Loren King

Disappointingly hollow.

Doesn't win any points for originality. It does succeed by following a feel-good formula with a winning style, and by offering its target audience of urban kids some welcome role models and optimism.

It's a refreshing theme for a kids' movie, one that incorporates history and urban flavor, not to mention a preservationists' perspective, into the usual mix.

A welcome respite from verbal nastiness and sexual cynicism. It's nice to see characters who enjoy falling in love, even if it's to a schmaltzy light-soul score.

Many of the story lines offer only superficial insight into the characters; Silver's rich but unhappy mogul has been done far too many times.

Snappy but sappy romantic comedy.

Unambitious and transparent, but that doesn't mean it won't warm the hearts of audiences on both sides of the Atlantic.

Any originality in this new movie is overwhelmed by its lazy eagerness to embrace the new standard for R-rated comedy.

Unfortunately, the potential for screwball comedy is wasted because L!fe Happens never finds its thematic tone or comedic rhythm.

The story is unique and engaging enough to transcend the uplifting sports-underdog formula.

Makes you want to run home and shower, but Rourke's performance gets under your skin.

It wisely lets us hear Pinero's words for ourselves, and in the end, they echo louder than the images that accompany them.

It's the pre-teen set who will revel in the adolescent angst and anarchic high jinks of Max Keeble.

The film doesn't have enough innovation or pizazz to attract teenagers, and it lacks the novel charm that made ''Spy Kids'' a surprising winner with both adults and younger audiences.

The script boasts some tart TV-insider humor, but the film has not a trace of humanity or empathy.

Despite some imaginative fatalities, is less a movie than a slick video game.

You don’t have to be Jewish to love borscht belt humor, or gay to love camp, or French to love farce. But when all three are thrown into a blender with a dollop of generic family dysfunction, as is the case in Let My People Go!, oy vey doesn’t begin to address the result.

MacDowell offers an engaging portrait of a complex woman who has survived life's slings and arrows. It makes Crush an affecting take on modern women.

It makes the viewer wonder whether Circuit would have been stronger as a documentary instead of the well-intentioned, overlong, intermittently entertaining but flawed feature that it is.

A video game cum movie that substitutes shrieking decibel levels for a coherent plot and any resemblance to originality.

Throws its obvious predecessor, "Waiting to Exhale," into relief, making that 1995 syrupy revenge fantasy look positively Shakespearean next to the moronic Two Can Play That Game.

That the mushroom-dwelling blue creatures still manage to be endearing even in their second big-screen extravaganza (in 3-D, no less) is about the best that can be said of The Smurfs 2.

Will your preschoolers enjoy it? Perhaps. Is it worth 88 minutes of their lives, or yours? Not in a world where "Sesame Street" is on TV every day. Not even in a world where "Sesame Street" didn't exist.

There's nothing original about the father-son conflict that forms the core of the film, nor is there enough suspense and drama.

An adequate horror movie for the Halloween season, but it too easily sinks into haunted-house-film conventions, even if the haunted house is decked out as an Italian luxury liner.

Neither the comedy nor the romance is strong enough in Immigration Tango to offer any improvement on Peter Weir's similar, and better, 1990 film "Green Card."

With a plot devoid of suspense and characters without complexity, Rand's iconic line elicits merely a yawn, or a shrug.

Packaged fluff aimed low, and patronizingly, at Spears's legion of young female fans.