Ed Park

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.

Despite a late-inning swoon of pat emotional generosity, Game Six is a gratifying playground of high-wire language.

Ismail Merchant's screen adaptation retains much of the novel's incident, but fumbles both the humor and moral ambivalence.

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

The film stakes out a self-affirming Atkins-free zone that seems unobjectionable in theory, but its speechifying tendencies and familiar familial tensions overwhelm the more delicate scenes.

Most of the action is tedious, and the less you pay attention to the dialogue, the less you'll feel your hand inadvertently twitching as if with joystick.

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

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

Chamber's charm lies in the sheer visualization of Rowling's weirder inventions: pots of shrivel-phizzed screaming treelets, Harry's arm gone boneless from a bungled spell, a scolding letter from home that leaps to life as a yapping paper mouth.

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.

Bears some resemblance to "All About My Mother," but lacks its compatriot's flamboyance, content to traffic in glib banalities and unwitting self-absorption.

A bitter little fable of rent control and its discontents, Duplex moves rapidly into darkness and claustrophobia.

Eliminates much of its source's plot, focusing on the book's first third. The result is a crisply shot chamber piece for husband, wife, and boy.

Crammed with wild action, obvious but well-mounted gags, and playful effects, the film is refreshingly silly.

Strangely coy about its denominational allegiance.

Based-on-a-true-story kitschfest.

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.

Seeing BLT has been positioned as a political act. Alas: The film in question seems hardly worth the fuss.

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

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."

Dodgeball is the most satisfying comedy of the past year--at least among the ones starring Stiller.

Ultimately everything feels one-sided and sanitized.

Transpires in a somewhat chintzy fantasy kingdom lousy with more cameos than your typical Love Boat season.

Stuffed to the gills with surprises.

Club's inability to moralize saves it from kitsch.

Aside from cameos by Jim Broadbent (as the drunken major) and Peter O'Toole (as Nina's reclusive, eccentric father), much of the acting strains for a sophistication that quickly becomes annoying.

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

E J-Yong's transposition illuminates, with satisfying crispness, the hyper-Confucian high society of the time, as well as the underground Catholic movement.