Sundance Mopey Alienation Flick No. 4,228 is For Ellen, an empty angst-athon that proves 90 minutes of close-ups of Paul Dano looking wounded can be even less interesting than it sounds.

There may be a lot left to say about Hurricane Katrina, but if so, I'm Carolyn Parker doesn't say it.

All I wanted to do was escape from this aggressively ugly world and its equally unattractive characters. It's not that the movie is in bad taste or cheesy (though it is) but that all of its hyperviolence adds up to nothing: This thing is dedd.

This is just a slow-moving skin flick broken up by lots of boring discussions about Cherry's future.

The setting for "17 Girls" is a French seaside town with a gorgeous beach. Aside from that, what you have here are the ingredi-ents for a Maury Povich show.

The Paperboy can't decide whether to be an unfunny sex comedy, a half-hearted detective story or a woeful race drama - so it decides to be all three, then becomes yet another movie (a swampy "Heart of Darkness") in the final act.

Directed by journeyman actor Matthew Lillard, this tame and by-the-numbers effort never succeeds in making the outcast situation cinematic or interesting.

It's another in the bicoastal indie industry's endless series of self-congratulatory comedies about the alleged dopiness of middle American hicks who do things like read Parade magazine and decorate with flags.

There needs to be a 12-step program for movie people to stop sharing their "deeply personal" yet insight-free stories of addiction.

The parallels between the kids' war and the real one are made far too obvious by Christophe Barratier, who made the equally treacly "The Chorus" and infests the movie with nonstop musical goo.

Even if you overlooked the production values from a 1986 porno and special effects like something your nephew cooked up on his Mac, the movie's "Yay, money!" zingers are just a big bag of sad.

None of Dunham's humor comes across, except when someone says, "And when you speak, your words are snakes I swat at with swords," which is hilarious, but not intentionally.

I'll grant that the film has many layers. All of them are terrible.

The Oscar-winning director of "Rain Man" - whose last film, the abysmal documentary "PoliWood" never went much further than the Tribeca Film Festival - demonstrates he can make a shakycam found-footage horror movie every bit as fake-looking, clumsy and unscary as your average college student working on a $200 budget.

Cancels itself out by being too campy to take seriously and too tragic to laugh at.

At 96 minutes it is exactly 93 1/2 minutes too long. If they're going to put this artifact in theaters, they'd better charge 1973 grindhouse prices: a dollar a ticket.

A low-watt, low-wit comedy.

This infomercial for Helnwein's work as designer for an Israeli opera called "The Child Dreams" doesn't tell us a lot about how opera comes together, but it is accidentally revealing about its subject.

Painful, misshapen and a little gross. It's an enlarged prostate of a movie.

If the poor really interested such filmmakers, these movies would have something to offer other than lugubriousness masquerading as seriousness, and clichés presented as hard truths.

Parental Guidance kicks off with a mean-spirited joke about an overweight woman and heads downhill from there.

Among gay Jewish French postman movies, Let My People Go! may be a Hall of Fame entry, but alas, by any other standard this would-be sex comedy is a dismal failure.

A supernatural horror-comedy that's frighteningly lacking in wit, John Dies at the End thinks it's "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" for dudes. But in its randomness, its vulgarity and its level of humor, it's more like the collected writings on the walls of a roadside men's room.

So feeble it fails even as train-wreck exploitation. I’d be unkind, but not entirely inaccurate, to label Coppola’s sophomoric, er, sophomore effort as a director an offer you can refuse.

Actually, Bruce, what stinks is the script — which is woefully lacking the kind of one-liners and memorable bad guys that helped make working-class hero McClane so iconic he’s still around after 25 years. Even the action sequences are pretty much by the numbers this time.

Save your money and wait for the new 3-D version of the 1939 classic that Warner Bros. has promised for later this year.

Most are exercises in sickening bad taste, with an emphasis on human bodily functions. The biggest stinkers? “T Is for Toilet” and “F Is for Fart.”

There was a time when the climate-change alarmist movement was like a guy with a megaphone at your ear, but now it’s more like a squirrel at your shoelaces.

Clip hurts your eyes, but if it’s supposed to hurt your heart, it misses the mark.

The joke is on arthouse audiences who show up for Funny Games, which is basically torture porn every bit as manipulative and reprehensible as "Hostel," even if it's tricked out with intellectual pretension.

I’d like to take back all those times I said Nicolas Cage was one of the most annoying actors on film. It turns out he’s equally terrible when he’s only on the soundtrack. And yet Cage is the least of the problems with The Croods.

It’s not a documentary, it isn’t entertainment, and aside from Chung’s intelligent, dignified performance, this sure as heck isn’t art.

A long, tedious and often unintentionally hilarious adaptation of Stephenie Meyer’s sci-fi follow-up.

Though it tries — with a much too heavy hand — the new Evil Dead is far less humorous than its predecessor.

A preposterous supernatural thriller that inexplicably managed to sign up Julianne Moore to star.

As far as I’m concerned, death couldn’t arrive quickly enough for these eight stereotypically self-absorbed Los Angelenos gathered for Sunday brunch at which the hosts (Blaise Miller, Erinn Hayes) plan to announce the demise of their marriage.

This is a horror movie that’s really a supposed comedy; she’s (Lohan) a supposed comedy actress who’s actually scary.

Seidl sternly rejects nuance. All the women are crude and insensitive, all the men are desperate and exploited. Despite copious full-frontal nudity, it’s an unrelievedly puritanical and didactic film.

Just because two people are miserable doesn’t mean they’re interesting.

A weird mash-up of disaster, horror and dystopia genre pictures, Aftershock fails to make the Earth move.

The terrorism thriller Java Heat sure is violent. I don’t even want to tell you how viciously Mickey Rourke mangles the French accent he’s trying to do.

At least there is a happy ending — DeChristopher, for wasting the government’s resources, properly served 21 months in federal prison. Now, he has moved on to Harvard Divinity School, where his sanctimony will serve him well.

Eckhart’s another matter. He’s adequate, but there is something about his raspy voice and WASPy body language that’s more in tune with being the bad guy at the board meeting than the hero racing through the train station.

A movie so pathetically lame that hopefully even Spears most ardent young fans will give this stinker a big thumbs down.

How do you inject life into a film whose central character is dull, slow, stupid and grim?If you're Arnaud Desplechin, you don't.

Every possible film student visual cliché (plus quite a few from the world of music video) gets a thorough workout.

Epic waste of celluloid.

A strong, early candidate for the worst movie of the year.

If bluegrass were as static and dull as this concert film indicates, Nashville would have hustled all the hillbillies back to the Smokies long ago.

Contains much more prosaic ingredients. Like props and sound effects that could have been borrowed from an off-off-Broadway play, a host of painfully strained performances and a plot that's almost unbearably stupid.

It's so painful to sit through you eventually stop feeling sorry for the floundering cast.

Don't even think of visiting this French fiasco.

A confusing mishmash.

Amazingly amateurish, the film lands wide of satirical targets that should be impossible to miss.

Calling it pretentious doesn't do justice to the toxic faux-bohemianism and unearned self-regard that bubble and ooze out of every aspect of Chelsea Walls.

Shapeless, tedious, hopelessly bad sequel.

A creepy, depressing and leering "comedy" that's a virtual collection of "What were they thinking?" moments.

One bad movie -- in the original sense of the word.

A skin-crawlingly unfunny riff on Woody Allen's "Bananas."

Laughs are few and far between, and the film feels brutally long.

More prettily photographed pretentious rubbish from the ridiculous Peter Greenaway.

This would be a stultifyingly incestuous affair even if all the jokes about fertilization weren't so tiresomely lame and predictable.

Kicks off with an inauspicious premise, mopes through a dreary tract of virtually plotless meanderings and then ends with a whimper.

This time out, Broomfield comes up with maybe enough halfway decent material for a 10-minute segment on a second-rate tabloid TV show.

Summer Catch is the sludge at the bottom of the barrel.

The only feeling the character seems capable of is lust -- and when he hits on the male nurse looking after his newborn baby in the hospital, this hollow, unfunny "comedy" moves from merely tedious to nasty.

Stinko movies often unwittingly critique themselves -- and the brain-dead romantic comedy Down to You (which Miramax understandably didn't screen in advance for critics) is no exception.

An inept, tedious spoof of '70s kung fu pictures, it contains almost enough chuckles for a three-minute sketch, and no more.

Kicks off as a cheap piece of retro schlock and quickly devolves into a putrid bloodbath with a thin narrative made utterly indecipherable by the first-time director's clueless approach to filmmaking.

Unfathomable balderdash.

A low-end scam by Lions Gate Films -- whose recent "The Wash" was a masterpiece by comparison.

The cheap-looking special effects, embarrassingly clunky attempts at humor and one-dimensional characters are bad enough, but the PG-rated movie's most offensive crime is its uncomfortably lewd interactions between adults and kids.

An unholy mess.

Amateurish, irritatingly gabby indie.

It reeks of contempt for the audience. This is not just a "B-movie" -- it's a B-movie that fails to entertain on any level.

As if the witless cultural stereotypes weren't bad enough, misogyny is rampant -- bare-breasted women abound, yet the protagonist remains fully clothed while having a bullet removed from his butt.

The family at the center of "Catch" is likable and authentic, but the seriousness of their plight sits uneasily with the shoddily assembled escapist goof it generates.

Bereft of inspiration, the agonizingly witless screenplay - blamed by the credits on George Gallo - resorts to pathetic cheap jokes about flatulence and impotence, lame slapstick and that juvenile gag about the horror of two men waking up naked in the same bed.

This witless action comedy begins to insult the audience's intelligence from the opening scene.

Beyond-lame satire.

A pointless, wincingly snide exercise.

Mindless, vapid fare... Watching the movie, you'll feel really dirty.

Strings together 60 amateurish short films to tell us drugs are cool, man.

Starts off bad, then tapers off.

Four Brothers? Ringling Brothers is more like it, because John Singleton's latest stinks like something the elephants left behind. It's not clear what the film is trying to do, but it seems safe to guess that it's doing it wrong.

The rest of the cast is uniformly awful, including Carmen Electra and Kathy Griffin as a wacky medium who asks, "What do I look like? A comedian?" Not from where I'm sitting.

Cinema vanité.

Train wreck.

In the dumps.

The Promise employs laughable computer effects and second-rate martial-arts fighting to tell the hard-to-figure story of a princess and her three lovers.

Stay Alive is D.O.A, a notion of an outline of a rough draft of a killer video-game flick.

At this point, there are inflatable toys that are livelier than Stone, but how can you tell the difference? Basic Instinct 2 is not an erotic thriller. It's taxidermy.

Sandler's latest ode to projectile vomiting, passing gas, gay jokes and physical insults to the groin is basically a feeble cross between "The Revenge of the Nerds" and "The Bad News Bears."

It's "Das Bomb." It's "The Perfunctory Storm."

The hero is the Texas prosecutor who won a questionable indictment of DeLay, Ronnie Earle. But he sounds more extreme the more he talks.

It's hard to say what's worse in the strange Portuguese drama Two Drifters: the insufferable wordless stretches, or the sudsy dialogue.

A kid comedy that's been zapped by extraterrestrial suckiness rays.

A campus comedy that's as dull as bong water, Accepted is like the product of a community college filmmaking class, remedial division.

An impressive supporting cast can't save this painfully unfunny, ham-fisted mockumentary poking fun at reality TV shows.

The entire movie seems to have about the same budget as a 30-second sneaker commercial. I'm not talking Nike, either. I'm talking a commercial for Steve's Second-Hand Sneaker World and Falafel Emporium that you'd see on NY1 News at 3:08 a.m.

The cinematography and sets look great, but the script is a bummer. It's overlong, overwrought and overblown.

The only thing that's shocking about Death of a President is how boring it is.

Martin Short as Jack Frost, means we're getting a turkey and a ham for the holidays. As for Tim Allen as Scott Calvin, an ordinary guy who took over Santa's job by chance, he's more like a tasteless lump of mashed potatoes.

A comedy that locks up Will Arnett's talent and throws away the key.

If I wanted to spend $10.75 making myself sick, I'd buy a bottle of cheap tequila.

89 minutes go by like 89 hours. Not just 89 regular hours either: 89 hours of being stuck in an airport. During a blizzard. While Lewis Black sleeps drooling on your shoulder.

Screamers, one of the most bizarre documentaries you'll ever not see.

This kids' cartoon from France is such a surreally demented attempt to connect with children that it's the equivalent of foie gras breakfast cereal or a bleu cheese milkshake.

As for the script, a wittier director would have spotted the absurd elements and delivered a horror-comedy instead of a straight-faced bore.

The chick comedy-drama Catch and Release may look bland, but it's not. It's worse. To rise to the level of blandness, it would need to have a few gallons of Tabasco dumped into it.

This spoof of "The Da Vinci Code," "Pirates of the Caribbean," "Harry Potter," "The Chronicles of Narnia" and other recent blockbusters piles up sex gags, toilet gags and make-you-gag gags.

There isn't a remotely believable moment in the script here, and Kramer's leaden direction only helps strand a capable cast headed by Heather Graham in an hour and a half of virtual laugh-free tedium.

This spring, boredom has a new name: Lucky You. In the poker flick, an announcer calling a climactic poker match uses a Texas hold 'em term frequently, saying, "And the flop. And the flop. And the flop." This movie reviews itself.

WARNING: Do not take your mom to Georgia Rule unless she's Roseanne Barr. You may expect a three-generational chick flick, but what you get is a child-rape comedy.

Watching I'm Reed Fish is like being forced to read the diary of a dull-witted teen who is breathlessly beginning a lifelong fascination with himself.

Part of the problem is that the Finbar character is both underdeveloped and unattractive - you don't get a sense of why anyone would miss him, let alone go searching for him in the snow. [17 Mar 2000]

A comedy for no ages, has an amazing amount of CGI - Cuba Gooding Incompetence.

Even worse than the hacky chick revenge fantasy now showing on channel 186 of your box.

A comedic sinkhole, a dramatic tundra.

Good Luck Chuck, a fungal little sex comedy, doesn't need a review. It needs a tube of ointment and a shot of penicillin.

Shoot ’em up, run ’em over, blast ’em with flame-throwers, who cares? These creatures are only there to go splat.

If there is anything positive in The Girl Next Door, it is the brave performance by Auffarth, who is in her early 20s. Other than that, there's little reason to see the movie. Unless, of course, you get off on watching the sexual exploitation of underage girls.

Not like a lump of coal in your stocking. Coal is useful; you can burn it. This movie is more like a lump of something Blitzen left behind after eating a lot of Mexican food.

At 96 minutes, this vanity/insanity project runs a bit long; five minutes would have been plenty.

If someone ran this guy through a scanner, the readout would say: “Mark down and stock in straight-to-video aisle."

The year's dullest movie has arrived: the deeply silly Badland, which is as dead as winter and twice as long.

This film is headed quickly for DVD. In the video store, though, it isn't funny enough to be shelved in the comedy section nor dirty enough to be filed with the smut. It might be useful in propping up a wobbly chair, though.

88 Minutes holds you in a state of acute suspense, keeping you wondering until the very last minute whether this is the worst Al Pacino movie ever made.

It's something old, it's something new, it's something borrowed and it's something that blows.

This adventurously awful film is awful in many ways at once.

The movie has two modes - very loud and extremely loud - and all of the actors are encouraged to mug their hearts out. That even includes Cusack's real-life sister Joan, normally one of the most reliable performers in the business.

The bad movie in my head was far better than the one on-screen, which offers no twists at all. A twist? There isn't even a curl or a bend.

I went in expecting to be disappointed, but even so, I was disappointed.

As usual, Hartnett exhibits the acting ability of linoleum; his performance would not be measurably changed if he lapsed into a coma halfway through. Only an amusing cameo by David Bowie enlivens things, but he's onscreen for just about two minutes at the end.

A slow ride to nowhere.

The laughs begin with the excellent title Hamlet 2 - and they end there.

Even if it weren't three years too late to parody Moore (ineptly played by Kevin Farley), Moore's ridiculous tribute to Cuban health care in "Sicko" is far funnier than anything in this desperately laughless farce from David Zucker ("Scary Movie 3").

If the script serves any purpose at all, it is to allow jocks to show off their buff bodies. They're hot, but not worth 12 bucks at the box office.

The movie boasts five Oscar winners. That figure exceeds by five the number of times I laughed at this cheap collection of icky jokes.

A Liam Neeson thriller so lacking in ambition they should have called it "Paycheck."

A grubby cut-price sci-fi thriller.

Dumb and unwatchable.

The toilet caper is the lowest point of a movie with many low points, including bad acting and a generic script.

For a horny-road-trip flick that's actually funny, check out last year's "Sex Drive," which just came out on video.

Formerly a real American hero, G.I. Joe is no longer a hero (it's a group) or American. (It's a multinational team of military superstars, though the way it does business, you'd feel safer with the Croatian navy on your side.)

Will Ferrell's terminally stupid, sloppy, campy and cheesy -- and thoroughly unexciting and unfunny -- experiment in "family entertainment."

Love Happens is a weepie about the grieving process, mainly my own.

Calls to mind Grandpa taking out his dentures and trying to put on a comedy monster show for little kids at Halloween: When he tries to be scary, he's goofy, but when he tries to be goofy, he's scary.

If anything is frightening here, it's the scenes of the small children being indoctrinated into an organic lifestyle and being made to sing, at least three times, a song about the evils supposedly lurking in the environment around them.

Not just a shabby "Wall Street" knockoff clogged with dull, jargon-spewing trading-desk scenes that fail to advance the plot in any way. It's also a nondescript "Sex and the City" retread.

Someday, The Bounty Hunter and last month’s “Cop Out” will be featured in a cable movie double bill as the two worst 1988 films of 2010.

This movie -- G.I. Joke, The D-Team -- tries to do so little, and yet falls so short. A clue comes when the girl asks Clay, "How's your steak?" and he replies, "Meaty." Simple enough to achieve in theory, but this would-be treat for cinematic carnivores is a sawdust sandwich.

There's a reason you've never seen the words "Will Forte" topping the billing of a major motion picture. After the throbbing flameball of unfunny that is MacGruber, you never will again.

Ice Cube's well-worn performance as a wise old geezer is the only bright spot in a movie that otherwise fumbles every opportunity to be funny, exciting or insightful.

When I'm Still Here reached its climactic moment -- Joaquin Phoenix puking into a toilet -- I had never before felt quite so much like a toilet.

This movie is so self- combustingly bad it could never be good. But it's damn great fun to watch the thing go up in flames anyway.

Oh, and one more thing the comedy of Jackass 3D has in common with "The Divine Comedy": Neither of them is funny.

There isn't enough plot in this amateurish mope-athon to fill up a half-hour TV show.

Everybody flirts with everyone else as director John Irvin pours on a level of shopping-mall-gift-shop-kitsch that would shame Wayne Newton.

Misconceived, bloated and incredibly ugly fantasy epic.

Little Fockers may not be the worst, most vulgar, most pathetic and least funny picture of the year. But it's a strong contender for second place behind the picture Brett Favre allegedly sent over his cellphone.

You know you're in trouble when you're suffering a comedy shutout and the pinch-hitters you send in are Kidman and Dave Matthews.

More than lives up to its name with ultra-campy performances, high-glucose direction, laughable dialogue, cheesy effects and a back-lot simulation of a Manhattan street that wouldn't pass muster on an after-school special.

Isn't quite insipid, although if it were a little better, it could be.

At the end, as Shadyac proclaims, "I stopped flying privately" (well, hurrah for you, Mahatma), renounces his Pasadena mansion and moves into a trailer park, the results of his epiphany grow funnier than any of his movies.

Peros probably intends Footprints to be an homage to Hollywood's Golden Age. But the script's so incoherent and the acting so amateurish that it makes the worst old-time Hollywood B-flick seem like "Citizen Kane."

Parents should take their children to Hoodwinked Too! Hood Vs. Evil, if only because kids are never too young to learn the important and liberating skill of walking out of a movie and demanding a refund.

Rookie director Sean Kirkpatrick keeps stomping on the drama pedal while blowing the cliché horn, yielding scene after tired scene of predictable developments as the principals keep shoving guns into mouths and screaming obscenities.

A chaotic mess.

The mystery is why the filmmakers thought third-graders or anyone else would be willing to pay for this master class in tedium.

Zookeeper barely avoids a zero-star rating because of James.

Coincidence and contrivance are the name of the game throughout.

A dumbass "Kick-Ass," the superhero comedy Griff the Invisible sits on the screen like a steaming lump of Kryptonite.

Luc Besson keeps ralphing up scripts about beautiful lady killers, but that doesn't mean you have to keep seeing them. Case in point: Colombiana...[a] dull cable-TV-quality item.

Chlamydia, gonorrhea and Jason Sudeikis are three reasons to stay well clear of A Good Old Fashioned Orgy, but they're not the only ones.

A thoroughly amateurish effort at capturing clued-in and smartass teens.

Actual abduction may be preferable to the movie of the same name, but only if your kidnappers don't torture you by forcing you to watch it.

Cage and director Joel Schumacher, who has fallen so far from the A-list that he provokes a demand for new letters of the alphabet after Z, have each found their cinematic soulmates.

Ho-ho-huh? Arthur Christmas is an animated kiddie comedy that delivers all the wonder you'd expect in a movie about a guy delivering one package. Maybe they should have called it "UPS Man: The Movie."

Depravity and addiction can be dramatic and fascinating, or they can be as they are in this week's indie filthathon Cook County.

The title It's About You is something Kurt Markus claims Mellencamp told him when he commissioned the film. With the elder Markus' self-important, egotistical narration rarely shutting up, it was a fairly prophetic remark.

Contraband aims to be dumb fun but gets only the first half right.

The only possible relief from director Xavier Gens' abusively bleak survivalist scenario is how implausible it is.

Romantic comedies are often as contrived and irritating as Loosies, but few feature a lead character so lacking in appeal.

Director-writer Shimon Dotan takes this iffy story and makes it nearly unwatchable by jumping back and forth in time, using screens within screens and bouncing between color and black-and-white.

Completely lacking in imagination and purpose, this vanity project might suffice as a home movie, but it's hardly worth the expense and bother of seeing it in a theater.

Besson co-wrote and produced this cheesy mash-up of elements from James Bond and "Battlestar Galactica."

A would-be piece of pulp fiction about a parolee trying to go straight, The Samaritan proves that even Samuel L. Jackson can be boring.

His late father directed "Rambo: First Blood,'' but Panos Cosmatos' debut feature couldn't be more different - this would-be cult classic is the movie equivalent of gazing at a lava lamp for nearly two hours.

The nicest thing I can think of to say about the doc Neil Young Journeys is that at least it isn't in 3-D.

A sleazy and pointless film about sleazy and pointless people, Killer Joe reminds us that what Quentin Tarantino does isn't easy.

In a culture where Anderson Cooper is out and gay-inclusive shows like "Modern Family" are wildly popular, a dud like Babymakers doesn't even find sticking power in its offensiveness. It just wipes off.

Put it this way: Jimmy Carter was funnier than this movie.

Formerly a maker of bad, but at least angry, movies, Spike Lee now seems to be trying to be the world's oldest student filmmaker. Take out the rookie mistakes from Red Hook Summer, and there'd be nothing left.

It's a time capsule from a strange moment - like "Hair" without the groovy music.

Molly Ringwald-like, Wren must choose between two guys: the nerdy Roosevelt (Thomas Mann) and the Porsche-driving Aaron (Thomas McDonell), but both are so dull it's hard to care. So feeble is the movie that even the wacky, redheaded best friend (Jane Levy) isn't funny.

I can't remember ever seeing such a spectacular implosion of a squad of all-stars as Rise of the Guardians. Well, not since Yankee Stadium in October.

One of those movies that comes "straight from the heart" - the heart of the hack screenwriter's manual that pushes formulaic structure to cover up a lack of compelling characters, genuine emotion or actual humor.

Molly’s Theory of Relativity is anti-cinema. All hope for any plot atrophies as Molly and her husband discuss their possible move to Norway with the wit and passion of a representative reading a tribute to Calvin Coolidge into the Congressional Record.

Just because your comedy is dumb doesn’t mean it’s funny.

While a mob thriller can be as nasty as it likes, what it can’t be is silly.

So unremittingly awful that labeling it a dog probably constitutes cruelty to canines.

A glossy, shallow thriller where not a single scene rings true.

Unwatchably bad.

Lame spoof.

Skin-crawlingly awful.

Bloody awful movie.

An incomprehensible Bob Dylan vanity project that is not only nearly impossible to sit through, but embarrasses a long list of stars who lined up to work for scale opposite the legendary musician.