Gene Seymour

Sophisticated romantic comedy for people who think "Corky Romano" is trenchant political satire.

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.

Succeeds best when it intensifies its focus on the work and life of its main subject, seen in interviews, home movies and in a climactic performance with Bono and the Edge on "Tower of Song."

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.

If I were 6, I could enjoy Rebound without thinking about all the better movies made from its concept.

Drains the original story of its satire and juices up its shtick, schmaltz and special effects.

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.

The droll cast--especially Ferrer, who's exquisite as a tough-talking dunce--deserved something more fully realized than this.

A coy, frantic attempt at screwball comedy, lightly seasoned and more than a little gummy.

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.

You'll be goaded throughout The Comebacks to think of "Bend It Like Beckham," "Remember the Titans," "Rudy," "Hoosiers," "Field of Dreams" and their ilk. What you also think about is how much this stuff worked better in "Airplane!" or "Blazing Saddles."

Thinking too much about the contents will ruin what little pleasure there is in the experience.

All told, this is going to make passable television. Eventually.

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.

From the beginning to its very end, The Benchwarmers seems to be struggling to justify its own existence.

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.

Its dark-edged crime-caper plot is so formulaic it seems almost ritualized. Yet Ice Cube and Mike Epps enact their standard odd-couple tango with such ease and brio, you'd think they'd never seen such movies before.

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.

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.