Jack Mathews

Though his latest, Sunshine State, shows Sayles usual literary care, it's a very slight work compared with such cinematic tomes as "Lone Star," "Matewan" and "Eight Men Out."

The homoerotic relationship between Friedrich and Albrecht is stopped short by tragedy, but the point is made - to Friedrich and the audience - that fascism has no room for humanity.

The result is a charming, inventive, ambitious, surreal mess.

There are too many characters undergoing life changes in the story for each to be properly developed in an 82-minute movie. But for the most part, the actors get the work done.

[Boyle] shrugs off any intellectual pretense to rollick in a dead-on scare fest. On that level, 28 Days Later is indeed a frightfully good time.

One of those bright ideas for a TV sketch that convinces someone it's too good to waste on the small screen. It's not.

Pretty much a road to nowhere.

Fear, thanks mostly to Foley's stylish direction and a couple of strong performances, is a much better movie than "Whispers," but those familiar with the formula will get no major surprises. [12 Apr 1996]

The script (written by Susan Minot from a story by Bertolucci) suffers from the same tired blood as his characters, and his direction is often ponderously self-conscious.

Tarantino's gift, at least with "Reservoir Dogs" and "Pulp Fiction," is his ability to create comedy within horrific violence. In "2 Days," the comedy and violence travel along different paths altogether, and when they finally do merge, as is often the case on the highways in the Valley, it isn't pretty. [27 Sept 1996, p.14]

Billed as an action thriller, it plays out as an urban-fairy tale version of "Bonnie and Clyde," with an ending suitable for a Harlequin romance.

There weren't enough good laughs for me to recommend it to anyone other than the most devoted Beanheads.

Casting Williams in this thriller, adapted from Armistead Maupin's novel, was a bigger mistake than the actor's performance.

The Coen brothers might have pulled this off, but it's out of Allen's faltering reach.

Billed as the first film to go from conception to the big screen within the Sundance program, Dopamine is an amiably slight independent film that probably should have gone directly to the Sundance Channel.

The writers, and director Miller, an MTV veteran making his feature debut, are never able to mesh the film's contradictory tones. [11 Dec 1998, p.F14]

Might have worked as a sex comedy, certainly as porn. But as a suspense thriller, it's creepy for all the wrong reasons.

A claustrophobic psychodrama.

It's a good thing Jaume Serra's House of Wax wasn't shot in 3-D like the original 1953 horror classic - Paris Hilton is in it and she doesn't have a third dimension.

Where's the levity, you ask? There is none, or rather, there is none that Manuel can perceive.

Tamahori attempts to cover the ludicrousness of the story with a wickedly fast pace and sensational action set pieces. And in a film more than an hour and half long, events do whiz by.

If you feel anything other than admiration for its craftsmanship, let me know; The Good German is as emotionally cold and unconvincing as any movie I've seen this year.

the director works way too hard to cover his tracks, and the resolution is a disappointment - if you get it at all.

There's great music and lovely settings, but the filmmakers have done little more with their subject than reiterate the Britannica's description of her.

Banderas has some very effective moments, but in his emotional scenes, Cristofer has him screaming his lines into Jolie's face with such a spritzing fury, she might have filed a union grievance.

A black comedy that some viewers may take as an assault. The disconnect between the realism of its violence and the near-slapstick tone of some of its comedy is too much to be framed within one movie.

Often tedious, sometimes fascinating anthology.

The Last Time feels like a script that was written backwards, as if the twist ending occurred to Caleo first and he then filled out a story to get to it. Fair enough, except getting there in this case is just no fun.

Goldblum, who has made psychological confusion his actor's stock-in-trade, gives Nolan's behavior just enough credibility to keep his quest alive for us, and Heche gives a delightfully unaffected performance as Lucy.

Evening is a case study in how a subtly evocative book can elude the most well-intentioned filmmakers and some of our finest actors.

Has many of the qualities that made the actor such a great target for self-parody in Spike Jonze's "Being John Malkovich" - it's sober, deliberate, self-consciously mysterious and no fun at all.

Essentially conversations, confrontations, and an extremely pat -- and very verbal -- reconciliation.

Sitting through the film is punishing work. The jittery closeups create a response that is more physical (I'm thinking nausea) than emotional, and there are no respites.

In trying to disguise his themes within the structure of a noir thriller, Parker was simply more successful at fooling himself than us.

When the producers of Eros, a triptych of short stories about eroticism and desire, described what they wanted from Hong Kong director Wong Kar Wai, American Steven Soderbergh and Italian master Michelangelo Antonioni, they must have written the memo in Chinese. Only Wong attempted something sensual.

The movie turns into something strange and annoying, an attempted blend of a suburban thriller with an Old West shoot-'em-up.

Dunst makes Davies the most confident and interesting person aboard the Oneida and makes this voyage almost, but not quite, worth taking.

Cats Don’t Dance treads this territory with a whimsy that will be over the heads of young kids and too unimaginative for adults.

There is one good, legitimate scare in Robert Zemeckis' quasi-ghost thriller What Lies Beneath, and that's just not enough for a movie that lasts more than two hours.

It's never a good thing to notice that the actors in a movie are having a better time than you are. It's so unfair. They're paid to work, you're paying for fun.

Directed with his usual flair for the obvious by Dennis Dugan ("The Benchwarmers), "Chuck and Larry" has the nowness factor of a Polish joke. Does anybody laugh at this stuff anymore?

The movie has a terrible premise compounded by a lame script and the miscasting of its surfeit of talented stars. You have to wonder why Dobkin, whose last film was the hilariously raunchy "Wedding Crashers," would be attracted to this tame material.

A pretty run-of-the-mill B suspense movie.

Finally, you get down to the music, which is easy to take for the first hour, before it starts doubling and tripling back on itself, in an unnerving and seemingly unending spiral of repetition.

Gerry isn't much of anything, and doesn't claim to be. It's a movie stripped of its movieness.

The themes are about the power and consequences of sex, but the stories are too glib and episodic to leave any impression.

Like a lost recording by the Beatles, Sylvester Stallone's Rambo arrives with its feet planted firmly in the past, a reminder of a time when Stallone, Chuck Norris and other wooden soldiers of the big screen filled multiplexes with the floor-shaking thunder of trivialized war.

The movie includes a postscript about her (McKinney's) loss, blaming it on more dirty tricks. That may be true, but it doesn't put the steam back in the film.

Beautifully shot but overly spare documentary.

The cat-and-mouse game between the patient and doctor and the coy is-he-or-isn't-he? game being played on us by the filmmakers becomes tiring.

Awkward, unconvincing bisexual roundelay.

Failures on the scale of writer-director Steven Zaillian's All the King's Men are as rare as falling sequoias, and they make a noise even if no one's in the woods to hear them. This sequoia is very noisy indeed.

The second half, picking up 10 years after Eddie was institutionalized, is pure screwball comedy. It's as if Cassavetes had written the first half for himself to direct, and the second for Carl Reiner. [29 Aug 1997, p.F10]

The film's biggest problem is its psychologically false ending. Having created a complex relationship, Anselmo seems to throw up his hands at the end and admit he doesn't have a clue about how to resolve it.

Among the year's biggest disappointments.

That final night of competition is exciting stuff, capped by a heroic victory ride, but this is otherwise a plodding feature about decent young people in a rough-and-tumble sport that makes you wonder how many IQ points they have being bucked around inside their heads.

While I understand Vergès' oft-repeated claim that he wants to use these sensational cases to point out that the French were no better than the Nazis in their treatment of colonial subjects, it's impossible to overlook his glib dismissal of his clients' crimes and the smug righteousness that rests in the smirk constantly on his face.

The characters she (Ephron) invents are not very interesting, and aside from the always reliable Travolta, the performances are uniformly aligned.

Besides repeating his premise that only fools fall in love and deserve whatever circle of hell they enter for it, he seems to really believe that morality has no place in art. Certainly, he's keeping it out of his.

Mostly, though, Hayek's problem is one of physical miscasting. She's so tiny next to the tall, rotund Molina that she looks like child in their scenes together. And despite a fake caterpillar brow, she's just not believable as a woman bemoaning her disfigurements.

A tale of love, desperation and conspiratorial madness, comes off on the big screen as a wacky psychological snow job.

Soft porn for people who like to watch - and want to be punished for it.

No one makes something out of nothing like the French, and in this wispy tale about a jilted middle-age man and the very young housekeeper who briefly lights up his life, writer-director Claude Berri's got plenty of nothing.

Farrell, adding to the case for his impending stardom, locks into his role with the laser precision of the sniper's rifle scope.

Looks stunning, but it's an ill-conceived mess that plays like two movies awkwardly spliced together. In one movie, parents are asked to stand by while the kids are entertained with cute animal tricks and slapstick pratfalls. In the other, the kids will be hushed while the parents are treated to inside jokes.

A combination ghost and shaggy dog story that is so well-made and acted you can nearly overlook its murky, unsatisfying ending.

Watching Garry Marshall's Raising Helen is like eating a box of Forrest Gump's chocolates. You may not know exactly what you're going to get, but you can count on a high sugar content.

Trying to resist Reese is like trying to resist Reese's Pieces: They're always the same but you can't help yourself.

There are a couple of surprises in the I-can't-believe-they're-doing-this vein, but mostly, "Pie 3" is an aimless charade of doggy poo, latex breasts and really, really bad language.

For Kidman, it is a one-note performance dictated by the script. Leigh had more dimension to work with and gives the film's most honest performance. Meanwhile, Black, whose job is mostly to deliver comic relief, is completely lost - that is to say, not funny - in the material.

Posey is as over-the-top as a drunk in a game of charades, while DeVito wears the sunny, slavering grin of an old coot hoping to get lucky at Jack Nicholson's pool party. If it still sounds like fun, good luck. Don't blame me if you leave frustrated.

Other than the terribly miscast Posey, the cast is solid, with Dukakis wrenching the heart as a mother tested to the max by her son's request. But the movie didn't tell me anything I didn't already know.

The material here, written by Ehren Kruger, is beneath banal, and the three leads are so miscast that it's like watching a dress charade.

It's not honest, and it's certainly no solution.

An underdevelopment of a bad idea that is entertaining, so far as it is, because of McDormand's totally unselfconscious performance. This wonderful actress is never less than interesting, and even as a caricature of a stereotype, she's fun to watch.

I've laughed harder during a single "Road Runner" cartoon than I did throughout Back in Action.

In writer Josh Friedman and director Brian de Palma's attempts to condense the book's convulsively odd final chapters, they've created an even loonier melodrama.

A string of sketches. Some are better than others -- or, at least, less bad -- but they exist as extended, stand-alone jokes within an enveloping framework.

It's that rare movie that had me wishing I was at the opera.

What sticks is a colorful, mesmerizing, at times breathtaking mess - it's like watching a bonfire on acid - and what slides to the floor is, well, you probably don't want to know.

You have to look at the earlier film to understand where the Coen brothers went wrong - terribly, noisily, annoyingly wrong. They've made a broad comedy out of a black comedy and completely lost its charm in the process.

You don't have to be a Muslim, or a humorless person of any persuasion, to find Brooks' performance excruciating.

Dispiriting, unsubtle and unpleasant.

It takes chutzpah to title this movie Déjà Vu; every scene in it rings a bell. Certainly, I had just seen the same affable-righteous performance from Washington in Spike Lee's "Inside Man."

One long camp joke, with vamped scenes strung together.

Herzog, who deadpans his way through the high jinks, is the best thing about the movie, but even he gets wearisome before Nessie has sunk the boat.

You can guess how it all ends, but getting there is a repetitious parade of put-downs and smackdowns that suggest you can't go home again - not when your mom's sleeping with a monster from your past.

James Siegel's best-selling thriller Derailed is a perfect commuter book that has become the most imperfect of movies.

The script gets so silly, the Monty Python troupe would reject it.

Only David Paymer -- and the actor formerly known as the singer Meat Loaf, playing Newman's suspicious neighbor, ring true.

The Beat That My Heart Skipped has nonetheless brought attention to a nearly lost classic. For more than two decades, "Fingers" was not available on video or DVD and was rarely screened. But it's available now, and if you've never seen it, put it on your must-rent list immediately.

The film is at its worst, however, when Daredevil takes over. That's partly because Affleck, a handsome fellow with possibly the most inert film presence of any actor since Sonny Tufts, looks ridiculous in Daredevil's red leather pantsuit and horned mask.

It's no wonder Sidney Lumet's Find Me Guilty had trouble finding a distributor. Its target audience is behind bars.

Luc Besson, a sort of French version of Steven Spielberg without the intuition, has tried a lot of genres in his young career and has had his greatest success with slick action films like "The Fifth Element" and "La Femme Nikita." Animated movies for kids he should stay away from.

There is a vengeance motif that is worked out in a way that is both emotionally satisfying and completely unbelievable.

In the expanding genre of quirky comedies, first-time writer-director Michael Clancy's messy, fitfully funny Eulogy is among the quirkiest.

As thin and wispy as a dream you can't quite remember in the morning, writer-director Jake Paltrow's The Good Night wastes the ample comedy talent of Martin Freeman, turns his famous sister Gwyneth into a shrew, and makes you wish Danny DeVito had directed the movie instead of acting in it.

Despite four very strong performances, Closer is hard emotional work to sit through. It's impossible to empathize with either the viciously insecure Larry or the unscrupulous, childlike Dan.

If there was an iota of plausibility to any of this, we could forgive the film's greater leaps of imagination - all those break-ins of absurdly unprotected bastions of Western civilization. But this is not audience-participation suspense. All you can do is sit and watch, and wish there was more wonder.

Amen is propelled by a most dubious assumption -- Gerstein's belief that if the German people knew of the Holocaust, they'd stop it.

In A Lot Like Love, there is no doubt - nor suspense, nor depth.

The movie works best as a car's-eye travelogue of Jordan. And the three women might be good company on another, less stressful trip. Say to the Caribbean.

There's an inherent distance between movies and their audiences that -- combined with the distance between 9/11 and today's opening of the film -- The Guys can't bridge.

Like Schwarzenegger himself, it looks tired, and a little bored.

We Are Marshall is less a movie than a commemoration.

Deery's points are well-taken, but they would have been a lot better made if he hadn't taken so many easy shots at the church by demonizing its local authorities.

The movie is as unpleasant as its hero, and the film audience gets no more for its money than the customers at the Laughing Stock. Still, watching Whaley take Jimmy down his tortured path has some morbid appeal -- like a train wreck in progress.

Here’s a double-scoop for conspiracy theorists.

Tough, unsentimental British film.

The story of the victims on the road is harrowing, but the tale of the kind cop and the teenager with an attitude is a string of big brother clichés.

Underdeveloped and badly diluted by overlong -- and overly stylized -- forays into the drug use, street hustling and cultural alienation that mostly affects the boys' friends.

From the beginning, Edmond is too self-absorbed for us to care much about his fate, but like the proverbial train wreck, you can't tear your eyes - or your ears - away from the spectacle.

Its noisily inappropriate pop-rock score overwhelms its meager subplots about British class conflict.

Tops Michael Moore's "Fahrenheit 9/11" in anger and frustration.

The opening of writer-director Eric Schaeffer's sloppy, sporadically funny adult sex comedy Never Again shows how an undisciplined filmmaker can sabotage his best intentions.

So what's the point of doing it a second time if you can't make it more realistic?

Has sentimental goo oozing from its opening frame, and the gunk gets so thick so fast, it's a wonder the projector doesn't freeze before the molasses-strapped finale.

Ultimately about the indomitability of faith, and the Christian symbolism is laid on thick. But the story, adapted from a famous behind-the-Iron-Curtain novel, sheds light on a subject few people have known about.

The cruelty of the law has been better demonstrated with news stories, and unless you're a Californian with two strikes against you, I don't know why you'd want to do this movie to yourself.

Director Marcus Nispel, a rock video vet making his feature debut, knows how to ratchet up the tension. His remake is a far, far better-looking thing than the original. There's also more humor, especially in the over-the-top performance of drill sergeant-turned-actor R. Lee Ermey as the loudest of the inbreds.

Eisner is not remotely up to the challenge. Spending millions on action scenes does not mean you get them right.

Ultimately, Murder by Numbers has been reduced to a tease, giving us a hint -- mostly through the fine performances of Gosling, who creates a charismatic sociopath, and Pitt, who's character seems genuinely troubled -- of the kind of relevant social drama it might have been.

There are some effective group scenes with Darius and Nina and their friends, but Witcher's dialogue and direction more often show the craft than the naturalism he's after. [14 Mar 1997, p.F1]

It neither mocks nor satirizes, it doesn't touch any social issues, and though it is about an election, there are no losers. For all those reasons, there aren't many laughs, either. Political comedy plays against tension, and there just isn't any.

Nothing fails like bad horror. But it's not despicable. It is merely boring.

Its premise had me worn out by the second reel.

Notre Musique is a cry against war and man's inherent needs for tribalism and violence, a position that wouldn't start a good argument in a college cafeteria.

Almost corny enough to be hip.

Really bad movies can be fun, and the dialogue here often attains a level of joyful inanity.

Rent the original. It tells exactly the same story, with a better cast and with special effects that are as good or better.

You know a comedy's in trouble when the only laughter the audience can hear is coming from the speakers. There are other problems with "Man," notably its abrupt shifts from farce to romantic comedy to suspense thriller, and the near absence of a political edge.

Though a stickler might ask what's at stake in a fight to the death between two guys who are already dead, the hard-core fans aren't likely to be disappointed.

A guy flick, but I can't imagine many male viewers actually identifying with Elliot or his friends. The depression would be unbearable.

Hawke, who is very good as the young man's estranged father, had best stick to what he does best.

The subtitle of this interview/documentary about the late, great French photojournalist should be "For Collectors Only." There is no theme, no point, no history, no illuminating insights - it's just Bresson talking about his individual photos and early sketches.

The setting and circumstances of the war overwhelm the personal story and diminish the dilemma of the title character's love life.

My rule of thumb for manipulative movies: I don't mind playing the marionette as long as the strings aren't visible.

A predictable outcome is not bad if it's fun getting to it. But this story is so lamely conceived and presented that it's a grind.

The lone gem of the anthology takes place in the loft of a trendy L.A. restaurant where a snooty Steve Coogan learns from starstruck Alfred Molina that the actors are cousins...This is the longest of the shorts, and has a payoff ending that nearly makes the whole thing worthwhile.

It was against all odds that Michael Mann ("The Insider") would make a boring movie focusing on the most eventful decade in the life of the most dynamic athlete in history. But that's what he has achieved with Ali.

Sometimes, movies would work better if you couldn't see them.

The result is a long night of confrontations that feel heavily rehearsed and unlikely. There are some good moments, but I didn't believe any of this.

The studio's fresh corps of CG animators may get up to speed before the current four-picture cycle is completed, but if they don't get better material to work with, the sky will be falling along Dopey Drive.

Some terrific characters and some of the year's punchiest comic dialogue.

Sillier than it is clever, and Toback's self-indulgence is tiresome. He's a genuine auteur, all right, but his life and the funky tastes that inspire him are just not as interesting as he thinks they are.

The Czech Republic and Russia, the respective homes of Emil and Oleg, should sue.

As a movie on its own, it's simple monotony. Olyphant, affecting Clint Eastwood's Dirty Harry voice, is about as menacing as Mr. Clean, and the action scenes - whether the weapons are fists, feet, swords or guns - fly past without any tension or suspense. Hitman is a miss.

As urban gangster drama, Once in the Life is way below mundane, and Fishburne's direction exceeds the rookie jitters.

Theirs is an affair not worth remembering.

Muppets From Space has its share of whimsical lines aimed over children's heads at their parents, but speaking for one parent whose kids are grown, it's not enough. [14 July 1999, p.36]

Too often crosses the line between good melodrama and rank cliché.

The movie never really comes alive, and Crialese's coyness with Lucy's character is more frustrating than mysterious.

The Village is Shyamalan's weakest story, and its ending - whether or not you're surprised by it - is a genuine clinker.

Farrell plays all this as if he means it, but he seems slight in the role and without great physical presence. In a scene in which Alexander is roaring at his troops to rouse them to battle, he sounds like Mighty Mouse pretending to be Superman.

Zwart never gets the tone right in this very American comedy.

There's something deeper at play in the film, something psychologically foul, voyeuristic and personal.

It's impossible to overstate the silliness of all this, but it would still be a decent Halloween trick - if it were Halloween.

Charles Shyer's update is a pointlessly tame romp.

It's in French with French actors, but its film noir sensibilities have a filtered Hollywood vibe about them. In other words, it's pretty much a mess.

Why remake a horror film if you can't make it scarier?

A vanity project by a moderately talented artist that has moments of real brilliance in it.

Don't like archetypes? Wait till you meet the cliches.

Something less than a gem. It has a brilliant lead performance from Yuliya Vysotskaya as Janna.

The result is a gorgeous, third-person version of an extended family-vacation movie that the Piersons, their friends and their former Fijian neighbors can enjoy for years to come.

The source for Jieho Lee's The Air I Breathe is an ancient Chinese proverb about the four cornerstones of emotion - love, pleasure, happiness and sorrow. But Lee and co-writer Bob DeRosa went 0-4 with their convoluted screenplay, making me thankful they didn't try to adapt the Seven Deadly Sins.

To see Allen, now 70, trying to reclaim the persona he's been handing off is like watching Willie Mays fall down trying to hit a slow curve during his last season. Woody may go on to direct many great films, but it's time for him to retire Alvy Singer.

Offers a passably entertaining bridge between empty-headed summer fare and fall awards hunting.

Horror fans will be appalled by the frivolity of the beheadings, amputations and blunt-force trauma. But when Tilly, complaining about all the good roles going to Julia Roberts, says she could have played Erin Brockovich and done it without the Wonderbra, you know you're into something almost inspired.

Among the creepiest adult monologues you'll hear in a regular theater this year comes from Karen Young in Heading South, a well-acted but misguided tale of displaced sexual longing on the beaches of Baby Doc Duvalier's 1970s Haiti.

In the funniest and, coincidentally, most "Jackass"-like scene in Todd Phillips' School for Scoundrels, a planned game of paintball gets off to a bad start when the players begin shooting each other at point-blank range.

It is both inside-baseball and self-parody, exposing a world that is just as ruthless and shallow as we've been shown it is in films like "The Player" and "Permanent Midnight."

The World has a pokey pace, but it presents a uniquely powerful look at the new big kid in the global economy.

A ghetto horror movie that sets up some decent scares before becoming so amused with itself, it's a wonder we don't hear the crew laughing.

For all its spiritual angst, Constantine is about as silly as fantasies get.

Essentially a home movie, nicely shot but dull.

The three actors do their best to breathe life into their caricatured roles.

A bungled mess that spends an hour creating two characters whose lives are about as believable as a successful ambush set by Wile E. Coyote for the Roadrunner.

Clintonistas may want to look away when Carville and his colleagues lay out their political philosophy for Lozada, or, as he's affectionately known, "Gani." It's pragmatic in a way that defies the needs of the impoverished majority of Bolivians.

The special effects work fine for minor acts of magic, but the climactic aerial dragon fight is lame, and most of the performances are at the level of high school plays.

Truly weird and unworkable thriller.

It irks the ink out of me to see Lane exalted as a hero for doing what any responsible editor would do, then being paid to consult on his own canonization.

An intended throwback to the halcyon days of colorful studio cartoons, more in the Chuck Jones style than Disney, and the animation of its characters and Western motif is fine. But the writing of co-directors Will Finn and John Sanford and their characterizations are embarrassingly bad.

Wild West Show would have really been something if Vaughn had taken a few of his fellow Frat Packers with him - say, Will Ferrell, Jack Black, Ben Stiller and Steve Carell - instead of the struggling unknowns.

Clearly, Caan's major influence is Quentin Tarantino, though he manages only a weak imitation. But give him credit for casting Kelly Lynch and Jeff Goldblum and letting them go.

Yukol has spread a huge canvas, gloriously costumed and photographed, but the staging and acting are often awkward and the saga is simply too dense for good drama.

Buscemi's latest, Lonesome Jim, written by James C. Strouse, asks you to spend 91 minutes with a 30-year-old slacker and would-be writer who has the DNA of a sloth. "Slowsome Jim" is more like it.

Shyamalan has learned from his idol (Spielberg) how to manipulate audience emotion through the intimacy of an ordinary family that is "contacted." But he is even more shameless about it.

Earnest but ambling drama.

The changes are meant to make it easier for audiences to accept Vincent's loyalty to Angelo and Joey, but they blunt the genetic mystery that made McAlary's story so compelling in the first place.

You have no idea how determined director Rich Cowan is to suck the last drop of sap out of this tree.

Though Brother Bear is as beautiful as any of Disney's hand-drawn features, the gang-written script is deadly flat.

Solondz's refusal to frame his dark, misanthropic impulses with an overriding point-of-view seems a cheap copout for a film whose title proposes that it's about the storytelling process.

Without the surprise, realism, audacity and upstart cheekiness -- pun intended -- that made "The Full Monty's" blue-collar strippers so irresistible.

Gets the proportions all wrong -- too much magic, not enough realism.

The 20 or so minutes we spend with the Albatross in the squall is high adventure, to be sure. Everything else is ballast.

Some people will want to call it pornography. In one respect, it's the opposite.

The film is otherwise a self-indulgent lark.

Mexican soap opera star Bárbara Mori may be the most beautiful woman to grace an American screen this year, and female viewers may feel similarly about her male co-stars Christian Meier and Manolo Cardona. But a telenovela with three gorgeous actors is still a telenovela.

Dear Wendy is absurd to the point of comic parody. Bloody as it is, it has no access to viewers' emotions, and its message - play with fire and you get burned - is too obvious to be provocative.

If you find a movie with a more annoying central performance than the one given by Brenda Blethyn in Cherie Nowlan's Introducing the Dwights, keep it to yourself.

Have Marc's friends tricked him with a conspiracy of silence, or was that mustache a growth only in his mind? The filmmaker has said there is no intended meaning to any of this, so search for it for your own amusement.

This drama from Fox Faith Movies has a mercifully light hand in selling its Christian-values themes, but its plodding story about a spoiled young scion who must complete 12 tasks assigned him by his late grandfather is still a slog.

Given the grim events, the buoyantly goofy An Amazing Couple has the effect of laughing gas pumped through the vents in a funeral hall.

This ponderous romantic melodrama...passes like a day behind bars.

The script and the performances are all fine, but it's very slow going.

The overall effect of Lucas' digital mania has been detrimental to the saga. Where the first trilogy was mythological fantasy, the second is pure cartoon. The sad truth is, the more three-dimensional they look, the more two-dimensional they are.

The results are often exciting and, except for occa­sional overacting by Calil, feels authentic. But the whole notion of exploiting a war and its victims to shoot a commercial feature is reprehensible.

A sad, almost morbid -- and cinematically inert -- eulogy to a complex man whose own genius was dampened by arrogance and politics.

It all comes together at the end, logically and with a twist. But it's not a game that allows the audience to play along. When the story is controlled by whatever memories the writer and director choose to put in the characters' heads, you're always on the outside looking in.

An improvement over "Jackpot," but not much. The best thing about it is Nolte, playing the grizzled priest as an angel in his own right. Everyone else- - save the young boy playing the orphan -- seems to be in on a joke we just don't get.

It's the banal romantic triangle that inspired Sverak ("Kolya"), who obviously didn't see "Pearl Harbor" in time to stop himself.

As dull and inert as the ink used to print the Gospels of Matthew and Luke that informed Mike Rich's script.

Filmmaker Steve Anderson stuffs an astonishing 800-plus mentions of the F-word into this 90-minute documentary. When the spectacle ends, the same question lingers: Why?

Slight Canadian coming-of-age drama.

Wenham and Porter are appealing actors, and Teplitzky's depiction of their coupling has an unflinching realism.

Has so many ideas working in it that they all but suffocate its thin plot.

Makes you appreciate opera, or NoDoz.

The brutally ironic ending, I might add, won't make anybody very happy about having chosen The Mist for their evening's entertainment.

With “Geronimo,” an honorable effort to right some wrongs done the Apache warrior in past movies, [Hill] seemed stifled by his commitment to history. And in “Wild Bill,” which he wants us to see as a psychological profile of a legend’s final days, he can’t for the life of him let go of the legend.

Ralph Fiennes has faced a lot of acting challenges in his career, but playing a New York Republican who could win an endorsement from Susan Sarandon might be the toughest. Mostly, he handles the task by simply smiling warmly throughout, and gets away with it.

Undertow becomes unbearably imitative and predictable. It's a kids-in-peril B horror movie in the guise of an art film.

Saga too arty for own good.

Unless you're seriously into the post-"Matrix" culture, which includes books, games, animation and interactive Web sites, or you believe the Wachowskis have a philosophy worth wading through, the two-part sequel adds nothing indispensable to the first story.

Paparazzi is for anyone who's ever wondered how good it would feel to knock down a photographer with his car and then back over him.

Failure to Launch sounds like really bad Oscar Wilde, but it's not that good. You are not supposed to dislike anybody here.

Despite some clever early fantasy scenes, Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini's adaptation of best seller The Nanny Diaries won't make Bridget Jones give up her writing.

You can't have as many twists and turns in a story as dot the i without testing the audience's patience, and losing it before delivering the punch line.

Surely, this bloodthirsty comic farce about a sadistic backwoods family being hunted by a sadistic backwoods sheriff is the "Citizen Kane" of hix-ploitation horror.

D.O.A.P. would be more effective, and more entertaining, if it took a cue from "Dr. Strangelove" and used Sterling Hayden's paranoid, quick-triggered Brig. Gen. Jack D. Ripper as the model for Cheney to get more outlandish behavior from him.

Keaton is so over-the-top, so loud and so physically animated that when Daphne develops a case of laryngitis mid-way through the movie, it's as if a neighbor's car alarm has finally been shut down. However, in those silent moments, when Daphne is communicating with notes, you realize how much you like this actress.

If this were a more serious film, its cynicism about the U.S. government would put it in a league with "The Manchurian Candidate." But it is simply an Arnold Schwarzenegger action flick with bantamweight Wahlberg doing the heavy lifting for the preoccupied Governator.

The film's overriding messages are of personal responsibility and redemption. If that is Villeneuve's objective, it's done as an insidious polemic. If not, it's guilty of an even greater sin: It's boring.

The tragedy that separates the Good Crush from the Bad Crush is a cleaver that severs the film's relationship with reality.

Night at the Museum takes a can't-miss comedy premise and misses by a country mile.

The author is not to blame. Published in 1999, "Be Cool" is hipper, cooler and better than "Get Shorty," but everything hipper, cooler and better about it is either missing from the film or camped-up beyond recognition.

Two hours of ludicrous action, forced humor and self-conscious romance.

Features some of the year's most beautiful scenery and two of its most wooden characters.

Star-packed fiasco.

The hand-held camera work gives the film an effective documentary pulse, but it adds up to only half a movie.

What might have read as a dense allegory comparing the rituals of the super-rich with the tribal customs of the violent Ishkanani tribe in the Amazon becomes a tedious, over-ripe soap opera on screen.

Allen was out of his element in creating characters who feel like East Coast cousins of the Clampetts, and his dialogue has never been more banal or forced.

There's only so much meaningful interplay you can get out of a beachful of slackers and some tanning oil.

What they say, mostly over black-and-white stills from his early career and meandering footage of desolate Mali, could be said in 10 minutes. The good news is that much of the remaining documentary is devoted to Kar Kar's elegant voice and exquisite guitar playing.

A by-the-numbers, let's-put-on-a-show quasi-musical that has absolutely nothing going for it, except Alba.

Jelski's dialogue is razor sharp and she got a terrific performance from the relatively inexperienced Gummersall, who runs a gamut of emotions and holds the screen like a seasoned star.

Pie 2's greatest asset is the rare, infectious amiability of its cast of characters and the actors playing them.

Though the film, adapted from a novel by Robert O'Connor, is obviously trying to reference "Catch-22," it is far too dark and violent to be funny.

Might as well have been titled "That Kentucky Fried Chicken Movie." That's how it will be referred to, anyway, though some people may insert an adjective such as "convoluted," "disappointing," or "anti-climactic" before the name of the fast-food franchise.

Rush has never played anyone this starkly unsympathetic, and he proves to be very good at playing very bad.

CSA is a sophomoric film essay that would have barely rated a passing grade from a tougher teacher.

Miller takes Chekhov's themes and checks them off, but he never gets under his egocentric characters' thin skins.

Though some of the action cinematography is stunning, and practicing snowboarders will love the sense of camaraderie established, it's not riveting entertainment for the rest of us.

The only thing to be said for it is The Rock. I've never seen the guy wrestle, but as a movie action hero, he's the real deal.

When 3 Needles premiered at Toronto last year, the stories were overlapping, in the style of "Babel" but without a unifying theme. It's less cumbersome as three separate stories, but they do not add up to much.

Queen Latifah, as the proprietor of the ­lady's salon next door to Calvin's, brightens things up in the brief appearances that serve as symbiotic promotion for the producers' coming spin-off movie, "Beauty­ Shop."

A strange creature, a narcissistic mock documentary.

Offers a dazzling showcase for Samuel L. Jackson.

George Bush supporters may think this dissection of the President's narrow and decisive 2004 election victory in Ohio is better than sex. But Democrats and Bush voters who have come to rue the day are more likely to compare it to losing the World Series on a seventh-game walkoff home run.

Despite the audience pandering -- not just in its violence, but in its wall-to-wall sexual vulgarity -- there are terrific elements in Baby Boy.

If you have seen the play, especially if you've seen it with the original cast, treasure the memory and protect it. The movie will attack it like a virus.

The film itself is a tedious melodrama whose sole saving grace is the performance of Samuel L. Jackson as Tommy Kincaid.

The joke is that the salesmen believe they're actually trying to discover talent and - like the people they're encouraging - are victims.

The strength of Windtalkers is in its occasional, all-too-short respites from battle, when Enders is struggling with his demons and Yahzee is trying to understand his aloofness.

This may be the best-looking film in the series; certainly, the Paris setting, with a climactic battle among the girders of the Eiffel Tower, keeps the visuals interesting. Better you buy a postcard.

On my list of favorite sports, I rank sumo wrestling just ahead of the truck pull, so I'm not a prime candidate for a "Full Monty" wanna-be about female sumo wrestlers.

Ford, soon to be eligible for Medicare, gives his entire performance without losing his breath or changing his expression, and Bettany, a British actor whose pasty complexion won him the role of Silas the Albino in the coming "The Da Vinci Code," is an apt tormentor cum foil of his prey.