Ernest Hardy

What's meant to be a colorblind story, plays up age-old stereotypes.

It could have been a hoot in a bad-movie way if the laborious pacing and endless exposition had been tightened. As it is, only LaSalle's sizzling performance makes Crazy more than a by-the-numbers psycho-horror thriller.

Still, the vibrantly shot Lucky Star could have been a mildly entertaining bit of escapism, were it not for the fact that Sophie isn't naïve so much as infantile, a point driven home by her wardrobe.

It's hollow, forced and false.

By the time the final gotcha plot twist unfolds, it's not the intended tears but a yawn that is produced.

Intentionally blurs fiction and reality.

Pandering and tired, Down to Earth lurches from one dead gag to the other, in search of both comedic rhythm and a dramatic pulse. It finds neither.

This is a film at odds with itself, wanting to be a 99 percenter rallying cry but wallowing in and fetishizing 1 percenter accoutrement at every turn.

The obvious, cliché-ridden visual style of this probe into the life, work and legacy of Carlos Castaneda ends up working very much against its subject.

Not a very good movie; it's sentimental, pandering and psychologically anorexic.

The Painting is a sleekly crafted quilt of moldy racial insight and feel-good kumbaya-isms set against the backdrop of the civil rights era. The acting is competent, TV-movie-of-the-week quality (network, not cable), while every single character is a type you've seen a million times before.

The story is unnecessarily muddled and confusing in the telling, and the athletically gifted Yen is overshadowed by largely mediocre CGI effects. Revisit the original instead.

The whole point is nothing more than the revelation that the terrain of suburbia is populated with damaged people inflicting damage on others. This is still news?

Buried beneath Silent Hill’s hyper-stylized stupidity (the film looks like a collaboration between David Fincher, Trent Reznor and music video director Mark Romanek) is the hollow effort to bottle something of the zeitgeist unease surrounding religious fundamentalism.

Although it's grotesque to see pre-teens stomping in underground warehouse-battle settings, at least Battlefield America's racial politics are interesting.

A crap film that's steeped in liberal paranoia, but it's also so ludicrous that it falls under the guilty-pleasure category.

It's a mean-spirited exercise in stilted outrageousness.

Preposterous and tedious, Sonny is spiked with unintentional laughter that, unfortunately, occurs too infrequently to make the film even a guilty pleasure.

In the end, Some Fish Can Fly doesn't.

The drama is unintentionally humorous, the humor incredibly labored and the acting rarely better than one might find in a Chi Chi LaRue XXX production.

The film is ultimately more labored than inspired. A cameo by James Brown is amusing, but it can't keep The Tuxedo from earning the distinction of being Chan's worst Hollywood film to date.

Superficiality and cliché mark the film's notions of family, dysfunction, and even survival.

If you're already a huge fan of any of these artists, this film will be a lovefest. For all others, it's a mild diversion at best.

There are also strong flickers here of a film that might have been.

The film offers no new insights into its people or into the dynamics of the Hollywood machine -- the whole affair, played for low-intensity laughs, is numbingly familiar.

What follows is one set piece after another in which the women make fools of themselves as the script herds them toward a happy ending of hugs and tears.

The biggest problem is that the character of Sabine is such a lame male fantasy of the enigmatic woman-child.

The Colony has modest rewards: It's decently acted, delivers some well-executed jolts, doesn't insult the viewer's intelligence, and is mercifully free of ironic distance.