The problem with this year-by-year structure is that the slow crawl to the end can seem agonizing if the film isn't engaging. And One Day, despite strenuous attempts by all involved to make us laugh, cry, and laugh-cry, is more likely to induce winces. We've seen it all before – and better.

His rise from a marginalized Jewish boy in Nazi-occupied Paris to his chain-smoking fame as the composer of such Euro-hits as "Je t'Aime … Moi Non Plus" is presented as one long, hallucinatory jag, revealing far less about Gainsbourg, I would imagine, than about Sfar.

Frankly, if I'm going to be offered a heaping pile of revisionism about the greatest writer who ever lived, I'd rather it be from someone with more academic heft than the director of "Independence Day" and "Godzilla." I trust the teachers who receive this film's study guide have a shredder handy.

Turns one of the greatest geniuses of German literature into a love-struck rapscallion.

Muddled cop thriller The Son of No One has a top-drawer cast and a bottom-drawer script.

I would imagine that even those who line up for this film will be somewhat let down, if only because it's clear that most of the juicy stuff will arrive in Part 2 – which won't be released until next November.

The cast, at least on paper, is formidable, if ill-used.

What this film really celebrates is crunch-and-thud video-game-style action, not especially well choreographed by director Guy Ritchie.

The best thing about the film is the majestic mountain vistas, shot in Canada. You can practically inhale them.

The film is more testimonial than drama.

This movie is "Finian's Rainbow" for dunderheads. Rudd has a few amusing moments talking to himself in a mirror (he's trying to convince himself he's a stud) but he would have been better off talking himself out of this film.

The idiocy of the film's conceit is that Simon recruits innocents like Will to carry out these vigilante killings.

The plot slogs along and family secrets are hauled out, each more implausible than the next.

Morgan is a wonderful writer when he's working from the headlines, but his "personal" movies, like "Hereafter" and this one, release a bleary, pseudo-profound aspect of his talent that's best left in the dark.

Potty jokes and bawdy gross-outs predominate, and the few good laughs are swamped by the overall laughlessness.

As for me, I don't see why women being as slobby and gross as the guys is such a feminist breakthrough – especially since, as in Bachelorette, the slobbiness and grossness is witless.

Sean Penn is one of those actors, like Nicolas Cage, who is best (sometimes worst) when he's over-the-top. Unlike Cage, Penn doesn't pour himself into dreadful commercial vehicles. No, his dreadful movies are usually not destined for the multiplex. Case in point: This Must Be the Place.

One of the many, many things wrong with Joe Wright's Anna Karenina, starring Keira Knightley as literature's most famous adulteress – take that, Emma Bovary! – is that one never feels the love. It's a conceit in search of a movie. It could just as easily have been titled "Décor."

The jokes mostly fall flat and the dramatic scenes fall even flatter.

Granted, this is not automatic laugh-riot material, nor should it be, but didn’t Fey recognize how hackneyed it all is? Does being a movie star mean blanding out everything that makes you special?

The filmmaking is TV-movie-of-the-week dull and Robinson’s ordeal is hammered home to the exclusion of virtually everything else in his life.

Is it possible to truly start life all over again? Arthur Newman might have been better if it had not started at all.

Is Malick deliberately courting self-parody here? Probably not. That would imply he had a sense of humor.

The Great Gatsby isn’t simply a classic American text: In Luhrmann’s hands, it’s also the greatest self-help manual ever written.

The tonal problem of the second installment, which often resembled a drug-infested pulp thriller instead of a comedy, is also problematic here.

Parker is bland throughout. Maybe all those episodes of "Sex and the City" have soured her on this sort of thing.

If, as the ads would lead you to believe, you go to see The Break-Up expecting a romantic comedy, you will be severely disappointed. If you go to it expecting a good movie, you will also be severely disappointed.

Its wasted cast includes Dyan Cannon, Sally Kellerman, Len Cariou, and Brenda Vaccaro, who miraculously manages to give a fine performance in this malarkey.

Just because The Fountain is different doesn't mean it's good. In fact, it's borderline unwatchable, though this hasn't prevented the Oscar buzz from buzzing.

The movie often seems glib in the face of tragedy. And when, near the end, Shepard tries to pour on the hearts and flowers by showing us just what made Simon crack up on camera, the bathos is icky. The whole movie is icky.

The end result, at best, is high-toned pulp.

Even by Farrelly standards, the film is a washout.

Few things are more dispiriting than a holiday movie straining to become a perennial. Such is the case with Fred Claus, an insipid Christmas comedy.

Poetic conceits only work if they're poetic.

The Bucket List is a movie for oldsters that, paradoxically, looks as if it was made for 15-year-olds. If this is what is meant in Hollywood as "thinking outside the box," then it's time to get a new box.

The best thing you can say about Mad Money is that it has a good cast. The worst thing you can say about it is that the cast is extremely ill-used.

This business of the 88 minutes ticking away is a pale imitation of the old "High Noon" ploy of playing out suspense in real time. After a while, though, I began to take a perverse pleasure in wallowing in the awfulness of it all.

Everywhere he goes he asks if anybody knows bin Laden's whereabouts – as if anybody is going to tell him! Why should we accompany him on his self-aggrandizing trip?

What Happens in Vegas is not only annoying, it's also incompetent – a bad mix.

The animated characters in "Clone Wars" are about as lively as the actors in the live-action movies, so I guess Lucas has achieved his goal of eliminating humans from his movies altogether.

I don't mind a movie where people spend a lot of time jawboning, but what they say had better be interesting. In Spinning into Butter we are spoon-fed the deep dark revelation that racism can exist as virulently in liberal environs as in reactionary ones. Alert the media.

I guarantee you, if Charles Dickens were alive today, he might well be writing movies but he sure as shootin' wouldn't have written "Ghosts."

The people who made Year One seem to think that all you have to do to make a hit comedy is get a bunch of jokesters together. But where are the jokes?

It's all so resolutely uninspired that even the kids in the audience may want to duck out.

Allegorical in the worst ways, Antichrist is about as profound as a slasher movie.

Critics who come out against Kick-Ass are leaving themselves open to that worst of contemporary accusations: a failure to be cool. But pretending that Kick-Ass is just another good-time comic book blowout is the greater failure.

Notable only for being a catalog of just about every kid-pic cliché ever committed to film.

A movie that at best is irrelevant and at worst is unwatchable.

Maybe Hackford, and his screenwriter Mark Jacobson, were attempting to convey the dullness of vice. If so, they vastly overcorrected. But what about the dullness of the performances?

To see Johnny Depp and Angelina Jolie in The Tourist is like watching a chemistry experiment gone horribly wrong.

The script by Allan Loeb careens all over the place without ever coming to rest on anything interesting.

It's as if the filmmakers were hungover from the first film and wanted to make a violent action movie instead.

The coarseness wouldn't be so bad if at least the steady stream of obscenities were funny.

Dislikable movie characters don't always result in dislikable movies but that's certainly the case with Sam Levinson's Another Happy Day, a dysfunctional family meltdown movie about an impending wedding that only grows more aggravating as it unwinds.

Sit this one out.

The script is replete with howlers. My favorite, from Kitsch, after the aliens strike: "I've got a bad feeling about this." Indeed.

Youngsters may enjoy it. But the humor is generally of the genre heard in the boys' locker room at the high school gym.

When promising independent filmmakers decide to jump on the bandwagon and pump up the gore, the results are sure to be touted as visceral and unflinching. Don't be fooled. Kramer has even commented that the movie should be viewed as a modern-day Grimm's fairy tale. It's grim all right.

Weitz doesn't have the chops for satire, let alone black comedy.

This woozily uplifting saga is big on homilies and deficient in just about everything else.

Bacon lavishes his camera on her (Sedgwick) in various states of dress and undress, but the script, by Hannah Shakespeare - talk about having to live up to a name! - is a cheat. It rarely expands on the boy's crises in having to deal with such a mother.

I suspect audiences will see Shyamalan's portentous doodle for what it is - the height of arrogance and a bad night out at the movies.

Borderline unwatchable, although, as is true of all Gilliam movies, it certainly is different.

I hope Keaton doesn't begin to make a specialty of these roles. They play into what is least attractive in her repertoire – the loosey-goosey, knockabout side of her that all too swiftly devolves into hysterics.

Some movies are so flagrantly awful that they achieve classic status. To this rarefied company we must now add The Astronaut Farmer.

Graham was good in films such as "Boogie Nights" and "Bowfinger" where her apparent innocence was a smoke screen for her lustful connivance. To be effective in the movies, she needs something to counteract her wholesomeness.

Maybe Jackson should avoid any more movies with "snake" in the title.

The story is too self-conscious about its offbeat qualities, becoming so cool that it practically freezes on the screen.

Sometimes, dear reader, there's no place like home, and that's just where you should be when this gorefest opens at a theater near you.

After a powerful opening, when we see the first victim suddenly go blind while driving in traffic, the film devolves into a dystopian freak show and wastes many wonderful performers, including Mark Ruffalo and Julianne Moore.

By comparison, Bride Wars makes "Sex and the City" seem like Jane Austen.

The only point of interest in New in Town is sociological. In the current economic climate, this comedy about workers whose livelihood is rescued by a benevolent boss represents the ultimate wish-fulfillment fantasy. Don't spend your hard-earned discretionary cash on it.

Why are Steve Carell and Tina Fey wasting their time, and ours, by appearing in the miserable comedy Date Night?

The Last Airbender is like a Care Bears movie that got waylaid in the fourth dimension. It's insufferably silly.

Full disclosure: I have to say I did laugh during Your Highness. Twice, I think.

Numbingly inane comedy.

It's a mash-up of blah buddy comedy and gross-out CGI monster splatter, with nary a laugh to be had.

An impossibly, incomprehensibly overlong and cacophonous bore.

It just may be the most boring movie ever made – period.

Monumentally unromantic.

They miss by a mile – or should I say, a light-year.

Caine acts dignified throughout, but there's no way to dignify dreck.

There's nothing fresh or off-beat in Final Destination 3, no talent that is struggling to get out. The only thing struggling to get out was me from the theater.

The subculture of weekend warrior bikers is such rich comic material that the ineptitude of Wild Hogs is doubly offensive.

A sham.

Comedy that seems designed to be as bad as it can be.

It's the audience for this film that will require therapy.

A movie of such stupendous uninspiration that, watching it, I didn't know whether to be affronted or hornswoggled. Movies this monumentally dreadful, after all, don't come along every day.

Such a feeble excuse for an action comedy that it's already taken pride of place in my upcoming worst-movies-of-2011 list.