A mystery that isn't mysterious, a thriller that's barely thrilling.

A stiff of a supernatural comedy.

Semi-Pro is the perfect name for this movie, because it feels like a half-baked comedy made by semi-professionals.

This thing is a mess.

The script sounds like literal diary transcripts, the camerawork tests the limits of eyestrain, and the soundtrack bleats with mediocre pop songs by unknowns.

For those whose idea of hilarity is an adult and a kid throwing fireworks at each other, then getting stoned and playing piggyback in the mall, this movie should be a refreshing tonic.

The film's first-time director, the TV-commercial-trained Marcel Langenegger, is out to emulate Hitchcock with dashes of "Vertigo," "Strangers on a Train" and more. But his homage is uninspired and disconnected, and his film is a bore.

The movie is sporadically funny in an anarchistic way. But Cho and Penn don't have the needed personality or comic identity to sustain a franchise and their non-drug humor is so crude and scatological that -- to say the least -- it leaves a very bad taste in the mouth.

Dempsey also needs some fashion advice. As always, he sports his trademark five o'clock shadow in every scene (which in itself is excessive). But with Dempsey at age 42, it's beginning to make his face look more sinister than sexy, less Dr. McDreamy, more Richard Nixon.

If you're a Toronto native or a big-time hockey geek, there are enough little in jokes to probably carry you through the leaden pacing and barrel-scraping gross-out humor, but it's an awfully dull ride for the rest of us.

Whether or not Garden Party is an accurate portrait of the shadow L.A. culture where the young, pretty and desperate can find quick rent money, this low-budget production never engages with its characters or stories enough to make you care either way.

The concerts themselves are only exciting when Young is at center stage. Although a balding millionaire in his 60s, he retains the ragged energy of a rock 'n' roll road warrior. Not so with the other members, particularly Stills.

It might be impressive as a made-for-DVD production, but coming from producer George Lucas, it makes for a cheap excuse for a big-screen spectacle.

Too bad Igor didn't jolt the film to life with his Frankenstein shenanigans.

When a film has to blare its racially and incendiary stance as obviously as Lakeview Terrace, you know it's trying too hard.

In this brand of comedy, nothing succeeds like excess, and this film is seriously deficient.

Not a moment rings true in this sentimental drama.

Neither clever nor heartwarming, Four Christmases is the coal in the stocking of holiday movies.

For all the bludgeoning insistence of Kramer's contrived plots and blunt direction, there's not much conviction to the outrage.

It's an unenlightening film that proves youthful anarchy is just as dull as a midlife crisis, and sadly, as predictable, too.

Crossroads may now fall into the same paragraph as "Glitter," Mariah Carey's disastrous star vehicle.

Tepid and only sporadically amusing.

Assails with its in-your-face, repulsively compelling (like a train wreck) brutality.

Most surprising (and disappointing) is the film's lack of humor. Scott, who has a huge following and has developed a lively comic persona, never seems in on the joke.

A screaming, silly cliche -- and somehow not a bit scary.

The lapses in logic make a weak subplot about a serial killer on the loose just plain silly instead of provocative.

Isn't merely bad, it's utterly flavorless and the filmmakers are either too lazy or too cynical to even pretend there's a story behind Lawrence's 21st century homeboy shtick in 14th-century garb.

Doesn't even fall in the lowbrow-but-entertaining comedy category. It's unabashedly dumb and pathetically offensive.

A joyless amalgam of horror movie cliches, none used more exhaustively than the false alarm.

By the time a member of teen-movie royalty makes a cameo in the film's finale, Not Another Teen Movie has long exhausted any hope of succeeding. Instead it becomes, well, just another teen movie.

There's no slow descent into ruthless warfare and we get neither the giddy charge of their bad behavior, nor the guilty sting of complicity in their ruthless desire. All that's left is an idea still in search of a script.

Yes, in this day and age, a tall man can pretend to be a very short man pretending to be a baby who uses his innocent disguise to molest women and whack men in the nuts. Isn't that funny? No, actually, not so much.

Unlike "Crying Game" (which, despite the gender confusion, definitely works as a love story for a general audience), the only emotion this movie evokes for its star-crossed lovers is an unpleasant sense of incredulity. [08 Oct 1993]

A sloppy, indifferent action movie with a sadistic edge and a sour hypocrisy.

Legends of the Fall is one of those movies that is so sloppy and so poorly written and so clumsily directed that every dramatic scene seems to either insult your intelligence or come off as being unintentionally hilarious. [13 Jan 1995]

An airless, mannered mess.

So violent and junky it seems to have been designed as evidence for the growing congressional movement to censor Hollywood.

The film was produced by Jerry Bruckheimer and directed by Joel Schumacher, and reflects the worst of their shallow styles: wildly overproduced, inadequately motivated every step of the way and demographically targeted to please every one (and no one).

Mercifully short -- a mere 80 minutes, plus the end-titles. That means I had to slap myself in the face fewer times than usual to stay awake in a movie this grindingly mediocre.

Overly familiar, poorly cast and often annoyingly crude New York comedy that never finds its groove.

In its best moments, resembles a bad high school production of "Grease," without benefit of song.

An innocuous waste-of-time.

Has all the telltale signs of desperate re-editing: mismatched shots, clumsy transitions and a devastating car wreck that occurred either on a dry sunlit day or in the midst of a nighttime downpour, depending on the flashback.

It is a foul-mouthed British underworld comedy so they may be hoping it will attract the hip audience of films like "Snatch" and "Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels."

Resnick's script never engages, the stars can't find the keys to their broadly played characters, and Ephron's direction is harrowingly out of sync.

Upbeat but generic songs (one performed by Little Richard) and jazz lines add a little energy but the film feels less like a feature than an expensive ad for the upcoming video.

What it doesn't have is a script that has anything original, cohesive, or, gasp -- funny -- to say.

Since we never see Thomas, we can't care for him. And he's hardly a sympathetic "hero" in his treatment of women and his insistence that other characters honor his personal boundaries while he ignores theirs.

Glib, sense-numbing action fantasy.

Levant turns up the slapstick, doubletakes, and epic fart jokes to a tortured extreme.

So uninvolving as basic storytelling that it quickly becomes boring.

Tautou seems tired, mean-spirited and utterly devoid of that Audrey Hepburn-like charm that made her the international movie find of 2001.

In this movie, he (Shelton) falls so hard he becomes, for the first time in his career, genuinely offensive.

By the time the film plummets to its rock bottom, we find ourselves in a flag-waving no-brainer of the first order, and one of the most thoroughly confused morality tales in recent memory.

Falls disastrously flat.

A potentially interesting idea deflated by the absurd proclamations of an arch screenplay and smothered under the ponderous gravity of M. Night Shyamalan's dreary direction.

An incomprehensible mess -- so boring and numbingly unworkable that it's hard to imagine what he could have been thinking.

A first-class snoozer.

Afraid to pitch into farce, yet only half-hearted in its spy mechanics, All the Queen's Men is finally just one long drag.

The roll call of perversions and adolescent sex gags are more creepy than kooky and the sudden shift to triumphant romantic sincerity at the climax rings as false as this film's sappy (sorry, happy) ending.

Stephen Brill's flat-footed script begins as an idiot comedy with the gross-out gags of a Farrelly brothers film.

What results is a movie as vacuous as the characters on screen. It's not often a movie makes you yearn for the energy and half-baked artistry of "Freddy vs. Jason," but there you have it.

Coupled with the flavorless dialogue of the inane script and a leading man who registers all the glow of a black hole, there's nothing to anchor this mindless mess of a film.

So bloated, self-righteous and exploitative, it's hard to imagine anyone staying to the end, much less demanding a sequel.

A movie in which almost nothing works.

Its motif is self-pity, Steers displays no particular way with a scene, and, as Igby, Culkin exudes none of the charm or charisma that might keep a more general audience even vaguely interested in his bratty character.

It's bad enough that the lazy script substitutes goofy situations for actual gags, much of which falls flat under Rob Pritts' plodding direction, but Corky Romano finally sours in cynicism and hypocrisy.

There are a number of funny and unexpected moments in the film, but they are ultimately swamped by the mean-spirited tone and increasingly over-the-top raunch and drug humor.

Who is Cletis Tout? Who cares?

Unfortunately, this low-lowbrow comedy, which tries to pass itself off as a "Friday" crossed with "Legally Blonde," also does nothing to distinguish itself from recent urban flops "The Wash" and "Pootie Tang."

A perfectly dreadful affair that makes no sense, has almost no good laughs and finally just sinks like a rock in a Beverly Hills swimming pool.

So poorly constructed and so elementally banal that it's a shock the script was written by the same guy (Nicholas Kazan) who wrote such taut thrillers as "At Close Range" and "Reversal of Fortune."

It's a sorry specimen if ever there was one, and could even stand as an argument for how the movies have deteriorated in recent years.

Not faithful enough to be an adaptation, too misguided to be considered an interpretation, and not funny enough to be a parody, this film would do well not to advertise its inspiration.

The kangaroo is devoid of charm, as are the actors, who have the chemistry of fingernails on a blackboard.

It's so sloppy that the flashback montage includes clips from scenes that were cut from the film!

Somebody in Hollywood thought taking "Some Like It Hot" and "Animal House," sticking them in a blender and serving in Dixie cups was a good idea. That somebody should be fired.

It should have been a cut above the usual teen comedy. But it touches the same old bases in the same old dumb ways.

In the annals of insufferable family entertainment, the VeggieTales set a new standard.

So witless, sit-com shallow and bad in every way that it's just not worthy of much discussion.

Insipid, overcooked and dull.

A big dud.

Rarely has paper-casting worked as dismally as it does for Jason Lee and Tom Green.

As dreary an hour-and-a-half as you could ever want to spend at the movies.

Idiotic.

It's phony and forced, but mostly it's just silly. If there was once a satirical edge to this thriller, it's been programmed right out.

Tries mightily to have the charm of "Bull Durham," but instead fields raunchy sex jokes, predictable story line, dumb dialogue and a lackluster love affair.

First-time director Steve Beck hurls a dozen ghosts and probably a million dollars' worth of prosthetic makeup at us for a full 90 minutes, but it's old hat and not a bit scary.

Since the expensive new movie version of the popular video game, Tomb Raider, is very true to its origins, it's a colossal bore.

Call this one "Die Hard" on Alcatraz, and this time the "cuckoo crazy" maverick has got the homeboys on his side.

Unlike original director Rob Cohen, Singleton has no gift for giddy action and his movie is a crashing bore.

The slapdash comic flailing of screenwriter and TV scribe-turned-director Ed Decter is only compounded by a script so disconnected you have to wonder if pages were lost on the way to the set.

Wants to be an offbeat, hard-edged, inspirational sports movie, but it misses its target by a country mile.

There is no histrionic excess or crackpot camp, only hoary sentiment, the puppy-dog cuteness of the mentally handicapped, and the proposition that the "cure" for lesbianism is one good man brave enough to get in touch with his inner cow.

The film's deliberately overblown cartoonishness and its gleefully pandering adolescent cruelty never blend into the enjoyable style of, say, a good spaghetti western (Rodriguez's acknowledged model), or even a bad Quentin Tarantino movie.

If it sounds like Prey for Rock and Roll might be fun despite its shortcomings, it is not. Even those with a predilection for bad movies about rock 'n' roll should avoid this one.

Contains much abuse and brutality, an annoying celebratory air of pimp-chic and enough explicit gay sex scenes to qualify as (very tepid) soft-core porn.

Efforts to expand the envelope of grotesquery make the film repulsive and suspenseless, and it sorely misses original director Tobe Hooper's grisly, wily sense of humor.

Where "The Cat" book was anarchistic but ultimately sweet-spirited, this movie is ugly, dumb and colossally mean-spirited.

The movie is a resounding dud: immaculately composed and shot (very much in the Kaufman tradition), but riddled with crime-movie cliches, wincingly obvious in its plot twists and rather badly acted.

Unfortunately, this latest effort is so mean-spirited and nasty that you wish Farrell hadn't bothered.

Not only have they (Coen Brothers) stripped it of all its wit and charm, they've loaded it down with the kind of race-baiting and bathroom humor they've always avoided in the past.

But as an artist, von Trier's contempt for humanity is becoming harder to hide with stylistic flourish. He doesn't even try here, and his arrogance is topped only by his misanthropy.

Favors giggly juvenile humor over inspired satire and ends up not with a moral, but a moral vacuum.

An excruciating rehash that has virtually none of the wit and charm of the original.

Tired and glib, it tries to milk humor from the sniping, sass and simple disrespect of its unpleasant traveling companions.

I'd be tempted to call the whole thing cartoonish, but that would be insulting to the real thing.

This isn't a movie, it's a marketing ploy. Would you like a plush Garfield toy with that popcorn?

It's been turned into a stupid kung fu movie.

Perhaps worst of all, this film seems to assume its teen viewers are a bunch of drooling half-wits, going to great pains to explain everything in so much after-school-special detail.

What is this movie about? Is it a morality tale? Is it about the complexity of romantic love? Parenthood? Accepting the often-blurred lines of our sexual orientation? Is it about the role of race in white-collar crime? What?

Yet another raunchy, gross-out farce, this one about smart-alecky city boys who have wacky adventures while exposing themselves in -- I mean to -- the great outdoors.

The whole enterprise is a colossal waste of everyone's time.

Absurdly over the top and not especially funny.

Dracula, who, as played by Dominic Purcell, has all the dark charisma and burning threat of a baked potato.

It's a botched job...the new "Phoenix" lacks the very things that made the old one special.

Many regular moviegoers will be appalled by its gleeful crudity and saddened by the spectacle of three icon stars mugging through a farce that's not that many notches above "Jackass: The Movie."

The film's one saving grace is Ledger (Mel Gibson's son in "The Patriot").

It's lively but fails to disguise the fact that his (Charbanic) script is a dud and his career in videos has taught him little about the art of narrative storytelling.

A perfect example of form without content.

All that's left are cute animals with animated mouths spitting out fitfully inspired one liners, sophomoric sexual innuendo and enough poop gags to last a lifetime.

A one-joke, one-note turkey.

Sour slapstick assault with a tin heart and counterfeit sentimentality.

Director Uwe Boll ("House of the Dead") has made a cottage industry out of this kind of junk. Maybe it's time for him to close up shop.

Ultimately this soppy Pacifier sucks.

As far as these things go, the film's violence is not outrageously excessive.

As a director, Duchovny is in big trouble every frame of the way. His characters ring false, his scenes seem improperly motivated in a glaring way, and his distasteful obsession with imagery of unflushed cigarette butts bobbing in a toilet is beyond inexplicable.

Has to be one of the most absurd of all big-budget action movies, and that's saying something. It's just a blink away from over-the-top self-parody, and I'm pretty sure it's not trying to be.

Overlong, unscary, poorly paced and banally written.

Had Araki chosen to illuminate, rather than exploit, the traumatic aftermath of child molestation, his wallow in the horrors of Mysterious Skin might have had a purpose. As it stands, his film is just another trashy look at America as the land of imbecilic perverts.

It's incorrigibly unfunny.

It may be emblematic of new-millennium Hollywood that this movie has turned out to be one more emotionless, brainless, overproduced action film.

The script and direction by Irish filmmaker Mary McGuckian is just deadly.

Pierson is a high-powered egotist with appalling tastes and a great-white-father complex, and his whiny family is about as much fun as fingernails on a blackboard.

The utter lack of tension or suspense is as dumbfounding as Hunt's blender approach to editing, which purees action scenes into incoherent mashes of image confetti.

Undiscovered promotes one of the stupidest visions of the entertainment industry since "American Idol" opened the celebrity gateway to the dregs of the karaoke generation.

Makes no effort to learn about the culture. It idolizes the idea of spiritual purity without offering any insight into what it really means.

It has the low-budget look and feel of an indie dating comedy -- and not a very good one at that.

Despite its title, the movie could hardly be less erotic. Indeed, promiscuity has never looked more totally unappealing, and its final scenes of Wilmot's advanced venereal disease are enough to make you take a vow of celibacy. A great date movie, this is not.

Writer/director Wayne Kramer's approach to storytelling is to withhold any information that might give away the plot.

The movie is just this side of terrible. It misses all the charm and fun of the original. Allen's mugging is incorrigibly unfunny.

In a better movie, this grand-dame performance might have been fun, but it's surrounded here by an impossibly dull and unsatisfying whodunit plot, unintentionally funny dialogue and such absurdities as having Catherine stay up late one night and whip out an entire novel.

For the most part, the film is a chaotic blur of disconnected movement that re-creates the feeling of an unforgettably bad concert experience.

Ever wondered what the bastard stepchild of "Rear Window" and "Harry and the Hendersons" would look like? Probably not. Nevertheless, here it is in the form of a Bigfoot horror flick gone horribly awry.

Redfield's fans will rejoice, if only to see the beloved novel illustrated on the screen, no matter how tediously. The rest of us probably should stay away.

The whole affair comes off as thin and artificial as a super model after a botox party.

The humorless and self-important execution attempts an operatic scale but only succeeds in sinking the remnants of the story's integrity. By the time it makes landfall, this incoherent production has blown itself out.

Mostly unfabulous.

It's an unimaginative, mean-spirited affair that makes you hate yourself for laughing at it, and it's so devoid of anything close to wit, subtlety or sophistication that it stands as damning evidence that Hollywood has surrendered wholesale to stupidity and crassness.

It comes off as tedious, pretentious, self-indulgent, talky and so garbled it might have been improvised by the actors.

A sleazy, uninspired, pathetically unfunny sex farce.

The most ridiculous period film since rappers took on the Old West in "Posse."

The script drowns out its ideas with arch melodramatic devices and ridiculous twists while Babbitt smothers even the daylight scenes in an oppressive gloom.

Welcome to the tawdry end of paradise, where no melodrama is too obvious and no conflict too contrived.

There is a point, however, at which the movie becomes simply sickening. Between the electric shocks and hot-iron branding, feats of grossness are accomplished that are so vile even the hardiest among the cast cannot suppress the upchuck.

The actors, all unprofessional with the exception of Kim Chan as the Zen master, step on each other's clipped lines so regularly that it becomes a stylistic affectation, like Mamet directing Beckett.

It's a tired rehash of animation cliches that distinguishes itself only by the extent to which it's crammed full of scatology and gleeful violence to animals, and otherwise panders to the worst instincts of its audience.

When the little girl tells her decapititated doll, "It's not just a bad dream," she is right. It's just a bad movie.

As stiff and slogging as animated films come.

This is one of the most confusing, horribly written movies I've ever seen, and I'm the king of watching bad movies ... and liking them.

It's hard to imagine how the movie year could possibly produce a more annoyingly stupid movie. It's so witless, broadly played and insulting to anyone's intelligence that it's almost as offensive, in its own way, as "Jackass: The Movie."

Not just a bad film, Hannibal Rising is downright dull, which is a far worse crime.

This is a much dumber movie than "The Lake House." In fact, the script is an ungainly mess and ultimately a shaggy-dog story.

Sylvester Stallone is filming a new episode of his "Rambo" action series, but Mark Wahlberg has beaten him to the punch with Shooter, a preposterous gut buster that follows the formula so closely it would probably lose a plagiarism suit.

It's a tedious experience in almost every way: The acting is numbingly one-note, the CGI work is unconvincing and often downright shoddy, and the action is poorly staged and framed so close you can never tell for sure who is lopping off whose head.

As a thriller, Next goes a certain distance on Cage's sad-sack charm and sense of humor, but it does nothing with its intriguing premise, and it's mostly just one more tedious and progressively dumb collection of Hollywood action clichés.

It is a pretentious and incoherent blend of ghost story and frontier adventure that becomes more preposterous and idiotic with each passing scene.

Director Fran Rubel Kuzui ("Tokyo Pop") cannot begin to find the style that would give some unity and originality to this mess. The result is a grindingly dull horror comedy and an unnecessary satire of Valley Girls - a full decade after that phenomenon has come and gone. [31 Jul 1992, p.12]

It's basically just more of the same maudlin sentimentality mixed with clumsy slapstick, hassled-father routines and Geritol jokes. [8 Dec 1995, p.29]

The biggest failing of the film is that it's the lamest possible excuse for a whodunit. [17 Apr 1998]

The dismal high school comedy Charlie Bartlett has the look, feel and sentiment of a made-for-video cheapie that might have been grudgingly whipped together by Robert Downey Jr. as some sort of court-ordered community service project for his many drug busts.

A gruelingly dull slog through basic horror-movie conventions, should be dumped in the Seine.

Before the movie reaches its climax, it has created a mess that requires divine intervention.

Besides being inept, it's also pretentious and boring: an ambitious art film gone horribly wrong.

It's a complete by-the-numbers daddy-day-care movie that doesn't have a genuinely enchanting moment or shred of inspiration in its overlong running time.

Exploitive while it pretends to be empathetic.

The most insipidly innocuous film ever made about facing mortality and living it up before passing away, The Bucket List has as much poetry and poise as its clumsy, clunky title.

The film's one original moment comes when Bluto has a conversation with a cow. The rest of it, from the distorting lens used randomly to suggest unreality, to the twist ending lifted verbatim from the superior "High Tension," is about as imaginative as a portobello steak with onions.

While too bland and stupid to be offensive, Never Back Down spouts a hollow message of nonviolence while celebrating the brutal satisfaction of beating the crap out of someone.

Plays like a pilot for a situation comedy about a 40-year-old carpenter who decides to return to the boxing ring.

It has absolutely nothing to say -- no redeeming commentary about nihilistic, narcissistic society and its appetite for instant gratification -- which would have made it sociologically interesting, or at least sort of Faustian in theme. Instead Sex and Death 101 is as empty-headed as its protagonist.

When the veterans of this war are finally allowed to tell their own stories, we will have something worth listening to. Body of War is just election year claptrap.

Preposterous, empty-headed and tedious.

Just a crappy flick for the Beavises of the world.

Is Hollywood so disconnected from its past and bankrupt of ideas that it doesn't even know this movie is a screaming cliché?

What finally sinks the film is that the more it tries to dazzle us, the more uninterested we become.

There is no stylistic thrill to this blunt object of a callous action film. It's content to bludgeon the audience into numb resignation.

Pretentious mess of a movie.

A girlie romantic comedy with tired slapstick pranks but not an ounce of self-respect or intelligence.

There's a huge subplot that makes absolutely no sense at all and, in the end, the only thing the movie has going for it is Diesel's Neanderthal charm.

An awful, misanthropic, deadly unfunny and badly acted war-of-the-sexes travesty.

While there are maybe two moments of genuinely clever humor, Storytelling is the work of a previously promising filmmaker who, having no new ideas, has morphed into a sniggering schoolboy intent upon being mean.

Though the pop idol recently said that movies are his ultimate goal, the best thing about On the Line is its music.

An excruciatingly awful thriller.

So badly plotted and written that it rarely makes much sense, even with the elementary story line.

Universal Pictures has a lot of gall to pick up a movie as thoroughly awful as Empire and -- with a straight face and a $20 million or so ad campaign -- thrust it on the holiday movie market as if it were a significant piece of filmmaking.

An insufferably insipid comedy with a cruel subtext.

Funny for 15 minutes and then fades into mean-spirited cruelty and stupidity.

There's a vicious, crude nerve that snakes through this sequel and it leaves no group unscarred -- but unfortunately, women and the handicapped take most of the thrusts.

If you're addicted to Billy Bob Thornton's slovenly charm, and thrill to the prospect of watching him talk endlessly about his bodily functions and penchant for anal sex with obese women, this is your movie. If not, it's like 90 minutes in hell.

Stiller and Black have the chemistry of fingernails-on-blackboard and the movie is disastrously unfunny.

A cinematic cat-astrophe.

It doesn't have the imagination or daring to make a full turn to self-parody.

It is so contrived and utterly stupid in every way that it surely must be the nadir of the genre.

It tries to be a sappy love story, an incredibly vile gross-out comedy and an envelope-pushing soft-core porno movie all at once. It ends up being an unappealing abomination.

Terrible in a terrible way: It's pretentious, incomprehensible and just numbingly dull.

Perhaps there is a more excruciatingly painful and self-abusive way to spend 82 minutes. But I honestly can't think of what it would be.

No style, no irony and no smarts, just a vicious streak that lasts 90 minutes.