged middle-aged man prancing about in the kind of froufrou cream-colored pantsuit that Dinah Shore retired to her back closet in 1977.

The picture is so lethargic that I began to think of watching it as a form of atonement.

The comedy is nonexistent.

The only thing shocking about it, however, is the degree to which self-congratulatory gutter exhibitionism has become the degraded ash end of indie ''edge.''

It's a shrill, stupid, brickbat-blatant piece of hackwork that practically sweats to be ''commercial.''

Personally, I'd say that it was about time Arquette was leashed.

An inept low-budget thriller.

The trouble with Whipped isn't that its characters are dirty mouthed horndog jerks -- it's that they're phony dirty mouthed horndog jerks.

If you look hard, you can make out a story in Femme Fatale, but it has nothing to do with the senseless pileup of jewel thievery, shutterbug voyeurism, and leggy sex bombs so shallow and bad they seem to have come out of a 1978 copy of Hustler magazine.

Poisonously smug, one-joke indie comedy.

A somber, draggy, deadweight, lugubrious, absurdly self serious version of ''American Beauty.''

Why would filmmakers with this much talent work this hard to thumb their noses at everything they put on screen?

Ryan radiates neither desire nor terror. She's freeze-dried in a world of lifelessly abstract feminine fear, and so is the movie.

It might be courting hyperbole to call Corky Romano the single worst movie ever to feature an ''SNL'' cast member (Dan Aykroyd hit some pretty arid valleys), but I'm willing to go out on a critical limb and rank it among the all-time bottom dozen.

Halloween: Resurrection comes closer to comatainment.

She Hate Me manages to be at once racist, homophobic, utterly fake, and unbearably tedious. This time, it's Spike Lee who's doing the bamboozling.

In every way dreadful.

It's like ''Grease: The Next Generation'' acted out by the food-court staff at SeaWorld.

There's something uniquely embarrassing about a rock & roll fable that is no more authentic (and no less coy) than an episode of ''The Monkees'' yet insists on presenting itself as the epitome of rebel-yell cool.

This may be the only would-be blockbuster that's a sprawling, dissociated mess on purpose. It's a perverse landmark: the first postmodern Hollywood disaster.

The film isn't just bad; it's a barely coherent, inert mess -- a heart-tugger for voidoids.

Top-heavy with whimsy, so muddled it makes Mission: Impossible look like a model of narrative cohesion, The Saint is the apo-theosis of the new incoherence, with the cliches of espionage and action thrillers jammed together like bumper cars.

The film treats its audience like fidgety junior-high schoolers, piling on the sub-Koyaanisqatsi cityscapes and cheesy episodes with Marlee Matlin as a lonely photographer, plus bouncy cartoons of human cells who look as if they'd be happier chasing stains in bathroom-cleanser commercials.

To dismiss this movie for being ''offensive'' would be to offer it high praise.

A black comedy in the form of vicarious serial punishment.

The real problem is the movie itself. The plot, with its interlocking contrivances, is like a machine that keeps trapping the actors in its gears. Since they aren't allowed to relate to each other on a simple human level, the spangly back-and-forth chemistry on which a romantic comedy depends is nowhere in sight.

Carrey suggests an escaped mental patient impersonating a game-show host-and, what's worse, his hyperbolically obnoxious shtick is the whole damned show.

Cowgirls, a flaky-surreal adaptation of Tom Robbins' 1976 feminist hipster road novel, finds the director of "Drugstore Cowboy" and "My Own Private Idaho" lost in the ozone of his own private whimsies.

Being Human doesn't seem to be about anything: Its five astonishingly limp parables might have been spun by a depressed Aesop who forgot to take his Prozac.