A depressingly predictable journey of self-discovery.

A murky and morbid dirge of a gay romance.

There are a few chuckles here and there, and there are odd wisps of cleverness in the script by Steve Adams, but for the most part, Envy is a film that doesn't know where it's going.

A sluggish meander through the life of the man considered by many to be a deity of golfing.

In trying to straddle both the grown-up and kiddie worlds with this inappropriately sexualized effort - their first theatrical release since 1995's "It Takes Two" - the Olsens have lost their footing.

What is astonishing is that husband-and-wife writers Wally Wolodarsky (who also directed) and Maya Forbes, with combined credits that include "The Simpsons" and "The Larry Sanders Show," could churn out something this nasty and ludicrous.

What really wrecks Wolfgang Petersen's Troy is some of the worst casting in recent Hollywood history: The lackluster ensemble hired by the director is overwhelmed by the generally impressive sets and crowd scenes, by the task of playing epic heroes and by David Benioff's rambling, tone-deaf screenplay "inspired by Homer's 'Iliad.'"

Kalem's grasp of dramatic storytelling is no firmer, and the disorderly film merely chases its tail for the second half, going nowhere fast.

This one-joke comedy vehicle is flying through a laugh-free zone.

Self-indulgent folly.

Ben Stiller's overbearing schtick officially reaches its expiration date with the desperate and puerile Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story.

Something high schoolers might yawn through in history class, but they have no choice. You do.

Bart Everly followed Frank around for two years, yet his film seems to consist mostly of regurgitated C-Span and news footage from the period, interspersed with asides from the outspoken liberal.

Not as vile as "Sleepover," nor as tangy as "Mean Girls."

Well-meaning yawn-fest.

Beautiful Brit actress Sophia Myles ("From Hell") is so arch, canny and amusing as the posh, pink-obsessed spy Lady Penelope, it's as if she is acting in the movie this should have been.

This Canadian-South African labor of love has its heart in the right place, even if the leads seem to have been cast more for their hunky looks than their stiff acting.

Disco may still be dead, but Benji: Off the Leash! resurrects another dubious artifact of the '70s - the crudely made family films starring that lovable mutt.

The biggest problem with the corny horror film Anacondas: The Hunt for the Blood Orchid is that its titular reptiles are about as scary as jellied eels.

The clichéd and predictable Suspect Zero is the latest evidence that Hollywood has run the serial-killer thriller into the ground through overuse - the same way it earlier exhausted, say, buddy action-comedies.

One of the silliest, most sieve-like screenplays of the year.

About as exciting as watching someone else's home movies -- albeit, beautifully photographed ones.

One of those painfully earnest -- and pretentious -- little indies in which a pair of emotional cripples neatly resolve all of their problems within 48 hours of meeting each other.

The worst crime perpetrated in the Swiss-cheese screenplay by Gerald Di Pego ("Angel Eyes") is the cynical use of a mother's love for her child as a plot device for an intelligence-insulting sci-fi dud.

The longest 85-minute road trip you could imagine.

That Eulogy has any laughs is largely a testament to the understated Romano -- he and Deschanel are the only ones in the cast who aren't straining to be funny.

The story is so slight, a low-wattage hair dryer could blow it away.

This Alfie has been castrated.

Viewers are left wondering just why they should care about them and the rest of the film's one-dimensional characters.

Sort of "The Da Vinci Code for Dummies."

As huge a travesty and a bore as 1956's "Alexander the Great," in which Richard Burton looked equally uncomfortable as a blond.

Provides a few minor thrills, but overall is talky and implausible.

Will go down in history as the movie that showed a turtle getting an enema. It also features a hot performance by Marguerite Moreau.

The willfully eccentric Beyond the Sea seems to be telling us a lot more about its star and director, Kevin Spacey, than its ostensible subject.

Macht is the best thing in A Love Song for Bobby Long, but his intelligent performance doesn't justify a tough, and very long, sit.

Amidst the ennui, there are some fine performances.

Isn't as relentlessly vulgar or cartoonish as "The Ladies Man" - nor is it a whole lot more realistic.

Has precious little to add to the canon -- and does so in a highly melodramatic manner.

It's unfortunate that the people DuBowski profiles tend to be self-indulgent or otherwise unappealing. It's still more unfortunate that the film focuses more on relatively easy issues of acceptance.

May well be the dullest and most pointless version ever filmed, thanks to a stunningly bad lead performance by Ethan Hawke.

Intermittently funny, often vulgar.

Unfortunately, this version of the familiar formula lacks the inspiration, genuine wit and raunchy charm of 1998's outrageous "There's Something About Mary."

Lackluster anime.

A pretentious, unsatisfying and ultra-slow-moving thriller.

Jarringly insensitive and amateurish debut feature.

Mostly, Freak Weather is just pathetic.

It's like "Waiting for Guffman" without the wit or irony.

The characters are so flat and the dialogue so dull you expect it to be one of those movies whose existence is justified by a big final twist. But it's three days after the screening, and still no twist. Maybe it's coming in the mail?

An unrelenting assault on the brain and eardrums.

It's the audience that gets punk'd in this crass and sloppy comic recycling.

Kontroll calls itself a thriller, and you will agree if you are excited by scenes of bored inspectors arguing with sullen straphangers.

That someone as smart as Duchovny would get bogged down in such predictable treacle is a mystery worthy of investigation by Scully and Mulder.

Say this for A Lot Like Love: It isn't one of those impossibly witty romantic comedies.

By the time this corn festival is over, you'll be crying out for the relative toughness of the average Jimmy Stewart film.

Tommy Riley is a ten-cent "Baby."

A shaky effort to make a point about art triumphing over all.

"The Waterboy" was funny because Sandler doesn't look like a football player. When he swaggers around The Longest Yard starting fights and taking beatings without flinching, he only reminds us how little Steve McQueen and how much Woody Allen there is in him.

Fails to elicit any substantive information from his (Tommy Davis) subjects. And he fails to put their plight into perspective.

A mild, slow-moving drama that belatedly tries to argue that graffiti writers are political artists, not an urban blight.

Ron Howard's bio-pic is an Oscar-baiting fairy tale that manipulates the audience at every turn of the clich.

Working in Terribly Serious mode, rookie director Chris Terrio proves as pompous as filmmakers three times his age.

The more serious Potter gets (there are several earnest soliloquies about dirt), the harder it is not to laugh.

By the time White gets around to condescending remarks... the film has become a sort of BBC "Hee Haw," meant to reassure Brits and New Yorkers that the South is indeed a land of pistol-toting, Jesus-praising gap-toothed freaks.

The Warrior may be mighty of sword but he is exceedingly limp of writing. We never learn why he went bad in the first place, or what causes his sudden conversion. If the audience is expected to do most of the work, we should be paid $10.50 each.

There's no real payoff - artistically or emotionally - in Gregory Harrison's gimmicky and tedious psychological thriller November, shot on ugly digital video.

Strictly summer schlock.

Herzlinger is a flack, not a filmmaker.

I hereby award the World War II drama The Great Raid a Cement Star for faithful and distinguished service to the cause of mediocrity.

Though Cho occasionally connects with her targets, more often than not she seems as intolerant and hate-filled as she accuses them of being - and that's not funny.

Yet another screwed-up mess that will give audiences another excuse to shun the multiplexes this weekend.

Solid performances can't save Melissa Painter's pretentious teen drama Steal Me, which plays like a cross between "Dangerous Skin" (without the gay sex) and "Picnic" (without the production values or credible situations).

Absurdity has a new name: Flightplan.

For most adults, and kids raised on "South Park," the painfully earnest story won't hold much interest. And the comedy is tame.

This maudlin, fact-inspired and anti-feminist dramedy is no "Far From Heaven" or "The Hours."

The Aggressives has plenty of character but no story; it would have done better to structure itself around a competition it briefly visits in which lesbians, in costume, compete to win prizes for looking masculine. That way the film would have had a direction.

It's easy to spot a failed tearjerker, though: All the characters are sobbing all over each other while the people in the audience check their watches.

Rambling, schmaltzy romantic comedy.

Basically a deadly dull rehash of "Resident Evil," which in turn was a third-generation clone of "Aliens."

Filmmaker Josh Stolberg claims to have been inspired by real-life events, but mostly he ineptly rips off other movies and wastes a cast that includes Rosanna Arquette, Adam Arkin and Elizabeth Perkins.

Your baby is near death. Instead of dropping everything to save his life, you make sure the video camera keeps rolling.

Marines did not play football in full anti-chemical suits in 112-degree weather; men would have been collapsing and perhaps dying because it was so hard to breathe in the gas masks. Do I quibble over details? Details are all the movie offers. There isn't a story.

F-A-I-L-U-R-E.

There's a line between rogue and jerk, and Reynolds lives on the wrong side of it. As Dusty, Klein is such a smooth operator that he could have been - should have been - the lead.

Lame family filler.

an overlong and surprisingly dull documentary.

Oh no, another let's-drag-a-dead-body-to-Mexico flick?

Tristan & Isolde makes sacking and pillaging about as exciting as the line at the post office.

This rehash of familiar pacifist arguments offers neither heat nor light. It's "Fahrenheit: Room Temperature."

A sincere but underwhelming dramatization of one of the biggest news stories of 1956.

Arlyck spends more time following himself and his own lefty family than checking up on Sean.

Sir, no, sir.

The kind of thriller whose ridiculous climax hinges on a hitherto undisclosed GPS tracking device in a dog's collar - an appropriate touch in a movie that's more than a little flea-ridden itself.

Too bad the story is so predictable and the big wedding scene, in which women dressed as angels dangle from the church ceiling strumming harps, is cornier than an Orville Redenbacher factory.

Running Scared has some camp value as the kind of midnight movie you can laugh at (not with), but it isn't so much imitation Tarantino as it is imitation imitation Tarantino.

Boynton isn't interested in telling a story, only in the atmosphere of political consultancy.

Just because the goods are made in Italy doesn't mean they're designer-quality; Don't Tell is glossy on the outside, cardboard and staples on the inside.

It's all interspersed with strange attempts at comedy that fail on two levels: They're not funny, and they puncture what little drama there is.

Drab, despairing and pointless.

It turns out the stories don't unite at all. Instead, we get a series of dramatic vignettes, most of them decently executed but all of them rooted in the weepy sensibility of TV movies.

There's not much story but there are plenty of colorful, almost David Lynchian drug freakouts, as well as lots of sick violence.

These films take years to produce, so The Wild isn't exactly a ripoff - but it isn't exactly fun, either.

If you go to the movies to ogle topless young women, Simon is definitely for you. If, on the other hand, you want something more cerebral with your $10 ticket and overpriced snacks, stay clear of this Dutch melodrama.

A cartoonish, unfocused and mostly unfunny satire.

Sir! No Sir! doesn't make a lot of sense, but it does have some fascinating footage of Jane Fonda, both as a dippy young protester and today, when she remains dazzled by her own legend.

Pretentious, stagy and over-the-top update of Chekov's "The Three Sisters."

It's supposed to be about a Kafkaesque experience. Instead, it IS a Kafkaesque experience. Why are we here? Is everything absurd? Is anyone in charge?

Its images came from a dusty box in the horror-movie attic, and the attic is where the entire picture will be in a month.

Hoot peaks during its wordless opening credits sequence, which swoops delightfully around Florida scenery. That, the cute owls and the easygoing songs by Jimmy Buffett, who also plays one of Roy's teachers, are the only things worth your trouble.

There are precious few laughs in this poorly written and directed "unromantic comedy" - the sort of dire date movie you'd take somebody to if you wanted it to be a LAST date.

A sloppy and only mildly engaging documentary.

Autumn wants to do for Jean-Pierre Melville what "Reservoir Dogs" did for Hong Kong cinema, but this new film is a joyless exercise in film appreciation.

Kids should see Garfield: A Tale of Two Kitties. It'll help prepare them for a lifetime of mediocre entertainment ahead.

A glacially paced, extremely moist, terminally gloomy and cliché-laden romantic drama with a supernatural twist.

Though Fiennes has done (far) better work, the blurry story seems almost profound when seen through his eyes. To the extent the movie works at all, it works best when it's just the camera and Fiennes in a bleak white room.

Rarely have I wanted to fast-forward through a movie as much as Click, a treacly and not-funny-enough Adam Sandler comedy.

Uma Thurman plays a flying hero who might as well be called Not Funny Woman.

The story is superficial at best. And the movie is too long.

If you want to punish your kids, send them to bed without dinner. If you want to disturb, frighten and depress them while making sure they fail biology, take them to the animated feature Barnyard.

This Sundance dud is a turgid gay soap opera with a limp twist, showcasing Robin Williams at his maudlin worst.

"This Is Spinal Tap" took the mockumentary up to 11. Brothers of the Head brings it back down to about four.

Solid cast notwithstanding, 10th and Wolf is a generic, direct-to-video-grade gangster movie.

When the villain is revealed, you are neither surprised nor scared. You just think, "That guy?"

Keeps such a lazy pace, with so many scenes that fail to move the story forward, that it should be cited for failing to meet the minimum speed for a crime drama.

Lethally dull and self-important remake.

The computer-generated flying effects are the only reason to see the movie, but at some point somebody left the computer on too long, so it went ahead and spat out the script.

The men who made The Guardian strive to be the averagest of the average - and don't quite succeed.

Misses everything that made the first one eat into your spine like meningitis.

This lame teenage James Bond will leave audiences neither shaken nor stirred.

One big hunk of cinematic moussaka with lots of appetizing shots of food.

As misconceived as it is corny and predictable.

Problem: Kidman is the only one in the theater who is turned on. The rest of us are giggling.

Harris can be a brilliant actor, and there are flashes of that here. But he's done in by a script that lacks any subtlety.

For much of Flannel Pajamas I wondered if the couple's big problem was that Stuart was secretly gay. Nothing so interesting - he's just a narcissistic control freak and she's off-puttingly needy.

Ryan Reynolds isn't around this time - and neither is most of the wit.

Turistas has mastered the international language: stupidity.

A low-key Field is the best thing about Two Weeks, which is set in a Wilmington, N.C., where everyone mysteriously sounds like he just got off a Los Angeles freeway.

DiCaprio and Connelly give off the sexual tension of pickled herring.

When the studio tells us that parental guidance is suggested, does it occur to them that they should have taken their own advice?

The apolitical and well-meaning Home of the Brave is predictable and maudlin.

What happens when several characters' lives intertwine with the maggot-infested corpse of a prostitute in The Dead Girl? A whole lot of crying.

Isn't as bad as you'd think, but this comic mash-up of "The Bourne Identity" and "Fat Albert" doesn't have much heft.

One of the few monster-crocodile movies that simultaneously tries to rip off "Jaws" and "Meet the Press."

In the hands of the formerly promising director Joe Carnahan, this stylish, nihilistic, hugely derivative mash-up of Tarantino and Guy Ritchie (before wife Madonna ruined his career) is fun for roughly half an hour.

Colpaert makes nice use of blue and green hues, and he makes some valid points about the Iraqi war. But the script lacks coherence and ends with a 180-degree flip that lessens the impact of what has gone before.

The cast includes Oscar winner Louise Fletcher (Nurse Ratched herself) and Henry Thomas of "E.T.," and the special effects look like they were executed on somebody's laptop.

A lightweight French comedy worth watching only for Cecile de France. The gamine actress - decked out in short reddish hair, black tights and a thigh-high mini - is charming as Jessica.

When you awake, it may all seem like a bad dream - but why is your wallet missing $11? Scary.

The mutants are brain-damaged; the filmmakers don't have that excuse to justify this movie, which is the kind of thing the sergeant would call "a stunning display of individual and group stupidity."

The movie pretty much exists to sell tie-in products, and it's about as entertaining as watching little kids playing with their toys in the sandbox.

You know those one-joke "Saturday Night Live" sketches that start to age after six minutes? Blades of Glory is one joke that lasts 93 minutes, costs $11 and could involve sitting next to a guy who retells the movie into his cellphone.

There's too little dog and too much fire house in Firehouse Dog, a mild kid comedy that turns into a flaming arson mystery with some scenes that could be too scary for little ones.

Satire is merciless; it demands that mocker be superior to mockee.

Some ideas are auto-stolen (from Coupland's last novel, "JPod"), but those quirky atmospherics aren't enough to sustain a largely plotless film.

An amusingly preposterous last act keeps you guessing, or maybe keeps you ducking, as it lets rip an avalanche of startling revelations and double-crosses. Nothing is what it seems - unless it seems cheesy.

There are a few scares, but not enough to make up for the murky script.

A 12th-grade "Sixth Sense" with a third-rate plot.

Next, which makes "National Treasure" look like a model of narrative logic, is almost beyond criticism.

A bizarre quasi-documentary that more or less tries to rationalize bestiality as a harmless quirk.

Peter Krause, the fine actor from "Six Feet Under," gives a one-note performance that seriously undermines Civic Duty, a thriller mining minimal dramatic payoff from the potentially potent subject of post-9/11 paranoia.

The kind of movie that cries out for the fast-forward button.

Fails to grab the imagination as it unfolds in familiar TV-movie fashion.

Considering that Gracie says nothing that hasn't been said in dozens of films, one does wonder whether Hollywood is being as diligent as it could be in digging up fresh story ideas.

A suspenseless rehash.

The bite and bark of Underdog are both pretty awful, but little kids might take this pooch for a walk.

"Rush Hour" was acceptable. It was to "Rush Hour 2" what McDonald's is to White Castle. "Rush Hour 2" is to Rush Hour 3 what White Castle is to cat food.

Picks up steam when it finally arrives in Cannes just in time to wreak yet more havoc at the big film festival, but getting there is pretty tedious. A little of the wildly mugging Atkinson goes a long way.

Wavers uncomfortably between satire and dime-store existentialism on the big screen. It's sort of as if Charlie Kaufman rewrote "The Fountain."

The comedy is without distinction and the conclusion is melodramatic. I must note that ads for the film are misleading because they give no hint of the dark side of The Bubble.

A caper comedy that forgot to put in the laughs.

So beautifully filmed (as if through a gauze curtain), it is especially sad that the script doesn't measure up.

A gorgeous snooze, somewhere between imitation Terrence Malick and a feature version of star Brad Pitt's notorious Vanity Fair layout with Angelina Jolie and their faux kids.

The opening montage raises expectations of a serious, politically incisive depiction of the region. What we actually get is an offensively pandering, Bruckheimer-esque riff on the real-life Khobar Towers bombing of 1996, a Saudi Hezbollah attack that killed 19 Americans.

Lust, Caution could have done with a lot more lust and a lot less caution.

So laugh-poor that it shoves all its comedy chips on a bet that you can build a movie around nose gags.

A kid unversed in other name-brand fantasy movies might go for The Seeker, but in 2007 it's redundant, a puttering Potter without wit and whimsy.

A slow train to Dullsville that makes all local stops. You know a film is in trouble if the most interesting thing in it is the luggage.

Made to win awards, and I'm here to present it with one: the Cliché of the Year honors, otherwise known as the Hackney.

Harper and the film's director, Jeremy Kagan, try valiantly, but they are unable to bring Meir to life or hold viewers' attentions.

A dreary message movie.

I went to a wartime thriller, but then a Poli Sci 101 seminar broke out.

This is the sort of movie that requires you not only to suspend disbelief, but to check your sanity at the ticket counter.

The plot contortions that very slowly unfold under Michael Radford's arthritic direction in Flawless are not much more entertaining.

A windbaggy film of Phillip Roth's novella "The Dying Animal."

Five minutes before The Golden Compass started, I was wondering when it was going to start. Forty minutes into it, I was wondering exactly the same thing.

It's a cute idea that a better filmmaker than writer-director Michael Schroeder could have done a lot with.

There are some funny moments, plus occasional nudity and sex, but the joke quickly wears off. What might have worked as a half-hour TV show doesn't suit itself to a feature-length film.

It's another flick about maps, landmarks and buried treasure that makes "The Da Vinci Code" look like TOLSTOY.

An occasionally revealing glimpse inside the mind of Chapman before, during and after the assassination.

A lukewarm film about what might happen to three New York City friends if the draft were reinstated, proves that even the most controversial of topics can be the basis for the dullest indie films.

A heist comedy in which the audience gets robbed.

There are a few sweet moments as the story reaches its unsurprising conclusion. But, all in all, Flakes isn't going to bowl you over.

Needlessly violent? No, Rambo is needfully violent. Johnny R. is a man constructed of violence.

Situations get increasingly ridiculous, and none of the characters ever seems like anything but a screenwriter's sketch.

At some point, this movie must have been a screenplay. But it's an enigma why anyone would bet tens of millions of dollars that people would laugh.

Jacques Rivette's film is full of painstaking historical detail, but the behavior of the two nonlovers is mired in inaction and emotionally incomprehensible.

Throws in enough hurtling bodies, screaming bullets and totaled cars that it at least holds your interest, so it passes the worth-watching-if-you're-stuck-on-an-airplane test.

It's pretty hard to make a dull movie about Henry VIII and his complicated love life, but The Other Boleyn Girl, a failed Oscar contender, manages to do just that, with yawns to spare.

Under Mark Palansky's uninspired direction, magic eludes Penelope in scene after scene.

Better than most Martin Lawrence movies - much as strep throat is better than malaria.

Relentlessly depressing.

Well, nobody said The Grand was another "Best in Show."

The movie doesn't do anything with these viney bastards. There's no back story, no satire, no allegory, no implications beyond what's happening on the pyramid.

A serial-killer flick told like an art lecture, Anamorph manages to be gruesome yet dull.

We keep waiting for a story, or at least some comedy, but none ever materializes. The dialogue makes Algebra II seem fascinating by comparison.

The film is narrated by Russell Crowe, whose star power is probably the only reason it's being released here.

Turn the River lacks almost everything Eigeman has as a performer: charisma, wit and snappy delivery.

Laughs are few and far between in the innuendo-laden script attributed to Dana Fox, who's also responsible for the reprehensible "The Wedding Date."

Beautiful but boring.