Ken Fox

A slow and pensive tone, but for all its lyrical pretensions it lacks real poetry.

As overstuffed as a twice-baked potato.

The general level of mayhem, the sudden transformations that are Plympton's trademark moves and the pervasive irreverence will no doubt delight Plympton's legion of fans; others may find 80 minutes of these shenanigans exhausting.

Who these brave men were and why they fought disappears under the usual clichés, while the astounding acts of courage that occurred at Ia Drang are lost to the dust and din.

It's a bit of 60s idealism wedged in what basically looks like a hip-hop music video.

The beautiful ice-blue landscapes are really the only reason to sit through this rambling and rather silly first feature by writer-director Sue Clayton.

As thrilling as they can be on stage, Chekhov's plays have never been the stuff of great movies -- there's simply nothing cinematic about them.

(Tykwer's) unpredictability has become predictable, and the only thing genuinely uncanny here is the unsettling — and unintentional — sense of déjà vu.

Given the serious subject matter, this adaptation of Irish writer Brendan Behan's autobiographical novel is surprisingly light and exceedingly good-natured.

So silly it's best taken ironically. But the film, much of it shot digitally, is also astonishingly beautiful.

Director Gore Verbiniski delivers the best one can hope for: a cleverly nostalgic, high-tech copy of the real deal.

Given Argento's willingness to attempt the controversial book at all, she pulls a surprising number of punches. What at first appears to go too far in reality doesn't go far enough: Argento doesn't even broach the subject of child prostitution.

When it's not wasting time with character, this deliberately dumb collegiate comedy is good for a few laughs of the big butts and sex variety, but not much else.

Isn't nearly as bad as it might have been.

Aside from an inspired bit involving a pair of sycophantic starfish, it's amazing how unimaginative a movie about a mermaid can be, and it's sad how thoroughly its girl-power stylings devolve into a muddle of mixed messages.

Herek does capture the rush and crush of a stadium concert, and the music (more Leppard than Priest) isn't half bad -- in a disposable, arena-rock sort of way.

But good intentions aside, Tucker and codirector Petra Epperlein only further confuse the issue: Their rap-video stylings and use of non-source music create the impression that you're watching characters trapped in a Tom Clancy Xbox game.

The film is rich in period detail and a keen visual sense of irony, but it's curiously static; scenes that blister the pages of Miller's novel barely move.

The cast is unusually good for this sort of film, which only makes the poor execution more regrettable.

The phrase "Everything happens for a reason" is heard more than once, a risibly simplistic cliché that not only stands as this film's hackneyed theme but also as a surprisingly honest confession as to just how calculated the entire film is.

The skating photography is excellent and, like the documentary's soundtrack, songs from the Stooges, Blue Oyster Cult and the Weirdos set the proper mood. But this dramatization does nothing Peralta's documentary didn't do better.

In the end, it all remains a dramatically inert set of talking points, and not even the high-caliber cast can make much more out of it.

The entire movie is one big build-up to a twist that, while not exactly cheating, plays is an awfully cheap trick.

Smith has changed a few plot points around to keep readers who already know the secret of the ruins guessing, and to some extent the strategy works. There was, however, no reason whatsoever to change the book's perfect endings.

But it's all done with such high style and whizzes along at such an exhausting pace that you probably won't have enough time to notice how little you care.

For all its shocking content, it remains a rather conventional psychological portrait of Oedipal attraction taken to a disturbing extreme.

Romano is no match for his heavy-hitting supporting cast: Next to the seasoned likes of Harden or Rip Torn, who's hilarious as Cole's campaign manager, Romano's presence barely registers. Aside from the charming Tierney, there are no surprises in Mooseport.

Decent songs, an amusing script and some surprisingly imaginative animation.

This short documentary might teach you a thing or two about the electronic instrument that revolutionized the sound of modern music.

Far too long for a movie so unabashedly formulaic, Sylvain White's drama about a kid from L.A. who discovers the world of "stepping" at an Atlanta university uses a propulsive soundtrack and flashy dance sequences to draw attention away from wooden acting and a cliched plot.

Harkening back to a time when race relations in New York City were even worse than they seem today.

It shares all the original's shortcomings —--it’s too long and too loud and filled with historical disinformation -- but none of the snap that made "National Treasure" fun for kids and a guilty pleasure for some adults.

The less said about Simpson the better; whatever her talents, she can't sell a simple reaction shot, and, perhaps sensing this, Coolidge's camera tends to drift south of her face.

While trying so hard to have such a good time, the movie simply forgets to be funny, and begins to grate before the body even cools.

The whole film has a rag-tag, purposefully shambolic feel -- but this communal commitment to a DIY aesthetic is also his undoing, particularly when he allows an irritatingly manic Jack Black to run wild and virtually hijack the movie.

The direction is slack -- it's Lloyd's first feature film and it shows -- the choreography clumsy and every ten minutes there's yet another gratuitous showstopper shouting in your face and insisting you have a good time.

Shane West does a pretty impressive impersonation of the on-stage antics of Darby Crash...Unfortunately, little else in this clunky, half-baked biopic rings very true.

Works better as a look at life among a family of Croatian immigrants in Vienna during the nightmare years of the Balkan conflicts than an exploration of the psychosexual tension between a prostitute and her son.

The Duffs are certainly cute together, but not even their natural chemistry can enliven all the preachy bits about hard work and the meaning of happiness.

Offers exactly what you've come to expect from the series: Bland but wholly innocuous family entertainment featuring a cute kid and an even cuter dog.

Raoul Ruiz's absurdly overwrought phantasmagoria tries to recast the notorious Viennese artist's life as a kind of Divine Comedy: Inferno.

A handsomely produced but unintentionally risible film that mistakes high grotesquerie for high gothic.

In the final analysis it all feels very much like a successful acting exercise that while psychologically acute, doesn't really bring much more to the table than what we've already gleaned from a few episodes of "Oz."

This strikingly beautiful anti-western is filled with arresting images.

The end result is a series of stylish vignettes, some entertaining and all variations on essentially the same theme.

Armstrong is fortunate to have the luminous Blanchett, who, along with her equally fine supporting cast, helps compensate for what the film lacks.

Though many of the risks she takes don't pay off, Elster's film contains a number of stylishly staged set pieces.

The message this oddball film propounds is pretty much standard stuff on the Oprah circuit.

An unconvincing and uninvolving psychological thriller.

Green and his regular cinematographer Tim Orr have a feel for the sad, generic landscape of small-town America, but rather than adding to an overarching melancholy it only reinforces an already drab, at times bizarrely comic tone.

A predictable amalgam of every military-academy movie you can think of.

In the end it appears that the problem is less divorce per se than immature and deeply selfish parents who should never have had children in the first place.

More shaggy dog story than a contribution to the ever-growing mountain of fact and fiction dealing with the Kennedy assassination, Neil Burger's feature film debut is a cleverly crafted but ultimately hollow mockumentary.

An appealing, if decidedly unconventional, buddy picture that seems to channel "Midnight Cowboy" while going its own quirky way.

Granted, the film is a technical marvel: The many chases through rooms, under floors and behind walls -- including one very scary encounter with a nail-gun -- are all done to jaw-dropping, state-of-the-art perfection.

A good opportunity to catch some marvelous acting.

Swank and Elba work hard for their paychecks, but Rea quite literally phones in his performance.

Even worse than its hypocrisy, gratuitous homophobia and cheap proselytizing, the movie is dull.

It all adds up to an unfortunate misfire: a film at odds with both its source material and itself.

The result is an inconsistent, incoherent anti-superhero action-adventure comedy.

The film nevertheless exerts a strange sort of power that makes for compelling viewing, even as its images force one to repeatedly look away.

Sensitively played but ultimately undone by its unconventional approach.

Lunkheaded but entertaining action flick.

The group's credo, "Live free, stay high," only confirms your worst suspicions about their real motives. And that makes it hard to feel any nostalgia for the good old days or condemn the members who came to their senses and moved on.

Polished, pokey and cloyingly formulaic, Denzel Washington's directing follow-up to "Antwone Fisher" is a Harpo -- as in Oprah spelled backwards -- Production all the way.

This solid, if familiar, neo-noir premise is nevertheless given a fresh spin by the funky NYC locales, the dubwise hip-hop soundtrack, the terrific chemistry between Brody and the underrated Seda and the one and only Pam Grier.

Overall, it's a seriously flawed but impressive and promising debut.

A privileged peek into the glitzy world of Texas's ultra-rich, minus the melodrama.

The plot soon dwindles down to little more than a flimsy, Austen-esque comedy of circumstance.

Unfortunately, Hu and her army of co-writers saddle the story with a tired romantic subplot and fail to develop meaningful characters.

Offers substantial food for thought on the subject of prison reform, and Ariel and Menahami close by noting that Bedi's example has been followed in Thai and -- surprisingly -- U.S. prisons with encouraging results.

Thank God for Brooke Shields: Spitting spite with every remark she hurls at her long-suffering mother, she's a revelation.

The humor is mostly visual -- 70s relics like Pong, Shasta and men's platform shoes compete with the sight of Ferrell squeezed into tube socks and short shorts.

For all its maturity - and nice performances from Johnson and Phoenix - the film winds up dancing around the 500-lb gorilla in the middle of the room rather than facing the pathology of its real subject head-on.

The film's conceits grow thin and von Trier's mocking, hectoring tone tiresome.

The ending doesn't really work, and Pla tends to overplay what's already a larger-than-life character, but Neron is perfect as the striking and cucumber-cool countess.

Director Jeff Renfroe and screenwriter Andrew Joiner's flashy psychological thriller wants to say something important about the dangers of a fear-mongering media and resultant ethnic profiling in an age of terrorism, but their warnings are undone by a tricky plot that tries to have it both ways while leaving the audience arguing among themselves as to what it all means.

It's all wonderfully trashy fun, but the good times come to an abrupt halt when the filmmakers, hoping to capitalize on the starlet's sensational death in 1967, cheaply dramatize the car crash that took the lives of Mansfield, her driver, her friend and lawyer, and Choo Choo.

Sex and psychosis mix in this nice looking, Super-8 psychodrama from Patrick McGuinn, the son of former-Byrd Roger McGuinn.

DeMeo is not without talent; he just needs better material.

This is first Lee's first attempt at a war epic, but it feels like it's his very first film: What should have been an eloquent answer to the likes of John Wayne and Clint Eastwood -- with whom Lee justly took to task over the total absence of any black soldiers in "The Flags Of Our Fathers" -- is instead a patchy war-time drama.

As a piece of cinematic art, this meandering, shambolic film isn't much to speak of, but as a time capsule, it's priceless.

As Lord Peter Carrington, former mediator of the European Community, points out, a case can be made for all sides in this highly complicated civil war.

It's a testament to both the timelessness and the prescience of Herman Melville's 1853 story "Bartleby, the Scrivener" that it can be so easily updated with so few changes.

They’re baaaaack.

The film's few saving graces include Dickinson's sardonic southern belle; Winger's welcome return to the screen after a five-year absence; and Howard's voice-over readings of Brown's powerful prose, which ultimately saves the film from itself.

Boasts spunk, imagination and a strong performance from Smallville's very talented Sam Jones III.

Gitai's film is an interesting, if not entirely successful, adaptation of an excellent book.

Give this Japanese import points for originality, but not much else.

It took the combined directorial talents of Ivan Passer and Sergei Bodrov to complete this historical epic about the 18th-century attempt to unify the contentious Kazakh tribes into what would become Kazakhstan (no Borat jokes, please), but the result is really little more than an intermittently entertaining.

Supremely silly but undeniably fun sequel.

Apocalyptic carnal horror with a strong Alejandro Jodorworsky vibe.

What does make the film disturbing is the way in which it positions Hitler as a mere mouthpiece for what was already in the air, a role he was convinced to play after suffering one disappointment too many at the hands of Jews like Rothman.

The film is hardly profound, but the form perfectly fits the content..

Characteristically stylish and willfully outre, and uncharacteristically watchable.

The truly heartbreaking sacrifice of a few extraordinarily heroic men is lost under the ponderous score and a series of even heavier speeches.

Starts with a bang and ends in a long, protracted whimper.

Cameron Diaz is the ideal guy's gal and Ashton Kutcher is, well, a guy. Together, they're a zero.

Despite Schnack's half-hearted attempt to divide the film into chapters, his film is too unstructured to hold the interest of non-fans who might have appreciated a somewhat less hagiographic approach.

No matter how deep one's affection for man's best friend, there's something undeniably fatuous about considering the emotional impact 9/11 has had on a dog named Rain.

This relentlessly name-dropping comedy lacks the teeth that could have made it really interesting.

Has everything one could ask of a true-crime expose.

Entertaining in spite its dubious accuracy.

Handsomely appointed and faultlessly acted, but no more alive than a well-dressed corpse.

Feels more like a 90-minute pilot for a TV series than a feature film.

Both enjoyably lighthearted and proof that even the most stridently purist approach to filmmaking can produce a cliched romantic comedy.

Grateful fans so enamored of traditional Irish folk music that they don't care how they come by it may enjoy John Irvin's folk-filled feature, but while there's lots of great Ceili music on tap, it's wrapped in a story so traditional that it's not especially interesting.

When characters aren't quoting Alfred de Musset, they're speaking in aphorisms of their own, and the dialogue is stylized and stilted. Happily, Kaas, one of France's most popular jazz singers, has a sensuous, sonorous voice, and Lelouch uses it as often as possible; in many ways, the film is a musical.

It comes as a huge disappointment, then, that having cast Witherspoon as Miss Sharp, director Mira Nair and Oscar-winning screenwriter Julian Fellowes (Gosford Park) were unable to resist that impulse to find 21st-century prototypes in 19th-century literary characters, fictional creations whose values lie not in the way they reflect our own narcissistic times, but the way they reveal so much about their own.

The film fires off too many intriguing plot possibilities that remain nothing more than that.

The film is surprisingly successful in developing a sense of mounting dread.

Ivory's last minute decision to render his hero sightless may make certain symbolic sense, but creates an even greater distance between Jackson and the woman he must inevitably come to love; their dull self-restraint makes "The Remains of the Day" look like soft-core porn.

This beautifully shot, 70-minute black-and-white film remains deliberately inconclusive.

All that charm is wasted in careless scenes that don't make much sense and the whole thing feels slapped to together with chewing gum and spit.

With its thumping soundtrack, absence of body hair and a camera that practically pants over every bulge, curve and crack of the male form, the film is really closer to porn than a serious critique of what's wrong with this increasingly pervasive aspect of gay culture.

Slight, genial documentary portrait of a man and his dream.

The whole thing whizzes by in such a panicked rush that there's no time for anything so immaterial as character, but what little we do learn about Chev works against the film.

Twenty-five years on, hardcore continues to be the soundtrack of choice for extreme, white-supremacist groups hoping to tap into teenage rage. With no one on hand to counter the argument, this may go down as hardcore's lasting legacy.

The only surprise here is how a film with so much promise could ultimately settle for so little.

Be sure to stay for the coda, a damning piece of newsreel that casts much of what went before in a whole new light.

Unfortunately, this earnest but short-sighted documentary by New York-based painter-turned-filmmaker Stefan Roloff touches only the tip of a very large iceberg.

What begins as a gripping adventure, thrillingly told with virtually no dialogue, eventually becomes a rather routine parable despite the unique setting and circumstances.

Much ado about nothing much at all.

This breezy romantic trifle isn't nearly as clever as it imagines itself to be, but it's smart enough not to take itself too seriously.

The widescreen photography is, however, quite beautiful, and the scenes of aerial combat thrillingly staged.

De la Iglesia's years of filmmaking experience are obvious in the film's formal touches -- his transitions between scenes and time frames are smooth and very stylish.

The film is merciless in its depiction of death and suffering, Pitt and Corbet are perfectly cast, and Watts, who also served as executive producer, gives a disturbingly raw performance.

The devout will no doubt enjoy this picturesque dramatization of an inspirational story many have known since childhood; others may understandably expect something more.

A bizarre hybrid between Euro erotic thriller and a parable of Jewish awakening.

Though stylishly produced, this clumsy parable will probably engender more boredom than sequels.

While it does take place over a weekend spent touring Northern California's wine country, writer-director Russell Brown's feature debut isn't exactly a bicurious "Sideways." The characters are less interesting and even less likable, and the only pleasure we can take is in their emotional pain.

Before it takes a sudden turn and devolves into a bizarre sort of romantic comedy, Steven Shainberg's adaptation of Mary Gaitskill's harrowing short story about dominance, submission and the twisted sexual dynamics of the work place is a brilliantly played, deeply unsettling experience.

The film is shamelessly presented by Miramax as "The Project Greenlight Movie," and writer-director Pete Jones's big break may ultimately prove a liability.

The fact that it's based on a true story doesn't make it feel any less trite.

Melodramatic.

This loud, overlong and thoroughly exhausting fantasy, based on Milan Trenc's slim children's book, purports to introduce youngsters to the wonders of New York City's American Museum of Natural History, but in fact aims squarely at hyperactive kids who can't sit still or stand a moment's silence.

While kids of all ages will want to see it, the movie is loud and occasionally brutal, and while the body count is relatively low, it's still pretty scary stuff.

In Ducastel's and Martineau's hands all the unpleasantness blows away like a kiss on a soft summer breeze, a light wind that nevertheless leaves a vaguely unpleasant scent in its wake.

While Grazia's story is too reminiscent of such films as "Blue Sky" (1994), which also draws an all too easy connection between mental illness and the oppression of high-spirited housewives, the evocation of provincial life in a tiny village that's wholly dependent on the sea is splendid, and recalls a number of classic Italian films.

The lack of opposing viewpoints soon grows tiresome -- the film feels more like a series of toasts at a testimonial dinner than a documentary.

Stovall's film could have been a little shorter and a lot tighter.

Not even the always reliable Diane Lane can save this one.

This otherwise amiable family film plods whenever the action returns to dry land.

This curious blend of fact and fiction is ultimately worth the trip -- just don't forget to pack the Advil.

This failure is especially surprising because Zwigoff not only reunited with "Ghost World's" writer, ingenious graphic artist Dan Clowes, but he aimed to satirize a rarefied sphere both know all too well: the art world.

In real life the opportunity to make amends is rare, though the attempt may produce great art. In The Kite Runner, we get neither.

A perfect example of how a top-flight cast can compensate for unimaginative filmmaking.

A frustrating lack of details compromise this much-needed look at how the promise of American diversity failed a community of Somali refugees in a large Maine town.

The film is little more than a stylish exercise in revisionism whose point -- we create, then destroy our own monsters in order to assure ourselves we're human -- is no doubt true, but serves as a rather thin moral to such a knowing fable.

The trouble is that if you haven't seen the other entries in the cycle, or don't have all the characters committed to memory, you'll have trouble figuring out who anybody is or, in the end, what any of it is supposed to mean.

Good-natured fun; it doesn't always work, but it's not for want of trying.

Pretentious but gorgeously photographed.

In a film in which the star talks graphically about the size of her vagina and ex-lovers appear as themselves to call her a whore, there might be such a thing as too much honesty.

Strangest of all, Roman Polanski shows up to torture our heroes with a Paris phone book, then subject them to a full-cavity search. A gratuitous nod to "Chinatown"? Who knows? Who cares?

Thirty years down the line, not everyone looks as they once did, so even fans will have trouble putting names to aged faces. Newcomers, meanwhile, will feel hopelessly shut out.

There's nothing particularly original about art-director-turned-filmmaker Ray Yeung's good-natured look at a pair of aging gay men in London, other than the fact that these men happen to be of Chinese descent. Beyond that, it's pretty much gay business as usual.

This is a creditable but disappointingly draggy war epic. It should sizzle like a fuse, but instead plods along with methodical deliberation.

Andreas' cast and crew, however, have done an admirable job of backing up that hilarious title with an intelligent little film that knows its limitations and makes the most of a shoestring budget.

The script too often sounds like an encrypted communique itself, and it's tiring trying to keep all the nonsensical space-jargon straight. The effort is more demanding than hanging onto a joystick, and not entirely worth the effort.

The results are only so-so.

The plot itself isn't really strong enough to stand alone. And that leaves the film an essentially conventional whodunit, if one with a rather unconventional sleuth at its center.

This curiously empty film was awarded the Jury Prize at the 1997 Cannes film festival.

The result is yet another tired, ultimately incoherent horror movie that undoes the promise of its pretty good premise and potentially interesting story structure with dull scares, sloppy ending and a pair of unconvincing, leaden lead performances.

The movie deals superficially with Native American pride and racism in the ranks, but it's hardly about the codetalkers at all: Neither Woo nor the screenwriting team of Joe Batteer and John Rice seem to appreciate the bitter irony in a Native American soldier protecting his land by serving the very government that took most of it from him in the first place.

The entirely computer-generated Hulk is a surprisingly expressive creation — it certainly gives a better performance than Connelly — but the action is late in coming and feels like a long set-up for the inevitable sequel.

Still passable popcorn fare, even if you'll barely taste it before swallowing.

Some of the humor is pretty raunchy (there are quite a few sex-related scenes and jokes) and tasteless. Adults old enough to appreciate the choice electro-boogaloo soundtrack and get the "Mr. Roboto" jokes will doubtless find the rest of it painfully dumb.

Throughout the film, doors slam, windows shatter and poor, battered Betsy wakes up screaming with tiresome regularity; even Sutherland appears bored by it all.

The humor is too adult for children and the plot far too childish for most adults; in fact, everything about the film is really too silly to warrant much consideration.

Though written by Wes Craven and his son, Jonathan Craven, this is pretty standard stuff: A lot of creeping through dark tunnels with just enough characterization to help you keep track of who's still alive, but not enough gore to really satisfy fans of Aja's bloodbath.

It's a mainstreamed, big-screen version of the bowdlerized, endlessly syndicated version of the show, not the raunchy original.

Cusack makes a half-hearted attempt to connect with Coleman, but chemistry is fatally absent and small wonder: Dennis is a unsettlingly strange creature who could well be from another planet.

There isn't enough by way of a story here to keep director Rosser Goodman and writer-star Brent Gorksi earnest but lethargic drama about a romantically stalled Angelino from petering out as well, but some decent performances from the likeable cast may be enough to hold your interest.

Impressively stylish but curiously empty.

It all feels like an insubstantial short that's been stretched to the breaking point.

A fascinatingly obtuse puzzle box that manages to be gripping even after it stops making sense.

The boys' laddish catchphrase -- "Shut up!" -- is particularly irritating, especially since they never do.

The downside is that many of these characters are hastily sketched and their stories unsatisfactorily developed.

Clearly, it's not for everyone. Extra points for a great electronic soundtrack, striking widescreen cinematography and an unapologetically freaky attitude.

The result is a confused mess of mixed signals that substitutes a brutal climax for any kind of satisfactory resolution. Parents should be warned about the frequent gunfire and a grisly death by hanging.

The film's rather shallow treatment of his art only reinforces the long-held opinion that Hockney is more a brilliant visual stylist than an artist of any great depth.

Falk is as good as ever and the rest give it their all; you couldn't ask for a better cast, just better material.

The film basically follows Moore and Slater's book, but without the details that reveal the strange complexity of the Bush-Rove symbiosis.

Heartfelt but only intermittently interesting documentary.

Stylized to the point of poetry.

Routine thriller.

And if you can't figure out who [the bad guy] is the minute he first appears, you've either seen too few movies with mind-numbingly predictable plots or you've seen far too many.

Levinson, who has directed enough films to know better, should recognize a stinker of a script when he smells one: Instead clever laughs he serves up sloppy schtick, dead spots filled with lame ad-libbing and Walken crooning "The Happy Wanderer."

The mystery is terribly plotted and the satirical elements are limited and not very funny.

Nicely shot around New York City, this dodgy mixture of cutesy romance, dark satire and murder mystery uses the same central conceit as Neil LaBute's "Nurse Betty."

The film is content to relentlessly scream "Boo!" behind the audience's back rather than provide any real thrills.

The story's rhythm is so bogged down in unnecessary characterization that the film can hardly breathe.

While butching up their hero, Moreton and cowriter Dennis Hensley left out one key ingredient: charisma -- for all his macho swagger, the guy's unbearable.

However stale the material, Lawrence's delivery remains perfect; his great gift is that he can actually trick you into thinking some of this worn-out, pandering palaver is actually funny.

This poky and indifferently plotted film isn't much of mystery.

The always charming Deschanel manages to rise above most of the film's logy pretensions, but the usually excellent Clarkson isn't so lucky.

Not even Drew Barrymore's million-dollar smile can save this humiliating comedy.

A few funny bits float the film for a while -- it's always nice to see Peters onscreen, no matter what she's doing -- but it's really as showcase for Marcus, who also wrote the script.

Long takes do not a masterpiece make, and the suspicion that the whole thing is a lark is only bolstered by Damon and Affleck's inability to contain their giggles.

Good intentions can't compensate for crude technique or lack of insight, but Israeli director Dan Wolman's deserves credit for broaching a serious subject.

It's neither romantic nor particularly funny.

It's even louder and dumber than the first XXX, but if watching things fall down and go boom in a very big way makes you cheer, you're in luck.

As contrived and pretentious as its title.

With all the glossy sex, you'd be forgiven for thinking Zalman King was directing, except that even King knows you don't need such a ludicrously complicated plot to show pretty people having sex. Each character is so burdened with gratuitous back story that it's exhausting trying to separate the grain from the chaff, until you realize none of it matters at all.

Once LL Cool J, easily the film's most magnetic presence, is out of the game, the whole thing falls apart in a hazy, confusing mess.

Lame and inane, but a huge hit in Spain.

Davis not only wrote and directed the film but edited it as well, all of which is no mean feat. Too bad she couldn't have lent some of her own gumption and self-assurance to her pathetic heroine.

Yes, it's really silly, and no, you won't remember a thing about it the second it's over, but adults looking for fast moving, non-violent fun that kids might actually enjoy could do a lot worse.

Purely literary stuff that's always the first to go whenever a book is adapted for the screen. Unfortunately, as this thin and entirely ill-conceived adaptation from director Neil LaBute demonstrates, that stuff happens to be the lifeblood of Byatt's wonderful book.

Tierney's so-serious script lacks any trace of humor, which might actually have made this depressing film feel a bit more real.

While there's little to be gained from over-critiquing a child's performance, it must be said that director Alejandro Agresti badly miscalculates the appeal of his young star; the fact he not only dominates each scene but provides the film's narration means there's not getting away from young Noya.

"Alien" redux.

Well intentioned but unfocused, director John Henry Davis's debut feature tries to tackle two serious subjects at once: maintaining one's faith in a universe that's seemingly without meaning, and the ways in which scripture is used to justify anti-gay violence.

Like its seven subjects, it can't see past the immediate demands of addiction, and the film becomes a seemingly endless string of scenes depicting shooting up, nodding out and waiting around for the next fix.

There's so much less to the film than the novel: Nicholas Meyer's screenplay fails to capture the intricate subtleties of its subject and replaces Roth's moral scope with a moralizing tone.

You may give up on Ian Iqbal Rashid's feature debut long before things get interesting, courtesy of a distracting conceit that shatters whatever spell the hackneyed premise might cast.

Not since Larry Clark's "Kids" (1995) has the threat of HIV infection been used so gratuitously, driving a narrative that ultimately has nothing to do with the AIDS crisis.

The not-so-incredible story of two girls in love.

None of this is funny, the surreal touches are ridiculous and the final fantasy sequence, in which the nameless ghosts of the murdered Wiener family smile on Josef, is simply nauseating.

The kind of film only a mother could really love.

There's no getting past the shockingly poorly dubbed voice work of the English speaking cast; Meyer's voice is particularly shrill and grating.

Shot through the bars of a barbed-wire topped cage and staged to a pounding soundtrack, the fight is quite a spectacle, but it's ultimately an empty one.

If your idea of a good time at the movies is watching two grown men go at it with fists and shivs and nasty wilderness booby-traps, then you're in luck.

Demonstrating just how different literature and filmmaking can be, filmmaker-turned-writer-turned filmmaker Dai Sijie botches an adaptation of his own best-selling short novel.

It's not nearly as funny as "The Waterboy" and has little of "The Wedding Singer's" goofy charm, but die-hard Adam Sandler fans -- whose numbers are legion -- will find plenty to laugh at.

A clear, unbiased documentary examining of the UNSCOM debacle would benefit anyone attempting to make sense of the dire situation. This, unfortunately, is not that documentary.

The music is surprisingly good and there's a skateboarding bulldog that you've just gotta see to believe.

A pastel-pretty and oh-so-dull coming of age tale.

A cheesy romance tricked up in cheap sanctimony.

While the film's erotic symbolism is surprisingly obvious -- all those trains and tunnels! -- it's otherwise bafflingly vague.

Unless you grew up in an Italian-American neighborhood like the one featured in this contrived but pleasant enough comedy, you might not know that "chooch" is slang for jackass, a likeable loser who can't help but screw up.

Too bad the film isn't nearly as elastic as the miraculous green goo: It can barely contain all the flubber-induced chaos and still make sense, but the filmmakers don't quit till they've run out of funny things for flubber to do.

The first-act crash is admittedly spectacular and the ending adequately suspenseful, but what comes between is disappointingly routine and completely lacks the kind character complexity that made the original a thrill every step of the way.

Some good lines notwithstanding, this is a real disappointment.

Though the film springs an okay twist at the very end, there's a good chance you won't be awake to see it.

Mimics the kind of comedy that doesn't date particularly well to begin with.

Gordon makes the mistake of preserving Bradfield's highly idiosyncratic dialogue -- dazzling on the page, deadly in any actor's mouths -- and the otherwise talented Lloyd is miscast.

It's painfully corny and surprisingly vulgar, but this embarrassing attempt at a father-son heart-warmer just happens to feature two Hollywood legends, and they're both in terrific form.

With friends like these, the poor guy took what he probably thought was the easy way out.

What begins as an entertainingly contrived lark soon feels like a poorly plotted muddle.

Just because it was written and directed by a woman doesn't mean the title isn't exactly the vulgar double entendre you think.

The good news is that Fishburne also stars, and has recruited a talented group of actors to flesh out the cast; the bad news is that no one seems to have been on hand to help out with the rest of film.

No amount of style or good acting can disguise the fact that this downbeat Israeli comedy is little more than a sudsy soap-opera with a distinctly unsavory aftertaste.

The film is a gorgeous nocturne of surprisingly little substance, a sleek advert for youthful anomie that never quite equals the sum of its pretensions.

A sloppy, self-indulgent valentine to the theater, delivered with all the grace of a letter-bomb.

There are two stunning battle sequences, and that rose-tinted bloodbath is a stroke of the eccentric genius for which Stone is famous.

Gutierrez keeps some of Leonard's tart dialogue, but not enough to hide the fact that the story has no momentum -- those gratuitous shots of pro-sufers shooting curls don't compensate -- and there's zero chemistry between the whiny Wilson and Foster, who has yet to make the transition from model to actress.

For all its sensitivity, the film abounds with movie cliches about the developmentally challenged.

If Jean-Luc Godard at his most Maoist had felt compelled to make adult movies, he might have cooked up something like pop-art punk-porn auteur Bruce LaBruce's slab of revolutionary raunch.

The film looks great and makes sophisticated use of digital effects.

Flashy, "MATRIX"-style action sequences trump ideas; it's hard not to feel you've just watched a feature-length video game with some really heavy back story.

Set mostly over the course of a single evening, the film is lugubriously paced and filled with improbable turns of events.

In the end it's simply another Chucky movie -- whether that's a recommendation or a warning is entirely up to you.

Not even the high-caliber talents of Gene Hackman and Morgan Freeman can save this stagy, ridiculously over-baked psychological thriller.

The movie exists only as a showcase for the animation technology known as hyperReal, a photo-realistic simulation of space, figure and movement that hopes to one day erase the line between animation and live action once and for all.

Neither the appealing cast nor the bouncing, ska-inflected soundtrack can keep the party going.

Director Scott Kalvert returns to wring every last cliché out 1950s juvenile delinquent movies, without adding anything particularly fresh to the formula.

The kids are fine, the original songs range from OK to wretched, and Barney is annoying as ever -- even more so, given his big-screen size and Dolby-enhanced guffaw.

The film only gains its footing in the final half hour, when Griffin and Solvang interview a healer who regularly performs female circumcisions and, finally, two people who actually have AIDS.

Appears to be a complete about-face for Kitano, and yet it's unmistakably his, both stylistically (the film is gorgeous to look at) and thematically.

The year's most eagerly anticipated green-eyed monster finally rears its ugly head, not with his trademark radioactive roar, but a deafening yawn.

That the film seems willing to erect a simple religious parable on such a moral morass is bewildering. That it should do so without accurately depicting the nightmare of Hitler's Europe is unconscionable.

The real-life Modigliani did indeed live a short, tragic life, but this factually inaccurate, plodding film makes it feel twice as long.

It's basically a one-joke comedy that spins out of control once the joke's over, but the cast is likable, the women smart, and one can't argue with the important safe-sex message.

It's hard to care even just a little when you have no idea what's at stake or why, be it Heaven or Hell.

This is a rare road picture that leaves us knowing less about our traveling companions than we did when the journey started; Dahan and screenwriter Agnes Fustier-Dahan reduce their characters to pasteboard symbols, colored by unexplained quirks.