They play cotton candy effigies of themselves named Kelly and Justin, and the best that can be said is that they don't embarrass themselves.

A grindingly conventional comedy that insists on tying up its subplots in pretty ribbons and bows.

The movie, which is crudely dubbed into English, lacks the raucous, anything-for-a-shock carnival humor of its American prototypes. After it's over, the only question worth asking is whether dear, cozy old Heidelberg can survive the slander.

Admirably high-minded and visually gorgeous but fatally anesthetized by its own grandiosity.

The movie works so diligently to convey a spirit of heroic uplift and fails so completely that it feels like a tragic misfire.

Rob Schneider runs an obstacle course of taste and emerges remarkably unsullied, considering the choices he faces.

Little more than a loose- jointed succession of goofy "Saturday Night Live"-style sketches and sight gags inspired by an actual event that is nearly half a century behind us.

The home-movie crudeness of Dead or Alive: Final indicates it was made on the cheap with minimal preparation.

Although there is the germ of a very sharp comedy in the intersection of real mobsters and make-believe thugs in a Hollywood mob comedy, Analyze That is far too lazy to do much with it.

The movie has a frantic staccato style that is more game-oriented than cinematic.

Ultimately seems naïve. In developing the comparison of sex and cannibalism, it never goes beyond the standard Draculian symbol of blood to include other bodily substances.

For all its intimations of fire and brimstone, the film isn't remotely frightening, and the high-school-level acting doesn't help.

Many of the faces that emerge through the murk appear bug-eyed. And much of the dialogue, which is frequently shouted, is only semi-intelligible.

As the film loses its grip on its multiple stories, the title begins to suggest an overheated stew bubbling out of its pot. By the end of the film, the intersecting dramas and histrionic performances have spilled all over the floor, so to speak.

In the end you have to wonder why the highly reputed director Michael Apted ("Coal Miner's Daughter") and the gifted screenwriter Nicholas Kazan ("Reversal of Fortune") chose to go slumming in territory like this. They must have been offered wads of money to do the dirty job.

Breezing along on gusts of stale air and perky inanities, Two Weeks Notice is a romantic comedy so vague and sadly undernourished that it makes one of Nora Ephron's low-cal strawberry sodas seem as tempting as a Philip Barry feast.

Quickly curdles into a nasty variation of the one-last-score genre.

The cinematographer-turned-director likes his MTV-style editing so much that in his drive for hyperkinetic overkill he sacrifices coherence to wallow in barely contained chaos.

A leaden, skimpily plotted space-age Outward Bound adventure with vague allegorical aspirations that remain entirely unrealized.

Flagrantly old-fashioned, triple-hankie tear-jerker.

So preoccupied with delivering its effects that it doesn't bother to make sense of its story.

The screenplay never begins to finds a workable balance between wit and adventure. And the performances in several smaller roles are so mechanical that they lend Kill Me Later the tone of a vanity production.

A lumpy three-and-a-half-hour glob of Civil War history.

This poorly acted, ramshackle tour of the lower echelons of the Los Angeles rock scene has the feel of a largely improvised home movie filmed without retakes, and its sense of humor could only be fully appreciated by struggling musicians.

Doesn't have a genuinely human moment.

A bubbling crockpot of farcical mush to warm the tummies of anyone who really and truly misses "The Brady Bunch," and I mean really and truly.

The spectacle of two mature stars forced to grovel in the bathroom for cheap laughs is pathetic.

Too lazy and too loosely structured to accomplish much besides conveying some vivid physical impressions. There is no narrator, and the structure that exists is clouded by the new-age mumbo-jumbo of eight principal commentators.

A slapdash, poorly acted, paint-by-numbers teen horror comedy, the sequel is too frenetically edited to build any suspense, and its special effects are strictly bargain basement.

The film's spareness and lack of words seem affected and ultimately unrealistic. At such moments, its refusal to put things into words and its crushing sense of gloom turn self-defeating.

A bleak, static mood piece about adolescent emptiness. There's little dialogue, and what there is offers the scantest information about Gerardo, who, as played by Mr. Ortuño, conveys an impenetrable blank-faced melancholy.

Squandered in foolish horseplay and on a story that zigzags so far out of control that it feels as if the screenwriter, Steve Adams, pasted together a bunch of zany notions in a frantic search for confusion.

Even for a fairy tale, A Cinderella Story, directed by Mark Rosman from a screenplay by Leigh Dunlap, fails to make sense.

Pushes its ugly humor further than most.

Makes no psychological sense. Even within the convoluted realm of film noir, the development of the relationships defies any logic.

Strains to be the ne plus ultra of arch, hyper-sophisticated fun, but the laughs are few.

The screenplay is closer in tone to an uneasy mixture of post-"Seinfeld" bile and unfocused Altmanesque satirical misanthropy. Partly because the story's structure is so haphazard, most of the jokes land with a thud.

As you watch the comedy lurch along, the woozy, sinking sensation it produces suggests a movie slapped together after the consumption of far too many gallons of that spiked eggnog.

Doesn't deliver.

Evokes a mood of tenderness. Beyond that, it is a weightless, sentimental and intellectually lazy effort from an independent filmmaker whose movies seem increasingly insubstantial.

May be the opposite of trash, but it is something just as disposable: dead literary meat. Dragged down by a stuffy screenplay clotted with generic period oratory, overdressed to the point that the actors seem physically impeded by their ornate costumes, and hopelessly muddled in its storytelling, the movie is edited with a haphazardness that leaves many dots unconnected.

Proving once again that skillful performances can't create something out of almost nothing - the best they can do is make it palatable.

This crude, inspirational tear-jerker is as sweet as a bowl of instant oatmeal smothered in molasses. It should please those who honestly believe that Santa Claus and God are synonymous; others may retch.

A tedious World War II epic that slogs across the screen like a forced march in quicksand.

Solemn, sentimental bore of a movie that suffocates in its own predictability and watered-down psychobabble.

Neither funny nor sexy, nor leavened by the wistful laissez-faire wisdom of the typical sophisticated Gallic comedy, it is less than a trifle.

Even if it ends on a hopeful note, this is a feel-bad movie that leaves a bitter aftertaste.

Overcompensates for its sloppiness with loud, knockabout farce.

Good intentions do not guarantee good movies, or even watchable ones. A sad case in point is The Kid and I.

Annapolis has enough material for an exciting trailer. But that's all the movie really is: a trailer tricked out with protracted boxing sequences and an undernourished romantic subplot that culminates in a single tepid kiss.

The gay, independent comedy Adam & Steve is as crude and nonsensical as any number of B-list studio equivalents, with the added disadvantages of a low budget and shaky direction by Craig Chester, who wrote and also stars.

The question is why. Why would a star of Michael Douglas's stature and intelligence attach himself to a Washington thriller as deeply ridiculous, suspense-free and potentially career-damaging as The Sentinel?

The upbeat ending can't erase the lingering aura of being trapped in an insane asylum with the Manson family.

Terminally glum and waterlogged.

A movie like We Are Marshall stands or falls on its ability to make you feel the pain and loss of individuals in a place where community pride and football are one and the same. As the film, directed by McG (the "Charlie's Angels" movies) from a wooden screenplay by Jamie Linden, follows a handful of Huntington residents during the months after the accident, not one of them comes fully to life.

Just when it seems as though the language of insult and humiliation couldn’t get any nastier, the movie escalates the barrage.

The kindest thing to be said about this deluxe photo spread of a film is that Sienna Miller's Edie and Guy Pearce's Andy capture their characters' images and body language with relative precision.

Feels like a desperate attempt to stretch a flimsy half-hour made-for-cable concept into a feature film.

The sloppy, absent-minded Premonition is a giant step backward for Ms. Bullock.

The director, as he showed in movies like "After Dark, My Sweet," and "Fear," specializes in conjuring conspiratorial atmospheres in which anxiety and sexual menace hang in the air like a heavy, bitter perfume. Long after you've dismissed the movie's ridiculous, convoluted story, traces of that scent may linger.

Under the direction of Andy Tennant, the Olsen sisters lay on the icky-poo cuteness with several trowels, often delivering their lines as though they were reciting the alphabet.

A scare movie about gambling addiction, is as grim and lurid as any in the recent spate of films about the evils of crystal meth.

The film's elegantly tricky cinematography and ominous, pounding score by Hans Zimmer (provocatively juxtaposed with the Rolling Stones), only underline the emptiness behind its technical flash.

The movie, which imagines its principal characters as metaphorically ticking time bombs, never convincingly portrays their passions.

Nightwatch spends so much time churning up eerie atmospheric effects that it doesn't have time to develop its preposterous story in which Martin finds himself accused of the murders.

Watching the movie is like reaching into a Christmas stocking and pulling out handfuls of cheap plastic toys that are broken.

A hopeless jumble of visual and linguistic styles.

Shirley’s instant metamorphosis from insecure high school student to ruthless madam is ludicrous in spite of the best efforts of the talented Ms. Waterston to convince you otherwise. The Babysitters has the increasingly jerky momentum of a film that was butchered in the cutting room, sacrificing continuity and character development to whip the plot forward.

War, Inc. is gonzo moviemaking with a bleeding heart. A satirical farce that wants to be "Dr. Strangelove" for the age of terrorism, it is a zany, nihilistic free-for-all that goes soft.

This candy-colored movie, whose soft hues match the colored cereal loops that Alby devours at his mother's house, is a post-Freudian fable that wants to be a kind of anti-"Wizard of Oz" for a culture inundated with toys and toons.

The kindest thing to be said for this frantic, cluttered mess of cheesy computer-generated action-adventure clichés is that at least you can see how the estimated $175 million budget was spent.

The film's spiritual deck is stacked. In the mawkish tradition of movies like "Simon Birch," "Wide Awake," "August Rush" and "Hearts in Atlantis," Henry Poole Is Here is insufferable hokum that takes itself very, very seriously.

Soon after that the movie simply stops dead in its tracks, as though the money had run out and the project had been called off in the middle of a scene that makes no psychological or dramatic sense. It leaves you frustrated and annoyed.

The suds that cascade through Tyler Perry’s The Family That Preys more than equal the cubic footage from nighttime soaps like "Dallas," "Dynasty" and their offspring.

A supernatural thriller so mechanically inept and lacking in suspense that it doesn't even pass muster as lowbrow Halloween-ready entertainment.

Filled with awful, recycled jokes.

Watching Ms. Zellweger’s joyless performance, you have to wonder what happened to this formerly charming actress who not so long ago seemed on the verge of becoming a softer, more vulnerable Shirley MacLaine.

Turns into an impenetrable essay on guilt, memory and the fear of death that even Mr. Langella's gravity cannot salvage.

Were it a farce instead of an earnest, paranoid thriller with pretensions to historicity, An American Affair might not seem so offensively exploitative. The fact that it is quite well acted, especially by Ms. Mol, who has the air of a sophisticated 1960s party animal down pat, only compounds the insult.

The Skeptic turns into a cut-and-dried Freudian melodrama that gives repressed memory a supernatural dimension. I'll take a bunch of teenagers terrorized by chain-saw-wielding zombies any day.

It isn't saying much, but at least her (Carey) work here is more substantial than in the catastrophic "Glitter."

You might blame Nora Ephron, whose screenplay for “When Harry Met Sally” established the formula that I Hate Valentine’s Day runs into the ground. Compared with this, Ms. Ephron is Chekhov.

An interminable mess of a film that juggles more characters and undeveloped subplots than it can handle and even manages to bungle the setup.

Muddled little dud of a melodrama.

A semicoherent, overacted mélange of travelogue, farce and suds.

A very shallow comedy. For the real thing, rent “The Ref,” in which Kevin Spacey and Judy Davis, with a boost from Glynis Johns, set the house on fire.

Not even the skillful performances of its stars, Susan Sarandon and Pierce Brosnan, playing the boy’s parents, can cover up the mysterious gaps in continuity of a screenplay whose thudding dialogue spells out every emotion while refusing to clarify many crucial plot details.

Muddled, pretentious assemblage of film clips of the band shot between 1966 and 1971.

Written and directed by the husband-wife team of Kieran and Michele Mulroney, Paper Man is so unsure of itself that its symbolic edifice feels like a desperately erected defense system.

As its momentum accelerates, and its special effects transform it into a pulpy cartoon, Predators loses its judgment and turns into a frantic, clichéd chase film. This chaotic stew of fire, blood, mud and explosives is so devoid of terror and suspense that any metaphorical analysis is rendered moot.

In Ms. Mirren's first film to be directed by her husband, Taylor Hackford, since "White Nights" in 1985, her formidable dramatic resources can't camouflage flat writing that eventually veers into gloppy sentimentality. At times even Ms. Mirren, who adopts a regionless American accent, seems uncomfortable.

The indoor scenes are so dark that you can barely make out the outlines of the bodies, much less distinguish who is who. Because almost half the film is this dim, it makes for a frustrating viewing experience. The jerky cinematography compounds the irritation.

This 95-minute movie is so overstuffed with characters, it would take a whole television season to sort them out and give them any depth. And even then, these people have so little on their minds that 13 hours might not do the trick.

In the movie's cheapest, most exploitative gesture - just as it is about to run out of tricks - a snake slithers into the pine box in which Paul awakens bound and gagged, not knowing where he is. With that gimmick, the movie sacrifices its last shred of integrity.

Inhale is a creepy medical thriller in the tradition of "Coma" that amps up the tension and suspense by slicing up time.

Filmed in Rwanda, Shake Hands With the Devil is certainly panoramic. But the best that can be said of the film is that it is an honorable dud.

Comic mishap, whose satire already feels out of date.

An incoherent hybrid of buddy movie, "Girls Gone Wild" episode and James Bond spoof that employs cheap cinematic tricks like multiple split screens for no apparent purpose.

Like Warwick himself, the movie begins to run amok after a taut and tantalizing first act. Not even Mr. Hyde Pierce's best efforts can make sense of a character who by the end of the film seems to be a completely different person with the same name.

The Ledge, it should be noted, is not dumb. What undoes it is its mechanical structure: a stale dramatic formula of the sort taught in elementary playwriting classes.

The body-swapping premise, which is stale to begin with, isn't explored with any depth, unless you find meaningful Freudian subtext in the movie's relentless anal fixation. But the premise at least sets up a farce that surpasses "The Hangover" in gleeful crudeness and profanity.

A stultifying hybrid of athletic instruction film and Christian sermon.

If nothing else the ramshackle, scatterbrained rom-com What's Your Number? confirms the arrival, heralded by "Bridesmaids," of a new subgenre, the smutty chick flick, into the Hollywood mainstream.

The screenplay, by Mr. Cooper and Jonathan D. Krane, is so sketchy that it feels like a hastily executed first draft.

So why? Why would stars of the magnitude of Mr. Cage and Ms. Kidman sign on to a project whose screenplay is so inept that the movie, even if profitable, will stand as a career-impeding setback? Can't they read?

The campy new screen adaptation of The Three Musketeers has all the reality and visceral excitement of a $75 million literary theme park dotted with fancy villages heavily patrolled by security.

What does it add up to? Nothing much. A tense, paranoid nightmare with a chilly metaphysical overview has been trampled into a blustering, bad cartoon.

The Son of No One self-destructs in a ludicrous, ineptly directed anticlimactic rooftop showdown in which bodies pile up, and nothing makes a shred of sense.

A depressing two-hour infomercial pitching Times Square as the only place in the universe you want to be when the ball drops at midnight on Dec. 31. (Believe me, it's not.)

Long before it ends Dark Tide capsizes and sinks with a sickening glug.

Virginia is a wildly unpredictable piece of work. Playing the kind of role that is often associated with Laura Dern, Ms. Connelly gives a brave, full-tilt performance that is true to the character but can't hold the movie together.

Beyond its eye candy, this wisp of a movie, inspired by Arthur Schnitzler's play "La Ronde," offers only hints of the complicated personalities behind the characters' sleek, well-toned surfaces.

Its tepid satire of art world pretensions culminates with a visual dirty joke that is mildly amusing but still not worth the wait.

The tone of Knife Fight is mean until the movie flips a switch and turns pious and mawkish as Paul tries to make amends for past sins. Whether playing it sleazy or noble, Mr. Lowe brings little emotional weight to his role.

The kindest thing to be said of Movie 43, a star-saturated collection of crude one-joke vignettes made with big-time directors, is that most of the participants seem to relish being naughty.

For all its visual pizazz A Glimpse Inside the Mind of Charles Swan III has the jerky momentum of a collection of disconnected skits loosely thrown together with only the vaguest notion of where it’s heading or what it all means. At best it is a mildly diverting goof with a charmless lead performance. Its underlying misogyny leaves a sour taste.

The weakest parts of Safe Haven are its action sequences, in which the illusion of reality is shattered by ham-handed editing, garish special effects and comic-book dialogue.

Starbuck is up to its eyeballs in mush.

Mental wildly overplays the kookiness and quirk.

Love Sick Love deteriorates into a series of pranks that are not funny enough to register as comedy or brutal enough to qualify as horror.

If 1st Night had a glint of social satire, it might have amounted to something more than a frivolous fatuity. But it plays as an arch, hammily acted farce.

So clogged with kooky gadgetry and special effects and glitter and goo that watching it feels like being gridlocked at Toys "R" Us during the Christmas rush.

One long, 1980s-style inspirational cliche.

Ultimately as sycophantic as it is needling.

As tightly plotted as a standard French farce.

This misty-eyed Southern nostalgia piece, in treading the line between sappy and sanguine, winds up mired in tear-drenched quicksand.

Deteriorates into a gory shoot-'em-up gangster movie with a quick-fix ending that leaves many threads dangling. It could have been something more.

You have to admire the effort its attractive cast expends pumping life into stilted, flowery dialogue that confuses pretentious attitudinizing with profound insight.

Even by the crude standards of teenage horror, Final Destination is dramatically flat.

Despite its occasional flashes of brilliance (every Rudolph film has them), this unsavory stew never comes to a boil.

Silly, heavy-handed film.

Are they fools or heroes? Because the movie can't decide, neither can we. And without an emotional payoff, Play It to the Bone ends up stranded in serio-comic limbo.

The worst flaw of Willard is a clunky tone-deaf screenplay based on Gilbert Ralston's original and updated by the director. Barely a line flies by that doesn't land with a wooden thud.

Turns into a meticulously choreographed bang-by-the-numbers action fantasy that I would accuse of peddling evil if the film weren't so dumb and incoherent.

Terminally scatterbrained gangster farce.

Can a feature-length movie be built on minutiae like jammed copying machines, unsent business letters and orientation programs for new employees? This innocuous wisp of a film, as weighty as a scrap of fax paper caught in an updraft, suggests that the answer is no.

In this elongated, formula-ridden sitcom posing as a movie, the date-weary Manhattan singles exchanging acerbic banter suggest the tougher, far less intellectual offspring of Woody Allen characters drenched in a whiny Seinfeldian dyspepsia.

Ms. Paltrow is not the only star in the film who tries gamely to churn this cinematic glass of diluted skim milk into something resembling butter.

A murky ecclesiastical horror film, may be the nadir of the subgenre that produced "The Exorcist" (at its high end) and "Stigmata" (at its middle-to-low end).

The story is a clever sitcomy contraption, the dialogue is pedestrian.

As the movie methodically plods forward on a screenplay (by Shawn Slovo) consisting entirely of clichés and watered-down exposition, it becomes sadly apparent that its only reliable asset is the gorgeous view.

The movie is so sloppily written and directed that its bits of bluster never cohere.

Most of the meager charms of the chaotic romantic farce A Guy Thing spring from the deft comic contortions of Hollywood's ultimate nerdy sidekick, Jason Lee.

Doesn't really know how to end. But if its melodramatic final moments are ludicrous, they don't seriously dilute the acidity of the sour little swatch of urban sociology that has come before.

What one word might best describe Payback? How about "loathsome"?

A movie that knows its audience. Its underlying philosophy might be: why try harder when this is all they expect?

Because all of this looks blatantly unreal, and because the timing of the shock effects is so haphazard, Dead Alive isn't especially scary or repulsive. Nor is it very funny. Long before it's over, the half-hour-plus bloodbath that is the climax of the film has become an interminable bore. [12 Feb 1993, p.C16]

Corny, suds-drenched movie. The kindest way of looking at this roughly patched-together story is as the cinematic equivalent of the music it memorializes.

With the dog days of August upon us, think of this dog of a movie as the cinematic equivalent of high humidity.

A rancid little nothing of a movie that baldly recycles plot elements of "There's Something About Mary."

(Patricia Arquette's) irritated reactions to her dire situation have all the force of a pet owner's whiny complaints when her feline refuses to use the cat box.

Because it unfolds like a garish hybrid of Simon Birch and What Dreams May Come, with some horror-movie touches thrown in to keep us from nodding off, "The Sixth Sense" appears to have been concocted at exactly the moment Hollywood was betting on supernatural schmaltz.

The movie, like its lovers, is really two films smushed together in the faint hope that sheer incongruity can grind out laughter.

Bogus on every level, right down to its half-hearted trick ending.

Years from now, if Mark Christopher's timid, meandering film 54 is spoken of at all, it will probably be lumped together with Whit Stillman's ''Last Days of Disco'' as one of two movies released in 1998 to bungle the same opportunity.

Sadly, Mr. Smith has made a movie so false and blatantly icky that it's the film equivalent of making goo-goo noises and chucking a baby under the chin for 103 minutes. At the end, all you're left with is drool and a mountain of baby powder.

An empty, farcical blood bath that's virtually shock-free except for one preposterous plot twist.

An unsalvageable mess.

If National Treasure mattered at all, you might call it a national disgrace, but this piece of flotsam is so inconsequential that it amounts to little more than a piece of Hollywood accounting.

Played in a loud sketch-comedy style that might be described as "Gay Mad TV." The haranguing, badly acted farce wears out its comic welcome within half an hour.

A moth-eaten stranded-in-the-desert yarn that throws in every cheap trick in the manual to pump up your heartbeat, is so manipulative that the involuntary jolts of adrenaline it produces make you feel like a fool.

Throughout Happy Hour, observations that mean next to nothing are presented as nuggets of profound enlightenment.

Impenetrable mess of a movie.

All you really need to know about Say It Isn't So,the latest flatulent noisemaker from the Farrelly Brothers' gross-out comedy factory, is that late in the movie, Chris Klein punches a cow from behind and finds his arm stuck inside.

There are brave, boundary-breaching movies, and there are mad, foolhardy ones. Harry and Max belongs to the latter breed.

The film has no idea of how to develop its one-joke premise. The tepid love scenes are as erotically charged as a home movie of a little girl hugging her Barbie doll, and the satire as cutting as the blunt edge of a plastic butter knife.

A shrunken, cowardly movie in deep denial of its true nature, which is far uglier than it is ever willing to admit.

But after 15 minutes, this yellow-orange vision of spiraling circles of hell, snorting devils and demonic shapes continually morphing out of one another, begins to seem redundant and conceptually impoverished.

A facile exercise in nihilism posing as an indie "Training Day" with street cred. Don't believe it.

Mr. Edwards, who wrote and directed Land of the Blind (it's his debut film), might counter that the movie is a Brechtian comedy that's not supposed to make literal sense: the big picture is what matters. But the big picture is a mess.

A wooden police thriller that is as dull as it is impenetrable and ultimately beyond ludicrous.

You may view Untraceable, as I do, as a repugnant example of the voyeurism it pretends to condemn.

This portrait of 20-something gay men and their straight friends is a joyless exploration of middle-class deadbeats (with the exception of Ephram) lost in a torpid funk of low self-regard. Because they’'e not rich, there is no sleazy zing of "Less Than Zero"-worthy glamor.

Plods along in its sloppy, joshing way, it tastes like pasta sauce that has sat on the shelf long after the expiration date on the can.

Feels like a movie whose story was slapped together during filming. Its three phases -- Southern pastorale, Sudsville and Kablooie -- don’t really connect.

In Good, the anemic screen adaptation of C. P. Taylor's play about a respectable "good German" who passively acquiesces to Hitler's agenda, Viggo Mortensen, miscast and ineptly directed by Vicente Amorim, plays John Halder, a liberal, mild-mannered literature professor who becomes a Nazi.

Less a movie than an essay.

Death in Love hasn't a drop of humor or hope. Its dull, smudged look makes every environment appear joyless and claustrophobic.

Homecoming is coldly efficient for what it is. But what it is is trash.

This disjointed, desperately whimsical film is simply not funny: not for a minute.

Robert Kane Pappas’s documentary about scientific experiments in life extension, makes a digressive, disorganized hash of a fascinating topic.

It is no wonder that the insufferable romantic comedy Happythankyoumoreplease, set in New York, looks and sounds like a flop pilot for a television sitcom.

Short-circuits the novel's quirky charms and period atmosphere by its squeamish attitude toward gritty circus life and smothers the drama under James Newton Howard's insufferable wall-to-wall musical soup.

Beyond the lugubrious pageantry, there is no sign of emotional or spiritual life in the film, only windy posturing.

You see, this character, who is given no back story, is Life with a capital L. He is the Forneys' guardian angel who rouses them out of their funk. Given the movie's U-turn into allegory, maybe he's supposed to be a punk Jesus. Not even Mr. Gordon-Levitt's unremittingly savage performance can begin to salvage such hokum.

A sloppy, exploitative act of star worship created (if that's the right word for cynical hackwork) around Mr. Lautner, the pouty 19-year-old heartthrob of the "Twilight" franchise.

A catastrophe worth noting only for the presence of its name cast.

At a certain point this would-be shocker suddenly jerks into high gear and becomes a blatant, incompetent rip-off of "Psycho."

Ms. O'Neal's Grace is a fluttery Blanche DuBois type who transforms into a ranting madwoman wreaking havoc. Instead of an ax, she wields scissors. From here on, the movie is a grotesquely overacted, ineptly staged screamfest.

A comedy that is so scatterbrained and long-winded that much of it feels invented on the spot. (It’s also a half-hour too long.)

The glum, episodic and unbelievable Arthur Newman is the film equivalent of a dysfunctional computer sloppily assembled from discarded parts of other machines.

Ludicrous, impenetrable and headache-inducing.

It is the kind of film that only a certain breed of cinematic cultist could tolerate. Its grade-school-level acting, for instance, is so rudimentary that it makes the cast of "The Blair Witch Project" (which Ice From the Sun seems to be consciously parodying at times) appear Stanislavskian.

A film that desperately wants to be a music video circa 1983.

A preposterous, prurient whodunit.

Although the concept seems promising enough, it is undone by disastrous casting decisions and an utter lack of ensemble unity.

Beneath its studiedly ugly surface, this bargain-basement answer to "Thelma and Louise" is as loathsome as any mindless, blood-drenched Hollywood action-adventure yarn.

Once Ice-T sticks his mug in the window of the couple's BMW and begins haranguing the wife in bad stage dialogue, all credibility flies out the window.

So lazy and slipshod it confuses the mere flashing of kinky soft-core imagery with naughty fun.

A confusedly misconceived hybrid of interracial buddy comedy and imitation Marx Brothers farce.

It is painful to watch an actor as skillful as Mr. Dorff reduced to delivering flat repetitive dialogue that would make any actor look foolish.

Why Mr. Foxx, who was so impressive in "Any Given Sunday," chose to make a movie so boring and idiotic that it barely meets minimal standards of lowest- common-denominator entertainment.

Teeters from a noisy sitcom (only one step removed from "The Beverly Hillbillies") to brickbat satire until it collapses in a pool of redemptive mush.

As this chaotic barrage of muscle flexing, swordplay, fireballs, crude digital effects and comic-book quips hurls itself off the screen, it's like having several garbage cans clogged with stale pizza, lukewarm cola, soggy French fries and greasy, ketchup-stained napkins emptied over your head.

The moment the movie loses its lighthearted spirit is the moment it loses touch with reality

The movie's computer animation is so cut-rate and its direction (by Joe Chappelle) so slack that the attacks are virtually terror-free.

What sets this syrupy swatch of kitsch apart from other films peddling a dogmatic religious agenda is the serious money that obviously went into it.

Might have generated a laugh or two had it not forced the actors into uncomfortable extremes of caricature.

Spike Lee carries his political exasperation beyond outrage into chaos. The carelessness with which he hurls his feelings about hot-button topics onto the screen is the filmmaking equivalent of last-ditch marketing: grab everything in sight, roll it up into a big messy mud ball, and hurl it against the wall, hoping that something sticks.

Barely watchable.

Every truly awful movie epic has a point of no return, a moment when the accumulated bad lines and bogus sentimentality become so cloying that the best defense against a mounting queasiness is an awed amusement. The Postman, offers a new opportunity for levity every few minutes after its first hour.

This stomach-turning exercise in gratuitous sadism -- wears a nasty smirk on its face right down to its end title comment, "Gotcha."

More than sad, it's slightly sickening to consider the technology, talent and know-how squandered on Hostage, a pile of blood-soaked toxic waste dumped onto the screen in an attempt to salvage Bruce Willis's fading career as an action hero.

The best and maybe the only use to be made of the catastrophic screen biography Modigliani is to serve as a textbook outline of how not to film the life of a legendary artist.

The range of Ms. Locklear's lobotomized acting runs from mild irritation to mild melancholy, expressed without expression.

As the jaundiced, disjointed, drug-infested story heads toward its dismal conclusion, its reputable actors vainly struggle to infuse the goings-on with a deadpan psychotic zaniness. But even when viewed sideways, Perception is not funny; it's hardly anything at all.

The only heat that rises from the movie is mechanical.

The movie is so witless and confused in tone that its seedy racetrack clientele only emerge as dim, inarticulate cartoons.

The movie’s most disturbing aspect, of which the filmmakers could not have been unaware, is the physical resemblance between Mr. Elba and Ms. Larter to O. J. and Nicole Brown Simpson. It lends Obsessed a distasteful taint of exploitation.

The queasiness produced by this sentimental weepie builds into a wave of nausea during its interminable finale.

You might reasonably assume that any movie starring Mr. Rourke and Mr. Murray would have to have something to recommend it. But aside from a haunting musical interlude, in which Mr. Rourke, with pathetic ineptitude, mimes playing a trumpet, Passion Play is barely palatable.

The only reason I can think of to watch Vivi Friedman's flat, satirical farce The Family Tree - and it's not a good enough reason - is the opportunity to play a game of spot the semi-star.

When a sheriff's deputy (Carla Gugino) visits the house, I Melt With You turns into a ludicrous, cheap horror thriller that sheds any claims to integrity. By the end, you feel nothing, not even contempt.

Rarely has a film exhibited a bigger disconnect between urban realism and utter ludicrousness.

Did I mention that Upside Down is simply awful?

To say that Justin Zackham’s farce The Big Wedding takes the low road doesn’t begin to do justice to the sheer awfulness of this star-stuffed, potty-mouthed fiasco.

What does it add up to? Um ... I have no idea and don’t really care. Just because the characters waste their time doesn’t mean you should waste yours watching them circle the drain.

Bottom-feeding monstrosity of a comedy.

An excruciating demonstration of the unsalvageability of a movie saddled with an amateurish screenplay.

It's a little sad to see actors of the quality of Christopher Plummer and Jonny Lee Miller struggling straight- faced to dignify this sewage.

Cheesy, amateurish film.

Mush, delivered with a trembling, quasi-biblical solemnity, is what emanates from Anthony Hopkins most of the time in Hearts in Atlantis, a nostalgic fiasco so shameless it makes movies like "Simon Birch" and "Frequency" seem as austere as the work of Robert Bresson.

Thoroughly incoherent... A dreary fizzle. [12 Jan 1996, p.C12]

The Singing Forest was written and directed by Jorge Ameer, whose film "Strippers" opened three years ago and remained the single worst movie I had ever reviewed -- until now.

Ms. Ryan's lean, eagle-eyed golden girl is enough to curdle milk.

No doubt there are those who will deem Simon Birch ''heartwarming.'' It is exactly the kind of movie that has given that hackneyed superlative a bad name.

So inept on every level, you wonder why the distributor didn't release it straight to video, or better, toss it directly into the trash.

Incoherent mess of a film.

Even by the standards of its bottom-feeding genre, Dirty Love clings to the gutter like a rat in garbage.

Putrid comic stew.

The movie... hasn't the foggiest notion whether it's a soap opera or a horror film, and wanders around in a generic fog.

A convoluted, hysterical mess of a movie with grandiose spiritual airs and not a drop of humor.

This imbecilic, mean-spirited farce, which sneers at adults, leaves you wondering: where are the Three Stooges when we really need them?

This strident exposé may gladden the hearts of some anti-’60s conservatives, but it is a shapeless mess steeped in prurience. Its grain of truthfulness, however, is just enough to leave you unsettled in the pit of your stomach.

It doesn't get worse than Grown Ups, Adam Sandler's sloppy entry into this year's man-child-comedy sweepstakes. Lazy, mean-spirited, incoherent, infantile and, above all, witless.

There is not a laugh to be found in this rancid, misogynistic revenge comedy.

For all the cinematic crimes against him, there has been no book-to-screen translation of his work quite as atrocious as Hemingway's Garden of Eden.