When it comes to time-wasting memory games, crossword puzzles are more fun than this movie.

The result is a numbing void, and a long, frustrating wait for something to happen.

Shrek The Third instead goes for less: fewer jokes, less energy, and toned-down characters.

From the maudlin musical cues to a senseless romantic subplot that's only barely tacked on, every aspect of Evelyn stabs blindly and insistently at emotional buttons -- Beresford has made the feel-manipulated movie of the year.

Sometimes the actors lip-sync, but more often, they're singing along with the original vocal tracks, trying to out-belt Elvis Presley and Bruce Springsteen, like a cadre of enthusiastic shower singers joining in with the radio. The resulting cacophony is generally harsh and sloppy, and the film follows suit.

Beautiful Creatures is an oddball creation: a morality play with no basic understanding of morality.

It's a shallow, treacly movie for children too little to question its many pointless puerilities. But do kids that young really belong in a theater? Keep 'em at home and wait for this to hit cable.

A grating muddle.

Opaque acting, excruciating dialogue, and flat, affectless direction certainly don't help, but even in brilliant hands, Flannel Pajamas would still be a movie about two horrible, unsympathetic people doing dreadful things to each other, and learning nothing in the process. Why should anyone else have to endure it too?

There may be nothing new under the sun, but there are at least films that dress up old tropes in new ways. This isn't one of them.

What's the excuse for dumbing down Snow White to moron level? Are there really people out there who thought the original version just didn't have enough toilet jokes?

Clumsy, ephemeral, and wholly unnecessary.

Moment for moment, Upside Down is the most embarrassing, hilarious, obliviously stupid movie since M. Night Shyamalan’s "The Happening," and its constant pursuit of a striking image over any other consideration undermines it at every turn.

Audience members are likely to feel like they're right there in the picture, suffering for no reason and trying to pretend it's funny.

With so many plot hooks and so many story demands, it's incomprehensible that Kaena spends so much time on meaningless action.

In every aspect, from story to tone to characterization to visual aesthetic, it's laughably perfunctory, as though everyone involved were too embarrassed to give it more than a half-ironic token effort.

At least when they're singing, they aren't sniping and griping at each other. That original title really would have worked a lot better.

Watching the film is strangely like looking at the same three still frames of supernatural battles over and over for 90 minutes.

Even the animation is imitative rather than inventive.

Perelman's follow-up, The Life Before Her Eyes, finds him clumsily trying to outdo M. Night Shyamalan.

Final score: Book 1, Movie 0.

The overall experience is manic, juvenile, and hit-or-miss, as if the auteurs behind "Epic Movie" were trying to remake "Wag The Dog." It's too soon to laugh about Iraq, and it'll never be time to laugh about it with this kind of maladroit humor.

Turns a cultishly creepy classic into a dull and windy farce.

The film still suffers from cheap plasticky design, a klutzy overall look, dim preschooler humor, and a nearly impact-free story that thinks it's clever when it steals cues from 2001.

By the time Olyphant leaves an enemy in the most ridiculous deathtrap since the '60s "Batman," just because it looks kinda neat, the whole project has started to feel like "Ultraviolet 2: The Further Stupidening."

It's almost charming in its sheer lack of ambition, but the lack of creativity in its by-the-numbers shocks is harder to excuse.

All the thought seems to have gone into the marketing, and none into the unfathomably terrible script.

A cartoonishly grim supernatural thriller that could stand a lot less talk and a lot more thrills.