It's as pretentious and wispy as its title.

This movie is a predictable, gruesome piece of business.

The plot, loosely derived from Madison Smartt Bell's "Doctor Sleep," is utterly stale. On their way to confront ancient evil, Strother and Losey keep tripping over timeworn cliches.

As little as there is to recommend in Scooby-Doo 2, it must be noted that the human cast has done an uncanny job of inhabiting their two-dimensional characters.

With all the dog dung in Envy, it's almost too easy to generalize that it stinks. But it does, unfortunately, despite the big-name actors in its cast.

As the film's boo! moments get spookier and more frequent, Godsend gets more and more inane.

The plot, the dialogue and the main characters' love connection are basically mind-numbing.

Even the staunchest of golfheads must know they're watching a cut-and-trite accounting.

The effect isn't just frenetic, unfunny and dull. It's kind of creepy.

A special-effects extravaganza that uses the barest of excuses to bring these characters together.

A movie that sags and drags under the weight of poor pacing, execrable writing and largely unlikable characters.

As a whole, the film is a perplexing, dark and brooding exercise, which only makes its inappropriately cheery ending feel all the more slight.

A picture-book French film that's pretty and trite, rather than edgy and moving.

You are likely to encounter more surprises on the way to the bathroom each morning than you do in this film.

A whodunit so bafflingly constructed that you can't even figure out what it is, so the whodun part is superfluous.

It's a nasty piece of work about two nasty pieces of work.

What's troubling about "My Mother" is not the way the sisters respond to the news, but the way that Paris and Fejerman have opted to make lighthearted comic fodder out of the daughters' responses.

It's hard to know which is more annoying: The fact that writer-director Reverge Anselmo makes Dori's schizophrenic look like little more than a cute, sexually available lush or that he makes Mark's Marine act like a jarhead with nothing inside except fireflies.

Utterly shatters the illusion with a trite plot, banal dialogue, clunky sentimentality and, worst of all, a sort of narrative arbitrariness.

An hour and a half of real airplane turbulence is better than sitting through the bad, offensive material that makes up Soul Plane.

While the younger Van Peebles certainly looks the part, Baadasssss! never feels like anything more than kids playing dress-up.

If you're mocking holier-than-thou-ness, you can't very well strike a hipper-than-thou tone.

It's laughably stupid, only fitfully scary and relatively harmless summer fun – if you're 12 years old, in which case you probably aren't supposed to be going to movies like this anyway.

This is another unhelpful screed, uncontaminated by sense or perspective, that preaches loudly to the choir.

The muddy, convoluted story revolves around the star's cool-guy poses and one-liners.

None of it appears to be well thought out, or thought through, and it's consequently never remotely believable.

Bland, workmanlike and instantly forgettable.

The gags are physical but rarely funny.

Hanks is great; the movie isn't.

Misses almost every opportunity to break new ground on the issue.

There's more bathroom and slapstick humor than a sixth-grader could stand, and a veritable flood of drool, blood and less mentionable effluvia, most of it courtesy of Mr. Wayans as he tries to be – you know – funny.

Here was my question for most of this movie: Wha-? I was clueless. Did not understand. Count me among the stupid.

On the whole, it feels like a cross between a PBS special hosted by a series of low-rent Deepak Chopras and an infomercial for self-help audio tapes.

Laugh? I thought I'd never start.

The story, which features an apparently lobotomized Guy Pearce as an opportunistic explorer and hunter who learns the errors of his ways, is deeply dull.

I would rather have a more interesting group of desperate people to spend my post-apocalyptic time with.

The movie drains Cole and Linda Porter of blood and fills them with embalming fluid.

Palmetto, directed by the German genius Schlondorff, who memorably brought "The Tin Drum" to the screen, somehow never quite finds the right line through the materials.

It wants us to believe that being popular and getting the cutest guy in school really is the key to happiness. Like, how totally last century is that?

Never manages to make its characters anything other than cartoons.

Unfortunately, MacLachlan's strong jaw line and his valiant attempt to act so very Cary aren't enough to save this film from stumbling over the many cliches in its part-screwball, part-melodrama plotline.

Less a tale of mysterious, tragic love than a three-way Harlequin romance.

Dragged down by a paper-thin story, the predictable number of fight scenes executed at equally predictable intervals and stock, unmemorable characters.

It's creepy, all right. It's just that HOW it goes about creeping you out is sometimes just plain cheesy.

The movie comes across as a political science course videotape rather than a movie to fully engage a general audience.

For the most part, the film's a bewildering disappointment.

It's not well scripted enough or well acted enough to do much of anything, save make anyone watching really hate Brittany Murphy for being so annoying.

It becomes, after a while, little more than a mind-numbing bloodbath.

Michael Winterbottom's Code 46 commits a Code 1 violation: It's boring.

These dramatic shortfalls make us merely worried that two human beings are in danger, but not two compelling souls. There's your missing ingredient, the human X-factor.

There's not enough story in it to fill a shoebox.

An unfunny comedy by Tony Vitale that is enacted not by fleshed-out characters but by hackneyed, two-dimensional stereotypes. There’re so many sexual and ethnic caricatures, it’s hard to know which is most offensive.

The suspense is laughably absent.

The movie, alas, is shackled somewhat by Waugh's original, pedestrian plot, which is too full of discrete incidents and slow to form an overarching story.

An extraordinary collective act of moral and physical courage is relegated to a backdrop for a mushy, synthetic family melodrama.

It's not really a movie. I suppose it's what could be called a recorded behavior.

The film, like the cheap double-scotches quaffed down by the central character, leaves a distinctly sour aftertaste that's hard to wash away the morning after.

Too long winded and dull.

Plot and narrative? Minimal. Confrontations? Endless. Surprises? None.

There are a couple of good things about the film, chief among which is Land's naturalistic performance. But the overall sense of it, heightened by a folk-guitar score so spare it feels like part of the soundtrack is missing, is not one of poignant minimalism but emptiness.

Nicotina skitters between dull and forced, this despite the use of split screens, jaunty music and the personable Luna.

Collapses under the weight of its own pretension, a victim of misogyny trying to pass itself off as female sexual empowerment.

The script is much like a nine-inning sitcom that uses an obvious formula to tell a familiar story while garnering cheap laughs.

Like so many technological marvels, at the human level it's not only merely dead, it's really most sincerely dead.

A snooze, despite all the sex and other gunplay.

It tries unsuccessfully to make a wry gumshoe noir out of an overarching, cross-sectional political diagram.

Ghost suffers most from a distinct lack of anything, well, cinematic.

One hackneyed, inauthentic, predictable scene after another.

There are some very funny passing lines, but the movie's too uneven to enjoy.

Director Howard is so mesmerized by the flames, he squirts formulaic lighter fluid over everything. A conflagration of hyped-up movie cliches, courtesy of George Lucas's Industrial Light & Magic special effects shop, scalds your face.

The firefighting equivalent of an Army recruitment commercial.

This movie just doesn't match its predecessors.

A few minutes of inspired lunacy aside, The Yes Men is largely a case of the same old preachers preaching to the same old choir.

Ultimately undermined by the fact that the two rock bands Timoner chose to focus on -- the Brian Jonestown Massacre and the Dandy Warhols -- simply don't matter as much as she thinks they do.

Unfortunately, the drama operates on a see-through, easily shatterable metaphor: the frigidity of the WASP soul. [17 October 1997, p.N32]

Goes nowhere fast.

So programmatic, so dogged in hitting the right steps at the right time that it completely lacks spontaneity.

As Primer progresses, it just gets murkier and the experience of it more drudgelike.

Between them, Clooney and Kidman would still need a third party to work up a personality. In fairness to both, they aren't given much to work with.

Absolutely awesome in its relentless mediocrity.

It's just sort of trying.

But humans who live above ground, including horror fans, will find themselves only fitfully entertained and more consistently appalled.

For all its art-house posturing, for all its exploration of the taboo topic, Birth is anything but good.

Occasionally amusing, technically lovely but ultimately dated.

Although this script starts off with great zest, it's ultimately a disappointment.

A purported heist flick that sucks all the style out of stealing.

One singularly unbecoming character, who should, by rights, forever remain a "singleton."

Rated PG, which must stand for "particularly gullible," it's "Raiders of the Lost Ark" for people who slept through American history class.

Like every other second of more than 10,000 seconds in Alexander, it doesn't engage in the least.

It would be one thing if Christmas With the Kranks were a satire on the assaultive, bullying nature of contemporary Christmas celebration in this country, but it's not. It's an ugly glorification of it.

Everything is tearful confessions, angry interrogations and breakups. But there's nothing underneath.

Stone's film is a case study in cultural analysis that aims at too much and achieves too little.

So taken with its own love of cinema, it forgets to lead you down the necessary dramaturgical path to make you fall in love, too.

The movie is loud, dark, bumpy and not even a little fun. You emerge into daylight bruised and battered, suffering a case of movie abuse.

So rancid is Brooks's fury that it's clouded his judgment, so that each of his main characters is a stereotype of the most broad-brush, malodorous nature.

This vainglorious biopic about Bobby Darin is really about what the '60s pop singer and actor means to Kevin Spacey.

Never manages to achieve the balance between authenticity and eccentricity.

The cast is too good for the script and the script is too good for the director and the director is too good for the horny dog jokes.

Traffics in nearly every trite cliche of the "colorful" South one can think of, from its pseudo-Gothic aesthetic to its overripe dialogue.

It grinds on and on without mercy. You're in the cross hairs. There is no escape. Where is that Secret Service when you need it?

Cut-and-dried sci-fi thriller.

The movie's fundamental problem is that Cusack's character isn't very interesting.

Becomes a strung-together collection of interesting, semi-interesting, boring and sometimes embarrassing (seemingly improvised) moments from the cast.

The film's maudlin focus on the young woman's infirmity and her naive dreams play like the worst kind of Hollywood heart-string plucking.

It has as much of an ax to grind as the humorless and misguided bureaucrats it mocks.

So chock-full of stereotypes as to be a filmic Southern Country Safari.

A fascinating premise. And yet, the movie, directed by Bruce Beresford, never quite blooms.

Best news: over in 87 minutes.

In a movie whose texture is supposed to be hard-edged realism, the characterization seems a little too pat and jaunty.

Attal, who resembles a young Robert De Niro, seems as addled as a director as his character is as a husband, throwing all manner of distractions onto the screen in order to divert the audience.

Unfortunately, the more traditionally drawn 2-D human characters are as flat, in every sense of the word, as can be.

Hampered by Niall Johnson's script, which is often confusing, muddy and ultimately cliche-ridden.

What it suffers from most is the sense of offhand storytelling that lies halfway between creative laziness and cost-cutting sloppiness.

The film degenerates into an overly simplistic satire -- with moon-worshiping, Guatemala-visiting, lesbian aborters on one side, and fetally obsessive, meat-eating, gun-toting Jesus worshipers on the other.

The humor's a tad too raunchy for the kids, and the predictable plot won't win over any of the parents.

Amusing premise, not-so-amusing execution.

Humorless, charmless and flat.

The film has no discipline, but that's okay because it has no suspense, either.

Lacks "spark."

Stumbles mindlessly in all directions.

An overwrought gangster fable.

Wes Craven, who started the "Nightmare on Elm Street" series, should know a lot better.

Sure, I laughed. Yes, I cried. But mostly I just wanted to throw up.

Where there was effortless cool in the first movie, there is nothing but manufactured posing here.

The Jacket is doing nothing but sampling elements of "Jacob's Ladder," "The Silence of the Lambs" and "Memento" without offering more than hackneyed solutions, including a rather cheesy conclusion.

With no real comedy to enjoy, it's torture to watch Diesel undergo a predictable change from emotionless soldier to loving family man. Makes you want to spit out your pacifier in disgust.

But by the time Willis's character saves this considerably long day, it's filmgoers who will no doubt feel like prisoners, as a movie that promises to be a taut nail-biter devolves into the kind of silly, overblown climax parodied so beautifully by Robert Altman in "The Player."

It feels like a retread of several better movies, with a nastier, more bitter edge.

This romantic melodrama ... doesn't even get to first base.

A syrupy Italian power ballad along the lines of the ones on the movie's soundtrack. Its tune is mawkish, bombastic but, in the end, not especially resonant.

Indeed it looks as if this otherwise straight-to-video endeavor, which was made in 2003, is being released only to cash in on Bernal's of-the-moment-ness in Hollywood.

Illustrates the law of returning diminishments.

Give Woody Allen credit for ambition. Failing at one movie wasn't enough. Nearly anyone can do that; it happens all the time. He's chosen to fail at two simultaneously.

The movie never transcended its elaborate production work to achieve an independent reality.

A predictable and outlandishly contrived take on the Pygmalion myth.

McConaughey remains more buffed than compelling. He's not helped by a two-hour convolution of episodes that are too busy imitating other, better movies.

It's almost too dull to pan.

For all its stylishness, verve and moments of visual poetry, the relentlessly punishing slapstick and overall cruel tone left me cold.

In reality, Eros is a letdown, a collection of bagatelles that, with one exception, fails to live up to its promise.

As a director, Solondz seems to have his own locked-in fate -- to favor caricature over compassion -- and his movies are the worse for it.

It starts with a bang and ends with a whimper.

It is flat-footed, uninspired and disjointed from start to finish, a glaring disservice to the men who played the game.

Never better than fair to middling pleasant.

Loud, dumb and obnoxious.

Feels like something I know is supposed to be good for me, but that I just couldn't stomach.

You'll be rooting for these people to get slaughtered out of sheer boredom.

To introduce an archetype like this to western audiences -- as the world weathers culturally and religiously demonizing times -- may have been worth this whole flawed movie. Too bad the story didn't just start with him.

So tame and limp, it may actually give mothers-in-law a good name.

Whether it's the sight of Reynolds squeezed painfully into a football uniform or the endless footballs-to-the-crotch and tired gay jokes, The Longest Yard has the feeling of mutton dressed as lamb.

The underwhelming, only fitfully amusing movie left me hungry for more.

The girls in 'Traveling Pants' are only mannequins wearing someone else's clothes. They don't get inside your head, let alone your heart.

Until the last 20 minutes or so of Rock School, the actual playing, while often startlingly good, is kind of boring.

Though Cedric, for all his nimble portliness, is no Gleason, there's plenty of talent to be found here. Too bad it's left to fend for itself against a raging mechanical bull of a script.

The movie made almost no sense whatever to me. I literally could not follow it, even as I was dazzled by it.

The script's a plodder, and the acting's unbearably stilted. The movie's intentions are like the starry constellations that inspire the eponymous hero: out of reach.

A series of cutesy but flat-footed jokes leading up to a foregone romantic conclusion.

Heights is nothing more than a second-rate version of several much better movies, all of which are available on DVD and video.

Regardless of the cute little hats and clam-diggers she wears, it's impossible to believe Kidman as a breathless ingenue; that relentless drive and steely Kidmanesque determination keep jutting through the cotton in flinty, sharp-edged shards.

For anyone old enough to cross the street without holding hands ... the movie's a reconditioned lemon trying hard to hide its flaws.

It's a bold exercise, an interesting experiment, but a movie it ain't.

The movie and its star just aren't that funny.

The story is more undead than all of these revenant shufflers. And the orgy of gore and home-engineered special effects doesn't make up for the shortfall.

Dark, dank, damp, grim, dingy and dour, Dark Water is a tasteful but unremitting bummer.

Feels like a manufactured Asian "Chocolat," which drives the label 'art house movie' even further into mainstream banality.

The satirical edge has been dulled in a film that is dominated, and ultimately swamped, by its star's mannered, pixilated performance.

The movie's signal flaw -- that is, other than its degeneracy, its sloppiness, its love of dark things and pretty stains and arterial spray patterns -- is Moseley as the demonic Otis.

If, at odd moments, The Rock is better than tolerable, it is usually because of its stars.

9 Songs inadvertently proves just how limited experimentation for its own sake can be.

This is nothing but a dare-to-be-terrible movie.

The dialogue is often drowned out by engine noise.

As long as it stayed mainstream dirty it was okay, but when it got into perversions the American Psychiatric Society hasn't even named yet, it left me behind.

It's not Deuce's satisfied clientele, but the audience, that gets the shaft.

It's just so darn annoying to watch this attractive, seemingly smart woman throw her life away for some (admittedly rather hot) sex in the greenhouse.

It just rings false, like having Hannibal Lecter take up vegetarianism.

A poor man's "Lords of Dogtown," substituting hard-core motorcycle racing for extreme skateboarding and featuring a young cast of television-bred actors.

Not terrible so much as terminally silly.

Tailored for the readership of Teen People magazine and about as thought-provoking as the average 500-word celebrity profile.

The movie is very loud. It is pointlessly loud, arbitrarily loud, assaultively loud.

Let's blame it on poor Robin Williams, who tries so desperately to be likable, whimsical, lovable, smart and funny all at once that he just wears you out. Blame it also on the behind-the-scenes engineers at Disney who think that effects are more important than story and character.

This is billed as a romantic comedy, but it's much more boring than funny.

Unfortunately, The Man makes the mistake of assuming casting is all it takes to make a good comedy.

This unusual convergence of stars doesn't amount to much.

Soccer needs this movie like Georgia needed "Deliverance."

Outlandish, uneven, preposterous and often maddeningly morbid.

Should we really be so moved and uplifted that a horny, ignorant young man begins to join the human race? Not when our voice of conscience is an off-screen filmmaker issuing pseudo-profound, and ultimately banal, pronouncements about the true nature of love and seduction.

For anyone to enjoy this starchy, contrived exercise in vanity and product placement, it's best not to have read the book. In fact, it's best not to have read ANY book.

It's a movie with the exciting parts cut out.

The fact that there's nothing wrong with it -- that there's nary a scenic detail or scrap of dialogue or performance that isn't utterly on the nose -- is precisely what's wrong with it.