Lisa Schwarzbaum

Too bad Kapur's new, glittering sequel also shows up feeling prematurely old, square, and cautious. A production of exquisitely complicated wigs and expensively grand wide shots, it pauses often to admire its own beauty, leery of messing with previous success.

Unbearable were Witherspoon not such a genuinely attractive performer.

You know what happens in Taken 2, don't you? The same thing that happened four years ago in Taken, but different. (But the same.)

Owen devotes himself to the horror-flick role of a father battling his daughter's monsters with the same trademark efficiency and intensity he brings to every project, whether pulpy like "Killer Elite" or pure like "Shadow Dancer."

"Revenge of the Nerds" is way cooler in its proud defense of geekosity, no question. But anti-ditz role model Amanda Bynes just happens to be cute.

Can be interpreted politically or even biblically or not at all, as the elemental struggles between dominance and submission, impulse and action, man and nature, father and son, play out to their stunning conclusion.

Think of Elizabethtown as Cameron Crowe's rambling amateur travelogue, one from a well-liked professional filmmaker momentarily so distracted by private notes scrawled on his souvenir map that he gets lost en route to telling his story of self-renewal. This undershaped, overlong warmedy is an homage to the memory of his late father.

Adorable or what?

An overstuffed, unengaging drama that makes time for a love triangle.

There's fun robot stuff, some good philosophical ideas, and a brief, nutty Willis-Ving Rhames reunion 15 years after "Pulp Fiction."

Mildly cute, mildly drooly, majorly too late spoof/homage.

The scenery (prettily captured by There Will Be Blood cinematographer Robert Elswit) is littered with heavy symbolism (fire! rain! dead birds!); the performances are merely heavy.

The importance of faith, church, kin, staying off drugs, sharing food, repenting from sin, forgiving sinners, appreciating a good black man, rejecting a bad one, and honoring black matriarchy is enumerated with typical, reassuring Perry broadness.

Even by Soderbergh's standards of serious playfulness/playful seriousness, Full Frontal is a tricky novelty item: The director himself has variously described it as an ''experiment,'' an ''exercise,'' and a ''sketch.''

Aware of its own cuteness because the dialogue plays by the rules of meta-entertainment.

A parable for adults -- particularly men.

Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Lynn Collins are so interesting that it's easy to put up with the decision-making dithering that goes along with the title.

To fully savor Jonas Brothers: The 3D Concert Experience, it's best to watch with an audience overwhelmingly populated by girls and young women.

The drama ultimately retreats to safer, duller, more illogical, and more reactionary impulses and stereotypes.

This puffed-up Western set in Big Sky country becomes a small-screen horse opera.

Director Todd Phillips tries for the kind of frat slaphappiness he applied so successfully to "Old School," but these boys are less scoundrels than individual salesmen for the brands of Heder and Thornton.

The only metatwist missing in the twittering self-regard of this indulgent home movie is the participation of a documentary video crew -- ideally helmed by some TV exec's USC-grad son -- shooting the filmmakers shooting the play within the play.

It's no myth: All play and no work makes Jackman, as Leopold, a doll of a boyfriend.

Taylor does that thing she does when she whispers as if she has just discovered speech; Pearce enjoys himself doing his own singing, and embracing grunge.

Doesn't have much time for refinement of image or elegance of plot. What it's got instead is an insider's feel for the local, excitable hoodlum life and speech.

A film not even a star as foxed and foxy as Johnny Depp himself could save.

The Dutch born Janssen sparkles serenely.

Fan-ready and saga-solid.

The shallow frat-on-frat rivalry and the poor-boy-loves-rich-girl subplot don't mean a thing. But the stepping does got that swing.

More naturalistic -- and as a result, more believable.

A visual and aural overload that ultimately tires rather than conveys a feeling of f—-d up-ness.

The movie's warm advocacy of hospice, with all the dignity such end-of-life care provides, does real, influential good.

My new theory is that Willis' own aesthetic soul is more old-world than he knows, and that he works best with directors who either are (Luc Besson) or might as well be (M. Night Shyamalan) European.

There's not a guy I know who hasn't been looking forward to seeing The Rock pick up the big wooden stick first swung by Joe Don Baker more than 30 years ago.

This feature-length dose of boyish sexual fumbling and fantastically dirty British slang is bound to expand an American viewer's vocabulary.

The big underachiever turns out to be DeVito, who is incapable of exhibiting believable warmth and complexity, or, indeed, of playing anyone who is not a cartoon.

A sodden drama of filial conflict that dares the audience to confuse the characters with the players. P.T. Barnum couldn't have come up with a better hook, but he would have rewarded his suckers with more ''On Golden Pond'' entertainment bang for their buck.

Rock and Mac exult in the kind of highly charged verbal and physical antics that are star-turn rewards for performers currently at the tops of their games.

The scariest thing in the not-scary-enough The Ring Two is the notion that even smart, attractive adults - yikes, even mothers - just never learn, either.

There is pleasure in giving oneself up to the gusty swirls of the film's imagery, and especially to the handsome grandeur of its star.

This sunny ode to brotherhood, made on a tiny budget, goes a fair distance on good vibes.

A triumph of performance, production, and adaptation over the empty-calorie dither of its source material.

Exceedingly blurred rendering of a simply told, artful novel.

No excuse for the bitterness and crudity in America's Sweethearts -- a noxious combination that erodes the 1930s and '40s screwball-comedy armature on which this mirthless movie is based.

Killing looks ridiculously easy in this dispensable exploitation picture, directed for maximum impact of head-cracking pain by ad-trained Irish director Gary McKendry in his first feature.

The balance of inspired idiocy to hackneyed buffoonery is out of whack.

Nothing I've read about Iraq or seen on TV in the past few weeks has felt nearly as real and intimate as this commanding fiction.

A brain-squandering thriller.

The trek is long, the direction (by Murray’s Quick Change colleague Howard Franklin) is soft, the script (by Roy Blount Jr.) is windy, and the occasional laughs are as heavy-footed as the thunking lead pachyderm herself.

Director and co-writer William Bindley engages every move in the underdog playbook, including, but not limited to, the time the good citizens of Bedford Falls chipped in to make up George Bailey's shortfall in "It's a Wonderful Life."

I just don't know any chick who will make sense of this flick -- it's that blitheringly out of touch with present psychosexual (never mind feminist) time and space.

Theatrically ambitious, musically busy, and in the end cinematically inert - clearly reflects the authorship of myth-loving director Julie Taymor.

It's not the fault of "The Sopranos" charismatic, beefy star (Gandolfini) that he's an actor of such substance and quiet ardor as to make idle movie star ribbitting look frivolous.

For some four fifths of its length, Jersey Girl is as square as a turnpike-diner place mat.

Nobody will go to see Michael Winterbottom's sexually explicit, novelty-act drama - a naughty peep show for sobersides, disguised as a nature documentary - to hear the songs; everyone will go to see the shagging, which occupies the majority of the screen time.

It's a tragedy, really: According to the hapless team who made the movie, Our Paige is a relatively interesting young liberal who knows her own mind before the accident and a rather tedious, girlish conservative who fusses about keeping her hair smooth afterwards.

The movie is cross-eyed with fuzzy thinking; it's also an interesting, if wacko, artistic response to world events.

The result is a naughty throwaway in all senses of the word.

The star (Allen), unleashed, is so energetic in his approximation of a bearded collie -- his nose sniffing the air, his whole being (which toggles between human and canine form) overcome by the need to fetch any stick thrown -- that his slobbery charm carries the picture.

Even though they're now college dudes, fulfillment for fellas is still predicated on copping a feel and downing a brewski.

With every recycled piece of business -- which is to say, every scene in Anything Else -- the distance widens between Allen and the elusive audience he pessimistically chases. He has never seemed less in touch with his own real, pulsing, 21st-century city.

As a book, The Beach offers the option of diving deep. As a movie, it sticks too close to the shoreline.

WDIGMT? serves up speeches about trust and fidelity and rolling with the punches and blah blah blah. But it does so with so little energy that the actors might as well be saying the words blah blah blah.

When Barrymore finally gets mean, the movie finally gets good. Then comes another sing-along, dammit.

The pond is so shallow in this wan romance that there's no room for anything to float.

The amazing thing about John Woo's steely, impersonal adaptation of Philip K. Dick sci-fi story about a tech genius whose memory is erased...is how it vanishes in front of our eyes even as we watch it.

Lowest-common-denominator humor.

Ironically, they make the bond between John and Savannah look so natural that the ''dear John'' turn in their relationship makes even less sense than it does in the book.

As for the splendid Spaniard Javier Bardem, now knocking socks off in "No Country for Old Men," his lot is worst of all. He's miscast as the romantic Florentino.

There's a shocking, casual quality to the self-destructive narcissism of the pretty, petty kids squandering their lives in the L.A. sunshine of The Young Unknowns.

Features the dullest, least lifelike collection of pals this side of "Eyes Wide Shut."

Costner's determination to avoid change keeps this baseball movie at a low line drive when it might have knocked one into the bleachers.

Subplots go nowhere, and characters -- many played by well-known actors -- barely get screen time. Willem Dafoe, Salma Hayek, and Jane Krakowski are among those who are there and gone.

Soft sexual and racial jabs replace the more daring political commentary of the original, a crude classic from the Roger Corman factory.

Clumsy camera work adds to the pre-wedding jitters in writer-director Galt Niederhoffer's pashmina-thin drama about attractive self-congratulatory Yale alumni gathering for the nuptials of two of their own.

Can these banal relationships between undifferentiated lovelies be saved?

Ellen Barkin provides unexpected diversion in a madwoman cameo as the PD's brassiest brass. But otherwise the clichés keep coming.

Croft is one humorless butt-kicker. Excavations in exotic lands have rarely looked so much like items on a to-do list.

Creator producers Paul Germain and Joe Ansolabehere have come up with some unexceptional children and underdeveloped adults.

A sad-but-hopeful, dramatic-but-gentle fairy tale intentionally made less upsetting for teens.

A hateful ”family” comedy based on jokey insinuations of incest.

By not trying too hard, this remake of a dumb movie has got spring in its step. The bounce is on us.

It turns out that Joe ends up liking the old Joe better too. Who just so happens to be the kind of average-Joe character that continues to make Allen such a tidy, non-Joe bundle.

Evenness of political keel, combined with a generic filmmaking style, is an artistic weapon way too puny for a successful assault on so tough, bruising, and crucial a subject.

Adrien Brody completists will appreciate Love the Hard Way, if only as an example of the kind of self-conscious, brat-noir projects their man probably won't be doing anymore.

A half hour in and still, the plot, tone, and setting are incomprehensible.

Director Stephen Herek (Mr. Holland's Opus) and screenwriter Tom Schulman (Dead Poets Society) offer no clues, no challenges, nothing to provoke the smallest bubble of curiosity in an audience that waits 40 minutes only to realize Oh, I get it, this isn't going to be Eddie Murphy Funny!

Knows what it needs to do for both its stars, does it, and doesn't make a federal case about it. I'd watch these two together again in a New York minute.

The most unexpectedly audacious, exhilarating, wildly creative adventure thriller I've seen in ages.

The movie is a morals-free procession of bang bang bang! and blood blood blood!, and men slamming each other with blunt objects and slicing each other with blades.

Allen's canniest hire of all is Leonardo DiCaprio, who plays a bratty, destructive young star, juicing the proceedings with a power surge that subsides as soon as he exits.

Director Chris Columbus...seals this comedy in an impenetrable bubble of hollow humanism.

The goons themselves, though, look rather chic, flying through the air in Galliano-goes-to-hell garments straight out of Vampire Vogue.

At no time do the men -- that is, the straight ones -- believably hold the upper hand. In the new town of Stepford, there's no bitterness, no struggle, no competition, none of the scars of the sexual revolution. There's just gay apparel.

The surprisingly puny haul comes from the jolly, usually sparkling comedy workshop of David Dobkin, who directed "Wedding Crashers," and Dan Fogelman, who wrote "Cars" -- two great movies that both make better stocking stuffers.

The most frightening sight, though, is that of Theron and Bacon, good actors trapped in the muck of making a living.

Dark of the Moon is hardly a fleet production, but here Bay makes his best, most flexible use yet of all the flamboyant bigness at his command: Computer-drawn characters and human actors seem to occupy the same narrative for once.

Tim Allen doesn’t do anything new in Jungle2Jungle, but he’s got that Allen-via-Disney persona operating at maximum efficiency.

The scariest thing about The Haunting is how awful it is. No, worse than awful: desperate. It’s a horror flick afraid of its own audience, as lost in its own geography as the fictional film crew in The Blair Witch Project.

Broody fun.

With so much flesh crunching and bloodletting, it could have been scary as all Walking Dead get-out. Instead, the movie plays safe by cutting every theme down the middle - a swing that's effective when splitting wood or vampire skulls, but dull when applied to filmmaking.

An immediately forgettable action pic directed with a blowtorch by Lee Tamahori.

Between cycles of gunfights and glowering, Yun-Fat displays some of the dignity and suave good looks that account for his star status (without much chance to show his wit).

Because I’m not a 9-year-old boy, however, this story of a kid who acquires a blank check, cashes it for a million bucks, spends it all, and learns that having stuff isn’t nearly as satisfying as having a father’s love comes across as a calculated, mechanical production owing much too much to Home Alone.

The hoot and giggle of a girl-power fairy tale blended from potions of ''Monty Python,'' ''Queer Eye for the Straight Guy,'' and ''Shrek.''

The movie flies by pleasantly, and is then instantly forgettable. Perhaps Jules Verne can explain the science of that.

It's easy enough to accept the romantic-comedy luck of the two finding each another. It's much tougher, and ultimately useless, to buy everything else about this fairy tale of self-reinvention in a stalled economy.

Battleship is a sound vessel floating in Hollywood's oil-slick sea of "Transformers" sequels and vampire riffs.

The movie is a guzzle of yahoo-Mountain Dew empty-calorie satisfaction: A quick blood-sugar high, an eyeful of bikes and bosoms, and you're out of the theater in 80 minutes. And on a bleak winter's day, that can be meal enough.

Even an audience moved to tender patriotism might wonder how Scott, a proven master of ''Gladiator''-size visual showmanship, could have bombed away the personality of every man fighting until he's left with nothing more than pure combat.

Struck by Lightning sticks to generic character sketches of high school student types - the jock, the goth, the cheerleader, etc. - and gives Carson the best lines. In between, some charming, buzzy talents pitch in on this short little lark.

Underneath, 21 Jump Street is a riot of risks that pay off, the biggest of which might be handing Tatum funny business.

Here's a romance without a spark of excitement.

Becomes yet another lame sports farce.

Stumbling adaptation of a Sam Shepard play about men, horses, chance, and lies.

The old-pro twosome of Streisand and Hoffman make such sexy and inviting ethnics (as a certain kind of movie likes to think of a certain kind of Jewish character) that they blithely prevail over the been-there-done-that gags.

As with his previous film "Fireflies in the Garden," writer-director Dennis Lee scratches the skin of family bonds until it bleeds. This time, he uses whimsy as a salve.

Eventually I gave up on meaning and began instead to study the profuse imagery -- and also the flat characters and anchorless performances.

Plot leaps that are fun on paper look generic on screen; here's another lawyer movie in which the characters are only as interesting as the actors playing them.

A failing-grade comedy about the wishful triumph of high school dorks over high school bullies.

It is fun, though, 
 to see the younger Hanks play a murderer - it's like seeing Justin Bieber work blue.

This insanely busy, exceedingly long, and sometimes endearingly preposterous rendering has simply gotten the directions reversed in its insistence on sticking only to where men-who-make-adventure-flicks have gone before.

An amiably raucous, scorched-earth mockumentary.

This toothless thriller...feels like a strained reworking of ''The Fugitive.''

The first 3-D film produced by Jerry Bruckheimer turns out to be similar to 2-D projects from the same noise-making producer--heavy on action scenes and heavy, too, on message.

The cast, though, includes a great bunch of Brit faves who have all done better work elsewhere.

In Metro, he’s been replaced by a slick, businesslike machine of an actor, playing an uninspired variation on the Axel Foley character he’s done for over a decade now, since starring in 1984’s Beverly Hills Cop. Only this time he’s not even funny.

Of course, there's still the Williams schmaltz factor.

The Hunted stalks the masculine psyche with sharp knives, but it tracks its audience too noisily to bag us.

Visually witty and even marvelous when it comes to depicting the spectacular creatures evolving at a speed previously known only in the Bible.

Nettelbeck has a particularly lovely sense of behind-the-scenes restaurant choreography. And her warm, patient understanding of little girls' psyches guides young Maxime Foerste, as the turbulent niece, to a terrific performance.

The Big Apple of this evanescent tone poem is an invented nocturnal landscape featuring speechifying eccentrics and absurdist moments that feel northern European in sensibility.

A cloddish, harmlessly drecky comedy from the Sandler factory of crude mush.

A junky thriller that mistakes brute-strength plot twist, showy violence, and the against-type participation of Jennifer Aniston for earned excitement.

Nightwatch is a horror for reasons that have nothing to do with suspenseful moviemaking.

Garish, squeal-pitched preteen comedy.

There's unwieldy mess -- but there's also unruly brilliance to this dark and funny story about the havoc that ensues when a man's uncensored Freudian id is allowed the run of the place.

The best stuff: Wow, can those kids hoof - and so, even past his half-century mark, can the preening, Chicago-born Mr. F.

As a shameless contraption of ridiculously sad things befalling attractive people, the engorged romantic tragedy Remember Me stands tall between those towering monuments to teen-oriented cinematic misery, Love Story and Twilight.

And as ever, the jokes are a jumble of the gross, the baggy, the raunchy, the mistimed, and - every once in a while - the refreshingly incorrect.

As ungainly in its jammed-together East-meets-West-ness as Steven Seagal in a yoga pose.

The character of a scruffy computer nerd, played with might-as-well-enjoy-myself charm by little-known actor Justin Bartha, steals the picture from glossier players.

Overstyled pseudo-thriller.

Pushes and pushes and pushes the emotional throttle without respite.

There's no enjoyably outlandish hiss to this variation on the formula, and no Ice Cube or Owen Wilson, either. This time, a ship of capitalist fools (and no movie stars, unless you count utility player Morris Chestnut as a headliner) steams along the river in Borneo.

A demented, orgiastically gory vampire/sex parable.

Leder establishes a syncopated rhythm unlike anything we're used to in a catastrophe spectacle.

The Cell is foremost about singular imagery, a succession of still pictures strung together frame by frame.

Self-righteous and smug in its use of heartland stereotypes, the movie backfires by assuming that its intended liberal audience is just as intolerant and condescending as the conservative opposition insists it is.

The effect-laden showdowns feel more dutiful than daring, and the rare moments of fun are parceled out frugally, like precious nuggets of adamantium.

It allows for little of the dark and funny in Irving's picaresque morality fable. No room! Not with the buckets of bathos thrown our way, substituting for mass-market spiritual uplift!

Soon enough it's back to stale jokes about spousal date nights.

At the Lethal Weapon plant, what you see, after 11 years, are the rusting remnants of a once innovative model.

The teachers (including original cast member Debbie Allen as school principal) turn out to be the best part of the show.

Ed Helms and Ving Rhames score laughs. But the breakout is "Step Brothers'" Kathryn Hahn as the tough (sales)girl who keeps up with the boys.

In a last-minute tweak, the production has also been meaninglessly 3-D-ified - never mind that there's nothing whatsoever 3-D-ish going on. Maybe those clumsy 3-D glasses are meant to let moviegoers mimic the superhero mask-wearing experience?

Stock farce characters and stale scenes of mayhem fill the downtime between the Martin-Latifah skirmishes.

Lane and Gere mime adult courtship with the efficiency of synchronized swimmers. Yet in this ocean of emotion, they look like they're drowning.

There's something about Holly: She's the most ridiculous, irritating, two-dimensional rom-com heroine since...Katherine Heigl's last rom-com.

Based on a true story, this Indian variation on a theme of "The Burning Bed" emphasizes the psychological freedom the inmate finds behind bars.

Williams turns out to be exactly the wrong candidate for the job, a comedian singularly uninterested in letting anyone else get a word in, but with nothing to say.

Wan, generically pretty adaptation of Alessandro Baricco's 1996 novel.

The movie is in love with its own story loops and fancy, pop-dream cinematography from Almodóvar associate Affonso Beato, which is fine; it's also in love with its own indie-culture cleverness, which isn't.

Washington is wasted here. Kelly Lynch is wooden. Crowe has a ball going over the top, but how much taunting and eyeball popping can a performer do?

A parent-and-kid-oriented comedy about the adventures of men doing the hard work of mommies, which couldn't be more timely -- or less delightful.

A ripe psychosexual compost heap of a drama that emits a provocative scent of rot and nonsense.

An unexpectedly alert teen-scream disaster chiller.

A needlessly frenzied, pseudo-raunch comedy that whips up a whole lot of R-rated antics only to arrive at crunchy PG-13 lessons in love and tolerance.

FYI, there's zero chemistry between P.S. I Love You's two commodified headliners. P.S.: The plus in the harsh grade goes solely to the divine Lisa Kudrow, delivering desperately needed laughs as the twitchy widow's husband-hunting best friend.

The sermonizing on behalf of good clean fun and hard old effort (Cosby co-wrote the script) is as faded as Big Al's sweater after too many days on earth.

Petroni takes the poem at face value, turning diaphanous literary imagery opaque and literal.

Be prepared to swallow a lot of empty-calorie jokes in which blacks and Latinos insult and misunderstand one another in a spirit of vigorous buffoonery.

Written by Mr. ''Full Monty'' himself, Simon Beaufoy, and, like ''Monty,'' sprinkles pixie dust over the heads of worn out local folk.

This hip send-up of the superhero lifestyle has a bunch of great comic bits from a group of great, eccentric talents, but not enough bourgeois discipline to see the story through.

The unnecessarily famous cast for such a standard, creaking, fake-spooky ghost story (with Bible verses thrown in for good measure).

Perelman pays such cooing attention to surfaces that our response to violence carries no more importance than our response to the delicate jewelry around the adult Diana's neck.

Radio is assembled from small, hard stones of ignorance and intolerance paved over by large, mushy examples of community goodness.

Ellis (The Good Wife's Graham Phillips), an alienated teen, smokes weed and hangs out with a goat-obsessed, pot-cultivating surrogate father (David Duchovny, hidden by hair). New Age details aside, though, Ellis is easily identifiable as a distant cousin-by-genre to J.D. Salinger's Holden Caulfield.

Operates on such outdated, unimaginative conventions of movie chemistry that Moore and Brosnan end up appearing older and stodgier than necessary.

Robin Williams (yes, I'm afraid so) plays a kind of Manhattan-based Fagin with a touch of Midnight Cowboy to his wardrobe. And ants will play havoc in any cynic's pants as this loopy, goopy fairy tale about a kid looking for his parents oozes to its predictable finish.

Her (Harron) torpid adaptation of Rachel Klein's novel about female sexual desire, jealousy, death wishes, and vampires at a girls' boarding school defeats Harron's talent for exploring darkness on the edge of kinkiness.

2F2F, under the cut-to-the-chase direction of John Singleton, strips the package known as the Mindless Summer Movie down to its barest components of wheels, skin, and a pulsing soundtrack.

The second insurmountable problem is the difference between Parker's performance as a fortysomething banker, wife, and mother musing (in voice-over) at her computer and her previous performance as a single, thirtysomething girl-about-town in "Sex and the City": There is none. I don't know why she does it.

The result is a stilted culture clash and a lot of monochromatically conflicted facial expressions from Perry before he's thawed by the love of an ethnic woman.

Martin's gift for physical and vocal comedy is as deft as ever.

The movie, directed with a gym teacher's whistle by "Scooby-Doo's" Raja Gosnell, is a contempo soft-focus remake of the 1968 original starring Lucille Ball and Henry Fonda.

An earnest, lumpy macramé of a personal nonfiction project.

Comes from the same jolly homage-to-schlock-shock producers who remade ''House on Haunted Hill,'' and the emphasis is shamelessly on ornate scares. But with its high-gloss cast and French art-house actor and director Mathieu Kassovitz (''Hate'') in charge, the movie also shoots for class.

Like choral singing and travel photography, this adventure is more fun for participants than it is for spectators.

A frustratingly old-school, Hollywood-style, inspirational biopic about Amelia Earhart that doesn't trust a viewer's independent assessment of the famous woman pictured on the screen.

Concentrate instead on the delightful performances. A thespian shoutout goes to Reynolds (his hair bleached bright yellow for the gig) for his jaunty way with a cape, tights, and the hands-on-hip poses of superherodom.

When the florid speeches of volcanic rage and frustration draw to a close - and when Collins and Gooding complete their acting exercises - we still have no clue who these men are and what sent them down their intersecting moral dark alleys.

Every once in a while, though, Firth's eyebrow hints, Can you believe I'm wearing this dorky leather breastplate?

Van Damme and his cronies (including Lela Rochon, Paul Sorvino, and, for no immediately graspable reason, Rob Schneider as Van Damme's rabbity sidekick) race, speed, shoot, chop, and zip through scenes of such festive mayhem, plot is a clunky afterthought, like a lopsided fake Prada label on a cheap nylon knapsack.

Directed by Luis Llosa with all of the subtlety of a snake-oil salesman, is in the great tradition of cinematic cheese, as processed as Kraft Singles slices. [18 Apr 1997, p. 48]

The hell of it is, Be Cool is tepid entertainment that could be cool if it spent less time entertaining us as if we were demanding a definition of rhythm.

The punchlines are as tired as Hogan looks.

Maybe the worst thing that can happen is that every other movie at the multiplex will be sold out this weekend.

The message is so good-hearted, so inarguable, so dull.

Joel Schumacher directs with far less fetishism than he might have, while producer Jerry Bruckheimer kicks up only a fraction of the bull dust usually visible in his projects.

Each man's shtick swells into a frenzy of overacting.

Myself, I felt victimized by the stereotype shtick of reliably grating Rob Schneider as a Canadian-Japanese wedding-chapel minister from SNL castoff hell. But maybe that's just because this movie encourages sensitivity by hitting everyone over the head with its humor hammer.

Opportunities for bad behavior abound in Waldman's novel - the author's prerogative. Roos, though, hasn't cracked the puzzle of how to explore that behavior on screen in such a way that the characters behave badly in interesting, rather than arbitrary, ways.

Writer-director Steven Zaillian's version stultifies, especially when compared with Robert Rossen's fiery 1949 Oscar winner. How could such dullness defeat the retelling, when Willie Stark is one of the most vivid characters in 20th-century American popular culture?

Terminally muddled crime drama.

Wayne's World's Penelope Spheeris directs and also plays herself, in a movie with a message as self-congratulatory as it is meta: All problems are surmountable when selfless Hollywooders work extra, extra hard, pulling together ''for the kid.''

The truth is, the freakiness kinda turns the director on, and he nearly strangles Suspect Zero with love.

The twist in The Double slack mystery-thriller is revealed with a shrug about a third of the way in. After that, it's all about Gere looking grim, and Grace looking stricken as he learns what we already know.

It's sort of an ursine ''The Last Waltz,'' with more costumes and no direction from Martin Scorsese.

For women who smoke and drink like fiends, the trio of pre-owned babes in this weirdly rotten femme-porn romance have awfully good, unwrinkled complexions.

Young boys are the only suitable audience for Speed Racer, the elaborate live-action adaptation written and directed by "Matrix" creators Larry and Andy Wachowski. And even they might feel an urge to squirm.

The movie is a folly, a desultory vanity project for its director and co-writer. But for those very reasons, W.E., by world-renowned personage and lesser-known filmmaker Madonna, is not without twisted interest.

An unintentionally ludicrous drama of repentance.

Plays out like a variation on an old design dictum: If you can't make it good, make it big.

Requires Neeson to stare coldly and talk to corpses, but Ricci has the greater dramatic challenge: She has to operate, unfazed, in close-up nakedness much of the time.

The orgasm, it turns out, is low on the list of Amy's issues. The title is faked.

Old Holden would call the whole movie phony, and I agree, if you want to know the truth.

Brisk and sweet, even if the script veers toward fussy and lame.

There's something and nothing for everyone in Conan the Barbarian 3D.

Shyamalan's most alienating and self-absorbed project to date.

The number of levels on which these pros trade on their diminished reputations makes the movie an inside joke rather than a funny one. If Spade thinks otherwise, he's nucking futs.

If this amateur justice league spent as much time analyzing clues as they did analyzing their junk, in every slang variation available in the Urban Dictionary, the murder mystery in The Watch could have been solved on the first night of surveillance.

There's a lot of yelling, cracking wise, and cooing in this creepy rom-com.

Witless, insultingly derivative, muddy-looking, and edited in the hammering epileptic style that marks so many films produced, as this one is, by Michael Bay.

Soul-sucking romantic comedy.

The entertainment gods have cast mixed blessings on Stolen Summer. Let Pete Jones pray.

Clearly, three sequels haven’t improved Miyagi’s English, but there is something bitchin’ about seeing a babe give a bully a good thwack. Not that girls will go see this or boys will care.

A weightless, style-driven thriller set in a photogenically chaotic Hong Kong.

The title Addicted to Fame hints that Giancola knows enough to count himself among the hooked. But the crappiness of this documentary about a crappy parody of a crappy B movie suggests that he hasn't kicked the habit.

Too many moments of evident labor weigh this clever production down. To quote the playwright: ''Your wit's too hot, it speeds too fast, 'twill tire.''

Best in show is the divine Gillian Anderson as a powerful celebrity publicist, editing the image of her clients in much the same way this adaptation tames Young's much pricklier book.

A mess -- all high concept, stranded performances, and no laughs.

The comedic slaps are too limp to leave a mark. Director George Ratliff applied a much clearer eye to "Hell House," his chilling 2001 documentary about a real church.

Along comes Two Can Play That Game to demonstrate that antifeminist silliness is color-blind.

The antics involving ghosts, chases, and burping that divert the small fry don't mix with the jokey, tribute-band dialogue spouting from the Mystery, Inc. gang.

James Westby's loving and self-aware homage to mouth-breathing boys who worship Wong Kar-Wai and can't talk to girls is the opposite of Tarantino-esque: It's Westby-ish, interspersing settings of biting social oafishness with spasms of film knowledge.

Eventually, the senses jam and a mental lube job is in order.

Just because A Walk to Remember is shrewd enough to activate girlish tear ducts doesn't mean it's good enough for our girls. They're willing to buy tickets; why not honor their wits as well as their wallets?

Dismayingly conservative dramedy.

Director Peter O'Fallon fires his biggest gun: a blast of Mozart's Ave Verum Corpus, truly heavenly music wasted on a handful of dust.

The fault, I think, isn't in our stars but in the script, running up a huge comedy tab the likable players can't pay off.

Walking the path grooved by such stone-faced confreres as De Niro and Schwarzenegger (and following up on his own more successful self-parody in "Men in Black"), Jones positions himself as a Man in a Stetson.

The nightmare is that the live guys in this Dreamcatcher lose the battle the minute the mechanical worm turns.

A gaggle of hip actors squander their gifts in this unfunny, out-of-control comedy.

Under the direction of Entourage's Mark Mylod, the movie not only makes cheap sex jokes but looks skanky, too. Lighting, camerawork, and editing are all a slapdash mess, one that further hinders the actors trying their best to get through this failed hookup of a comedy.

Well-meaning but hopelessly lost little comedy.

Stripped of the pleasures of terror, flattened of grandeur (with a tacked-on coda that fairly groans with storytelling defeat), the movie sinks from the weight of its own heavyhandedness.

TV's ''I Spy'' knew how to swing. The movie 'I Spy knows only how to scramble and string together moments of Murphy braggadocio and Wilson stoner-ocity, and the sweat shows.

The Other Man is self-conscious, overproduced, overacted Euro-marital hoo-ha.

In the presence of profound questions, the filmmaker goes profoundly shallow.

The Ephron sisters, sophisticates entrusted with a simple TV situation comedy, lose the magic of the com as they mess with the sit.

Isn't exactly good - like "Legally Blonde 2," it's a more exaggerated, less buoyant sequel to what should have been a one-off comedy - but it's enjoyable.

Some sure symptoms: The movie demonstrates a smart movie geek's obsession with the rhythms and gory details of horror storytelling, undermined by a pompous insistence on spiritual lessons of the tritest kind.

It’s an unmitigated nightmare of crude, boorish tripe-and woe unto our nation’s future if kids find it hilarious.

The resentments acted out at the dining table by the rest of this miserable family - gathered for a graduation celebration that turns into a wake - are so oppressive that Eugene O'Neill might ask, ''Too much?''

It's a toss-up as to what's the worse sin in this graceless piece of tragedy porn.

The ethos of the Chelsea Hotel may shape Hawke's artistic aspirations, but he hasn't yet coordinated his own DV poetry with the Beat he hears in his soul.

Another depressingly empty action thriller.

An overstructured, overacted indie drama about gambling, addiction, and the sawdusty romanticism of old-time magicians.

What Emily doesn't do, though -- what this slow-moving, sour, sloppily assembled teen drama doesn't allow her to do -- is make her predicament of any emotional interest.

Neither grand enough to be impressive nor antic enough to be charming, the movie settles for bland and frantic, climaxing in a showdown among decadent pyramid builders. How bad are these guys? They're sadists...and, wink wink, sissies.

How you feel about Valentine's Day may depend on how you feel when someone really, really cute -- and someone you're really, really fond of -- gives you a nasty box of cheap chocolate on Valentine's Day, picked up at the corner Rite Aid and delivered with the price tag still attached.

Something puddles to nothing in this relentless Miami sun.

Just coarse, clunky, jerry rigged, and -- worst of all -- not funny.

The cast itself is weirdly overqualified.

Just as all regular models can't be supermodels, so all action chicks can't be superheroines. Elektra Natchios turns out to be walled off rather than mysteriously alluring; blank rather than deep.

The star is done in by the deathless mediocrity of the production, an assemblage of random camera shots, messy editing, redundant scenes, and witless dialogue as haphazardly stitched together as the flesh on Jonah Hex's face.

This condescending story wastes him (Douglas).

Diverting enough, but it's also the kind of high-concept studio concoction Ricky Gervais might have ridiculed in his great backstage-showbiz sitcom "Extras."

Quick, get the bug repellent, it’s another infestation of clueless, chatty, goofily dressed Gen Xers flitting around the scary idea of love!

An overly picaresque first feature written and directed by David Duchovny, who also co-stars.

To a character, every man in this faux-homey burg has been castrated! They're all impotent buffoons!

What is there to do but laugh in self-defense at such pompous self-regard when blood gushes, fuses pop, and Seagal scowls in a series of snappy, embroidered buckskin jackets?

The music screeches, the actors vamp, the knives and weapons and bombs and fireballs fly around the screen. Meanwhile, the well-prepared moviegoer slips into her or his own private fantasy of a world in which movie effects are themselves locked away in an institution for the criminally insane until such time as those effects are really, truly necessary for the story.

Florid, convoluted historical drama.

No authentic emotion of any kind happens in this damp, Seattle-based romance, a fizzle for both stars.

As Williams ricochets between playing submissive soft-drink executive tethered to the whims of a hysterical boss and pathetic dad at the wheel, trying to cajole his family into vacation satisfaction, we can be excused for getting carsick.

And here's the revelation: Miley Cyrus is a really interesting movie star in the making, with an intriguing echo-of-foghorn speaking voice, and a scuffed-up tomboyish physicality (in the Kristen Stewart mode) that sets her apart from daintier girls in her celebrity class.

Unlike in ''Freaky Friday,'' no magic spells are involved. Nor is there any of ''Freaky'''s marvelous charm in this ungainly Manhattan fairy tale, directed by indulgent sentimentalist Boaz Yakin.

A bummer - slack rather than loose, tired rather than fun.

There is not one honest moment, not ONE, in Hanging Up.

An out of date 1950s movie.

A recitation of woes doesn't constitute a plot, and panoramic shots of migrating wildlife don't convey enough African flavor.

With no Jamie Lee Curtis as a volleying partner, though, Lohan's chipper energy is, like, so totally out of proportion given the colorless pliability of everyone around her.

The movie may be more bogus than a Gucci bag for sale on a Fifth Avenue sidewalk, but at least the backgrounds are real.

The Naked Gun writing team and actor-turned-director Hart Bochner do unto the stereotype of inner-city high schools what needs to be done to stereotyped inner-city high schools -- parody them silly -- in this high-flying, low-comedy production.

So many body parts from other engineered romantic comedies have been crudely harvested and stitched together in the making of this weird robotic lark that "Maid of Honor of Frankenstein" might be more useful a nickname.

There's nothing particularly revolutionary about writer-director Robert Edwards' grimly satiric political fable.

When Rock finds his authentic swing as an actor as well as a comedian, he'll be, like, a movie god.

The story is timeless; this could have taken place when Doyle graduated in '76 -- or any year, really, since the effects of high school linger throughout adult life and nerds are forever.

Requires tremendous restraint not to conclude that this entertainingly apocalyptic mess is about nothing, since it may well be about everything. But I doubt it.

This is strictly substandard stuff, with imitative creepy noises, vertiginous camera angles, and long pauses.

The laughs are few in this inert, ungenerous comedy.

The editing in Battlefield America is super-speedy: Each shot lasts about three seconds, and then it's off.

A crappy thriller gussied up with a chrome-plated veneer.

Natalie Portman, by the way, is fierce and funny as a babe warrior the brothers meet along the way. She's good with dirty words, too.