Lapica isn't yet enough of a writer or director (or an actor) to make the dramatic arc unpredictable in any way. It may be effective for some as therapy. It is far less so as cinematic storytelling.

As a pocket history of the battles over Jerusalem in the ’40s, O Jerusalem is serviceable enough. But all the melodrama cheapens the real drama, and turns a war-torn region into a soap-opera stage.

I find Lars and the Real Girl adorable in the worst way, bailed out only by most every member of its excellent cast.

All you want from a movie like this, really, is a little brainless fun, and it keeps holding out on you. Everyone looks fatigued. Even Cage’s toupee seems ambivalent about having signed on for a sequel.

While director Eric Valette provides the occasional chill, the disturbing spooks aren't enough to make this boat float. Burns sleepwalks through One Missed Call totally devoid of charisma, and Sossamon muddles along, going through the motions.

Diane Keaton--now there’s a trouper for you. She will not be caught giving less than 110 percent, even in a drab little heist comedy.

CJ7 is roughly as grating as that “Flubber” remake.

The latest, Untraceable, owes everything to “Lambs,” and to “Se7en,” and to all the “Lambs” and “Se7en” knockoffs made by directors less talented than Jonathan Demme and David Fincher. In addition to being dull, the Portland, Ore. -set Untraceable is a monster hypocrite, wagging its finger at the mass audience’s appetite for strictly regimented, “creative” torture scenarios.

Jumper, the film, goes everywhere and nowhere.

The court scenes are rarely funny, either in the trash talk or the slapstick.

As generic as its title, College Road Trip feels like a first draft, the one the studio brings to the rewrite team that, in this case, never got hired.

Despite honorable work from Theron, Robb and Stahl, Sleepwalking makes good on its title in a not-so-good way.

Moving slowly these days, Reynolds does less than no acting in this role, and he’s still the best thing in Deal.

Dempsey's pleasant enough, but he hasn't yet learned how to play against a mediocre script's obviousness. Monaghan has, which is gratifying.

The screenplay by Dana Fox (she was one of the rewriters of "27 Dresses") devolves into a series of humiliating pranks that always give the upper narrative hand to the male lead. Talk about depressing. I mean, that's what male screenwriters are for--to unfairly stack the deck against the female leads.

Staggers and wanders and feels far longer than its 85 minutes, and it's best considered a calling card for better things to come.

After the insufferably dense mermaid mythology of "Lady in the Water," Shyamalan clearly wanted to keep things simple. He whizzed straight past "simple" to simplistic.

The Love Guru”does not bring out Myer's best, and aside from a deft early Bollywood parody, there’s nothing visually to help the fun along.

Not even Smith's charisma can mitigate the chaos that is Hancock.

The film has one objective: to smack its audience in the face with fleeting, competing wows, over and over.

It wanders and putters and follows its main characters around.

On your deathbed you will want back the time it takes to see this one.

It's almost always rewarding to watch an underdog triumph--what else could explain why movies exactly like this keep being made?--but Longshots is one underdog that's hard to love and harder still to champion.

The appeal of the film version, such as it is, relates almost entirely to eye-for-an-eye, severed-limb-for-a-limb vengeance, two hours and 41 minutes of it, with just enough solemnity to make anyone who thought "The Dark Knight" was a little gassy think twice about which superhero myth THEY'RE calling gassy.

It's a seriously withholding action comedy, stingy on the wit, charm, jokes, narrative satisfactions and animals with personalities sharp enough for the big screen, either in 2-D or 3-D.

The movie itself is hyperactive and a jumble.

It's a high-powered cast, but it has painfully little to work with, apart from widely varying humor.

Ritchie, who shoots and cuts everything in RocknRolla like an ad for a particularly greasy brand of fragrance for men, delivers the beatings and killings in his trademark atmosphere of morally weightless flash.

It's rather sweet to think of Filth and Wisdom as Madonna's reconnection to her own boho Manhattan striver self a generation ago, and I did enjoy the last five minutes or so, when the movie essentially stopped and Hutz's band, Gogol Bordello, took over.

Sean Anders' derivative gross-out movie Sex Drive is easier to take if you accept that the answer to every baffling plot question is "because it’s a teen sex comedy."

I enjoyed Eliza Dushku's mad poetess, probably for the wrong reasons, but with a project this meager, you take your artful sneers and scenic diversions where you can get them.

Seven Pounds has a heart as big as all outdoors. Unfortunately it's made out of high-fructose bull.

Bride Wars really does not capture the mood of the moment. It comes from a different time, a different planet.

This material is offensive. The film may end with a straight-faced reassurance that "no actual Torah scrolls were destroyed or damaged in the making of this motion picture," but it's perfectly willing to exploit the Holocaust for cheap, weak thrills.

Some of the players comport themselves better than others--Barrymore is sweetly wistful in her minor role, while Johansson, as a confident go-getter who sets out to steal her crush object rather than moon over him, is sexier than the whole cast put together.

Director Paul McGuigan ("Lucky Number Slevin") has never been keen on plot logic, and that might be fine here if he offered anything other than Peter Sova's lush images of Hong Kong.

A thin, largely unfunny comedy that marries lazy filmmaking with bad timing.

This new Friday the 13th, unquestionably savvier and snappier than the original "Friday the 13th," though just as useless, is a needed return to simplicity.

Feels about 150 years out of date.

Astonishingly, Angels & Demons IS the same sort of lumbering mediocrity.

The film is awkwardly stitched together from candy-gloss arena concert footage and somewhat grimier-looking backstage/limo/hotel room moments. There is no attempt to make it all hang together as an organic whole.

It's tough to get on board with these monsters. They don't get the banter they--or we--deserve, and the screenwriters lean on wearying stereotypes.

Noisy, cut into a head-snapping blur with little room for Cena to even try showing emotion, 12 Rounds is an occasionally exciting but always empty experience.

A coming-of-ager that nearly slaughters you by minute 30 with the relentlessness of its protagonist's voiceovers.

The movie's heart, of course, is with poor addled Mike and his kids, but 17 Again works only fitfully to make the Efron/Perry character worth a story.

Ferrell may well shoulder the blame for Land of the Lost, even if he doesn't deserve it. He did, however, willingly participate in this coarse, sloppy big-screen version of the old Saturday-morning time-warp adventure.

Fox's cleavage is the only camera object that catches Bay's attention for more than a millisecond.

Easy Virtue may be a bauble, as Larita's described at one point, but Coward's examination of hypocrisy demands real skill. The style should suggest "whipped cream with knives," as Stephen Sondheim once described "A Little Night Music." Elliott's film is more like curdled milk with a spork.

How big a bastard can Woody Allen build a screenplay around and still generate a modicum of audience goodwill? The answer: not this big.

The pacing throughout is languid. Your eye becomes fixated on the hideous 70s wallpaper behind them. If only the story's interstellar narrative developments had the intensity of that wallpaper. Rod Serling might've gotten a great hour out of it (the story, that is, not the wallpaper). It simply is not two hours' worth, no matter how many quantum leaps into the unknown Kelly takes.

I wish the movie made emotional sense, because it’s all about getting in touch with whatever’s holding you back, but it doesn’t.

It's a serious drag to see how Ritchie has turned Holmes and Dr. Watson into a couple of garden-variety thugs.

Not so much character-driven as character-dragged--against its will.

Numbingly gory when it isn’t just plain numbing.

There’s nothing wrong with All About Steve that a rewrite couldn’t fix, as long as the rewrite involved a different writer, a different character and a different story.

This is “True Lies” without the striptease or the Arab-maiming.

The scenery's nice. But once you've said the scenery's nice, you're no longer talking about a movie worth talking about.

The poster’s the funniest thing about the project: Johnson, sporting a pair of fairy wings larger than his forearms, glaring at the camera.

Certain scenes in When in Rome signify nothing less than the death of screen slapstick, but I’m hoping it’s one of those fake-out movie deaths where it’s not really dead, not forever.

The acting's not the problem, and it's a nice thing to find Moore playing a human-scaled human being, with a recognizable human touch. The material has a hint of it too. But only a hint.

We have to take the sexual tension on faith, as with everything in this formulaic glob of a script.

It may well be a hit, but me, I'm waiting for "Iron Man 2."

The film is perfectly mediocre, which is heartbreaking, not heartwarming.

A weak romantic comedy.

As robust and clever an actor as Cox is, he can't make Jacques any less of a blowhard; Kari's wit simply doesn't come through in English, at least with this script.

The tragedy is that the performance comes to nothing. Nearly everything else in the film is vile.

Knight and Day may well suffice for audiences desperate for the bankable paradox known as the predictable surprise, and willing to overlook a galumphing mediocrity in order to concentrate on matters of dentistry.

For me, the mechanics or even the (excellent) designs are not enough. Jeunet's archness keeps conventional empathy or engagement at bay, and by design maintains a tone of artificiality.

The British intelligence operation at Bletchley Park that cracked the Enigma code is truly the stuff of great drama. But that story doesn't offer Matt LeBlanc in a wig and heels.

There's nothing original about the father-son conflict that forms the core of the film, nor is there enough suspense and drama.

The film's crude humor and violence -- cartoonish, but still violent -- should offend parents of younger kids. Yet its ultra-broad, pratfall-filled comedy will satisfy only the most indiscriminate teens.

The situations and jokes are as predictable and as lowbrow as the endless pratfalls the boys take in their high heels.

Like its parade of predecessors, this Halloween is a gory slash-fest. It can't escape its past, and it doesn't want to.

The Last Airbender (they couldn't use the series' "Avatar" title because another film got there first, without all the bending) is more about marshaling extras and interpolating tons of computer-generated effects and keeping the factions straight. It's a tough sit.

What could have been a juicy, pulpy noir, based loosely on the real-life 1976 Mustang Ranch love triangle involving Joe and Sally Conforte and Sally's boxer paramour, instead has the dramatic consistency of rice milk.

Amiable Gooding still smiles through it all, weathering the cold, physical abuse and implied racism, doing his best to make his audience believe that Snow Dogs isn't offensive mush. But he can't bring it off.

A pair of decent performances does not a movie make, however, as Mazur and Giovinazzo are surrounded by fourth-tier actors (Ventresca and Steven Bauer) and spotty directing of a mediocre script.

Against the rest of his dramatically flimsy crew, Snipes' sunglasses-at-midnight strut conveys an almost lifelike sheen. Almost. He's more alive than the movie, which is dead on arrival.

Worth your time and money? Fuhgeddaboutit.

Jason X conjures up more giggles than scares, assuming you make it through the first 15 minutes.

If "American Beauty" were a bland comedy, it would be Joe Somebody.

As scary and minor-chord heavy as FearDotCom can be, there's no big payoff, no logical resolution.

Offers the most onscreen explosions in recent memory. It's almost pornography for arsonists.

With Clockstoppers, Frakes hobbles along with a high-concept film that doesn't live up to its potential.

Black delivers the best line (“Do you want me to get naked and start the revolution?”), and Lithgow scores a giggle for calling his ex-wife “coyote ugly” to her face, but neither of them can disguise this lemon.

Neither drama nor comedy, Summer Catch is a long, slow lob of a movie that never crosses the plate.

This low-budget comedy will most likely try the patience of a paying audience with its uneven pacing, wavering tone and poor production quality.

Were it not for young star Amanda Bynes' energetic good nature in the face of drab dialogue and wooden stereotypes, What a Girl Wants might have been a career-ending movie violation rather than just an embarrassing fender-bender.

Serves as both an homage to and shameless thief of its influences. The result: a sprawling, deformed, undisciplined piece of cinema that hobbles along on weak, genre-splicing tactics.

When a movie keeps repeating its title, you know it's a stinker.

Like all B-movies (or in this case, pseudo B-movies), "Skeleton" contains sparkling moments of promise and camp performance.

Is it a political movie? Yes. A movie with strong ideas and issues? Yes. But propaganda with its heart in the right place is still propaganda, and seldom easy to watch.

Ultimately, Stateside ends up a diluted, scattered drama--less than the sum of its parts, but with an impressive cameo list.

Might be justified as "mindless fun" if it weren't for the acute lack of fun in its 93 minutes.

Jakes' characters are points to be made, flesh and blood cautionary tales that don't particularly feel human. His dialogue, even in the mouths of Michelle and her troubled mother, sounds as if it comes straight from the pulpit.

Worst of all, though, is the movie's moral maneuvering.

Tries hard to be sweet but plays like "Pollyanna" with fleas.

Against "Whale Rider's" well-acted, intimate story, Gordon's film feels like an endless spiral of sub-par soap-opera acting, mired in trite, predictable dialogue.

If "Mean Girls" was Lohan's debutante ball, "Herbie" sits her back at the kiddie table. She's matured, and no longer fits in the Disney mold.

Even as slapstick, it's a major snoozefest.

Though The Kid & I falters as both a comedy and an After School Special, it works as a rather touching episode of "This is Your Life," with a parade of cameos from Arnold's career that'll coax a sniffle or two from his family.

Anytime Jaa isn't on screen, The Protector sputters.

Sometimes, you can use a smaller devil to catch the Devil, the movie suggests. But in this case, the entire movie goes to hell in record time.

A remake for schlemiels, or at least easy marks when it comes to formulaic Hollywood comedy. But the film's peculiar sluggishness and nagging hypocrisy probably won't get in the way of its popularity.

Director Burr Steers milks them dry, like an overeager farmer at milking time, which is a paradox since this is the wettest picture of 2010, what with the sea spray and Efron's tear ducts and the general metaphysical mist.

It's reductive, insanely violent slapstick, but that's the phenomenon in a nutshell.

The choicest dialogue in Burlesque provokes the sort of laughter that other, intentionally funny films only dream of generating.

Aiming for a piece with the raw impact of "Precious," on which he served as executive producer, he (Perry) ends up with 134 minutes of misjudged intensity.

Their (The Brothers Strause) effects are pretty good, on a fairly limited budget. And that's about all you can say for Skyline.

The pathos really are shameless, arriving with killing regularity and false humility.

The sole memorable scene involving a little Focker in Little Fockers, though memorable doesn't mean amusing, involves Ben Stiller's male-nurse character administering a needle full of adrenaline to his dyspeptic and unhappily aroused father-in-law Jack Byrnes, played by Robert De Niro.

It is, for what it is, a work of considerable care and craft. And it's completely soulless.

Take Me Home Tonight, believe me, you've already seen.

On the whole, I'd rather be on Pluto, which isn't even a planet.

An exhaustingly pushy, phallocentric and witlessly smutty spoof of early '80s medieval fantasies such as "Krull" and "The Beastmaster."

Hanna presents the problem of the well-made diversion that is, at its core, repellent.

The wastrel Sparrow ends up both overexploited and underpowered in this fourth outing.

Hangover II is more like a spitball meeting, a series of ideas that might, in theory, be good enough for a sequel, than it is an actual movie.

Just another self-absorbed teen chronicle, with the added twist of a little time travel and a surprise ending.

Maybe this review is more about me than about Conan O'Brien, but I really couldn't get past the odor of self-congratulation emanating from nearly every scene in Conan O'Brien Can't Stop.

A work of ineffable soullessness and persistent moral idiocy.

The events of the movie may be a little bit true, or a lot, but hardly any of it plays that way.

The first "H&K" caught people off-guard with its canny idiocy and zigzagging, picaresque treasure hunt premise. By now, there's no catching anyone off-guard with these two, except by way of the most off-color and off-putting means possible.

Reveals a flash or two of real filmmaking (mostly in a suggestively grotesque birthing sequence), enough to save it from pure lousiness.

If actors this good cannot overcome their material, then we can only say: Tom Hanks, Sandra Bullock … Max von Sydow, Zoe Caldwell, Viola Davis, Jeffrey Wright, John Goodman… thanks for your honest efforts in the service of a fundamentally dishonest weepie.

Hutcherson spits his lines out as quickly as possible, which you appreciate, because the way the likable Johnson wrestles with his lines ("It looks like the liquefaction has tripled overnight!") you think, well, it's a living.

Madonna stayed married to director Guy Ritchie just long enough to absorb his most grating cinematic instincts - shooting in every style, in an addled, shuffle-mode, falsely glamorizing way until all is chaos. And, astonishingly, boredom.

The storytelling proceeds in such a halting manner, with De Niro's speeches going on and on and on, that before long you'd kill for an easy scare.

Here and there, in the father/son scenes, you see a glimmer of an honest interaction. All in all, I'd rather watch a "Ned's Declassified School Survival Guide" rerun.

Because The Campaign tries to say something about truth vs. hogwash in election season, it's doubly sad the efforts of screenwriters Chris Henchy and Shawn Harwell come to so little.

Hit & Run is pretty rancid as comedy. Worse, the chases are strictly amateur hour, all shortcut editing and no gut satisfaction.

Calling Dredd 3D a movie is sort of a lie. It's a premise, and there are levels to reach, and always there's another grimy hallway to stalk, and then you turn right or left, and then kill some more.

Davis, in particular, manages to create a fully dimensional character in the midst of a highly polemical screenplay.

Boasts one moment, perhaps three or four seconds in length, so delightfully intense and uncharacteristically juicy that the rest of the film - most of the rest of the whole series, in fact - looks pretty pale by comparison. Not vampire pale. Paler.

Only Biel and Greer lift it above the level of bleh.

The camera bobs and weaves like a drunk, frantically. So you have hammering close-ups, combined with woozy insecurity each time more than two people are in the frame. Twenty minutes into the retelling of fugitive Valjean, his monomaniacal pursuer Javert, the torch singers Fantine and Eponine and the rest, I wanted somebody to just nail the damn camera to the ground.

Gordon is lost, and his style of shooting - telescopic close-ups, which never give us enough space to appreciate the performers - feels wrong for comedy.

This is a fantasy grab bag in which nearly anything can happen.

Isn't just the weakest of the "Die Hard" pictures; it's a lousy action movie on its own terms.

The Incredible Burt Wonderstone serves as a reminder that everything in a film has a chance to go wrong before a film begins filming. In other words: It's the script, stupid.

It's Bay World. And after an hour of Pain & Gain, it felt more like "Pain & Pain."

It's got the sex. It's got the violence. And, most important, it has an array of pot-centered jokes that might be funny to someone under the influence of an illegal substance. [30 Apr 1999]

A rather wan version of "Jurassic Park" - a series of setups featuring humans being picked off by bigger, faster and stronger carnivores.

This is the laziest kind of filmmaking.

All the principals in this cinematic mess have had moments of glory on stage and screen, and one can only hope they got paid well for participating in this comedic embarrassment.

Although Banderas occasionally shows flashes of style, individual elements too often go together like grits in a puff pastry.

The storyline isn't coherent, the music stinks, the characters are one-dimensional, the dialogue is insipid and it is neither funny nor romantic.

To say this movie's premise is bonkers is putting it mildly.

Largely a disappointment.

Offers two or three worthwhile laughs.

There is really no one to like in this film.

Even overlooking the fundamental inanity of the movie, one is left to contend with some offensive racial stereotyping.

Called upon to blend the fey and the fiendish, the usually fine Cage is reduced to acting like some kind of combination of Dudley Moore and John Carradine. Throughout, though, he seems to be enjoying it; I can't imagine why. [2 June 1989, Friday, p.E]

If you are misguided or otherwise unfortunate enough to see Forces of Nature, you will find yourself the next day with but one image, one memory, in your head: Sandra Bullock's teeth. [19 March 1999, Friday, p.A]

You watch the movie in a dumbfounded stupor. Why on earth was it made? [26 March 1999, Friday, p.A]

It sounds like standard Cinderella stuff (and the script comes complete with plenty of allusions to princesses in towers), but it's played here with an emphasis on possessions and possessing that borders on the obscene… It's a pretty ugly movie. [23 Mar 1990, Friday, p.C]

A rock 'n' roll film should be funny-crazy -- not just a big, dumb promo for some over-the-hill dudes in makeup who are trying to sell today's kids on yesterday's glory by championing deliquency.

Think about the worst movie ideas you've had in your life, the ones so embarrassing they make you wince. Now imagine this: a modernized version of Shakespeare's "Macbeth" titled Scotland, Pa.

Boring and banal, overwrought and undercooked, Hudson Hawk is beyond bad. [24 May 1991]

A stupid, stylized road picture. [10 Sept 1993]

[Chris Elliott]'s spoof of a young seaman's apprenticeship seems desperate as he piles special effects willy-nilly atop jibes at stupid old salts. [14 Jan 1994]

The movie drags down everyone involved, regardless of their apparent talent.

Will come off as insipid, unfunny and too serious at times for its own good.

It's just a matter of holding your nose until the whole thing is over.

There is nothing to redeem this movie, and no real reason to see it.

Its jokes aren't funny. Its sloppy direction comes courtesy of Jordan Brady, who made "The Third Wheel," another reportedly failed comedy gathering cobwebs at Miramax.

Verhoeven does not explore the dark side, but merely exploits it, and that makes all the difference in the world. [20 Mar 1992, Friday, p.C]

From my vantage point, it doesn't include a single laugh.

Most of the humor is aimed at 14-year-olds.

For all its promise of lively trailer-park humor, Joe Dirt digs, then lies in its own grave, killed by blah characters, lame jokes and cliches you can see coming a mile away.

The first half hour of Hot Chick, before the switch, plays like soft-core porno from the '60s. The rest plays like a bad "Saturday Night Live" sketch stretched to the breaking point.

Its humor stems precisely from our enjoying its lead character's rotten behavior.

The political movie satire from hell.

Insipid, ineffective, inept and insulting to our intelligence.

Custom-designed for 13 year-olds, laden with broad sight gags, gross sound effects and a bowlful of potty jokes.

Some movies are a joy. Some are a chore. And some are sheer torture. A good example of the latter is Virus. [17 January 1999, Metro Chicago, p.8]

Could be the most overblown and confusing example of anime yet, as it piles one pretentious story element on top of another.

Unintentional comedy that will bore even the 15-year-olds at which it is undoubtedly aimed.

It's hard to believe how bad this movie is.

Spends its first three-quarters confronting us with one of the most dislikable characters in recent memory.

But in the end everything comes down to Lawrence, who has yet to develop a truly distinct comedic sensibility.

The sad truth is, I can say nothing to recommend this film.

A big techno-dud.

Technically it does not qualify as one of the worst American-made movies ever. It only feels that way. The movie's offenses are too numerous to catalog.

It has a lack of ambition and energy that is almost total: It's the most this movie can do to roll over and ask for a little more lotion on its back. [22 July 1987]

Such a low-class, low-laughs rip-off that it makes "There's Something About Mary" resemble a Noel Coward comedy of manners. [23 April 1999, Friday, p.A]

A staggeringly bad picture: a shallow, cliche-ridden mess that keeps blowing up on screen.

Tom Lazarus and Rick Ramage should be ashamed to have written such nonsense.

Mind-numbing sequel to "Pokemon the First Movie."

So derivative and crass that it's far more entertaining to try to think of the dozens of films it's ripping off than it is to take any of it at face value.

Just Married is what industry people refer to as "January Junk," cinematic flotsam that gets tossed ashore once they have cleared the shelves of Oscar contenders.

There may be better ways to waste your time than seeing this movie.

You have to have faith that kids will recognize a bad movie when it's foisted on them -- and they don't get much worse than The New Guy.

A criminal waste of talent.

Put together enough pointless, random details, and you get Gigli, a movie that's less incompetent than bewildering.

It's just a watery, undeservedly smug update of the low-budget, kids-stranded-in-the-sticks bloodfests of the 1970s and '80s.

This film should have clocked in at 90 minutes, tops, rather than almost two hours. A good, healthy scissor-snipping might have allowed some of its quirkier aspects (like the use of a stun gun and a jaw-dropping lab result) to stand out more.

About as sharp an updated version of the original as is Jennifer Lopez's song of the same name a modern, Latina version of the Beatles classic.

By embracing a static plot, making Gerardo a depressed Robotron and Mexico City a ghost town, Hernandez only succeeds in alienating us, even while focusing on the most universal of themes: Breaking up is hard to do.

Let's make this simple: If you spend money on Soul Plane, you've been played.

An almost mystifyingly bad movie.

The kind of fascinatingly bad film only a really gifted and fearless moviemaker could make: a 92-minute long raggedy-raunchy vision of sex, transit and alienation in which Gallo focuses on himself so obsessively, it's as if he'd become his own stalker.

The kind of movie that produces a particular series of questions: How the heck did this get made? Who needed a tax shelter? Who had money to burn?

For the most part, The Gold Diggers is not even chuckle-producing. At best, it might warm a cockle or two or provoke a bit of a smile.

Although several of her (Breillat's) previous films were intriguing and provocative, this one seems styled more as raw material for satire on "Mad TV" or "Saturday Night Live."

Therese's story would work better as a marionette show than on the big screen. The camera is best at picking up subtleties, and there are simply none here.

Run-of-the-mill sitcom-y in its pedestrian writing and uninspired direction.

Resembles an old Nine Inch Nails video. Missing from the mix are any characters with whom you'd want to spend one minute around a campfire.