Hazel-Dawn Dumpert

An easygoing work of unforced humor built on gags that should be stupid, but are ultimately too ridiculous to resist.

It's (Stuart's) utter believability that lets us follow him into the ecstasy of absurdity that is the rest of the film.

While Kaminski understands that movie terror comes in at the eyes, he has little skill for connecting sensation to hearts and minds.

It's a setup so easy it borders on facile, but keeping the film from cheap-shot mediocrity is its crack cast.

The first half-hour of The Core is hip enough to its own moribund formula that for a brief, shining moment, there's hope the film will actually be a goofy gas instead of the effects-bound lump it becomes.

A work of top-shelf schlock.

On its own, the story is tepid, and less than original. What draws us in is the way in which Gatlif sets it against a rich Andalusian backdrop.

So many stars means so little room for character and plot.

The film's best and scariest moments come when Miles is confronted with scenes that he translates into proof of the Wendigo's power.

The story's charming, the set pieces are wildly inventive, and even the throwaway one-liners, about everything from movie-animation pioneer Ray Harryhausen to the old Oscar Meyer jingle, are hilarious.

The movie is not without charm or humor, but it leaves little for Lane to do besides chuckle at setbacks as if they were naughty children.

Well-acted, briskly paced and prettily photographed, the film is a mild-mannered family story with a caring heart, and that's ultimately enough to make its 104 minutes worthwhile.

Does have its charms.

The photography is clear and colorful, the acting just fine, and the pace steady. However, the wan script by Geert Heetebrij imbues the brothers with so little personality that their respective transformations -- pack no emotional punch.

Demme (Monument Ave.) brings a sure hand with pace and structure to the soft-at-heart script by Robert Ramsey and Matthew Stone, allowing Murphy, Lawrence and company to sit back and focus on the job at hand -- making us laugh.

And like, the movie's got all these bright colors and shit, so it's not some fuckin' boring art film, and the new wave soundtrack is awesome.

Might make a fun Lifetime TV movie -- if it weren't quite so morose.

May be scant on character and plot development, but it’s rich with affection for daydream believers

Strangely drab.

It requires nothing more of a viewer than quiet complaisance, which is rewarded in turn by pleasant scenery, a few mild laughs, and the dependably involving presence of Weaver and, especially, Neuwirth.

The uneasy meeting of cultures is mirrored all too well in the stiff and clumsy direction.

To watch Joplin, Rick Danko, Jerry Garcia and Mickey Hart, all massively wasted, giggling and jamming, is a delight tempered by the knowledge that Joplin would be dead just months later, with the rest but one following after.

Paymer is the key to this mild-mannered comedy built on easy setups and borscht-belt one-liners.

Never really gets across the essence of who the band members are and why they inspire such fidelity.

This new feature has replaced the original's benevolence, taste and wit with cynicism, armpit humor and manic, desperately unfunny padding.

Whatever ghost-story intrigue the film musters gives way to a tedious cycle of fighting, screwing, shouting and storytelling stuck together by two hours worth of hard-boiled dialogue gone gummy.

Signals the real end of the party, charting a denouement that arcs from blissful ignorance to violence and its ever-present threat to a final retreat.

The young filmmaker clearly needs to experience a bit more of la vraie vie before his own observations can take in more than the clumsy romantic feints and parries of early adulthood.

Aside from isolated flares of unchecked emotion ...Bouquet's Lucie is too far removed from our ken of romance and overriding purpose, or from Berri's for that matter, to be embraced entirely.

It's a case of persona overwhelming presence, and the butterscotch smoothness that was such an asset opposite George Clooney's glittering cool in "Out of Sight" is all but lost in the sheen of this high-gloss production.

The performances are revelatory.

It becomes clear that all this man-child craves is to be loved and, thus, saved.

This feeble remake offers little more than two pretty and willing leads who nonetheless can't hide their embarrassment over being set up as distractions to hide the film's thorough lack of coherence and appeal.

While The Business of Fancydancing is a thoughtful and complex work of sound and vision, it doesn't seem quite right to call it a film, for a couple of reasons. First of all, it is plainly, if crisply, shot on video, with a bright, shiny surface that fairly screams low-rent. Second, the whole business is strangely non-cinematic.

Dean Parisot's direction of the funny, affectionately satirical script by David Howard and Robert Gordon is crisp and assured.

As always, conversation is the constant threading together Rohmer's stately pace and episodic structure, the thing he uses to show us who his characters are and what their friendship entails.

A wonderful movie. For every misstep there are the sublime expressions of agony and ecstasy of which Herzog is a master.

It's cynical and it's depressing, and I would lock a child in a room before I'd show him Mortal Kombat: Annihilation.

The film isn't really about much and so feels patchy and forced, with elements more calculated than inspired, more urgent than exciting.

By cinematic standards, not exactly scintillating stuff: The mix of archival materials, talking heads and dramatic readings is strictly PBS 101. Filmmaker Peter Gilbert's great achievement lies in his integration of disparate historical threads and voices into one steadily paced, riveting tale.

Transcends its video-box-shelf-filler pedigree only when it's actually indulging in guy stuff, mostly of the frat-boy, beer-commercial variety.

Jabberwocky is not a Python film, a fact most obvious in its marked lack of humor.

What could have been a fascinating exploration of geographical mayhem becomes instead an exercise in tedium.

Bad in such a bizarre way that it's almost worth seeing, if only to witness the crazy confluence of purpose and taste.

The result is a sui generis, love-it-or-hate-it exercise in homegrown American surrealism.

The film is never less than lovely to gaze upon, shot in saturated colors, richly appointed in period trappings and peopled only by the very beautiful. But it is also, by its end, too silly to take seriously.

For the most part, the action, shot entirely on Hawaii's famed North Shore without blue screens or tanks, is awesome, all swirling turquoise tubes, thundering foam hammers and sleek, graceful riders.

The result is a carefully wrought, historically grounded and thoroughly absorbing look at a quintessential American experience.

It's perhaps Greendale's greatest flaw that, rather than stirring the blood, its heartfelt call to arms comes off as a sentimental, even trite, notion from an increasingly distant past.

There's little to recommend Knockout.

While the film strives to prove its cool, it's also built on the insufferably antique idea that some flattery and a good fuck are all any woman needs.

Trueba reveals his subject organically, letting the music speak for itself.

Sandler is -- à la "The Wedding Singer" -- in his washout romantic mode here, and no amount of spastic-colon jokes, cartoon violence or good-buddy cameos (Al Sharpton, John McEnroe) can distract from the fact that Gary Cooper he ain't.

Director Mel Smith (Bean) struggles to make up for the lack, clumsily juggling screwball dames and criminal elements, and trying to disguise the film's marked lack of vitality with split-screen tricks, jokey camera angles and a limp musical montage.

The Amateurs is nothing if not easy to watch. Yet, as a writer, Traeger is consternatingly adolescent and glib.

Narrow definitions of femininity limit the comedy and the romance.

Miraculous photography.

If director Scott Elliott falters, it's only in the spots where he tries to comment on her (Alice's) persecution without being complicit in it.

Strictly for budding young ladies, though it does offer those who've already bloomed the grown-up pleasures of Firth, a great actor who graciously invites you to join him in the slow-burn romantic corner into which he's rapidly painting himself.

The director is Garry Marshall, but The Princess Diaries is no where near as nauseating a fairy tale as Marshall's "Pretty Woman."

Nettelbeck's storytelling grace, however, only highlights her clumsy script, which drags the viewer through an all-too-predictable menu of catharsis and romance that can overpower the film’s subtler, more complex flavors.

Perhaps because this is director Yoji Yamada's 77th movie, every aspect of his filmmaking is placidly assured and meaningful.

Not only relates the astounding story of the expedition and its unimaginable hardships, it presents a thoughtful study of a time when there were adventurers who might actually respond to an advertisement reading "Men wanted for hazardous journey. Low wages, bitter cold . . ."

Film is a ghostly and gorgeous tale of a court magician, the legendary Abe no Seimei.

How much can one girl grapple with over the course of an hour and a half?

Ultimately a wiser and truer film than its crass and cartoony beginnings would have us believe.

The good news is that this off-the-wall ensemble comedy may just be the summer's happiest surprise.

By the time we get to the big finish, it feels as if we've merely been poked repeatedly in the ribs with a really good-looking stick.

Glitter is, if nothing else, comfortable with what it is, namely earnestly made, wholehearted schlock.

Stettner's vision of both women lacks fullness, relying on stereotypes of feminine strength and vulnerability.

Sarkissian's script is both overwrought and undercooked, crammed with floridly senseless speeches.

Rozema seems determined to defrill the Austen trend and charge it with a fiercer sort of femininity.

There are gruelingly unfunny gags, an unspeakable soundtrack featuring BTO and Billy Ocean, and Victoria's Secret mannequin Heidi Klum as a model who demands that her pussy hair be styled into a bushy red heart.