The film stars Bruce Campbell of the "Evil Dead" series as Elvis in a touching, funny and at times grotesque performance that is actually the best thing about the movie.

Overlong, overcrowded, overstimulating and with an over-the-top performance by Charlize Theron as the evil queen Ravenna, the movie is a virtual orchard of toxic excess, starting with the unnecessarily sprawling cast of characters.

From the get-go, the story remains bogged down in its rather limited morass.

There's something dead and rotting at the center of Mama, and it isn't the ghost of the woman who lends the horror film its title.

This "Holmes" is just about as silly as it awesome. At times, Ritchie and company try so hard to make sure this isn't your father's "Sherlock Holmes" that it comes across as, well, cartoonish.

Has its moments. In fact, it has too many of them. At 2 hours and 20 minutes and with enough characters to take up a few floors at a big hotel, it feels about an act too long.

An insufferable, self-important, sloppily made bore.

It's heartwarming. But the film never really takes fire.

Suffers from melodramatic overkill.

If your kids are too young to sit unsupervised, get together with other parents and pay an older sibling or sitter to go.

It's almost too dull to pan.

What The Two Jakes makes us long for most is the earlier film.

One of the rules of satire is that you can't mock things you don't understand, and Religulous starts developing fault lines when it becomes clear that Maher's view of religious faith is based on a sophomoric reading of the Scriptures and that he doesn't understand that some thoughtful people actually do believe in some sort of spiritual life.

Thank goodness for Tasha Smith's character, Shonda. She supplies the only reliable laughs as Pam's fun-loving best friend.

There are many ways to define the shrieking awfulness of The Family Stone, from the general lack of wit to the cheap exploitation of cancer to its casual cruelty, but it's writer-director Thomas Bezucha's casting that really goes awry.

It's just a loud, derivative grade-Z horror film of no particular distinction.

Opportunities for dramatic tension, comedic effect, erotic energy, even just flat-out weirdness -- all are squandered by Brocka and the actors in a haze of blandness that gives the film all the edge of a particularly gay Gap commercial.

Has all the energy and spontaneity of a bowl of waxed fruit. If watching "Dogtown and Z-Boys" was tantamount to witnessing history itself, watching "Lords of Dogtown," which Peralta wrote, feels more like watching a stiff, meticulously choreographed reenactment.

Sylvia plays it safe, and in doing so it becomes little more than just another domestic melodrama devoid of life and, of all things, poetry.

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.

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.

So why bother with this earnest but imperfect impersonation when the original artists are readily available on VHS and DVD?

Mad Max just sails off into nonsense.

It's too bad the filmmakers didn't take a breath, look at the rushes and see what a comedic gem they had. With just a few tweaks, The Merry Gentleman could have made a wickedly funny parody of the over-earnest, lyrically hard-edged indie movie. But it's too late for do-overs.

Hanks is great; the movie isn't.

Less a movie than an act of vandalism.

Even if a good phone-sex movie does exist, For a Good Time, Call . . . is woefully, definitively not it.

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

I'd give this movie about half a miracle.

As written by Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child, The Relic deserved to be taken off the shelf; as adapted by a quartet of screenwriters and directed by Peter Hyams, it should have been left on one.

Soccer needs this movie like Georgia needed "Deliverance."

Nothing more than an action-packed bagatelle masquerading as history.

Dark Shadows doesn't know where it wants to dwell: in the eerie, subversive penumbra suggested by its title or in playful, go-for-broke camp.

It just never began to work for me, and the sub story behind the ghost story is far more interesting than the ghost story in front of the sub story.

With its callow cast and playful tone, there is nothing dangerous about Forman's variation on the novelist's schemes.

It's such a great story, you have to ask two questions: Why didn't they make this movie before? And why did they make it this way?

At once listless and overheated, giddy and utterly zipless, the current incarnation lacks not just the savoir-faire of its stylish predecessor but also the sex appeal.

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

For all his patient, accumulative storytelling, Sayles yields little that doesn't feel trite or overly schematic.

It's uncompromisingly bad, single-mindedly off-target.

Writer Alan Sharp gets so caught up in the legend and the lush language that he doesn't seem to know he's written "Death Wish" in kilts.

A jagged little pill of a movie from baby boomer avatar Edward Zwick.

So single-minded in its reach for fantasy, it becomes the genre's evil opposite: banality.

Michael Caine delivers a stunning performance in Harry Brown, a rancid little revenge fantasy that probably doesn't deserve him.

Gets more operatically farcical (most of it unintentionally so) by the minute.

the movie comes on as a novelty item, meaning it's so full of disparate parts and so unable to approach coherence, it just sits there and burns out.

There's some cool sword-fighting. But still, it's junk.

Needless to say, in the age of inferior remakes, this would-be homage -- a sort of Wim Wenders Lite -- is a mawkish debasement of its source material.

Belabored, ostentatious, overlong behemoth.

There's no question the movie's entertaining. But the blatantly schematic depictions of black and white, liberal and hawk, and other tiresome dichotomies turn A Time to Kill into the moral equivalent of a cockfight.

A giant disappointment. It's as bustling as its titular city's piazzas, but it goes nowhere.

An exercise in vanity, indulgence and a startling degree of shallowness.

When all is said and done, Mike proves to be not only peripheral to the main thrust of the movie, but a drag on its momentum.

The movie feels forced, cliched and derivative.

That's the thing about this corpse pileup of an action movie. It persistently tries to drag the audience down to its mindless level.

In the translation from page to film, the life seems to have gone out of the story

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

It's a movie by a true believer in anti-globalization, and it may win a few converts, but not among devotees of convincing, capable cinema.

If it weren't for Sharif's extraordinary presence, there wouldn't be a cherishable moment in the movie.

A good-natured but failed experiment in meeting cute -- indie-movie style.

The only good thing you can say about "Rocky V" is that at least Stallone has the sense to throw in the towel.

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.

What's strangest, though, about Die Mommie Die! is how material that was obviously so giddily irreverent in origin became so inert, so joyless and dull.

Seems fatally out of tune, with every staged encounter falling as flat as the protagonist's hot-ironed bob.

Unfortunately, the dramatic potential of such a moral quandary is left largely unmined in director Joseph Ruben's monotonous parlor game of will-he-won't-he. [14 Aug 1998, Pg. N.39]

But when mechanical plots are a drama's main engine, we look for something else to divert us, preferably good comedy. That's in short supply, unfortunately. And it's no fun to sit through the movie's retread Woody Allenisms.

Feels razor thin. None of the characters is particularly noteworthy. And the revelations of deep-seated conspiracy in the usual privileged, closed circles are hackneyed and tired.

The film would be insufferable if it weren't for the total sincerity and commitment of its players.

Feels more like "Porky's" with marinara sauce than "Summer of '42."

The most screamingly obvious reaction to Gerry is: what a load of pseudo-arty you-know-what.

So light and airy, it almost floats away on its own breeziness.

A nasty bit of counter-programming, Wolf Creek is for people sickened by the sentimental excesses of the day and the holiday season and want to hide from them in mayhem, slaughter, torture and degradation.

I'd rather sit in bumper-to-bumper hell on I-495 for two hours than get caught in Traffic again.

A soundtrack buried inside a sitcom.

The hero of Sinister is almost unaccountably dumb. So, unfortunately, is the movie.

The swells of inspirational storytelling sometimes threaten to swamp the underlying inspirational story.

It's a glossified, cluttered parody of itself. Almodovar is no longer a burlesque auteur. He's a repeat offender.

It's too long, it's too dull, it's too lame.

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.

Never manages to achieve the balance between authenticity and eccentricity.

Ford's earthy Everyman and Pitt's vengeful youth are probably more interesting than they have any right to be inside these tired macho roles. Of course, Rory and Tom could be bursting with blarney and the movie still wouldn't gather any momentum.

Equally earnest and unconvincing.

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

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.

Another ultra-stylized movie-about-movies by the Cannes-winning Coen Brothers, Hudsucker is clever but cold, a heartless mechanical gizmo. The actors rattle around tinnily like shiny marbles inside its cavernous sets and hollow script.

Could be filed under "wacky misfire."

And the action? It's especially hard to determine who's fighting whom in "Legends," because, well, because they are a bunch of owls.

Instead of gold-medal-winning, last-minute heroics, the movie weirdly becomes about the scandal of arbitrary gymnastics judges. Is it a movie or an episode of "Real Sports"? It veers into fresh territory but not dramatically satisfying territory.

The actual movie is the cinematic equivalent of cheap Chinese egg rolls: all flour and cabbage shreds, maybe half a nibble of pork.

Terribly tragic, terribly romantic and, ultimately, terribly, terribly dull.

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

The Awakening is nonsense, but with its posh British cast and colors drained to near-gray, it's very solemn nonsense.

True to the film's name, there is one thing I couldn't hardly wait for, and that's the closing credits.

Its scope isn't broad enough to draw in the uninitiated.

The film's moral commentary is De Palma redux: same old Brian enjoying the peeping, bringing us into the guilt zone, then saying shame on all of us.

A tarted-up but tedious reprise of the '70s TV series.

The parodistic romantic comedy makes the fatal mistake of so much middlebrow satire: It becomes that which it mocks.

Anyone who's ever sat through a Neil LaBute film knows you can make a movie in which all the characters are unsympathetic, but this trio is uninteresting, to boot.

This overproduced romantic comedy doesn't even qualify as fluff; it's flat, featureless plastic.

Zem and Bourgoin are great, but the movie is too frivolous to win anything but a dismissal in the court of moviegoer opinion.

What "Wild at Heart" feels like is a kind of housecleaning -- a disjointed collection of images and odd snatches of ideas that the director couldn't make room for anyplace else. They have no context, and as a result, no power to thrill or disturb.

"Bridesmaids" may have been crude, but it also said something about female friendships that felt true. Bachelorette feels like it's about four women who, not even all that deep down, can't stand one another.

It's stingy at heart. Burton, who collaborated with British screenwriter Jonathan Gems, brings nothing of "Edward Scissorhands's" magic or "Beetlejuice's" wacky fun to this sadly empty exercise. Aimlessly plotted and blandly written.

All dancing and hugging and no good.

What's supposed to be a deep examination of the transcendence of love and art and poetry turns into another shallow film about how repressed the British are.

There doesn't seem to be much purpose to it except a half-baked notion that the histrionics of the mentally insane (or a moviemaker's idea therein) are eminently cinematic. They aren't.

The ultimate in deja viewing:an overfamiliar and exasperating game of cat-and-mousie.

The 20th-anniversary sequel to the groundbreaking horror film-and the sixth in an increasingly awful series about the bulletproof murderer Michael Myers-is a styleless and predictable affair.

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

A plodding, aggressive film that is neither engaging, disturbing nor funny.

You can't criticize it for false advertising.

It's piddling -- a hangdog little comedy with not enough laughs...its spirit rattles around inside it like a marble in an oil drum.

For those with no vested interest in this protracted and supernatural soap opera, but who do care about cinema, The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn -- Part 2 will be, unsurprisingly, a silly and somewhat cheesily made waste of time.

There's a little too much over-the-top drama, as well as superfluous detail, in this Icelandic film.

It's a remarkable, if appalling, spectacle of self-abasement. But of course, that's Sandler's specialty.

It's less a children's movie made for contemporary children than a children's movie made for people who still remember, and pine for, how children's movies were made 50 years ago.

The result is cutesy but harsh, a hybrid of saucer-eyed anime and square-jawed angularity that brings to mind an edgier "Pokemon."

With Casa de Mi Padre, it's often hard to tell the difference between when it's making fun of bad movies and when it's being one.

This lurid celebration of shock, schlock and the shamelessly perverse finds the 67-year-old grandfather of torture porn scraping the bottom of his admittedly limited creative barrel.

It's about as deep as electronic white noise.

The kid chews up the scenery like a baby T-Rex, egged on, no doubt, by director Agresti.

Promises to speed up the pacemakers of grumpy old Republicans with its ruthless indictment of the unzipped presidency.

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

The problem is, the movie doesn't really care if we are laughing with it or at it.

You can't make an epic about a mouse.

It's like a music video of Helen Reddy's "I Am Woman" filmed in the Chevy Chase Pottery Barn.

A glittery but dunderheaded murder mystery.

Fractured, tentative, oh-so-artsy and very much in the style of Wong's previous Hong Kong-set boy-meets-girl movies. But this time, the effect is contrived: a star-driven pseudo-indie affair that will please neither celebrity worshipers nor cineastes.

There's a thin line between some drag comedy and misogyny, and Girls Will Be Girls, a crass comedy in which all the women are played, with over-the-top abandon, by men, roars past that line.

Let's not waste any time: This movie is just awful. Prime problem: Josh Kornbluth, the chubby, wild-haired, bug-eyed star.

The stars of First Descent aren't particularly memorable, or even likable. At their worst, they come off as cocky, self-absorbed Peter Pans; at their best, they're sweet but shallow.

Gilliam does two things well: mud and trees.

It's kind of a ghastly hoot, and while I suppose it does no harm, it also contributes nothing. It's a guilty unpleasantness.

It's a highbrow romantic farce, without the laughs.

It's exactly like "Star Wars" -- if you subtract a good story, sympathetic characters, intelligence, wit and moral purpose.

Even Strong's best efforts can't save John Carter from collapsing in on itself like a dead star.

Too scary for very young children, yet too silly for most older fans of director Bryan Singer’s earlier forays into the Superman and X-Men franchises, “Jack” seems designed to appeal to a very narrow, and possibly illusory, demographic: the mature moppet.

Shouldn't fool viewers into thinking it's anything but a pseudo-artsy piece of tripe.

Between bad hair and tonal irregularity, the movie doesn't give you much to like.

Should have been a smart bit of cinematic froth but instead sinks like an overworked souffle.

The movie itself may be a species of Montezuma's revenge.

Piddling spoof.

That's the problem with the whole movie, which lies halfway between poker-face documentary and broad farce.

Put another movie on the barbie, mate; maybe it'll be better.

What Kalin fails to provide in the slightest degree is energy. The movie just sloshes along in a heavy, slightly overdone way.

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

Someone forgot to remind Duvall to write an ending.

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.

An offering so endearingly lame it seems to have missed the past 10 years' worth of special-effects breakthroughs.

Fails because of its gratuitous rape and violence and also because of its pretentious and intellectually one-dimensional grounds, which make the violence at the end feel even worse.

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

You can't fault the filmmakers for reshaping a diary into a cohesive film. You can however, fault them for taking one of the great antiheroes in preteen literature and turning him into, well, an even wimpier kid.

A brightly wrapped, ketchup-drenched mush-burger, it slides down the Zeitgeist esophagus like a slippery McPelican. You pay, you swallow, you drive home. You're left with nothing except, possibly, heartburn.

Yields the same sort of archetype and the usual results: De Niro's workmanlike in a dismayingly familiar role.

Isn't as novel as it hopes to be, but it gets the job done.

It's hard to imagine that any self-respecting man would want to sit through two hours - let alone two minutes - of such caustic man-bashing.

There's only so much an actor can do with lifeless dialogue. It's hard to blame the cast for looking less than committed; they all realized too late that Shepard created a monster.

Puffed up with Mamet's brawny bromides and DeVito's self-indulgent direction, this bio-pic would be an altogether empty load were it not for Nicholson, all snake eyes and snarls as the Teamsters boss.

Theroux and company could be said to be "Garden State"-ing, or trying to. Instead of that film's sheen of the touchingly weird, Dedication finds a whole lot of the coldly dumb.

With conceptual misfires like this, Lee's best work recedes even more swiftly into the past.

For a quicker and more startling survey of Hong Kong stunts gone wrong, just check out the blooper clips that conclude any '80s Chan flick.

The story isn’t bright enough or grand enough to contain all of Roberts’s star power.

The plot for They Live is full of black holes, the acting is wretched, the effects are second-rate. In fact, the whole thing is so preposterous it makes "V" look like "Masterpiece Theatre." [5 Nov 1988]

This is a one-note deal, and it doesn't take long before you want to, well, just move out and leave these characters in their rent-controlled limbo.

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

Jack Reacher is a wildly ill-advised miscalculation, with Cruise's virtually unstoppable appeal butting uncomfortably against Reacher's alternately cocky and downright crude cynicism.

Anne Fletcher's lifeless comedy about an overbearing mother and her exasperated adult son, has no flawlessly delivered punch lines. It doesn't even have a hangnail.

The fight between good and evil feels fixed in favor of Hollywood redemption.

Iranian American director Cyrus Nowrasteh, co-writing with wife Betsy Giffen Nowrasteh, has amplified the basic elements of Suraya's story into the worst kind of exploitive Hollywood melodrama, presented under the virtuous guise of moral outrage.

Save yourself 10 bucks, and an hour and 45 minutes of your precious time.

If you find yourself at "The Island" I have only three words of advice: Vote yourself off.

Things really slow down during the movie's ill-advised forays into drama.

Let's wait for a movie where they do get it all right: story, acting and dancing. It'll happen, just not this time.

Comes across less as a fully realized work of storytelling than as a commercial for a corporation whose goal of entertainment has been replaced by that of making money.

"Welcome to the Rileys"? Thanks, but no thanks.

The acting by Binoche and her two young co-stars is more nuanced than the film deserves. They bring a rich expressiveness and sense of complex inner life to their characters. It's the movie - and its placard-sized message - that is more two-dimensional.

About as funny as digging your own grave in an unmarked part of New Jersey.

Occasionally amusing, technically lovely but ultimately dated.

It all amounts to a missed opportunity considering how many female athletes and sports fans would probably flock to the first film that targets their demographic since "A League of Their Own" nearly 20 years ago. The people behind The Mighty Macs could learn a lot from that film, especially that following formula is fine, as long as you don't skimp on the details that complete the portrait.

Instead of offering a perspective that, at the very least, laments a world where the flow of money hurts otherwise good people, Allen simply pushes the movie into an uncertain sinkhole between morality play and black comedy.

Each plot twist trumps its predecessor into ludicrousness.

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