Kyle Smith

Isn't as bad as you'd think, but this comic mash-up of "The Bourne Identity" and "Fat Albert" doesn't have much heft.

A feeble dramedy about a Baltimore beauty shop where someone should come in to sweep up the clichés.

When I go to a Mummy movie, I don't want ninjas and yetis and men turned to stone. I want embalmed corpses and hieroglyphics. I want pharaoh. I want pyramids and sphinxes and Ace bandages. Did "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon" take place on the Nile?

At 96 minutes, this vanity/insanity project runs a bit long; five minutes would have been plenty.

This adventurously awful film is awful in many ways at once.

Every Little Step shows only this: It hurts to flunk an audition, and it's nice to get hired. Everything it has to say about Broadway was said better in Bob Fosse's movie "All That Jazz" -- in its opening five minutes.

If Martin Scorsese were 30 and a Los Angeleno, he'd be making movies much like this one.

Shoot ’em up, run ’em over, blast ’em with flame-throwers, who cares? These creatures are only there to go splat.

Demonstrating that an hour and a half of stunts doesn't make a movie, this feature is X-treme only in its multidimensional dullness.

Not since "300" have I seen such manly mano-a-mano-ing as the iron clash of wills in the docu mentary King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters.

I understood two words of Youth Without Youth: "The End."

Better than most Martin Lawrence movies - much as strep throat is better than malaria.

Drag Me to Hell is pure cheese. Goat cheese.

Quiet, sober and tense, the movie makes some interesting points -- contrasting the frenzied hookups of the two men with the butcher's rote, dismal lovemaking with his wife as their bodies are carefully hidden under sheets -- but it lacks the emotional firepower of "Brokeback Mountain."

Doesn't have as much behind-the-scenes juice as you'd hope.

It's trashy and disgusting - and those are the best parts. Mostly it's just an endless, pointless drone with characters like bacteria and dialogue like an untuned radio.

The mutants are brain-damaged; the filmmakers don't have that excuse to justify this movie, which is the kind of thing the sergeant would call "a stunning display of individual and group stupidity."

The Romantics isn't as consistent or as well-rounded as its parent, "The Big Chill," or as entertaining as its less literate but more extroverted cousin, "St. Elmo's Fire," but with its tart dialogue and its perfect ending, it is sensitive as well as sagacious. It's a rare combination.

Aggressively ugly and intergalactically boring, the dismal sci-fi kiddie cartoon Battle for Terra is too weak to be shown anywhere except maybe on the next flight to Saturn.

There's too little dog and too much fire house in Firehouse Dog, a mild kid comedy that turns into a flaming arson mystery with some scenes that could be too scary for little ones.

The highest praise I can give a superhero movie is that it makes me forget about its 10-cent-comic-book soul.

Name names, please. Or shut up.

A rock bio minus the fun. The sex is guilt-stricken, the drugs are used to treat epilepsy, and the rock 'n' roll is about isolation and despair.

Cusack shows that he can still play the sensitive-but-fun guy until the ladies sigh and the men take notes.

Splashed with Monte Carlo glamour, physical comedy and nimble scams, the movie rolls along enjoyably to its goofy but endearing big scene: an homage to "Dirty Dancing."

The White Ribbon is one of the finest films that ever repelled me, a holiday in the abyss.

As frightening as it intends to be, but not enjoyably so.

Dividing its loyalties between documentary and fictional narrative, it lacks the advantages of belonging to either side.

When Grown Ups star and co-writer Adam Sandler repeatedly slapped Rob Schneider in the face with a dehydrated banana, I was jealous of Schneider, who suffered less than I did getting slapped upside the head by this rotting fruit of a comedy.

A chilling pulp movie told with a pavement-eye view of the dregs of humanity.

A sharp comedy as well as a punk-pulp spree. Don't go if you can't handle Brit slang. ("Grass" = informer.)

Kim Basinger gives one of her strongest performances in Even Money, a kind of "Crash" fueled by gambling instead of racism.

It's a pulp story pinned to the screen with an ice pick of conscience in a manner that would have pleased Allen's idol, Ingmar Bergman.

Nothing But the Truth is like listening to the fourth-best debater in middle school present a term paper called "Politics, Power and the Media."

Never before have I been so emotionally involved with an apple core, or seen salvation in a flip-flop. Taika Waititi, you had me at nunchuks.

Though nothing much happens, all of the actors get to do lots of teary close-ups.

Some ideas are auto-stolen (from Coupland's last novel, "JPod"), but those quirky atmospherics aren't enough to sustain a largely plotless film.

Though it does have a handful of dirty jokes meant to earn the audience-pleasing PG-13 rating and features Marge swearing, it falls short of classic status.

Watching it is like being the only non-stoned person in the room as someone tells a long, long story.

At last, someone has figured out that there might be laughs in teens trying to lose their virginity.

Few kinds of art are more boring than the insistently transgressive, and few movies are more boring than Humpday.

You wouldn't call The Boondock Saints II: All Saints Day a taut thriller. More like a fleshy, messy, jangled frenzy of shootouts and much discussion about the mechanics of romantic entanglements that bloom between prison inmates.