A flavorless snack, time filler until "Saw III" and "Hostel 2" are served up.

The sage-elder/wayward-charge saga Peaceful Warrior aims for inspirational highs but mostly feels like a self-help book read aloud by actors.

Cease Fire is no art film but, rather, mainstream fare that's likely to appeal primarily to Farsi-speaking audiences. It is talky, too long at 1 hour, 44 minutes and tends to be preachy and tedious.

Devoid of verbal wit, instead relying on a relentless stream of Looney Tunes-inspired violence.

There is something bizarrely compelling about the movie. It's slower than watching a train wreck but invokes that same level of disbelief.

It's always dispiriting to see children's movies succumb to desperate pandering to the coolness imperative, especially since, given the marketing muscle they tend to have behind them, the bigger trick seems to be in getting people not to see them.

There are no laughs to be found in writer-director Michael Traeger's would-be comedy The Amateurs, but there is one big mystery: how actors of this caliber could have been convinced to take part.

It never quite settles on whether it's a "Mean Girls" burlesque of teen life, an "American Beauty"-style bad-things-in-the-suburbs drama, or a wayward horror film. And it certainly never reconciles itself to successfully pulling off a hybrid of the three.

There seems to be a high level of personal commitment to the project. It is then all the more disappointing that such effort went into something that comes off so hollow and uninspired.

As boredom sets in, the viewer realizes that "The Covenant" does possess one magical power: It afflicts its audience with restless leg syndrome.

The movie's disinterest in character might be forgivable were its plot not riddled with holes.

Even for ultra-low-budget, grade-Z horror movies, this is a truly incompetent film.

This is a bitter, occasionally farcical drama with the most hostile cinematic view of Los Angeles since "Crash."

Like an ugly tie or a pair of slipper socks, Black Christmas is destined to be forgotten the instant it's unwrapped, gathering dust until the season rolls around again.

Director Luc Besson, best known for "La Femme Nikita" and "The Fifth Element," admits he knew nothing about animation before he started this project, and it shows.

It's more like "That Girl" on speed than anything else.

Yes, stepping is an age-old tradition at historically African American schools, but this smells of desperation; one more misstep for a film with two left feet.

The original film was intellectually engaging as well as tangibly creepy, while the new remake is just plain bad, and boring to boot.

It's a relentlessly silly horror/fantasy/romance that is merely the latest twist on a tired premise.

Equally as perplexing as its lack of perspective is the film's overall shortage of information.

Bad as Harris' Hannibal Rising screenplay (his first) is, at least it's an improvement on his dreadful book, streamlining its convoluted action and discarding large chunks of unspeakable dialogue.

By the time it sputters across the finish line, Wild Hogs feels as if it's gone on forever -- like a trip in a hot car with the windows rolled up. The air is stale and hard to breathe, and it sure feels good when it's over.

Detailing the sexual and romantic misadventures of the employees and patrons at a London cafe, Caffeine is about as appetizing as a pot of dishwater coffee.

The film and its makers simply try too hard. Director and co-writer Judy Hecht Dumontet can't stop "helping" with overactive editing and scoring, such as tinkling bells every time the sacred tortilla is shown early on.

The movie is all surface, loudly clamoring for attention and then losing its voice.

Audiences probably often wonder when the reality genre is finally going to eat itself. American Cannibal stands ready for that moment with a bib and vinegar.

You'd like to think such bankruptcy of imagination means we've seen the last of these subterranean creeps. But you know they'll be back soon to collect their royalties from the gore hounds who apparently don't care how dull or warmed over the accompanying package.

One of the funniest films of the year. That's not good news for this attempted action-adventure, which clearly lost its way in its own copious fog.

Redline isn't exactly a car wreck, mainly because it's far less exciting, and you can, in fact, look away. Perhaps at your shoes.

When it comes to unflinching, riveting looks at a compulsive artist who can't be other than who he is, nothing comes close to Crumb. [28 Apr 1995]

Coppola decided that he really wasn't making a horror film after all, but rather a love story, a comic burlesque, a costume drama, a piece of erotica, whatever. But no matter what else you do with it, a Dracula that cannot manage to be more scary than silly is as pitilessly doomed as that elegant old Transylvanian himself. [13 Nov 1992]

Beach's storytelling tactics, much like the film as a whole, would simply be annoying if they weren't also borderline insulting.

Jack is more depressing than the weight of its demerits because of the quality of the work both these men have done before.

Condemned is, if nothing else, an object lesson in how to punish women for fun and profit. But it's all for a point, the filmmakers would have us believe. One suspects that's a point of sale.

Loaded as it is with undeveloped notions about feminism and individuality, nothing about it is really memorable except the appealing musicality of the fine k.d. lang/Ben Mink score, which deserves better. [20 May 1994]

Little more than an extended excuse for a soundtrack.

Georgia Rule oscillates clumsily from shock to slapstick to schmaltz. The result of these big tonal swings is a cinematic strikeout.

Chopped into episodes headed by typewritten dates, Provoked turns the case of a lifetime into something straight out of Lifetime.

The film's theory, that maybe we're all living two parallel lives -- if we even exist at all -- is intriguing, but it's rarely taken beyond the notion that Danny's just dreaming it. The result is, to be charitable, underwhelming, narratively and visually.

Falling Down encourages a gloating sense that we the long-suffering victims are finally getting our splendid revenge. The ultimate hollowness of that kind of triumph reflects the shallowness of a film all too eager to serve it up. [26 Feb 1993, p.1]

The latest, and, one fears, not the last episode in the kiss-kiss-bang-bang saga of L.A. police Detectives Roger Murtaugh (Danny Glover) and Martin Riggs (Mel Gibson) is even more of a comic strip than its immediate predecessor. [15 May 1992]

It would be lying not to say that some of the moviemakers here aren't working at the top of their craft, or that the movie won't reach audiences. On its own terms, Kindergarten Cop is nearly fool-proof: the last word in glib, shallow, soulless, spuriously warm-hearted commercialism. [21 Dec 1990, p.1]

Except for that music and a bit of the acting, Swing Kids is unsatisfactory from just about every point of view. [05 Mar 1993]

With its stylized story-line and almost styleless direction, it sometimes resembles a juggling act with sledgehammers. [13 Jul 1988, p.1]

Admirers of Rambo III will probably point out that it moves fast. But then, so does a gazelle-and a gazelle has better dialogue and more personality. [25 May 1988, p.1]

Nightwatch is a seriously overcast B-movie with rote performances from everyone but Brolin, who gives James an edge of danger that says that if he isn't a killer, he will be.

Not only are none of these characters particularly fun to be with, but the inevitable violence that enters their lives is strong and unpleasant. [03 Sep 1993]

It's camp noir, but the director, Renny Harlin, doesn't allow the jokes, feeble as they are, to take hold. He slam-bangs the action as if he was prepping "Die Hard 2," so that even Clay's self-infatuated strut and bleary leer don't have time to register. The film is pointlessly souped up. [11 Jul 1990, p.1]

The movie is a pastiche of tortured slapstick, groan-inducing dialogue and a lethal dose of treacle, apparently awaiting one of Williams' trademark sprees of riffing and vamping to save the day. That moment never comes, however.

It's a movie on the wrong side side of the so-bad-it's-good line.

Director Frederik Du Chau's big-screen Underdog has all of the cartoons' crudeness and none of their charm. It's the celluloid equivalent of sugar cereal: cheap, empty and headache-inducing.

Depending on your revenge story preferences, the brutally pretentious Descent is either a payback flick with an agonizingly formless middle, or a soul-darkening head trip bracketed by a crude vengeance tale. Mostly, though, it's indie provocation trapped between shock and blah.

The film is strictly straight-to-video action movie stuff, albeit with dialogue in iambic pentameter.

War ties itself in knots trying to bring something new to a stale formula. It's never painful to watch, but that's only because it provokes no feeling at all.

Fluent in the laughable dialogue of a million bad fantasy flicks:

Martian Child would like to be "About a Boy (Who Thinks He's a Martian)", but, disappointingly, it doesn't even come close.

The result is a film that's main crime is inducing stupefying boredom with little payoff in the end.

You could go see P.S. I Love You, or you could hit yourself on the head with a meat mallet -- it depends on the amount of time and money you want to devote to what amounts to roughly the same experience.

Its convictionless competence is merely dull, denying the pleasures of an outright howler without providing much else.

A stew of cheap irony, ponderous but meaningless allegory, violence and pretension, the movie is all borrowed style and calculated pandering. It does, however, get more ludicrous by the minute. So in that sense, it's good for an occasional laugh.

It's a big, cheesy, familiar bore. With its garland of set pieces featuring Matthew McConaughey in mortal danger strung together by beach-groovy musical hooks, Fool's Gold feels at times like a third-rate Bond movie set to a Jimmy Buffett album.

Bubbly to the point of indigestion and mechanical about ticking off the romantic trajectory.

This is as listless, mindless and utterly useless a piece of corporate brain-clog as one is likely to come across for quite some time.

Director H.S. Miller thinks he's made something broodingly visionary when you're more likely to be aesthetically shaken up by one of Mad magazine's Fold-Ins.

If you swiped the most insipid dialogue of the teenage-angst movies of John Hughes and Kevin Smith and Amy Heckerling, you would still have a script -- and a movie -- far superior to the newest of the genre, Remember the Daze.

As a work of nonfiction filmmaking it is a sham and as agitprop it is too flimsy to strike any serious blows.

The direction by Gil Cates Jr. is inept at best, and the script by Cates and Marc Weinstock seems to operate under the assumption that trafficking in flabby clichés -- the kindly call girl, the scrappy youngster, the angry dad -- will somehow smooth over the underdeveloped characters.

Deception would be laughably bad if it weren't so rotely inert.

The genitally ambiguous as well as transsexuals and gay people deserve more than XXY's good intentions.

The fakeness of it all overwhelms, dampening any real excitement. It's hard to care about characters so stiff and one-dimensional they out-cartoon the cartoon originals, and it's hard to watch them bop around like avatars in a flat, airless, digital world.

Even at its stride, "The X-Files" was a load of malarkey. But it was thoughtful malarkey and compulsively watchable. One could say the same about the first two-thirds of The X-Files: I Want to Believe before it spins out of control and into a delirious plane of awfulness.

Where "Superbad" found something raucously winning in hanging with adolescence's loser elite, Harold is a disingenuous, one-note underdog portrait.

In the end, Take is too enamored of its time-shifting gimmick and cheap suspense to ultimately have much impact.

With so many pointless detours ripping you away, the film feels as lamely digressive as the proverbial one-track guy whose head won't stop turning as each new temptation walks by.

The film gets the scummy patina right, all phony-Leone dusty trails, but while everybody on screen looks to be enjoying themselves, it is no fun to watch.

Though he claims to be a seeker, someone who "has to find out" why believers believe, Maher sets out not after answers but cheap laughs that preach, so to speak, to the converted.

Pedestrian and awkward, this film is a disappointment not only in comparison with Lee's earlier epic, the underrated " Malcolm X," but also in comparison with another film with similar aims, Rachid Bouchareb's "Days of Glory."

One of those fever-pitched computer-generated whizbangs in which every character spits out lines like a caffeinated Catskills comic.

Ultimately, its most unforgivable sin is that it's simply not funny.

Not even a brief appearance by Quentin Tarantino and a ton of references to other movies enlivens the proceedings much.

If the makers were hoping they'd chronicled a metaphor for life's struggle, they probably weren't counting on the struggle being monotony.

Despite its superficial lip-service to self-actualization/realization, there has to be more to life than what Beverly Hills Chihuahua is putting out there, which is fit for neither man nor beast.

What was presumably intended to play like a fable plays, instead, like an overly long car commercial crossed with a scare-mongering public service announcement.

A movie where the only conception of life seems to come from other movies makes for no kind of movie at all.

The biggest mystery, perhaps, is why accomplished actors such as Molina and Hope Davis agreed to be in this.

The idea of a revenge comedy isn't necessarily a bad one, Bride Wars simply fails at it despite having the formidable duo of Kate Hudson and Anne Hathaway, who in their own distinctive ways usually command the screen.

Mostly, though, the movie is something of a snooze, a gabby PG-13 horror flick whose most shocking image might be the bored look on Gary Oldman's face as he goes through the motions of playing the rabbi in charge of dispatching the film's damnable demon to somewhere over hell's rainbow.

Without dwelling on the limited abilities of novice British filmmakers Tom and Charles Guard (a.k.a. the Guard Brothers) -- who seem to have divvied up duties here by having one sibling focus exclusively on close-up shots of doorknobs and the other oversee everything else -- the movie's fatal flaw is the undeveloped relationship between the two sisters.

The new comedy is flat, the romance is listless, the pacing is sluggish, and the fish-out-of-water flops -- flip-flop, flip-flop, I can hear it still.

All Echelon can offer is some wobbly action and views of Red Square.

Although the script by star Anton Pardoe is ambitious and creative, its dizzying array of characters, along with a dense story that unfolds more like a checklist of showdowns than an organic narrative, make for a tedious sit.

Unfortunately, the movie is so rudimentarily written, acted and directed, and its more earthly concerns painted with such a broad, superficial brush, it's hard to be convinced of such key story elements as Sheri's advanced leukemia, her love of ballet and the fact that she and dad Vince (Robbins) are actually father and daughter.

That's about all Next Day Air can muster by way of invention, trying to slap a new face on a gaggle of rote gestures in a vain attempt to cover its own uselessness. But no matter how big the guns it draws, every shot is a dud.

Rarely have the words "game over" come as such sweet relief.

Someone has driven a stake through the heart and ripped out the soul of the 1980 original. The responsible parties, make that irresponsible parties, should be found, thrown in movie jail and not allowed within 50 feet of a set again. Ever.

Kabir Khan's New York -- part Bollywood potboiler, part overwrought examination of the war on terror -- is a slice of the Big Apple that you should skip.

At the end, all is horrifically explained, the body count inflates, yet hardly anything makes sense. In Papa Lynch's films, little is explained, yet because he's so gifted at mining our deepest fears and scariest desires, logic is excused.

This is a film with a mission: Get to the grand-gesture climax without disturbing any clichés in its path.

Any higher intentions are brought crashing down by predictability, wooden characters, giggle-inducing attempts at scares (shrieking bats, anyone?) and cinematography so gloomy it should be checked for serotonin deficiency.

What the plot doesn't decimate, the film's slower-than-a-clogged-drain pacing does. Sadly, this is one box that's just not worth picking up off the porch, much less opening, not even for a million dollars.

A joyless fluffball about after-college job woes with a dispiriting message for smart young women.

Keeps its audience in the dark -- literally and figuratively -- far too long to be of much use besides as a patience-trying exercise in reference spotting.

Legion may traffic in signposts of the apocalypse, but the whole affair mostly indicates that we're in the movie wasteland that is January.

They try to get 'real' about strange occurrences. Instead they get ludicrous.

Satire aside, what the oddball folks here never feel is real, despite the filmmakers' claims of autobiographical parallels.

Invites the kind of judgment it condemns.

Duffy tamps down his best instincts -- occasional wry humor and the appealingly oddball supporting character (Willem Dafoe last time, a bug-eyed Clifton Collins Jr. here as the MacManus' admiring Latino cohort) -- and doubles up on his worst: homophobic gags, tedious '90s-era slo-mo shootouts and overwrought gangster tropes.

What are in very short supply, though, are the central chords of Dickens' carol: Crachit's generous spirit, Tiny Tim's sad plight, Scrooge's emotional arc as he finds his humanity. Oh, the scenes are there amid the action, but they are fleeting. By the time A Christmas Carol finishes piling its many shiny presents with their many bells and whistles under the tree, there's no room left for tears for Tiny Tim. Bah humbug indeed.

The film is no more than a tedious, over-long Bollywood soap opera.

There's certainly no energy surge in writer-director Jameel Khan's effort, which is a collection of lazy, look-who's-stupid-or-pathetic vignettes so loosely assembled and laugh-deficient they play as if you're thumbing through a sketch reject pile.

Because Nine is a musical, it would help if your leading man could sing, and I don't mean carry a tune, but actually flex some vocal muscle. Again, love Daniel Day-Lewis, excellent racing shirtless through the forest, but a song-and-dance man he is not. So what does that leave Nine with? Well not much.

A leaden murder mystery with a clunky structure that swings back and forth between 1958 and 2008, Stolen wastes the talents of a reasonably good cast.

Benson is so terrible her close-up line readings feel as inconsequential as the insert shots, and Madsen, it must be said, finally looks exasperated with playing grumbly psychos. At times he looks as helpless as his hostages.

It's doubtful that records are kept about this sort of thing, but consider the possibility that Clash of the Titans is the first film to actually be made worse by being in 3-D.

Every time Kudrow exits the picture, imagining her fed-up character's life away from the twee therapeutic noodlings of Paper Man makes for its own time-killing retreat from dull indie-film reality.

Wilson's amiable vocal work keeps the predictability from becoming too grating.

The grand Mirren is, truth be told, miscast and Pesci is misdirected as Grace and Charlie Bontempo.

Consider Twelve its own memory-retarding narcotic.

Did I mention the dialogue? Well, really the armored car driver put it best when he said, "We're in trouble here…" No joke.

Fake or not, I'm Still Here is no fun to watch, and in fact Phoenix's situation comes off as so dire that it becomes a reason to doubt the film's authenticity. Filming someone having a mental breakdown is embarrassing and exploitative at best.

The girl world found in crass comedies such as You Again, movies that reduce women to sad clichés and a uniform level of bad behavior that would appall the cast members of "Jersey Shore."

One can't help experiencing the same dread about the exhausting flood of lackluster horror films that swamp our screens and, as Case 39 unfolds, realizing we're enduring one more.

Sadly, there's not an ounce of tension or a single decent scare to be found amid any of this convoluted mayhem.

GhettoPhysics undercuts its approach with too much cant, too much rambling and too much that is self-evident.

This hollow downer about deep wells of male anger, wallowing regret and mental disintegration is ultimately a thematic cop-out.

Not just any kind of trash, it's high-art trash, a kind of "When Tutu Goes Psycho" that so prizes hysteria over sanity that it's worth your life to tell when its characters are hallucinating and when they're not.

South Korean filmmaker Sngmoo Lee's debut feature is less a genre-spanning romp than a tiresome lab experiment in computer-generated tropes and green-screen oppressiveness.

As a misfit-centric slap at religious conformity, the story's premise couldn't be more primed for trenchant social comedy, but screenwriter Knight and director Eyad Zahra opt for maintaining a thin veneer of tiresome obnoxiousness over exploring the contours of an emotionally complicated subculture.

Your Thanksgiving turkey has arrived on schedule and it's called The Nutcracker in 3D.

It is incredibly tempting to resort to the implied off-color word play made possible by the Focker name and suggest that this third edition is totally - but I won't.

Season of the Witch is at its worst when it tries to be a straight-ahead action-adventure film. The early sequence set against the epic battles of the Crusades is almost brazenly bad with its unconvincing "300"-style special effects.

This soapy drama manages to be both half-baked and overcooked.

Eventually, Immigration Tango throws away what little credibility it has in going for a finish of total improbability and silliness.

By turns flat and strained, Peep World is a collection of personality disorders in search of a story.

Meanwhile, Mirren, that grande dame of cinema, just seems tired. And who could blame her? She's in the midst of this disaster, literally and figuratively dying right in front of us. Made me want to cry, just not for Arthur.

This often risible head-scratcher never cracks the surface of its muddled ambitions, largely wasting its iconic settings on a series of motley interactions, Tinseltown trivia and self-conscious philosophizing.

Grant has never been less charming and Parker never less fashionable or more grating than they are as Paul and Meryl Morgan.

A lame, tedious comedy.

Hansel and Gretel are this movie's breakout stars, but it's not enough to make Hoodwinked Too feel like anything but a storybook hurled straight at your head.

Brings vampires, werewolves, zombies, detective noir and spoofy comedy together for a murky genre gumbo with barely any flavor.

Unformed protagonists don't come more wallowingly irritating and contradictory than George.

Though the title hints at a tale of infatuation, Levy sheds little light on interpersonal conflict or why we're such an addictively self-documenting modern society.

Larry Crowne is an inside-out movie, acceptable around the edges but hollow and shockingly unconvincing at its core. When that core is two of the biggest movie stars around - Tom Hanks and Julia Roberts - it's an especially dispiriting situation.

This animated-live action hybrid is really more 3-D disaster than family comedy. Even Neil Patrick Harris, who has proved he can save just about any sinking ship, cannot make this boat float.

A leaden mash-up of western and science-fiction elements that ends up noisy, grotesque and unappealing.

Stay past the credits, though, and you'll find a tongue-in-cheek rap video recap with the cast - and directed by star Dustin Milligan - that carries the kind of spoofy insouciance missing from the main attraction.

Sure, this frequently improvised spoof isn't intended to be taken seriously, but it's also not funny or incisive enough to counter the unappealing persona the actor-comedian has concocted here: an impulsive, clueless narcissist on a journey to reinvent himself as an action star.

A not very good romantic comedy made somewhat bearable by Faris.

The barbs feel stale at best, squandered at worst, and the ominous music that accompanies each sounds as if it has been lifted from the silent movie era.

No image or moment is grounded – every shot is augmented with restless animation, smart-ass narration or video game sounds. The artificiality of it all is smothering.

Six has in essence backed himself into a rhetorical corner, leaving as perhaps the only option for his next stunt something in which the filmmaker Tom Six winds up with his mouth surgically attached to his own anus.

Writer-director Abe Sylvia slathers on the cartoonish characterization and neon-colored '80s pop - Benatar! Joan Jett! The Outfield! - for an easy-bake mood-setting, which is tedious enough. But his attempts at situational humor on the road - including a stripping scene for Dozier as coming-out metaphor - fall embarrassingly flat.

Frankly, it's hard to imagine even George Clooney making such ill-used screen minutes interesting. But the movie around those moments is even worse.

A grating and witless would-be spoof of religion, male-bonding and, it seems, horror movies.

In the wake of "Bridesmaids," Sandler's lipsticked tomfoolery - and inability to share the screen with genuinely funny women - feels particularly regressive and stale. Both movies have diarrhea gags, but only one feels defined by such humor.

If only 11-11-11 had arrived a little closer to Thanksgiving - the turkey connection would have been entirely appropriate.

I'm going with the filmmakers as the folks most responsible for perpetrating this terribly unfunny and overwhelmingly raunchy film that stars the normally likable, or at least comically forgivable, Jonah Hill. He is neither here.

Yet that deeply strange and agitated performance by Quaid is the only thing that makes the film remotely bearable.

Depressing and airless.

Most depressing is the spectacle of Debbie Reynolds in the de rigueur Betty White role - Hollywood having relegated seniors to the category of adorably "outrageous" while it caricatures single women as desperate updates on romance-novel heroines.

An undercooked, "Glee"-like hybrid of grating indie pop songs and forest slasher flick.

Perhaps most egregiously, director Mike Sears, working from Martin Dugard's awkwardly structured, subtext-free script, builds little excitement for the game of lacrosse, which comes off here as all sticks and legs and bad camera angles.

Gone is also your hard-earned money if you buy a ticket to this slack piece of work, a movie that makes "Murder on the Orient Express" feel like "The Silence of the Lambs" by comparison.

Cult comedy team Tim Heidecker and Eric Wareheim take the mechanics of the Funny or Die website and stretch it past the breaking point with their movie.

The only way to describe this movie's trio of party-throwing protagonists is numbingly predictable, as if writers Michael Bacall and Matt Drake had "Superbad" on a loop in the background.

If you've seen most any rom-com you know where this one's headed. Unfortunately, under director Sheree Folkson's unsteady hand, getting there is more frustrating than fun.

A frantic, badly constructed, slightly offensive muddle that doesn't so much end as run out of things on a checklist.

Any potential enjoyment here is fatally undermined by the film's barely developed characters, self-conscious dialogue ("I will wax his tugboat!") and repetitive imagery.

The film lacks inspiration or zest in storytelling, performance or action. This is pure product, a movie desperately without energy or enthusiasm of any kind.

Plodding, predictable, amateurishly staged and with wild swings in acting quality - sometimes within the same person (Roberts) - this is the kind of well-meaning, homemade concoction hopelessly enamored of the kind of clichéd potboilers that don't get made anymore. And with good reason.

The nonstop adversity lacks any real sense of danger. Or, for that matter, emotional punch. Why these two long-distance runners keep each other alive should be of front-and-center concern. Instead, My Way is mostly an endurance test.

When Rebecca De Mornay shows up as the criminals' fiercely doting matriarch, the ready crackle of her studiously demonic performance brings welcome distraction from this otherwise crude litany of torture and wretched death.

The movie perks up during Dinklage's scene as an escort, and screeches to a painful halt for a few conversations with God, who's played by a cloud-roosting Whoopi Goldberg. In a sophomore letdown from "The Woodsman," director Nicole Kassell gives the film no energy or rhythm, while the script pushes all the pre-set buttons.

Part road movie and part coming-of-age story but mostly plays like some creepy-perv fantasia looking for mileage from the mature-beyond-her-years presence of young star Chloë Grace Moretz.

Thin, neatly folded, paper-airplane of a movie threatens to nose dive into tweeville.

Common sense and basic logic are left at the door; there's a brief creature effect that is laughably, outlandishly awful.

The lack of suspense and surprise in this dispiritingly rote film becomes its own form of contamination.

Weaver's last ditch attempt to upend rom-com convention and rewrite the movie as a skeevy lout's comeuppance hardly makes up for the clichéd slog that comes before.

A spectacularly slapdash and wearingly half-hearted effort from the prolific writer-director-actor, lacking energy, structure or common sense.

The only payoff to Lloyd's structure is that the young actress Condola Rashad, a recent Tony nominee, is allowed to appear in both the film's first scene and its final segment to bring the story full-circle, though her enigmatic, beguiling presence underlines just the sort of energy missing from the rest of the film.

Comes off as formless and inane.

For the sake of the children, The Oogieloves in the Big Balloon Adventure should be allowed to quietly float away.

The dull, hectoring financial melodrama Supercapitalist has all the spark of a high school assembly skit about not letting friends drive drunk.

To borrow a hamburger chain's refrain, not lovin' it.

Lawrence's natural, disarming screen presence is ill-suited to something as mannered and labored as House at the End of the Street, and at moments it's as if she freezes up, unable to simply throw on a scared-face for no good reason.

The trouble is that it's hard to care about poor Wayne when he seems so empty-headed and naïve - civic unrest in Peru on the eve of its first democratic elections in 1980 is the setting - and when the movie itself seems so unfocused.

Budgetary constraints aside, director John Putch struggles to find balance or generate a single spark from the clunky mix of romance, political diatribe and thriller.

There is a flamboyance to some of the imagery - Heather and her demonic doppelganger embrace on a flaming carousel - but no exuberance, no sense of wonder, fascination or enjoyment. Everything feels like a throwaway.

Feels like a failure on all fronts - unpleasant to look at, needlessly in 3D, drearily unfunny and worst of all an incomplete portrait of the person to whom it is ostensibly paying tribute.

With its stock characters and low-expectation high jinks, the German import What a Man could have been fabricated on the Hollywood rom-com assembly line.

For all the attempted intrigue and mayhem, the film is dullsville, mired by a poky script, unremarkable action and, the hard-working Garcia aside, uninspired performances.

The underwhelming, would-be political satire Knife Fight plays more like a failed network TV pilot than the savvy feature it clearly set out to be. Think: Aaron Sorkin-lite, uh, really, really lite.

How many directors does it take to screw in a star-studded piece of aggressive stupidity and call it a movie? An even dozen, and there is no punch line.

A Good Day to Die Hard plays like an extended victory lap for star Bruce Willis and the entire "Die Hard" franchise. Not surprising, but not overwhelmingly entertaining either.

Inescapable is like "Taken" without the tension.

With some momentary exceptions, Jack the Giant Slayer simply isn't any fun.

A good idea for a ghost story is dead on arrival in The Condemned, a would-be thriller whose intended horror-tinged chills register as ho-hum hokum.

It's hard to believe that the group who came up with the hard, clean edges of "Top Gun," sleek and unfeeling though it may have been, could make a picture as crude, as muddled, as destructo-Derbyish as this one. If Beverly Hills Cop II is its opening salvo, this is going to be a long, smoggy summer. [20 May 1987]

In the end, the difference between "Funny Games" and Hollywood schlock horror may only be a matter of breeding. Funny Games is "Saw IV" with a PhD.

Laurence Coriat's shapeless script...pads its overlong running time with standard teen trauma — band squabbles, girl betrayals, skinhead brothers — that saps the audience's energy before the grand finale.

The story goes slack onscreen, so much so that the movie's two-plus hours will seem an eternity.

Writer-director P.J. Hogan may have based Mental on an actual incident from his childhood, but the crazy quilt of a movie that resulted feels anything but real.

For all the ways Dickerson vigorously dramatizes the stages of solitary confinement — nervous humor, fear, rages, survival ingenuity (including a nifty breathing apparatus) — it's never enough to explain why this particular individual's story is worth telling.

There's plenty of action, some ping-ponging romance and even a bit of tension as Silver Circle spins its muddled tale. But it's all so overwhelmed by the rudimentary, computer-generated animation (characters don't so much walk as lurch and glide) that, well, the medium becomes the message.

Aside from preserving these folks for a presumably grateful posterity and convincingly depicting Austin as an open-air lunatic asylum, Slacker does not offer much to anyone who likes to stay awake.

Though the photographs are memorable, the photographer is not.

To be fair, there are moments that earn their laughs and nostalgic memories for the marriage that was and the relationship that is that are sweet. But like many big weddings — a lot of things go wrong and not much goes right.

The film is, perhaps, intended as a deadpan burlesque of race and class and beauty ideals...but it plays more as a boorish, overextended punch line.