A ''fun trash'' movie that's more trash than fun.

Here's what I can say for sure about the humanoid attackers in the new version of The Crazies: They're not very interesting.

In The Bounty Hunter, the couple that foils a bunch of tiresome grade-C thriller goons together stays together. Whether or not that's a recipe for love, it's certainly not a formula for romantic-comedy magic.

Regrettably, the film's story is so busy yet flat that the effect isn't magical -- it's more like watching the tale of some very enchanted wallpaper.

If you're hungry to see a romantic comedy about a genetically and culturally imbalanced geek-meets-babe relationship that makes the one in Knocked Up look like the quintessence of plausible human mating, then by all means subject yourself to the one-joke sub–Judd Apatow snark-athon that is She's Out of My League.

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 film is Moore's story, and she acts the hell out of one sexy scene, but most of Chloe is plodding and drab.

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.

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

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.

The movie is stiff-jointed and dull.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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."

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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?

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

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.

This one is somberly kinetic and joyless.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.)

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.

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.

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

The dialogue is chintzy and rhythmless.

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

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

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

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

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

A cumbersome dud, grows draggier with each new revelation.

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

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

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.

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

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

A sentimental epic that forgets to include the sentiment

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

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.

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

Aspires to blasphemy but achieves only banality.

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

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.

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

Soft-core trash with a tent-show hook.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

Keeps teasing you with intimations of the libidinous animal within.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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 dumbing down of low-IQ sentimentality.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

A limp and sodden downer.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.''

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

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.

The film suggests Titanic in a giant wading pool.

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

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.

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.

Cloddish, unfunny dud.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

A flat, heebie jeebies thriller.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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."

Dramatically, though, the film is torpid.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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'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.

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.

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

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?

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

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).

A grisly one-note chase thriller.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

Upside Down is a very fancy piece of junk.

The fusion of cheekiness and deliberately overscaled fantasy never jells.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

Bland to dismal.

Jean-Claude Van Damme's latest dud.

Bloodless and false.

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

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

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.

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.

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

"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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

Trivial and charmless.

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.

This one is just murk.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

Might best be described as bereavement porn.

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

Has a topsy-turvy sense of injustice.

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.

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?

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

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.

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.

It barely boasts enough funny material to fill four minutes.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

Doesn't contain a single scary or imaginative moment.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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]

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.

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

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.

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?

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

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.

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