ALL ABOUT STEVE

It's one thing for a movie to present its audience with hateful characters. It's quite another when the movie itself appears to hate its characters, and in the depressingly, almost sadistically unamusing All About Steve, very little reads beyond the filmmakers' contempt for the "lovable" whack-job they're purportedly championing. I've seen stupider movies this year - at least two or three of them - but I don't think I've endured one that annoyed me more than this new Sandra Bullock vehicle by director Phil Traill, which humiliates its star at every turn, and humiliates you for spending 100 minutes trying to make sense of it.

G.I. JOE: THE RISE OF COBRA

Anticipating that the movie would suck, a friend extended a challenge prior to my screening of G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra: Try making it through the whole movie without thinking of Team America: World Police.

THE TAKING OF PELHAM 1 2 3

Set in modern-day New York City, director Tony Scott's action-thriller The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3 finds Denzel Washington playing transit-authority executive Walter Garber, a conscientious worker and devoted family man accused of accepting bribes, and consequently - 799 WORDS TO GO!!! - demoted to the rank of dispatcher. One afternoon, while monitoring routine subway transport, Garber notices an irregular stop made by one particular train, and attempts to make radio contact with its motorman. Instead, he makes contact with the train's hijacker, a tattooed psychopath who calls himself Ryder, and - 751 WORDS TO GO!!! - is played by John Travolta. Ordering Garber to secure a ransom of $10 million, Ryder insists that he'll begin shooting passengers if his demands aren't met, and given an hour to procure the money, Garber, a hostage negotiator (John Turturro), and the city's mayor (James Gandolfini) unite to stop the - 700 WORDS TO GO!!! - madman from ... .

Oh, I'm sorry, are those interruptions irritating? Well, you'd better get used to it - gripping and entertaining though it mostly is, Scott's movie oftentimes feels like the cinematic equivalent of that opening paragraph.

ANGELS & DEMONS

You may not necessarily know character actor Armin Mueller-Stahl by name, but you likely know him by sight, and almost surely by voice. Familiar from such thrillers as Eastern Promises, The Game, and the recent The International - and Oscar-nominated as David Helfgott's über-strict father in Shine - the 78-year-old German, with his closely-cropped gray hair and wizened eye slits, doesn't look much different now from how he did playing Jessica Lange's is-he-a-Nazi-or-isn't-he? dad in 1989's Music Box. And he sounds exactly the same, with that heavily accented, hoarse whisper of his; by the time the performer reaches the end of a sentence, he always seems dangerously close to running out of breath.