Curiously, TRON: Legacy makes the same mistake the original did: All the best stuff comes in the first act. The rest of the movie is as exciting as an overnight round of computer coding.

Casino Jack fails at its most critical mission: Laying out in clear detail exactly how and when Abramoff broke the law.

In Country Strong, the Oscar-winning Paltrow gets upstaged and outacted by the kid from "Tron" and the snotty brat from "Gossip Girl." Who'd have thought?

Its stop-and-start feel keeps you from ever getting fully absorbed in the story.

You watch it in stunned disbelief, wondering how a movie that started so strongly devolved into something so absurd.

The Mechanic remains singularly uninvolving - a rote exercise in a genre with characters so familiar they barely register.

Aside from the thin characterizations, The Eagle never manages to convey the importance of the heroes' quest.

Although the picture is nominally the story of a man with a murderous temper, it is less a thriller than a metaphor for the plight of illegal immigrants.

For all its peripatetic energy, Limitless still winds up with the same-old blazing guns and wanton destruction of property. No matter how smart you may be, Hollywood will figure out a way to dumb you down.

Hugh Grant and Sarah Jessica Parker are supposed to pass for a married couple, but they have all the chemistry of two actors who just met and shook hands moments before the cameras rolled. They don't even seem to like each other much.

I respected The Beaver for having the conviction to treat mental illness seriously and without compromise. But did it have to be so maudlin, too?

By the time Ceremony reaches its admittedly clever finale, you're too wrung out from Angarano's tiresome antics and Winkler's unconvincing dialogue to care who ends up marrying whom.

A severe bout of sequelitis afflicts this eagerly awaited but only sporadically amusing follow-up.

The actors are talented enough to carry the movie, but they fade into the background once things grow dire, and the special effects take over. There's no sense of wonder or awe.

The main problem with Submarine is that Oliver is not a likable protagonist.

Oh, what a hollow experience Dark of the Moon is! Bay is so afraid of boring his audience, he pitches every scene at the same high volume right from the first shot, and the effect is exhausting.

A continuous parade of slaughter.

Aside from its period New Zealand setting, there is little to distinguish Bride Flight from something you might watch briefly on Lifetime, then change the channel.

Evans – always a reliably dynamic and vivacious screen presence – can't do much to bring the character to life. As far as superheroes go, Cap remains a bit of a stiff.

The movie is pleasant overall and occasionally comes up with a big laugh. When the movie's over, though, it evaporates from memory, just like a one-night stand that didn't go nearly as well as you'd hoped.

The movie wants to be an exploration of family ties and the various ways in which the people we love respond in times of crisis, but the drama is unconvincing, the characters are ill-defined, and Fischer, so good on The Office, seems a bit incomplete without Jim at her side.

James Franco looks more bored and distracted in Rise of the Planet of the Apes than he did when he was hosting the Oscars: Watching the movie, I kept waiting for him to pull out his iPhone, aim it at the camera and take a snapshot while mugging sheepishly. Has there ever been a film with a less engaged protagonist?

There's an irrelevance to the movie that the filmmakers, hard as they try, can't quite shake - something awfully square about the picture: It would have played a lot better a decade ago.

A big part of the problem comes in the casting. Guy Pearce and Katie Holmes - the kind of odd pairing of actors that comes only after your first and second choices have passed - are unconvincing and curiously unsympathetic as the architect Alex and his girlfriend.

Chasing Madoff is as much a journalistic exposé of Madoff as it is a love letter to Markopolos, shot in the style of "Natural Born Killers" by a director terrified of boring his audience. In Proserman, the documentary genre finds its own Michael Bay.

The film is just a procession of increasingly grim and ugly scenarios and discoveries, capped off by a wildly frustrating ending.

The movie tends to lapse into soapy melodrama and heavy-handed preaching whenever possible, and the feel-good ending that appears out of nowhere essentially negates a lot of what has preceded it, adding one more moral to a movie already weighed down by life lessons.

Killer Elite is too formulaic to overcome a been-there, done-that feel.

If anyone other than Gus Van Sant had directed Restless, the film could have well been impossible to sit through.

The best thing about this mildly diverting but instantly forgettable comedy is that it seems to have awakened something in Murphy that had laid dormant for much of the past two decades.

Still, this is one French comedy that could have used a little more hand wringing and a little less whimsy.

The movie fails utterly at coming up with a story that merits all the eye candy.

The entire point of Carnage is to poke fun at the fragile civility of the upper-middle class - they're all animals inside! - but how much more fun would this material have been if the story hadn't been about polite white people?

Steven Soderbergh has been telling interviewers that he's planning to take a sabbatical from filmmaking because he has lost his inspiration. His lack of interest is palpable in Haywire, a rote exercise in action filmmaking that is sleek and polished and instantly evaporates from memory.

In his first starring role post-Harry Potter, Radcliffe must carry the movie with little dialogue and practically nothing to play other than fear, constantly reacting to creepy toys that suddenly spring to life and reflections in windows that shriek unexpectedly at him.

I haven't watched "Fargo" in a few years, but I still remember almost every scene. I saw Thin Ice two nights ago and cannot in all honesty tell you how it ends.

Eventually, though, Seeking Justice devolves into the usual business of chases and elaborate double-crosses that leave behind all vestiges of realism for the sake of popcorn thrills.

A surprisingly sappy misfire from brothers Jay and Mark Duplass, a hug-it-out, touchy-feely movie that succumbs to the maudlin sentimentality they had avoided in all their previous pictures (The Puffy Chair, Baghead, Cyrus).

The Hunger Games takes no risks.

The actors, many of them now in their mid-30s, look understandably fuller in the face and thicker around the waist. The jokes, too, are starting to show their age: They wobble.

For a good hour or so, The Raven is gruesome, ludicrous fun. Then it's just ludicrous.

The Avengers has a knockout final 30 minutes, all gee-whiz crash and bang and eye candy that makes grand use of 3D and IMAX and all the other toys. But the Transformers movies did that, too.

Depp and Burton are two gifted, like-minded artists whose affinity for oddball characters and humor makes them natural creative partners. But they also enable each other's laziest, most indulgent habits: Too often, they seem to be making movies to entertain themselves instead of the audience.

The whole of Prometheus - which was written by Jon Spaihts and Damon Lindelof, and rips off everything from "2001: A Space Odyssey" to "Event Horizon" - feels derivative and passé: The film is a shiny, high-tech relic.

As Seeking a Friend for the End of the World crawls toward its sentimental finale, you're rooting for that asteroid to get here, quick.

Ted is more of an idea than a movie, a string of jokes and homages starring a cartoon and some game actors whose performances are destined to be enjoyed in chunks, rarely from start to finish, during momentary breaks of channel surfing on late-night TV.

To Rome with Love is so inviting, and most of its gaggle of characters so diverse and likable, it's doubly disappointing that Allen, who wrote and directed the movie, can't think of what to do with them.

It looks fantastic, but it's also hard to sit through, because by that point The Bourne Legacy has repeatedly proven there are no surprises to be had here, no more fresh stories to be mined from this well. The stunts look exhausting, though. No wonder Damon bailed.

The movie is oddly impersonal - you remember the concept more than the story - and feels like something that was made simply for the opportunity to pair Streep and Jones for the first time.

The best stuff comes early in Ruby Sparks, which was written by Kazan (granddaughter of Elia) and directed by the husband and wife team of Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris (Little Miss Sunshine).

You end up feeling sorry for all the actors forced to humiliate themselves, except for McConaughey, whose portrayal of sadistic, manipulative evil is mesmerizing, in part because it was so unexpected. He continues to surprise. Friedkin, sadly, continues to coast.

The Master has become a contest between two gifted actors trying to shout each other down. The commitment to their roles is impressive, but it's tethered to a weightless, airless movie, a film so enamored of itself, the audience gets shut out.

For a good hour, Seven Psychopaths is lively, bloody fun. Then the yawning starts.

Reacher is so good at everything he does, and Cruise plays him in such a robotic manner, that the movie becomes a bit of a bore: The hero is practically omnipotent.

From a purely cinematic standpoint, The Underneath is Soderbergh's most daring work yet, full of elliptical flashbacks and fast-forwards; ominous camera angles and cinematic tricks. But Soderbergh's movies (sex, lies and videotape, Kafka, King of the Hill) have always been cunningly smart, and The Underneath is not. [28 April 1995, p.5G]

Evil Dead is just a well-made gross-out, and it's kind of a bummer.

While the scope of the movie is bigger, its impact is smaller. "Blue Valentine" was a precise, heartrending portrait of a marriage coming apart at the seams. The theme of his new movie is a lot harder to discern.

For its first hour or so, Oblivion is a visually mesmerizing, intriguing picture that doesn’t feel like the same-old: It engages your eyes and piques your curiosity. Then, gradually, the novelty wears off, the clichés start to pile up and we’re back to Post-Apocalyptic Dystopia 101.

The movie is intentionally elusive, like a memory you can’t quite fully recall, but the result has all the depth and weight of a greeting card.

A $100 million production of a 10-cent script, is so clunkily written, so bereft of any engaging ideas or emotions, you'd think De Palma would have sneered at it on first reading and passed

Feels static and constricted, its intensity dulled by overreliance on dialogue.

For the story of a man who made his mark on pop culture by being a likable buffoon, the irritatingly arch Confessions of a Dangerous Mind takes itself way too seriously.

The fact that Swept Away got made at all implies there simply is no dissuading Madonna from her movie-star aspirations. Her tenacity is admirable, but it's also block-headed.

Death to Smoochy? Yes, please.

Misses out on just about everything that made the original work, most notably Falk and Arkin, whose odd-couple pairing was the foundation on which the entire movie rested.

An overly convoluted, tiresome mystery that exists primarily to antagonize the audience, Basic consists almost entirely of dense exposition, then concludes by laughing at anyone who tried to pay attention.

This is a gleefully repulsive movie. Spun is bound to be described as bold and cutting-edge by those who confuse shock value with achievement. Most people, however, will just long for a shower after it's over.

A compendium of missed opportunities, uninspired action and clichés so tired, you wish the screenwriters had called 911, too.

No matter how much good will the actors generate, Showtime eventually folds under its own thinness.

An insufferably artsy, pretentious work, the sort of picture that gives art films a bad name.

There are frothy romantic comedies and then there is Jet Lag, a movie so thin it borders on nonexistence.

This new, presumably improved Chainsaw is just as humorless as the original, but it's also slicker, glossier and resoundingly artificial.

The movie is all moist grime and seedy atmosphere, and it's certainly something to look at: It's beautifully lurid. But it's an empty, unengaging movie, and by the end, it has become ridiculous, too.

In the end, they are only moments, and even at a merciful 86 minutes, Dirty Dancing: Havana Nights feels formidably long.

Even though Taking Lives is not very good, it does contain a) a cool car chase and b) a sex scene in which Jolie goes topless. For some, this will be enough entertainment.

Despite the actors' admirable efforts, everyone in The Door in the Floor is too affected, too fancifully written, to come off as anything other than conceits.

The unrelentingly dull Where the Money Is tests his (Newman's) legendary charisma in a way no actor could overcome.

A forced and wholly unnecessary sequel.

A fairly tedious, stupid picture.

Singleton's sloppiest, laziest movie to date, springing to life in fits and starts, risibly mawkish and occasionally gripping, and often feeling like it was made up on the set.

There's nothing here that hasn't been done before, and better, in any given "Halloween" or "Friday the 13th" sequel.

Has all the depth of an episode of "Joey."

It's a redundant comedy, like hearing the same tired joke for the 100th time.

Art School Confidential, the first disappointment from director Terry Zwigoff, is all glum, dour cynicism.

Neither as good nor as bad as you'd hoped it would be: It's just a mediocre exploitation picture with an inspired premise (succinctly spelled out by its title), loads of gratuitous gore, a dash of equally gratuitous nudity and enough inanities to make you wonder if Ed Wood rose from the grave to serve as a creative consultant on the project.

There are three or four big laughs scattered throughout The Pink Panther 2, along with a smattering of decent chuckles. But all those moments combined account for maybe five minutes of screen time, which leaves you with another hour and a half of movie to sit through.

More toy commercial than movie.

The whole thing feels at least three summers too stale.

The result is almost suffocating: a movie that has been tinkered and fussed with until there is no spontaneity left -- no warmth or life or messiness.

Certainly a grand-looking picture. For a film that's filled with CGI effects, there wasn't a single shot that looked artificial, and the production design is tremendous. But it's a hollow, boring spectacle.

Jason Statham gives the best performance. Dolph Lundgren gets the best character arc. Terry Crews gets the best gun. Jet Li gets the best kill (you'll know it when you see it).Arnold Schwarzenegger gets the best cameo. And Sylvester Stallone? He gets the blame.

You know this supposedly risqué comedy is in trouble when the funniest gag involves a foot cramp during sex.

There is absolutely nothing in this prequel/remake that improves on the first film or negates it in any way. If you've never seen The Thing - and you really should - stick with the genuine 1982 article and skip this elaborate act of mimicry.

The latest collaboration between Cohen and director Larry Charles proves the formula they created with "Borat" and then started to milk dry with "Brüno" has finally run out of juice. Time to move on, guys.

In Snow White and the Huntsman, this talented but woefully miscast actress (Stewart) is expected to rally an entire army of soldiers, even though she usually looks like she forgot the combination to her locker.

So needlessly convoluted, so crammed with subplots within subplots, it simply forgets about its gangland "Romeo & Juliet" premise.

A Jerry Bruckheimer production, which gives the movie a disquieting sense of stupidity.

Silly, overplotted conspiracy thriller.

The kind of schlocky, disposable time-killer that once might have starred Jean-Claude Van Damme, The Impostor is a relentlessly dull chase flick with an inexplicably high-toned cast.

The dullest, clunkiest, big-budget fantasy since Steven Spielberg flattened Peter Pan in "Hook."

Shrill and sloppy film.

But there's nothing in this amateurish movie that the opening credits of last year's "Go" didn't do better.

A spectacularly mediocre movie.

At the very least, Corman would have remembered to make the movie fun.

A grand, eye-popping film, a beautifully photographed epic with the depth of a Bugs Bunny Cartoon.

It's up to O'Donnell to carry the show, and he's simply not up to the task.

One of the most anticlimactic finales I've ever seen in a movie

Gives romance a bad name.

A hostage drama without any tension. It is a love story without any heat. It is as curiously empty a movie as we've seen all year.

The best thing you can say about Just a Kiss is that it isn't every romantic comedy that throws in suicide, bondage and a plane crash in between all the bed hopping.

Chasing Papi leaves you wishing Hollywood would just forget about Latinos altogether. If this is how they really see us, I'd rather not know.

A feather-light musical rushed into production to capitalize on American Idol-frenzy, is nothing more than an excuse to give the two leads several musical numbers, a la those Frankie Avalon-Annette Funicello "Beach Blanket Bingo" movies, and with just about the same amount of substance, too.

Never achieves takeoff.

The most intriguing thing about Lost Souls is how it managed to attract so much talent.

So thunderously unfunny...There is no reason for an 82-minute movie to feel so very, very long.

Looks exquisite, but don't bother digging deeper.

A horror/sci-fi/action mishmash that aims to be the kind of brainless timekiller once used to round out the bottom of a double bill at the drive-in.

The characters in Secretary never feel the least bit human. Their quirks, sexual and otherwise, are all on the surface. Inside, where it counts, nobody's home.

Witless, unoriginal mishmash of gangsta-drama clichés.

The dumbest, most risible retelling ever made of the exploits of legendary bank robber Jesse James.

Feels like it's been pasted together from 51 other movies -- none of them good.

It takes a concerted effort to make a movie as relentlessly stupid and grating as 15 Minutes.

The movie is pure product, and proud of it: There isn't a single surprising moment in all of its 88 minutes, because Domestic Disturbance is designed to stick to tried-and-true formulas, instead of shaking them up a little.

Who writes this stuff, anyway? Does this not sound like utter gibberish? Surely, this film did not actually get made, did it? Yes, it did. I have seen it. But you, oh, fortunate one, don't have to. Consider yourself lucky.

It's all rote, sleep-inducing formula, but it might have still worked if the movie weren't so timid and unimaginative.

Glitter, the kind of movie only 11-year-old girls who dot their i's with hearts would find bearable.

Gas -- the hot air variety -- is exactly what Driven is made of.

Drowns in its own noxious fumes. Who knew being bad could be so dull?

Lands with a thud right from its painfully unfunny prologue and maintains its plodding, exasperating course straight through to its car-chase-and-shootout finale.

Winds up suffocating you with its aura of bogus, store-bought nostalgia.

The movie's attempts at zaniness are flat, almost embarrassing.

A fluffy, feel-bad drama, with some serious things to say about the viability of homosexual men as fathers and role models.

No atmosphere, no tension -- nothing but Costner, flailing away. It's a buggy drag.

The vilest film of the season.

Another joyless, brain-numbing adventure through lackluster Indiana Jones territory.

Formidably stupid.

Gigli's awfulness is of a rarer, more precious variety. It's the sort of bizarre, ill-conceived picture you can't believe exists, but are secretly glad it does.

This is a disastrously clumsy, heavy-handed movie, one so desperate and exploitative that it resorts to putting a live grenade in the hands of a baby in order to get its message across.

Timeline gives Gigli serious competition for worst film of the year honors.

The performances are shaky, rendering Latter Days as a movie that you've seen before, and done better, too.

The scattershot nature of the script, which feels as if it had been made up on the spot, leaves the actors looking like they're enjoying some private joke not shared with the audience. Self-indulgent does not even begin to describe it.

There is so much that is wrong with The Alamo that it is easier to begin with what the movie gets right: Davy Crockett. As played by Billy Bob Thornton.

A failure on every conceivable level -- from its trite, pedestrian dialogue to its static, torturous pacing.

An unsatisfying, overly restrained bore, capped off by an ending so strange and inconclusive, it feels like something you'd find on the ''deleted scenes'' portion of a DVD.

Emits a fishy odor, like a recruitment film for an obscure cult you'd rather stay away from.

Lee remains a superb entertainer -- like Oliver Stone, he's incapable of ever being boring -- but in She Hate Me, he comes dangerously close to seeming trivial, a crank-for-crank's-sake.

For all its noble intentions, the movie is really a work of crass exploitation -- an obvious and manipulative grab to cash in on the post-9/11 hero worship of the firefighting profession.

If this is magic, I'll take "Gigli."

Bad enough to make even James Gandolfini and Catherine O'Hara seem dull.

Where "Seven" seemed to radiate diabolical evil, Saw just radiates idiocy.

No, it's the movie itself -- an unimaginative, generic affair memorable only for its incessant and flagrant plugging of Apple computers and iPods -- that should put a stake through the franchise for good.

Taxes the patience of even the most willing viewer with its sheer nonsense: It's distractingly illogical.

A Middle Ages "Rocky" that spares no cliche in its unduly long, 2 1/4 hours.

Just plain bad. Really, really bad.

If you're going to direct a piece of crass, nonsensical junk, at least have the decency to release it straight to video, where it belongs.

The brothers (Farrelly) produced Say It Isn't So, which bears their stamp in every frame and features all of the elements their movies are known for, except one: laughter.

Terrifyingly dull movie.

Cox's morose performance could not be less interesting, Harrison's visual stylings all feel borrowed from David Fincher movies and nine inch nails music videos, and the film's elliptical mysteries, which twist onto themselves a la Mulholland Drive, aren't interesting enough to ponder.

This movie demands that the viewer -- and even its own characters -- turn into thumb-sucking 3-year-olds with no need for plausibility or logic, as long as there are lots of flashing lights and whooshing noises emanating from the screen.

Two for the Money, which was written by Dan Gilroy (Freejack, Chasers), is so badly constructed and illogical that its inanities manage to drown the actor (Pacino) out.

Never before has Egoyan made a picture this egregiously, relentlessly bad.

War is hell, and so are bad movies about war.

Despite the movie's bouncy ebullience (courtesy of a terrific period soundtrack) and dashes of fantasy, the film quickly becomes an endurance test.

It is a grand-looking, grandly empty pageant.

If Annapolis is not the worst movie to date of this still-young year, it is certainly the most hackneyed, as well as the most depressing.

After a while, hearing Martin say ''Zee area eez zecure!'' doesn't cut it any longer, and that's pretty much all The Pink Panther has to offer.

Few expected Basic Instinct 2 to be very good, but no one expected it to be this boring.

Like its predecessors, Tokyo Drift suffers from a terminal lack of levity.

A handsome, sincere, well-meaning bore.

If watching people having their faces cut off, getting their legs amputated and having their throats tenderly slit is your idea of a horrific good time, you'll certainly get your money's worth here.

For the first time in the film series, Harris wrote the screenplay himself, which means the movie is practically identical to the book. In other words, they both stink.

Georgia Rule is so artificial, it feels like more of a flow chart than a slice of life.

Sarandon blends into the background, having practically nothing to do except stand around and wring her hands as the two men in her life battle it out in a passive-aggressive war. It's enough to make her want to run off with Thelma.

Most certainly a personal work -- so personal, in fact, that I can't imagine anyone but Coppola being able to sit through it.

The problem with Revolver is that it is Ritchie's first attempt at a ''serious'' look at the underworld, but the result is so pretentious and muddled it's almost a little embarrassing.

The best stuff in Jumper comes early, while the movie is still busy explaining its scenario. It's only when all the pieces are in place and the story actually kicks in that things start to fall apart, and quickly.

This is easily one of the silliest, most preposterous thrillers ever made, and the only reason it didn't go straight to video has to be that it stars Pacino.

Such a dull, clunky, joyless mess, it's hard to believe the people who made it understand much about movies.

Tomb is the kind of movie you sit through dreading the expository scenes, because the acting is so bad and the dialogue so pointedly written to make sure the little ones in the audience can keep up with the plot.

The whole thing is so listless and mechanical, watching it is a curiously dispiriting experience. You start hoping someone whips out a bear suit.

It's not every movie that makes you wish Vin Diesel would run in and start blowing up stuff.

Even a film as shabby and humdrum as Beverly Hills Chihuahua, which never musters up the wit and beauty of a single frame of "Lady and the Tramp," is not without its pleasures.

Four Christmases is sour to the point of curdling, a satirical look at the holidays a la "Bad Santa" that does exactly what that film avoided: come off as both off-puttingly misanthropic and gloppily sentimental.

There isn't a single scene in this story about a traveler from another planet (Jim Caviezel) who crash-lands on Earth during the Iron Age that doesn't remind you of another, better movie.

A curiously inert and talky action picture about good-looking mutants on the run from bad (but equally good-looking) ones, Push wastes a decent idea and stylish direction on a script that's much more Ingmar Bergman than Stan Lee.

Even Ben Stiller looks bored out of his mind in Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian, and he got paid several million dollars to star in it.

The new Fame is practically identical to Alan Parker's 1980 original -- I mean, it's the same damn movie -- except for all the parts with heart and humor and poignancy and soul and fun.

It is absolutely, inexcusably terrible.

How can a movie as overstuffed with funny people as The Goods: Live Hard, Sell Hard be so listless and leaden?

The more Shrink tries to get you invested in the emotional turmoil of its characters, the more you want to reach into the screen and shake them and tell them to get over themselves.

You don't go into a movie called Ninja Assassin expecting a hell of a lot, but this shockingly disjointed and relentlessly dull picture can't even deliver the martial-arts kick its title so plainly promises.

There is also a last-minute "Sixth Sense" twist, although it definitely won't make you sit through the movie again to see if the filmmakers cheated.

A thriller boasting Mel Gibson's first starring role in eight years, elicits a gigantic wow -- as in ``Wow, does this movie suck!''

Johnston fails to make a story set in 1891 England relevant to contemporary audiences.

Everything about this excruciatingly dull, talky film screams made-for-network-TV: The I'm-only-here-for-a-paycheck performances by famous actors; the Crate and Barrel catalog mise-en-scene; the syrupy, heartwarming score that lays the pathos on so thickly you gag on it.

A soulless, witless, landfill contraption that Smith once would have mocked mercilessly.

A movie as annoying as its oddly punctuated title, After.Life is a misguided and empty-headed attempt at psychological horror that succeeds only at talking the viewer to death.

Too bad, though, that whenever the characters stand still to talk, Knight and Day induces stupor in the viewer.

Shyamalan takes the beloved Nickelodeon anime series -- the full title was Avatar: The Last Airbender -- and turns it into 103 minutes of overproduced, stilted nonsense.

Raises a few questions -- like just what were they thinking?

The film suffers from a severe lack of urgency and emotional engagement. You can't get involved in a movie in which the characters all seem to be harboring double identities.

With such a large cast, none of the actors is able to turn her character into a fully realized person.

Sitting through Little Fockers is a soul-sucking, dispiriting experience.

This excruciatingly dumb, formulaic picture, which somehow required the work of four screenwriters but contains not even one single, fleeting moment of wit or humor.

There's a startling moment 10 or 15 minutes into The Adjustment Bureau - the only time, really, when the film achieves any level of surprise. The dispiriting dullness of this dreary misfire hasn't had time to settle in and thicken: The movie hasn't yet revealed its utter and thorough ineptitude.

British satire loses something when it's handled by Americans: You miss the perspective that a foreign culture brings, so instead of wit and humor, you end up trafficking in self-congratulatory clichés and sentiment.

A stiff, unconvincing epic.

With Kaboom, Araki takes a huge step backward from the maturity and restraint he demonstrated in 2004's "Mysterious Skin," his best and most-assured film to date.

The film will probably play a lot better in dorm rooms with plenty of beer kegs and bongs on hand, but in the confines of a movie theater, it's deadly - the sort of bad comedy Mel Brooks made late in his career, until he finally smartened up and quit.

The Conspirator hits a new nadir for Redford: Sitting through this stage-bound, talky, stiffly-acted movie reminded me of having to endure the Hall of Presidents attraction at Walt Disney World (one of the few existing bits of proof that Disney had a dark and evil side).

Even the most forgiving moviegoer will recognize this movie as the blatant cash-grab that it is.

The tone is all over the place, which makes the movie difficult to take neither seriously nor as popcorn fluff.

Every summer movie season usually has at least one spectacular, disastrous flame-out, and although the dog days of August still loom, I doubt there will come a big-budget blockbuster worse than Cowboys and Aliens.

Momoa, a familiar face from "Game of Thrones" to "Baywatch," has the muscles but not the imposing persona and barbaric presence that Conan requires.

The talented actors are game, but they are done in by the shallow nature of their characters, none of whom behaves in a manner remotely resembling real life (they don't really seem to be related, either).

Abduction is a crass and lowbrow attempt to cash in on a young actor's heat - an exploitation picture where the person being taken advantage of is too young to notice.

Why does The Big Year's trailer intentionally hide what the film is really about? Here's why: Because bird-watching - or birding, as practitioners prefer to call it - makes for a stupefyingly boring movie.

Even a supporting turn by Vincent Cassell as Otto Gross, a fellow psychiatrist, cocaine addict and unapologetic adulterer, fails to enliven the movie: A Dangerous Method makes even a cokehead hedonist boring.

Jack and Jill contains long stretches of squirm-inducing tedium in which Sandler riffs and ad-libs far longer than he should.

This odious, hypocritical movie marks director David Gordon Green's graduation into full-on hack.

You need lots of gifted people chasing after the same bad idea to make a movie as colossally misguided as Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close.

Neeson is always compelling, even in a movie as ridiculous as The Grey.

Man on a Ledge just made me think of an old Van Halen song: Jump.

The action, which bookends the movie, is atrocious, defying all laws of gravity and physics and machine gun-edited into incomprehensible lunacy.

This is the kind of colossally misguided vanity project.

"The silence will kill you!" warn the posters for Silent House. That's only if the boredom doesn't get you first, though.

The movie has an undeniable visceral power. It is also a loud, grating wallow in dime-store despair, a cheap and hollow button-puncher.

Battleship is a board game for children, so it stands to reason a film adaptation would also be aimed at kids. But did they have to gear it to really dumb kids?

Men in Black 3 is so dull and empty, it's the first movie that has ever made me think "Thank God this is in 3D."

That's My Boy more than lives up to its R-rating - including one gross-out gag repulsive enough to make you put down your popcorn.

Enormous in its scope and colossal in its stupidity.

An irritatingly contrived drama.

Aggressively, defiantly stupid.

This is ultimately a movie about highly intelligent people in pursuit of trivial nonsense: At least Mulder and Scully caught a real monster every once in a while.

Chuck Norris is also in this movie, although you should know that he gets roughly five minutes of screen time, half of those devoted to his telling of a Chuck Norris joke. That is as funny as the movie's self-aware humor gets.

The best moments in director David Koepp's slight, dull movie are the scenes in which bike messenger Wilee pauses at busy intersections to figure out the path of least obstruction.

Even the story-within-a-story structure doesn't pay off. This material needed more substance and ideas - and less flash and sumptuous production values.

There are several cameos in For a Good Time, Call… by famous actors portraying the girls' phone-sex clients, including Kevin Smith and Seth Rogen, but they've been clearly been left to improvise, and they don't put much effort into their routines.

The movie even fails on a psychological level, never illustrating how, in a pressure-cooker environment and swept up by mob-think mentality, we are capable of committing acts that innately repel us.

Despite all the freaky business on display - and there are moments here when you cannot believe your eyes - The Paperboy suffocates you with boredom like a hot, wet blanket. You want to push it away and escape. It makes sleaze boring.

This Must Be the Place is as emotionally zonked-out as its protagonist, and just as difficult to warm up to.

There isn't a moment in the entire picture in which you will recognize an element of your own life.

Hitchcock spends too much time off the set of Psycho, where the real story was, and focuses instead on incidental matters that feel like outtakes. Mother would not have been pleased.

An excruciating and melodramatic comedy.

An unsalvageable wreck.

Time to give the shoot-’em-up thing a rest, guys: It’s tired and played out, and so are you.

Oz the Great and Powerful is an oppressive, bloated bore.

A sluggish, soporific dud, the dreariest big-budget science-fiction adventure since "Dune."

Bad enough to earn a rare spot on my hallowed list of ''The Worst Movies I've Ever Seen,'' An American Carol is testament that the country's culture wars are raging just as strongly within Hollywood as anywhere else.

Monumentally silly thriller.

A shockingly, unbelievably bad movie.