John Powers

The movie's one unalloyed pleasure is a funny Goth Girl, played by Melissa McCarthy, who grasps, as Parker apparently doesn't, that the script is energetic rubbish, not The Greatest Story Ever Told.

Despite the busy camera work, bombastic score and rapt attention to violence, director Antoine Fuqua (Training Day) can't mask the script's white-savior paternalism.

The story itself falls to earth with a thud, not least because of a casting catastrophe. The boyish, goofily smiling Wahlberg is egregiously out of place as the kind of charming-ambiguous dreamboat you'd have to be Cary Grant to pull off.

It's the disease of Hollywood remakes that they nearly always lose sight of what made the original good in the first place. Where Alexander Mackendrick's film offered a delicately diabolical blend of the ordinary and the brutal -- the new Ladykillers bludgeons you with cartoonish gags about stupid football players, irritable-bowel syndrome and somebody accidentally shooting himself in the head.

Van Sant ultimately reveals so little about this odd couple that we frankly don't give a damn what happens to them. Nor, apparently, does he.

Johnson clearly digs the idea of Daredevil as an agonized hero, slathering the screen with gloomy lighting and Catholic imagery, yet the movie has far less emotional weight than, say, "Spider-Man" (whose building-hopping pyrotechnics it often appears to be copying).

Although (Reeves) acting inclines toward the wooden, it's always been his weird genius (if that's the term) to exude a charmed aura, an uncanny sense of being the chosen one -- remember, he's been the Buddha. I'm not sure any other actor could play Neo nearly so well, for the others would all be working to seem like The One (as he's known), while Reeves conveys that quality just by showing up.

But if City of God whirs with energy for nearly its full 130-minute running time, it is oddly lacking in emotional heft for a work that aspires to the epic -- it is essentially a tarted-up exploitation picture whose business is to make ghastly things fun.

Though it doesn't fully transcend its small budget (the lighting is dingy), the story feels rooted in something more solid than prefab posturing.

Ultimately just another celebrity bio-pic, and far less trenchant than, say, the more conventional "Auto Focus." For all their whirring ingenuity, Kaufman's scripts require a director who will tether his cleverness to reality.

Although Sandler's formula remains constant -- the downtrodden hero can do eet! -- what's new is his willingness to share the screen equally with a male co-star. Not that anyone could get in the way of that mugging steamroller Nicholson.

Scorsese and his writers have saddled their dream with a corny plot apparently lifted from some old 1930s Warner Bros. film starring Jimmy Cagney and Pat O'Brien.

K-19 is so unnervingly square that it seems eerily like Party-sanctioned Soviet filmmaking: Its Motherland-loving sailors, myth-making shots of K-19 and displays of heroism are worthy of the Young Lenin Pioneers' Handbook.

Dillon doesn't yet possess the directorial chops to give his story the necessary snap; the action too often feels poky and muffled. But he does have a strong sense of place, and the movie's almost worth seeing just for Jim Denault's exquisite cinematography.

Although a few moments are hilarious, this would-be romp remains laboriously earthbound when it should be swinging gaily through the trees.

Brave, gifted, haunted and poor, these kids are so heartbreaking that you wish Shou had the good sense to give their lives the attention he lavishes on himself.