It doesn't strike a single note of authentic emotion.

Scenario is ripe for subversive humor, but Ralston never even questions the superiority of the genetically privileged.

The film's pace is just plain wacky, moving with the haste of a receding glacier most of the time, but then jumping ahead as if Hartley hit the gas on a time machine.

Alternates between being amusingly pretentious and studiously dull.

Not just unromantic, it's unfunny, too.

Unfortunately, the visuals are not compelling enough on their own to hold our interest, and a highly mannered Derek Jacobi is all wrong as the narrative voice of Nijinsky.

Preposterous collegiate drama that exists simply to show pretty girls kissing, pretty boys undressing and pretty people of every sexual orientation drinking, doing drugs and otherwise wreaking postadolescent havoc.

To be avoided by anyone considering a vacation to anything wilder than a zoo.

Out of place, out of time and out of its own cultural context.

Only a memorably commanding Ruehl transcends the limitations of her two-dimensional character.

A movie about healing that makes us want to scream out, ""Hollywood, heal thyself!"

Although it's recycled from start to finish, there are some decent jokes laced throughout, plus enough gore to satisfy the most bloodthirsty tastes.

All the subtlety of an Olive Garden commercial.

A classic case of good intentions and bad filmmaking.

You never know what these people are going to say or do, but you're pretty sure it will be whatever they want to.

A waterlogged bagel, hardly the valentine to New York it imagines itself to be.

If you want to direct a movie that's already been done, it's a good idea to pick one you can improve on.

Unless you're struck by the urge to watch strangers work out their petty issues in couples therapy, it's hard to find a compelling reason to sit through Gregg Lachow's irritatingly self-absorbed indie drama.

So riddled with plot holes and implausible actions, you can't help feeling insulted by it.

Feels like reading someone else's diary. Undoubtedly, there's some very important stuff in there, but it's most interesting to the person who wrote it.

Brutal but somewhat endearing.

It tries to be more existential than gumshoe but falls way short.

Made in 1998, the picture sags beneath the leaden weight of its pre-millennial theme.

Though Flicker based the story on real events, the execution is so melodramatic that none of it feels remotely true.

Though Morrow and Forlani are fine actors, they can't even fake a physical attraction between their characters, let alone orgasms.

Kinsella, in his feature debut, milks cliches, caricatures and an unlikely set of coincidences to tie things up in a neat bundle.

A slice of life that adds up to exactly the sum of its parts, no more, no less.

A bad Altman impression of the L.A. rock scene.

Ken Liotti's script barely earns a C+.

Director and screenwriter Adam Brooks, adapting Jennifer Egan's novel, doesn't seem to understand what makes a movie relevant.

Trudy is really the only character with the "Barrytown" zest, and Montgomery throws herself into the role with unselfconscious abandon. She makes the screen crackle with energy.

The truth about Lies is that it's a case of art-house porn being more porn than art.

While it's visually stunning, the pretentiousness makes it hard to take seriously.

Frenzied, gothic nonsense.

Would that the film were as interesting as the setting.

Chevy Chase looks tired, Pam Grier looks embarrassed, and pop star Iggy Pop gives a performance that -- if you can believe it -- is even sillier than his name.

The movie veers so wildly between being zany and grim, we're left feeling more empty than entertained.

Mattei's script was written in 1998, and the absence of any sense of the impact of 9/11 on New Yorkers is palpable. While watching "Love," I was thinking what great potential there was - still is - for a Manhattan "La Ronde" set in the days following 9/11, when strangers sought comfort from each other in spontaneous sexual alliances.

Del Toro ("Cronos") is a stylish horrormeister, and he has created an evocative, foreboding atmosphere. But only a fan of this kind of mayhem could find a way into the story.

Jovovich, Besson's 24-year-old ex-wife, hasn't a clue how to project shadings, interior emotions, character or personality. Everything's in a full screech.

Normally, I'd recommend a movie like this only to diehard fans. But even they may want to wait until it hits cable.

Sadly, a film about betrayal is ultimately betrayed by the film maker's own lack of conviction.

Earnestness is the primary appeal of Meng Ong's clumsy melodrama.

The marvelous Dussolier makes a poignantly aging lothario, but Fillieres is so off-puttingly strange, we don't really care what she thinks about.

Madhur Jaffrey and Faran Tahir fare considerably better as Nina's conservative mother and brother, leaving us confused ourselves: Why didn't Patel focus on them, instead?

Desperate for a slice of Spanish soap opera? You might try this misguided romantic melodrama.

A ponderously slow experience.

The salvaging operations, and the scavenging of B-52 parts for retail recycling and junk art that seem to consume most of the film take it to tedium, and beyond.

The movie walks a tightrope between playing this misunderstood malady for laughs and sentiment.

Underdeveloped and badly diluted by overlong -- and overly stylized -- forays into the drug use, street hustling and cultural alienation that mostly affects the boys' friends.

A perfect example of an "art" movie that is so lugubrious and soul-sucking that it's hell to sit through.

Caught with a shaky hand-held camera, this aimless diary glides indifferently along Weber's stellar collection of photos.

Wretch of a B movie.

Ron Shelton's boxing pic is long on road work but strictly a flyweight.

Atoothless morality play.

The characters speak in Dialogue rather than English, the actors are so busy emoting they forget to act and the story feels like a first-draft college project.

Wells' vision of the distant future is cartoonishly simplistic without the subtext of British class consciousness that informed the novel.

A jumbled composite of blurred images, poetic yearnings and metaphoric dialogue.

Cantor seems to have noticed how dull the actual footage is, since he relies heavily on "arty" shots and black-and-white inserts.

May be free of gay stereotypes, but it's absolutely riddled with romantic cliches. It's hard to see the progress in that.

The movie creaks and groans, weighed down by clichés.

Completely false, manipulative, exploitative and insulting.

We wish other directors would keep Edward Burns busy acting so he wouldn't have time to make his own movies. This is his fourth since "The Brothers McMullen" and they get more tedious each time out.

Stevens, an actor taking charge from the other side of the camera, and writer and co-star Breen are going for a romantic black farce, a darkly noble idea, but one that requires far more empathetic characters and funnier situations than they've created.

I don't know why Redford and the white-hot Gandolfini signed on for this fiasco, but the give-and-take between them is the film's sole pleasure.

Juices up the visuals with fancy camerawork and split screens, but it can't distract enough from the vulgarity of the material.

Not all cartoon violence; there's cartoon nudity, too. Berry was paid a well-publicized $500,000 bonus to bare her breasts in the movie.

There's a lot of scary stuff in Wes Craven Presents: Dracula 2000. There are eyeball-sucking leeches, decapitations, punctured necks... and appalling acting.

Stambrini puts so much weight on shock value, she overlooks the matter of emotional resonance.

Frankly, you may prefer the company of cinematic serial killers (Freddy vs. Jason) after you meet the pair at the center of this story.

By the time you've worked through the allegorical implications, you may be wondering why you didn't just go see "Charlie's Angels."

The picture's a dud... Instead of Chow's gravitas rubbing off on the kid, Scott's dude-ness dilutes Chow's authority.

It's hard to say which is worse: The fact that 20th Century Fox believes this sour, sexist fantasy reflects anyone's actual experience or that Hollywood is so woefully behind the cultural curve.

Those who need little more than a car chase, gunplay, pretty girls and a solid soundtrack will be entertained. And Ice Cube fans won't be disappointed. Everyone else may want to think twice before shelling out hard-earned dollars.

Only Stanley Tucci seems aware of the drop-dead stupidity of the plot, and acts up a storm of high camp as the narcissistic scientist.

Stole so many details from the earlier film, "The Hustler," that you have to think of it as either a bad parody or an unfortunate homage.

The movie is full of puzzling celebrity cameos, as if Brazilian director Bruno Barreto called in all his chits.

There are some nicely gory touches for genre connoisseurs...But JC2 lacks the all-important character development we got in the first installment.

Exploitation shamelessly posing as empowerment, Neema Barnette's self-congratulatory drama about women in prison promises to reveal shocking truths.

After 45 minutes of incomparable boredom, the movie gets slightly better when it stops reaching for cheap yuks and lets the actors do what they do well.

Though topnotch actors often can elevate mediocre material, they need a topnotch director to help them do it. Steve Carr ("Dr. Dolittle 2") is not that director.

Gets too caught up in its escalating violence and strained-to-bursting moral subtexts. It's the blood of souls drenching the screen, and it's a hideous sight to behold.

There is a fair share of turkeys at the multiplex this week, but none are quite as overcooked as Extreme Ops.

Don't let the title fool you. The one thing they have in common is how decidedly unerotic they are.

Gere, who's credited with keeping the project alive for years, has never thrown himself quite so fully into a role, and Pellington tells the story without a hint of skepticism. I suppose he had no choice. If you're going to treat poppycock as history, you had better believe it.

Has a lot of nerve making fun of Olivia Newton-John's "I Honestly Love You," as the choice of newlyweds fated for divorce in 12 to 14 months. The Wedding Planner should have such a shelf life.

What's funny for 5 minutes doesn't make for a full-length movie.

An awkwardly executed, tedious and -- a near impossibility for a Holocaust movie -- emotionally uninvolving bore.

A personal documentary on a family member. The question is, who -- outside of friends and family -- would want to watch it? The answer...is ... beyond me.

Could easily be just another episode of "Hey Arnold!" the TV show. Except that it's three times as long, and not half as much fun.

If you're in an especially generous mood, you'll give in to a few laughs. By the end, though, you just may find yourself pining for the good old days of Pauly Shore.

A preposterous action movie in which a Navy SEAL makes the world safe for democracy one continent at a time.

To be fair, Sandler deserves some credit for bringing us the first mainstream movie about Chanukah. Too bad it's completely idioticah.

More than a bad movie, it's an anti-movie.

The full title of this animé import is WXIII (Patlabor the Movie 3), and if you think the name's confusing, you may want to spare yourself the work of figuring out the film itself.

A painfully flat spoof of the 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion.

Possibly the sourest revenge movie ever, Audition starts off as a sweet, low-key romance, then abruptly turns into a grisly, sadistic thriller.

Kline will break your heart, while the rest of the movie will just make you sick.

Regrettably, neither cast nor crew is able to save it from itself.

This is clearly the Worst Performance by an Actress in a Death Scene since Sofia Coppola took a bullet for her dad in "The Godfather: Part III."

Something's wrong with the math here -- the inheritance of the story's small-town hero is enlarged from $20 million to $40 billion, yet the new movie isn't worth the price of a Depression-era ticket.

History as filtered through the faux-liberal prism of Hollywood's dream factory, and an insult, I believe, to the people who actually carried the fight and endured the pain for civil rights.

Dreamcatcher has no business being this bad.

Striking naturalism and blatant dishonesty blend awkwardly in this bleak drama.

Commits the cardinal sin of moviemaking: It leaves you bored.

A serious and thoughtful movie that probably does not mean to trivialize the Holocaust and blame the victim. But it is playing with fire nevertheless.

The writing, directing and acting are all so sketchy, it's a mystery that Kattan didn't just try out this material the way he should have -- in a three-minute sketch.

About as many characters, dragons and force fields as "Pokémon" has pocket monsters, so it may be difficult for the uninitiated to keep track.

A flashy homage to a dozen better movies, this self-conscious Hong Kong action flick is so packed with visual thrills, you may not notice that there's absolutely nothing beneath its impressively slick surface.

The best part of this proudly absurd experience is the music.

Dysfunction seeps from every pore of this family, and the anger and ugliness of the characters overwhelm not just the story but the movie's stunning National Geographic location.

This is the kind of misfire that can take everyone down with it. It's not just bad, it's mean-bad.

If the 10th "Friday" sounds like the first "Alien," it's strictly intentional. Todd Farmer's script rips off that classic sci-fi horror film, replaces the acid-based monster with the hockey-masked Jason, adopts the self-mocking attitude of "Scream" and lets the heads, arms, legs and torsos fall where they may.

An unimaginative schoolyard-bully comedy.

Despite catchy animation and a few intense scenes, there's simply nothing here we haven't seen before.

Why Travolta is slumming in B movies is anybody's guess. (I'll take a wild flier: "Battlefield Earth"?)

The stars have little opportunity to engage their characters. The gang-written screenplay and Chris Koch's artless direction turn their scenes into a series of broad, overplayed comic sketches.

It's too bad the film never makes good on its early promise, but clearly, the rolling fireballs and flying bullets are the priority.

Offers traditional cinematic gab about marital status, sexual orientation, nationality and degree of fulfillment.

I hated it, but I grant that it does tap into a vein of technological horror - the fear of the VCR! - that will have young videophiles chatting it up for weeks

All the magic at the disposal of today's filmmakers cannot bring to life this unappealing animated children's movie.

Their (Murphy/Wilson) exchanges and interplay are so campy and over the top that I kept expecting them to pull out frying pans and start bopping each other over the head with them. I Spy is one just Stooge short of homage.

A warmed-over ripoff, rather than the gritty urban drama it so desperately wants to be.

The movie's really about the impressions of the original performances by newcomers Eric Christian Olsen and Derek Richardson. Olsen does an uncanny Carrey, and Richardson vaguely resembles Daniels.

Typical of road comedies, it's a pastiche of sketches.

Shows that there's a limit to how much mileage one can get from offbeat, creepy and symbiotic.

Brody does have a mesmerizing presence and is the only reason to see a film that likely would have gone straight to video if he hadn't won that Oscar for "The Pianist."

This time around, the cult director dispenses with the feminism, the satire, and even the issues, so he can concentrate on his true passion: the dissecting.

Features amateurish acting and direction, and a going-nowhere script.

Creates a hellishly evil portrait of a police department in which every white cop is either a racist thug or an enabler, and every black cop a disgusted observer or crusading hero.

The main theme is the loneliness of the social outcast. That, plus a soundtrack to wake the undead, and the morbidly entombed presence of Aaliyah, will attract an audience despite the movie's intrinsic cheesiness.

Does little more than re-create the oppressive feeling of suffocating employment. And why put yourself through that experience without the promise of a paycheck at the other end?

Travolta is the least of the film's problems. With a script by James Vanderbilt, whose first credit was for a movie about the tooth fairy ("Darkness Falls"), and directed by John McTiernan, last seen struggling with "Rollerball," Basic is a fundamental failure.

This is the worst performance by a pop star in a dramatic role since Madonna suited up for "Shanghai Surprise."

With little dialogue, a murky night setting and the slowest of plots, this Portuguese fantasy only comes alive when it conforms to its true nature as arthouse pornography.

Much talking, much sex, much to-do about nothing.

Unfortunately, it isn't until the final scene -- a spoof of the horror genre's false-ending cliché -- that Bats really takes wing.

Having mined England and Ireland dry, filmmakers are now turning to Wales for their quirkiness quota.

Both a madcap comedy and a cautionary tale about the dangers of drug abuse. But it's not funny or smart enough to work as either one, let alone to strike a balance.

If only half as much attention had been paid to story and character as to set design, the cast wouldn't be playing second banana to a gut rehab.

If you only want a sequence of slashings, impalements and head-squishings, you'll get your money's worth. But if you like a little movie with your mayhem, you're out of luck.

As in "The Edge," in which Alec Baldwin and Anthony Hopkins were stranded in the wilds, you can earn a wildernesssurvival merit badge just from watching.

Doesn't play on the screen. P.S. Your Cat is Dead is a stage-locked, two-character play on a static set, and though Guttenberg takes it outside for a couple of scenes, it remains that on film.

The plot is as riddled with holes as Matilda's victims, making her sudden appearances more distracting than distressing.

Novice director Lucky McKee wrote the first draft of this labored horror flick while he was in school, and for a student film, it's not bad. But it's not ready for the big time.

The movie eventually chokes on its own pretensions.

Unlike pop rival Britney Spears, Moore does project star quality on the screen, but she gives Halley an edge of nastiness that makes her harder to empathize with than she should be.

By the time the credits roll and a disclaimer informs us that there may, in fact, be a lost gospel of Jesus and that it is being suppressed by the Church, all we can think to say is, "Ah, shaudup!"

The martial arts are well represented, the gentler arts -- like, for example, acting -- are not.

Drifts from goofy situation comedy to pop culture parody to a last-act load of sentiment that would sink a trash barge.

A teen comedy so stupid that a long nose -- perhaps with a red bulb on it -- actually would have helped.

Drop Dead Ugly is more like it.

There comes a time when the future looks old, and that's where "Star Trek" finds itself on the time-space continuum.

Lacks the charismatic presence of Vin Diesel, who has priced himself right out of the franchise. Without Diesel, there's not much gas, at least not from the nonvehicular elements.

Having these characters interact is both the joke and raison d'etre of "League." Its story is beyond banal.

Tries everything possible to win you over -- satire, gross-out comedy, even earnest romance. But as any high-schooler can tell you, the harder you try, the bigger you fall.

If you think you're tough enough, go ahead and sit through the endurance test that is Bad Boys 2, a brutal, 2 1/2-hour display of production overkill.

The movie doesn't even have novelty on its side, since we're basically watching the original "Final Destination" all over again, minus the smarts and humor.

Oddly enough, given his limited role, the movie seems to have been made around Nelly; when he's not onscreen, everything falls apart.

Father Amaro comes off as another pedophile in a frock. You'd have to hose this guy down if he were driving a school bus.

Competent in the extreme, the talented Jolie would make a great Jane Bond. But mired in this joyless orgy of preposterousness, her biggest challenge is simply keeping a straight face.

Neither chimps nor children should be subjected to such shabby mediocrity.

The title doesn't hint at the unsavory mess the film actually is.

Stays firmly, depressingly, inside the lines.

The result is a movie that talks big, even walks big, but has no scale whatsoever.

Who knew that Juliette Binoche and Jean Reno could be unlikable? And yet, there they are, grating on each other's nerves (and ours) as strandees at Charles De Gaulle airport.

The worst performance in a film that diminishes even the talented Stockard Channing is given by Allen. He's never written a more unpleasant, vapid or irredeemable character for himself, and he makes it worse by overplaying.

Having written, co- directed and played the lead in this awkward, ego-driven memoir, Hayata has turned a genuinely compelling life story into an embarrassing vanity production.

It's hard to care what really happened on Wonderland Ave. when the audience hates the neighborhood.

Director Uwe Boll wholeheartedly embraces the film's concept, and with some fancy editing and a pulsing soundtrack, the effect really is like watching a video game.

A great idea that never gets off the ground.

Heavily influenced by Guy Ritchie, director Mo gets most of his comic mileage from a Hasidic Jew and an angry dwarf -- which should tell you everything you need to know.

Campion has made something that's almost unbearably pretentious.

Of this much I'm sure: It's an awful movie.

Not to be cruel, but the aspirations of the movie and its principals are so far beyond their reach" not to mention budget"that it arrives in theaters dependent on the kindness of strangers.

French director Mathieu Kassovitz Frenches this flimsy tale to death. No scene goes underplayed, no performance (save one, from Robert Downey Jr.) lacks volume, no horror cliche is forgotten.

But where the original was slight but sweet, the remake is depressingly superficial and cynical.

There is not a frame of "Cheaper" that doesn't feel contrived. It fails the most fundamental test of movie logic.

The story, adapted by Dean Georgaris, doesn't come within a light year of science-fiction plausibility, and after a while Woo gives up trying to sell it and reverts to the action choreography that made him a master of Hong Kong martial-arts movies.

There's no story to speak of - three cohabiting bachelors are dragged into adulthood by the simultaneous pregnancies of their girlfriends - but Anderson, Imperioli and Eddie Griffin are amiable company and there's an earned laugh here and there.

The movie is dismally organized, his (Keys) interviews are shallow and uninformative, and the project has a whole lacks a strong point of view.

An underwritten drama.

Only sharp dialogue and a suspenseful buglary might have given this lame, quasi morality play some energy. It has neither.

It's an old maxim that you can't make a good movie from a bad script. But with the suspense thriller Twisted, Philip Kaufman shows that you can make one that looks like it should be good.

It might have been a marketing nightmare, but if Lopez and Tyler had switched roles, it would have been a better movie.

With so little action or even insight, Marathon is far too long at only 74 minutes. Perhaps for the sequel, we can come along as Gretchen watches paint dry.

There's a reason filmmaking is considered a craft, and Hoge, a former teacher in a juvenile prison, cannot pull off what would be a tricky proposition for a skilled veteran.

It features an insane amount of violence and a number of visual references to the comic, but it lacks the original's humor and spirit.

Self-indulgent in the extreme, Julián Hernández's laconic ode to heartbreak feels like the work of a lovelorn teenager.

I love golf, history and good stories, and I found this to be among the most boring, flat and cliched sports movies I've ever seen.

I have not read the Anne Tyler novella from which the movie is adapted, but it is clear from the earliest scenes that Evie and Drumstrings are of a different generation from 37-year-old Taylor and 36-year-old Pearce.

Whether Jawed Wassel could have made more of it with further editing we'll never know, but it's a clunky bit of storytelling.

With the exception of one masterfully choreographed - and improbably bloodless - martial-arts gang fight, the new version of Jules Verne's Around the World in 80 Days is one of the lamest remakes of a classic film I've ever seen.

As much as I love swing, all I got out of Martin Guigui's murky, incomprehensible grade B romantic fantasy was a few twitches of nostalgia for the music.

"Quantum Bull-Bleep" would be a more apt title for the conclusions that the movie draws, but one concept was a revelation to me. One of the scientists said it's a fact that a single object can be in two places at the same time. I guess that explains O.J.'s alibi.

We're bombarded by witless racial clichés, stale sexism and homophobia and enthusiastic celebrations of extreme flatulence.

The Intended is well-intended, but it is also the dreariest, most uninvolving movie I've seen this year.

The only intriguing character is the manager of the diner (and de facto fairy godmother), played by Regina King.

A ticket to this movie is a season's pass on that train - and you must complete every ride.

A movie needs more than a few sexual innuendos and throaty purrs to keep us from taking a catnap. How about a strong story and credible characters?

Too solemnly boring to entertain parents or older siblings - but, alas, too loud for a long nap - Yu-Gi-Oh! is basically a feature-length promotion for the trading cards.

It's never a good sign when the creepiest moment in a movie about monstrous 50-foot snakes is the sight of 2-inch leeches sucking on someone's back.

Shot with an annoyingly jerky hand-held camera, Virgin is a test to stick with, and despite the best efforts of Moss, it wore me out.

Structure overwhelms everything, but it's not as if Wicker Park has nothing to say. It's full of ugly truths about emotional frailty, and implies that stalking is a bad thing only when you're not charming enough about it.

Toback is a smart guy with kinky tastes who has nothing left but to tempt actors into performing in his sex fantasies.

The last act, when the movie falls apart like a cheap toy, is both a deus ex machina and an anticlimax.

This off-putting satire is a jumble of misguided ideas that gather like lint in the navel of self-obsessed director Philippe Caland.

The award for hardest-to-watch movie of the year.