Lawrence Van Gelder

These tales of upward mobility seem at odds with Mr. Pérez-Rey's choice to include a clip from the 1983 remake of "Scarface," in which Al Pacino, playing a Marielito thug, introduces a machine gun as his "little friend."

Lots of people will probably like The Kentucky Fried Movie, just as they like Kentucky Fried Chicken and McDonald's hamburgers. But popularity is still no reason for deifying mediocrity.

If an Olympic competition for overplotted movie is ever held, Circus seems a likely contender for the gold.

Though it flies in the face of credibility and becomes downright silly by its end, I Know What You Did Last Summer knows its way around the rules of the popular horror-film genre.

What Yellowbeard establishes is that for even the funniest of performers, a good script may be as essential as pitching is to baseball.

Street-wise older children might find it to their taste; but all the new trappings cannot disguise the fact that "Together Brothers" is an old story, being retold perhaps wisely, but not exceptionally well.

The film, at least 20 minutes too long, has too many competing story lines to succeed as more than an oddball mood piece.

When it comes to an ending, Drive Me Crazy offers no surprises, but it arrives there in amiable, sensible style.

No more than a sentimental little comedy.

Weighing in at almost exactly one pound and unable to breathe or eat on his own, Nicholas James Baba-Conn seemed doomed to a very short life; his chance for survival was calculated at close to zero.

This mediocre sci-fi horror film about an Ohio high school being taken over by thirsty space aliens intent on world domination breaks no new ground. But it has an engaging cast.

Warm of heart, modest in polish, Amy provides satisfactions that must be balanced against its flaws.

However fascinating the source material, there's something less than cinematic about 90 minutes of watching people read letters in front of windows.

Knock Off runs breathlessly over land and water in familiar comic book fashion, offering more action than sense and next to nothing in the way of suspense, humor or romance.

In the failure of Electric Dreams to blend and balance its ingredients properly, plot elements are lost (the brick), credibility is overtaxed (the lovelorn computer), and what remains is high tech without being high art.

Slight but bright and charming.

Amounts to recycling rather than reinvention.

Lavish in its depiction of surfaces -- clothing, furniture, lighting fixtures -- Flowers of Shanghai proves deficient in its revelation of inner lives.

The Devil's Rejects is a trompe l'oeil experiment in deliberately retro filmmaking. It looks sensational, but there is a curious emptiness at its core.

The pleasures are familiar, but not the least bit inspired.

Combines old-fashioned boys' adventure with a heavy-handed modern lecture on parenthood. The film possesses a decent heart but suffers from a simple mind.

Serious, competent and unsurprising debut film.

Sheds heat but insufficient light.

The buoyancy is only intermittent.

Though it generates its share of unintentional giggles, Desert Wind does manage to take us to a seldom-visited place: the hidden corners of the straight male mind.

A well-cast disaster movie more notable for special effects and stunts than for credible drama.

The Time We Killed has the raw intimacy of a filmed diary, but as with reading a stranger's journal, it eventually gets dull.

Where "Ringu" derived its power from the simplicity of its premise and the purity of its execution, One Missed Call staggers under the weight of its director's taste for baroque excess.

What results is a candy-colored broad comedy with noteworthy performances.

A rare and often chilling glimpse into the culture of North Korea.

Instead of sending up their cinematic sources, the creators of Muppets From Space rely too much on this spent screen fuel. Frenetic movement and loud music overwhelm warmth and compassion, and the balance of character, plot, irreverent humor and innate decency that made some of the earlier Muppet movies so welcome is lost.

Rather than seeming classic, Freeway appears to be another film maker showcase, a derivative apprentice work.

This sweet-natured but plodding adaptation of a young-adult novel by Carl Hiaasen could have used a little less broad satire of corporate greed and a few more, well, owls.

While instructive on environmental concerns about the impact of logging, Butterfly does not reward those who seek dispassionate psychological insight into the zealous Ms. Hill.

Structurally, Sex, Politics and Cocktails is wildly, almost frantically inventive, with techniques ranging from stop-motion to split-screen to silent film-style intertitles. But no amount of directorial trickery can mask the essential vacuousness of the story and its characters.

It is a measure of the shortcomings of this genial, well-meaning but ultimately unenchanting film that scene after scene is stolen by the second bananas.

The offending videotape is never seen, but the entire film is built around its absence. Periodically, the film returns to a written police account of the video, which scrolls up the screen, documenting the animal's suffering blow by blow to the sound of ominous music.

Turns out to be a pretentiously righteous drama that drowns any claim to serious attention in a sea of superficial characters.

Ordinary lives have become an ordinary film.

Mr. Morel's predilection for murky, nearly pitch-black cinematography and spare, elliptical dialogue indicates his debt to filmmakers like François Ozon and Claire Denis, but Three Dancing Slaves lacks the psychological precision of Mr. Ozon's or Ms. Denis's work.

The novelty of a bloody horror film built around a malevolent doll carrying the soul of a serial killer has worn thin.

People who are immune to atrocious acting in minor roles; to occasionally poor dubbing; to a totally unoriginal story; to the sort of sloppiness that allows at least one reference to the octopus as a squid; and to a climactic sequence that looks like feeding time at the aquarium when it is at all intelligible, will cull the exceedingly minor rewards of "Tentacles" from some realistic underwater photography, a nicely manipulative opening sequence in which the baby vanishes; and the bobbing corpse gimmick that was more shocking than anything else in "Jaws."

Mr. Rodriguez seems unsure what his film is really about, making the moral of the story -- "dream an unselfish dream" -- feel more like a vaguely judgmental homily than a satisfying conclusion.

Repackaged as cyberthriller, the old time-travel adventure returns in this stylish but overplotted and ultimately illogical combination of science fiction, mystery and romance.

Belly is a film that begs for a pat on the head for its virtue while catering to cinematic tastes more interested in crotch shots, topless dancers, wall-sized television screens, ganja galore and, wherever possible, crime without punishment, all to the accompaniment of a high-octane soundtrack.

Leave It to Beaver is the sort of movie that could be described as good clean fun if it happened to be good or fun.

Plods along, never catching dramatic fire, sometimes suffering from amateurish acting and often relying on its intrusive and treacly music to impart mood and rhythm.

Sometimes even a talented lineup produces unexceptional results.

Easy to like and difficult to admire.

To make a film in 2005 that asks audiences to sympathize with the plight of a band of terrorists is an intellectually audacious gesture.

Short on suspense, routine in its action and monotonous in its performances.

Special effects in which the actors appear repeatedly in black outline and occasionally distorted perspective; and an assortment of tricks (rearing up on hind wheels, blushing and blinking his lights) that possesses a somewhat limited power to captivate...Reluctant adults marched off to "Herbie" by tiny press gangs may take what consolation they can from the scenery, featuring France and Monaco.

Theresa Russell is terrific as Angela's slatternly but loving mother, but her character disappears abruptly midway through the movie.

Poverty, capable of stunting lives, can also blight films. A case in point is the earnest and heartfelt but undernourished and plodding Off the Hook.

More focused on surface than true revelation.

Most of the principal female characters are either sexually voracious, sexually promiscuous, pregnant out of wedlock or angrily bent on revenge.

There's not much sense to the plot. But the film makers' blunderbuss approach to humor, with visual and verbal jokes coming in profusion and scattering high and low, guarantees that just about every funnybone is bound to be hit, some more than once.

Too much soap opera colors its love story, and the industrial- strength dancing by booted men that is its centerpiece falls short of exhilaration.

Nearly every one of the film's emotional scenes is too predictable to hit its mark, but Mr. Jones's dry delivery has its moments.

For all its experimental intentions, Loudmouth Soup feels familiar: a claustrophobic Hollywood satire that's short on kinesis and long on conversation.

Pallid writing, awkward acting, familiar situations and tired jokes make the morons, wimps and losers of Meatballs Part II easy to pass up.

That "The Keeper" was made by a novice is evident in the visible seams between the present-day narrative and the flashbacks; the whole thing plays like a loopy amalgam of stilted costume picture and after-school special.

A sadistic, bloody, foul-mouthed action movie.

Despite the presence of such performers as E. G. Marshall and Sean McClory and the comedy team of Penn (the hustler) and Teller (the Arab), My Chauffeur remains a victim of low literacy, muddled characterizations, frequently rudimentary acting and unrealized yearnings toward humor.

Screwballs establishes that - in the absence of talent - teen-age prurience, old Thunderbirds, rock music and hula hoops do not add up to entertainment.

Ridiculous without being awful enough to be hilarious.

A tepid vat of cinematic sludge...O'Neal will doubtless survive this latest misadventure, as he did last year's outing as a genie in "Kazaam," but only the most devoted of his admirers will want to watch him lumber through "Steel."

Goldie Hawn and Steve Martin are appealing performers, but none of the energy, professionalism and gameness they display -- can surmount the mess that surrounds them in this misguided comedy.

As long on adrenaline and special effects as it is short on genuine novelty and intellectual content.

Five-year-olds who have read their Shakespeare will recognize that Turbo is a lot of sound and fury signifying nothing.

Vampires aren't the only things in Bordello of Blood that can't stand up to daylight. Neither can the plot.

It is the absence of genuine comedy that exposes glaringly the film's fundamental attitude of condescension and scorn toward blacks and women, and a tendency toward stereotyping that clashes violently with its superficial message of tolerance, compassion and fair play.

With its heavy symbolism and awkward, lurching pace, A Hole in One leaves viewers with little more than the vague conviction - which I think I already had going in - that falling in love is better than an ice pick to the brain.

In the end the elaborate gimmickry of Inspector Gadget cannot conceal its very ordinary storytelling.

The law of averages demands that every once in a while a movie must come along starring young nonprofessional actors who aren't very good. That's unfortunately the case in 15.

Memo to Shaquille O'Neal: Don't give up your night job.

A quintessential Renny Harlin film: a big, dumb, loud action movie.

Film Geek has a likable premise, an unusual setting in downtown Portland, Ore., and a pleasantly homemade indie feel. Unfortunately, Scotty Pelk, as written by James Westby and played by Mr. Malkasian, is actually so irritating, so genuinely hard to take, that like the rest of the characters in this semiautobiographical movie, we soon find ourselves itching to get away from him.

The team that gave the world "Dumb and Dumber" returns with something feeble and feebler.

Think of it as a modern-day variant on a Shakespearean comedy, only without the verbal felicity or dramatic structure.

This clunky juvenile comedy lurches among multiple story lines without fully realizing the comic potential of any.

A modest but engaging mixture of comedy and drama that derives most of its energy from the performance of Callie Thorne.

Eventually becomes preaching that is likely to tax the credibility of the unconverted.

If it were medically possible to overdose on claptrap, Orca would be compelled to carry a warning from the Surgeon General.

The scenery, however, is handsome, and Miss Pays is indeed the sort of beauty who might have inspired Fitzgerald. But on the subject of credible motivation, Oxford Blues is likely to have left him depressed.

A high-concept, low-reward hodgepodge that mingles elaborate stunts and shootouts with stereotypical ethnic humor.

In films, as in the ring, heart and will without exceptional talent don't produce winners.

All its 89 minutes of fast cuts, swooping overhead shots, sun, surf, song, sunburn and sex cannot obscure the extent of its shallowness.

When it comes to father, sons and mob life, stick to "The Godfather."

Comes off as noisy and ill conceived, long on morphing monsters, short on storytelling talent and uneven in its efforts at animation.

There is an explanation for everything, but it is a long time coming and not worth the wait.

Begins to seem not so much an examination but an exploitation.

Cause for fright in only one respect: the possibility that it could spawn sequels.

Gang Related is a preposterously overplotted tale of two police detectives with moral compasses so defective that they have buried their brains and consciences along with 10 of their murder victims long before the film even begins.

Even pretensions toward the humorous and hip cannot save this blood-drenched film from its innate tastelessness.

Light on originality and low on suspense though high on design and special effects.

In the spring a monster's fancy lethally turns to thoughts of lust. This thought, reduced to a level contemptuous of taste and reasonable intelligence, underlies Species II.

Monotonously paced and too long, Jersey Guy also suffers in its early scenes from attempts at humor that probably read better on the page than they play on the screen.