An odd and entertaining mix of backstage melodrama, indie verite, and "Showgirls" kitsch, the usual gender stereotypes are upturned.

The humor and chops are there, but the story isn't quite.

Barnz tries, at least a bit, to acknowledge the heroic and historic legacy of the union movement and its rightful place in the contemporary labor landscape. But much of the blame for the sorry state of Adams Elementary, and the school system at large, is placed at the union's feet.

A likable if not exactly groundbreaking comedy.

Beautiful Creatures tries terribly hard to establish its own mythology of magic and witchcraft and Southern-fried adolescent angst. This isn't Hogwarts, though, and it's not even Forks High from Twilight, but boy, you know Warner Bros., the studio behind Beautiful Creatures, wants it to be!

In some ways, Identity Thief is a raunchier variation on another recent odd-couple road pic: Barbra Streisand and Seth Rogen as overbearing mom and nebbish son in "The Guilt Trip."

It's fun to watch Keaton and Kline together, bickering and (of course) bonding all over again.

It's the classic odd-couple buddy movie setup, only it'll pull at your heartstrings, whether you want it too or not. And you won't want it to, because it's sap.

Meta and messy, Seven Psychopaths does not hang together like "In Bruges."

Casting herself (as the proprietor of the local cafe) along with a mix of professional and nonprofessional actors, Labaki tries to get across her give-peace-a-chance message with humor, with song, with melodrama.

Little White Lies wants to capture something momentous and meaningful in these people's lives. But ultimately it's hard to care.

Directed by veteran stuntman Ric Roman Waugh, Snitch is shot with a mix of nervous close-ups and weirdly vertiginous angles.

Admission works in stops and starts.

Any semblance of seriousness and verisimilitude suggested by the marketing campaign is quickly forgotten once director Antoine Fuqua's enjoyably tacky Die Hard-on-the-Potomac gets under way.

More a deification than a documentary.

Despite the charismatic efforts of the British actor Ahmed, The Reluctant Fundamentalist gets bogged down in proselytizing and plot.

Disconnect is an Eleanor Rigby movie. Look at all the lonely people. A "Crash" for the Internet age, Alex Henry Rubin's topical opus swoops down like an alien spaceship to investigate a disparate group of Earthlings living in close proximity in the suburbs of New York City.

An atmospheric Argentine thriller starring Viggo Mortensen in twin roles (literally), Everybody Has a Plan is in the vein of, if not on the same plane as, Michelangelo Antonioni's "The Passenger."

Stephen King without the snap, David Lynch without the kink, teen horror without the teen hormones, Darkness Falls falls apart in a crescendo of creepy-crawly hoo-ha. It's more like Darkness Kerplunks.

With a clamorous soundtrack and a whirl of elaborate chases and busily choreographed fight scenes, this is Sherlock Holmes with Attention Deficit Disorder.

Less a Holocaust retribution fantasy than a messy homage to war movies, and to movies, period.

Ultimately, 44 Inch Chest has very little on its mind.

An uninspired computer-animated feature that may satisfy undiscriminating pipsqueaks and nearly no one else, Planet 51 is a low-IQ E.T. in reverse.

A syrupy and extraordinarily ridiculous adaptation.

A mildly scary, totally meaningless excursion into the realms of psychological horror and alien-abduction conspiracies.

There are tiny glints of humor and intelligence at work, and the action and animation rockets along slickly and stylishly. But unlike the protagonists of almost any and all of the Pixar titles, Astro Boy's namesake lacks even an iota of soul.

Knowing has about a half-dozen screenwriter credits, which may explain why scenes crash up against one another - smart, stupid, far-fetched, compelling. And the trouble is that Cage walks (or runs) through them all, treating each with the same level of intensely goofy seriousness.

300 is "Gladiator" for the gamer set.

Awash in nostalgia and amped-up male camaraderie, Richard Curtis' Pirate Radio takes a great story - the hugely popular offshore radio stations that illegally broadcast pop and rock in 1960s Britain - and turns it into an aggressively irritating floating frat-party romp.

Harry Connick Jr. acquits himself best of the lot.

Has a low-key tone that works in its favor for a time.

"Kill Bill" without irony, and without Quentin Tarantino's flair for cool dialogue and chop-socky action (and without Uma Thurman, for that matter), Elektra is a pretty-looking, pretty dull adaptation of the Marvel Comic about a dishy, deadly assassin.

The big shift between Carpenter's B-movie and filmmaker Jean-François Richet's comic book-style remake is that instead of a troop of bloodthirsty gang members encircling the precinct, the bad guys here all look like good guys.

The movie's main purpose seems to be to make audiences squirm uncomfortably. Yelp and shriek in armchair-clawing glee? Not likely.

A creaky, cliched, feel-good family drama about learning to stop and smell the roses - and planting a vegetable garden while you're at it - Uncle Nino is shameless, sappy fare.

The film feels long, the editing is choppy, and the plot strands are at once convoluted and cliched.

For the casual viewer who feels like maybe all the Sith hoopla is worth checking out, well, it's like tuning in to the season finale of "24" without having watched a minute of its lead-up episodes.

The Island could be read as a metaphor for societal ills (commercialization, conformity, pharmaceutical overkill) if it weren't so shamelessly dumb. And dumb it is.

Manages to rocket along at full speed. At the same time, however, the movie feels as if it's not going anywhere at all.

Alternately tedious, cliched and unintentionally funny.

For high-speed action, eye-popping locales, and chopsocky fight-fests galore, watch The Transporter - on video.

A silly melodrama.

A strange mix of showbiz whodunit and soft-core eroticism, with a couple of fine actors - Kevin Bacon and Colin Firth - wandering around stunned and stoned-looking, as if someone slipped them a mickey.

The Weather Man belongs to a school of earnest, artsy Hollywood flicks that includes the Michael Douglas-goes-bonkers "Falling Down," and a lineage that goes back to revered 1970s pics like "Five Easy Pieces."

Chicken Little is entirely lacking in anything "Disneyesque."

Owen is all right as the harried husband whose relationship at home has turned frosty, but the essential heat between him and Aniston is missing. The actress succeeds in shedding her "Friends" persona, but there's something missing here, especially as things get knottier.

A lush, lovely snooze-fest.

Jeremy Irons slithers on board with a haughty sneer and papal vestments, playing Bishop Pucci.

Shot in Panama, with a cast of local Indians and B-tier Latino and Anglo actors, End of the Spear has neither the marquee heft nor the artistic gravitas of "The New World."

For a while, Firewall whips up the accordant dollops of suspense and dread, but it's not long before the timely issue of identity theft takes a backseat to old-fashioned Hollywood villainy, unnecessary (and nonsensical) red herrings, and STUFF THAT DOESN'T MAKE SENSE.

Alas, Brick, from writer-director Rian Johnson, isn't as clever as its conceit.

Shaquille O'Neal and Dr. Phil open Scary Movie 4 with an achingly unfunny couple of minutes of severed limbs and errant hoop shots.

Eva Longoria brings a crisp swagger and fluent Spanish to her role.

McKellen, Hanks and Tautou - and Alfred Molina, as a bishop with an agenda - are no slouches when it comes to emoting, but screenwriter Goldsman's rigorously faithful interpretation of Brown's flatfooted prose stylings is the filmic equivalent of putting big chewy baguettes in the actors' maws.

There's nothing hip or ironic about Poseidon, which makes Russell and Lucas the perfect leading men.

Over the Hedge isn't by any stretch bad. It's just banal.

And did I mention that it's long? It's long.

A long, tedious and convoluted follow-up to 2003's rollicking high-seas hit, The Curse of the Black Pearl, this second installment in the promised trilogy lacks the swash and buckle of the original. And then some.

Lady in the Water boasts an eclectic cast - almost entirely squandered.

A merrily macabre things-we-do-for-love yarn.

Does the world really need another movie about a married guy wandering blindly into an affair, or the married gal who can't decide whether to remain faithful or fool around?

The trouble with The Last Kiss comes down to Paul Haggis' screenplay.

In essence, a wild soap opera disguised as a political allegory, it's a movie, with its over-the-map performances, that is worth catching only for the inadvertent laugh or two.

Shot like a Disney period piece (prettily, with spiffy props, shiny vintage vehicles, and costumes just back from the cleaners), Flyboys introduces its squadron the old-fashioned way: with character-establishing setups.

Shortbus suffers from a vague, ad lib-y script and a cast that, while hardly shy, isn't exactly charismatic.

Alas, something happened on the book-to-screen operating table: Yes, Running With Scissors is rich, twisted, insane, mordant and ridiculous, but it is not funny. Not at all.

Jonathan and Christopher Nolan's adaptation of this novel by Christopher Priest offers three acts of exasperating muddle.

Filled with close-ups of Jesus and his apostles (all the better to hide the absence of elaborate period sets), mixing quotes from the Scripture with flat exposition, this low-budget affair is earnest and, alas, more than a little bit cartoonish.

Bobby has its heart in the right place (on its sleeve). But it doesn't have its screenplay anywhere - or at least, anywhere near the heft that its subject demands.

A noisy, not particularly charming collection of skits and skirmishes.

What Hannibal Rising is, mostly, is a hoot.

Isn't as jaw-droppingly awful as its trailers suggest.

Premonition is an odd little thing, with a protagonist in a protracted fugue state and a plot that doesn't know whether its coming or going. Or maybe it does.

If only the screenplay had more going for it than hackneyed homilies and living-in-the-ghetto stereotypes. If only first-time director Sunu Gonera had a surer hand, a knack for something bolder, wilder, goofier.

Vacancy, in the end, simply offers a particularly aggressive brand of couples counseling.

The closest FF:ROTSS gets to wit is when Johnny convinces a reluctant Reed to attend a bachelor party, after promising the uptight groom-to-be that there won't be any "exotic dancers."

Ultimately, Evan Almighty is too sappy, too sanctimonious.

Satire should be knife-sharp and whip-smart, and The Nanny Diaries never is.

Death Sentence's message - that vengeance is ultimately futile, spinning out a vicious circle of rage and hate - may be commendable, but there's nothing noteworthy about the way Wan, Bacon and their troops go about delivering it.

What are you going to do when your lead actress offers a performance that's as unlikable as the woman she's portraying? Maybe it's the script (flimsy, formulaic), or filmmaker Alejandro Gomez Monteverde's conspicuous direction, but Tammy Blanchard's Nina, a waitress with a dour disposition and an unwanted pregnancy, pretty much sucks the life out of this well-meaning melodrama.

Dull plod.

Zemeckis, who blazed trails mixing live-action with animation in "Who Framed Roger Rabbit," blazes not even a footpath here.

Dizzyingly incoherent and subversively surreal, this sophomore effort from the man who made the great, strange "Donnie Darko" is certain to have its fans. I'm not going to be one of them.

DePalma's movie offers its own doctoring and processing, without delivering an ounce of real humanity - good or bad - in the bargain.

There's not a believable character, nor line of convincing dialogue to be found.

Intermittent moments of mild amusement ensue.

Moderately scary, moderately amusing, intermittently dull and obvious, Diary of the Dead is not groundbreaking, nor even ground-quaking.

A bummer.

The playwright, actor, director and drag queen (yes, his bewigged and be wild Madea makes a brief and totally gratuitous appearance in his new film) knows how to give human dimension, and a dimension of humor, to the cliches and stereotypes.

Decidedly loopy and nonlinear, Mister Lonely is precious and artsy, but there are moments when Korine's, er, unique vision brings something bold and beautiful to the table.

Piles dumb gag upon dumb gag - it's like benign pummeling. Occasionally, you just have to laugh.

Anderson, who's turned Brit in a number of TV series and films, including "Bleak House" and "The Last King of Scotland," is compelling in her white lab coat and surgical scrubs, and she brings some real tenderness to her tete-a-tetes with Mulder.

Epic piffle.

The movie bogs down in tiresome good guys vs. bad guys action cliches.

A great story - and a true one, more or less - Bottle Shock nonetheless fails to deliver much in the way of entertainment.

The script appears to have been designed, created and produced entirely in 1-D: a mishmash of kidcentric antics, follow-your-dream cliches, and innocuously icky humor.

Full of clunky humor, battle-of-the-sexes musings and spicy accordion music, Everybody Wants to Be Italian is relentless - but not necessarily relentless fun.

Lakeview Terrace's pretense at exploring racial intolerance has been exposed for what it really is: a B-movie copout.

Feels downright ancient.

Murky and grainy, and showing human beings at their grimmest - thievery, rape, betrayal, murder - Blindness is no barrel of laughs. But it IS a barrel of pretentious metaphorical musings.

If only RocknRolla's characters were at all believable - even in the context of its own cartoon universe.

Gritty, jumpy and rife with cliches.

Although its low-key realism is admirable, Eden doesn't really work: the long silences, the aching stares, the telling props, Breda's quivering blues, Billy's drunkenness, his distraction. There might as well be a sign stuck to the Farrells' front door: Dysfunctional family lives here.

Level of humor: subteen.

For its amusing premise, Fanboys is scarily flat.

There's little of the seen-it-all, wise-guy acerbity that made his character in the X-Men trilogy stand apart from his fellow mutants. Here, he just glowers.

Not exactly a hundred million dollars' worth of classic comedy.

Full of forced jocularity and drawing-room hissy fits, with its cast parading around in vintage threads and antique cars, Easy Virtue is a close-to-insufferable souffle based on the 1925 Noel Coward play.

The problem with NATM:BOTS is that Stiller, Adams, and company seem to be pretending that they're having fun, too.

Just about the only folks likely to find this humdrum hybrid of "Mission: Impossible" and "The Wind in the Willows" worthy for consideration are non-discriminating pip-squeaks.

Although Will Ferrell materializes for a goofball cameo, The Goods: Live Hard, Sell Hard lacks a key element that his "Talladega Nights" and "Anchor Man" both had - that is, somebody to like.

The film veers between cutting parody and cliche, threatening to become interesting at any moment, but never quite doing so.

Around the Bend doesn't inspire one to care.

Not even Halle Berry, emerging from the blue Caribbean in an orange two-piece -- can bring this thing to life.

Shows glimmers of great drama, but jettisons too much essential cargo (character development, relationships, plot, common sense) in an effort to be lean and clean.

It's old, old hat.

Cold and stylish, slick and violent.

Has its compelling moments, and its playfully inventive ones, too.

A squirmy mix of therapy-session slogans, pop psychobabble, and lots of crying, yelling and pouting on the part of its two stars, who appear in various alarming hairpieces.

It's nothing if not predictable.

It has its moments of swaggering camaraderie, but more often just feels generic, derivative and done to death.

Despite some jaunty performances and its pretty Cotswolds locale, the film, in the end, is hardly a pleasure at all.

Fuzzy, feel-good movie about baseball, babes and believing in yourself.

It's still a submarine movie, confined by the ship, the sea, and a convention-laden script.

Travolta, a bit portly (or is it starboardly?), phones in his performance from his place in Maine; Vaughn is ice-cool but not especially convincing; the kid is OK, and Polo is a blank.

Too cute by half (or maybe three-quarters).

Yes, bestiality in a PG-13 movie. It's the end of life as we know it.

A knuckleheaded period piece.

The real problem isn't with the actors, it's with 1) the source material, a highfalutin romance novel with a clever literary conceit, and 2) LaBute's clumsy, uncomfortable efforts to telescope Byatt's book into a workable movie.

A tad more character development would have been nice.

Has a dark, low-budget feel and an incongruous combination of self-consciously jokey patter and gross-out gore.

Much of the dialogue is the silliest sort of fantasy mush, and a good deal of the picture appears to have been shot while the lighting guys were out to lunch.

At this point in her career, Lopez can clearly bend the universe -- but no amount of bending can make Enough anything more than formulaic.

Has the disjointed feel of a bunch of strung-together TV episodes.

Gimmicky artifice.

Stiff but handsome film, there's little sense of the conflict and complexities that drove Alma Mahler.

The film's intimations of bisexual romance have a certain innate drama that no amount of bad acting or cornball rugby matches can completely erase.

Rock Star sinks into a morass of melodrama.

Less a movie than a collection of pretty cool action set-pieces, linked together with some seriously awful acting and dialogue that even Dr. Evil couldn't deliver with a straight face.

The folks at Disney's Touchstone Pictures would have been wiser, however, just to have forgotten all about this hyperactive farce.

If that sounds a lot like Rushmore, it is, except that the heart has been sucked out of the thing -- replaced by glib chatter, gratuitous Baudelaire references, and distracting product placement.

Far-fetched and utterly humorless, with a literally tacked-on conclusion (yes, more text on the screen), the only thing that's surprising about Unbreakable is how lame it is.

A collection of double entendres that would make a stevedore blush.

A thuddingly dull remake of the 1971 crime drama starring Michael Caine.

The real Radio, and the real coach -- seen together in the movie's feel-good epilogue -- deserve better.

Catastrophically overdone.

If Taking Lives starts off with a modicum of wit and creepy-crawly scares, it winds up somewhere else altogether: in the cliche-strewn land of preposterous red herrings.

A by-the-numbers extravanganza that journeys from London to Venice to Siberia to Cambodia without ever really going anywhere.

Feels thoroughly canned.

Doesn't take itself seriously, and that's a good thing.

Despite its penchant for the crude and lewd, is gooey in ways that have nothing to do with bodily fluids.

Where Mike Figgis' film, with Nicolas Cage and Elisabeth Shue, bore deeply and darkly into emotional territory, The Center of the World turns out to be just as fake as its setting.

By Twisted's final twist, though, it's all Judd can do to keep a straight face.

It's simplistic and reactionary and designed to get hearts pumping but not minds thinking.

Fails to provide one essential ingredient: suspense.

Unravels in a series of spooky dream sequences, dopey detective work, and a couple of richly hambone-ian De Niro soliloquies.

The real problem is that there's nothing to George but the movie's props.

Dumb, dumb, dumb - borrowing scare tactics from Hitchcock and other suspense masters, but forgetting basic story.telling essentials such as character development and logical exposition.

Utterly charmless - there's not even a glimmer.

There are, to be sure, some impressive special effects here, and whoever Warner Bros. hires to make the new Superman movie should take notes.

There's nothing Disneyesque about this bomb except the forced levity of its musical score.

War is hell, war is cruelty, war is toil and trouble, war is just a shot away. But is war a snooze? Well, by the time Enemy at the Gates has run its course — it sure seems that way.

A messy fish-out-of-water gangland romp.

A woefully thin and pointless musical comedy boasting the no-chemistry coupling of Cuba Gooding Jr. and Beyonc?

In Jersey Girl, Kevin Smith wears his heart on his sleeve - and on his pants, socks, boxers and backward-facing baseball cap.

This glum and grandiose new King Arthur has little to do with the Camelot monarch we've come to know through books and film.

There's nothing original, nor compelling, about Twist.

It is a good hour too long, although it does boast Christopher Walken.

The trouble with Alfie - apart from the film's existence, and the wrongheaded idea of remaking a minor classic - is that not a soul is likable.

Fairy-tale-like musing on true love in cynical times.

An elaborately worked-over opus that's as tarted-up and artificial as Scorsese's '70s classic Mean Streets was gritty and real, Gangs of New York feels like a movie musical without the songs.

Think Jerry Lewis doing Eminem, or maybe it's Eminem doing Jerry Lewis (or maybe it's Pauly Shore doing Vanilla Ice), and you've got B-Rad.

A handsome Holocaust melodrama hobbled by a transparent and cartoonish script.

It's a big stuffed turkey of a movie, just in time for the holidays.

It isn't frightening. Sometimes, in fact, it's laughable.

From its jungle forays to its waterfall tumbles to its deadly spider bites - is entirely, utterly unoriginal.

Aspires to the devilish crudity and unfettered social commentary of South Park. But Zwigoff's direction lacks the exaggerated cartoonishness necessary.

The film never gives you a real sense of what drove Darin on, fighting a heart ailment (from childhood rheumatic fever) and fighting an industry and press that wanted to pigeonhole him.

Cute, cloying and catastrophically predictable.

Boy, can Harvey Keitel be bad -- and not bad like "Bad Lieutenant," bad like bad acting.

A sappy excursion to Edwardian days.

Aimed at teens and tweens, the almost-squeaky-clean Step Up 3-D shamelessly piles on the corn, stacking it so high that it's bound to tilt over and collapse.

Feels like the cinematic equivalent of the BP disaster in the gulf: It's a big-screen oil spill, a needless gushing of macho bluster and wild set pieces, and a waste of millions and millions of dollars.

How bad is Prince of Persia? Whether or not director Mike Newell is to blame, the action sequences lack verve and scope.

An overobvious and underwhelming satire about American consumerism run amok.

The script is boilerplate, the wit pretty much witless.

What this arid and arty exercise offers is the opportunity for a bunch of actors, many of them tethered to TV series, to deliver theatrical monologues pulsing with misogyny and narcissism. It's like second-rate Neil Labute.

The trailers already have given away the "surprise" cameos in The Expendables, so try not to blink when Stallone goes into a church (shades of John Woo) to meet his mystery boss, played by a bald-pated, trademark smirking Bruce Willis.

Kilcher is lovely. But sadly, Ka'iulani is a perfunctory biopic of the sort one might encounter on television during Women's History Month.

The film drifts along on a stream of humiliation jokes - physical, emotional, sexual, hairpiece-ial.

There's a fine line between stupid comedy that's actually pretty smart and stupid comedy that's just dumb, and The Other Guys crosses the line - into realms of unredeeming dunderheadedness - more often than it should.

Flat and predictable.

Joltingly graphic and atmospheric (Nixey and his crew at least know how to set up a few good shocks), Don't Be Afraid of the Dark fails to involve us in any meaningful way with its characters.

Tonally, Casino Jack is all over the place: exaggerated comedy, cartoonish high jinks, then heavy-handed melodrama (a third-act face-off between Abramoff and his wife, played with no center of gravity by Kelly Preston, comes out of nowhere).

An alarmingly charmless attempt to evoke the elegant romance and jaunty, jet-setting intrigue of the aforementioned titles, The Tourist is notable for the total absence of movie-star heat that movie stars are paid unseemly sums to radiate.

If illuminating dawns and dusks had basked Mia Wasikowska and Henry Hopper in a rosy glow, the mopey cuteness of Restless would have been too much to bear.

It's a sorry spectacle, watching garden gnomes being robbed of their dignity.

With clunky dialogue...I Am Number Four puts the burden on its special effects (passable) and the chemistry between Pettyfer and Agron.

It'd be nice if Jason Statham and Ben Foster, The Mechanic's mentor/protege duo, could crack a smile. Once.

Sandler, shambling and smirky, delivers another of those one-take performances of his - likable and lazy, forever on the verge of cracking himself up.

Virtually every set-up and set-piece in this extravagantly tedious adventure is misleading, or worse, irrelevant.

Seyfried holds the camera's attention, playing this storybook business pretty much straight, although David Leslie Johnson's script puts the actress sorely to the test.

While The Sitter isn't that dumb, or dreadful, there really isn't much going on here.

Eisenberg (who starred in director Fleischer's far better Zombieland) does his usual Eisenbergian thing, more slacker and less hacker, but still hitting the same notes. And Ansari squawks and yelps, like a parrot with a grudge.

To say that The Grace Card piles it on is an understatement of profound dimensions.

In Time is that kind of movie: Philip K. Dick for knuckleheads.

Stevenson is big and swarthy and not altogether without credibility, but he's got as much charisma as a potato.

The offbeat comedy is not entirely devoid of charm, but its derivativeness is almost embarrassing.

Shot on the cheap, with cheesy animated credits and comic-panel "Bams!" and "Pows!" splashed across the screen, Super has a jokey, low-rent quality (or lack of quality) that could be endearing, if Wilson's performance weren't so nihilistically dull, and if there were somebody in the picture who had a soul.

Hopped up like a kid on a sugar rush, Hoodwinked Too! tries to emulate the "Shrek" formula - mashing Hans Christian Anderson and the Brothers Grimm with pop-culture references and wisecracking anthropomorphic sidekicks.

A big comedown from "The Fighter," Contraband finds Wahlberg in default mode: With his Popeye biceps and broody stares, the actor can do a character like Chris without even thinking about it - and that's what he does here.

Hesher has its genuinely affecting scenes, but too much of the time it feels false and shallow.

Until Seven Days in Utopia sucker punches you with a surfeit of faith-based platitudes, its upbeat brand of golf mysticism isn't altogether unappealing.

Relying on improv-y riffing and watch-them-coming-from-down-the-block-and-around-the-corner sight gags, The Campaign is intermittently amusing, but more often just interminable.

This is not about a reluctant hero drawing courage from some deep personal well. It's not about dread and danger. It's about visual effects.

Loaded with careening car chases and rooftop runs, glass-shattering shootouts and exploding fireballs, Killer Elite offers more than enough to keep action junkies happy.

Who knows if it was Del Toro's idea, or Stone's, but at a particularly crucial - and criminal - moment, as a very bad thing is about to occur, the actor twirls his mustache menacingly, like a Mexican Snidely Whiplash. Yes, Savages is that kind of story.

By the end of Machine Gun Preacher, its title character has become a cartoon.

Almost certainly, The Last Stand will not be Schwarzenegger's last. For better or for worse (and this is somewhere right in the middle), he is back.

No one is bad in The Big Wedding, but no one is remotely believable, either.

Reality aside, The Watch is harmless enough - and even occasionally humorous, in a riffy, sketch-comedy kind of way.

Feels more like a postscript than a probing, provocative documentary.

The moral of Taken 2? If you're going on a family vacation, be sure that the human-trafficking ring you put out of business in that far more satisfying and suspenseful thriller from a few years ago doesn't know how to find you.

There are so many things wrong with Luhrmann's Great Gatsby - the filmmaker's attention-deficit-disorder approach, the anachronistic convergence of hip-hop and swing, the choppy elision of Fitzgerald's plot, the jarring collision of Jazz Age cool and Millennial cluelessness. But at the crux of things, the problem is that it's impossible to care.

For all its mayhem, for all the smashing windows and kabooming fireballs, the grenade launchers and giant helicopters, A Good Day to Die Hard not only fails to top its predecessors, it also forgets the basic Die Hard rules.

Most of it plays like Jackass.

Cloud Atlas is pop spiritualism, comic-book grandiosity, Zen for dummies. I can't say I didn't enjoy it on some level, but it's not the level of universal wisdom the Wachowskis and Tykwer would have us be on.

Obama, it is implied, is deliberately making America more vulnerable to attack from Muslim extremists. No mention is made of the fact that it was under Obama's watch that Osama bin Laden was killed.

Promised Land is a frustrating film to watch. It should be better than this, smarter than this.

Elegiac and corny and not really convincing on any level (especially when it comes to its treatment of women - be they hookers, or waitresses, or girls on the town), Stand Up Guys nonetheless holds some fascination just for the off-the-charts affectedness of Pacino's performance.

"There's nothing here!" screams Romina Mondello - Kurylenko's Euro gal pal, walking the deserted sidewalks of this Anytown, U.S.A. Boy, truer words . . ..

Am I crazy, or are Spring Breakers and "Oz the Great and Powerful" essentially the same movie? James Franco stars in both - a tattooed, gun-totin' gangsta in one, a charlatan magician in the other (you figure out which is which), and, in both, he's encircled by a bevy of Hollywood babes determined either to get witchy on him, or get that other witchy-rhyming word on him.

The film is at once shamelessly transparent, manipulative, and far-fetched, and impossibly suspenseful. You'll want to take a shower afterward - that's how icky you'll feel.

A sloppy, sentimental story line and pivotal plot turns that are only sketchily realized undermine the life-on-the-road misadventures.

The Wolfman feels like a film reedited and reworked so many times it has lost all narrative rhythm and suspense.

It doesn't help any that Wahlberg, looking perpetually dumbstruck, is among the clunkiest line-readers working in movies today.

Struggles mightily to find its loony essence. But Bullock's apple-cheeked larkishness is all flailing limbs and bug-eyed reaction shots - there's no there there. Cooper's character is woefully underwritten, Church's is yet another vain anchorman-wannabe cartoon.

Another tale of Tinseltown drugs, sex and excess - has transferred itself to the screen with mind-boggling, laugh-inciting horribleness.

How to count the ways that Be Cool isn't? For one thing, it looks terrible: grainy, ill-lit, edited with blunt, rusty shears.

There's nothing remotely fantastic about this Fantastic Four.

Another high school vixen movie, this one with a potty mouth (the vixen) and pretensions of social commentary (the movie), Pretty Persuasion brings to mind a number of other titles, all better.

Domino is less a movie than a hyperkinetic slide show - presented during a nuclear attack.

A fairly dreadful melodrama drenched in self-pity.

This tale of a white mother's kid gone missing in a black New Jersey neighborhood - and the tensions and news media attention that ensue - is pretty much pure jive.

Apocalyptically awful romantic comedy.

Basic Instinct 2 is supposed to help Stone show it's possible for a woman to be sexy in her late 40s. But it's Rampling - who is 60 - who comes off as the more provocative and alluring. Stone's purring, snarling, bedroom kink is embarrassing.

Icky, incoherent thriller.

If the moral of Click is a stop-and-smell-the-roses bromide about how family comes first, the real message of this sappy, potty-mouthed seriocomedy is that a steady diet of Drakes and Hostesses will do you no good.

"The Godfather" without Brando, "GoodFellas" without Scorsese, "The Sopranos" without Gandolfini - 10th & Wolf is all that, and less.

Trapped between edgy art flick and exploitation psychothriller, The Quiet manages to be neither, and manages to be pretty awful in the bargain.

A mix of "Alice in Wonderland" and William S. Burroughs, "Psycho" and the psychotic. It's pretty much a squirmy experience all around.

Tobey Maguire, terribly miscast and squeaky (that voice - it belongs to a kid!).

Art-directed within an inch of its life, Sleuth has the smirky gloss of a project that everyone involved with thinks is terribly good, and terribly clever. These people - Branagh, Pinter, Law and the usually great Caine (even in bad stuff) - are laboring under an epic misconception. Sleuth is just terrible.

Guy Ritchie's Revolver premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival two years ago September. That's 26 months on a shelf somewhere, depriving moviegoers the thrill of jaw-droppingly awful Ray Liotta line readings, of bloody shoot-outs, bags of money, cutaways to frosty babes sucking on lollipops, and even a bit of violent anime.

Like a grade-school version of an Indiana Jones adventure.

Drawing comparisons to "The Wire" may be unfair, but taken on its own, this anemic vehicle for Ice Cube and Tracy Morgan to mug and jive through is just weak, weak stuff.

88 Minutes proves itself to be a maddeningly mediocre, ineptly manipulative "real-time" thriller.

Maybe if there was something going with the dialogue - snappy Chandlerisms, say, or even just sentences that made sense - the fussy digital artifice of The Spirit wouldn't seem so, well, dispiriting.

An embarassingly unfunny, stumblebum adaptation of Toby Young's memoir.

Entertainingly goofy for about 30 minutes. And then, for the next two hours-plus, it's agony.

A stagy, arty, and uncompelling account of the Welsh writer and his menage-y relations.

The film quickly turns unintentionally, and unrelentingly, awkward.

A pity-party of Hollywood narcissism.

Ostensibly a comedy, and a feeble and innocuous one at that, Post Grad is one of those what-were-they-thinking?

What a mess.

This startlingly lame tale about a young upstart challenging a veteran leader of the pack doesn't update the genre, it simply recasts it.

Painfully cute drama.

It's too gauzy, and - with its Ron Bass script - too goopy by half.

Hoffman's turn as the drag queen has its endearing and comically catty moments, but Flawless' utter phoniness subsumes all efforts at honest acting.

I'll be darned if I can think of a more excruciating, ponderous, remarkably unfunny and inert cinemagoing experience to come down the pike in ages.

Dark and murky, grainy and grim.

A flat-out cynical attempt to launch a new Lethal Weapon-like franchise.

Feels like it's been homogenized and Hollywoodized to death.

This is no "Raging Bull."

Gets stupider as it moves along. By the end, you just don't care whether that cold-hearted snake Petrovich (that would be Reno) gets his comeuppance. Just bring on the Battle Bots, please!

Uptown Girls gives the impression that everyone behind the camera just threw up their hands in helpless resignation.

An unintentional high-tech hoot.

A bubble-brained comedy with as much bearing on the real world as a Pokemon cartoon.

Lewd, crude, blessedly brief.

A slasher spoof of sorts, except that unlike the "Scream" pics, scant effort seems to have gone into the spoofing aspect of the story.

Duplex's tenant-from-hell scenario is as predictable as it is tedious -- a tinny, unsatisfying throwaway farce.

Feels stagy, stiff and entirely unnecessary.

With the raunch quotient cranked up several notches, the sequel is calculated, cynical and, worse, not funny.

While this cheesy, heavy-metal melange of horror, space hooey and cowboy shoot-'em-ups isn't exactly dull, it isn't anything to write home about either.

Awesomely ridiculous thriller.

Williams, going full throttle as the desperate deposed kiddie icon Rainbow Ralph, is, well, simply exhausting.

Laughably predictable and lamentably unfunny, Laws of Attraction practically creaks from the effort exerted by its cast, straining to bring snap and panache to a hackneyed exercise. Sno Ball, anyone?

Often incomprehensible (a combination of jumpy editing and lots of thick British Isles accents) and hardly ever entertaining - even unintentionally.

Mike Myers, responsible for the picture's one, or possibly two, laughs.

This unabashedly stupid comedy is, well, unabashedly stupid.

A riotously awful biopic rife with stereotypes and boxing movie cliches, Against the Ropes represents -- among other things -- a woeful turn in its star's career.

Catwoman, which talks about the "duality" inside all women (wild vs. docile, rapacious vs. cuddly), does have its guilty pleasures. Most of these come courtesy of ice queen Stone.

What Never Die Alone is is a hackneyed tale of vengeance set in the 'hood, teeming with stock characters, slo-mo gunplay, and rampant misogyny.

How'd this thing get made?

Although there are several truly jolting scares, there's also an abundance of hackneyed dialogue and more silly satanic business than you can shake a severed limb at.

Where the first pic breezed along with gags and gunplay, this forced follow-up is artificial to the hilt - fueled on a kind of trying-too-hard hilarity that makes even good actors look bad.

13 Ghosts is the type of project that all parties concerned will have to live down for the rest of their lives.

Envy makes a pretty entertaining three-minute trailer. If only they'd left it at that.