Despite exotic locations, epic cinematography, and much spectacular crash and bang, this "Mummy" feels like a threadbare toss-off.

The movie's cleverest idea is to give the Octopus identical clone henchmen with names like Phobos, Logos, and Huevos, all played by Louis Lombardi with a marvelous fat-boy idiot grin.

Ball's trying to be honest about adolescent coming of age, but since he's dishonest about everything else, the movie collapses in on itself.

Family, sadly, is a plate of leftovers: a bland, baldly written melodrama about two longtime best friends and their messed-up families.

Worst of all, the movie's simply not very shocking. Madonna has made a career out of toying with image and ego, but this is a vanity project in the smallest sense possible.

Nothing in How to Lose Friends feels fresh or on target.

Perhaps because Campbell is a purist at heart, My Name Is Bruce is as awful as anything he has done - a broadly silly gore comedy in which no gag is too cartoonish to be indulged in at least once and preferably three times.

Four Christmases is essentially "Meet the Parents" quadrupled.

If most December movie releases are epic-length and Oscar-ambitious, then Punisher: War Zone has to be considered Hobbesian counterprogramming: It's nasty, brutish, and short.

A chick flick that makes its chick characters - and by extension its chick audience - look like hateful, backward toddlers, and there is something wrong with that.

Its swooping 3-D visuals let fans briefly feel they can touch a group that barely exists behind a wall of beefy security men.

A "great poet" movie, the poet in this case being Dylan Thomas, and it's utter bollocks.

Imagine some very smart people setting out to make a very naughty action film and shooting themselves in the foot. Voila: Crank: High Voltage.

The problem is that both Philippa Goslett's script and Paul Morrison's direction lack the stylistic craziness - the sense of real, lunatic danger - a project like this desperately needs.

Sometimes a cute-stalker movie can win the audience's heart. Management only makes you ponder the line between true love and a restraining order.

Genially terrible, Lost is lazy, sloppy multiplex filler, good for a few solid giggles and not much more.

It's bigger, noisier, shinier, and dumber, and it has no earthly reason to exist.

The general consensus on this one: Rats.

Aliens in the Attic is conveyor-belt family product, an action/adventure/sci-fi/comedy made from the bland corporate DNA of Nickelodeon and the Disney Channel. It appears designed for families who never leave the mall.

Be warned, though: This is the multiplex equivalent of ADD.

A comedy that can’t even admit to its own overwhelming sense of disgust.

Diary of a Wimpy Kid the movie returns Kinney's tale to live-action reality, and the party's over.

The results are -- there’s no other word for it -- a disaster.

It's coherent, well shot, and tartly acted, but it wears you down like a dinner guest showing off his doctorate.

Perhaps the biggest disappointment is that The In-Laws was directed by Andrew Fleming, who delivered the fizzy Nixon-era comedy ''Dick'' a few years back and who also had a hand in ''Grosse Pointe,'' the wicked, briefly-lived WB parody of TV teen dramas. The man obviously knows from satire, but not on the evidence of anything here.

She's like Bob Hope with fake breasts and a wig. Now, that's scary.

Harmless in the extreme and it'll mute your kids for nearly 80 minutes, but why not just treat the little yard apes to the real deal and take them to ''Spirited Away''?

Bacon makes an appropriately detestable villain; unfortunately, he's the most interesting character here. As for Love, well, this puts her one career rung closer to ''Hollywood Squares.''

A blandly filmed and subtext-heavy talkathon that wastes a game cast on a group of characters about whom it's almost impossible to care. If this were a cocktail party, you'd be back home with a good book already.

Sure, go ahead and take the kids. But, for pity's sake, read them the book first.

Has a welcome humor but only in theory, and theory, chilly and self-involved, is where this filmmaker seems most at home. Like its bio-digital sirens, the movie never quite comes alive.

Truly, there is nothing the woman (Isabelle Huppert) can't do - except save "Promise'' from the valley of the shadow of bad French movie pretensions.

The feel-bad movie of the summer.

Del Toro does remind you of Brando here; unfortunately, it's the Brando of ''Apocalypse Now,'' the one with the green face and puffy line readings. Jones fares better, even if he wears the same grieving-for-humanity expression throughout the film.

Abandon is this CLOSE to being good, juicy, bad-movie fun.

There are rich issues at play here, about the nature of attraction and whether individual will is or isn't pinned to the wheel of physiology. But Decena hasn't dramatized them; he's used them as talking points set to an indie-film guitar strum, and the result is both earnest and passionless.

The Gospel of John is to "The Passion of the Christ" as tap water is to parboiled sacramental wine.

There are about 15 minutes of genuine, bust-a-gut comedy in Bringing Down the House, and, surprisingly, they belong to Steve Martin, who hasn't been funny on film in years.

The ugly duckling of Nickelodeon's after-bath lineup. That's its strength.

A bumptious splatter farce that manages to improve from awful to moderately engaging as its cast is winnowed down to the five guys themselves.

Settles for the cliches of American suspense films, right down to an ending that leaves the door open to a possible sequel.

A pleasant, thin, hammerlocked movie about the pleasures of breaking free - it's the Cliff Notes version of anarchic classics like ''Bringing Up Baby'' or ''What's Up, Doc?'' Should you want to take the graduate course, you'll find those films at your video store.

Beware of stoner rock stars talking politics. No matter where you stand on the spectrum, the ecological/anticorporate idealism of Greendale is so vague as to be insulting to anyone past the backpack-and-Birkenstocks stage of life.

Indeed a rip-off - a rehash of Hong Kong superstar Chow's greatest celluloid moments with an overlay of Hollywood action cliches, youth-flick silliness, and ah-so stereotypes.

Has the distinction of being much dumber and pulpier than the comic book on which it's based -- the ink practically comes off on your fingers as you watch it.

A textbook example of how a director can strip away plot, motivation, character, and meaning and still leave arrant pretension standing tall.

If you're up for a relentlessly overripe melodrama that takes place in movie-Europe as opposed to the real thing (the Parisian streetwalkers in berets are a good tip-off), by all means catch Head in the Clouds.

She has been made lovable -- and a Vanity Fair with a lovable Becky Sharp has no reason to exist. It's as if Shakespeare had put Hamlet on Prozac: What's the point?

What it is, distressingly, is a mess - a ragbag of promising ideas and failed narrative, of good acting and plain old bad filmmaking.

It might even work if In the Cut was remotely convincing as a thriller, but Campion can't help wrinkling her nose at genre.

Williams gives a performance that's honest and carefully wrought but on some level still a stunt. All that courtliness is wearing him out, and it's wearing us out too.

Pureed, predictable conflation of ''Alien'' and ''Titanic'' and ''The Shining.''

The director deserves admiration for sticking to her guns, but here's a heretical notion: Maybe the producer's cut would have been a better movie. This version may be too late, but it's also too little, and that's what hurts.

Equilibrium just happens to be a really bad comic book.

The result is a revenge thriller that's too taken with its own ambience to actually thrill.

Ye bites off substantially more than he can chew.

Works so hard to be inoffensive that you may well be offended.

A peppy, fast-moving, wafer-thin amusement that's fine for kids if you don't mind a lot of Three Stooges-style martial arts. For grown-ups, it's the equivalent of a 59-cent tin globe.

We haven't had a good Frankenstein, Dracula, or Wolf Man movie in a long time, so here's one where the whole gang shows up. One catch: It's not good.

For a movie that's sexist, racist, and possibly the most deeply closeted gay love story to be released this year, After the Sunset is reasonably entertaining.

Such a meticulously wrought piece of hokum that it's both easy to admire and impossible to warm up to.

Where "Nemo" was clever, soulful, and marvelous to look at, "Tale" is manic and surprisingly ugly, with a script that leans on the shallowest aspects of hip-hop street cred while pimping for corporate product placement at every turn.

Reasonably painless if you've never seen a comedy about the travails of newlyweds.

Works hard to give quirk a bad name.

The producers of Ella Enchanted probably assume, correctly, that many more kids haven't read the book than have, and they're out to give that audience a slick, shallow good time.

Hints at a place where desire, fear, pleasure, and power all intersect, but it never actually goes there.

It's a disappointingly limp small-town farce played several shades too broadly by a cast that has done better work elsewhere.

As it is, the movie only shudders to life when Dickie Pilager's onscreen.

So unfocused is Shonda Rhimes's screenplay and so flabby is Marshall's direction.

A dunderheaded comic melodrama with clothes to die for and dialogue to shrink from. It’s downright depressing.

Watching this movie in 3-D is very much like sticking one's head in a blender and hitting "pulse."

Takers might have made a perfectly decent little B heist movie, but someone had to go and forget to give the cameraman his Ritalin.

The film pulls off the remarkable feat of immersing a viewer in their world without providing any insights whatsoever.

The film's biggest miracle is the straight face Nick Nolte maintains in his role as Socrates.

Watching Arthur and the Invisibles is like sticking your head in a Gallic pinball machine: It's hectic, technically impressive, and your skull starts to pound after a while.

Meant to be an insider's tale, but it feels like it comes from the cinema of hangers-on.

When Laura Linney turns up about an hour into The Hottest State, you can see the movie that might have been.

The larger problem is that the central duo is just plain dull.

It can’t be easy to turn the story of Hawaii’s last royal into a waxworks parade, but writer-director Marc Forby has pulled it off.

You'll come away from Legendary with no sense of what amateur wrestling is about.

Is there a statute of limitations for how many good actors can be wasted in a bad movie?

An attempt to turn the 2005 nonfiction bestseller into a high-energy docu-romp, Freakonomics is a misconceived botch.

While there are moments of eldritch atmosphere and a few pro forma jolts, nothing here justifies our attention, let alone the film's inexplicable R rating.

A torpidly precious love story about death-obsessed adolescents, the film's becalmed and embalmed in its own sensitive self-pity.

The movie's primary pleasure is Hopkins, who manages to take the role of Father Lucas seriously without being serious about it at all.

If not better, a Part II always has to be bigger. In the case of The Hangover Part II, that means raunchier, nastier, darker. It also means much more predictable, which is ruinous.

Dumbed down, tarted up, and almost shockingly uninspired, it's the worst superhero movie since "Green Lantern."

A laughably inept series of adolescent poses trying to pass itself off as a movie.

As for the movie itself, it's tolerable.

Hopefully the last, of the fake trailer spinoffs of 2007's "Grindhouse." It makes last year's "Machete" look like "The King's Speech."

A grimly preposterous serial-killer thriller set in 19th-century Baltimore, this riff on the final days of the author of "The Tell-Tale Heart" and other masterpieces of the macabre might qualify as literary desecration if it weren't so silly.

Butter dearly wants to be a hot-button social satire that plays rough with sacred cows: Midwestern power-moms, the religious right, race, sex, you name it. Mostly, it wants to be an Alexander Payne movie from the 1990s. "Citizen Ruth," say, or "Election." Instead, it's a shrill, cartoonish mess.

I say kill off everybody else and bring back Farrell for the sequel.

All the good intentions in the world can't save White Irish Drinkers from playing like the baldest of retreads.

If the director had brought any toughness of perspective - or at least the self-lacerating humor of 2002's "Igby Goes Down,'' still the reigning champ of screwed-up-Manhattan-prepster films - we might be able to digest George's follies without cringing.

The line between gross-out humor that's inspired and the kind that's witless is fine indeed, and Movie 43 obliterates it with poop and movie stars.

It's a working illustration of what differentiates movie stars from TV stars. When we buy a ticket for a George Clooney movie, it's because we want to see George Clooney (or Emma Stone or Tom Hanks or whomever). The real stars of "Glee," on the other hand, are the characters, not the actors.

As history it's bunk; as inappropriate historical fiction, it's awfully close to comedy.

If anything, Burke & Hare is a slaphappy mess that recalls Landis's earliest work on 1970s midnight movies like "Schlock'' and "The Kentucky Fried Movie.''

It's another one of those loud, penis-obsessed bro farces, lazily written (by actor Seth Rogen, among others) and haphazardly directed.

I could pile on the cooking metaphors until you cried "uncle," but the fact remains that there's a very good movie in here that its makers have failed to bring off.

I don't know if I've ever seen a movie as spectacularly tone-deaf as Hyde Park on Hudson.

It's a solid short film stretched to Silly Putty thinness.

There are two problems with A Good Day to Die Hard: It’s terribly filmed and nothing in it makes any sense.

This third go-round for the "Wolf Pack" doesn't bother to Xerox the original 2009 hit comedy, as 2011's witless "Hangover 2" did. Instead, the new movie heads in different, if utterly formulaic, directions. So it's not terrible. It's just bad.

Wilde is stuck with the harder job of simultaneously playing sexy, innocent, conniving, and heartsore, and the effort appears to give her a headache. "This is kind of like an old movie," Liza says to Jay in one scene. Lady, don't you wish.

A sociopolitical prankumentary in which the prank blows up in the filmmaker's face, exploding-cigar style.

We get it: Stand Up Guys is supposed to be cutesy criminal magic realism. But Stevens, an actor turned director, never finds the right vibe, and the movie's genuinely creepy misogyny sours the attempts to go sentimental in the final act.

The actor/walking disaster known as Charlie Sheen gives a perfectly credible performance here. It’s the rest of the film that tries your patience.

The Lovely Bones, then, is something special: A spectacular, cringe-inducing failure as both a book adaptation and a film.

Everything about Couples Retreat feels plastic, though: the jokes, the trees, the extras, the attitudes. It’s dumbed-down entertainment aimed at a dumbed-down audience - the comedy equivalent of a McMansion.

You come away with only the memory of Christie, the film's perfect California blonde, lying insensate on the beach in the final ravages of AIDS - a potent and frightening image the rest of The Informers can't live up to.

A sex comedy that appears to have been made by people who've never actually had sex.

''Love" doesn't have a plot so much as it has a concept, scribbled in crayon.

One could forgive a budget this threadbare, performances this amateurish, a plot this tortuous if the 3-D effects passed the cool test. Sadly, watching ''Adventures" is an experience akin to seeing the world through dung-colored glasses.

A genre cheapie from its digital-video camerawork to its Casiotone soundtrack to its bland, buff cast, the movie is a cultural watershed in a dry gulch.

''Health Inspector" hopes to do for Larry what ''Ace Ventura: Pet Detective" did for Jim Carrey, who in this context looks like Noel Coward.

The accidental comedy sensation of the year to date.

Making a comedy that celebrates binge drinking and cretinous behavior isn't a crime against nature. Making one that's as brutally unfunny as Beerfest is.

The results are dull, of all things. The movie itself feels like an overstuffed burrito,

The saddest part is that "Deck" wastes four comic talents ranging from the near-genius (Matthew Broderick, Danny DeVito) to the inspired (Broadway star Kristin Chenoweth ) to the charming (Kristin Davis of "Sex and the City").

A pallidly "hip" revision of classic fairy tales that would be better told straight up if anyone had the nerve. It will divert small children, but so will a brightly colored object if you twirl it.

If you boil off dialogue, performance, narrative logic and grind a movie down to the nub of genre, will there be any suspense left? The answer is yes, but only in a Pavlovian sense. You react to this dull shockathon like a wired lab rat who's seen it all before. And guess what? You have.

Essentially, an act of terrorism against entertainment. It's inconsequential, potty - mouthed, extremely silly, and -- the worst sin of all -- dead boring.

After "Gothika " and "Catwoman ," a viewer has to wonder: Why does this woman keep making thrillers if she can't bring herself to be thrilled?

Consider this the sequel to "Ernest in the Army " that the late Jim Varney never got around to making. It's not very good but at least it's not evil.

The Ten is a virtually snicker-free exercise in audience pain. It's less a movie than an endurance test.

A dull little PG-rated spook story for tweener girls.

Like most family movies these days, "Alvin" is torn between the glitz that sells and the homilies that endure. It's a load of Ting Tang Wallet-Wallet Bling Blang.

By far the funniest part of Strange Wilderness is the trailer for "Harold & Kumar Escape From Guantanamo Bay" that's running before it.

You've seen dozens of movies like this on cable in the wee hours.

It's mostly harmless dum-dum stuff, though.

So, yea, it is a stinker. But it is prophesied that in six months time you shall come across 10,000 B.C.’ in the land of Pay-Per-View. And you shall say: ‘‘Pass the popcorn.’’

You feel like you're not watching the end of the world but the end of a career.

At nearly two hours, Mirrors is overlong for a summer horror toss-off, and the movie's three or four false endings make it seem even more of a haul.

Manages a fairly rare trick: It's a movie that's both deeply felt and completely phony.

Any good will the movie generates, though, is grated right back off by Black, whose obnoxiousness has lost whatever charm it once possessed.

That this witless, formulaic sequel to the hit comedy Analyze This even dares to spoof ''The Sopranos'' is embarrassing. It's like Freddie Prinze Jr. slamming Gene Hackman as a bad actor.

How inept is Serving Sara? It makes even Elizabeth Hurley seem graceless and ugly.

No one on the screen bothers to commit to a character.

Eerily similar in its story line to "In the Cut," the much pasted Meg Ryan sex-and-death thriller that came out last year. Only it's worse.

Sanctimonious claptrap -- an inert pageant of waxen figures that fails completely as drama even as it insults the sensibilities of anyone not clinging to rosy memories of the slave-era South.

House of the Dead, sadly, is so bad it's bad.

The exact cinematic equivalent of a classic Bob Dylan song. It's also proof that what is towering genius in one medium can go insanely wrong in another.

The Take represents the downside of the new documentary renaissance.

The overall tone is one of mild Sex Pistols excess combined with Monkees-era high jinks.

"Prison isn't all that different from a nightclub,'' comments Alig toward the end. Funny; this movie isn't all that different from prison.

Worse than junk, in fact. Beyond Borders so trivializes the plight of the world's displaced peoples that it becomes actively obnoxious.

A film of singularly boneheaded conceits, Butterfly is populated by, and appears to have been made by, stoned college dudes more hung up on oh-wow twists than the need to make sense.

Despite all that onscreen turgidness, Anatomy of Hell is itself so much a matter of the mind that it never rises above theory.

Never quite as dumb as "Harold & Kumar," but it's nowhere near as smart, and that's what kills it.

A black-dressing young intellectual of my acquaintance recently ascribed a "lazy generosity" to Garfield and his daily antics. If so, the movie gets the laziness but misses the generosity.

The film was conceived as a youthful tour of all that's wrong with the two-party system, with the likably shambling actor Philip Seymour Hoffman as host, but the breadth of subjects covered precludes any response other than nebulous discontent.

A wan, derivative entry in the torture-porn cycle.

Irene in Time is the initial first-run feature to debut at the Stuart Street Playhouse, Boston’s newest art house cinema. Both the theater and its audiences deserve much better.

The Last Airbender' is dreadful, an incomprehensible fantasy-action epic that makes the 2007 film "The Golden Compass,'' a similarly botched adaptation of a beloved property from another medium, look like a four-star classic.

Picture Timberlake in the booth recording his lines and you have the best joke in the movie. Everything else is actively painful, a frenetic, unfunny mix of action, romance, dud dialogue, and icky things popping out of the screen.

A miscast, underwritten, drably directed adaptation of a very popular novel, it's the feel-bad film of the summer and an almost perfect example of how not to turn a book into a movie.

A pox upon history and an insult to the 16th president of the United States. It's that, of course - actually, that's the point - but this joyless, deafening cinematic headache commits a different crime. It's a sin against entertainment.

Ramsay delivers an overdirected, conceptually obnoxious art film that's torture to sit through, listen to, and think about.

The Women on the 6th Floor is delicate and sensitive and utter bollocks - a bourgeois wet dream made to soothe the souls and stir the loins of powerful men in midlife crisis. But some of us wish we could see this movie told from the maids' point of view.

Me, I'm a Johnny Rotten man, so this limp culture-clash comedy with a heart of patchouli just made me want to stab my eyeballs out.

Unfunny, predictable, and vulgar, it’s the generic equivalent of a Judd Apatow movie. As always, you get what you pay for.

Pain & Gain, a jokey but fatally tone-deaf true-crime caper, plays like “Fargo” for idiots.

It wouldn’t be Thanksgiving without a turkey, and in Old Dogs, we have the season’s blue-ribbon gobbler.

The problem with the "Alien vs. Predator" series is that the humans keep getting in the way.

For a movie to pretend, in the face of the deaths of tens of thousands of Iraqi men, women, and children directly or indirectly caused by our presence there, that we can wage war without anyone really getting hurt isn't naive, or wishful thinking, or a jim-dandy way to spend a Saturday night at the movies. It's an obscenity.

Saved from total puff only by the obnoxiousness of its star, who seems to be laboring under the delusion that he's the next Eddie Murphy.

The Heart Is Deceitful wants to cauterize us into feeling something -- anything -- but it's far too heartless to know what.

An American Haunting sets the bar at a new low: It makes ''The Blair Witch Project" look like a masterpiece of world cinema.

It's a remarkably laugh-free comedy that takes on a dark subject and skitters along its surface.

For proof that some actresses can take on a misconceived role and get out alive, there's Huffman as Lilly.

Who on earth is this embarrassment -- easily the worst film of the year to date -- aimed at?

A weirdly airless disaster, a turkey so insistently DOA that the dialogue serves as its own epitaph.

Kranks is a feel-good movie in which every character is hateful (except, sigh, the cancer lady), and a Christmas movie too chickenhearted to mention Jesus.

If the producers had dug up Ted Geisel's body and hung it from a tree, they couldn't have desecrated the man more.

Finding Amanda, unfortunately, is one vast, irritating surface.

Vengeance has the odor of court-ordered community service. The jokes never rise above the groin. The trees look plastic, the characters more so.

It's more like "Porky's for Dummies," a thoroughly depressing teen farce in which Internet voyeurism has replaced human intimacy and where privacy is SO 20th century.

The most painful movie so far in a year that's already scraping the bottom of the barrel, Your Highness is a tedious, dung-colored misfire that sullies the genre of "Monty Python and the Holy Grail" and "The Princess Bride."

Easily the worst movie of the week, month, year, and Bullock’s entire career. It is to comedy what leprosy once was to the island of Molokai: a plague best contemplated from many miles away.

A live-action film based on a line of dolls, it's pure marketing chum for tweeners: a proudly shallow, purposefully bland ode to girly-girl narcissism. I could actually feel my brain stem shrivel up as I watched it.

An overlong, joyless, and inconsequential affair, full of dead air, and possessing only a few moments of jaw-dropping bad taste. It's a dull disaster.