Jonathan Rosenbaum

The CGI characters seem less like artwork than humans wearing animal suits, but despite the overall ugliness and sitcom timing, this has enough action, violence, and invention to keep kids amused.

Semiabsorbing.

An exceptionally stupid movie.

For most of this romantic comedy, fatuous contrivances run neck and neck with what seem to be authentic observations about repressed sibling rivalry; some of the latter are too painful to be funny, and eventually the contrivances win out, but the cast keeps it all watchable.

An extravagant mess.

Coolidge directs as if the characters were believable human beings--at least until she gets to the end, when Hollywood and fairy-tale conventions have to triumph over humanity and common sense.

If Sayles had persuaded me he knew anything about Bush, his background, or his entourage that isn't already well-known, I might have felt more like laughing.

Running beyond three hours, the movie more than overstays its welcome, and despite some vague genuflections in the general direction of The Godfather regarding family ties and revenge, there are simply too many years and locations covered, too many crane shots and rainstorms.

Though its ending feels protracted--especially the climactic chase--it kept me reasonably distracted.

Not so much a sequel to "The Fugitive" as a lazy spin-off that imitates only what was boring and artificially frenetic about that earlier thriller; the little that kept it interesting.

It's a letdown from the man who brought us "Men in Black" and "Addams Family Values."

Van Sant's doomed and misguided experiment.

Directed by Richard Benjamin, this is an inordinately silly comedy that manages to be pretty likable if one can get past some of its harebrained premises.

Not so much ill conceived and misdirected as unconceived and undirected, this is folly on a grand scale.

Not all of these ideas are successfully dramatized, and you may have trouble believing in most of the characters, but as a deeply personal work about free-floating existential identities, this 1989 film has the kind of grit and feeling that few action comedies can muster, with Eastwood and Peters interesting and unpredictable throughout.

Another chapter in the ongoing struggle between the talented Mike Figgis (Stormy Monday, Internal Affairs, Liebestraum) and studio recutters and reshooters, this intriguing but unsatisfying love story between a manic-depressive (Richard Gere at his best) and his sympathetic therapist (Lena Olin) makes memorable uses of both its west-coast settings and its cast (which also includes Anne Bancroft), but, like Liebestraum, it seems to come to us with several parts missing.

If I were a Christian, I'd be appalled to have this primitive and pornographic bloodbath presume to speak for me.

Laughless, brainless, styleless, and clueless.

Despite a brisk opening and some agreeable (if sloppy) choreography at the very end, I was less than tickled by the premise of David Serrano's script, that the characters lie to and betray one another as naturally as they breathe.

So lackluster both as an homage and as a story in its own right that I was already forgetting it before it was over.

The action has been transferred from suburbia to New York City, but otherwise the filmmakers stick like glue to the formula of the original: a little boy from a well-to-do family left on his own is threatened by low-life working-class crooks whom he repeatedly foils and tortures, and upscale property values prevail.

Mathis and Bullock are especially good, and Phoenix and Mulroney, playing out a jealousy-prone friendship as if they were Jeff Bridges and Timothy Bottoms in Bogdanovich's The Last Picture Show, do a fair job with their roles.

A Disney musical with an undistinguished score (Alan Menken and Jack Feldman), fair to middling choreography (Kenny Ortega and Peggy Holmes), and clunky direction (Ortega) that still manages to be entertaining in spots because of its story.

An episodic thriller that certainly has its moments, but eventually peters out into dull formula standbys; Eastwood's Harry seems weary of his own sarcastic witticisms, and the ones here won't make anybody's day.

This is in some ways my favorite Hartley picture - because it takes the most risks and gives the mind the most to do.

The characters are instantly reversible--the bratty kid turns out to be a sweetie pie, the mother just needs to be told off. Only Giamatti, as the cliched businessman husband, is irredeemable.

A powerful Christian parable, painful but illuminating, about crime and redemption.

Though Adrian Lyne's clodhopper direction, underlined by a mushy Ennio Morricone score, predictably runs the gamut from soft-core porn in the manner of David Hamilton to hectoring close-ups, this is perhaps Lyne's best movie after Jacob's Ladder--a genuinely disturbing (if far from literary) adaptation of Nabokov's extraordinary novel, written by former journalist Stephen Schiff and starring, predictably, Jeremy Irons.

Lori Petty does a nice job in the title role of this enjoyable 1995 feature based on the postapocalyptic SF comic book and set in the year 2033; it's basically aimed at teenagers, though it's a lot more feminist than what usually passes for adult fare.

Has some flavor, and Ron Silver gives a swell impersonation of a cool and slimy studio executive.

As long as Spacey is singing, the movie soars.

The film's oily overdefinition of various class and cultural categories (ranging from “poor” and “well-to-do” to “avant-garde” and “vulgar”) is strident enough to betray a condescending attitude toward the audience.

Working with a shapeless script, directors Anthony and Joe Russo (Welcome to Collinwood) can't figure out what they're making. They lunge in several directions, but fail to get around the central problem: most of their actors have little flair for comedy.

Without being any sort of miracle, this is an engaging and lively exploitation fantasy-thriller about computer hackers, anarchistic in spirit, that succeeds at just about everything "The Net" failed to--especially in representing computer operations with some visual flair.

If you don't mind the telegraphed punches of Ruth Epstein's script and Harvey Kahn's direction, this should carry you along.

I'm far from being a fan of the sport, but the boxing sequences held me and the overall atmosphere appears reasonably authentic.

The tricky plot has an interesting payoff, but it's a slow and bumpy ride getting there, and Koepp fares better with special effects than with generating either suspense or interest in the characters.

Though it lacks the sensational pizzazz of "Blackboard Jungle", the politics here are arguably somewhat better, and the supporting cast -- George Dzundza, Courtney P. Vance, Robin Bartlett, Beatrice Winde -- isn't bad either.

A sensationalist grunge festival spiked with dollops of poetry on the sound track.

A few laughs and a lot of hyperbolic shtick make this a little better than formulaic before the standard-issue resolution.

I only laughed once here, at a Treat Williams reaction shot; the rest of the time I was trying to figure out why Allen made this movie.

Kiarostami tries to explain himself and reveals contradictions and a penchant for hyperbole--along with surprising insights.

It's full of pain and quirky characters standing at oblique angles to one another, and while it doesn't add up it held me throughout.

David Morse, who plays the driver, gives a relatively sharp and understated performance -- for me the only bearable thing in the movie.

By the end Smilla has become a formulaic action hero--equally at home in an evening dress and blue jeans--not a marginalized victim seeking to uncover the source of her wound, and the film collapses around her like glaciers of melting ice.

The ethnic humor that gave May's movie its charge is replaced by crass mean-spiritedness. If I were in movie hell, I'd rather see "Good Luck Chuck" again than return to this atrocity.

Easy to take but ultimately rather aimless.

The usual valorizing of guns and vigilante justice and tedious action sequences to begin and end the picture.

Jeremy Piven and Annabella Sciorra exert some charm as bodyguards tracking the couple; Mark Harmon and Caroline Goodall are OK as the heroine's parents. Andy Cadiff directed Derek Guiley and David Schneiderman's by-the-numbers script.

Broder's script makes the weird transition from satire to camp as if there were no distinction between the two. It's a bracing if at times bewildering experience.

This isn't a major Dante effort, but his ability to make a good-natured satire that allows an audience to read it several ways at once is as strong as ever, and many of the sidelong genre notations are especially funny.

Takes a while to arrive at what it has to say, but some of the performances kept me occupied in the meantime.

In what I saw, Madonna in the title role tries bravely not to buckle under the weight of Stone and Parker's sense of Stalinist monumentality and fails honorably, while the Lloyd Webber music goes on being nonmusical.

The film mechanically uses the crosscutting technique made famous by Kubrick's "Dr. Strangelove" without any of its wit or focused energy.

Tsai's obvious disgust at the sex is part of what makes the film so unpleasant; he remains a brilliant original, but this is a parody of his gifts.

Tries to be an audacious, irreverent satire about youth culture like "Lord Love a Duck," but most of the laughs get strangled at birth by the uncertainty of Siega's tone.

Flaky, funny, and sexy.

Material so bereft of plot and insight that all it can provide is actorly turns with no cogent means for tying them together.

Whereas "Posession" was relatively light on its feet, this is so overloaded from the outset that it can only sink.

There's wonderful use made of a Maine port town, and Ruben gets a dizzying thrill or two out of overhead shots, but the conceptual overload finally prevents this from coming together.

The general idea is to exploit a certain amount of role reversal, and Reginald Hudlin, who directed "House Party," does a fairly good job of making this fun.

The third remake of "Invasion of the Body Snatchers" (1956) may not be a patch on the original, but it does have a few things the other versions lack.

This is one of those slick, violent, ridiculous Hollywood jobs that make little sense as a story, a comment on life, or a depiction of characters, but are moderately enjoyable in their spinning of movie conventions. There's even a good De Palma-style fake shock ending.

It's Fellini's last black-and-white picture and conceivably the most gorgeous and inventive thing he ever did—certainly more fun than anything he made after it.

Though director Ulu Grosbard is as good as he usually is with most of the actors, the story problems tend to stump him too.

Despite a continuity problem or two, this is one of those rare contemporary romantic comedies that actually work.

It's ultimately hamstrung by storytelling that seems both underdeveloped and overdetermined.

Alas, most of the surprise and the wit to be found here ends with the title.

By the time [James Ivory and Ruth Prawer Jhabvala] get around to articulating a story, the inhibitions imposed by their "good taste" begin to seem more like gutlessness, and what initially promises to be an exposure of American liberal doublethink about slavery winds up as a querulous wimp out on a subject that the underrated "Mandingo" is better equipped to deal with.

This is a powerful and persuasive look at an ethnic community and what makes it tick.

The filmmakers treat all the characters, not to mention the audience, as sitcom puppets.

Despite all the silliness the drift races are gripping, and director Justin Lin captures Tokyo's energy and glitter far better than Sofia Coppola.

Beautifully structured and emotionally wrenching.

Lawrence Kasdan directed this fair-to-middling black comedy from a script by John Kostmayer, and although the pacing is sluggish in spots, people with a taste for acting as impersonation will enjoy some of the scenery chewing.

Not quite a thriller and not quite a character study, though with elements of both, the film is limited by its ambiguous relation to history.

Maybe writers Josann McGibbon and Sara Parriott were thinking of Tracy and Hepburn--assuming they were thinking of anything--but not even Roberts's smile can put this one over.

It reeks of unearned profundity, but I found it entertaining.

One can have a reasonably amusing time with this predictable sequel, which is a bit longer on action and shorter on wit and character than the original (hence less good, in my opinion), but still diverting and harmless enough.

By the end the story is more satisfying than you might expect.

Unfortunately the movie's more interesting and challenging social aspects, which imply more than one "British-Chinese gay experience," are often overtaken by its smarminess--including an aggressively banal score and the way some actors have apparently been encouraged to overwork their eyebrows.

There's a mechanical desire to work in as many outlandish twists as possible, and shallow grotesquerie quickly takes over.

Seems intentionally slapdash and stupid, but when one of them referred to Europe as a "country," I wasn't sure if it was meant as a joke or not. Even so, I laughed once or twice.

Based on this outing, writer-director Joe Carnahan (Narc) can't tell a story worth a damn--especially not a complicated mishmash like this one.

With a shamelessly cliched script by Amy Holden Jones (based on a novel by Jack Engelhard) that includes a speech plagiarized from Citizen Kane, the results are only for those who can take fare like "Valley of the Dolls" with a straight face and want to see Redford play Jay Gatsby again.

It has its moments, but not many, and generally speaking it runs neck and neck with Dune as the least successful and least interesting Lynch feature.

The plot of this character-driven drama is slender and the digital images rather muddy--apparently an impoverished indie feature can look bad and still not be very interesting--but to his credit, Thelemaque sticks to his minimalist turf. And the dogs are great.

Friedkin does a superb job of serving up the well-appointed script by James Webb and Stephen Gaghan.

Haven't we seen this already?

The direction of this clammy 1935 horror item is credited to Louis Friedlander, which is actually Lew Landers in hiding—perhaps understandably.

Not very believable, even in relation to its own premises, but if you were charmed by "Somewhere in Time" and/or Jack Finney's novel "Time and Again," this might charm you as well.

Writer-director Walter Hill, known earlier in his career for his American versions of French thrillers by Jean-Pierre Melville (indebted in turn to Hollywood noir), specializes in tweaking much-used material.

Director Jonathan Kaplan clearly has a feel for the material, but he's at the mercy of a pedestrian script by David Arata and producer Adam Fields.

So visually striking, so compulsively watchable as storytelling, and so personal even in its enigmas that I found it much more pleasurable than any of the Hollywood genre films I've seen lately.

If you decide to hit the concessions stand (where you're bound to have lots of company), I'd suggest going out for popcorn during either the first hour or the third, because the second features some pretty good big-screen effects involving planes, ships, and explosions.

Maybury's art-world talents don't include storytelling, and his visceral bursts of fast editing and extreme close-ups don't yield any full-blown characters, narrative, or political vision.

A potent, moving, liberal-minded docudrama.

Brainlessly efficient action thriller.

Essentially a one-trick pony.

But as a neo-Dickensian Disney exercise in old-fashioned sentiment this has a certain charm and a sense of human decency that tended to win me over.

The performances of both Schwarzenegger and O'Brien are labored, the pacing uneven, and maybe only half the gags work, but there's a certain amount of creative energy and audacity mixed in with all the confusion.

It's also about pain, which both tempers and complicates the eroticism.

An experimental feature that keeps shooting off its ideas like an endless row of skyrockets, Kikujiro ultimately conveys this grief with such sustained intensity that it can only leave a scorched path of devastation in its aftermath.

Writer-director Robert Shallcross believes in it so passionately that he came close to convincing me too.

A pretty good job of zipping things along and occasionally scaring us, and the digital effects are fun.

Hampered by the kind of overacting that the cast seems to enjoy more than the audience.

Too bad the overreaching script has to go after effects recalling "Alien," but as a stylistic exercise this still has its chills.

Affecting and offbeat.

Full of high spirits and good vibes.

You can't be both political and incoherent, and even though Kelly's models are "Kiss Me Deadly" and "Blade Runner," this vision of the near-future suggests a random blend of "Dr. No" and "Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!"

Given the audacity, it would be a pleasure to report that the results are hilarious, but most of it isn't even funny, and the sense of "anything goes" hangs heavy over the film as it develops.

Loaded with facile social themes, opaque characters, pointlessly intricate flashbacks, and inflated technique.

Overwritten by Billy Crystal and Peter Tolan, overdirected by Joe Roth, overplayed by most of the cast, yet typically undernourished.

Not terribly funny, but the intimations of an older, saltier America in the picaresque plot make this watchable.

An exceptionally feeble entry whose ideas, visual and otherwise, consist of hand-me-downs from 2001, Star Wars, Blade Runner, and Superman III, and whose special effects, despite the hefty budget, look strictly bargain basement.

A seemingly mad dog periodically turns into a well-trained pet.

Interminable...Writer-director Richard Lowenstein seems as bored with the proceedings as most spectators are likely to be; consequently there's probably more gratuitous camera movement per square inch here than in any other film of 1986.

The mechanical possibilities are worked out with precision and relish, but [the director] is careful not to allow the comedy to linger too long in the realm of real feelings. A platitudinous ending restores a safe and sane emotional order.”

For a movie that consists almost entirely of real sex and real rock 'n' roll, 9 Songs feels remarkably conventional.

"Sorry, viewers" is more like it.

The passionate and carnivalesque sense of politics reminded me at times of "Dog Day Afternoon," but despite the absence of cynicism this is a 90s story in every sense of the word

The film's hatred of Ricci and Channing and its affectionate tolerance of the hero's mousy hypocrisy and his mentor's negativity are familiar Allen motifs, but the faint echoes of his best work only make this one seem grimmer.

If you haven't lived until you've heard Geena Davis say "Suck my dick," New Line probably deserves your money.

Bullock, Rowlands, Whitman, and others in the cast -- most notably Harry Connick Jr. -- acquit themselves as admirably as the pedestrian script allows.

The silliness only slows down for a few hokey romantic interludes. But if you like to see stuff crash or blow up, this is your movie.

At least it has Bill Murray.

I'm all for bold screwiness, but this provocation seems labored despite the striking images.

Rick Rosenthal's action comedy is positively dripping with good intentions, and although it has its moments of charm, this hands-across-the-waters gesture rarely gets beyond formula Disney material (how far can you get with humanism when the humans are made out of cardboard?).

For the first 100 minutes or so I found this hokey but serviceable; after that my watch became more meaningful than anything I could locate on-screen.

Alas, the plot eventually takes over, and it's exceptionally ugly and unpleasant.

Despite (or maybe because of) his obligatory nods to Hitchcock, this is slick and entertaining enough to work quite effectively as thriller porn, even with two contradictory denouements to its mystery (take your pick--or rather, your ice pick).

Miraculously, De Niro and Grodin turn this sow's ear into a plausible vehicle for a buddy movie, and thanks to both of them, this movie springs to life.

Registers as frighteningly typical and indicates how successful the Bush administration has been at convincing Americans that Saddam Hussein was behind 9/11 and armed with weapons of mass destruction.

Searing drama that uses the police procedural to explore the moral and psychological devastation of the Iraq war for U.S. soldiers (and, incidentally, for Iraqi citizens).

Provocative but also infuriating, this alarmist documentary argues that the levying of a federal income tax in 1913 was unconstitutional and set America on the road to fascism.

Mimi Leder directed Michael Schiffer's script, handling some of the action sequences deftly enough to promote the latent idea that people who don't speak English don't deserve to live.

Naim's premise has possibilities, but its execution often feels slapdash -- the viewer's sense of deja vu may be even more excessive than the characters'.

Seems like a dopey idea to me, but if you aren't familiar with the Fitzgerald novel, you may enjoy this; at least Jones and his costars play the story as if they believed in it.

As old-fashioned movie fun, this isn't bad, even -- especially? -- when it skirts the edge of silliness, and it's better than the 1960 George Pal version.

At first I thought I was watching yet another version of "A Christmas Carol"; then I wondered if it was a remake of "It's a Wonderful Life"; finally I gave up trying to find anything at all in it that was unfamiliar.

Brian De Palma's 1992 thriller borders on incoherence and irrelevance as plot, but as a chance for De Palma to perform stylistic pirouettes around a void, it's full of sleek and pleasurable moments.

While the level of imagination here is scaled to the bite-size dimensions of TV, the sense of an alternate universe felt in Herman's TV show is woefully lacking. But fans and undemanding kids may still be amused.

I don't doubt the noble motives behind this Disney parable, but the attempts at amiable, laid-back dialogue (script by Gerald DiPego) are painful, the pacing is sluggish, and the confused story's poorly focused.

Woody Allen at his most inconsequential and insubstantial; don't expect to remember this black-and-white throwaway of comic sketches five minutes after it's over.

This is a pretty stupid comedy in spots, with holes wide enough to drive trucks through, and director Arthur Hiller is as clunky as ever, but the cast is so funny and likable—above all, costars Jim Belushi and Charles Grodin, and newcomer Loryn Locklin—that they almost bring it off in spite of itself.

Poorly acted, over-the-top, and generally out-of-control bloodbath.

Nobody seems to know quite what he's doing in this opulent but fairly empty period fashion show, apart from campy overactors like Christopher Walken and Jonathan Pryce who appear eager to fill the voids left by their colleagues.

Unfortunately this is much tamer than it had to be--Rudnick Lite, meaning on the edge of evaporation.

The adroit mixture of pantheism and sentimentality continues to be sufficiently timeless to allow Disney's heirs to recycle this picture endlessly.

Not wishing to spoil the fun -- pretty hard to come by anyway in this 1998 blockbuster's 150 minutes -- I won't tell you the outcome, but I'll wager you can guess.

I don't know if Rob Reiner is the one to blame for this atrocity, but he directed and coproduced.

This is the silliest horror movie I've seen in years, though some of the special effects are pretty good.

This leads to some fairly amusing gags involving surreal ads for actual products (e.g., for Jaguar: “Sleek and smart. For men who'd like hand jobs from beautiful women they hardly know”). Moore's boss is so horrified by this development that he sends him to a sanitarium, at which point the movie takes an abrupt nosedive into the sort of tacky media lies it is supposedly attacking.

If old-fashioned jolts are what you're after, this nasty piece of merchandise delivers. But so does electroshock.

Good, amusing, disreputable fun—until it starts getting solemn and preachy.

This is gold-plated navel gazing in the worst 60s style.

Not bad to look at, but consistently unedifying.

Betty Thomas, directing a script by TV veteran Jeff Lowell, seems uncertain whether to sympathize with her three heroines or with the title cad, but there's something mildly charming about this cheerful revenge comedy's lack of any straightforward moral agenda.

Nothing miraculous, but it's time pretty well spent.

As an "Animal House" romp about consumer slackers in a New Jersey mall, it's harmless enough--just don't expect any sort of edge. Smith has left the working class to become just as boring as everybody else.

Even though Kristy is seen mainly through the uncomprehending eyes of Jake, McGovern manages to fare better with the cliches thrown at her than Bacon does; but neither has a prayer of scoring at a game whose rules and players might have been dreamed up by a computer. Even the cutesy minor gag of putting the title's initials on the hero's license plate has something grimly nonhuman about it.

Val Kilmer, clearly pleased to be entering the Oscar disability sweepstakes, does what he can as the hunk who learns how to see.

An extravagant waste of resources.

With its flashy, pretentious visual effects, this is really a 98-minute dream sequence--though it's worth recalling that the most effective dream sequences tend to be only a few minutes long.

A few of the bad-taste gags are funny, and Carrey's grimaces have a certain inspired delirium, but this is a long way from the social comedy of Jerry Lewis.

It's been a month since I attended a preview, and I'm more grateful than sorry that I no longer remember it well. Drug thrillers and revenge plots bore me.

Fairly strong on period atmospherics, but it mainly adds up to yet another pointless adaptation of a literary standby.

Part of the idea here was to play in the ambiguous zones where Las Vegas tackiness, LSD hallucinations, Gilliam beasties, and lots of vomit become difficult to separate.

Formulaic sass machine... I was writhing in my seat.

Formulaic but fairly well-done.

A loud and often stupid action thriller in which director Thomas Carter (Swing Kids) has every screaming psycho killer and every hysterical hostage behaving identically. Lots of car crashes, one superb explosion, and the fleeting charms of Carmen Ejogo (Absolute Beginners) hardly compensate for the overall unpleasantness, in which sadism is taken for granted and no character is allowed to develop. The idiotic script is by Randy Feldman.

Pistol-packing De Jesus evokes Pam Grier in spots but certainly holds her own.

It bored me clean out of my wits.

More of the same, though a lot coarser than its immediate predecessor, and the characters and situations have now calcified to the point where they're simply sitcom staples.

The director's familiarity with silent cinema enhances the prudish pornographic footage, but when he starts cutting between separate perversions, I began to wonder if he was getting as bored with the material as I was.

If you're up for good nihilist entertainment, look no further.

This is better than good, it's wonderful: if facial expressions can be compared to colors, Gedeck works with an unusually broad palette, constantly surprising us, and she helps her costars shine.

Though praised when it came out (1930), Alfred Hitchcock’s film of Sean O’Casey’s play, with some of the original Dublin cast (including Sara Allgood as Juno), is a fairly deadly case of canned theater that’s pretty close to what Hitchcock many years later would refer to as “photographs of people talking.”

Its main source is a comic book, but it might as well be a computer.

Teen romance and operetta-style singing replace the horror elements familiar to moviegoers, and director Joel Schumacher obscures any remnants of classy stage spectacle with the same disco overkill he brought to "Batman Forever."

This moves back and forth between slightly clever and dopey or silly, kept vaguely watchable by the charming leads.

A watchable thriller.

The truth is that this programmatic Christian parable is pretty unbearable--glib, often myopic, and reeking with sentimentality and self-pity.

An entertainingly offbeat blend of 19th-century science fiction and Hope and Crosby Road comedies.

Slight but savory.

Almost no plot here and even less character--just a lot of pretexts for S-M imagery, Catholic decor, gobs of gore, and the usual designer schizophrenia.

This has its moments, but most of these are engulfed by the overall murk.

The sincerity of their performances (Lopez and Caviezel) overrides the intermittent implausibilities of Gerald Dipego's script.

A corny but sincere weeper written by Jonathan Marc Feldman, directed by Thomas Carter, and shot mainly in Prague.

Eugene Levy is the only actor who emerges relatively unscathed in such a fetid climate; as for Joan Plowright, I hope she took home a healthy check.

Glitz with no mind and lots of fancy visuals, edited with a pounding beat.

Mainly it's a shambles, though for once Williams gets to do what he's best at (his stand-up shtick), and the absurd story, no matter how carelessly assembled, keeps moving.

Howard, as usual, seems bent on mixing genres to make several movies at once--monster movie, crime movie, coming-of-age movie, and action-adventure movie (among others)--yielding an overall narrative that's not boring but not especially suspenseful or focused either.

Its trickery might seem cute or clever to viewers who don't take either movies or people very seriously, but to me it recalled cynical "puzzle" films like "Memento" and "Irreversible," with no reason to exist apart from its gimmick.

Slapdash plot, paper-thin characters, misogynist undertones, and mechanical crosscutting are all soft-core standbys.

This semianimated adventure is enjoyable and imaginative despite its formulaic qualities.

"B.S. I Love You" would be a more accurate title.

The movie offers an insulting "let them eat cake" gesture toward the 1982 audience, but the pacing is so ragged and the characters so lifeless that few will be able to stay awake long enough to feel offended

I was seduced part of the time, thanks largely to Bonham Carter's sensuality, but the whole is unsatisfying, and it's tempting to see the imposed recutting as a major source of the problem.

It's silly adolescent stuff, but director Brett Ratner and screenwriters Paul Zbyszewski and Craig Rosenberg serve it up gracefully.

Thematically, this has a lot to do with the sexiness of class difference and the hypocrisy of marriage and double standards, although, as often happens in porn, the “dream sequences” by the end make it hard to know what's actually happening in terms of plot. But customers looking for photogenic flesh and passion, with a passing plug for safe sex thrown in, won't have much cause for complaint.

The talented director Bill Duke (A Rage in Harlem, Deep Cover), who brought distinction even to The Cemetery Club, his previous outing, goes to sleep here, and it's hard to blame him; why stay awake for insulting hackwork like this? James Orr and Jim Cruickshank wrote this malarkey.

Considering the 32 writers (including Tom S. Parker, Jim Jennewein, and Steven E. de Souza) who worked on this live-action adaptation of the 60s Hanna-Barbera cartoon series about a Stone Age family, one might have expected a few funny lines here and there, but this is mirthless (and worthless) from top to bottom.

Offers the same crudely effective variation on the hatred and fear of hillbillies in "Deliverance."

On the plus side, it isn't boring, and Jolie and Ethan Hawke, who plays an art dealer and key witness, generate a certain amount of edgy chemistry. But eventually the filmmakers' desire to shock and tease overtakes any feeling for character or common sense.

Before this turns to total mush, it's a quirky, fitfully effective fantasy periodically enlivened by the cast.

This comedy-drama was written by Simon Beaufoy, who brought us "The Full Monty," and it has some of the same gamy mix of alternative sexuality and working-class heart.

I haven't seen the original, and this mishmash -- doesn't make me want to.

You may find it pleasantly diverting, especially if you like the leads, but mostly it made me want to see "Adam's Rib" again.

It's fun, instructive, and stimulating, but never beautiful. Ultimately it's limited by its compulsion to knock our socks off at every turn and to compare itself with "Alice in Wonderland."

I was bored well before the end, but found the first half hour pretty funny.

Tacky in the extreme, this self-congratulatory 1988 film is an exercise in hypocrisy, indulging every form of Christmas exploitation that it pretends to attack, and many of the laughs are forced.

This all-day sucker put me to sleep -- though it's possible I retreated out of self-defense.

The mirthlessly sadistic gags tend to target people in wheelchairs or hospital beds and betray a mild if all-encompassing disgust for the source material and the audience.

Cage is the only actor allowed to do riffs on his assigned part, something he takes full advantage of; the others are stuck with their two-dimensional satirical profiles, which grow increasingly tiresome and unyielding as the comic plot predictably unfolds.

The only one who seems to be having much fun is Parker Posey, camping it up as one of the vampires.

Humorless, lugubrious, and interminable.

Dopey, violent horror thriller.

Charmingly low-tech fantasy.

I had a pretty good time with this until the end, when I felt so soiled by the filmmakers' cynicism and the characters' gratuitous viciousness that I wanted to take a bath.

The most obnoxious case of masculine swagger since Andrew Dice Clay, with just a tad of Paul Lynde thrown in for spice, Jim Carrey defies you not to bolt for the exit while playing the title hero in this 1994 comic mystery.

The Fort Lauderdale setting imparts little flavor or atmosphere, and the same goes for the flagrantly unerotic dances.

Jon Voight, the all-purpose villain, does a pretty good job of imitating Marlon Brando imitating a Paraguayan snake expert, but the rest of the players--including Jennifer Lopez, Ice Cube, Eric Stoltz, Owen Wilson, Vincent Castellanos, Jonathan Hyde, and Kari Wuhrer--seem to be in a hurry to pick up their checks.

Director F. Gary Gray doesn't have a clue about how to film this couple dancing, and Peter Steinfeld's crude script confuses character with shtick while racing us through a story where loyalties and motivations turn on a dime.

Of course the movie's real raison d'etre is watching Ice Cube tear up government facilities and blockades with a tank, spout Schwarzenegger-style kiss-off lines, and commandeer the kind of babes and high-tech cars that James Bond usually plays with.

Freeman's God is a mix of Old and New Testament, with a dash of both sexism and sitcom; Carell's Noah is a political fool, but that only proves he's honest and sincere. This is idiotic, but it's so good-natured I didn't mind.

The unfocused story is so bereft of any clear sense of period or location that the political melodrama sometimes seems to be taking place inside a cigar box.

Four writers worked on the script, and they all should hang their heads in shame.

This interminable, poorly constructed drug thriller by writer-director Frank E. Flowers sat on the shelf for two years before winning a release.

Vacuous filmmaking of a very familiar kind.

This 2005 farce about a hellish Passover seder panders to middle-class Jews as gleefully as Tyler Perry's movies pander to middle-class African-Americans, though there's less religiosity and a greater degree of self-hatred in the vulgar stereotypes.

Arnold Schwarzenegger and Jamie Lee Curtis must have a soft spot for the disabled kids of billionaires, because both have cameos near the end of this vulgar and dreadfully dopey enterprise; more impressively savvy is director Penelope Spheeris, who plays herself directing the movie-within-a-movie and manages to seem superfluous in both roles.

John Frankenheimer is credited as director, but given the scrambled, multiple agendas at play here, he seems to function more like a bemused traffic cop.

The script...and Rob Reiner's direction...bristle with phoniness.

There aren't many movies that deal with middle-aged women, and this one manages to do so with a fair amount of wit and heart.

Misshapen and obfuscating biopic.

Dog slobber enthusiasts (as well as fans of dog farts) will have a field day. Everyone else will have to settle for a formulaic cop comedy that has Hanks but little else.

Somewhat preposterous but fairly watchable mystery thriller. The plot gets so convoluted and farfetched that you still may be scratching your head after the denouement, but you probably won't be bored.

The stylistic discontinuities and pile-driver excesses can be off-putting for an outsider like me, but for fans this may well be part of the appeal.

Unfortunately, the pattern has so calcified that Gene Autry westerns seem like models of moral complexity by comparison.

It's hard to think of a deadlier shotgun marriage than Jacques Tourneur's poetry of absence and Spielbergian uplift, but Shyamalan has patented the combo, adding pretentious camera movements that are peculiarly his own--even the jokes are pretty solemn.

If this were witty, it might have qualified as a downtown version of "All About Eve"; if it were believable, I wouldn't have come away feeling that the actors (including Dylan McDermott and Chloe Sevigny) were wasted.

This egregious collection of cock-waving cliches is the silliest piece of macho camp since Roadhouse.

The film gets campier by the minute.

Reminded me most of Jean Genet's "Un chant d'amour," with bondage and latex replacing incarceration and cigarettes. This is not to say that it's equally good or poetic, but the eroticizing of a whole universe is no less apparent.

Once the gore and suspense take over, this becomes mechanical and unpleasant.

Sitting through this barrage of all-purpose insults aimed at obvious targets was an unenlightening chore.

Another virtual-reality SF movie -- and you're not likely to care.

Originality and even a certain amount of obscurity are more appealing than formula. This doesn't work, but I was never bored.

There are many plot complications, most designed to get us to applaud our tolerance of religious differences.

Seems more theatrical than cinematic, needing the kind of direct address that only a stage can provide.

Misguided version of one of the Bard's best comedies.

Script and direction are both fairly slapdash, but the actors and the overall sweetness keep this chugging along on some level .

Under the circumstances, MacLaine, Costner, and Ruffalo acquit themselves well.

Translating Woolrich's pulpy obsessiveness and crazy contrivances into the stuff of light comedy is no easy matter, and the movie gets as far as it does mainly with the help of Lake and Shirley MacLaine.

I found it more pleasurable as a time waster than either "Mission: Impossible."

If you haven't lived until you've seen Laurence Fishburne and Sam Neill duke it out in a vat full of red paint, here's your chance; personally, my idea of hell would be having to see this stinker again.

For most of the running time I was mainly confused, as well as mildly nauseated by the gross-out details of a tale that tends to be more slimy than scary.

Has some of the ring of truth, even though the movie lingers far too long over its own epiphanies.

The film itself regresses, starting in the present and winding up with a cautionary ending that evokes the hokiest SF movies of the 50s.

I don't know the actual budget of this adventure yarn, but it feels like a middle-range effort whose heart is with the bargain-basement offerings of yesteryear.

There are a few pretty good design effects en route, but not enough to compensate for all the embarrassments.

The special effects, for once, are witty rather than overblown, and director Nora Ephron, writing with her sister Delia, handles the material with some grace and confidence.

With all her (Bullock) grotesque disguises, this often suggests a sequel to "Mrs. Doubtfire."

A first-rate Hollywood entertainment--at least if one can accept the schizophrenia of combining a cop/buddy action thriller with an angry satire about the shamelessness of the media.

This fumbling and formulaic semiremake of The Private War of Major Benson (1955) is basically just an excuse to let comic Damon Wayans—functioning here as cowriter and executive producer as well as star—strut his stuff. But he's strutting in a void, and not even two gold teeth will light his way. The initial premise [is] good for a couple of laughs at most.

Nearly all the SF premises are accorded the status of Andrew Dice Clay one-liners - which means that they, along with the characters, keep changing from one scene to the next.

Peter Hyams, a pretty good cinematographer but a mediocre director, goes to work on a script by Andrew W. Marlowe that's designed to carry us from one bit of hyperbole to the next.

A major washout.

The cast is certainly impressive, and probably reason enough for seeing this.

This effective, well-paced antimilitary thriller has more conflicting flashbacks than you can shake a stick at.

This doesn't exactly set the world on fire, but I was charmed by its old-fashioned storytelling, which is refreshingly free of archness, self-consciousness, or "Kill Bill"-style wisecracks.

Unafraid to look absurd but lacks the self-conviction needed to come off as camp.

Frantic and unfunny.

A charming, albeit slightly overextended (even at 81 minutes) multiracial sex comedy.

Tierney and Hackman contribute most to keeping this life-size and funny.

Technically speaking, this feeble effort is the ninth Pink Panther or Inspector Clouseau comedy, but only the third without Peter Sellers. Roberto Benigni (Life Is Beautiful) does what he can as Inspector Clouseau Jr. (which isn't much, given the degree of prominence accorded to a hackneyed kidnapping plot).

The stunt work is pretty good, the brain work close to nonexistent.

Cutesy and unconvincing parable.

Suspense is fairly effective until it's stretched to the point of monotony.

It did give me plenty of jolts and surprises.

The protracted shoot-out at the end of Dear Wendy is even more pornographic than the moment when a female member of the Dandies exposes her breasts. The audience is clearly expected to enjoy the bloodbath even while it disapproves.

Dopey but charming.

The only characters in this formulaic crime comedy that I halfway liked were a couple of barely glimpsed wives, but the two leads keep it going through sheer determination.

As soon as it became clear that this remake has nothing to do with real Georgia moonshiners and everything to do with car chases, smashups, and explosions, I could sit back and enjoy it as good, stupid fun.

Pretentious, boring, and consistently uninvolving, this effort by producer Robert Evans and director William Friedkin to make comebacks with an incoherent Joe Eszterhas script simply won't wash.

Some of the precise meanings of this Bill Forsyth comedy eluded me, but the vibes couldn't have been nicer.

Considering the degree to which Fatal Attraction and Basic Instinct are already self-parodies, writer David O'Malley and director Carl Reiner don't have to do much to show how silly they are; in order to understand how silly this movie is, on the other hand, all you have to do is sit through it.

The film is far too appreciative of its own jokes to let the audience discover anything on its own.

Gamely running through parodies of TV commercials and shows, not to mention Spielberg, Schwarzenegger, Stallone, Selznick, and Gandhi, the movie proves to be awful by any standards--feeble, corny, and labored in script as well as direction--although the Capracorn of the basic premise occasionally manages to convey a certain sweetness.

It's slight but likable, and diverting enough as light entertainment.

Even when his work is at its most contrived, which it certainly is here, writer-director Ron Shelton is the best purveyor of jock humor around.

For all its pretensions and avant-garde narrative dislocations, the star-studded cast...keeps this buzzing.

A superior soap opera, evocative at times of Warren Beatty's "Reds."

Ridiculous but occasionally fun.

The actors make this fun if you can overlook the ludicrous view of Jeremy Leven's screenplay.