Desson Thomson

I'm talking cheap visual gags, painfully embarrassing moments and other sophomoric humor guaranteed to get you and your friends almost vomiting with laughter.

May not rock the joint. But then, it isn't trying to.

This movie should have blown us out of the water. Instead we catch ourselves occasionally thinking the unpardonable thought: "OK, sink already."

A great American picture, full of incredible images and lasting moments.

Lures us in with extraordinary subtlety. Keeping sound effects and incidental music to a relative minimum, it builds its suspense almost subliminally. So when something scary or shocking does occur -- deprived of those Hollywood-style cues -- we are truly startled.

Not about good storytelling, but it knows to turn up the volume, cut to dizzying closeups of driver's eyes as they negotiate dangerous bends and indulge its audience in the soul slaps, fanny grabs and head nods that govern this racing lifestyle.

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

Probably the most engaging Potter film of the series thus far.

Even Posey -- who brightens most movies she's in -- fails to stir the movie's unresponsive tectonic plates.

Moore provides a rather rambling discourse of causality, which includes racism, white flight and Africanized bees.

The central story, in which Helms has to make up his mind whether to attend his sister's funeral, is too limited a conflict to hang a movie on. Ultimately, audiences will have to satisfy themselves with the collective presence of these actors and the movie's obviously good-hearted intentions.

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

You believe in everything.

A hilarious fantasy, about a plucky piglet that learns how to tend sheep, Babe is a barnyard charmer.

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.

The reunion is fun and frantic, like the original on double nitro.

The best moments occur when -- as in reality -- we're still in the dark. As soon as the movie gets to its version of a punch line, it turns into another Hollywood vehicle spinning aimlessly in space.

A bewildering, boring assembly of rock-video-surreal nightmare sequences with more repetitive episodes than Groundhog Day.

Such a bizarre movie that it has completely occupied my thinking for days. Not because it's a good movie, mind you. It's more like the equivalent of a botched tooth extraction with a coat hanger. Some bloody shard remains stuck in an inflamed, fleshy part of my psyche, and it's going to take some serious tugging and tearing to root it out.

The movie holds you in thrall from first frame to last. Hatred is hatred unslaked. So is racism, ugliness, love, lust and sorrow.

Soccer needs this movie like Georgia needed "Deliverance."

Roll past this casino.

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

She (Madonna) really ought to be tried for impersonating Sharon Stone in Basic Instinct. Or playing a second-rate Hitchcock mystery blonde -- she's even named Rebecca.

Even by its own standards, the movie becomes increasingly macabre and ludicrous as Anne's machinations get the better of her, and everyone, including the audience, is left feeling shattered, shaken and vaguely unclean for having participated in all this.

Feckless and crude without any particularly funny redeeming value. If there's anything more to this poor excuse of a movie than immediately meets the eye, I'll get back to you.

A thematically bleak yet subtly comic film.

Takes the spirit of their late night TV show and flies with it.