A miscast James Franco and a lack of charm and humor doom Sam Raimi's prequel to the 1939 Hollywood classic. Oz the Wimpy and Weak would be more like it.

Although directed in effectively creepy fashion by Roberto Buso-Garcia, the film’s leisurely pacing and overall restraint will likely leave genre fans dissatisfied even as its lack of depth will turn off art-house patrons.

A mockumentary obviously inspired by his landmark 1990 series The Civil War, misses the Christopher Guest mark by a mile.

For all the earnestness with which the filmmakers replicate the muted colors and attitudes of the post-war era, they ultimately fail to say anything truly interesting about either the past or the present, resulting in a work that feels as superficial as it does slick.

Ultimately the movie disappoints, falling between two stools and failing to convince either as spectacle or as a fable about religious obsession.

Part adventure saga, part elaborate home movie, the documentary showcases both the emotional and physical pitfalls faced by this emotionally fraught crew.

Features a winning performance by Sara Rue as its titular heroine but otherwise has little to recommend it. Playing a wallflower who blossoms when she finally meets the right guy, the actress has charm to spare.

The ideal animated film for Ron Paul to watch with his grandchildren, the bizarre Silver Circle certainly deserves points for sheer eccentricity.

An appealing cast and well-executed mood of foreboding would seem to hold some promise commercially, but the script grows silly in the third act, letting the picture down.

The Story of Luke suffers all the flaws associated with disability films and more. Familiar faces in the cast may attract notice in niche bookings, but no one involved will benefit from the exposure.

The strained results eventually prove wearisome, although the sexy Winter is effectively scary and at times even moving as the psycho femme fatale.

The impression is that De Palma is indulging himself with homages to his own Hitchcockian greatest hits, with results that veer close to self-parody on occasion and emphasize just how far this once-outstanding director's creative star has plummeted.

Pretty, occasionally witty and not believable for a moment, Sophie Lellouche's Paris-Manhattan is suffused with fannish love for Woody Allen's films but hardly lives up to their legacy.

This farcical romantic comedy lacks the charm and star power to compensate for its contrived plotting and only mildly amusing situations.

Equal parts thriller and feel-good inspirational tale, 33 Postcards succeeds mainly in provoking the viewer’s sense of disbelief.

Lacking the objectivity or contextual analysis to more fully examine the important issues it raises, it’s a minor chapter in an unfinished story.

Ultimately, the film is as numbingly boring as, well, a lengthy train ride during which there's nothing to do but look out the window.

The clumsy and cliched approach by writer-director Bala Rajashekaruni robs the movie of any dramatic punch.

Director Benjamin doesn't really handle the material with the outrageous excess it deserves, with the result that the proceedings seem far too mild.

For the most part, the acting is shrill and cartoonish. Indeed, most of the actors appear to be, in the finest desi filmmaking tradition, from the filmmakers' close circle of friends and family.

What the problem comes down to is a group of filmmakers making misguided choices in an effort to broaden the movie's demographics beyond those who attend X Games.

Gratingly unfunny groaner littered with zero-dimensional, unlikable characters and hackneyed, threadbare comic setups.

Nothing anchors the lighter-than-air story as it drifts away under the direction of Stephen Norrington ("Blade") into an FX stratosphere where wit, character and vigorous storytelling cease to matter.

What fans of the original movie, "Charlie's Angels," which was fun and good-natured, will make of this sloppy mess is hard to guess.

Casa feels like a miss. The digging into each of these women's lives stays shallow and seldom uncovers anything unexpected.

Having tackled treacherous terrain to film Hayata's story, the filmmakers miss the opportunity to deliver a scorching testament to the dangers and passions that drive the saga.

The story has little resonance or depth. The R-rated movie comes off as exploitative and derivative.

Bored audiences enduring this talky, aimless film might wish that they, too, were watching the porno film that is seen only in brief snippets.

With the exception of a decent train-top chase, Torque is all vroom and no action.

The results might make for some swell production stills, but as a motion picture, Teknolust never really makes it alive out of Hershman's head.

A limp sex comedy about men behaving badly.

Combining the ludicrous with the lurid, Twisted is twisted all right.

In terms of inspiration or even the slightest shred of ingenuity, Banks ranks more like an 000 than an 007.

Ultimately a hollow and pointless exercise.

By the time they're done with all the tinkering, "Scooby-Doo" ends up bearing as much a resemblance to Hanna-Barbera as the recent "Cat in the Hat" did to Dr. Seuss.

This thin concoction of domestic drama and thriller suspense won't hold up after the curiosity factor runs its brief course. Neither Robert De Niro nor a phalanx of a dozen producers can deliver Godsend from unintentional comedy.

Even more egregious than the film's concept is its execution, as it somehow manages to make scenes of drug addiction, hustling and even brotherly incest quite tedious.

A dysfunctional drama.

From its uninspiring title -- and certain turnoff for young males -- to its limp slapstick and uneven acting, A Cinderella Story arrives with a dull thud.

Manages to be insulting both to slasher movies and lesbians. Where's the gay rights movement when you need it?

The scariest thing about this film is how desperate the makers are to earn a scream.

The sequel retains not only the same gimmicky premise as the original but its preference for cliche-ridden dialogue and flat-footed comedy as well.

May have been adapted the 1996 French film "L'Appartement," but pretty much all evidence of what was once an engaging psychodrama has been lost in the translation.

Litvack is lazy with his jokes, characterizations, motives, and plotting.

A bland, formulaic picture where romance and comedy are noticeably absent. A more wooden and uninspired effort from talented people behind and in front of the camera is difficult to imagine.

This thoroughly repetitive, ill-conceived and poorly executed effort -- with an emphasis on the word "effort" -- defeats these two talented people more often than not.

A laugh-starved comedy that seeks to plug into the comic stylings of Mo'Nique for its energy and humor.

A paranormal mystery without a spine. It has no suspense because it has no belief in itself.

David Hubbard's script is so steeped in sludgy sentimentality that the film's early hints of quirkiness quickly give way to heavy-handed faith healing.

If ever there was a lusty, lowbrow genre film destined for a life on video, this is it.

Ultimately, the film staggers under the weight of its pretensions, its plot spiraling into murky illegibility.

Definitely third-rate Holocaust material.

Muddled and uninteresting.

Along comes Elektra to effectively lower the bar for Marvel Comics page-to-screen transitions.

Runs 96 minutes but feels like so much more. There is only one gag.

The sort of soft-core, erotic thriller that would benefit from a lot more trash and a lot more sex.

A lackluster affair, devoid of laughs and just about anything else one might construe as entertainment.

An examination of a sexual relationship that's about as viscerally explicit as hardcore can get...But as satisfying viewing experiences go, the film comes up mighty short in terms of story, interesting characters and technical prowess.

A bottomless pit of lame characters, horror-film cliches and improbable monsters.

An entirely dispensable, soapy caricature of a love story that comes complete with a jukebox full of music industry cliches plus Ashlee Simpson's big feature film debut.

Dirty Deeds is as feeble as a teen comedy can get.

Nick Cannon, playing an L.A. cop who goes undercover as a prep school student, provides the few sparks this wan action-comedy can muster.

This misbegotten horror film deserved to go direct to video. Or cable. Or oblivion.

Has little to say to moviegoers. Goldberg's direction is all flash and no substance, and his story and characters offer little reason for viewers to empathize with such self-pitying characters.

Just lousy.

Smultaneously silly, ostentatious and terribly boring.

A disturbing supernatural drama that leaves a sour taste in the mouth.

An oddity as awkward as its title, Angels With Angles is writer-director-star Scott Edmund Lane's would-be valentine to old-school showbiz comics, wrapped in a silly adventure-romance involving Cuban cigars and, yes, Fidel Castro.

Surrealism is one thing, but The Intruder appears so ill defined and random that it ends up looking simply inept.

Attention, Ben Kingsley (I mean, Sir Ben Kingsley): It's officially time to turn in your Oscar.

Fails to exploit the myriad comedic possibilities, settling instead for broad, unconvincing slapstick aimed at 12-year-olds and gags Shakespeare would have rejected as ancient.

A disappointingly dreary affair.

Toilet humor, jokes about paraplegics and serious overacting make this lowbrow comedy an irritating watch.

Ultimately Adam & Steve mainly goes to prove that indie gay romantic comedies can be just as witless, vulgar and over the top as their straight, major studio counterparts.

You have to credit the filmmakers for at least acknowledging their level of dreck during the final credits, when Lovitz rhetorically asks, "This was a complete waste of time, wasn't it?"

The writing is rudimentary and the direction often awkward, but Mo'Nique would confound a veteran director.

An indie ethnic comedy clearly hoping to become the Jewish equivalent to "My Big Fat Greek Wedding," this well-timed offering, which arrived in time for Passover, is unlikely to have that sort of crossover appeal, or any appeal at all, for that matter.

A road picture mired by unsteady camera work, lackadaisical pacing and cumbersome speechmaking, Free Zone is an excruciating cinematic trek. Israeli director Amos Gitai's narrative, both visually and conversationally, is a disappointing dud.

Essentially a telenovela with cinematic pretensions, La Mujer de Mi Hermano (My Brother's Wife) is a vapid slab of soap depicting a love triangle among three remarkably uninteresting characters.

Lifeless and irredeemably sour. It is difficult to imagine much of an audience embracing it, despite a cast of well-knowns and up-and-comers.

A grim little drama about a young woman's experiences with a left-wing cult, Alison Murray's debut feature suffers from disjointed storytelling and myriad other problems, including a bizarre reliance on modern dance sequences to interrupt the action.

Bottom line: A soft-hearted gross-out pic. If you're not a male between 17 and 23 and don't find the chance to see R-rated rejects from "America's Funniest Home Videos" a good thing, The Long Weekend will be a long and pointless haul.

Once the initial round of breast-feeding and rectal thermometer bits is fired off, the picture starts to give off the funky whiff of unattended Pampers.

Zoom is a movie that would make Dr. Frankenstein proud. Put together with parts from so many other movies, the thing positively clanks.

Beerfest is tedious and, at 112 minutes, too long to sustain a sophomoric, one-joke comedy even for the presumed target audience of older male teens and the college-age crowd.

For the most part, the proceedings are slow, solemn and tedious.

The track records of the performers are impeccable, but Issit has obviously never watched an awards show or similar event where comedy actors appear unscripted. Placing the weight of such a preposterous storyline on their improvisational shoulders was a disaster waiting to happen. And it happened.

Sharing its title with a historic Reno hotel that's seen better days (or maybe not), El Cortez is a clumsy lump of ponderous pulp fiction with "Cooler" aspirations.

A misconceived washout of a darkly gothic story of madness, addiction and child abuse made all the more unpleasant by Gilliam's trademark intense visual style.

The movie strands you in two miserable flats with these cliche-ridden characters and a static love story that is as predictable as it is pedestrian.

Let's Go to Prison ultimately feels as long as a stint in the big house.

There are a couple clever touches here and there, including one sequence in which the end of a candy cane has been carefully licked into a highly lethal weapon, but for the most part the accompanying histrionics feel more regressive than retro.

A low-rent monster movie that could well have been released by American International in the early 1970s, Primeval boasts a level of cheesiness that should well merit it a regular rotation on late-night cable.

A tepid ghost story filled with all the usual things that go bump in the night minus the somewhat crucial element of suspense, this bland effort from Sam Raimi and Rob Tapert's Ghost House Pictures is surprisingly devoid of the creepy, claustrophobic atmospherics that haunt the brothers' Asian work.

All of [Cages's] natural charisma is unable to compensate for the plodding narrative and thin characterizations.

This silly film does nothing to enhance Taiwanese auteur Tsai Ming-liang's reputation. The acting is below par, the mise-en-scene is clumsy and the structure is lazy.

At best a kitschy "Catch Me If You Can" and at worst a tedious comedy that grows more tiresome by every self-consciously irreverent minute.

Loaded with obtuse symbolism, the film is not only hard to understand, it isn't much fun trying to figure it out.

The star wattage quickly dims in this slick-looking but ringingly hollow affair that starts off generically at best before collapsing into a convoluted heap of shrill screen cliches.

The hilariously dirty insult comic Lisa Lampanelli shows up all too briefly as Engvall's shrewish wife.

Proves to be more prone to malfunction than dysfunction.

Overlong and overstuffed with cliches -- the movie doesn't seem to realize how close it comes to comedy.

Pretentious to the core and lacking any context or credible characterizations.

Longing makes you long for a good movie. Tedious and long-winded even at 90 minutes, this German film, written and directed by Valeska Grisebach, tells a mundane tale of adultery that lacks even the slightest insight.

A thoroughly undistinguished addition to a genre that probably reached its peak a quarter-century ago with "An American Werewolf in London."

Ultimately this is utterly forgettable stuff, not even managing to fulfill its mandate of mindless summer fun.

Any scrap of charm or honest-to-goodness humor already possessed in limited quantities by the original has been relegated to the outhouse in this sorry follow-up.

The sad result is a karaoke nightmare. Loud and pointlessly crude, the film takes the disintegration of a dysfunctional working-class family and gives it the song-and-dance treatment.

While this actor-filmmaker has delivered such worthy films as "A Rage in Harlem" and "Deep Cover" in the past, this misbegotten effort would be instantly forgettable if not for its potential as future camp classic.

Trade is an earnest attempt to dramatize the network of Internet sex "tunnels." Unfortunately, the film's horrific and important subject matter is distilled into a lackluster lump of generic buddy-movie/road-picture components.

The most appreciative audience for this lame National Lampoon release likely will be guys in tour buses.

All the while, the music screams and clamors like an ignored child because director Xavier Gens and writer Skip Woods can't pump suspense into this inept mess.

The English term "shambolic" best describes a slow-paced, bloated and self-indulgent picture that combines science fiction, sophomoric humor and grisly violence soaked in a music-video sensibility.

The film's pretentious style and fractured storytelling preclude any audience involvement in the coy melodrama.

The direction is uninspired, acting is lifeless, and the script borders on the inept.

Poorly structured and at times incoherent.

A top-notch varied group of actors, no doubt attracted by the colorfulness of their roles, has been assembled, but their hardworking efforts are ultimately done in by the supremely pretentious nature of the material.

What's most disturbing about "Bank" is its lack of ambition. Maybe Jenkins will take more chances in the future. If he's lucky, this stinker will be quickly forgotten.

Ultimately best suited for the confines of late-night cable.

Straight out of the slice-and-dice school of filmmaking, Vantage Point fractures chronology and perspective in a vain attempt to disguise its flimsiness.

At least a fright-wigged Joe Mantegna, delivering an execrable cameo as a whacked-out doctor, has a good excuse for his presence; the writer-director is one of his former film students.

A particularly nasty slice of medical-themed horror, Marc Scholermann's film is the sort of thriller in which the tenderest scene depicts an autopsy.

Managing to make the films of Michael Moore and Morgan Spurlock look like dry, scholarly treatises by comparison, Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed more than lives up to its subtitle.

Only Diaz shows spark because the actress knows how to simultaneously play nice and be a nasty character, thereby gaining audience sympathy. Everyone else hits one note, and it isn't nice.

Not only does the film stumble badly from one skit to another, the skits themselves have too much dead air.

One of the unfunniest comedies ever. Punch lines are lifeless. Characters are borderline catatonic. Running gags can't even walk.

Too much of the proceedings are silly rather than horrifying, with the nadir being the appearance of some particularly athletic Yetis who briefly pitch in to lend a hand.

This low-rent frat house comedy is at once far more vulgar and decidedly less anarchic than its obvious inspiration and should flunk out of theaters before this year's crop of freshman students even finish unpacking their bags.

Odd too, for a film that wants to correct impression anyone had as to the abilities of black U.S. soldier in combat, are the ethnic cliches about Italians and Germans, to say nothing of rednecks.

Easily the worst in a trilogy that has been notable mainly for the presence of its everyman action star, Transporter 3 is a nonsensical, choppily edited bore, with awful dialogue.

A banal revenge melodrama-cum-detective story, but fans of the video game on which it is based should not be alarmed.

Eden Lake has the trappings of a low-IQ thriller but it's really a contemptible tract feeding the prejudices of the U.K.'s rightwing tabloids that claim the country is overrun by teenagers wielding knives.

Playing somewhat like a juvenile version of "Rosemary's Baby," this inept, incoherent attempt to cash in on young girls who can't buy a ticket to the R-rated "Saw V" (or are too lazy to sneak in) will be out of theaters long before the Halloween pumpkins start to rot.

Splinter is a bad idea, borrowing body parts, as it were, from old horror flicks to genuinely unsatisfying results.

Ultimately, the film doesn't succeed in its thematic aspirations, proving yet again that great literature doesn't usually transfer successfully to the screen.

Bad enough to create one of the most joyless Christmas movies ever, but then to go for an unearned feel-good ending adds insult to injury.

The film plays like a garish melodrama that reproduces the most ham-fisted, polemical aspects of "Crash."

So unrelentingly violent that all but teen boys might as well stay home.

The film might amuse some, especially fans of Alfred Hitchcock, but is likely to annoy almost everyone else.

What finally undoes the struggle to maintain suspense is Goyer's dialogue, which is consistently hokey.

2 1/2 hours of shouting, gesticulating, pratfalls and groin kicks will leave viewers with an MSG headache.

Strictly old hat -- and a poorly assembled hat at that.

This comedy whodunit generates more laughs than its predecessor, which is to say, two or three.

Despite its high-profile cast and a sizable marketing push from distributor Summit Entertainment, audiences won't require any paranormal powers of their own to realize they've seen this one before.

The end product is surprisingly charmless -- a shrill "Devil Wears Prada"/"Bridget Jones"/"Sex and the City" knockoff that keeps threatening to fall apart at the seams.

It's like being trapped for an hour-and-a-half in a pound full of yappy puppies.

Director Andrzej Bartkowiak ("Romeo Must Die") works hard to supply the appropriate grittiness, but other than a few reasonably well-staged fight sequences, the proceedings are dull and visually uninspired. Justin Marks' solemn screenplay lacks any trace of wit.

Director Alex Proyas resolutely thinks in B-movie terms. Even with an A-list budget, he oversells every plot point and gooses the thrills with hokey lighting, bombastic music and serious overacting.

We can be grateful to a stellar cast and some discipline on the part of Matt Aselton, a commercials director making his feature debut, that Gigantic doesn't go completely overboard. Nevertheless, the film will appeal mostly to festivals and adventurous audiences.

After nearly two hours of nonstop mayhem, the film ends on a surprisingly muted note, though pains have been taken to make sure that the hoped-for sequel has been carefully set up.

Although the teenage audience is notoriously undiscriminating, it's hard to imagine many kids turning out for this laugh-free comedy.

Lame sketch comedy, an uninspired performance from Will Ferrell and an overall failure of the imagination turn Brad Silberling's Land of the Lost into a lethargic meander through a wilderness of misfiring gags.

For those wearied by cliches about poverty, rote characterizations of minorities and shocks for their own sake, best to avoid "Cracktown."

The new gimmick here is that all the flying body parts and absurd impalements come in 3D. And that's about as inspired as anything gets in this edition. Story and character get chucked to the sidelines as the arena has room for only death scenes.

This remake turns a fondly remembered horror/thriller into a mild and tedious suspense film.

An unmitigated B-movie that isn't thrilling enough or cheesy enough to make it worth the trip.

It's getting increasingly difficult to avoid films as bereft of redeeming qualities as Deadgirl, an exploitation-horror hybrid best left to torture-porn fanboys and academics seeking to dissect the outer reaches of the contemporary young-male mindset.

Whimpers a bit like "Rosemary's Baby" and gurgles occasionally like "The Exorcist," but the video look and bare-bones craftsmanship all scream B movie.

Claustrophobic, tedious sci-fi thriller.

Insipid, predictable, broad comedy mixed with Disney Family Values makes for one exasperating sit.

A viewer is challenged to guess what the filmmakers thought they were doing. A 1930s screwball comedy with a modern sensibility? A misguided valentine to those who march to the beat of a different drummer?

Seldom has such great star power been marshaled in the service of a sillier movie than The Other Man.

Unfortunately, whatever father/daughter, time/memory, music/therapy issues Jaglom is striving to invoke here come across as mostly psychobabble and immaturity.

Despite the artistic flourishes, this is still an utterly repellent look at a psychopath who does not deserve the attention of the filmmakers or the audience.

Although the Tarantino influence still is tangible, this time around Duffy reveals himself to also be a big Francis Ford Coppola fan, but the cartoonish end result plays like "Godfather III" meets the Three Stooges.

Krakowski's heavy-handed overreaching is the fatal problem: It's impossible to believe this character, even as he softens late in the game, as a forgiving and familiar victim of awful parenting.

The acting is overly broad, so even the dimmest light bulb in the audience gets the gags.

The sole redeeming factor is the presence of Olivia Wilde (Fox's "House"), who manages to keep the proceedings watchable for at least a portion of the running time.

Over-the-top -- and ultimately tiresome -- female mud-wrestling, kick-boxing and cat fights in a parody of old exploitation movies.

The latest demonstration of the impossibility of making a good movie from a bad script is provided by When in Rome, a romantic comedy approved by the previous regime at Disney.

The movie is a letdown, stringing together pointless episodes to little effect. It's the kind of thinly conceived, quirk-for-quirk's-sake indie that gives indies a bad name.

Simply weird. The funny has gone missing.

Comprising reclaimed bits from "Blade Runner," "A Clockwork Orange" and "Children of Men" and glibly served up with hyper Guy Ritchie attitude by first-time feature director Miguel Sapochnik, the resulting in-your-face mess never knows what it wants to be when it grows up.

Adolescent angst is the focus of Accidents Happen, a turgid melodrama based loosely on Brian Carbee's autobiographical book and one-man theater piece.

Paper Man is a bad idea, and the film, despite a few brave and good performances, never recovers from awkwardness of its premise.

The back-to-the-beginning approach unimaginatively goes through the motions, offering scant justification for its boring existence, at least from an artistic point of view.

A collection of feeble jokes in the service of green themes. Sustainability never looked so stupid.

Well, that didn't take long. Everything fun and terrific about "Iron Man," a mere two years ago, has vanished with its sequel. In its place, Iron Man 2 has substituted noise, confusion, multiple villains, irrelevant stunts and misguided story lines.

A numbingly indulgent drama whose fine cast can't breathe life into a script that isn't nearly as self-aware as it thinks.

The film seems nearly writer-free. Absolutely no time gets wasted on story, character development or logic.

One thing Marmaduke does have in common with the earlier Disney titles is a blessed scarcity of crass bodily-function gags that often pass as family comedy.

Even during the climax, the film still is struggling to introduce the world of the film and its strange rules.

The film doesn't just fail, it actually gets sillier by the minute.

No one on the creative side has his eyes on the characters, so they flounder in a sea of misguided energy.

The main performers do a reasonably good job of parodying the "Twilight" leads, with Proske particularly effective in subtly lampooning Kristen Stewart's moody mannerisms.

The production is over-stuffed with cutesy split screens, jarring dream sequences and a pushy score by Bright Eyes band members Nathaniel Walcott and Mike Mogis that succeed in dragging the proceedings from merely cloying to increasingly annoying.

Has no inherent laughs, so an extremely versatile and talented cast struggles mightily to make something funny that simply isn't.

Speed-Dating seems designed to exploit the black indie theatrical circuit but hardly merits even a DVD release.

Director Christian Alvart ("Pandorum") is unable to invest much stylization into the proceedings, and Ray Wright's by-the-book screenplay only serves as a reminder of the innumerable demon-child movies that have preceded this one.

In terms of real horror, nevermind sexual-politics provocation, "Grave" can neither re-create its predecessor's impact nor compete with stranger new beasts like Lars von Trier's "Antichrist."

A rote captivity drama with aspirations of sociopolitical relevance, As Good as Dead has nothing to say about torture or racism and little excitement to offer as compensation.

This lame comedy about a big doofus who enters the fight game manages to take every cliche in the book and render them even more cliched.

Jonathan Lynn's lamentable black comedy Wild Target again shows that attractive and charismatic actors can do nothing to save a movie that's charmless, pointless and witless.

Extremely crude in its technical elements, the low-budget film does reveal stylistic ambitions through devices like frequently reverting from color to black-and-white film stock. But the shaky narrative style and broad characterizations undo its effectiveness.

(Perry) style is too crude and stagy for Shange's transformative evocation of black female life, and his moralizing strikes exactly the wrong notes to express the pain and longing that cries out from her heated poetry.

Beyond the dazzling "first contact" sequences seen in the trailers, Skyline is a spasmodic and incoherent shambles hampered by an astoundingly stupid screenplay.

An aimlessly wandering DIY-indie that will send viewers retreating to popcorn movies at their local multiplex.

Feste, who has one previous effort as a writer-director, last year's "The Greatest," fails here to do the most basic thing -- give an audience a rooting interest, or any interest at all, in these four troubled people.

A "non sequel" to Alex Cox's 1984 classic "Repo Man," the crazily plotted and deliberately garish Repo Chick only serves to provide further evidence of the cult director's diminishing talents.

Features sitcom-style stock characters and situations, not to mention the sort of ethnic stereotypes to be found in TV ads for fast-food Mexican restaurant chains.

Mistaking arrested development for enlightened innocence, Waiting for Forever is an indigestible hash of whimsy, drama, romance and, for good measure, crime.

Rarely do films from Hollywood emerge in such an inane manner. Its rote characters are inevitably in predictable situations with no subtext or subtlety to any of their predicaments.

As it thuds along from one wolf attack to the next, Catherine Hardwicke's first film since taking leave of Bella and her toothy friends adamantly refuses to provide any wit, humor or fun.

This low-rent, R-rated "Rush Hour"-ish comic caper could have been several notches better with more charismatic leads and some dialogue upgrades but still would have felt like a genre hand-me-down.

This dour, uninspired, Hispanic-themed variation on the profitable "Step Up" dance movies is unlikely to similarly rouse teens.

A gore fest aimed at indiscriminate action fans. Those interested in learning more about goings on in medieval history will probably find the splatter tedious and off-putting.

The lameness of the gags and dialogue and the film's frequent deep dives for the bottom at the expense of real comedy speak to desperation in Hollywood to figure out the audience for contemporary naughty comedy.

The action that follows is as broad and unconvincing as the characters involved: director George Ratliff manages to turn even dignified Ciaran Hinds into a ham.