At 67, maestro Argento's taste still runs toward bloody entrails and eye-gougings, but Asia's sexy sour-lemon smile is underused in his movies.

The performances are expert, but can't make up for a flat script and direction. Unless you, like Claire, are a glutton for punishment, we suggest you choose nothing over something.

So that's three snickers, not counting the Bush quote, 'cause including that one ain't fair, man.

And then there is the most annoying animated sidekick in a long time: a bulb-headed, trying-to-be-cute glow creature called Kilowatt (Kristen Chenoweth), who sings an ear-piercing, high-pitched note when it's scared, which is often.

Another preachy, overacted message film that owes its out-of-time structure to "21 Grams" and "Babel," except writer-director Charles Oliver uses the idea of restorative justice.

The latest indignity.

Miller clearly wanted to make an impression, and that he does. Maybe it's better to be remembered for one of the worst movies of the year than forgotten for a mediocre one.

Why would you watch a bad movie about better movies, when you could just rent the originals instead?

The plot makes absolutely no sense.

Problem is, this movie is all surface - to quote one character, it has hidden shallows.

See, everyone complains about humans in movies but no one does anything about it, so it fell to Eagle Eye to make everything laughably, ridiculously fake.

Adds to the sad realization that this once-vibrant and witty actor (Cage) is completely controlled now by his inner teenager.

Is it an exaggeration to call The Women the worst movie of the year? Well, yeah, probably. But it may be the most disappointing, given all the effort that went into it.

Forgive us for being demanding, but shouldn't an animated kids movie like this one be, at the very least, fun? Cute? Watchable?

As for that title, neither character is Italian, but each thinks the other is - a weak device designed purely to inspire a slew of stereotypes.

Jamie Bell gives a watchable performance in this self-conscious, coming-of-age drama, though the film's overall effect is best described as David Lynch lite.

Ball knows one trick, and it's sure over.

Well-intentioned but as earnest as a college freshman discovering campus politics.

Rarely has there been a movie as misguided as Hounddog, which self-righteously indulges in exploitation while loudly decrying it.

Where on the evolutionary scale of wacky-dudes-learn-to-grow-up movies does Role Models fall? Certainly less evolved than "Meatballs," but head and hairy knuckles above "Daddy Day Care" or "The Benchwarmers."

This year's installment is as disappointing as a Halloween bag filled with nothing but raisins.

The story has more holes than a shot-up metal door, the acting feels bored at best, and the intermittent action, while passable, hardly makes up for the downtime.

Piles on the indignities, violence and island-of-man turmoil.

Willing as Campbell is to Shatner-ize himself, his movie will appeal only to true believers.

Only natural spitfire Spacek, as the pickup-driving mom of the land, feels fresh. There's even a mouthy kid Garity is "taking care of" - guess whose son he is?

Like a worst-case-scenario, indie-movie cliché, Wendy and Lucy throws every bone it can at the screen.

If there are Nazis fighting other Nazis in a movie and it's still boring, something's gone wrong. Valkyrie has a coterie of problems, and represents a whole new front in Tom Cruise's public relations war, but first and foremost there's the tedium.

Hudson has, if nothing else, traded up: last winter she was stuck in "Fool's Gold."

A romantic comedy that's neither romantic nor funny.

Purists will be – happy? Relieved? – to know that the "ch-ch-chhh" music survived, and the body count still totals 13.

Tries waaay too hard, just like its motormouth jock-snark heroes.

Unfortunately, the whole movie seems constructed just to get the singer/actress into a knock-down catfight, shoehorning one of show business's sexiest entertainers into a scorned-woman role. And even then, the pay-off feels cheap.

A movie without a moment of truth to be found.

An overstuffed failure that mistakes sleight storytelling for dazzling entertainment.

Ever fast-forward through a late-night cable romance just to get to the good parts? This amateurish relationship dramedy features all the stuff you'd skip, and nothing else.

This is one of those films in which almost every element is done in such an embarrassingly amateurish way, you want to put it out of its misery.

Unfortunately, this strained comedy relies entirely on clichés and contrivances to tell the story of Sherman.

It takes a really bad stupid comedy to make you appreciate well-done stupid comedies. And boy is Miss March a stupid comedy.

The movie doesn't try for "Airplane!" or even "Scary Movie"-type ribbing, but its adherence to the genre isn't quite pure, either. Despite McCormack's good-natured efforts, this is "MADtv"-quality satire.

Dano is a talented actor who needs to aim higher, and it should go without saying that Deschanel can do - and should know - better.

Ellis' stamp is immediately apparent, from the absurdly vapid characters to the undercurrent of barely repressed anger.

Douglas is the only one who looks like he's actually having fun with the dim-witted script.

The end result is like Quentin Tarantino reworking a Charles Bukowski story.

None of it makes any sense, but it is just nutty enough to provide a few (entirely unintended) laughs.

What the movie needs more than anything else is a fast-forward button.

During all of the film’s oh-so-long 97 minutes, Year One, barely earns a snicker.

This lumbering, ha-ha-look-what-we-remade action-comedy is a high-concept disaster.

Glatzer's self-consciously quirky indie is misguided on every level.

Unpleasantly icy film based on a true story.

The performances are dreadful, the direction shoddy and the final twist so idiotic, your mind can’t help but drift toward all the better scripts just waiting, sadly and silently, for the chance wasted here.

Unfortunately, Vardalos has no one else to blame for a shockingly amateurish effort that goes from bad (her oddly insincere performance) to worse (consistently sloppy camera work) to make-it-stop (it would be an insult to television to call the script sitcomish).

Flashbacks show samurai shenanigans, but it's all cluttered and rambling. Watch "True Blood," "Let the Right One In" or "Twilight" instead. Or wait for "Thirst" or "New Moon" or "Daybreakers" or ...

Tis embalmed drama is a ghost from the '80s, a decade that regularly produced surprise-free, caramelized biopics. The airless Amelia is missing practically everything.

The Box is its own kind of awful, a disconnected mess that never finds its reason for being.

The cozy sentimentality in The Time Traveler's Wife is the only thing that grounds it. Mostly it's just featherheaded.

As ineffectual police work and broken feet stack up, the silliness gets out of hand.

Early scenes set up the tragedy, but the majority of Oliver Hirschbiegel's movie is set in a TV studio where the two eventually face each other, and the tension, unfortunately, quickly becomes stagey.

The filmmakers were too busy throwing together potential blockbuster material to notice all the loose ends and gaping holes in logic. Which may, ultimately, explain why Willis looks so confused throughout. Maybe he, too, is straining to locate some intelligence amid all the machinery.

The movie soon turns into only a production-designed run-and-chase game, and our curiosity about what happened to Earth and the crew is teased and teased again until the movie’s big letdown of a reveal.

One we wish we hadn't seen

Peter Jackson siphoned out all the soulfulness that made the author's combination thriller/afterlife fantasy a best-seller. In its place is a gumball-colored potboiler that's more squalid than truly mournful.

Yep, Hess wrote and directed "Dynamite," and here's proof we shouldn't have rewarded him. The hollow "Broncos" is even more cruelly disdainful, designed primarily to scorn the pathetic lives within.

Travolta, who delivers an impressively enthusiastic performance, seems to have no idea that he's stuck in one of the year's worst movies. The perpetually pained expression on Williams' face, however, suggests he knows otherwise.

Since Bullock coproduced this masochistic venture, it seems she buys into the idea that fluffer-nut ditziness is what she does best. Except it isn't.

A documentary with too much dead time between the arduous tasks at hand, never grabs a viewer because -- sad to say -- it's too dull.

Throughout, Davidson's intentions are honest but become lost in a haze of overly familiar story beats.

Does John Leguizamo need a better manager, or does he just have terrible taste in scripts? Because aside from voicing the "Ice Age" movies, he wastes too much time on misfires like this one.

Von Trier ("Breaking the Waves," "Dogville") has no barriers, which absolutely can be a good thing. Here, though, his uninhibited nature is an omen of the pretentious butchery to come.

Motherhood's litany of complaints and trite comedy-drama comes off as thin, and targeted, as a flyer for The Children's Place.

Writer-director Sebastian Gutierrez seems to think his characters are oh-so-edgy, and maybe they would be -- if it were 1982.

The film is an exasperating bore.

It's also suffocatingly stagy, especially when the husband's new love (Kristen Bell) and a violent thief (Justin Long) show up.

The movie even has the nerve to start with a montage of moments from his better films, a bad idea that sets off an escalating tumble downhill.

The overlapping stories, the emotional disconnect, the heavy-handed symbolism -- no, it's not a movie from the makers of "Babel," its a mumbling, stammering copycat drama from Swedish director Lukas Moodysson.

These actors know how to liven up a room, yet here they're forced to perform in Miller's Theater for the Overwritten.

Thirteen-year-old boys big enough to sneak into R-rated movies are presumably the prime audience for this witless comedy from the Broken Lizard troupe.

Director John Polson's elliptical storytelling style quickly becomes an irritant.

On the plus side, the Irish landscape is gorgeous, and Scott and John Lithgow are amusing in small roles. But Goode barely makes an effort, so Adams' frantic exertions feel especially disheartening

John Peaslee's Screenwriting 101-style script has merely left everyone floating on their own.

This sock-it-to-'em souffle falls very quickly, unless watching Travolta trying on another faux-hip look is considered fun.

Frozen is good for five minutes of "What would you do if?" games. Then it's just stiff as a board.

Has warmed-over chills and a muddled, zombie-like execution.

A cringe-inducing, self-consciously kooky indie comedy that's best enjoyed for its taste of Rip Torn.

Only viewers wondering if James Van Der Beek has finally outgrown "Dawson's Creek" will be at all satisfied by this dreadful police procedural that contains good history lessons and bad TV-cop-show drama.

This synthetic comedy is instantly grating.

Would like to think of itself as an extension of its lead character -- gangly, a bit uncouth, but ultimately sweet. Unfortunately, it's more like the best friend in a movie like this -- irritating, unfunny and something that hangs around longer than it should.

A tacky 'Fatal Attraction' for the lesbian set.

Can't overcome mythic stupidity.

The connection they share is clear; the reason we're invited to sit in is foggy at best.

Kick-Ass - based on a graphic novel - thinks it's so brave and bold. But it's more like the title character, a dweeb who just thinks he's tough.

The title of The Misfortunates ­really applies to any audiences unlucky enough to sit through it.

The Losers is simply a lot of low blows, telegraphed each and every time.

Charmless and derivative.

This fawning appreciation wears thin, despite the good-natured clowning of Alabama dentist/would-be actor George Hardy, who's like a poor man's Bruce Campbell (our apologies to Bruce Campbell).

Don't blame Haley, though. Wesley Strick and Eric Heisserer's screenplay goes in the wrong direction entirely, dropping Freddy's sick sense of humor while turning him into a generic bogeyman.

An epic example of muddled storytelling, chintzy excitement and scatter-brained execution.

To call MacGruber"a total bomb is a bit much, but this comedy-action flick sure feels like it was put together with gum, shoelaces and a couple of sticky Twizzlers.

Though the story is semi-autobiographical, Davis' judgmental script alternates cheap humor and clichéd characterizations with nuggets of faux wisdom about sex, love and film. At least porn doesn't pretend to be something it's not.

Robert Luketic's bland action comedy focuses on the uninteresting relationship between its two bland main characters, and that's the deadliest thing in sight.

The father is the only one who can leave the house to go to his factory job, and that seems like a paradise for viewers trapped watching this clinically shot claptrap.

Likely to draw a range of responses. Many will be transported by its gorgeous construction and breathless emotion. Others will find it patently ridiculous.

Unfortunately, its positive attributes are thrown out of balance by its abundant negatives - including chintzy effects, lumbering storytelling and an overstylized, earnest incompetence that evokes "Speed Racer."

This Spanish sequel to a 2007 cult hit uses the way-overdone conceit of videotaped terror.

The James Bond parodies and genre riffs feel at least 20 years past their prime, and most will fly right over the heads of audience members 7 and under

Both written and played in broad strokes, each character quickly devolves into the most simplistic of symbols. The results comes across more as an agenda than art.

This dour, hyperactive family film is joyless, overly busy and starchy.

The Last Exorcism trods on previously stomped ground and has almost no good jump-outta-your-seat moments.

While all four leads deserve better, it's especially galling to see Burstyn - still so lovely - wasting her time and talents on a film with so little wisdom to share.

Most of the acting is amateurish at best, and the tone is vintage "Afterschool Special." But it does aim to be family-friendly, and at least it succeeds there.

A chatty little bore.

Jonathan, who was so great in "Roll Bounce," deserves better. It'd be overly generous, however, to say the same about anyone else involved.

Johnson is convincing as a swaggering, jokey Lennon, but the photos of young John, Paul and George that end the movie ultimately have more punch than this bubblegummy montage.

It doesn't help that Eastwood's laconic style is as torpid as it was in such misfires as "Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil" and "Changeling."

Half-assed, halfhearted attempt to copy the Farrellys' out-there style is missing both their jackassical riffs and their heart.

Stahl should have had a career similar to Sam Rockwell's, blending thoughtful indies with fun popcorn flicks. Instead, he's spinning his wheels in junk like this. Calamitous indeed.

I Love You Phillip Morris not only blasts gay stereotypes back decades, it could actually make people wish for a third "Ace Ventura" movie. Both of those are an accomplishment, though neither is a compliment.

Other than those related to cast and crew, it's difficult to imagine who else would sit through Ry Russo-Young's self-obsessed indie.

It's finally here: The most boring alien-invasion movie ever.

Do not, in fact, go at all. Because aside from the actual nutcracker, most of the crucial elements are missing from Andrei Konchalovsky's bizarre miscalculation. Magic and joy top the list.

Franchise morphs into generic slasher series without Jigsaw.

Brooks' shallow screenplay feels half-finished, and he never compensates with additional guidance or directorial flair. So all his actors are forced to flail about ineffectually. Apparently, none of them read the script in advance. Because surely then they'd have known to take a pass.

At least "Witch" offers Perlman's easy, early-hominid charm, and a semi-suspenseful rickety-bridge scene.

This tonal mishmash cripples The Dilemma almost immediately, though there are many other speed bumps, including Vaughn's irritating, fast-talking prattle.

On the bright side, Ivan Reitman's disappointing new comedy isn't just cheap and formulaic, but so forgettable few people will even remember she (Portman) was in it.

Terminally silly, even more so for being "inspired by actual events."

Director James Keach's movie is so annoyingly dipsy-doodle that TV veteran Bilson, trying hard to look haunted and angsty, is boxed in.

This is perhaps for Shakespeare completists only.

I Am Number Four, with its gangly title, seems like a dimwitted cousin to those hipper properties - a Superman-come-lately tale of puppy love, extraordinary powers and puberty that's duller than a chalkboard and less powerful than an extraneous Jonas brother.

Faith-based audiences may find comfort here, but the film's heavy-handedness is a burden it can't overcome.

The amazingly awful dramatic thriller Red Riding Hood could, with tweaks, be enjoyably bad in a "Plan 9 From Outer Space" kind of way. Instead, it's M. Night Shyamalan-style bad, which means despite all the unintentional snickers, you feel trapped.

There's a reason potboiler paperbacks don't make good movies - there's too much outlandish plot, even for Hollywood.

If I were to guess how Hollywood envisions the inside of a teenage boy's brain, it would look exactly like Zack Snyder'sSucker Punch."

Trust - a drama about the dangers of teen sexting and online predators - plays as prurient, ham-handed and amateurish.

This Arthur is missing a soul.

Perry's characters have always been drawn with broad strokes, as heroes or villains. In this case, all the villains are young women, and all the young women in this film-without exception--are monstrous.

Even if you've got a soft spot for silly rom-coms, know that this one is as empty-headed as it gets.

Alba certainly tries her best at portraying not just a beauty but also a beautiful mind, yet very few things add up despite director Marilyn Agrelo's efforts.

Any way you slice it, writer-director Spencer Susser's movie is bad company, full of wanna-be-outrageous anecdotes from the fringe.

What's most baffling is that such a canny actor is so unable to direct his own cast.

This is what happens when the Norwegians try to make their own "Blair Witch Project": We get three-headed trolls that hate Vitamin D and references to "Deliverance."

Well-meaning but dreadfully executed movie.

Director Michel Leclerc's comedy plays like one of those foreign-movie spoofs Jerry and the gang would go to see on a "Seinfeld" episode. Only here, there's no "young girl's journey from Milan to Minsk" - just from madcap to moronic.

Anyone hoping to engage even a single brain cell, however, is out of luck. Which is too bad, since popcorn blockbusters don't actually have to be mind-numbingly stupid or soul-suckingly empty.

Has raw action and urgent performances, but loses power due to an amateur approach.

A children's comedy about talking animals that feels as if it were written by children or, perhaps, by talking animals.

Carpenter's economical but mundane chiller is possessed more by previous ghoul-friend flicks than it is by his better work.

Alas, this learned woman of letters - her expertise became the work of Dostoyevsky, whose major novels Geier nicknames "the five elephants" - is ill served by a trudging approach and dry-as-dust, procedural style.

The result is a dull, high-minded soap opera.

With the most growling and grunting of any movie this summer - and that includes those apes perched atop the box office - Conan the Barbarian seems at times to have actually been made by barbarians.

As clichés trot through their sessions - it's like "In Treatment" as bedroom farce - we check out. Huppert, though, is as fearless as ever.

The one crime a B-movie should never commit is boring its audience. By even these low standards, Shark Night 3D is dead in the water.

These World Wrestling Entertainment-produced movies are a world unto themselves: Cliché-ridden B-flicks anchored by monstrously huge grapplers giving acting their all.

Rois has moments of desperate urgency and depth, but Twyker's love of parallels is finally done in by artsy shots of the threesome au naturel against stark white backdrops.

A ridiculously cheesy confection filled with unthrilling thrills, bored-looking adults and a comically overstuffed backstory.

Broomfield's point that Palin followers threaten her enemies, though, is worthy of a different documentary - perhaps one about American fanaticism.

It should surprise no one that visually quirky, graphic-novelish, pulp-noir action flicks rarely come through the sausage machine intact.

Rote, dull and point-blank obvious.

It must be said that everyone - including Dominic West and Rosamund Pike -- works awfully hard to entertain us. But that just makes it all the more depressing when joke after joke falls painfully flat. Stay home and introduce your kids to Mr. Bean, instead.

The only real reason to see this movie is to show unwavering loyalty to Cena. And even so, he'll never know if you wait to watch it on cable for free.

Sadly, for 99% of its running time, this muddled sci-fi drama is filled with enough overplotting, bad acting and riddle-speak dialogue to stop a clock.

Finding a fresh setting for a comedy is difficult, but a Renaissance fair is too broad a target.

Unless your own horoscope recommended wasting two perfectly useful hours of your day, take a pass.

Though this family film is slick and well-intentioned, it comes off as shallow as a prom committee meeting.

Though Julia Leigh's surprisingly dull debut is meant to present the mysteries of a troubled young woman, you're more likely to wonder why its star, Emily Browning, is drawn to such demeaning roles.

It almost seems unfair to mention that Carla Gugino shows up as a cop 80 minutes into these overlong proceedings; by then, viewers who walk out would never even have known that she was involved.

The Sitter is not only an atrocious shout-out to bad '80s comedies, it's also the kind of movie Jonah Hill should look at as a crass blast from his past.

A dumb thriller starring Dennis Quaid as a weirdo mortician taunted by high school kids into revealing what he did with his wife and her lover years before - and look at the movies it rips off...

Ridiculous and mannered, Loosies is light-fingered but heavy-handed.

The acting and general schlockiness make "Friday the 13th" look like "Macbeth," but it's clear D'Onofrio just wants to hang out. And actually, a lot of the music is really good. Let's hope next time, he decides to make something like "The Commitments" instead.

Albatross is the kind of movie that looks good, begins with promise, and then nosedives into deep disappointment.

She's (Heigl) disastrously miscast as a character beloved by fans of novelist Janet Evanovich.

It would be easy to say that the final minutes of this mixed-up thriller make everything before it meaningless, but that would indicate the odd conclusion has meaning, too.

Still, in movie terms, Warrior's Heart makes curling look like gladiatorial combat.

"War" is depressingly mean-spirited.

Act of Valor is like watching the wrestlers in dramas produced by the WWE: They're great at what they do, but being in front of the camera isn't part of that.

Appearances from Jeff Goldblum, Zach Galifianakis and John C. Reilly help some, but all the mincing from Heidecker and Wareheim, the wanna-be, gross-out humor and THE CONSTANT SCREAMING get tiring.

Though the central blowout is as epic as advertised, so is the movie's self-congratulatory obnoxiousness.

It's an unfunny Spanish movie that worked best as a two-minute trailer.

The biggest trouble with "Bliss" is the way it wastes a cast that deserves so much more.

"Dopey" is too good a word for it.

Directors James Mather and Stephen St. Leger stage a few good action set pieces, but unlike the 1981 midnight movie classic it imitates, the blandly titled Lockout never busts out of its cheesy concept.

The folksy shenanigans are well-intentioned but frankly interminable, with Kline's wry efficiency the best relief from all the yowling and whining.

Director Mary Harron ("American Psycho") can do little with this bloodless drama.

This wannabe Sherlockian thriller is like a night spent at Madame Tussauds, watching mannequins strangle other mannequins.

Safe arrives filled with bombast and sneers but barely any thrills.

It winds up just being annoying.

Add two more stars here if zoning out to weirdo-dreamy, '80s public-access TV with a synthesizer soundtrack is your idea of midnight fun. Because this ambitious, but not uninteresting, failure has that in its DNA.

The most charitable approach to this unfortunate diversion in Jackson's career would be to pretend it never happened. Now, who wants to go see "The Avengers" again?

What you don't expect is how bad almost all of it is.

The charmless but harmless A Cat in Paris hits theaters yet doesn't enchant.

Madagascar 3 can't upgrade its own shtick, becoming a craven example of a fast-buck, no-fun family film.

It's bluntly written, poorly shot and edited, and cruel without being clever.

As awful as most of That's My Boy is, it's sort of mesmerizing to see how Sandler - in a script credited to David Caspe - keeps his touchstones in place.

This insipid mashup of history lesson and monster flick takes itself semi-seriously, which is truly deadly.

This slovenly, self-indulgent riff on Charles Bukowski-like fringe-livers has all of the naked harshness of Bukowski with none of the poetry. At least Haas gives it a good shot.

A ghost-busting drama set in a world of mystics, mind-benders and various and sundry fake-psychic gobbledygook. But the weirdest thing is how all the fun gets lost in a bottom-drawer "X Files" story.

Everything that goes around comes around, but the roundelay in 30 Beats comes off, well, a little square.

What's most notable about this aggressively cynical project is how much talent it wastes.

There's something sadly poetic about a movie dealing with disappearing memories that vanishes from your mind while you watch it.

How does a comedy troupe even get from the frat-humor antics of "Beerfest" to the middle-class suburbanality of Babymakers? Well, everybody gets old eventually. Growing up, on the other hand, is optional.

Filled with enough clichés to be broken up and sold in pieces as junk material.

This comic drama tries too hard to serve up a slice of manic life, but Eisenberg, along with Tracy Morgan and Isiah Whitlock Jr. as the affable druggies, provides some spark.

As generic and forgettable as its title, this half-hearted attempt at a teen comedy feels like a term paper you might buy online: poorly written and cribbed from a million other sources.

By the middle of the second hour, you'll be wishing a zombie would just chomp off your head to end the pain.

If only the movie could live up to its own potential. Instead, we're stuck with blandly unappealing costumed characters meandering through a boring quest to find some lost balloons.

While plenty of gross-out comedies have come and gone in the last two decades, Leslye Headland's Bachelorette may be the most vulgar of them all.

It's the same-old flesh-chewing. Like vampires, this genre is getting deadly.

After much fumbling, the snicks and giggles of adolescence grow wearying yet again.