Gene Seymour

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.

As its plot thickens, Waist Deep gets more outlandish. The whole mess empties out into an overextended car chase through Los Angeles.

The noir atmosphere doesn't quite smother the dialogue's cheesy smell.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

To her credit, Jovovich carries out her action-hero duties with swagger and conviction that never get out of control. Clearly, she's expecting a franchise out of this.