Reiss guides the film with a firm hand, ratcheting up the tension and ably guiding his actors. It's his protagonists that undo the film, making it a chore to sit through.

Especially disappointing that Lemmons, who in "Eve's Bayou" gave us insightful glimpses into the emotional world of black adults, has lost her balance, elevating formula over revelation.

Comes off as a desperate attempt to breathe life into dull proceedings.

Screams straight-to-video.

Catalog of ugly female stereotypes and rotten jokes.

Dull, tacky docudrama

The cast, which includes Cloris Leachman as the sisters' mother and Paul Sorvino, Jamey Sheridan and Mark Harmon as their various men, emote like pros, even as they deplete any audience goodwill left over from past triumphs.

A sappy love story wherein nary a gun or action sequence is seen after the first 10 minutes.

Wears its lack of originality in a crowded slasher marketplace like a red badge of desperation.

What this turkey produces in the way of hang-ups is a transparently phony class conflict.

Hyams ("End of Days," "Timecop"), who is his own cinematographer, has no idea how to shoot or compose Xiong's wired choreography.

Talky and labored.

The predicaments of this whiny, unprepossessing crew inspire about as much sympathy as a celebrity divorce.

A hodgepodge of psychosexual horror gimmicks, from the virginal psychic artist to the impotent psychotic actor.

Is it possible for a movie to have a worse title? This might not matter so much if the film that followed were any good, but for the most part it's drudgery.

Basically a TNT Western with Tom Berenger in the lead.

An ostensible action-comedy that can't seem to get either side of its genre equation right.

Tiresome vanity project.

Writer and director Gilfillan has an estimable biography, having studied at the Beijing Film Academy and worked as an assistant to John Woo, but there's nothing in her prosaic feature debut that suggests this means a thing.

If you're above the target age of 5, Thomas may coax you into a naplike stupor.

Now that's exploitation.

Everything from the Rube Goldberg sets to the Jim Henson creatures is aimed squarely at a preschool audience.

(Lawrence)'s not just unfunny, he's coarsely anti-funny. The film just lurches from one dull skit to the next without bite or much of a point.

It's hard to imagine a movie at once more pandering and insulting to adult women

It is, however, Tortilla Soup's cultural transposition that feels most phony. Where Lee brings depth and subtle observation to his middle-class ensemble piece, Ripoll has simply added a thin Latino glaze.

Surprisingly few insights from the quintet, and after 90 minutes we're more familiar with the furniture of their rooms.

What could have been a fascinating exploration of geographical mayhem becomes instead an exercise in tedium.

A surprise hit in Thailand, the film is nonetheless a reductive mess.

Shandling comes off as a sleazebag -- all that's missing are the gold chains, tufted chest hair and English Leather.

The makers of this malnourished teen drama haven't just dropped six letters from the title of Shakespeare's Othello, they have excised everything that gives the original its troubling power -- principally a point but also furious passion.

Overproduced, psychologically muddled, and burdened with an enchantingly overheated screenplay.

As mean-spirited toward its working-class characters, especially its women, as it is profoundly unfunny.

What’s striking about John McKay's feature debut is how much contempt toward his female characters the writer-director manages to pack into 115 minutes.

A lobotomized updating of "A Midsummer Night's Dream."

Even though Ready To Rumble isn't funny or good in any way, there's plenty of softcore gay porn (wrestling), loud music and women with large breasts.

Preposterous and tedious, Sonny is spiked with unintentional laughter that, unfortunately, occurs too infrequently to make the film even a guilty pleasure.

Just lies there, poorly lit and tone-deaf.

There's really only one reason to see Party Monster, and that's Seth Green's scene-stealing performance as former (and somewhat reluctant) New York club kid James St. James, the boy who would be queen.

The only vaguely funny moments are courtesy William Fichtner, as the dead woman's husband, and Jamie Lee Curtis in full metal drag as his furtive squeeze.

Director Jordan Brady achieves the remarkable feat of squandering a topnotch foursome of actors -- particularly Theron, a very game and able comedienne -- by shoving them into every clichéd white-trash situation imaginable.

Director Shankman has diligently studied the forms and reproduced the moves of the screwball romances he so clearly loves, but he simply hasn't the chops to put together even a decent rip-off of those glittering jewels of the '30s and '40s, which depend on great writing, classy situation comedy and, above all, chemistry.

Lazy, infinitely silly cartoon.

For trashing a classic, Tunnicliffe and his writing cohorts deserve a Grimm-style fate -- perhaps a long, slow boil in the witch’s vat?

Sometimes the predictability of a romantic comedy is reassuring, and sometimes it makes you want to scream, as with this witless wonder.

Sucks -- because it's a frenetic bore that insists on its audience's adoration while making no demands upon their intelligence.

Unfunny comedy. Nearly everyone is terrible except for Cumming, who just does what comes naturally and steals his every scene.

Why Crop Circles now, if not to ride the hype of M. Night Shyamalan's "Signs" to some quick cash? The movie’s rambling, slapdash, repetitious nature suggests as much.

The limp title says it all.

To be fair, it's not solely Cage's fault that his new film, Captain Corelli's Mandolin, is lousy -- director John Madden (Shakespeare in Love) deserves most of the heat for this listless dud.

Sandler is -- à la "The Wedding Singer" -- in his washout romantic mode here, and no amount of spastic-colon jokes, cartoon violence or good-buddy cameos (Al Sharpton, John McEnroe) can distract from the fact that Gary Cooper he ain't.

A betrayal of all things Buffy, not to mention a complete waste of Gellar’s strengths as a young actress. Even the most hardcore of her fans would do well to give it a miss.

It’s hard to know what’s more depressing -- a senseless remake or the idea of a once-great director doing such shockingly slack work.

It's animated cockfighting for children.

The film isn't just banal, it's aggressively, arrogantly banal.

Occasionally the Woo-inflected action sequences - particularly a horse stampede through town on hanging day, and an escape from a moving train - rouse the film from its anti-historic, even mythophobic torpor.

Within a few minutes of the film's frenetic opening set piece, however, it's obvious that director David Kellogg and screenwriters Kerry Ehrin and Zak Penn have no idea how to capture the spirit of the source material.

A tedious viewing experience.

Suggests that we're supposed to take this love story as something more than farce. Please. Tom Hanks fucking that volleyball would have been more convincing.

A waste of the filmmakers' time and ours, and offering further evidence that, outside the art house, much British cinema has its head jammed tightly up its own arse.

What should have been a smart, stylish crime caper that nourishes film buffs with its multiple cinema references feels more like force-feeding.

The film's failings are only highlighted by the fact that while, occasionally, we're granted real glimpses of interior lives, largely emanating from de Leon, Davao and Picache, those lives are never given the chance to take shape.

The pits.

A pretty miserable time at the movies.

A cut above the usual teenage-wasteland movie.

Old people are made to look ridiculous; clowns are brutalized; characters talk in rapid-fire vaudeville shtick.

Bruckheimer shifts from high-concept historical romance "Pearl Harbor" and high-concept T&A "Coyote Ugly" to a first attempt at high-concept light comedy, yet only his fondness for dragging acting talent down with him carries over.

Levy, Luis Guzman, Cheri Oteri -- utterly wasted. At 82 minutes it feels longer than “Lawrence of Arabia” -- and a lot less funny.

Loud, chaotic and largely unfunny (veteran actors John Witherspoon and Anna Maria Horsford seem at best indifferent to the material), Friday After Next is the graceless sodomizing of a cult classic.

An excruciating no-brainer blend of “Starship Troopers” and “Top Gun,” without the former’s guilty-pleasure concoction of gory F/X and dark humor or Tom Cruise’s megawatt smile.

Made with the slick, shorthand complacency of a TV movie, Beautiful is so overstuffed with contrivance, you can hardly breathe.

The only real-life situations the movie evokes vividly are the circumstances of its own production: underrehearsed actors in hastily staged scenes speaking page after page of awkward expository dialogue.

Working from a script by David S. Goyer ("Dark City") that lacks any sense of humor or character, Snipes seems unsure if he should vamp it up or play it straight, while Dorff just plain sucks.

It isn't only that there is a dearth of ideas in Hollywood Ending -- however hateful, "Deconstructing Harry" was at least about something -- it's that the whole thing is almost entirely devoid of pleasure.

Cuba Gooding Jr.'s unrelenting energy can be galvanic in good films, but in lesser efforts it reeks of frenzied futility.

I can find nothing nice to note about this excruciatingly slow, overly tasteful piece of whimsy.

The freak show of druggy squalor and the wired sexuality of hardcore kink and flaccid cocks float by solely for our carnivalesque amusement.

A brutish affair replete with sliced bodies, a diced storyline and enough clanky dialogue to wake the dead.

Dworman's comic style dangles in the abyss somewhere between sub-Woody Allen and Mel Brooks (his script borrows too heavily from both).

For a film that deals with adultery, racism, immigration and class struggle, Loco Love is a startlingly weightless work. It has the antiseptic look and feel of an Olsen Twins video.

There are moments that suggest the comedy that could have been.

Although rumor and marketing indicate that this is meant to be a comedy, there's little that's funny here.

The best parts of the movie occur during the outtakes, which are genuinely funny. The movie proper is insufferable.

When it comes to real people living and loving in the real world, the studios don't have a clue.

This feeble remake offers little more than two pretty and willing leads who nonetheless can't hide their embarrassment over being set up as distractions to hide the film's thorough lack of coherence and appeal.

A better title for this flick might have been Astigmatism: Nothing ever comes into focus long enough ... to deliver even the faintest sense of fright.

Director Raja Gosnell apparently doesn't even try to pump life into this wan film version of the beloved Saturday-morning cartoon.

Schumacher has gone into the cinematic heart of darkness and emerged with his own peculiar kink on the war movie: Vietnam beefcake.

No one ever turns into a real character, and none of the scenes have either dramatic or comedic resonance.

Extraordinary is the very last adjective that comes to mind.

Various actors deserving of better (including Zooey Deschanel, Eddie Griffin and Lyle Lovett) suffer through the undercooked material, while love interest Eliza Dushku gamely gets through both a bikini-modeling montage and a mechanical bull ride, but none of their efforts can save this film.

First-time director Bryan Johnson's failure to resolve the film’s two moods -- psychopathic sexual brutality and light social satire -- proves fatal.

Visually sumptuous but intellectually stultifying.

The only time the actors appear to have accelerated their own heartbeats is in two paintball scenes, as well as -- professionals all -- the fart-lighting contest. It's pretty pathetic.

Directed by Donald Petrie ("Miss Congeniality") with about as much substance and style as a ham sandwich. It's a heavy hand that damps down such airy creatures as Hudson and McConaughey.

Nice try, guys . . . now give me back my 97 minutes.

A star ensemble is preposterously miscast.

The booty here is 100 percent fool's gold.

Never quite gets up to speed, lurching its way through a glossing, superficial take on street life and teenage sexuality.

How fortunate that the J. Lo bod, majestic butt and all, finds itself in excellent working order in Gigli: There is precious little other consolation in this formless windbag of a romantic comedy.

British director Eric Till’s ghastly Euro-pudding co-production (with all the international accents and badly post-synchronized dialogue that implies) manages to make a travesty of its title subject.

The execution is actually worse than the premise. Nonstop racial, sexual and cultural stereotypes parade across the screen with little wit or real humor to guide them.

Those seeking anything resembling a real discussion of the issues had best seek elsewhere.

The movie is a funereally paced downer.

If it's difficult to pinpoint exactly where this maladroit drama about the infamous New York discotheque went wrong, it's because everything in the film is lousy: The writing, the directing, the acting, the casting (Neve Campbell?), the moral posturing, the Capote clone, the Andy lookalike, even the glitter that clings to Salma Hayek's lashes like tears.

An undercooked allusion to chaos theory -- gives every appearance of having been conceived, planned and executed out of a high school locker room.

That Amy Heckerling produced and, supposedly, had an uncredited hand in scripting this turkey is the saddest thing I've heard all year.

A big-screen reality show that flashes plenty of t-- and d--- but little integrity.

When will Hollywood learn that a genre trend can last for years if itís nurtured with decent scripts? No time soon, apparently.

It's noisy, it's flashy, and it's deadly dull -- without the goofball, horror-nerd energy of Kevin Williamson, who wrote the first film, this essentially storyless picture, written by Trey Callaway and directed by Danny Gan-non, revolves doggedly around Hewitt's tits.

The fault lies mostly with the writers, who consistently come up short on wit and imagination enough to finish, let alone flesh out or polish, a joke.

Miserably unfunny, wholly unnecessary affair.

As bad as the movie is, when it tries to be funny -- a hired killer who sings to his victims, a fat man named Bumpo, and an interminable fight scene choreographed to “La donna è mobile” -- it somehow manages to get several degrees worse.

By the end of this mercifully short excuse for a horror movie, you'll be wishing the beast had chowed down on the entire ensemble.

A movie bloated with character cliches and a bullying score that bludgeons us into whatever emotion composer Marc Shaiman thinks we should be experiencing.

It's impossible to find an iota of aesthetic worth or an ounce of pleasure in this sludge.

Cute and smarmy are nothing new for writer-director Tom DiCillo; what is new is the crushingly unfunny fusion of the two he's hit upon for this film.

If your child forces you to go to Yu-Gi-Oh!, remember that there's no law against iPods in movie theaters.

As for anyone else who may experience a sudden need for therapy after sitting through this, you're on your own.

Queen Latifah gets co-producer and scenarist credits for this anemic comedy, and also a supporting role that amounts to the worst performance of her career.

Spanglish is Brooks' unqualified kitchen disaster - a desperate, shapeless, overreaching big-screen sitcom of a movie that just wants to be loved. Is that so wrong? In a word, yes.

Full of shuttery jump cuts set to music cues so loud your heart can't help but convulse, Darkness should have been left to molder in Miramax's vast vault of horror-movie stiffs.

A truly dreadful sequel.

The skits are dreadful, the jokes suck.

Achieves a generic period look, but there's nothing lived-in about its rooms, nothing persuasive or necessary about its time and place -- there's no longer even a movie fan's nostalgia to give it some spark, or a reason for being.

When Plympton isn't indulging his manias, the film just sort of nods off, and nothing much happens -- either visually or storywise -- for what seems like ages.

It's bad enough that Australian writer-director Pip Karmel feels she must attempt the alternate-reality gimmick.

What's meant to be a colorblind story, plays up age-old stereotypes.

Fails to fulfill.

Intriguing for a while, then steadily more confusing and finally just incoherent.

Parker has boiled An Ideal Husband into a thuddingly unimaginative costume drama laden with frocks, riding crops, servile butlers and very good actors desperately treading water.

Writer-director Jon Gunn and co-writer John W. Mann can't fashion a meaningful parable from their knot of dangling plotlines and absurd scenarios.

Yo momma so fat, when she gets in an elevator, it has to go down. Had enough?

The humor stays on one low level throughout, and thus fades fast.

Bad photography, bad acting and bad dialogue.

No, this isn't an adaptation of Don DeLillo’s great 1985 novel, but a muddled talking-ghosts movie.

So tedious is Fascination that the plot, the embittered characters and, yes, the sexuality are merely insipid.

Deadening comedy.

Shakily cobbled together from stock footage and new interviews with authors and family, Stalin’s Wife is nearly barbarous in its denial of aesthetic pleasure. The whole thing looks like a late-night-TV infomercial.

Nobody onscreen seems to realize that this deadeningly self-serious treatment of family dysfunction is so overwrought that it becomes a spot-on satire of low-budget ineptitude.

Shrill, smug would-be satire.

Conceptually, Underclassman is the stillborn spawn of "Beverly Hills Cop" and "21 Jump Street." Except its star, Nick Cannon, possesses neither the biting cool of young Eddie Murphy nor the sullen mystery of Johnny Depp. And the script, by David T. Wagner and Brent Goldberg, is breathtakingly bad.

The picture is an enormous disappointment... The result is one of the most self-consciously grimy movies on record - it looks as if the negative were developed in a mud bath.

A degraded and degrading film, of interest only because it's symptomatic of so much that's wrong with the drearily repetitive tabloid mentality that has infected not just the news media, but the whole culture industry.

Terrible movies about trivial subjects are commonplace and inconsequential, but a terrible movie that grapples with potentially inflammatory subject matter is far worse, because its aspirations are higher - which makes the failure of Varun Khanna's moralistic drama all the more spectacular.

Mini is too tame for Skina-max and too inane to survive on the art-house circuit. It's a pretentious erotic thriller that gives honest trash a bad name.

So why not a sequel that subtracts the only good thing about the first movie, Ryan Reynolds? When Tara Reid won't even come back, you know things can't be good.

Cedric gets some help from a butt-kicking babe (Lucy Liu) who may or may not be his girlfriend, and if you believe this pairing could plausibly happen, you might be gullible enough to buy a ticket to this movie.

If you care a thing about your evening's entertainment, you'll walk out of this howler before you ever buy a ticket.

By the time this dud drops on NetFlix, it'll be as obsolete as a Chia pet jokebook.

Pretentiously impressionistic, sloppy almost to the point of self-parody, Temple’s film is New Journalism without the journalism -- or, alas, the drugs.

An amateurish mashup of "The Butterfly Effect" and "The Family Man" (talk about unholy hybrids!) that strains patience from the get-go.

What is it good for? Absolutely nothing. Offering neither the enjoyably preposterous auto-heroics of the Transporter movies nor the lithe, legible athleticism of even second-tier Hong Kong thrillers.

As numbing and depressing to watch as suits hammering out a film-packaging deal one venal clause at a time.

Meet the Spartans is a mild improvement over their "Epic Movie," which is like saying that a debilitating fever is more fun than appendicitis, but what’s shocking is how lazy it is, which is a shame for former UK child star/pop singer Sean Maguire, whose Gerard Butler impersonation is spot-on.

The entire movie is an object lesson in diminishing returns: of nagging shock cuts and blaring sound cues used as indiscriminately as joy buzzers; of “look out behind you!” scares that wouldn’t make a Cub Scout flinch; of a blurry visual scheme that was far more terrifying in "The Diving Bell and the Butterfly," where it sought empathy rather than empty sensation.

Is Meet Bill the worst movie ever? Probably not, but it's certainly incoherent enough to give "Gigli" a run for its money.

McCormick and screenwriter J.S. Cardone don’t have one original thought between them, but they do appear to share an obsession with characters opening hotel-room closets in which the steel hangers gleam ominously.

The animation, incidentally, is half-a--ed, like they ran out of the $292.96 budget halfway through. Rip-off indeed.

With its inexplicably watchable shotgun-riding bimbos, unconscious homoeroticism and "Shawshank Redemption" ending, The Fast and the Frivolous here is almost so bad it's good. Almost...

Another of those dopey crime thrillers where the hardcore, bad-ass antihero inexplicably decides one day to lower his guard and open his heart, causing all kinds of hell to break loose.

Astonishingly inept alleged satire.

It plays like a disastrous Sci-Fi Channel castoff, thanks in no small part to Myrick's odd decision to include incessant voice-over narration by Ball, which plays like a really terrible in-character DVD commentary track.

Given the passivity of computer use, the "hacker thriller" is film history's great running joke, but special attention should go to Echelon Conspiracy's authors for conceiving a climax that tries to juice tension out of someone using a search engine and staring at a download countdown.

Idiot plotting and dialogue are what you'd expect from a genre that typically rewards narrative development with a skip function. But the rote fight scenes are a disappointment.

The movie layers its fatalistic drama with absurdist horseplay and a few moments of Lynch-ian mysticism, but it's an awkward mix at best; even when The Perfect Sleep is trying to be funny, it's far too self-conscious to really be much fun.

In keeping with the film’s giddy superficiality, what’s revealed is a series of sexy poses passed off as character depth. All the backstabbing, shifting alliances and dark motives are held together by adolescent, innuendo-laden dialogue and thick Sapphic overtones.

Many in the youthful target audience won’t be able to identify the "homages," and the script is far too lazy for seasoned horror fans to stomach.

Watching Ramis struggle with his two stars is like watching someone try to juggle lead weights.

Murphy slogs his way through this dismally dull sci-fi comedy.

So what in this high-concept lame-a-thon makes screenwriter Bradley Allenstein think he can diss the Clippers?

Given the tainted history of Supernova, it's difficult to figure out where to place blame for either the undernourished screenplay or the moribund action.

Let horses be horses, scrap the tin-eared Lukas Haas narration.

It's a nice try, but the film remains a pinhead's idea of softcore fetish material.

An unnecessary remake.

It's outclassed by the memory of just about every prizefighting flick you've ever seen.

There are gruelingly unfunny gags, an unspeakable soundtrack featuring BTO and Billy Ocean, and Victoria's Secret mannequin Heidi Klum as a model who demands that her pussy hair be styled into a bushy red heart.

It looks like the film is angling for a "Northern Exposure" reunion, except with none of the regional eccentricity.

This sort of nostalgia-drenched, sexual-coming-of-age saga has been done to death.

Airless, joyless, worse than you could even imagine.

Gormless, gutless little home movie.

Shrill and gloomy.

Mutates halfway through into a ham-fisted action movie that squanders the good will, and insults the intelligence, of its audience.

Offers no perverse philosophical conundrums and no eye-popping visuals. It's a dull, lifeless bore.

If you get your jollies from watching women being shot, stabbed and humiliated, you’ll love video director David Dobkin’s pointlessly grisly, tediously derivative feature debut.

A work of top-shelf schlock.

The cinema of morons made by morons for morons, Swordfish is everything you expect but worse.

Crude animation, shrill voicework.

All the while, director Lorena David labors to keep implausibility and bad acting from sinking a ship that never should have left port.

It's shockingly inert.

While the film is well-paced, visually it is deathly dull.

It's tough to decide just what's more offensive: the movie's musty depiction of gangsta rap as public enemy No. 1, the notion that all an uptight white girl needs to loosen up is a few puffs on a Philly blunt, or the idea that any of this might be remotely funny.

Just avoid this ghastly, insulting farrago at all costs.

The film seems to argue that Rock's real-life manipulation of the race card is little more than exploitation, rather than the essence of his incendiary comic critique.

A stinker.

Absurd beyond belief or reason.

The film, whose clumsy editing and dearth of establishing shots keep the viewer in an unintended state of confusion, is a corpse in its own right: It’s filled with the rotting ideas of far better movies.

Mechanical revenge fantasy that skirts every serious issue it raises along a slick, cynical trajectory.

Grotesque and ugly.

So badly written, so poorly directed and performed, and so garishly visualized -- attention Kmart shoppers! -- it defies explanation.

How this hopelessly muddled and tedious dirge got released -- unless it was through the clout of Mel Gibson, who's grafted on as an FBI agent in a neck brace, with no discernible connection to the action -- is the real mystery.

Highly reductive and deathly dull slasher flick.

The film's deadly lulls outweigh its infrequent highs.

A cheap "Star Wars" rip-off with swords instead of light sabers.

Racing flick results in a wreck as horrifying as the film itself.

Annoyingly fourth-hand -- scraped from the shoes of "The Full Monty," mixed with Michael Caine's "Little Voice" hair-smarm and salted with "Billy Elliot's" dandruff.

All Serving Sara can offer is Perry with his arm shoulder-deep up a longhorn steer's backside, a wasted supporting cast that includes Vincent Pastore and Cedric the Entertainer, and a huge, comedian-shaped hole where Hurley's performance should be.

Black cats, ill-timed power outages and children in peril are just a few of the hoary scare tactics ineffectively rendered in the style of so many films buried in the dark recesses of January.

A mind-numbing exercise in high body counts and big tits.