A mistaken message is a price a filmmaker pays when he tries to load weighty themes like the cycle of violence on an overgrown boy who scoots around on a bicycle.

Its pleasures are slight and fleeting, and so many movies have done what it does, and done it much better, that there's nothing to get even remotely excited about - much less to draw audiences into theaters.

8 Women would probably be a looser, giddier salute to show-biz ideas of femininity if it were performed by eight drag queens.

Brain-softener.

Plays like Abbott and Costello Meet Conan the Barbarian.

The best thing about Black Knight is when it finally says goodnight.

And Witherspoon? She does the American equivalent of a mechanical British performance: She hits every note too perfectly. There's no shadow to her smile.

Like Adam Sandler's "Mr. Deeds," this is a hybrid, hipster-cornball movie that wants to celebrate common folk but unapologetically uses words like "trailer trash" to describe them.

An uninteresting take on a tired formula that is only occasionally funny and usually pretty gross.

Rock Star neither touches a raw nerve nor garners any resonance as a period piece. You'd be better off renting "This is Spinal Tap."

Ends up neither fish nor fowl. It's a misanthrope's "E.T."

For grownups, this treacle is going to be pretty hard to swallow.

If it worked, The Fast and the Furious would put viewers in the same position as the policeman protagonist, attracted to speed but appalled by crime. Instead it sentences you to an hour and a half in a high-decibel limbo.

The movie goes awry from the opening shots.

S.W.A.T. may be an acronym for Special Weapons and Tactics, but by the end of this routine melodrama, it might as well stand for Standard Whacking and Trashing.

To be fair, Friedkin does amp up the tension when called for. If only it were all for some purpose, or in service to a story that actually went somewhere.

A violent, dumb, offensive mess.

Tries to rock our world, but it regresses to a single-celled B-movie.

It's not hell, but limbo, junior high-school style.

Nolan pushes the twilight-zone atmosphere so hard that it loses its capacity for mystery. When it's not assaulting us with jolting audiovisual expressions of fatigue, this movie plays like a pedestrian response to David Lynch's effortlessly eerie "Twin Peaks."

Busy, over-stylized mess of a movie.

The material has a definite "haven't-we-been over-this-before?" feel.

Pious, high-minded and bad history.

Of Madonna's considerable talents, making the camera love her isn't one: The screen seems to go dead every time she's on it.

So what do we have here? Lots of cars going very fast.

Painstakingly painful.

How does an embarrassment of riches turn into mere embarrassment?

The apotheosis of adolescent junk. Every sequence spews or splats carnage-filled effects. It's over-the-top, but not pleasurably so -- it's calculatedly over-the-top. The only way to get off on it is to revel in its prodigal waste of materiel.

The only question is how many levels of meaning can be plumbed from the phrase "Let's party!"

As shallow and manipulative a movie as any that come to mind.

Formless, feckless, mindless, directionless and at times stunningly humorless.

A hollow excuse for an erotic mystery.

Too bad this movie is more tepid than the average Snipes potboiler and even rustier than his mindless Blade pictures.

It's the oddest case yet of the Emperor's New Clothes. After all, the Emperor in the fairy tale was naked. This movie has tons of fabulous clothing. The people disappear within their wardrobes.

Movie lite, a clueless, formulaic paint-by-numbers comedy.

It seems that in the movies, at least, there is a limit to how far low expectations can take you.

The dramatic content in Memento is as blank as Leonard's post-traumatic mental state.

American art movies rarely come fancier or emptier than Northfork, a down-home arabesque made of angel fluff.

Needs a story.

A hollow, relentless mess.

Wonderland marks a "biopic" first: Moviegoers will know less about the real-life subject going out than they did going in.

Simply go out and rent the original. In the thin ranks of killer-power-tool flicks, it's still the standard to beat.

Never persuasively dramatize the agony, ecstasy and intricacy of composing poetry. Without that aesthetic component, all you see is that Plath's hunger for life couldn't compete with her death wish.

Beyond Borders keeps angling for a peace prize; it might have won more hearts and minds if it came together as a movie.

Lackluster in narrative and in no way original or innovative, the movie is pretty much generic Disney, a film about universal brotherhood stitched together from parts that worked better in other films.

A return to form -- bad form. Lifeless, unimaginative and almost determinedly uninspired, it's paint-by-numbers filmmaking at its dreariest.

The result is a flabby, episodic phantasmagoria.

In this movie, when the honeymoon is over it's really over.

Torque isn't a movie, it's an 81-minute soda commercial.

So, here's the problem with The Butterfly Effect: It's silly.

The astonishing brio and verve of street dancing deserves better than this.

What's wrong with Latter Days is that its banter is pedestrian and its lessons forced.

Gibson mounts a convincing crucifixion, but his victim is the audience. The Passion of the Christ aims its metallic cat-o'-nine-tails at the viewers' nerves.

The serial-killer thriller of the week, should have gotten a life of its own instead of trying to steal it from Michael Pye's novel of the same name and several other movies.

Hanks tries his hand at a king-size heartless comic role, and flubs it terribly. He looks slack and pasty and, what's worse, sounds slack and pasty.

Lame.

Failed marital farce.

The biggest crime of Van Helsing is that it resurrects classic monsters and fails to make them scary. With a full 132 minutes of feeble jokes and gimcrack phantasmagoria, it's not spine-tingling - it's butt-numbing.

By the end, this movie's balancing act is the equivalent of network news' equal-time laws. The "fairness" becomes deadening.

Two of the most insistently unlikable movie creations to afflict audiences in some time, a pair of self-obsessed anti-romanticists who spend some two decades doing stupid things at each other's behest. They also whine a lot.

Garfield the comic strip stopped being funny about 10 years ago. Garfield the Movie makes it to about the 10-minute mark before tedium sets in.

Heaven knows what the suits at Disney were thinking, for what they ended up with was a bland Jackie Chan movie and a lifeless travelogue.

This new version may be closer to the Cole Porter biography, but it's hardly any more true to life. There is no life in this movie. It's a brittle contraption of a biopic.

The story is without an original thought, the characters little more than caricatures (unappealing ones, at that) and the filmmaking so uninspired that it's hard to imagine anyone embracing it with anything more than a shrug and a wonder why they didn't wait to catch it on TV.

Catwoman is a mess, there's really no other way to describe it... It doesn't work as high art, and it's too ponderous to be truly high camp. As a fashion shoot for the pin-up crowd, however, it's the cat's meow.

A mess, but it means well.

Congratulations, Renny Harlin. You've successfully exorcised all the horror out of The Exorcist.

Christmas with the Kranks is so calculated that it's pathetic, a warm-hearted holiday greeting card with not one scintilla of honest emotion inside.

You don't want to look at anything else when Zeta-Jones is on-screen.

As a romance, Spanglish is like a wholesome flirt who drags things out and becomes a tiresome tease. As a satire of upper-middle-class Los Angeles, it's a disaster.

Meet the Fockers? Avoid them would be a better suggestion.

Kids, except for the very youngest, are going to be bored.

Overblown sanctimony and sentimentalism as corny as the Fourth of July.

If you put the word Tired first, it would perfectly describe the movie.

The result is as flat as a year-old beer commercial.

Giamatti provides those small moments of triumph that Duets pretends to celebrate but instead stifles with its sense of superiority.

Most of the film is one big blooper reel. There's not enough of a gap between the rejects and the finished movie.

Whatever spark the newer Precinct 13 has comes from its supporting players.

There's nothing about The Wedding Date that isn't forced or labored; there's only a stubborn determination to embrace every cliche and make sure the stars photograph well.

It's disconcerting to see Ferrell, a master of macho psychosis, adopt the stop-and-go dithering of Woody Allen-style neurosis.

The residents of Beauty Shop never quite gel. Instead of camaraderie, the feeling is one of bare tolerance.

All this is out of the Haunted House 101 textbook.

All the characters are writ in broad strokes, making it impossible to sympathize with, much less relate to, anyone.

There's no irony within the film, but there's a whopping irony surrounding it. Just as Star Wars has finally ended, Rocky seems to be starting all over again.

It's hard to know what these stars are ready for after this fiasco. Maybe a fitness video.

At least The Honeymooners is not one of those remakes that looks bad compared to the original. It's just bad, period.

As sweet and hopeless and silly as a doting dad framing his second-grader's latest finger-painting and calling it a Matisse.

This movie makes it official: No matter how awful, even the networks and basic cable are now officially hipper than the studios.

Forget chemistry: There's no biology to the star casting.

Roos suffers from fallen archness in his interminable new movie Happy Endings. He wants to be mischievous and ambitious and "human," all at the same time. He ends up with delusions of tragicomic grandeur that leave an audience fed up and dissatisfied.

There's little that's special about Underclassman, certainly nothing that Murphy and Eddie Griffin haven't done better in movies far funnier than this.

Unfortunately, nothing in it rings with the faintest tinkle of truth.

Luhrmann steals good ideas, fair ideas and terrible ideas - anything that once moved him when he was a little boy. He's turned Australia into a more-than-you-can-eat buffet of colorful kitsch.

The film's storytelling and image-making lack originality and vitality. Nothing sticks to your memory unless you come in with recollections of the book.

The movie plays like a dunk-the-clown game at a carnival. Through intent or ineptitude, he sets up the Bush family and administrations as caricatures.

The only reason to see Nights in Rodanthe is to check in with Diane Lane.

Starts out mixing social burlesques and melodrama and ends up one more failed thriller about men behaving badly - and stupidly.

This Women doesn't take place in reality or even in a glamorous urban fantasyland. It's strictly TV Land.

Under the guidance of Jon Avnet, they're (De Niro/Pacino) both playing New York police detectives - partners, no less - in the cop-and-serial-killer tale Righteous Kill, and they're thunderously mediocre.

What kills Max Payne is that the characters think and feel in slow motion. Half the time, mentally, they're just running in place.

It's hard to go wrong with a movie full of talking dogs. But the makers of Beverly Hills Chihuahua sure try.

It's no compliment to say a movie is "all of a piece" if the piece is all worn out. For all its surface harshness, this movie is a star vehicle at once rickety and cozy.

Revolutionary Road isn't just a failed literary adaptation. It's a failure of the worst kind: It doesn't even make you want to read Richard Yates' deservedly legendary book.

Look, I love dogs. But this film tried my patience almost beyond endurance.

This film isn't an enjoyable martial-arts extravaganza like "District B-13" or the "Transporter" films.

The problem with Confessions of a Shopaholic isn't conspicuous consumption. It's ostentatious idiocy.

But The Ugly Truth can't escape its own ugly truth, that the central characters are written to extremes both ludicrous and tiring.

The Hangover is like an infernal comedy machine. Surrender your soul to its foul mesh of cheap cleverness and vulgarity. and you howl like a delighted demon. Resist, and you feel all sense and sensibility being crushed in its cogs.

Will pop your eyes without tickling your funny bone.

17 Again errs not only by covering such well-trod ground, but also by doing so through a main character - played by a game but ill-served Zac Efron - who's about as dense as they come.

Sheila Bernette, as an aged pickpocket, is less a stereotype than an escapee from some provincial British comedy of the early 1950s. But she steals necklaces and knickknacks with such finesse and gusto that she also steals the movie.

The low points in this movie aren't just catastrophic: they're bewildering.

The only hope for Inglourious Basterds is that audiences will embrace it the way the Broadway crowd did "Springtime for Hitler": because it's so bad they think it's good.

The latest failed Hollywood attempt to make a movie from a video game.

Was the Swedish director, Mikael Hafstrom, taking revenge on the American star system?

The surefire laugh-getter centers on using a tampon to stop a nosebleed. Watching this movie, I had to hope it could stop brain-drain.

It's hard, bordering on impossible, to evaluate this movie without stepping on people's beliefs.

The second movie, Dead Man's Chest, is everything you feared the first would be: a theme-park spectacle lasting 2 1/2 hours.

At least "White Chicks" had a point behind the humor.

If you're not a fan of M. Night Shyamalan's convoluted, teasing thrillers, you'll find that getting into this movie is like cracking a puzzle in which the constructor keeps breaking his own rules or grabbing new ones from ultra-thin air.

Forget any hope of raffish adventure if you think of seeing Flyboys.

By the end, it doesn't even have the courage of its political incorrectness.

A catastrophically messy action-movie mash-up.

A movie made at wits' end. There are four or five authentic laughs in the whole 170-minute extravaganza.

The Loss of Sexual Innocence is belabored, pretentious and often willfully opaque. [25 Jun 1999]

Formulaic 'Chuck & Larry' is a crass, unfulfilling effort.

A ham-fisted cautionary tale of religious fanaticism that would have been hooted out of even 19th-century theaters as melodrama of the most lurid kind.

The movie has nothing to offer except titillation.

Is there anything more pathetic than a movie that will do anything for a laugh or a tear that doesn't get any laughs or tears?

It's as if all the digital tools of new millennial filmmaking fell into the hands of men who had less storytelling sense than a campfire bard or a cave painter.

In this film, Soderbergh appears to judge the actors by how well they spew or swallow bile.

Goes straight to hell, and in this case it is its own handbasket.

The script is drippy, humor-free and old-fashioned:

Bottom line: Juwanna Mann is a drag - in every sense of the word.

As ugly, excessive and vulgar as "The Usual Suspects" was stylish, subtle and suave.

It's as if the book itself has been locked up and institutionalized, forced to conform to a system that all but obliterates its own unique personality.

A gigantic mess.

Pleasantly meanders around a group of people who pitch projects and pitch woo on the Riviera.

The vocal canines appear for about 30 humorous seconds, in a dream sequence, and are then never seen again. Unfortunately, the same can't be said about the rest of the film, which runs an additional 98.5 excruciating minutes.

Why would anyone pay to see this movie?

Collateral Damage isn't jingoistic; it also isn't exciting. It's a depressed rabble-rouser.

A mean-hearted, ham-handed and gratuitous effort to exploit it's teenage audience's conviction that, underneath it all, their teachers really. do hate them.

A raunchy, remorseless "Curious George."

Lowbrow humor is one thing...but Love Stinks sinks the bar beyond comprehension.

Solondz is still stuck in an adenoidal whine.

The One is all sound and fury, and nothing else.

Just another tepid entry into this year's Death-as-Turn-On Sweepstakes.

Catherine Breillat's pretentious, meandering, self-indulgent portrait of a libidinously deprived young woman is nothing more than pornography tricked out as feminist parable.

Too bad you can see this sort of thing done more amusingly every week on ABC-TV and Comedy Central.

This dialogue isn't helped by two actors who look terrific but can barely choke out a word that sounds remotely authentic or spontaneous.

Must be among the most blatantly manipulative movies ever made. It's cold, calculated and treats its audience like its robotic central character.

So witless it wins most of its laughs when Czech-speaking characters spout obscenities that get translated into English subtitles.

Takes a literary milestone of ambiguity and makes everything about it blisteringly obvious.

A tired piece of hackery, made only slightly less distasteful by a couple of inspired moments from supporting player Alan Cumming.

Here's hoping your own dreams of Africa are more interesting -- and better acted -- than this movie.

To top it off, the ending is a clumsy cheat. Of course, I was rooting for the news gal to expire and the film to die a quick death.

A mess.

Avary has taken a pig's ear of a book and turned it into a pig's ear of a movie.

Stay away from this movie. Brainless cartoonish violence.

An odd little movie. And not in a good way.

The movie bobbles along on a weird, soft-edged sarcasm.

The less said the better.

There's a funny movie struggling inside of Dickie Roberts: Former Child Star. Too bad it never gets out.

The desert is clean in Gerry, but it's also empty.

Ultimately groans under the weight of its own quiet gorgeousness.

There's something junior varsity about the whole sensibility that makes the new version seem more dated than the old one.

By the end, Pootie Tang feels as long as Kevin Costner's "Wyatt Earp."

Life as a House mounts a brutally insensitive attack on its audience's sensitivities.

Adam Sandler does Frank Capra wrong. His unfunny remake stomps all over the honest values and endearing qualities of the original.

The Emperor's Club is a beautiful fraud -- as gracefully proportioned as a Christopher Wren academy, yet as devoid of content as a prep-school promo film.

The only way sober adults will keep awake is wondering how the lead mobsters on "The Sopranos" -- who also are amateur film critics -- will rank the movie next year on HBO.

To call Death to Smoochy satire -- or parody, burlesque, or even lampoon -- would be too generous. The moviemakers merely glide on the thin ice of yesterday's cynicism.

The collateral damage of action products like Ballistic is to the sensibility of the audience.

Fails to meld suspense and farce or to bring even the wildest pursuits and smash-ups any visual sense of comedy.

A very funny movie ... in some alternate universe, maybe.

Aimless and unfocused.

A misfire in almost every direction.

Not enough to keep Clockstoppers from turning viewers into clock-watchers.

The only bits worth watching are the scenes where Olsen is in full Carrey mode and Richardson is doing his best Jeff Daniels. The spot-on impersonations take the mind off the plot, the poo-poo gags, the clunky chase scene and the ripped-off finale.

If you do insist on seeing this film, don't arrive late: the clever, animated opening credits are a stitch, suggesting a sprightliness of touch and winsome wickedness of tone that's missing from the rest of the movie.

A brain-dead buddy-movie tearjerker with semi-tasteful romance and tasteful gore mixed in with the derring-do.

The film is so busy that every minute is exhausting. It's as if the filmmakers were idealistic teen-agers afflicted with a group case of Attention Deficit Disorder.

This chick flick never should have made it out of the incubator.

This kind of fiasco turns movie critics into so many Night Stalkers.

The plot is as thin and confusing as it sounds.

What we have here is a film where the first 20 minutes are repeated again and again until everything comes to an absolutely predictable end.

How can we make the entire movie disappear?

How did an embarrassment of comic-book riches become simply an embarrassment as a movie?

What's more annoying than the screenplay's relentless assaultiveness is its odd, sordid cuteness.

Fanaro's script never really hones in on the concept's potential.

This movie doesn't play; it just lies there, waiting to be kicked around by anyone unfortunate enough to have shelled out good money to see it.

Oh, this is all so terribly not good.

The indisputably gifted Jim Carrey shows the side of him that just wants to be loved - the Riddler on Ritalin, the Mask unmasked. And it turns out to be stultifying.

Hands-down, the best James Brolin-in-an-Italian-accent movie ever.

With its incomprehensible plot, flat visual style and indecipherably mixed messages (violence is good; no, wait, violence is bad!), this movie seems chiefly to be an excuse to sell even more trading cards.

Indeed, Scream is better than the average slasher film, as its advertisers insist. And, indeed, it is probably Wes Craven's best film, as they also insist. But that is a little like saying the pimple on the left side of your nose is "better" than the pimple on the right side.

Ghost Ship would have been so much better if they'd just let the ship do more of the acting.

Stupid. Illogical. Simplistic. Pandering. And those are its good points.

There's a movie opening today that is so indistinctive I can barely remember its name.

Isn't a full-bodied comedy, and it isn't a bona fide action movie, either. It just makes a facetious spectacle of itself.

Not since Rocky II has there been a more blatant attempt to recapitulate a box-office hit without adding any new attraction or appeal.

The bottom line is that the studio's marketing strategy is just a tad incomplete. Instead of hiding Pinocchio from critics, Miramax should have hidden it from everyone.

Irreversible, though, is not a Kubrickian head trip. All Noe has come up with is a turn-on for sadists.

Equilibrium doesn't tread softly on our dreams; it tramples them.

Excruciating...The movie proves to be singularly unfunny and static almost from the non-get-go. Virtually nothing happens; the movie is all premise.

In the Cut is a disaster. Familiar to the bone, arty on the surface, it could serve as the doomed pilot for a nightmare TV spinoff: Law & Order: Literary Victims Unit.

The film itself is an exercise in frustration.

Dr. Seuss' The Cat in the Hat is gorged with shtick and gadgetry. When it comes to highlighting everything better left in the dark, it makes even the Matrix sequels look like works of genius.