The movie is generic and shallow in its glimpse of the love and sex lives of a handful of young New Yorkers.

The party itself is something to see. A Pasadena blowout turns into a horny, druggy, apocalyptic scene culminating in riot police, news choppers, and a gentleman with a flamethrower.

This movie has no teeth. It does not want to say anything, other than the unprintable word for penis, over and over.

But that ending is a whopper all the same: a heartless blast of tragedy, exploitation, amusement, and general flagrance.

Mosteller might be the movie's real discovery. He twists his lisp and slurry speech around the dialogue in a way that exudes far less attitude than the kids.

I'm not getting the most of his (Washington) charisma or enough of that million-dollar dental work. I'm not getting the joy, and I miss that.

It's the sort of movie that thinks cutting between two different stories makes it art. Usually, it feels like an exercise in art. There's a lot of calisthenics but very little beauty or truth or whatever it is the movie is going for.

These are truly tedious stakes for an action movie. The franchise isn't worried about world safety. It's fretting over whether to start wearing Depends.

Bring Wet-Naps to The Devil's Double. It's coated and fried in the same batter KFC uses for Extra Crispy chicken. The movie might be greasier, actually.

It's hard to tell whether this is a tribute to female solidarity or a lamentation.

There's too much narration and too many drug-movie cliches.

Janet McTeer provides a little ham to the role of a woman who dresses up her dogs because she misses her dead twin sons. But there's not nearly enough of her. Nor is there enough legitimate suspense.

This is a ridiculous movie - a thriller so indifferent to suspense, so above mystery that one character literally stabs another in the front.

Killer Elite is based on a true story and about a half-dozen Jason Statham movies.

It's a parade float atop which Streep can pose and impose. Sometimes her showmanship amounts to shamelessness. She wants us to watch her sack another part.

The movie is so desperate to be palatable, to appeal to everybody that it doesn't taste like anything.

It's cheap the way The Grey wants to be both a Liam Neeson "Quit Taking My Stuff'' movie and an existential thriller about survival.

Chasing Madoff is mostly that sort of movie, the kind you make when all you've seen is other movies and television shows about crime, when you want someone to know what you can do with a juicy story that takes some effort to ruin.

There's a misery in Fassbender that's spellbinding. I rolled my eyes for most of Shame. But never at him. That face tells the story of addiction: the joylessness of sex.

The movie attempts to both explain everything away and pat itself (and Norway) on the back once we see Noa watching President Obama deliver his Nobel Prize speech.

Gangster Squad is an almost movie. It's almost terrible. It's almost entertaining. But it's missing the shameless insanity of a wonderfully bad movie, and the particular vision, point of view, and coherence of some very good ones. So it sits there in between - loud, flashy, and unnecessary.

It's all been called Salmon Fishing in the Yemen, just like Paul Torday's 2007 novel, and, except for some despicable behavior in the later going, it couldn't be more harmless.

It's a stupid movie by smart people who aren't smart enough to realize it's stupid.

Come for the surfing. Stay for the sainthood.

Parental Guidance is overly generous with regard to the silliness. However, it's not clueless. Crystal seems determined to give as generously as he gets. When a bully whacks him, Crystal covers the bully in vomit. Good for him.

As ponderous and overwrought as a film hogged by a couple of young hipsters named Roméo and Juliette can be.

The ending steals actionably from "The Blair Witch Project," the movie that helped spawn these first-person chillers.

This is acting that seems more freaked out, more traumatized than it ought to for a movie about an unwanted houseguest.

Roskam appears more interested in trying to combine genres that don't easily cohere. On one hand, the film's a crime-thriller and police procedural. On the other, it's about the lingering trauma of Jacky's personal misfortune. The other hand is much stronger.

This tired little movie got on my last nerve. If Driss is so charismatic and so full of ingenuity, why isn't he using any of that skill to help lift up his family?

This movie is the height of by-the-book dullness.

The Words aspires to depths greater than the sex we never see these two have. There's nothing for the eye to do while the ear fills with the banalities of two streams of narration, one by Dennis Quaid, the other by Jeremy Irons, all of it built around a lie.

This is a manic hour and a half. It's full of pushy, grabby, assertive, borderline obnoxious characters, not all of whom went to Harvard.

There is one bright spot. Ellie Kendrick plays Dolly's silly, breathlessly romantic little sister, Kitty.

Birbiglia, who's from Shrewsbury, has done some wonderful things with awkwardness. I'm sad to report that Sleepwalk With Me isn't one of them.

It's a movie so late in noticing a shift in American male grooming that for a documentary on the subject to work, Spurlock would either have to pitch it to our grandparents (or be a grandparent) or trace the arc of the shift and unpack it.

For some, Atlas Shrugged Part II is a ridiculous movie. For others, it's scripture.

An inconsequential high-school-reunion comedy that gets better when it stops trying to make you laugh.

The Collection is an honest title. The movie is just a lot of other people's greatest hits.

The whole thing ends with an urgent plea to visit the movie's site, which is partially devoted to The Issues, which involve such topics as "overmedication," "overtreatment," and "reimbursement."

Lacks the creepy immediacy of even the most misbegotten of the found-footage genre.

This is many lousy movies for the price of one.

It’s unclear what Amy Adams did to deserve Leap Year, but all that’s missing from the movie is a set of jailhouse bars over her scenes.

It’s like Bob Fosse night at the martial-arts studio. Most of the killing here is done with bladed throwing stars that, like the ninjas themselves, arrive from nowhere. They appear to have been used to edit the film as well.

It’s network television drama, starring actors best known for their TV work and full of the petty gripes and mild worries of characters who really have nothing compelling to worry about.

Neither (Bullock/Reynolds) brings out anything good in the other, and watching them try hurts the eyes, the tummy, and the libido.

Blithely inept.

Gabizon never establishes a consistent tone or point of view. Instead, we hop from one episode to the next, with no momentum and no reason to care about these people.

House of D, is like the kind of sticky greeting card you'd find on CBS some Sunday nights.

For Hilton haters, the stupid and grotesque remake of House of Wax will only stoke their schadenfreude.

The horrible anticipation he [Aja] builds is derailed by a gimmick that makes the twist in, say, ''Fight Club" seem perfectly logical. To say more would be to ruin the movie, and why should I do that when its own makers have done it for you?

Lila is all come-ons without any charm.

Offers cliches instead of chills.

A one-trick action thriller that feels like a poor cousin of an episode of ''24." Call it ''12."

Just Like Heaven suggests that a post-coma Elizabeth might understand what life is truly all about. Of course, if being alive means having to live in this movie, maybe she was better off the way she was.

An erotic thriller. It is also an Atom Egoyan picture, which means any claims either to actual eroticism or conventional thrills are theoretical at best.

Finding Home is well meant and earnest but is stretched to almost twice what would have been a comfortable length.

Rarely is a movie audience asked to put up with so much noise for such a thankless payoff.

It's actually a pretty lousy thriller.

The movie treats trysting as comedy and yet is stingy with the laughs.

Franco can be exhilarating in movies -- tremulous, unhinged, a little wild. Here his jaw never stops quivering and his eyes stay welled up, advertising a breakdown that never comes. Not that Myles has a presence a man would fall apart over. She's too professional to drive anybody crazy.

This is an inept and unsubtle romantic fantasy about how black people and white people don't mix.

An overblown urban crime drama that should be a lot better than it is.

The strip is now a cartoonish sitcom pretending to be a romantic comedy about a drama queen and his adventures in lust. The movie might have gotten away with it, were it interested in romance or comedy.

Unofficially, You, Me and Dupree is a companion piece to last summer's "Wedding Crashers," a movie whose lunacy is desperately needed this summer.

Perhaps Employee of the Month, which was typed then directed by Greg Coolidge, is unfolding in the key of satire. But you'd have to be a dog to hear it.

The most popular facial expression for victims in The Grudge 2 is something I'd like to call "deep befuddlement." This time "deep befuddlement" goes double for paying customers.

A slick but dull new shoot- ' em-up from Jamaica, doesn't penetrate the mysteries of high-rolling, high-risk thug life.

The real problem with Harsh Times is Jim himself. Bale goes at the part with his usual intensity, but the character still seems like a psycho without psychology or a soul.

Watching the movie made me long for the big , risky ideas and entertainingly fearless filmmaking in David O. Russell's "I Heart Huckabees " and Spike Jonze's "Adaptation ," which Kaufman wrote. Both were similarly conceptual escapades, but they let it all hang out.

Creaky, earnest melodrama.

For better and worse, the movie is more attractive and competently assembled than its schlock peers. That's refreshing, but it hardly excuses the appalling lack of suspense, intermittent tastelessness, or shockingly low camp quotient.

The only recommendable thing about Norbit is that he's not as bad as every other person in this movie.

The movie needs Richard Dreyfuss .

Probably as tolerable as it can be for a comedy with no obvious creative aim. You can imagine the crew cracking up on some outtake reel, which honestly is what this movie feels like.

A powerful film of suffering and sacrifice and desperation. But it's vacuous, banal, and, where its mix of sentiment and grisliness is concerned, rather despicable.

The movie might have been more tolerable had Besson searched harder for a performer and not a specimen. Barbara Stanwyck in her prime might have made more sense.

Nothing about this movie works, not the title (it used to be called "Clubland "), not Blethyn's attempt to inject comedy into her rickety stereotype of a character.

Stardust certainly could have gone somewhere fun. But the magic and zip you need to get a blimp like this off the ground is scarce.

Unlike most of what Moore has been in, Dedication is unlikely to delight retirement homes on movie night. But it's not imaginative, lively, or true enough to speak to its intended audience of American Apparel shoppers, either. It's a slog.

You don't have to hand the folks behind Dragon Wars much (the acting, directing, costumes, editing, props, music, etc: They're all off). But when they decide to sic that giant snake and those prehistoric dino-birds on downtown Los Angeles, the movie turns shockingly watchable.

Human trafficking is an awful societal issue, and Trade happens to be an awful movie about human trafficking.

The Hollywood version of one of those fawning "60 Minutes" segments about musical prodigies. For most of it, I could hear the congested awe of Morley Safer.

A sorry excuse for a ghetto SOS.

This is one of those your-roots-are-showing family circuses where just about everybody seems like a clown.

This story could have gone in a number of more inspiring allegorical directions but winds up your average bedtime story instead.

Drillbit Taylor sounds like a rediscovered blaxploitation movie or a name near the top of the NFL draft.

I was not a fan of Albert Brooks's "Looking for Comedy in the Muslim World" (2005), but Brooks, at least, seemed willing to concede before it was over that his movie was a terrible idea. Spurlock seems opportunistically optimistic.

The truth is, indeed, still out there. And when Carter finds it, may he heed its wisdom: Let go.

Swing Vote is a satire that's afraid to satirize.

The movie is a work of ambivalence. Is English making fun of these women? Or is she making a pilot for Lifetime?

The thrill of the ridiculousness is gone. So is all the mystery that made Statham so appealing in the first place.

At the very least, a movie like this requires coherence to stay afloat. Barring that, it needs a star to distract us.

Fired Up feels like everybody's first time doing anything - writing, acting, directing, cheerleading.

This is not a movie. It's a coming attraction for a theme park.

Almost nothing works in this movie.

The finale of this tedious piece of Asian-ish action-schlock based on a popular anime series implies an intention to make more. One was plenty for me.

The Bounty Hunter does give Christine Baranski, as an Atlantic City entertainer and Mama Aniston, another opportunity to enthrall us with her drag-queenliness.

Brilliantly named Half Past Dead -- or for Seagal pessimists: ''Totally Past His Prime.''

The lack of sexual tension is astounding.

The average Bollywood routine is passionately cheesy. This movie seems cursed with a lactose intolerance.

The casting alone should warn you about what kind of bottom this movie's going to hit.

Like the horror-flick hacks who infest Hollywood like termites, the Pangs don't build suspense, they assault the senses with twitchy photography and Danny's editing.

Boring, mediocre movie.

The most dispiriting thing about Anger Management is that its cameos seem like leftovers.

Comes tantalizingly close to being interesting.

When it's funny it's uproarious. Otherwise, you're crestfallen to discover that the movie is a relentless sucker punch to black entrepreneurship.

Noe's summation is an ideological sucker-punch from a filmmaker who gets off on abusive relationships. He may as well have thrown a big ''whatever'' up on the screen.

Watching [Berry] run around in that getup I felt embarrassed, the way I do for people who put on makeup before climbing a StairMaster -- it's too much.

The sex bits are flat, the racial innuendo is flatter, and somewhere, Cosby is having a Pudding Pop and shaking his head in disbelief.

Because Spun is so plotless it's almost avant-garde, we're meant to be delighted with its assortment of set pieces.

It plays better as exasperating comedy than genuine horror -- although there is something terrifying about being stuck in a movie whose idea of a bogeyman is a scarecrow with an eating disorder.

For most of the movie, however, Halle sprints, Halle swims (55 laps!), and Halle screams. It's a two-hour fitness video -- a portrait of the Oscar winner as personal trainer.

There's nothing really wrong with it -- it's bad, but no worse than it needs to be, which is the problem.

As lifeless and unneeded as The A-Team is, it might have been worse.

Watching Granger and Priya chase each other around a hotel like squirrels in a park, you wonder what these two see in each other.

Like so many of these farm-raised films, this one looks polished, but takes no risks, offers no surprises, and contains a final sequence that's laughable for its lack of courage.

It’s a fascinating story: part genetic mystery, part socio-racial tragedy. However, Laing’s life, despite its inherent melodrama, does not automatically lend itself to the screen.

The Strip makes you appreciate what hard work effortless comedy is.

The secret here is that the movie is rather tasteless. It has the high, slightly nauseating stink of perfume on garbage.

There is much to learn from Picasso and Braque Go to the Movies. First, a wealth of sharp professorial minds and great artistic eyes is no guarantee of equivalent documentary moviemaking. Second, when making a sort of thesis statement, it helps to have a thesis.

Rarely have clips from so many good and great movies been put to such dull use.

It has no pulse, no apparent breath.

Seeing her (Kidman) in junk like this is a bit like watching the Queen of England eat a Taco Bell chalupa.

The movie is swept up in earnest self-importance.

Never achieves the exhilarating feat of exemplifying the types of Hollywood movies it wants to unpack.

I don't know whether she's (Hudson) drunk, stoned, or simply out of her mind, but if it weren't so sad watching her pick away at this skimpy, overlong romantic lie, she might be entertaining.

Even by the unambitious standards of some children's movies and many movies that star Caine, this one has a difficult time making a case for itself as anything other than an adventure in baby-sitting.

Jeff Who Lives at Home devotes so much of itself to mocking the loneliness and personal shortcomings of these characters that once it stops jabbing and turns serious, you start laughing.

There's just very little in Beautiful Boy that feels fresh or new or truly raw. The houses, that title, every emotion, even the false moves: They're all generic.

It's all emotionally counterfeit, and that bogusness infects the comedy.

The directors don't know how to make this new plot funny or infectious. Most promises of comedic pleasure go as unfulfilled Stifler's T-shirt. This movie hasn't a clue where to begin the donation process.

You could cast this movie with potato chips and still get cheers when one of the bad guys is cuffed. It doesn't matter that none of it is to be believed.

Good Deeds is the first of the 11 movies he's written and directed to try a one-tone-fits-all approach. Sadly, that tone is funereal, and it's always a beat out of step with the rhythms of both real life and most movies.

This isn't a genre-less character study, it's myopic romantic comedy, and watching a woman of Catherine Zeta-Jones's easy carnality and fathomless beauty compete for the attention of Gerard Butler, who's pining for Jessica Biel, is dismaying, like spotting Anna Wintour in line at a soup kitchen.

If Bunraku were serious about subverting or reinventing the genres it's cobbled together, Moore would play the gunslinger or the samurai or the crime boss. But no. All she gets are a couple of scenes that demonstrate that she still looks great soaking wet.

Seeing her (Schilling) and Efron fumble at each other is like watching a stick of butter and a bag of flour not turn into a cake.

It's doom that we're meant to feel here. And repulsion. I hate to say, but I shrugged.

For too long, this movie asks us to be interested in something that rarely in the history of the service industry has been sustainably entertaining: how dull certain jobs can be.

Nothing works. Or some of it works, but that doesn't matter because what's working is so deeply, painfully boring.

Some bad movies can make you feel awful for the people who made them and worse for the audience that shows up. The actors, the script, the camera: There's nowhere good they can go. For Greater Glory is that kind of bad movie: a total embarrassment.

This is all a long way of saying that the best way to better understand the man who made those and dozens of other movies is simply to see them. There's no case to be made for a mangy shortcut like Hitchcock. It's all surface and formula.

Grant and Parker stand around as if they're waiting for someone to yell, "Cut.'' He's in one movie. She's in another. Neither is any good.

Like a lot of action-movie directors, Gray lacks the imagination to view the art of cat-and-mouse as more than a chance to play with state-of-the-art war technology.

The Fourth Kind doesn’t build, instill, or maintain an audience’s fear. It just spends 98 minutes trying to prove that what you’re watching actually happened.

Taken? You bet.

It's hard to have sympathy for a movie that tosses in the old shower sneak-up sequence or allows its characters to speak as obviously as possible while standing in a pool of red liquid.

As she sashays, mirthlessly, from one thankless confrontation to the next, it's unclear why anyone would find Garner any more deserving of stardom than certain mannequins.

This gnarly and illogical little sitcom is bound to make any adult reconsider that next outing with the kids.

Messing should know this is precisely the kind of movie Grace would ridicule Will for dragging her to see.

Barely any of it is funny, and if a minute of it is meant in mockery, few of the darts ever find the board.

A deplorable piece of cynicism whose only point of interest is Gael Garcia Bernal's accent

Scares up few chills.

The latest cannibalization of a popular older horror film.

What the movie lacks most is a real sense of adventure.

It's ultimately just a rigorous personal training film made by people who don't seem to like movies or the people who go to them.

The fun of these movies is that Linney often seems too refined for such greasy junk, but there she is anyway, hamming it down as it were.

His [Director Tony Scott's] pornographic lust for bloodletting, gunplay, and out-of-control camerawork far exceeds his abilities to tell a story.

Neither thrilling nor psychological, but it's chicly shot and edited and is pretty much art-directed to death.

Aeon Flux is the sophomore picture from Karyn Kusama, who's first movie was a modest boxing film called "Girlfight." Here she's in over her head. The movie's sexual and scientific ideas never come through, and the characters would be fun only if they came with a joystick.

An embarrassing romantic comedy from Rob Reiner.

This is by far the most embarrassing of his seven movies.

A depressing piece of gun-crazy Hollywood scuzz that, with its gassy style and runaway immorality, makes a Tony Scott movie look like a Robert Bresson picture.

Part sketch-comedy cartoon, part Cracked magazine spoof, installment four is the most scornfully made yet.

The Lost City is Andy Garcia's ballad to Havana during the Cuban revolution. You'll have to forgive the penthouse view, though -- it's the only one Garcia can seem to find.

This mangy comedy only demonstrates that Lohan's star power is too bright for falling into mounds of mud, rooting around in cat litter for a contact lens, and getting punched out by a roughneck jailbird, as she does here.

It's a terrible sign for a movie when the sole reason for its existence is a satanic opening date.

This is a movie that's built around characters the audience is bound to find more insufferable than anyone does in the movie itself.

Too confused to provide any thrills, even indecent ones.

Television is a state of mind. And the makers of Saw III have delivered the most despicable episode of "One Life to Live" ever.

It's another standard-issue bad star-vehicle action-comedy, this time for Cedric.

A sloppily made bowl of reheated chick-flick cliches.

It's a movie only a psychic could love, since a psychic would know to stay home or see "Zodiac" instead.

The moviemaking is driven only by contempt; he (Roth) wants to nauseate us into submission.

If unused spit takes, flubbed dialogue, and extra improvisation are so uproarious, why not give us 90 minutes of that? License to Wed is tolerable for about five.

Fun here is fleeting.

This is less an affront to women than it is to comedy.

The movie tries going for a laugh or two. It even makes stabs at irony. But since none of the story is suspenseful, remotely believable, or, at the very least, cheaply entertaining, who cares?

The latest Guy Ritchie shoot-em-up, is a joke. You laugh with it but mostly at it.

This is the sort of movie where men stand blankly over dead loved ones, then start digging. Masculine stoicism or emotional botox? You decide.

A tedious adventure-romance.

Might as well have been written by a rushed piece of software. The program calls for a surprise engagement, a street fight complete with crotch punches, an apartment eviction, and a runaway child - all in about five minutes. As an obstacle course, this is mighty efficient. As comic storytelling, it's painful, not too far from being socked in the crotch.

I've seen Pacino over the edge. This is not it. He looks pooped and pickled. Maybe being the only thing standing between a megaplex opening and a trip straight to the $4.99 bin at Target wiped him out.

The movie actually does feel like an Americanized work of Hong Kong moviemaking. But the desperate, derivative style, the nonsense plotting, and leggy, horny women are applied like too much MSG.

When it was over I felt vaguely embarrassed. I wasn't just leaving a movie theater. I was taking a walk of shame.

This is the first time we've seen Myers in the flesh since he committed assault and battery on Dr. Seuss, and I wish the cat had stayed in the hat.

On just about every occasion in Meet Dave, Murphy appears to be on the verge of cracking himself up. This is good news. At least someone found him funny.

The movie might have something to say about black racism, but the conversations go nowhere, and the cliches of the genre take over.

There's a cheap thrill in watching Hudson defuse Cook's pig antics with some foulness of her own.

This is not a movie that has great passion for pleasures of the flesh. Its sexiest scenes involve bullets cutting through the air in the slowest motion possible.

Forget the metaphors, why not just make a movie about poor, exploited Mexicans?

A brutally inane movie.

Playing Clouseau's exasperated boss, Cleese rams his head into a wall minutes into the action. That's a powerful image, insofar as his headache was mine.

The movie might have worked if it winked more - or if it played things completely straight.

Despite all the hyperventilating, the movie fails to consider what these crimes mean when, say, the residents of the White House happen to be black. The filmmakers recognize that identity politics are often a trap door. But it's one they're helpless to save themselves from falling through.

There is still a great horror movie about foreclosure to be made. In the meantime, this movie plays games. (How many rounds of hide-and-seek should an audience tolerate?)

This movie brings to mind much better cable TV shows like the marijuana comedy "Weeds,’" the one-on-one psychodramas of "In Treatment," and the astonishingly cinematic "Breaking Bad."

Thurman is bespectacled again for Motherhood, and it saddens me to report that neither she nor this comedy turns into more than an argument against procreation.

For what it’s worth, Tooth Fairy is a somehow dimmer cousin of those Tim Allen “Santa Clause’’ movies.

The Banger Sisters so frequently features Hawn running around in revealing attire, tossing instructions at exhausted people that I'm inclined to think of it as a workout video.

Cradle of lifelessness.

Moves from cheekiness to ineptitude, often in a single take.

The resulting movie is a nauseating flight of Hollywood navel-gazing.

Harwood's screenplay obscures any sort of philosophical, religious, or historical considerations in favor of pulpy and faith-bruising sensationalism.

This movie is wretched, condescending, and sad, like watching an elderly man spend more than 100 minutes tapping his arm for the youth vein -- which he never finds.

As perfectly bad horror movies go, Wrong Turn is something new: a gore-splattered workout flick.

There's not much of a script. The direction is the pits, and stars Pierce Brosnan and Julianne Moore, playing dueling divorce lawyers who fall in love, are lousy, too.

Because the characters in the movie have only stock obsessions and vague personal histories, there's no reason to be interested in them.

The trouble with the movie is basically everything. It's long, sloppy, and -- to both the quantum-physics ignorant and informed -- steadily implausible, never exciting in either its skill or its ludicrousness.

Just bland behavioral propaganda, and Holmes makes such a guileless and robotic spokeswoman, it wouldn't be nuts to think the White House was just another mansion in Stepford.

The 6-year-old I went with had the villain pegged in the first 15 minutes. Needless to say, she completely ruined the movie for me. Meddling kid.

Another gay movie that luxuriates in emotional implausibility.

By the time I saw poor Tim crushed, head to toe, by a falling sheet of plate glass, I was certain I hadn't signed up for anything this punishing.

Not as desperate, unfunny, and nonsensical as its title. It's worse. Worse than you can imagine. Unless, of course, you've imagined 90-something minutes of bloopers and outtakes that congeal into a story -- much the way a scab is formed.

The movie is as grim and grave as the comic book. But it lacks atmosphere. It's often illogical and drubs you numb with its single dimension: noisy retribution.

Shyer's version is a thing of infinite emptiness and nauseating vanity. It's not funny, alluring, affecting, or erotic, just conceited.

A terribly self-satisfied lecture about the ubiquity of quantum physics in spiritual life, is dishonest enough to suggest that even its cavalcade of scientists and mystics might not know anything about such topics as reality and the sub-atomic world.

Positively reeks of self-importance -- the jokey, ham-fisted, pseudo-socially relevant, punch-pulling kind. It reeks worse of acting -- the Jack-Lemmon-in-a-coma Kevin Spacey kind.

The movie's no good: It's written, directed, performed, photographed, edited, and marketed on a fifth-grade reading level; despite that and its twin stars' saucer eyes and ropy limbs, it's no Muppet movie either.

It has a little something to irritate everybody. People looking for romance will find only cardboard lovers. People looking for a resounding musical will find it odd that the camera runs away from the lip-synching cast. And people looking for opera -- well, shame on you.

The characterization couldn't be more flagrant if the soundtrack creaked out an oldie by a certain ancient pop quintet: You're a candy girl.

The film's centerpiece is a massacre at a wet T-shirt contest, which the horror director Alexandre Aja has a good time staging (yes, Eli Roth, we see you with the water gun). But it feels like an imitation of B-movie beach schlock and John Waters. The visual humor lacks wit or nerve.

Just as I was beginning to hope that she’d (Heigl) find a part that called for intelligence and sophistication and backbone, she plays another uptight naif.

Tom Six's movie has the freakiness and sadism of its genre, but it's so heavy with self-appreciation -- Dude, we had the craziest premise for a movie! -- that it can't lift off into the perverse ecstasy of decent exploitation. That was also the problem with "Snakes on a Plane.''

Material this banal needs a madman of David Lynch proportions to incinerate it. Hackford leaves it intact, forcing us to regard a car he doesn't have the guts or skill to crash.

I watched at least a quarter of My Soul to Take, the worst horror movie Wes Craven's made perhaps ever, with the glasses off. It was shot - and is available - in a standard format, and, like many conversions, the 3-D gimmick is like watching a movie through an ashtray.

The Strauses don't care about how to keep an audience. Their movie has no sense of suspense or dread - Skyline is an apocalypse movie that plods like one of Romero's zombies.

Every boogeyman and slasher cliché this movie borrows was better somewhere else. Although it probably wasn't grosser.

A migraine inducement that you'd think Jack Black had gotten out of his system years ago. Yet he still finds an excuse to wear a blazer and shorts and fling his bodily orb like Angus Young on Guitar Hero night at the neighborhood bar.

Howard never decides on tones that complement each other, and the dissonance is jarring.

It's the latest in the blank-from-hell genre, in which misogyny and entertainment are made to seem indistinguishable while the blank makes life hell for someone who then is cornered into striking back.

Drive Angry is something new for Cage - a movie that feels like it's straight FROM cable.

After a while, the movie tires of the witch business and trots out a plot twist that permits the effects department to spend money. Some moviegoers might find the bait-and-switch funny.

Hop may have taken years to design and animate, but it feels as if minutes were required to compose it.

The film is remarkably stunted.

You don't want to think, what would Preston Sturges or Alexander Payne do with this material? But there is a seed of satirical cynicism in this movie that a smart, clear mind could have finessed. Jake Kasdan is not that director. He doesn't appear to know what to do.

One of those movies that an audience knows is terrible the minute it starts.

New Year's Eve is fun in the way that eating at a buffet is fun. It's two hours of foods that have nothing to do with each other piled high on a plate because it was too cheap to resist.

It's got both a soap opera plotline and a Chuck Norris-load of taxpayer-financed gadgets and gear. It also has Reese Witherspoon in another terrible part.

Heartlessness, stupidity, cynicism, and greed are a demoralizing combination for movie-going. We pay to see a movie that doesn't respect us for being there at all.

It's not that Jenna Fischer is miscast in A Little Help. It's that she's mis-everything else: misused, misdirected, misanthropic.

This is a terrible little movie even by the standards of the genre.

Even by the standards of mental-institution-movie misogyny, what an accidental but predictable creepshow this is.

None of what we see is at all credible.

The movie wants us to find this frightening, but there's no suspense, no terrifying images.

A moronic exercise in supernatural claptrap.

I'm afraid this is one of THOSE movies, one where ''plot" is another word for ''gratuitous sex scene."

A horror film whose only scare is that it was made at all... As with so many stupid horror movies in these post-''Scream" times, this one is at such a creative loss that all it can do is make its audience feel duped for having purchased a ticket.

At its least intolerable, the movie is a fatherhood freak-out.

It's not as bad as the average Hollywood movie, it's stupendously worse.

The result is a unique time at the art house: a work whose badness becomes guiltily pleasurable, like a Harlequin romance novel masquerading as a dissertation.

The movie fails to conjure the wonder of the Ray Bradbury short story that inspired it.

The product of immaturity. It approaches suffering with a meaninglessness that must be a luxury for anyone who has never lost anyone, or is incapable of empathizing with someone who has.

Even by the lowest standards, this is a frightless, cynically made movie.

Tens of millions of dollars were spent to tell us what we should have known going in: that the makers of the movie you're slogging through will spare no expense to demonstrate how much they hate us. Do us a favor. Tell them the feeling is mutual.

The willful sloppiness and retrograde gags make Epic Movie, which was not shown to critics, an inevitable byproduct of our Internet video era. It seems downloaded and projected onto the screen, a failing online-film-school project paid for and put out by a Hollywood movie studio. That said, very little on YouTube is this unentertaining.

Long-delayed, pitiful excuse for a horror film.

Just watch Austin on "WrestleMania" instead, avoiding the shower this movie leaves you wanting.

As it develops, Who's Your Caddy? just becomes depressing. You want to alert the United Negro College Fund: A mind has terribly gone to waste.

Getting to the true root of his evil may necessitate "Saw LX."

You want to make lemonade from this, but even the lemons stink.

One Missed Call was originally a so-so Takashi Miike freak-out. Now it's a worse-worse American eyesore.

Over Her Dead Body is to romantic comedy what Spam is to meat. But at least with Spam, you get cool packaging.

When Jamie Lee Curtis ran from a killer in 1980's "Prom Night," she was 22 and had a unique gift for belting out fear. She was the Beverly Sills of slasher flicks. That "Prom Night" was dumb, but it wasn't insulting in the way this remake is.

A horror film with a moral. No matter how nasty a gang of murderers is, the moviemaker calling the shots is ultimately worse.

The grime, filth, slop, vomit, and crotch-nibbling pigs double all too easily as a recipe for this movie's failure. It hasn't been made so much as excreted.

Bangkok Dangerous is bad without lifting a finger toward interesting. The trouble with it is that the people who've made it don't appear to understand life enough to allow any of it into their movie. This is an airless affair.

Oh, Jigsaw. Here we go again. You kill. I doze off. Someone at the studio goes "ka-ching!"

The Unborn joins a growing glut of Holocaust- and Nazi-themed material -- "Valkyrie," "Defiance" - that are long on posturing, suppositions, and righteousness, yet short on moral complexity. Nazism and its crimes have lately inspired theme parks more than actual movies. Too many rides on that roller coaster and I feel sick.

Looks like something stubbed out in an ashtray.

Another helping of egregious slicing and slashing.

The writers don’t write, the director doesn’t really direct, and the actors don’t exactly act. They wait for the movie’s contraptions to impale them.

The movie crassly repurposes tragedy to excuse its cliches.

At some point, I just tired of looking at all the nicely composed shots unworthy of the stock they're printed on. Lives are at stake here, and I don't mean Julia's and her annoying pals'. I mean the lives of you and me, the only pronouns that really matter here.

Banderas slums through this dollar-bin action flick wearing the same look of wiped-out exasperation that Danny Glover's Sergeant Murtaugh sports in each installment of ''Lethal Weapon.'' And like Murtaugh, Banderas might be too old for this, too.

A stupendous bore.

Cosmic slop.

The only chills to be found are courtesy of your theater's central air, and the suspense will come from the wait to see which disappointed kid in a hockey mask will be the first to slash the screen.

Clueless and sad.

Godsend makes swill of religion, science, family, and morality. It has the sensitivity of a cactus, the ingenuity of a square wheel, and the integrity of a CEO.

Most atrocious movies build into their badness, as lacks of talent, ideas, self-confidence, or a total hatred of an audience, are revealed. This one gets it out of the way up front and never looks back.

This prequel has something to appall everybody.

There's no real journalism here, just the sort of appalling revisionism that can turn a bloodbath into a beach party.

Yes, I've seen Dumb and Dumberer, so you don't have to. As good deeds go, this is about as significant as getting a cat out of a tree, but believe me, you're better off at home, alphabetizing your old comic books, talking to your parents, or watching paint dry.

Man on Fire is ponderous and bloated, dragging the Bible and Giannini into its swirling cesspool. Scott can't give the movie any real emotional weight. And Washington gives his first lifeless performance.

Every ounce of the film feels artificially upbeat.

It's the sort of stupid swill that gets spewed out by a studio committee, slapped together without a brain, a heart, or a good idea about where to put a camera or when to cut a scene.

Like so many movies with a keypad for a brain, Resident Evil: Apocalypse is another exercise in making us feel the irritation associated with having to stand behind some game hack for our turn to play.

We’ve just been treated like a fire hydrant.

This is another miserable movie about women at war over nonsense.

The dismemberment and torture are now shtick. The filmmakers - "Saw" veterans - struggle to imbue this movie with the usual righteousness.

It's a crude, queasy, ugly remake of a crude, queasy, ugly, yet artistically superior 40-year-old Sam Peckinpah movie.

The movie is terrible partly because it's badly written, directed, and conceived and partly because it lacks the necessarily thematic coherence to accomplish proselytism of any kind.

All the makers of Texas Chainsaw 3D cared about was getting your $16.

Amid the dumbness and disgust for paying customers, the movie does manage to cough up something I didn't expect: a performance so terrible you can't quite believe it's happening: Bentley's.

They have the chemistry of step-siblings, so a movie that has them make out is, as the one of the few girls in the theater exclaimed, "so gross."

Really, all Six is going for, with the generous application of both hardware supplies to the skin and feces to the camera, is a tired commentary on his shallow talents: They're excremental.