Ed Park

Director Chuck Russell lacks the visual panache, the comic touch, and perhaps the budget of Sommers's title-bout features, which refined a historically grounded B-movie sensibility into pure, gasp-inducing entertainment.

Falls into the clotheshorse cliché: all dressed up and no place to go.

Family goes easy on the schmaltz, and the catastrophes have the puncturing feel of real life.

This poorly conceived sequel to Gore Verbinski's "The Ring" ditches that film's scariest conceit.

Aware of its awfulness.

Numbing but effective debut.

Scenes end abruptly, laughs are as rare as yetis, and the overarching question seems to be: Can we turn this into a franchise?

Bones splits the difference between horror and social commentary, with pallid returns.

Affleck and impressively amazonian Alias star Jennifer Garner (as the ninjitsu-savvy daughter of a wealthy tycoon) are lankier than "Spider-Man's" Maguire and Dunst, which is good if you like lanky, but their relationship substitutes cliché for chemistry.

So busy rehashing rom-com clichés that it shirks the genitive, prelude to other flaws.

Why not travel back in time and not make this movie?

A huge problem with the whole shebang is that the impressions (all courtesy Cornwell and Sessions) are shaky at best.

It's all an excuse for some daft production numbers, however, and a chance to relive the vanished Holland of your youth. Yes Nurse? No Nurse? Maybe Nurse!

Some reliably vertiginous fight sequences (rope bridge, rooftop signage) and modest flight experiments liven up the mix, but for all the leads' individual appeal, they seem to occupy slightly different films.

Ham-handed to start, with a fondness for cochlea-crushing decibel levels, National Treasure gets more entertaining as the preposterousness rises.

Lighthearted if shy of a lark.

The animated scenes conjure aromas of the stilted "Clifford," and the overall approach is to throw preordained movie sequences (rap number, shopping spree) together and hope for the best.

Based-on-a-true-story kitschfest.

If nothing else, Sophie Fillières's Ouch! is a secret pop culture index.

Strangely coy about its denominational allegiance.

CCM's dissipated endgame borrows soggily from "The Ring," resulting in something that wouldn't make it past the first script meeting for Scary Movie 4.

Hardly a nuanced portrait of a young woman's breakdown, the film nevertheless works up a few scares, particularly a tense call-number hunt in the library stacks.

A shamelessly recycled vision of decrepit high tech.

In Van Helsing, the orgy of morphing, shrieking, lightning-cracking, and habitual rope-swinging quickly turns oppressive.

"X is to Y, as this shit is to boring."

Stateside's real-life frame allows the complexities of mental illness and military service to lose dramatic tension, resulting in a desultory home stretch of group therapy, tears, and reconciliation.

Though ample time is spent mingling Murphy's jabberjaw locutions and Wilson's curveball spaciness, the film leaves only the bitter reek of a botched chemistry experiment.

Such confusion makes the script-flipping finale something of a respite, as it gives one an excuse to forget everything that's happened.

Marred by a rambling voice-over at one end and a pat therapeutic resolution on the other, the film has a nice half-hour patch somewhere in the middle.

The story has too many characters, about whom we know too little.

Contains exactly three decent jokes, all stuffed in the last 15 minutes.

If The Last Man were the last movie left on earth, there would be a toss-up between presiding over the end of cinema as we know it and another night of delightful hand shadows.

Dog Run mistakes milieu for meaning; its succinct title's at least a word too long.

Though it's high time for a probing drama that illuminates the labyrinth of America's immigration system, those responsible for Green Card Fever should have their artistic licenses revoked.

Efficient, suitably anonymous chiller.

Even if, per Wilde, all art is quite useless, it need not be quite as useless as this.

White Noise vigorously pushes the supernatural line throughout, but unfortunately its final movement is so incoherent that the whole thing collapses.

Washington is in default dignified mode here. He capably embodies the hero's transformation from doughy dad to man of action, amid the movie's shameless button-pushing and cheap religious overlay.

The only drama is in waiting to hear how John Malkovich's reedy consigliere will pronounce his next line.

The only possible surprise in The Tuxedo would be an extended demonstration of what was once Chan's trademark, the daffily choreographed kineticism forbidden of late by either his own age or the scruples of story editors.

Preachy and humorless, Eban and Charley shocks only by the quality of its numbing solipsism.

It's about following your dreams, no matter what your parents think. Socrates motions for hemlock.

As genre comeuppance, this might have been nasty fun, but the movie barely makes sense, with its unbelievable naïveté and arbitrary flashbacks.

In The One the maze of death leads only to exhaustion -- a solipsistic extension of Bruce Lee pacing the room of mirrors at the end of "Enter the Dragon."

Syd's (Chris Evans) emotional tailspin is embarrassingly banal, and his assertion that "everybody here hates me" quickly applies to the audience as well.

At least Sean Astin, as a scene-chewing prima donna, seems to be having a good time--and mom Patty Duke gets to call him a "turd."

A pleasurably intense burst of anarchy with no moral in sight, thank God.