Why would you take your kids to see Space Chimps, an uninspired animated feature about chimp astronauts, when you could take them instead to see "Wall-E"? And if they've already seen "Wall-E," you're really lowering the bar by venturing into this one.

There is one bit of good news. For all you abominable snowman fans out there, "The Mummy" is filled with yetis. And, boy, are they ever angry.

Any movie that opens with the killing of a pet dog is definitely going to capture your attention. But where do you go from there?

Although the film's visuals are a cut above, say, "Sin City," another serioso graphic novel-turned-movie, it has the same mood: a film-noir-ish soddenness punctuated by megaviolence. Watchmen is the anti-"Incredibles."

Stone may think he's made a movie about the toxicity of the Bush presidency, but what we have instead is a cautionary tale of a decidedly lower order. As far as I can make out, the real message of W. is: Don't vote for anybody who talks with his mouth full of food.

It's a lot easier to follow than "Syriana." But intelligibility is about the only thing this international thriller has going for it.

Clocking in at 160 minutes, this interminable movie comes across like a rough cut. Perhaps Lee believed its length would give it gravitas. The opposite is true.

The Express may prove valuable to movie historians since it's a compendium of virtually every sports movie cliché ever contrived.

A lumbering number that takes its identity as a costume drama quite literally.

A young and as-yet-unformed actor, Stewart is cast in a role she's simply not ready for, and her effort to work hard – exactly what any actor must hide from the audience – is painfully visible in every scene. By contrast, Pattinson is smooth as glass, a born movie star who only needs to slant his eyes to grab attention.

The honey runs thick in The Secret Life of Bees, and so does the treacle. The cloying dullness sets in early, although not from the first frame.

Seven Pounds, coming after "The Pursuit of Happyness" and "I Am Legend," seems like the third in a trilogy of inspirational bummers.

Sadly, it lacks the classic awfulness that might have lifted it into the pantheon of Truly Bad Movies. Instead, what we have here is a garden variety bad movie, of which there have been all too many lately.

Fanboys, directed by Kyle Newman, doesn't delve into the mania of fandom, it exploits it.

It's not the retro attitudes in "Confessions" that bother me (at least not much). It's the lack of laughs.

It occurred to me that Emmerich and Co. might be playing this whole thing for laughs. It probably occurred to them, too.

The best thing The Edge of Love could do for you is to send you back to Thomas's poetry. Dash this folderol.

Swinton's performance, and practically everything else about Julia, seems off – tone-deaf. She plays an out-of-control wastrel who enters into a kidnapping scheme gone horribly wrong, as does the movie.

Being touted as the first film ever shot in the Smithsonian complex. With any luck, it will also be the last. This is not the best use of our landmarks.

As a laughing-through-tears jokester tourist, Richard Dreyfuss provides the only moments of real acting, as opposed to overacting, mugging, and scenery chomping.

Perhaps Nair believes that heroism in our tabloid era has become degraded. If so, she overcorrected. Amelia is so pure in heart that it slides right off the screen.

The novelist Cormac McCarthy was served well by the Coen Brothers' adaptation of his novel "No Country for Old Men" but comes a cropper in The Road, a lugubrious trek through postapocalyptic debris.

This is certainly the grubbiest Holmes in movie history.

Doesn't evoke New York and its vignettes are trite – with one exception, a touching sequence directed by Mira Nair with Natalie Portman as a Hasidic bride and Irrfan Khan as a Jain diamond merchant.

Zemeckis tries to juice things up by staging numerous chase scenes up and around London, but do we really need "A Christmas Carol: The Action Picture"?

By turns antic, frantic, and dull, "Pippa Lee" is unconvincing – emotionally, dramatically, filmically.

Amid all the mayhem, there is Paris in all its faded-light glory. Is the movie worth seeing as a travelogue? Only if you are (a) a masochist, (b) a terrorist, or (c) desperate.

This is the kind of movie where life lessons are posted every quarter-hour. (I timed it.)

Brooklyn’s Finest does indeed provide a new genre twist. This must be the only cop movie ever made where a character is driven off the deep end by mold.

Not a sterling example of how to make a high-toned weepie, let alone a serious examination of trauma.

Was Paper Man worth making? Captain Excellent and I would probably differ on that one.

I much prefer Mel Brooks’s “Robin Hood: Men in Tights” to all this doomy somberness. Why take the legend so seriously?

It probably won't matter to its core audience that The A-Team doesn't make a lick of sense.

As the doomed princess, Q’orianka Kilcher, who costarred as Pocahontas in Terence Malick’s “The New World,” has imperially striking features but limited acting skills. If her performances should ever rise to the level of her looks, she’ll be great.

His drug-smuggling underworld, specifically the Amsterdam-New York connection, is likewise drably depicted. Is this because director Kevin Asch and screenwriter Antonio Macia deliberately played it down, or are they just incompetent? I’ll be charitable and vote for the former, but sometimes sensationalism is preferable to being altogether unsensational.

The characters who come off best in Dinner for Schmucks are those dead mice.

The opening action sequence, unrelated to the main story, is nicely done, but after that it's all downhill.

At some point in their careers, most male actors want to play (a) Hamlet, and (b) a hit man. I hope that Clooney has gotten "b" out of his system.

As the boarding school honcho Father Benedictus, Geoffrey Rush chews so much scenery that he looks ready to burst.

Eastwood and Morgan are not con artists, but their awe here is so unblinking that their film comes across as a transcendent con job.

A love-it-or-hate-it movie. Put me in the (sort of) hate-it column. My slight qualification here is because Darren Aronofsky's movie starring Natalie Portman as an increasingly unhinged ballerina gets points for being unlike anything else that's out there.

If you go to Burlesque expecting a campy hoot on the order of "Showgirls," you may be in for a disappointment. It's not quite awful enough, although it's plenty bad.

Morning Glory isn't targeting the dumbing down of TV news. It's pandering to the audience that craves the dumbness.

Normally I'd watch Helen Mirren in anything, even if she was just putting out the laundry or reading the phone book. But, given the roteness of her line readings here, it might have been better if the phone book rather than Shakespeare was her text.

Ought to have been state of the art. But there's not a whole lot of artistry to be found in this movie.

Sometimes empty is just empty. What Gertrude Stein said about Oakland can also apply to Somewhere: "There is no there there."

Country Strong is the latest and, in many ways, the least impressive entrant in the achy-breaky sweepstakes.

It would take a lot more than holy water to rescue Season of the Witch from mediocrity.

A fumbling comedy directed by Dennis Dugan that could have benefitted from surgical reconstruction. How about some liposuction to siphon off all those lame jokes?

Oldman makes a four-course dinner out of the scenery with enough slash and burn to leave you wondering if he is vying with Nicolas Cage for the title of filmdom's biggest hambone.

The casting of both Riegert and Allen may sound like an "Animal House" reunion, but the two have no scenes together.

It is not the redemptive uplift that I am objecting to here. It's the way that Bier manipulates us in order to send us aloft. She wants the world to be a better place. Fine. But what she has concocted here is an arty version of the same old Hollywood dumb-down dramaturgy. It just has a higher gloss.

It seems a bit cruel to cast Garner, who exudes charm, in such a charmless role.

This semiexpressionist fantasia is a botch.

The flashback sequences sometimes come across like "'For Whom the Bell Tolls' for Dummies."

Foster seems blinkered and tone-deaf to what's actually appearing onscreen.

Writer-director Massy Tadjedin cuts back and forth between these twin temptations. Will Michael succumb and prove Joanna correct in her suspicions? Will Alex's French accent conquer all? Do you care? I didn't.

The only saving grace is that this time around, the script (yes, there is one, and it was concocted by Ehren Kruger) has occasional wisps of lucidity, and Bay delivers – overdelivers – on the mayhem.

Since the only really good "Planet of the Apes" movie was the 1968 original with Charlton Heston, I've always wondered why filmmakers can't just leave well enough alone.

The problem with this year-by-year structure is that the slow crawl to the end can seem agonizing if the film isn't engaging. And One Day, despite strenuous attempts by all involved to make us laugh, cry, and laugh-cry, is more likely to induce winces. We've seen it all before – and better.

His rise from a marginalized Jewish boy in Nazi-occupied Paris to his chain-smoking fame as the composer of such Euro-hits as "Je t'Aime … Moi Non Plus" is presented as one long, hallucinatory jag, revealing far less about Gainsbourg, I would imagine, than about Sfar.

Frankly, if I'm going to be offered a heaping pile of revisionism about the greatest writer who ever lived, I'd rather it be from someone with more academic heft than the director of "Independence Day" and "Godzilla." I trust the teachers who receive this film's study guide have a shredder handy.

Turns one of the greatest geniuses of German literature into a love-struck rapscallion.

Muddled cop thriller The Son of No One has a top-drawer cast and a bottom-drawer script.

I would imagine that even those who line up for this film will be somewhat let down, if only because it's clear that most of the juicy stuff will arrive in Part 2 – which won't be released until next November.

The cast, at least on paper, is formidable, if ill-used.

What this film really celebrates is crunch-and-thud video-game-style action, not especially well choreographed by director Guy Ritchie.

The best thing about the film is the majestic mountain vistas, shot in Canada. You can practically inhale them.

The film is more testimonial than drama.

Stephen Root, Ted Danson, Dermot Mulroney, and other familiar faces lend their support, but it's not enough to overcome the limp, by-the-numbers execution. The film comprises innumerable expository scenes, leavened with uninspired comic relief.

Harrelson is effective, but the film isn't helped by the inevitable comparisons to the far superior "L.A. Confidential" and "Bad Lieutenant" movies.

This movie is "Finian's Rainbow" for dunderheads. Rudd has a few amusing moments talking to himself in a mirror (he's trying to convince himself he's a stud) but he would have been better off talking himself out of this film.

The idiocy of the film's conceit is that Simon recruits innocents like Will to carry out these vigilante killings.

The plot slogs along and family secrets are hauled out, each more implausible than the next.

Morgan is a wonderful writer when he's working from the headlines, but his "personal" movies, like "Hereafter" and this one, release a bleary, pseudo-profound aspect of his talent that's best left in the dark.

Potty jokes and bawdy gross-outs predominate, and the few good laughs are swamped by the overall laughlessness.

As for me, I don't see why women being as slobby and gross as the guys is such a feminist breakthrough – especially since, as in Bachelorette, the slobbiness and grossness is witless.

Sean Penn is one of those actors, like Nicolas Cage, who is best (sometimes worst) when he's over-the-top. Unlike Cage, Penn doesn't pour himself into dreadful commercial vehicles. No, his dreadful movies are usually not destined for the multiplex. Case in point: This Must Be the Place.

One of the many, many things wrong with Joe Wright's Anna Karenina, starring Keira Knightley as literature's most famous adulteress – take that, Emma Bovary! – is that one never feels the love. It's a conceit in search of a movie. It could just as easily have been titled "Décor."

The jokes mostly fall flat and the dramatic scenes fall even flatter.

Granted, this is not automatic laugh-riot material, nor should it be, but didn’t Fey recognize how hackneyed it all is? Does being a movie star mean blanding out everything that makes you special?

The filmmaking is TV-movie-of-the-week dull and Robinson’s ordeal is hammered home to the exclusion of virtually everything else in his life.

Is it possible to truly start life all over again? Arthur Newman might have been better if it had not started at all.

Is Malick deliberately courting self-parody here? Probably not. That would imply he had a sense of humor.

The Great Gatsby isn’t simply a classic American text: In Luhrmann’s hands, it’s also the greatest self-help manual ever written.

The acting is sincere and the camera work is pretty, but this art-movie variation on "The Sixth Sense" doesn't have enough energy to fulfill the high promise of Berliner's previous picture, the enchanting "Ma vie en rose."

In all, it's “Diner,'' female style. Directed by Donald Petrie from a blatantly manipulative screenplay that took four people to cook up. [24 Oct 1988]

The message of the film is that life isn't neat and predictable like a well-arranged business trip; yet everything in the picture is so calculated that there's no life to it. [23 Dec 1988, A& L, p.19]

Armageddon may sell tickets, thanks largely to a high-powered marketing machine that's been conducting its own countdown for the past several months. But it's not a pretty picture.

The Abyss' isn't abysmal, but it's a replay of hits we've already seen - a recycled "close encounters of the wet kind'' with far too few ideas of its own. [18 Aug 1989, Arts, p.10]

Verhoeven's lurid thriller has moments of welcome self-parody, but most of the action manages to be sensationalistic, homophobic, and tedious at the same time. [20 Mar 1992, Arts, p.12]

John Hughes pours his usual slickness and sentimentality all over everything. [27 Feb 1987]

Judged by the standards of ordinary filmmaking, it's as strange, suggestive, and surreal as other Lynch pictures have been. Judged by the standards of Lynch's own career, however, it's amazingly stale and second-hand… [and] contains not a single moment of genuinely felt emotion. [1 Sept 1992]

The main performances are generally weak, although the smaller ones are sometimes brilliant, and the yarn never builds much momentum as it leapfrogs from one subplot to another. [28 Dec 1990, Arts, p.14]

A second-rate adaptation of the second-rate Choderlos de Laclos novel: two hours of pretty people sitting in pretty rooms and talking about sex. [23 Dec 1988, A& L, p.19]

As before, the movie is more impressive for its finely detailed vision of Los Angeles as a futuristic slum than for its story, acting, or message. It's all downhill after the first few eye-dazzling minutes. [2 Oct 1992]

The director, Taylor Hackford, doesn't have the cinematic savvy to sustain so many tensions in a meaningful way; and the screenplay strays far over the line between incisive political comment and heavy-handed Red-baiting.

Punchy, cleverly stylized, but utterly empty yarn about a feisty young woman who welds by day, disco-dances by night, and dreams of the day when she can devote her life to her art.

The story is mostly a rehash of the original "48 Hrs.," with the same hard-boiled mixture of violence and wisecracks. Directed by Walter Hill, who specializes in this kind of thing and gives it a certain conviction, if little else. [13 Jul 1990, p.10]

Blending animation and live action, this ferocious fantasy is hopelessly vulgar in ways never dreamed of by "Who Framed Roger Rabbit."

While the production is attractive in a calendar-photo sort of way, there's not a speck of genuine feeling in its glossy images.

The stagebound setting gets boring; the action doesn't build a steady momentum; and the characters do far too much hanging around until the camera's ready to point at them again.

The combination of caveman dialogue, overcooked action, and anything-for-an-effect performances is maddeningly crude even by cop-movie standards. [22 May 1987, p.23]

Parker is bland throughout. Maybe all those episodes of "Sex and the City" have soured her on this sort of thing.

If, as the ads would lead you to believe, you go to see The Break-Up expecting a romantic comedy, you will be severely disappointed. If you go to it expecting a good movie, you will also be severely disappointed.

Its wasted cast includes Dyan Cannon, Sally Kellerman, Len Cariou, and Brenda Vaccaro, who miraculously manages to give a fine performance in this malarkey.

Just because The Fountain is different doesn't mean it's good. In fact, it's borderline unwatchable, though this hasn't prevented the Oscar buzz from buzzing.

The movie often seems glib in the face of tragedy. And when, near the end, Shepard tries to pour on the hearts and flowers by showing us just what made Simon crack up on camera, the bathos is icky. The whole movie is icky.

The end result, at best, is high-toned pulp.

Even by Farrelly standards, the film is a washout.

Few things are more dispiriting than a holiday movie straining to become a perennial. Such is the case with Fred Claus, an insipid Christmas comedy.

Poetic conceits only work if they're poetic.

The Bucket List is a movie for oldsters that, paradoxically, looks as if it was made for 15-year-olds. If this is what is meant in Hollywood as "thinking outside the box," then it's time to get a new box.

The best thing you can say about Mad Money is that it has a good cast. The worst thing you can say about it is that the cast is extremely ill-used.

This business of the 88 minutes ticking away is a pale imitation of the old "High Noon" ploy of playing out suspense in real time. After a while, though, I began to take a perverse pleasure in wallowing in the awfulness of it all.

Everywhere he goes he asks if anybody knows bin Laden's whereabouts – as if anybody is going to tell him! Why should we accompany him on his self-aggrandizing trip?

What Happens in Vegas is not only annoying, it's also incompetent – a bad mix.

The animated characters in "Clone Wars" are about as lively as the actors in the live-action movies, so I guess Lucas has achieved his goal of eliminating humans from his movies altogether.

I don't mind a movie where people spend a lot of time jawboning, but what they say had better be interesting. In Spinning into Butter we are spoon-fed the deep dark revelation that racism can exist as virulently in liberal environs as in reactionary ones. Alert the media.

I guarantee you, if Charles Dickens were alive today, he might well be writing movies but he sure as shootin' wouldn't have written "Ghosts."

The people who made Year One seem to think that all you have to do to make a hit comedy is get a bunch of jokesters together. But where are the jokes?

It's all so resolutely uninspired that even the kids in the audience may want to duck out.

Allegorical in the worst ways, Antichrist is about as profound as a slasher movie.

The Wolfman isn’t scary. In fact, it isn’t much of anything.

There are a few hilarious bits, but even those are drowned out by constant gunfire and Morgan’s motormouthing. Willis is going through the motions; Scott is funny, if irritating; Morgan is irritating and not so funny.

Whitaker and Schreiber, both of whom are capable of brilliance, are stuck in one-dimensional roles. It’s not only the characters who have mechanical organs; the film itself is equally lifeless and cold.

Critics who come out against Kick-Ass are leaving themselves open to that worst of contemporary accusations: a failure to be cool. But pretending that Kick-Ass is just another good-time comic book blowout is the greater failure.

Notable only for being a catalog of just about every kid-pic cliché ever committed to film.

A movie that at best is irrelevant and at worst is unwatchable.

Maybe Hackford, and his screenwriter Mark Jacobson, were attempting to convey the dullness of vice. If so, they vastly overcorrected. But what about the dullness of the performances?

To see Johnny Depp and Angelina Jolie in The Tourist is like watching a chemistry experiment gone horribly wrong.

The script by Allan Loeb careens all over the place without ever coming to rest on anything interesting.

It's as if the filmmakers were hungover from the first film and wanted to make a violent action movie instead.

The coarseness wouldn't be so bad if at least the steady stream of obscenities were funny.

Dislikable movie characters don't always result in dislikable movies but that's certainly the case with Sam Levinson's Another Happy Day, a dysfunctional family meltdown movie about an impending wedding that only grows more aggravating as it unwinds.

Sit this one out.

The script is replete with howlers. My favorite, from Kitsch, after the aliens strike: "I've got a bad feeling about this." Indeed.

David Chappelle's performance as a cabbie is amusing, but the film should have been packaged with a Surgeon General's Warning - "Cigarettes is bad for you."

Rarely have Gibson's tears seemed more fictional than in this supposedly authentic account of a historical event that's far too tragic to merit such superficial treatment.

Stoner jokes, awful gags, and just stupid stuff equate to one bad movie.

For a movie about people with hugely complicated inner lives, this sadly unconvincing drama stays resolutely on the surface, rarely hinting at anything like an insight or idea.

In short, this movie is exactly the kind of starry-eyed escapist fantasy that Dr. Powell suspects Prot of having. It's harmless enough, since we can be cured just by leaving the theater.

Action freaks may enjoy the chasing and chomping, but there's no hint of human interest or moviemaking imagination.

Khouri's new picture takes all this talent and turns it into the kind of manipulative mush that Hollywood used to market under the condescending label "woman's picture" years ago.

The plot is a shameless plea for vigilante violence, and the dignity of the black hero is outweighed by the ethnically marked evil of his Hispanic antagonist. Beneath its crisp veneer, much of the movie is a high-energy hymn to hate.

Fans of unregenerate underground moviemaking will have a ball.

There's nothing special about this movie -- it's just business as usual for today's debased action-movie genre.

Audiences may want their own speedy divorce from this irritating collection of stale jokes, pointless vulgarities, and warmed-over clichés.

Has amusing bits of social satire, but they're crowded out of the stable by lots of bathroom and barnyard humor.

Add a megadose of bombastic James Horner music and a perfunctory love-affair subplot and you have a movie that's its own worst enemy.

So vulgar and incoherent that even Hackman's gifts can't score a touchdown.

The star's over-the-top energy isn't enough to make this hopelessly vulgar, numbingly repetitious farce worth watching.

Creepy.

It has a degree of sociological interest, but it would be more effective if the material were shaped into a more coherent form.

The story is irresponsible and the filmmaking is awful.

Everyone tries very hard to make the story sweet and funny, but the soggy screenplay defeats them every time.

Lachow goes for cuteness and whimsy every chance he gets, missing a lot more often than he hits.

Not even veteran talents like Dukakis and Scheider can surmount the artificial dialogue, arbitrary plot twists, and wan humor of this disappointing comedy-drama.

Strains to be shockingly original but winds up as cheap and cheesy as its characters.

A few mildly amusing gags don't outweigh the trite situations and mean-spirited attitude of this comedy.

This sexually explicit South Korean drama aims more to jolt than to illuminate, but it illustrates an aspect of Asian cinema that globally minded moviegoers should know about as films from that region take on more international prominence.

Tries to be daring and iconoclastic but winds up seeming as spoiled and childish as its main characters.

Too bad (Arnold) can't save the movie from it's superstitious clap-trap, sadistic violence, and sheer silliness.

The filmmakers seem well in control of their chaotic material, but what can be said when the movie features wall-to-wall teenage alcohol abuse.

The satire is intermittently amusing, but Arcand adds little to the arsenal of standard mockumentary tricks, and the interesting cast doesn't get many interesting things to do.

Shallow and sentimental in the sappiest Hollywood tradition.

If a mildly magical story is what you're after, it'll be worth the price of admission. Otherwise save your milk money for something more substantial.

The results are unbelievably tedious, but Mansfield buffs may find it intermittently worthwhile.

The acting is solid and the heroine's quirky dialogue is amusing for a while. But repetitious writing and a weakly constructed story turn the promising premise into a disappointing mishmash of crime, politics, and show business.

The story is inspirational in a superficial way, but the filmmakers focus so exclusively on their attractive heroine that the picture loses any real connection with Africa.

As dopey as its heroes, and the cast's admirable energy isn't enough to keep the story punching through the final round.

The comedy isn't quite as crude as it sounds, but there's not much of value here beyond a little lively acting.

Spoiled by its simplistic portrait of people from the Mideast as incorrigibly violent and untrustworthy.

If you want a movie time trip, the 1960 version is a far smoother ride.

There are a few clever lines and Cleese has some sensational moments, but that's not enough to make the farce seem fresh.

The picture goes for sentimentality rather than substance every chance it gets, and the cast falls right into its syrupy trap.

The movie means well, but neither its emotions nor its performances ring very true.

Everyone works hard, but the results are sadly short of style and personality or irony and intelligence.

This is a great subject for a movie, but Hollywood has squandered the opportunity, using it as a prop for warmed-over melodrama and the kind of choreographed mayhem that director John Woo has built his career on.

Most of the characters are one-dimensional, and Avary's over-the-top directing doesn't make them interesting for more than a few isolated moments.

This low-budget drama tries very hard to convey messages of tolerance and compassion, but it's too weakly acted and directed to have much impact.

The story is a string of sub-Scorsese clichés, and if engaging actors like Malkovich and Hopper seem to be sleepwalking through their roles, imagine how unwatchable Diesel manages to be.

Perhaps they truly believe war is an inescapable aspect of human life. If so, why make movies that rub our faces in its horror? If artists have no antidote to war's evil or insight into the suffering it brings, their motive in depicting it must be merely to sensationalize its terrors and make money from the morbid fascination it holds for audiences. We deserve better.

The kind of comedy that aims at "edginess" and "sassiness" without managing to be edgy or sassy for a second.

Four chuckles and a lively final-credits sequence are a mighty poor score for 99 minutes of alleged comedy, and the sentimental stuff is even worse.

Eventually you realize the whole movie has been about young showoffs who think it's uproarious to gross out neighborhood grownups.

Preposterous plot, bad acting, and dialogue that provokes more laughs than shivers.

The film is as tricky and superficial as its low-life characters, using visual flimflam to mask its lack of substance.

The violent story is long on nastiness, short on credibility.

What remains discomforting is their sheer failure to be funny.

This superficial treatment makes so many dubious decisions - oversimplifying issues, for instance, so there'll be more time for high-flying emotion - that 1960s veterans may be moved to protest rather than praise.

Like the nuclear sub it's named after, the picture is big, shiny, and expensive. It's also cold, hard, and cumbersome, and lacking the barest hint of emotional or psychological depth. [9 Mar 1990, Arts, p.10]

Carpenter pulls out all the action-adventure stops, but he and coscripter Larry Sulkis forgot to write dialogue the audience could listen to without howling in disbelief.

It's encouraging to see Hollywood tackle themes of faith and religion, but here, too, Shyamalan is timid, reducing them to fuzzy New Age clichés. Add wooden acting, stilted dialogue, and a faux-arty style, and you have a thudding disappointment.

The infuriating thing about XXX isn't that it delivers thrills and spills to moviegoers who don't know any better, but that its Hollywood hype reinforces the notion that brain-dead entertainment is what movies are all about.

A private eye enters a horrific world of degrading sex and bottom-feeding pornographers.

The dialogue is dumb ('zilla has the best lines, "arrrrrggh" and "maaroarrr"), New York is waterlogged, and Godzilla isn't on screen enough.

The consequences aren't remotely as comic as they're meant to be.

Falls flat on screen, weighed down by far-fetched plot twists.

South Korean melodrama uses a unique location, dominated by fishermen's floating huts, as the background for an overheated story that grows steadily more grotesque and unpleasant as it proceeds.

The story is mildly entertaining in its hackneyed way, but there's no excusing the picture's exploitative treatment of almost all the female characters.

The funny scenes are as far apart as oases in the Sahara. [22 May 1987]

The junior Giannini, who has inherited Giancarlo's handsome looks, portrays his mercurial character with energy and flair. Madonna doesn't. Indeed, it's hard to remember the last time a certified celebrity gave a performance so monotonous, unimaginative, and all-around tiresome to watch.

Let's look at the bright side. If this movie bombs as it deserves to, we won't have to sit through "Analyze Those" a few years from now!

I doubt if the results would have satisfied Kahlo, whose originality in matters of life, art, and ideas was vastly more far-reaching.

The bad thing about A Guy Thing isn't the talent of its stars but the warmed-over triteness of the material they're forced to work with.

The problem with Possession isn't that it's filmed in a lackluster way, but that it shouldn't have been filmed at all. Byatt's novel is an adventure in language, telling its story through a kaleidoscopic array of Victorian-style poetry and prose, alongside gripping accounts of the characters' activities and escapades.

What really hurts is the movie's shallow screenwriting, self-indulgent acting, and woozy camerawork.