Gene Seymour

His constant chatter may grate, but Noya does the wide-eyed wonderment thing very well.

As a full-service holiday movie, The Santa Clause 3: The Escape Clause gets you into the mood to shop early and often by making the North Pole look like a shopping mall with a never-ending school pageant.

Hostel II is far too shrewd and savagely witty to be caught engaging in higher seriousness. Roth could probably go even further with this particular franchise if he wanted to. Yet somehow, I think he's meant for grander, subtler and more intricate distractions than this.

What Idle Hands lacks in originality, it makes up for in energy and insolence. It takes guts for a movie to indulge as much as this one does in proto-hippie humor and you find yourself tickled, in spite of yourself, by the movie's nerve, if not its jokes.

The movie falls short of the grandeur it's reaching for, but if you're looking for balm to soothe your frazzled nerves, you may be able to scrape some from the movie's rawer edges.

Mindless escape. [12 April 1999, Calendar, p.F-4]

It's nice, once in a while, to come upon a movie that knows it's nothing special, proves it and doesn't care so long as its target audience feels good enough to have a refreshing beverage or two afterward.

Driving Lessons follows the well-worn path laid down by other, better movies while making strained, ludicrous things happen toward the end.

Pettis is adorable, but she pushes the cuteness dial well past one's tolerance level. Still, if you've got small ones yourself, they'll probably enjoy the messes Joe and Peyton make together. They may also wonder why it takes so long for all the movie's messes to get cleaned up.

The movie's clatter and whiz-bang suggests more humor than there actually is.

There's something plodding and uncomfortably strident about Little Animals that keeps the audience from sharing, much less understanding, Bobby's enchantment.

The hard-sell comic delivery one expects from contemporary date movies is pleasantly tempered here.

Snarkiness and sentiment are in constant battle for supremacy throughout Run, Fat Boy, Run with no chance of a comfortable draw.

Kattan and Ferrell do their best to fill out the shallow Butabis.

After a while, the only way for a reasonably intelligent person to get through The Country Bears is to ponder how a whole segment of pop-music history has been allowed to get wet, fuzzy and sticky.

It's no use expecting Return to Never Land to match, much less exceed, Disney's 1953 version of "Peter Pan," which by itself isn't quite in the uppermost tier of the studio's full-length cartoons.

For all its familiar conventions and hoary improbabilities, Double Jeopardy is a relatively efficient model of its kind.

As long as you keep thinking of "Babe," you can't help thinking that there's no excuse for movies like Good Boy! to merely push the usual buttons, deploy the usual poop jokes and carry out the usual sight gags.

A hostage drama, cliches intact, is what we get.

Righteous Kill's script is credited to "Inside Man's" Russell Gewirtz, and you wonder how the sleek, nuanced flow of that earlier movie evaded this one.

Griffiths' Pam holds your attention without any gratuitous mannerisms or broad asides. It's a sleek, rangy performance that all but redeems the hackneyed familiarity of the premise.

Edmond does, on the surface, seem very much a contemporary tale of urban terror. Yet despite the best efforts of all concerned, what seemed explosive and provocative two decades ago now comes across as schematic and artificial.

There's no real rigor or craft applied to this story -- just mood, tone, neo-gothic imagery and frantic attitude. If only Penelope knew what it truly wished to be and how to go about it. Which is probably what this overly coy fantasy's modestly appealing title character wishes as well.

There are enough grace notes and gentle surprises strewn along this well-trod path to make Just Looking just good enough to justify Alexander's career move.

The cause is just. But there's something off-kilter about the mix. Maybe it's because the animation retains its TV flatness while the story's texture is gratuitously bulked up.

The movie, with all its brashness and crassness, can still claim noble motives in encouraging insecure young people to seek the pop diva buried deep within.

Manages to sustain a sweet, funny groove for, say, 65 of its 85 minutes.

It looks as if no one bothered to deliver more than the minimum requirement of magic or artistry.