Joe Leydon

Toddlers and pre-teens will be entertained, and parents will be pleasantly surprised, by this more-than-just-bearable musical road movie.

At once annoyingly hyper and underwhelmingly dull.

The documentary works best when it simply offers a concise and cogent account of epochal events.

The tone of Reel Injun is respectfully serious, though well short of angry, while focusing on how the stereotypical depictions of marauding redskins affected the self-images of Native Americans.

Trendy influence of insidiously creepy Japanese horror pics is felt in almost every frame of Boogeyman. The effectively atmospheric and unusually involving thriller tells the story of a distraught young man's protracted duel of wits with the eponymous evildoer.

Much like a botched souffle that fails to rise, Simply Irresistible is a bland confection that remains doggedly earthbound while attempting flights of romantic fantasy.

Might be extremely effective while preaching to the converted, but it's no great shakes as secular entertainment.

A genially haphazard but frequently amusing neo-stoner comedy that plays like "Cheech and Chong Go to Animal House."

Shamelessly sappy and emotionally manipulative, Patch Adams is an aggressively heartwarming comedy-drama that may be roasted by critics but embraced by ticketbuyers.

It's an unabashedly corny but occasionally stirring dramedy based on the true-life story of scrappy young baseball players from Mexico who, in 1957, scored an improbable string of successes while playing their way from a Monterrey sandlot to the Little League World Series.

A lavishly mounted and appealingly old-fashioned swashbuckler with nary a trace of wink-wink irony or revisionist embellishment.

Provides enough cheap thrills and modest suspense to shake a few shekels from genre fans before really blasting off as homevid product.

Just funny enough to mollify purists and amuse the uninitiated.

A pleasingly retro recycling of "The Love Bug."

Uplifting and entertaining feel-good, fact-based sports drama.

Lightweight but likable.

Harvests a bumper crop of laughs.

Plays more like '70s drive-in fare than a monster mash of recent vintage.

Ingeniously nasty and often shockingly funny as it incrementally worsens a very bad situation, then provides a potent payoff with the forced feeding of just desserts.

Aimed squarely at adolescents who might find "Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure" too intellectually taxing.

An undemanding dramedy.

Even more family-friendly than its immensely popular predecessor.

Seldom has a pic been more appropriately titled than Disaster Movie, yet another frantically unfunny free-form farce.

A spectacularly trashy and aggressively flashy motorcycle melodrama in which computer-enhanced action scenes, unbound by gravity or logic, are choreographed, photographed and edited to resemble video-game stratagems.

Long on atmosphere yet short on dramatic tension.

Indeed, you could argue that weighty questions about the nature of evil and the allure of sin figured more prominently in the similarly titled "Se7en," one of several other, better suspensers dimly echoed here.

Sometimes shaky, sometimes smooth handheld DV lensing (by Drews and Krybus) gives the pic an immediacy that greatly enhances its dramatic and emotional impact.

Picture benefits greatly from appealing performances by Jennifer Aniston and Steve Zahn, who deftly apply darker emotional shadings to their characters when necessary, and equally fine work from a small ensemble of solid supporting players.

Engaging lead performances and snatches of witty repartee help lubricate the creaky plot mechanics in Weather Girl, a lightly amusing but thoroughly predictable dramedy.

There’s barely enough plot for a half-hour episode of a weekly TV series spinoff. And there’s even less here in terms of acting, writing and filmmaking polish to appeal to anyone over the age of 10.

Emerges as a formulaic thriller that plays more like direct-to-video fare than a megaplex-worthy feature.

Amiably slapdash docu about The Comedians of Comedy tour mixes on-stage performances, backstage bull sessions and downtime tomfoolery to generally satisfying and frequently hilarious effect.

Loosely plotted and wildly uneven farce.

This undistinguished picture qualifies as an endangered species. As a digital babysitter, however, it may prove sufficiently efficient to generate fair-to-middling homevid sales.

Lofty ambitions and unaffected sincerity are not quite enough to sustain The Keeper: The Legend of Omar Khayyam, a reverentially pokey drama that plays less like a conventional movie than a lengthy series of hagiographic historical tableaux.

Imagine a '30s screwball comedy played to a sensuous Brazilian beat and you're ready for Bossa Nova, a delightfully amusing romantic roundelay.

A glossy teen-weepie romance that often plays like an inspirational indie skewed toward Christian niche market.

The fragrant aroma of magnolias is undercut by the distinct smell of mothballs throughoutThe Loss of a Teardrop Diamond, an admirably earnest but curiously flat attempt to film a long-unproduced scenario by Tennessee Williams.

Even though it sprints along a well-trod path through familiar territory, Saint Ralph remains surprisingly compelling.

Only small children with limited attention spans will be impressed by the lackluster kung-foolishness in 3 Ninjas: High Noon at Mega Mountain.

Generates genuine suspense as it follows a group of American actors in the former Soviet Union during a fateful period of the Perestroika era.

There's a provocative premise at the heart of Master of the Game, but uneven acting, indifferent direction and melodramatic dialogue blunt pointed ironies.

Trifling time-killer.

A low-key charmer that's bound to enchant small children and amuse their parents during many hours of repeat viewings.

Beautifully lensed and intelligently crafted.

Slickly entertaining documentary.

The Legend of Ron Jeremy is, at a brisk 75 minutes, long enough to get the job done.

Scores a few chuckles while following a familiar game plan.

Unvarnished verisimilitude, visceral impact and vividly evoked emotional and physical extremes distinguish Hooligans, the impressive debut feature by German-born helmer Lexi Alexander.

Picture shrewdly shuffles together attractive young leads, cagey screen vets and a fantasy-fulfillment scenario in a slickly polished package that should appeal to anyone who's ever dreamed of beating the odds.

Richly amusing and sporadically insightful as it offers an up-close-and-personal view of Ivan Thompson, a self-proclaimed "cowboy cupid" who plays matchmaker between American men and Mexican women.

Feels achingly sad and frustratingly incomplete.

Nacho Libre strikes a delicate balance of whimsy and absurdity that may surprise auds primed to expect wall-to-wall slapstick.

Has the unmistakable look and feel of a micro-budget indie produced for a small circle of friends, many of whom are listed in the credits.

There is a great deal more style than substance here. The special effects experts and the other members of the technical crew do their considerable best to give their various hacking sequences the look of warp-speed sci-fi fantasy.

A stunningly unfunny farce that makes the worst of a stale concept.

Amusing indie comedy blithely blurs the line between risque and raunchy, often to hilarious effect.

One of the summer's more pleasant surprises. A silly bit of tiptop tomfoolery with cross-generational appeal.

Solid performances, handsome production values and a few genuinely creepy scenes are not enough to save Godsend.

Offers a largely satisfying mix of broad slapstick, seriocomic sentimentality and mostly amusing satirical thrusts at easy targets.

Sandler (never making a false step while maneuvering though vertiginous mood swings) and Cheadle (deftly commingling instinctive decency with quiet desperation) are individually excellent, and bring out the best in each other. And the picture itself transcends its real but relatively minor flaws to score a satisfyingly potent impact.

An extremely enjoyable neo-screwball comedy about attractive opposites on the road.

Latenight cable TV filler disguised as a feature film.

Destined to be better remembered for its grisly billboard imagery than for its relatively tame torture-porn tropes, Captivity is a thoroughly nasty piece of work that nonetheless earns credit for generating modest suspense after a predictable but effective plot twist around the 50-minute mark.

With equal measures of prickly wit, gleeful pride and bemused gratitude, Charles Nelson Reilly looks back at his life, and invites his audience to share the view, in this thoroughly engaging filmization of his one-man stage show.

This family affair is a squeaky-clean cable-ready comedy, unabashedly retro fluff.

A star vehicle composed of second-hand parts that nevertheless gets great mileage (and big laughs) from its recycled plot.

An impressively polished documentary by Bob Hercules and Cheri Hughes. Perhaps even more thought-provoking than its co-helmers intended, pic is bound to spark conversations and debate.