The movie's a bust in myriad ways, especially because almost every scene possesses the oily feel of manipulation and condescension.

Has its heart in the right place, but its head seems to be lost in a swirling maelstrom of teen movies that have come before.

The title pretty much says it all: syrupy romantic comedy dripping with unearned sentiment.

It's dull enough to make a Mormon fidget.

It's too turgid and redundant to have any real impact. As a thriller, it barely thrills; as a lecture, it has nothing new to say.

Lestat, like all vampires, is a bad boy frozen in time; because the role is emotionally static and one-note, it can't hold our attention unless it's played by an actor with deep reserves of mystery, elegance, and sexual power. Cruise has no such qualities.

Everything that happens proves just as predictable as before.

A little too loud, and a lot too boring.

A particularly painful event for those of us weaned on Brooks' earliest films, Saturday Night Live shorts and vintage clips of his deadpan standup appearances. It contains precisely two funny moments.

This is a sequel so bad that even Cedric the Entertainer and Anthony Anderson didn't return for it, let alone Terrence Howard and Paul Giamatti.

That Thing You Do threatens the shameless stereotypes it constructs with cats' claws, but when the deserving targets present themselves at their most vulnerable, the movie rolls over and expects audiences to stroke its tummy.

Aside from a single jazzy image of Hunt taking a nosedive off a Shanghai skyscraper, Abrams' movie is too oppressive, too enamored of its brutality to deliver anything like real thrills; its deeply unpleasant tone nearly makes you long even for Woo's cartoon absurdities.

Is The Break-Up worth your time? Let's put it this way: Whenever Vaughn is onscreen, it is. When he's not, it ain't. The movie's a comedy, but it's also about a breakup, so it gets a bit maudlin toward the end.

There's a fascinating movie buried inside this story, but it's not the one the filmmakers decided to make. This Omen is simply too big for its britches.

Here, jokes are just as likely to end not in punch lines, but in uncomfortable silence, impenetrable irony or stomach flips.

Whatever goodwill one harbored toward the first Pirates film is quickly dashed by its sneering successor, Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest, which is less a film than a two-and-a-half-hour trailer for the final installment in this accidental trilogy.

Surviving Picasso falters in its careless structure.

[The movie's subject] sounds like great movie material, but the film, except in flashes, doesn't do it justice.

The new version by Harold Ramis trots out a load of bargain-rack gags, tarted up with pricey effects for the A.D.D. generation. Woe to those who cannot leave well enough alone.

One can only assume all the, ah, good stuff landed on the cutting-room floor, because it sure as hell didn't make it to Mars.

Notting Hill offers another example of moviemakers consoling themselves about how tough it is to be famous while congratulating themselves on how down-to-earth they really are.

Like a half-remembered dream, the movie's often so overwhelming that even its dull, dead moments (of which there are many, unfortunately) leave you wondering what you're missing and what you've just forgotten.

Banal sit-comedy masquerading as religious deepthink dolled up as boy-meets-goy love story.

Unhampered by imagination and driven solely by libido.

Sits before us like an exquisite platter of wax fruit, colorful, flavorless, and, if you eat it, very likely to come back up.

Consistently fails to deliver the charm it presumes to have.

Obnoxiously dull.

The fact that Romance was written and directed by a woman doesn't make the film any better; it simply makes it objectionable on other grounds.

Forces its snuggly weirdo upon us and instructs us from the get-go to love him.

That this mess should come from the hand of Istvan Szabo, the brilliant Hungarian director of "Mephisto" and "Colonel Redl," is the real shocker.

Taken as a whole, the movie seems to be searching for a harmony it never really achieves.

What keeps Love in the Time of Money from being truly awful is the fact that the actors give it their all -- they may be in contrived situations, but by golly they'll make the best of them.

It's not really a kids' film, nor it is particularly funny, by either design or execution. It is, rather, Columbus' latest attempt at a comically tinged tearjerker.

Björk holds the movie together, her natural charisma and the overwhelming intensity of her emotions should blind a lot of viewers to the ludicrousness of the story and the intentionally rotten videography.

This sort of thing is the problem with making stuff up as you go along.

While the idea may be good, its execution is awful.

A waste of a decent premise.

Not too far from the version of "Serpico" staged by the Max Fisher Players in "Rushmore."

It's time to run, screaming.

Adequately breezy and sleazy -- a movie about the horniest man in the universe looking for a little one-night stand.

It doesn't help that the special effects aren't spectacular, the pace is numbing, and Bierko is an even less mesmerizing presence than Keanu Reeves.

By the end the movie audience, like the electorate, is less satisfied than strung-out and exhausted.

At its best (which isn't much), Le Divorce blusters along with the tolerable tedium of had-to-be-there home movies; at its worst (which is about 90 percent), it illustrates why the French went and invented the word merde.

No doubt Fox wants to tap into those Latina dollars, but you've got to spend money to make money, and this shoddily cheap-looking product ain't gonna do it.

There are enough good scenes within the 94 minutes of The Guru to make an entertaining coming-attractions trailer.

The pseudo-mystical nonsense in Brian Helgeland's supernatural thriller far outweighs its scare factor.

LaBeouf's got the beef, and his inevitably bright future may be the only reason anyone will ever look back on The Battle of Shaker Heights.

Plays like something Dr. Phil and "Sex and the City's" Carrie Bradshaw might have written during a commercial break, a feel-good fantasy that sounds deep but has no more depth than a kiddie pool drained for winter.

Assassination Tango is Duvall's fourth, yet it still feels like a first film; worse yet, it feels like a waste of an undeniably great actor.

Its heart is in the right place, but it has no soul.

Get out your hankies and weep for the heart-tugging disaster Message in a Bottle.

They do it up big, but their frame of reference -- mostly old sci-fi movies and TV shows -- is pint-sized.

Means to be heavy in terms of psychology, provocation and the examination of emotion, but it sinks like a stone the minute it hits the surface.

So convoluted and half-assed it's tempting to dismiss it as unfinished; it feels like six different movies cut together by a blind editor.

Exactly as you may expect, this thing is good for a few cheap little laughs and no more.

Director Marcus Raboy hasn't made a bad movie, exactly -- just one that seems to have forgotten its own jokes, much as those who watch it will forget everything about it a week later, stoned or not.

It's barely a movie at all, more like a thousand car commercials spliced together in an hour.

Not that there aren't funny moments in the film, but they're cobbled together so awkwardly that you'd never suspect the director had made a film before.

If you were ever in marching band, you'll love this; if not, stay far away.

This compression of logic--coupled with two hours of ham-fisted delivery--guarantees that Antitrust won't jangle your nerves but will intermittently split your sides with laughter.

A dismaying dearth of romantic chemistry -- during their brief scenes together, the two (Pitt, Roberts) actually seem afraid to touch each other -- and we end up with a Frankenstein's monster of a movie: lots of interesting pieces cobbled together with all the stitches showing.

In the little war between charm and belligerence that is the real centerpiece of Lost and Found, romantic comedy takes a beating.

Emits the embarrassing aura of a filmmaker desperate to be considered cool, yet utterly inept at finding original ways to reach that status.

If a movie is going to be so totally derivative, it should at least do a better job of it.

Dude, where's the script? Just Awful.

Some of this stuff should give you some good laughs. Unfortunately, the film's not a comedy, and once the conservative-bashing wears off, the alleged thriller elements kick in. Too bad that for you, the viewer, there's still another hour to go.

The most overrated movie of the year (of all time?) by people who should know better.

No one is more blameworthy than Witherspoon...With her newfound clout and charm, she could make better films; instead, she strolls up to the audience standing in line at the ATM and demands we fork it over or else.

What isn't hard to say is that Noé really isn't a very talented filmmaker.

So how bad, in the final analysis, is Gigli? The best that can be said is that it doesn't beat out "The Ladies Man" as the most abrasively awful film of the past five years, nor does it top "Battlefield Earth" for sheer misguided lunacy.

The picture's biggest problem is that no one is sympathetic.

Cornier than the cornfields spread out in front of the dilapidated rural Texas manse inhabited by Robert Duvall and Michael Caine, playing grumpy old brothers with mismatched accents.

If any further indication were needed of the fact that gay has gone mainstream, this flaccid farce provides definitive proof, for it's as forced and unfunny as subpar Sandra Dee.

Hackman, playing it gleefully amoral, walks away with the film, for what that's worth...which is a video rental for fans of the actors involved. Yes, that's video, not DVD -- four bucks at Blockbuster is more than you ought to be paying.

Nothing happens. At all. Ever. Remember when Steve Martin was funny? Apparently, neither does he.

Paycheck is a terribly muddled mess, a Hitchcock homage (with generous, obvious nods to The Birds, Strangers on a Train and North by Northwest) by a great filmmaker trying to say a great deal with so very little.

Pretentious yet devoid of poetry, left-of-center yet artless, this well-intentioned trudge does not exist to be enjoyed or appreciated so much as to be coddled and patronized as one would a retarded child.

Lackadaisical feel of the film; Freundlich is unable to generate much suspense.

Ryan never quite convinces us she's seen the inside of a fight gym, much less that she's worthy to be Rocky in a miniskirt. On the other hand, her director here was not Campion but actor Charles S. Dutton, whose behind-the-camera skills, developed via cable TV, tend toward the cartoonish.

Silly, misguided, formulaic and largely a piece of trash, but it's not quite a disaster. There's the dancing and the music and the sunlight.

The film is often unintentionally silly, and it might have been better if it tried to be.

The film's finale is truly egregious, a laugh-out-loud combination of ludicrousness and sadism that someone somewhere probably found scary, assuming they never saw a thriller before.

Lars von Trier's latest thingamabob is a large, pretentious blob of coulda-been. As in, it coulda been deep and insightful. It coulda been sociologically challenging. It coulda been formalistically thrilling. But it isn't.

Should make about $750, which is how much they need to save the farm, but a little less than Disney CEO Michael Eisner needs to save his job.

It's flapping its wings so desperately in pursuit of artistic heights that it nosedives directly into the ground. The relentless exertion makes the film a chore to watch.

Lured to the project with John Cusack as her original co-star (cruelly replaced by Matthew Broderick), Nicole Kidman phones it in.

Among the several iterations of Jules Verne's novel about the inventor's adventures whilst traipsing through England, Asia and the Wild West, this new one is the least impressive and most depressive. Even the 1989 made-for-TV version starring Pierce Brosnan possessed more spark and steam than this lazy, lackluster take.

As witch movies go -- even lighthearted, supposedly comic witch movies -- Practical Magic is conspicuously lacking in supernatural phenomena.

Highly commercialized teenybopper fluff, likely to please the tweenie girls but sorely lacking in anything original or even interesting.

Duff isn't exactly known for complex fare, but even "The Lizzie McGuire Movie" was way better than this.

There's way too much schmaltz in the mix. Even the musical score bombs: Throbbing, eerie techno simply does not suit a character trapped in the 1940s.

Well, Sanaa Lathan's in there somewhere as the smart and sexy ass-kickin' chick, but it's really all about the monster disembowelments, which happen often.

Every situation, every bit of dialogue, comes straight out of the Big Book of Movie Clichés.

It plays like a parody of suspense movies, then occasionally becomes serious, then boring, then makes a jarring 180, then frustrates, then gets vaguely interesting again.

The movie, which feels as amateurish as a student film made for cable access, doesn't deliver the goods; the gotcha moment never comes.

It's the solipsistic, obvious, misogynistic, and occasionally redeeming tale.

If Alfred Hitchcock were retarded, lobotomized, and freshly dug up, he might possibly c--- out a movie like this one.

It's unfortunate that, nudity and all, this is one of Toback's absolute worst efforts.

The very best thing about A Dirty Shame, a giddy sex farce from John Waters, is the credits.

Russell, a former student of Buddhist monk-philosopher Robert Thurman's, is reaching too far, straining too hard, saying too much that adds up to so little after all the mumbos and jumbos tallied up by film's end.

It would take the ghost of Stanley Kubrick to get great performances out of Jimmy Fallon, Queen Latifah, and supermodel Gisele Bündchen, and Tim, you're no Stanley.

Feels like a quirky sitcom -- "Arrested Development" without the development.

It's big and loud, but this Peacemaker is still a dud.

Succeeds in scaring you and boring you at the same time; unlike Moore's movie, it's agitprop bereft of artistry, porn for Republicans.

You're almost tempted to laugh at Birth by the end, but by then you're too busy cursing it to bother.

The witless inanity of After the Sunset is so numbing that the sole reason for any living creature to sit through it--man, woman or household pet--is to marvel at the speed and variety of actress Salma Hayek's costume changes.

Has all the charm of a canceled CBS sitcom.

Slips by quickly enough, but it never engages our interest more than passingly.

Once the terror ends and the credits roll, we finally get to the best part: a merciful escape.

While not entirely successful, at least deserves points for creativity.

Here is the horror-action genre at its silliest and most uninspired.

It's a mess, but it isn't as bad as you think.

Part female revenge flick, part Saturday Night Live skit, part courtroom drama, and part religious tent revival, this movie never congeals into anything worth watching.

Mimic is static, highhanded, and confused, wasting most of its 105-minute running time simply spelling out the premise.

Billed as a comedy, this low-wattage sitcom is both ill-tempered and mean-spirited.

It's chatty when it wants to pretend it's deep and spiritual, messy when it's striving for chaotic and thrilling, and boring when it has no other options left.

Proves an absolute chore to sit through.

It's a lame Heather Locklear romantic comedy and a lame Hilary Duff romantic comedy all in one!

To damn Herbie: Fully Loaded as soporific crap, as lazy profiteering, as yet another needless and cynical remake in a season populated by such con artists, would be as pointless as the movie itself.

Stripped of every major scary moment and restructured in what feels like a deliberate attempt to remove all suspense, this "horror" movie is now a domestic soap opera.

A problem with Park's naturalistic worldview is that it's hard to find anyone to root for. The movie is beautiful to look at, but hideous in its narrative.

It's easily the ugliest film Gilliam's ever made, a movie shot with a lens someone forgot to wipe. It's also his loudest: Every scene is amped up to 11, and every line of dialogue is delivered as though it's a cry for help from the bottom of the well.

There's no reason to see this film in a theater -- you'll hate yourself for paying full price. Plus, you'll need beer, and lots of it, to appreciate the movie properly.

What's missing is romance. Despite the engaging friskiness of its two stars, the film is romantically vapid. Watching it is like trying to warm up to a hologram.

Terrence McNally's Tony Award-winning work has been called "one of the major plays of our time." Moviegoers who aren't stage-struck may wonder, "What's the fuss?"

It has but one thing going for it: a cast filled with Oscar nominees.

This was a better movie back when it was called "Gossip" . . . oh, wait, no -- that one sucked too.

Any goy, too, can fall for this tripe, especially if they've a fondness for mawkish cliché, sitcom pacing, popcorn psychology, and lousy cinematography.

The final showdown between sole survivor and killer is sufficiently well done that you wonder why the rest didn't measure up.

This highly sanitized, heavily costumed, dramatically inert nonsense makes last year's dreadful golf biopic "Bobby Jones: Stroke of Genius" look like a masterpiece.

Less fun than "Cry_Wolf" and "Venom," if that's possible.

As an actress, Madonna has to work on her vulnerability more.

The Dying Gaul becomes so overwrought in the last act that it ends up as pure histrionics.

Rent plays as a very long joke with no punch line, an exercise in mawkish sentimentality that's embarrassing to watch. Kudos to the actors for truly committing to their roles, but with this material, it might have been better if they hadn't.

Witless, terminally irritating remake.

If you really want to live life to the fullest, step one is to avoid wasting an hour and a half of your life in a theater showing Last Holiday.

Its execution is stultifying, laughable and ultimately a little offensive.

Instead of a gripping, conscience-bending thriller, Paradise plods along, determined to be some sort of master chess game ruminating on personal and cultural value systems and the complex and often contradicting facets of loyalty, honesty, friendship, love, responsibility, self-preservation, and exploitation.

Too much attention to art-deco detail, a meandering story that hesitates whenever it wants to touch an emotional chord, then squanders the opportunity with an eccentric line-reading or an extravagant camera angle.

A muddle—not amiably ambling, not affably shaggy, just a mess that gets messier till, at times, the whole thing looks improvised by amateurs more concerned with being clever than something resembling affectionate.

Yes, the "Taxi Driver" parallels are intentional: Hill spells them out in the press notes, all but branding Observe and Report a Scorsesefied remake that reeks of stale Cinnabon.

Standard revenge shenanigans ensue, with more boo-hoo numbers from Vin, who ain't up to it -- he hasn't been this lame since, uh, ever.

May find it hard to sit without embarrassment through this bizarre mixture of paleontology, preposterous anthropomorphism, and fuzzy-headed New Age myth-making in which the only thing missing is the show tunes. Thank God for small favors.

Awful narration almost ruins the ghostly, gorgeous Running Free.

Singleton's version is cynical and silly--one long set-up to a closing scene that promises, or threatens, a sequel.

We're in for a long, unpleasant, reactionary ride.

Doesn't work as comedy or drama or anything in between.

It's too easy, but here goes: This movie's a Loser. Sorry.

Predictable and conventional and unadventurous. It can't really be defended, except that it's comfortably enjoyable.

Moments of strained mirth indicate how false and fabricated the whole enterprise really is--just a couple of well-to-do superstars doing their darnedest to prove to us that they're regular folk. And failing.

Really, what women want is what all of us want: a decent movie, something vaguely insightful and occasionally funny. This isn't that movie.

It doesn't add up to much more than a trifle that might have been more impressive as a short.

Screwball mistaken-identity crapfest...it's just utterly plain, a confection so bland you don't even care that it doesn't really make any sense at the end.

Less a spiritual quest than a very self-indulgent gimmick movie that could use a strong shot of inspiration.

The film has no form or function; at best, it's a 90-minute infomercial.

Proof of Life kidnaps the audience, then tortures it to a slow death

Happily stuck between a rock and the deep blue sea.

A wobbly Basinger and a feeble screenplay doom I Dreamed of Africa.

Many of the most absurd things on view in this film are absolutely true.

Full of conspiracies, all The Skulls lacks is a brain.

Every movie Dugan releases looks like something made on accident--tosses yet another stink bomb into theaters for audiences to sniff over.

Bernal can't decide if he's making a Tarantino homage or an Almodovar riff or an Albert Brooks tribute...and the wobbly sensibility finally knocks the movie's legs out from beneath it altogether.

Aspires to be a "Beach Blanket Bingo" redux with a gangbang Grease finale, but it plays like junior high Neil LaBute filmed by an elementary school AV squad.

When the movie's not playing stupid, it's aiming for sickly sweet sincerity. It's such a jarring and inevitably juvenile juxtaposition it comes off like a Hallmark card parody written by the staffers at "Cracked."

A romantic comedy with neither humor nor sparks between the leads, Marci X attempts to lampoon gangsta rap clichés so obvious they feel ten years old -– “Malibu's Most Wanted” brought more to the table.

Think "My Best Friend's Wedding," subtract gay best friend, dorky karaoke scene, charm, and any hint of malice or conflict, and you've got it.

Comes across as artificial.

Experiencing this movie is a little like watching a manic-depressive's medication wear off.

What Lies Beneath is my head on the movie theater floor, snoozing through this film.

Are there really legions of postboomers out there sighing nostalgically over the happy hours they spent watching Inspector Gadget?

An ambitious, frustrating drag.

It's like an amateur theater production. Reiner rushes through the setup in such a mad dash that it feels like a cartoon.

A film built upon transitions so weak and obvious it's astonishing the entire thing doesn't collapse on itself.

This ain't no movie. It's a very long, very tedious infomercial for Phantom Menace action figures, on sale now at a Target or Toys "R" Us near you.

A work of hilarious, nearly Ed Wood-worthy ineptitude.

It could be said that Reeves is one of the great manifestations of the mysteriousness of stardom. He gives the worst performance in Sweet November, and he's the best thing about it.

This lame hostage movie doesn't even deliver for Seagal fans.

Bearable only because, unlike the recent spate of teen films, it's so breezy it barely even registers.

Disappointing only because its best moments are transcendent; its worst moments, sadly, are just so ordinary.

Deafeningly dull movie.

Prochnow rocks; nothing else does.

Every bit as pathetic and unfunny as it looks.

Meet Joe Black takes an interesting idea--Death assumes human form and comes to earth to learn about human existence--and reduces it to a flat, uninspired, interminably slow movie.

Rent a porno instead; it'll be less exploitative. God help us, two more of these things are planned.

It poses as an unblinkered look at the hangups and hypocrisies of the bourgeoisie. In reality it's an empty, narcissistic tantrum.

Connie and Carla doesn't just do violence to the memory of Wilder's brilliant sex farce (Some Like It Hot); it's so clumsy, it might give cross-dressing itself a bad name.

The Punisher would be almost offensive were it not so inconsequential. There's just something terribly off-putting about a movie in which every gruesome death is a punch line, where a villain's homosexuality is used to lure him to his death and dozens of innocents are gunned down just to launch a film franchise.

Alas, the film has good intentions, but it's a failure. Just try to stay awake.

Hope Floats comes lumbering along, scourging all in its path with saccharine sentimentality and bogus emotions.

Instead of satire, we're treated to diarrhea jokes, dogs dangled from the windows of speeding SUVs and tasteless sobriquets bestowed upon anyone who looks vaguely ethnic.

Every once in a while, a film comes along that so blatantly disregards emotional authenticity that one fears for the sanity of its director. She Hate Me is just such a film, and Spike Lee is its director and co-writer. Artless, sensationalized, didactic and often downright silly.

A movie that leaves you wondering what the fuss was all about when its end credits appear; it's a mish-mash of a dozen other, better films ground up and watered down--Seven, Silence of the Lambs, and Manhunter, to name a few of the usual suspects.

It's a self-satisfied, self-loathing mess that demands you adore and cheer for the very person you come to hate well before its 105 minutes are up. Little Black Book will leave you feeling skuzzy.

While tyro director Simon West fills Con Air with all the slam-bang action and well-honed wisecracks that were the more positive qualities of its predecessors, the film brims even more with all their worst qualities.

The fourth installment in the Batman franchise is one long head-splitting exercise in clueless cacophony that makes you feel as though you're being held hostage in some haywire Planet Hollywood while sonic booms pummel your auditory canal.

There might have been a decent comedy here if someone had remembered to insert some actual humor.

The only thing worse than second-generation Guy Ritchie is fourth-generation Quentin Tarantino, and this movie has the musty smell of 1995 all over it.

It wears out its welcome well before its halfway point, by which time you're either so tangled up in plot points you're strangling, or so bored you just wish you were being strangled.

Andrew Litvack, whose inability to direct is outweighed only by his inability to write anything remotely witty, enlightening, or engaging. Calling this a farce would be, well, a farce.

September Tapes, with its torturously high-minded narration and ludicrously low-road shenanigans, uses the terror attacks of 2001 as the setup for an infuriating gotcha finale.

This really should have gone straight to video--or, better yet, to the nearest landfill.

Wrenches paltry giggles and cheap warmth from a screenplay that makes "Son in Law" seem like Sam Shepard. But wretched Affleck is the real liability.

Runs two hours and 20 minutes and plays like 10 days in the county jail.

The performances of the Anglo cast are closer to catatonia than Catalonia.

The most offensive movie of the year.

An utter drag, a tepid and sterilized telling of Susann's life.

If Big Momma's House isn't as bad as you imagined, then you've no imagination at all.

May steal from the best, but it does it so badly and obviously that it has to depend upon gratuitous shock-cuts and soundtrack stings to elicit any kind of reflex-action fright from the viewer.