Writer-director Sandra Goldbacher, a former BBC documentarian, fills the film with arid pauses, creating a claustrophobic study in ''repression.''

Ralph Bakshi's first feature in nearly a decade would like to be a down-and-dirty "Who Framed Roger Rabbit," but Bakshi isn't up to the task.

A premise masquerading as a movie.

To call Lukas Moodysson's A Hole in My Heart the feel-bad movie of the year would be an understatement -- it's the feel-sick movie of the millennium.

Trust, the cult-movie view turns precious and smug.

Moretti makes this ''study'' in despair a naggingly neutral, at times borderline coy experience.

Catherine Breillat, the French director of "Fat Girl", blends victim feminism with the threat of slasher violence in this arid ''deconstruction'' of Bluebeard, the wife killer of legend.

The movie is "Star Wars" with martial arts, plus a touch of "The Last Emperor." Technically, it's not badly done; I enjoyed the physical clash of elements, the water balls rising like sculpture in the air.

The role requires Clooney to dial down his charm to nearly zero, and frankly, he looks twitchy and uncomfortable without it.

This rotely cheeky, Anglo-plastic adultery comedy is set in the golden-green English countryside, and it makes a few quirky nods toward artistry, but it's really just a glib concoction.

The Tourist isn't a debacle, but it's a caper that's fatally low on carbonation.

Mostly an epic rehash of the tale Larsson has already told, and that makes it, at two hours and 28 minutes, the first movie in the series that never catches fire.

The best thing about it is Claire Foy's performance as the seething, caged is-she-a-witch?. Foy, like a Brit Kristen Stewart, has an entrancing sparkle of disdain.

As it is, The Mechanic is ham-fisted pulp, like Robert Rodriguez's "Machete" taking itself seriously.

The soundtrack, overseen by Sergio Mendes, has a few lively bossa nova moments, but not nearly enough.

On Stranger Tides isn't nearly strange enough. Its one real act of piracy is stealing away your excitement.

Even a filmmaker as dazzling as Steven Spielberg has to create characters who lure us into their point of view, and the trouble with Tintin is that we're always on the outside, looking in. What all that motion can't capture is our hearts.

The movie is stiff-jointed and dull.

We're just watching a film try to pass off misanthropic blunt-wittedness as "edge."

Puss in Boots is beautifully animated (with 3-D that adds nothing), but the film is so mindlessly busy that it seems to be trying to distract you from the likable, one-note feline swashbuckler at its center.

To the audience, this stuff seems like awfully old news. We're supposed to be witnessing the birth of a great journalist, but Hunter S. Thompson, as his career went on, got swallowed up by his mystique as an outlaw of excess. In The Rum Diary, that myth becomes an excuse for a movie to go slumming.

Director John Singleton offers bits of suspense, but Abduction is less a movie than a piece of engineering, a glumly ludicrous cat-and-mouse blowout designed to win Lautner male fans along with his girl demo.

The film, devising events that led up to his mysterious death in 1849, is also the most gruesomely literal-minded of period detective stories.

The film is so self-conscious it seems to be dictating your every reaction.

The role of a former star of the "golden age" of porn sounds perfect for Kim Cattrall, and she handles it nicely - at least, in the rare moments when this indie comedy isn't terminally contrived.

Most of the numbers in Rock of Ages are flatly shot and choreographed, and they look as if they'd been edited together with a meat cleaver. With rare exceptions, they don't channel the excitement of the music - they stultify it.

This one is somberly kinetic and joyless.

As the checkout girl everyone's got a crush on, Natalie Portman makes a winsome return to her "Garden State" gawkiness.

A sign of how desperate the series' producers have become is that the big twist here is that Leatherface, the slobby butcher-boy demon in his mask of human skin, is now...the good guy. (That's a ''jump the chainsaw'' concept if ever there was one.)

The shots of urban traffic jams have more spark than the story, which skips from a pregnancy to the filming of a musical to murder - without convincing us of any of it.

The Lucky One doesn't have the schlock rapture of "The Notebook" (the one Sparks adaptation that has really worked). The trouble with the movie isn't that it's too girly-swoony; it's that it tries to achieve emotion through glowy sunsets and a paint-by-numbers script.

Brolin and Gosling are both supposed to be playing World War II veterans who bring their knowledge of battle into the tough turf of the streets, but that's just a concept that the sketchy, half-baked script tosses out there.

In the occasionally funny but mostly facile '80s-style culture-clash comedy Parental Guidance, Billy Crystal, who now resembles a very cute puffer fish, plays Artie Decker.

The film has the same moral design as "Dead Man Walking," but since it never gets inside the darkness of the killers' minds, it's really just a rambling episode of "A Current Affair."

Is it possible for an actor to go through the motions even as he's going over the top? In Being Flynn, Robert De Niro does phoned-in scenery chewing.

One of Dafoe's deadbeat friends observes, ''The world's been ending ever since it started, man,'' and you may think the same thing about this movie.

It's all very sub-Tarantino showy and empty - at least, until the head-scratching climax, which tries to be "Eyes Wide Shut," "The Wicker Man," and "The Twilight Zone" all at once, but only makes you wish that you were watching one of them instead.

Lawrence Kasdan's comedy strikes a note of rib-nudging blah coyness that feels very 1987.

Bobcat Goldthwait's new movie is a burlesque that turns into a harangue that turns into a rampage.

Fourteen years after "Happiness," why is director Todd Solondz still mucking around with the sort of idiot neurotic dweeb who makes George Costanza look like George Clooney?

The film comes off as an elaborately didactic and overheated lecture.

There isn't much to the characters in this morose thriller.

Benoît Jacquot's film is shackled to a blah bourgeois leftism.

The trouble with Guillaume Canet's French gloss on "The Big Chill" is that it has no underlying chill.

Cotillard, with stringy long hair and a coal fire of severity in her eyes, has what it takes to play a woman who feels that she's lost everything. But she's forced to flail and mood-swing from scene to scene. In an insult to the disabled, there is never much to her but her hellacious injury.

The Comedy pretends to be a satire of entitlement, but it's made in a style so indulgent that the whole film feels entitled in the extreme.

The countdown-to-Armageddon structure generates almost no tension, but Olympus Has Fallen does have lots of squalidly bloody hand-to-hand action, all of which is so pulpy and standardthat the film actually makes you grateful for the presence of Gerard Butler, gnashing his teeth in the Bruce Willis role.

If only for the sake of adults, couldn't the folks behind the Alvin films have had the good grace to turn Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Squeakquel into a musical?

Clyde is meant to be nuts, but too often it's Law Abiding Citizen that checks rationality at the door.

Without that heightened racial antipathy-turned-camaraderie, there's not a whole lot to Cop Out besides watching Kevin Smith pretend, with a crudeness that is simply boring, that he's an action director making a comic thriller about cops versus a Mexican drug gang (yawn).

It's no coincidence that The Box plays like the world's murkiest Twilight Zone episode. It's loosely based on ''Button, Button,'' a short story by Richard Matheson, who wrote some of the series' greatest scripts.

The Limits of Control, even with its flow of star cameos (Tilda Swinton, Gael García Bernal, a frenetic Bill Murray), is a listless long pause that rarely refreshes.

Really, who needs a bad guy who's this guilty about being bad?

Extraordinarily faithful to the spirit of that creaky, derivative, fly-infested, don't-go-in-the-attic boofest.

Ma Mère, while less prudish than Catherine Breillat's dour deconstructions of sex, is also less competent. It winds up making incest look absurdly swank.

The latest reshuffling of "Chainsaw" tropes.

In Land of the Dead there are virtually no good parts. The movie is listless and uninspired.

This is a movie of fake conflict, fake heart, even fake doggy love.

Stealth, a dregs-of-summer knockoff, is too ponderous and inept to serve a comparable function now, yet the film's lack of thrust may be related to an absence of conviction about its own war-is-a-videogame clichés.

Jordan lets slip virtually every rudiment of drama. He never deigns to develop his characters, he coats the movie in a wet blanket of whimsy, and he lets pop songs do his work for him more lavishly than Cameron Crowe did in "Elizabethtown."

The movie isn't racist; it's just lame. If Brooks truly cared about Muslims or how their funny bones worked, Looking for Comedy might have had some zing, but all his character is interested in is the 500-page report he has to deliver - a homework assignment from hell.

Garry Marshall takes over the movie (no mystery: his son, Scott, directed it), and Keeping Up With the Steins turns into a recipe to forget: chopped liver with ''heart.''

There's one moment that achieves the camp shiver of the original, when Damien's nanny hangs herself at his birthday party (''Damien, it's all for you!'').

In A Scanner Darkly, we're watching other people freak out, but the film is maddening to sit through because their freak-outs never become ours.

It's "Bewitched" meets "Fatal Attraction," with one funny bedroom scene, but it was a miscalculation to make Thurman the antagonist.

French art thriller 13 Tzameti has a literal hair-trigger premise, yet it's so lacking in human dimensions that it creates virtually no suspense.

In this American remake of the spooky, more-atmospheric-than-coherent 2005 J-horror thriller, the ghosts blink and crackle into existence with an electromagnetic sputter, but really, they're not so different from the gauzy, see-through spirits of yesteryear.

In this year's lump of coal, Matthew Broderick is the control freak who lives for toasty yuletide cheer, and Danny DeVito is the vulgar pest who wants his holiday lights seen from space. The dueling-neighbor crankfest is blah.

The Nativity Story is a film of tame picture-book sincerity, but that's not the same thing as devotion. The movie is too tepid to feel, or see, the light.

The movie, with the exception of that lone squirmy surgery scene, is "Hostel" without sadism, thrills, or funky severed-limb F/X. It quickly turns into a very dull escape thriller.

A remake of the 1986 suspense ''classic,'' is as processed and hoot-worthy as the original.

So much flatter than it was on the comic-book page.

Graham makes the coming-out dithering bearable, but not before she has jumped through hoops of contrivance.

The ultimate crime of this paranoid enemy-of-the-state pulp, directed with more style than brains by Antoine Fuqua (Training Day), is how dull it is.

Has the taint of exploitation.

It's a tale that reduces angst, not to mention love, to a generational tic.

The creepy-faced robot twin babies are funny (for a while); the rest of the film is not. It's like "Meet the Parents" with Dr. Phil as the officiant from hell.

For a light comedy, The Nanny Diaries turns out to have an off-putting theme. It glorifies the romance of slumming.

Goofy, pompous, annoyingly boomer-myopic Fab Four musical.

Seems to have been given the comedy equivalent of blood thinner. It has the blazing satirical boldness to skewer the first Tobey Maguire Spider-Man -- and, amazingly, not much else.

The Ruins is lumpish, static, and obvious. It's a gringos-go-home cautionary fright flick done in the spirit of a cheap '50s horror movie, except that it leaves you longing for the competence of grade-Z studio-system trash.

A primer no one needed, Where in the World Is Osama bin Laden? should have been called "The Post-9/11 World for Dummies."

Graham is charming, but Miss Conception is a cloddish biological-clock bedroom farce.

The only brazen thing about the film is how shamelessly it rips off "School of Rock."

Friendly yet toothless, College musters little energy even as anarchic-party-movie nostalgia.

Miracle isn't powerful, it's muddled and diffuse.

The original Day the Earth Stood Still had a paranoid poetry that lifted the audience up even as it warned the world to come together. This one is so dour it just comes off as a scolding.

I can't imagine what Dali or Buñuel would have made of such bourgeois sentimentality.

There are brutal scenes with razor blades and other impromptu devices of erotic torment, but what makes the movie a trial to sit through isn't just the heroine's pain-freak tastes.

Gory but dramatically inert vampire schlocker.

It wants to be "Good Will Hunting" set in the land of "Entourage," but its bummed-out touchy-feeliness is every bit as concocted as its overly jaded showbiz corruption.

One of those tepid, genteel biopics that's far too busy ennobling its hero to bother giving him any recklessly interesting personality traits.

A grisly one-note chase thriller.

It's not just that Tony Soprano is richer, darker, cooler, and scarier. The dude gets more laughs.

The dialogue is chintzy and rhythmless.

An Australian crime caper that's one part ''Sexy Beast,'' one part ''The Full Monty,'' and three parts very flat soda.

Little more than a plodding celebration of global television trumping everything in its midst.

It sounds churlish to argue that a movie can have too much integrity for its own good, but that's exactly the problem with La Ciénaga.

More and more independent filmmakers seem to be cobbling together characters and scenes that have surface hook and flash without organic emotional logic.

There are many things wrong with Novocaine, but the film's most gnawing pain is its clodhopper farfetchedness.

Keeps teasing you with intimations of the libidinous animal within.

Further sad evidence that Tom Tykwer, director of the resonant and sense-spinning ''Run Lola Run,'' has turned out to be a one-trick pony -- a maker of softheaded metaphysical claptrap. It's enough to make you want to see him run again.

The title translates, roughly, as ''This & That,'' a confectionary shrug that pretty well sums up the blasé inconsequentiality of it all.

This remains the one and only fusion of ''Deliverance'' and ''Hansel and Gretel'' that I ever hope to see.

An embarrassment--a fairy-tale showbiz satire that seems to defang itself, scene by scene.

Achieves the near-impossible: It turns the Marquis de Sade into a dullard.

Raging ego aside, the penny-ante hucksterism of his I'm-going-on-dates-to-get-famous-making-a-movie-about-dates approach is too cloying and opportunistic to bear.

Aspires to blasphemy but achieves only banality.

Presents undercover law enforcement less as a profession than as an accessory, an excuse to pout and glower chicly, to stand around in nightclubs acting like a sullen version of the Last American Rebel.

A flat, heebie jeebies thriller.

There's precious little in Luc Besson's solemnly inflated, battle-weary historical epic.

A limp and sodden downer.

Soft-core trash with a tent-show hook.

Traffics in the coyly blasphemous, aren't-we-dysfunctional family-disaster chic that has become the single most annoying trend in independent filmmaking.

The dumbing down of low-IQ sentimentality.

Rigid, airless, and browbeatingly repetitive, Das Experiment is an overly didactic piece of thesis hectoring; it's like ''Lord of the Flies'' set in a Skinner box.

The film suggests Titanic in a giant wading pool.

Altogether too faithful to its source. The makers of this ponderously middlebrow Canadian production have re-created the Gospel of John in its pristine entirety -- word for word, miracle for miracle.

The image of this kitchen-magician dream robot comes at us in little jolts and spasms that have the zappy, self-contained rhythm of a fast-food tie-in commercial.

Like Mike has the synthetically wrapped pseudo-charm of a perfunctory ''Flubber'' sequel.

There's a glimmer of what the film might have been, though, in the performance of Mike Myers, who plays Studio co-owner Steve Rubell, with his sweaty thinning hair and look-at-me-I-got-class Lacoste shirts, as a vengeful gargoyle presiding over a kingdom of beauty he can rule but never join.

So riddled with cultural stereotypes, woe-is-me neurotic mopiness, and glib therapeutic compassion that by the end all it leaves you with is a waxy buildup of falseness.

It's like a series of cliches exploding in your face.

Be wary of any movie in which the hero is monosyllabic and a stutterer at the same time.

A sentimental epic that forgets to include the sentiment

A turgid muddle of romance, espionage, and geek valor, despite intimations that it might have turned into ''A Reasonably Dapper-Looking Mind.''

An inert screwball cartoon, a celebration of monogamy as fashion statement.

The problem with the movie isn't that it sells out Rocky and Bullwinkle -- it's that it can't keep up with them.

The trouble with the movie is that there's nothing to Muriel but her false dreams: We never quite glimpse the woman they're hiding.

Her setups here are so witless and pedestrian that there's no imagination to the crude slapstick punchlines; we're just watching a bland jester pantomime sensory overload.

Scored to a disarmingly quaint array of fiddle-and-banjo tunes, The Newton Boys has so little in the way of blood or rancor that before long, you begin to notice that there's no real drama in it, either.

If any actor could reveal the squirmy soul of a war criminal, it's Caine, so it feels like a cheat when The Statement gives him nothing to portray but self-condemnation.

One of those desultory F/X and no script potboilers that seems to restart itself with every new scene.

Populated by ersatz versions of stars who, in this case, are fairly vanilla to begin with.

Just when you thought it was safe to go to the movies without sitting through another imitation of early Quentin Tarantino, along comes Suicide Kings.

A movie overtly designed to win attention (and not to do much else).

Seems populated yet uninhabited; the only real star is the gloom.

As a satire of new-style collegiate types, this MTV production actually evinces a few germs of rancid wit.

A cumbersome dud, grows draggier with each new revelation.

For Woody, it's looking more and more like the end of his days of whine and neurosis.

In the history of rock-star indulgence on film, I would rank it somewhere between Bob Dylan's epic carnival of pretension ''Renaldo & Clara'' and the overblown messianic doldrums of 1982's ''Pink Floyd The Wall.''

Turns into a grab-bag freak show as desperate as it is arbitrary.

The movie is based on a 1999 series of comic books by Alan Moore and Kevin O'Neill, but the original tone of deadpan historical audacity has been replaced by a kind of wax-museum literalness.

After too many ''Full Monty''s, it has come to look like nothing so much as a coy ritual of emasculation.

The award for the most annoying character to appear in a movie so far this year turns out to be a tie: It goes to both of the oh-so-swankly tormented romantic mischief makers of Love Me if You Dare.

Daredevil is the sort of half-assed, visually lackadaisical potboiler that makes you rue the day that comic-book franchises ever took over Hollywood.

Sokurov's new companion piece (to "Mother and Son"), has the tedium without the trance.

There's no denying that Washington can play a rococo villain with flip ebullience, but I fervently wish he were doing it in a movie that paid more than lip service to the real world.

The new movie is a dusty piñata stuffed with omens and not much more.

Supplies stretches of actual skating footage by pros doubling for the stars. It's in these moments, freed from the earthbound pull of its market-tested components, that the movie briefly relaxes into the sheer thrilling audacity of flying into the air propelled by a board on wheels.

Don Coscarelli, writer-director of the logy, fatuous Bubba Ho-Tep, is trying to will a cult movie into existence -- which, of course, never works.

Quite honestly, you could nap for an hour and not miss a thing, but when the crew finally makes it to the glowing piles of booty at Treasure Planet's core, the film unleashes some pleasing visual fireworks. That's where it should have started, not ended.

When Kidman slithers into a bathtub with her young ''husband,'' the scene, in its soft-pedaled way, is the definition of exploitation: It appears to have been cooked up for no other purpose than to conjure creepy child-porn overtones.

The two characters barely even have a relationship; they're a union of demographics--the "urban" market meets the slapstick-action market.

Les Liaisons Dangereuses is such an elaborate and satisfying structure of deceit and salaciousness that every attempt I have seen to adapt it on film -- "Dangerous Liaisons," "Cruel Intentions," even the trashy 1959 Roger Vadim version -- has resulted in an entertainment of agreeable nasty elegance. Until now.

A lurid hodgepodge of the ''subversive'' and the secondhand, the movie lacks the primal pop pleasures of Lynch's best work.

Kutcher is the wrong actor to anchor a psychological freak-out.

A send-up of rap personality in which no one actually has a personality. The joke, alas, is on the movie.

Hartley is trapped between sincerity and mock sincerity, and that all but dooms a filmmaker to slipping through the cracks.

An exhausted epic, one that Stone has directed with an almost startling lack of personality or vision.

It's hardly much of a thrill to see The One recycle, on a lower budget, the slo-mo bullet dodges from "The Matrix," along with unspectacular variations on several other of that film's time-bending demolition-ballet effects.

Hilary Duff makes me long for the comparatively Dostoyevskian depths of Sandra Dee.

Too chicly depressive -- and, for the most part, too dull -- to bear.

Cloddish, unfunny dud.

If any character steals Bill & Ted's Bogus Journey, it's the Grim Reaper, who, as played by William Sadler, keeps smirking with pleasure at the chance to loosen up.

Technically, Madonna's singing is beautiful -- elegant, silky, refined. Yet there's no fire, no twinkle of ambitious joy, to her performance. Her face is fixed, almost tranquilized -- a porcelain mask.

Foster, working from a patchy, meandering script by W.D. Richter, produces scene after scene of rudderless banter. The movie is all asides, all nattering; the actors seem lost in their busy, fractious shticks.

Yet despite its promising pedigree, Dangerous Minds has a slick, syrupy fraudulence -- it's like an Afterschool Special made for MTV.

The film has barely started, and already we can tell what we're in for -- two hours of metaphysical drift.

Dramatically, though, the film is torpid.

I'm happy to report, though, that even a dud like Spy Hard can't completely douse the stumbling Zen charm of Leslie Nielsen, whose genius is that he never quite sheds the illusion that he isn't in on the joke.

The film's chief novelty turns out to be its drab ''literary'' approach to horror.

Cronenberg directs this doomed romance in the same flat, claustrophobic, night-of-the-zombies style he employed in ''Naked Lunch''; as a dramatist, he's still stuck in Interzone.

With Poetic Justice, John Singleton has (at least temporarily) lost his way, but he may have found an actor [Shakur] who can help lead him back.

The movie, a piece of luridly baroque metaphysical trash, is about a Vietnam veteran who keeps getting jolted by demonic visions.

The battles are grainy and ''existential,'' but what they aren't is thrilling. They're surging crowd scenes with streams of arrows and flecks of blood, and Crowe, slashing his way through them, is a glorified extra. He's so grimly possessed with purpose that he's a bore, and so is the movie.

A stunt masquerading as a statement.

The faux espionage plot, with its winks at terrorism, is really just a convoluted plea for the relevance of precious indie artistes (i.e., Hal Hartley).

Feels like an attempt to rebottle the postmodern fizz of Wes Anderson's "Bottle Rocket." I wish instead they'd put a stopper in it.

Roland Joffé brings an artful video-grunge look, and not much else, to this "Saw" clone.

A dawdling, myopic drama.

The film is so committed to its view of Ezra as a pawn in the psychotic game of postcolonial Africa that he is never allowed, as a character, to become more than a pawn.

But overall, this lazy, sweet trifle seems to express the banality of well-being.

The British director Ken Loach can be a master of working-class realism, but not in this cranky, rudderless shambles.

The surreal thing is, Zac Efron can't do despair.

Director Gaspar Noé proved a shock poet in "Irreversible" (2003). In Enter the Void, he's a shockingly tedious show-off.

Neither colorfully brutal nor especially fun. It's a plodding, derivative gothic potboiler: "The Shining" meets "Coraline," with a touch of "Gremlins" played (boringly) straight.

This suburban gothic is a logy, convoluted mess.

The lesson is that fun can't be planned, but the film is so airless (think iCarly as a videogame) that there isn't a truly playful moment in it.

This underworld fairy tale is so soggy and sentimental it's like a new genre: Hallmark noir.

Upside Down is a very fancy piece of junk.

The more that secret comes out, the more incoherent (and ludicrous) the film gets.

Overheated yet bizarrely opaque criminal character study from Belgium.

Red Hook Summer has some fantastic gospel numbers, but as drama it's a casserole that never comes together.

The movie wants to be Hitchcockian, but it's the flat-footed Hitchcock of "Marnie" that Park evokes. His filmmaking here is hermetic and lugubrious, with each physical movement meaninglessly heightened and every line hanging in the air with (empty) significance.

The rapper and actor Common has become a highly skilled screen star, but this touchy-feely dud does him wrong.

I gave up making heads or tails of Synecdoche, New York, but I did get one message: The compulsion to stand outside of one's life and observe it to THIS degree isn't the mechanism of art -- it's the structure of psychosis.

Orphan isn't scary -- it's garish and plodding.

If you want to know how inept the movie is...well, it's so inept that you may wish you were watching an M. Night Shyamalan version of the very same premise.

Adam Sandler stars in a one-joke Caddyshack for the blitzed and jaded.

A yawn-by-numbers romper-room dud.

Most of The Man is as awful as last year's debacle, "Taxi," yet Levy, stuck in a no-brainer variation on Billy Crystal's predicament in "Analyze This," shows just enough noodgy passive-aggression to suggest what the movie might have been were it not shackled to buddy-action clichés.

Asia Argento is not what I would call a good actress, but she's a prime specimen of train-wreck sexuality: a debauched Eurotrash starlet who oozes punk cred more than she does talent. It's not too hard to see why she wanted to write, direct, and star in The Heart Is Deceitful Above All Things.

Antonio Banderas is a charming and talented man, but in Take the Lead he lays on the old-world panache so thick - the accent, the flowery courtliness, the romance of romance - that he comes off like Dracula's metrosexual cousin.

A few of the images are startling, but as Radha Mitchell (a good actress) wanders through a ghost town, searching for her lost daughter as though she was touring an abandoned movie set, Silent Hill is mostly paralyzing in its vagueness.

Even in her dullest vehicle, Lindsay Lohan exudes an unfakable shine.

You can see what the film was going for, but the jokes just sit there; you chuckle a few times, mostly out of lame hope, but you never bust a gut, never really get what you came for.

At least Ribisi's fake-cojones histrionics are fun. The rest of this "Donnie Brasco" knockoff, with James Marsden as a Gulf War veteran who goes undercover, is a turgid, ketchup-spattered dud.

The results in Employee of the Month are toothless.

No belief on earth can rescue Swank from a film that's a chain of disaster chintz masquerading as a sermon.

He now imparts so many life lessons via his Rube Goldberg thresher devices that he's starting to turn into the Rod Serling of severed body parts. Now that's torture.

For all of De Palma's studious multimedia trickery -- a valid, even inspired idea -- Redacted is so naive it's an embarrassment.

The Farrelly brothers could burp out a movie funnier than The Hottie & the Nottie, a farce of corrupt stereotypes that's never more grotesque than when it pretends to be more than skin-deep.

The premise is out of '70s porn, and so is the overbroad satire and almost total lack of conviction.

Myers is trying for another of his endearingly hormonal imp-egomaniacs, but hidden behind a wavy beard, a wax-curled mustache, and an astoundingly ugly squashed fake nose, he's a little too grotesque.

Most of this just seems, you know, so three years ago, so "Bourne" again.

If you've always longed to see a Cold War satire done in the hit 'em over the head frantic camp mode of ''Love, American Style,'' then Company Man is the movie for you.

Lawrence is so ON that he appears to be gunning for clockwork bursts of audience approval.

This rusty jalopy of a movie, which is so ramshackle it's nearly enough to make you forget how tossed-together the 1976 ''Car Wash'' was.

The Medallion makes you long for Tucker -- and for Jackie Chan to fly without digital wings.

How lame have high-concept, no-brain comedies gotten?

It's hard to say what's more excruciating: Alex's novel, which is like ''The Great Gatsby'' rewritten by Lizzie McGuire, or his quarrelsome flirtation with Emma, who has no existence as a character apart from her drive to reshape Alex into a specimen of respectable tamed manhood.

It was originally called ''Animal Husbandry,'' and while the producers were throwing away that title, they might have done well to chuck the movie along with it.

Has all the mood enhancing flavor of a tropical cocktail made with watered down rum and fake fruit juice.

The fusion of cheekiness and deliberately overscaled fantasy never jells.

Bland to dismal.

The film is proof that if you repackage the classics (in this case, Dickens) for the youth market in an era of MTV dislocation, what you get, in essence, is postmodern Cliffs Notes with an alt-rock soundtrack.

"Species" at least had the benefit of Henstridge's glazed porn-doll perversity, but this time any glimmers of sexual ominousness are buried in a lame, desultory chase plot and in the woefully underimagined special effects.

Jean-Claude Van Damme's latest dud.

Few comedies have worked this hard to make everyone on screen look this dumb.

It just makes you want to flip on the tube to see the real (fake) thing.

Tells a moldy-oldie, not-nearly-as-nasty-as-it-thinks-it-is joke. Over and over again.

Stuart Townsend, Theron's reallife boyfriend, may have inner fires as an actor that have yet to be revealed, but in Head in the Clouds he's a somber puppy who looks as if Theron could eat him alive. I wish she had.

The movie doesn't so much extend Schwartzman's antic outsider persona from ''Rushmore'' as uglify it, reducing him to the ultimate Uncool Anti-WASP.

Bloodless and false.

The Avengers is too enervated to qualify as even a full-scale disaster.

Tame and witless enough to make me long for the ancient, dusty fright kitsch of ''The Munsters.''

Van Helsing, a fusion of eye candy and brain sputter, is a long, kinetic, yet dreary mess.

The movie is a true folly, yet there's no denying that Gilliam has gotten some of the hallucinogenic madness of Thompson's novel on screen.

In its hostile sitcom way, Christmas With the Kranks is a paranoid comic nightmare of conformity gone mad.

If Crowe's eyes are open, he seems to have directed most of Vanilla Sky with his mind wide shut.

It takes the movie all of 15 minutes to descend into sub-Spielbergian banalities about poor Max's search for his absentee dad.

The director, Nora Ephron, displays her peerless gift for making everything seem snappy and mushy at the same time, and Travolta's performance has a slovenly, I-can-do-anything-and-you'll-still-love-me obnoxiousness.

Since there is a mystery, the movie might have been entertaining camp had director Taylor Hackford staged it with pace, style, or a whisper of surprise. Instead, the plot just clunks forward-for two hours and 10 minutes.

I Love You to Death is strenuously unclever.

Though not quite the fiasco of revved-up gunplay that Beverly Hills Cop II was, this new movie, directed by John ''Rock-'em Sock-'em'' Landis, is just a clunky action thriller, with occasional comic moments rationed out to the audience like stray crumbs.

The movie has no script, and even the better gags - like one in which a couple of the pilots scribble away at coloring books in the backseat of a plane - could have been staged more vividly.

Trivial and charmless.

This one is just murk.

A brutally monotonous thriller.

Even the film's one "original" twist is just a desperate attempt to link it up to Ghost Rider, the only lousy Nicolas Cage action film that is actually spawning a sequel.

The movie wants to be deadly cool, but mostly it's just deadly.

I love a good mind-bender, but it's getting more common these days to see thrillers that don't so much bend your mind as chop it, smash it, and place it in the Cuisinart. Trance, the new film directed by Danny Boyle is a high-brainiac art-world thriller that wants to do nothing more (or less) than give your head a majorly pleasurable spin.

Back to the Future Part III has that same sort of studio back-lot clunkiness. Only this time it's the audience that gets conked — by the sheer desperation of the whole enterprise.

The movie is MTV Kafka: Instead of dialogue, character, behavior, it has a look and a mood. And that's all it has.

A ponderous dystopian bummer that might be described as "The Road Warrior" without car chases, or "The Road" without humanity.

As the brutish Kable, Gerard Butler must find out who's pulling his strings, but it's the audience whose chain gets yanked by this headache-inducing techno-violent mishmash.

The wedding, which turns the very concept of ''Greek'' into the sort of hideous, pandering clichés that look rejected from bad Jewish and Italian sitcoms.

The thinnest, draggiest, and most tediously preachy of the Saw films.

Writer-director-stars Zach Cregger and Trevor Moore, of the Whitest Kids U'Know, here prove the crassest, most maladroit moviemakers you know.

Screenwriter Kevin Williamson (the Scream trilogy), having bottomed out in the horror genre, now dips below bottom (there isn't a line that has his knowing sweet-and-sour zing).

Antal has assembled what may be the single most colorless group of mangy lowlifes I have ever seen.

So badly told that it ends up dissecting a corruption that exudes from nowhere but itself.

As Brier's comrade-in-lip-gloss, Ashlee Simpson, dressed to look like a teenybop girl version of Crispin Glover in "River's Edge," is the real deal -- in fake cred.

The movie is trash shot to look like art imitating trash.

Atrociously scripted and edited.

The movie lacks even the misplaced fervor of obsession. It's lifeless kitsch.

Don't let the Carl Hiaasen pedigree fool you: Hoot is an Afterschool Special too crummy to give a hoot about.

A glumly serious British mock rock doc: You could forgive the paucity of jokes if Brothers of the Head had anything to say, or if the '70s-vérité surface were remotely convincing.

This dank and rhythmless ''psychological'' potboiler was directed by Jamie Babbit, who made 2000's "But I'm a Cheerleader," and though she has shifted tones from shrill camp to moody angst in The Quiet, she still thinks in stereotypes so thin that they put you to sleep the moment they open their mouths.

A few more films like Tears of the Black Tiger, and kitsch will be on its way to having a bad name.

Hannibal Rising reduces this great creature of the pop imagination to a Eurotrash Boy Scout throwing a homicidal snit fit.

Murphy speaks in a breathy lisp, as if his mouth had been partially buttoned shut, and he doesn't give himself the nerd's traditional redeeming feature of a geeky, slide-rule intellect. Norbit, all frozen gawk, is just a very dim bulb.

Chatwin comes off as prickly and annoyed -- they should have called this "Perturbia."

Inert dud of a hitmen-are-people-too comedy.

In a season of digital bombast, it can be a relief to walk into a stodgy life-of-the-great-man costume drama. Goya's Ghosts, before it turns into a messy, horse-drawn load, achieves a civilized stuffiness that gives off its own mild pleasure.

The audience gets the message (religious fanaticism: bad), but nothing we see is convincing on its own.

The morality of revenge is barely at issue in a movie that pushes the plausibility of revenge right over a cliff.

The film completely misses what should have been its real target -- the filming of Game of Death, a martial-arts campfest worthy of Edward D. Wood Jr.

You can expect a lot of shredding and gurgling. 30 Days of Night is relentless, but it's also relentlessly one-note.

Kate Hudson is as blah and dazed as her costar is cloyingly enthused. If it's possible to have too even a tan, Hudson in Fool's Gold would be the poster child for it.

Simon Pegg has what it takes, but he's saddled himself with a script (co-written by Pegg and Michael Ian Black) that Adam Sandler wouldn't have pulled out of his bottom drawer.

None of the faux icons comes close to being a character. Instead, they are contrasted with a group of nuns who skydive without parachutes. Could this possibly be a metaphor for Korine's filmmaking? It certainly goes splat.

It's like "Schindler's List" crossed with "The Sound of Music," and Roger Spottiswoode directs it in a stiff, lifeless, utterly dated style of international squareness.

It's not much fun to see these two reduced to "Mad TV" parodies of themselves.

It's just a grindingly inert death-wish thriller.

While George Lopez, Cheech Marin, and Paul Rodriguez are funny men, it's amazing how boring these Latin-shtick cutups can be when none of them gets a single good line.

Randall Miller (Bottle Shock), appears to be trying to cross a bad Elmore Leonard thriller with a bad indie-festival family-angst comedy. He gives us the worst of both worlds.

It's a dispirited, galumphing mess.

It all makes you want to see a Bollywood movie, all right -- a good one.

A stillborn rendering of Michael Chabon's first novel.

Isn't it time Steve Zahn grew up? Ever since the '90s, this walking quirk of an actor has pushed his dazed solipsistic zaniness (he's like Michael J. Fox’s hillbilly cousin), but he's 41 now, and it no longer looks cute on him.

The result is a sub-"Saw" knockoff that manages to be brutal yet monotonous, not to mention monstrously unpleasant.

Whenever an actress takes on a gritty working-class role, the audience does a gut check of authenticity. Either the actress gets it, like Melissa Leo did in "Frozen River," or she doesn't, like Michelle Monaghan as the spoilin'-for-a-fight truck-driver heroine of the inert indie dud Trucker

It's no insult to Melville to say that he wrote, in effect, the original ''Dilbert.'' This movie, unfortunately, makes ''Dilbert'' look like Melville.

Kollek is a fringe auteur who makes independent films the old fashioned way: no budget, static camera, a script that telegraphs its tiny, paste gem ironies.

Would like to be a Halloween treat, but it's more like a nightmare of blandness.

De Niro seems to be reacting to nothing so much as the lame movie he's stuck in.