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?

You must lead a dull life if it would be enlivened by 76 minutes' worth of Old Joy.

To paraphrase that old quip about slow-paced art films, it literally is watching paint dry.

No, which has been nominated for this year’s Best Foreign Language Film Oscar, is largely a gimmick picture: At all times, it looks like hastily assembled news footage shot on grainy videotape in 1988. That means light flaring up to spoil the image, bumpy camerawork, a nearly square picture and all-around grubbiness.

Has the aroma of an autobiographical confession by someone for whom life hasn’t been overly difficult.

The movie offers very little that food radicals don't already know.

I’m probably more intrigued than 99.3 percent of the American public by the idea of deconstructing the hidden symbols in Stanley Kubrick’s “The Shining,” but the theories proposed in the doc Room 237 aren’t eye-opening. They’re laughable.

Moreover, in attempting to update the play to a buzzing CNN world, Ralph Fiennes proves that as a director, he makes a fine actor.

Anderson, in her first major non-Scully film role, is lethally miscast.

Essentially a weird series of nonsequiturs. I'd rather be watching a sequel to the much-maligned "Little Nicky" -- a Sandler film that was at least trying to do something interesting -- than this failed experiment in fusing high and low culture.

Indulgent, tedious documentary.

The similar Kevin Bacon HBO movie "Taking Chance" got there first. Worse news: The earlier movie was sober, meticulous and quietly convincing, not a shouty, shoddy bore like this piece of flummery.

Why was this pointless movie made? Because quality actors like Blanchett and Weaving like to play drug addicts. They can't stop themselves. They need help.

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

Every Little Step shows only this: It hurts to flunk an audition, and it's nice to get hired. Everything it has to say about Broadway was said better in Bob Fosse's movie "All That Jazz" -- in its opening five minutes.

The laziness of this filmmaking (which assumes you know that Gray killed himself in 2004) is of a piece with the emphatically uninteresting tales told by a classic dinner-party bore who once referred to his ramblings as "creative narcissism." He was half-right.

It contains no poetry. It simply conjures up a horrible feeling -- and then sits back awaiting congratulation.

Seems to exist solely to drive this observation home in the most heavy-handed way.

By the time two hours had dragged by, I felt a lot like I had sat through a five-hour wedding.

Avoiding the usual vein-popping diatribes, he comes across as learned, calm and folksy. But much of what Gore says in this slide show he gives to people whose minds are not yet fully formed (undergraduates, actors) is absurd, and his assertions often contradict each other.

Like its subject, a lawsuit that is expected to go on for another 10 years, Crude has no ending. This is the perfect ending for this Goliath versus Goliath documentary about powerful personal-injury lawyers taking on a powerful corporation.

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.

The movie is trying to do far too much and doesn't do anything well. "Ambitious" isn't the word here; "random" is more like it.

The silliness of Moore's oeuvre is so self-evident that being able to spot it is not liberal or conservative, either; it's a basic intelligence test, like the ability to match square peg with square hole. His documentaries are political slapstick that could have been made by a third Farrelly brother or a fourth Stooge.

Few kinds of art are more boring than the insistently transgressive, and few movies are more boring than Humpday.

What Amenabar offers here is an unconvincing, pretentiously artsy pastiche of just about every hoary old gothic thriller you can think of.

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.

Heavy-handed, predictable and almost completely unbelievable.