A triumph for the machines, more proof that we do indeed live in the Matrix.

A two-hour search for a pulse... A miscalculation from a prodigious talent who has forgotten that you squeeze the life out of romance when you don't give it space to breathe.

Good-natured fun when it isn't stale, which is most of the time, this talky comedy set in a Chicago barber shop is a sitcom pilot disguised as a movie.

The film wants to make a case for Parker as the first modern woman. It gets the look and the attitude right, but it can't find her heart.

Even with sex, drugs, hip-hop and a murder, these four stories are dull, dull, dull, dull.

Even director Carl Franklin, an artful purveyor of sterner stuff in "One False Move" and "Devil in a Blue Dress," can't prevent One True Thing from descending into chick-movie hell.

A fine case ... but none weighty enough to keep this fluff from evaporating as you watch it.

From the lowercase lettering of the title to the deadly familiarity of the plot, there is much to grate on your nerves in this TV Afterschool Special trying to pass as a real movie.

The result is a failed and lifeless experiment in which everything goes wrong.

Veering between sentimentality and exploitation with a few misguided stops at raunchy sex farce, Reign Over Me never finds a tone to suit its purpose.

We're getting more of the same, but less of the impact, like weed from a bad dealer.

A clumsy package of clichés.

What Dick rendered potent, Nolfi renders preposterous.

The movie, however, is a crock.

Director Sydney Pollack zapped out a taut thriller in "Three Days of the Condor". But The Firm is mostly flab, in the manner of Pollack's elephantine Havana.

It's not so bad that it's good. It's so bland that it's boring. Not even worth a hissss.

Grating.

Rob Cohen, who last directed "The Skulls" --ouch! -- can consider this one another career-killing skid mark.

This afternoon-TV special trying to pass as a real movie earns an extra half star solely for Samuel L. Jackson, who brings his usual fire to the role.

If you're gay and/or eight years old, HSM3 is the movie event of the year.

To be honest, I started hearing things, too. Just when Jones was delivering an inexcusably sappy speech about baseball being "a symbol of all that was once good in America," I heard the words "If he keeps talking, I'm walking."

It's not the trite talk that sends Cruel Intentions into a tailspin, it's the lightweight casting.

Derivative and blindingly dull, Quick Change is an occasion for a quick nap.

Writer-director Roman Coppola is trying to capture a time he's too young to remember, when the French New Wave reinvigorated film art.

"You're an awfully hard man to like, Hitler." Few serious films could survive a line like that. Max certainly doesn't.

Even Cate Blanchett can't save this misbegotten horse opera.

Despite melodramatic lapses -- the gripping action recalls Walter Hill's 1981 "Southern Comfort" -- this is Schumacher's most ambitions film since "Falling Down" in 1993, and it plays to his strengths with young actors.

There may be worse movies this summer than The Great Gatsby, but there won't be a more crushing disappointment.

Whitney Houston deserved better than to go out onscreen with this botch job remake of a 1976 soap opera that never deserved another thought.

The Hughes boys blow it by burying a fine cast -- Robbie Coltrane as a cop and Ian Holm as a royal sawbones are standouts -- in stock scares, sappy romance and cliches that really are from hell.

Estevez means well. But having your heart in the right place is no excuse for insipid ineptitude.

Strands Matt Damon and Casey Affleck (both named Gerry) in a desert with little to say and do except lose themselves in an existential wasteland of doomed beauty.

What a bold notion for a movie, and what a bust in terms of execution.

Launches the fall season with a crashing thud.

I have the same allergic reaction to this open faucet of tear-jerking swill as I do to the 1996 Nicholas Sparks novel that inspired it.

This big-screen Hamlet, pumped up to operatic scale by overkill director Franco Zeffirelli, exposes Gibson's shortcomings.

No go. Marshall deserved better than this misbegotten tribute.

Watching the stars try to out-cutesy the mutt is one for the puke bucket.

Though saddled with hoary jokes, Goldberg at least pumps some funky life into the bland proceedings.

Offensive on multiple levels -- if only the plot had any levels at all -- Black Snake Moan leaves no "Tobacco Road" cliche unsmoked. Ricci gives it her all, and then some, but even her body and Jackson's blues can't heal a movie that rockets plum off its nut.

This mumbo-jumbo plays like The X Files on Prozac. No wonder the actors look narcotized.

I can't believe that even the most rabid chick-flick masochists wouldn't gag on it.

Does romantic comedy have to come off as sugared stupidity? It does here.

Con Air has all the signs of a hit. That's depressing.

It's damn hard to enjoy a thriller when you don't, won't, can't believe a word of it.

Overheated, underdone farce. Race for the exit.

Me, I just think it blows. What does it matter if you spend millions on a movie - love the talking, battling bears! - if the effects are cheesy, the story runs off on tangents and after watching the movie fail utterly to be the next Lord of the Rings, you just want to go home.

This flabby comedy deserves only one thing: to fall on its fat one.

A sappy-sweet romcom that seems to have been invaded by a screenwriter - one Geoff LaTulippe - with delusions that he's David Mamet.

The infuriating cop–out ending reduces the premise to mush. I wanted to scream. Here goes: Arghh!

The true story of the LaMarcas, well told by the late Mike McAlary in Esquire, has been pounded into TV-crime mush by screenwriter Ken Hixon and director Michael Caton-Jones. Shockingly, the acting doesn't help.

The cheap thrills wear off way fast, and we're left with atrocious acting, feeble writing and clueless directing (from first-timer Steven Quale). The horror! The horror!

The movie left me with the feeling of being trapped with a person of privilege who won't stop with the whine whine whine.

If you have to ask why this sucks, you deserve to waste your money. Why not also check out "Like Mike," "Juwanna Man" and "Hey Arnold! The Movie"?

What the film lacks is suspense, surprise (the new ending is a dud) and passion.

A borrowed idea -- hello, "Blade Runner," hi there, "Matrix" -- but an idea nonetheless.

Makes you gag.

Shopworn propaganda.

Beware 2012, which works the dubious miracle of almost matching "Transformers 2" for sheer, cynical, mind-numbing, time-wasting, money-draining, soul-sucking stupidity.

Another January dud. Broken City drops hot-shot actors in a quicksand of clichés and watches them sink.

Doesn't deliver an ounce of charm.

It's not just that Jennifer Lopez looks lost and out of her league acting with Robert Redford and Morgan Freeman. That's to be expected. It's the drag-ass solemnity of this turgid family drama that makes you crazy.

Director Michael Hoffman sprays on the tears like a toxic mist. Avoid like the plague.

Director Gillian Armstrong turns Sebastian Faulks' pungent novel about World War II into a soporific.

Something cold and mechanical has seeped into the sequel. The divas push so hard for fun, it kills the spontaneity that fun needs to breathe.

Satire in a blanket of bland.

The movie plays like an evangelical prayer meeting, though I'd hold the hallelujahs. The characters we came to admire as vulnerable misfits hit the stage like visiting royalty and with a nonstop perkiness that makes the Von Trapps look like manic-depressives.

Director Antoine Fuqua (Training Day) can stage action, but he can't save a trivializing, reactionary script featuring a Hollywood star (read America) as a global savior.

Give the girls a cheer, but remember: "Bring It On" is still the poo, Missy. Take a big whiff.

I can't detect the hand of Hill in even a single scene in Bullet in the Head. It plays like a Stallone vanity project, impure and stupefyingly simple.

For the first time, the Farrellys seem to be embarrassed by their own crudeness. For the first time, they should be.

This tear-jerking twaddle, adapted by David Nicholls from his 2009 bestseller, is nearly as bad as Anne Hathaway's British accent, which is heading for infamy.

Penelope is dead on arrival.

Director Burr Steers, of the terrific "Igby Goes Down," is stuck polishing clichès.

Buffy isn't heinous, just disposable. As a friend tells Buffy while she eyes a fashion purchase, "It's so five minutes ago."

A romantic comedy so numbing it feels like Novocaine.

We have to suffer through two hours of this rancid summer cheese.

The film takes a true story and drags it through a swamp of hyped-up Hollywood cliches.

The most shocking thing here is the fact that Peter Chelsom directed it. His 1995 movie, "Funny Bones," is a genuinely transgressive piece of dark comedy. I can't detect a trace of Chelsom in Hannah Montana, which means he won't have to wear a blonde wig to hide his shame.

Build a comedy around Jim Carrey in manic mode and they will come. Case in point: Fun With Dick and Jane, a pointless, painfully unfunny and yet inexplicably popular remake of the 1977 fizzle with Jane Fonda and George Segal.

Director Luke Greenfield, the auteur behind "The Animal," starring Rob Schneider, wants to pass off this limp-dick farce as social satire. Ha!

Here's a true S&M date movie. Only sadistic men and masochistic women could love it.

It could have been the 21st-century Showgirls. I wouldn't have missed that for the world. Instead, Burlesque, starring Cher and Christina Aguilera playing drag queen versions of themselves with all the vitality of Madame Tussauds wax dolls, is a bust that lacks the pizzaz and bugfuck nuttiness of Paul Verhoeven's 1995 trash epic.

This movie isn't over-the-top -- it doesn't know where the top is. Trash addicts will eat up every graphic minute, even if they prefer to wait for the DVD.

The language is leaden, the pace glacial and the characters indecipherable. It's easier to read the actors -- they all seem eager to win an Oscar. Fat chance.

Never achieves liftoff.

What's left is a lot of strenuous playacting when what's called for is the finesse of the Japanese original. Skip this stub-toed substitute.

Don't ask whether or not you should take The Day After Tomorrow seriously. Don't take it at all.

You'd get more of a jolt from Angela Lansbury on "Murder, She Wrote" and more intellectual stimulation from a cozy game of Clue.

I'd watch the vibrant Rachel McAdams and Eric Bana in anything, but The Time Traveler's Wife is pushing it.

The big problem with Big Trouble, despite a fine cast and director (Sonnenfeld made "Get Shorty" and "Men in Black"), is that the damn thing isn't funny.

No trite, tear-jerking cliché goes undrooled in the script by director Kirk Jones.

There's a difference between exposing misogyny and crassly exploiting it.

Yikes! Chris Renaud and Kyle Balda direct strictly for short-attention spans on a fruit-loopy palette that made me want to puke. Had Dr. Seuss lived (he died in 1991), I'm confident he would have puked as well.

I've been told the movie plays best with very young girls. That's an insult very young girls should not be forced to endure.

It's getting harder to sustain a rooting interest in the career of Johnny Knoxville.

Cage and Baruchel work hard to stay accessible, but the computer-generated effects come on like heavy artillery blowing away any hint of flesh and blood. The Sorcerer's Apprentice should be rated U for Untouched by Human Hands.

There's no code to decipher. Da Vinci is a dud -- a dreary, droning, dull-witted adaptation of Dan Brown's religioso detective story.