Maitland McDonagh

Funny little Nazis require rather more finesse than The Littlest Reich possesses.

It all seems terribly familiar.

Though this frank documentary about extreme sexual practices comes with a cautionary message, it could perhaps use a stronger one.

While there's no denying that the film's animation is technically impressive and is sometimes quite clever, its inventiveness is frequently at the service of gags so distasteful that gag is the operative word.

As live-action adaptations of cheap, unapologetically stupid cartoons go, this is top of the line: The cast is appealing, the sets brightly colored and fun to look at, the mystery as lame and goofy as any featured in the many inexplicably beloved Scooby-Doo cartoons.

As provocative as Michael Moore's "Fahrenheit 9/11," but nowhere near as engaging.

Sandler's performance is aimed squarely at the fans who love his smarty-pants man-boy shtick and Rock gets off some funny lines, but overall this is one dreary, formulaic slog through sports-movie cliches.

An earnest, thoughtful, surprisingly well-written (given the number of writers who worked on it) drama about guilt and betrayal that features excellent performances by Harrison Ford and Brad Pitt and dares to defy the juvenile wham bam thank you ma'am aesthetics that have turned mainstream action pictures into feature-length video games.

As to what happens between shows, well, apparently not a whole hell of a lot. If there are groupies, demolished hotel rooms, midnight payoffs to the vice squad or drug- and alcohol-fueled misbehavior, there's no evidence of it here.

This DIY oddity is both quirkily funny and strangely poignant, and does justice to the same themes that underlie the far more lavishly produced "A.I.: Artificial Intelligence."

The images of gods and ordinary Tibetans that Bush captures are more eloquent that his turgid narration, and overall the film works better as a travelogue than an introduction to Tibetan Buddhist beliefs or history.

Overall, this puff piece is shapeless, repetitive and feels much longer than it is.

Actress-turned-writer/director Asia Argento's angry, outspoken, semi-autobiographical rant of a film is strident and occasionally juvenile, but it packs an undeniable wallop.

The film's liabilities include Lustig's excessive reliance on flashy editing, tacky special effects and a blaring alterna-rock soundtrack that's used to make the characters' thoughts and motivations painfully obvious. Among its assets are the clever premise and generally appealing performances.

The film's bright spot is Irish comedian Dylan Moran, who plays Libby's charmingly dissolute cousin and who also happens to be Dennis' best friend. He's fresh, unpredictable and genuinely funny -- everything the film isn't.

This supremely silly supernatural potboiler is slickly entertaining for just under two hours and absolutely hilarious for 10 minutes near the end.

Would be as tedious as a home movie if the couple, Edward DeBonis and Vincent Maniscalco, weren't gay men and their nuptials not colored by the clash between their personal faith and their rejection by the mainstream church.

Gloriously seductive musical sequences seem suddenly hokey and self-conscious when they're staged in Western settings, and the songs' English-language lyrics are painfully banal.

It has the air of a particularly accomplished student film, by a student whose philosophical concerns outweigh his interest in narrative filmmaking.

The child actors are bland, the adult characters are forced to act like dunderheads to keep the paper-thin plot going, and the generic-sounding Jimmy Buffett songs are just a LITTLE out of sync with the film's target age group.

Even by the standards of pop-moral parables passing for entertainment, this is bland stuff.

It delivers some bracingly nasty gore scenes, but there's no spark left in the run-scream-repeat formula, and a movie whose biggest draw is profoundly untalented hotel-fortune heiress Paris Hilton is in desperate need of some juice.

To his eternal credit, Jones gives his considerable all and even coaxes a startling note of poignancy from one scene, while Smith just bops along, lobbing gags and grinning at the special effects.

Camille's desperate, destructive antics just don't seem especially cute or funny.

An intoxicatingly beautiful but painfully simplistic fable about love and death.

A screwball comedy without a charismatic, smart-talking dame is no screwball comedy at all.

Danner, whose Dina actually resembles a human being, would be its saving grace if her gracefully controlled performance weren't lost in a sea of braying caricatures.

Diehard Sandler fans will probably find it uproarious, but others will have to make do with the occasional chuckle.

The climactic shootout might have more impact if we actually cared about the so-called characters.

And while the divas make their characters hugely entertaining, they're also such high profile actresses in such a soft-edged film that it's hard to actually worry about what's to become of them.

The cast, a mix of beauty-contest winners, models, veteran actors and newcomers, is as diverse as the characters they play and work together surprisingly smoothly.

It's hard not to feel sorry for the high-profile cast, obviously working for brownie points in heaven -- they're so good, yet nothing they do can make the movie fly.

Smith's unrepentantly juvenile sense of humor leans heavily on elementary pop-culture parody, a particularly tiresome and parasitic form of humor that depends on an audience of smirking know-it-alls who can be trusted to snicker whenever they get the reference.

Rather than rage, Peosay's film radiates sadness over a singular way of life in danger of imminent obliteration.

The film is never dull -- no mean feat, given that it spends two hours telling a story whose end is widely known -- and features performances that range from coarsely effective to phenomenal.

Though ultimately the film is all smoke and mirrors, the sensibility it reflects is rich and exciting.

This loving parody is steeped in comic book trivia and lore: The more you know, the more heartfelt your response to the film is likely to be.

It's a shame it's not a better movie, but its small virtues include an uncompromising performance by English actor Jonny Lee Miller.

The music is generally undistinguished, with the exception of the searing "Every Six Minutes."

Young Tamimi is a terrific rider but a lackluster screen presence, and the film's brevity ensures that her trials have a perfunctory quality that keeps them from being truly compelling.

It unfolds in the angst-haunted shadow of the 9'11 terror attacks and teeters on a thin edge of sheer panic.

For horror fans in a forgiving mood, it's an adequate fear fix.

A blackly comic, neo-noir heist picture, Australian screenwriter Scott Roberts's directing debut fairly oozes strenuous eccentricity.

The less time you've devoted to thinking about the nature and uses of the erotic imagination, the more challenging this will seem.

This lackluster sequel was surely much more fun to make than it is to watch.

Visually stunning and breathtakingly frank, but thrill-seekers beware.

Essentially a romantic comedy with a heavier-than-usual dramatic component.

Anonymously titled and packaged like a vulgar teen sex comedy, this candy-colored trifle is so precious it nearly floats away on a cloud of fairy dust.

Casting a film set in Latin America with Spanish-and Italian-speaking performers acting in English misfires; the actors' diverse accents clash, some are clearly more fluent than others and the sense of relief when anyone speaks a rare line in Spanish is palpable.

Overall this is an assured piece of genre filmmaking that delivers the goods so stylishly it hardly matters that they aren't fresh.

Falls victim to an overly tricky rethinking of the way familiar TV shows are transformed into movies.

The strong cast keeps the material from descending into sheer smutty tripe, but it's an uphill battle and in the end, not really worth their considerable efforts.

If Michael Wincott -- who under normal circumstances can chill your blood just by breathing -- can't make the villain compelling, you know the movie's in trouble.

It's a frequently funny diversion that doesn't have a mean-spirited bone in its body.

The main characters are defined by their problems, and the secondary characters (notably Brigette's parents) are so crudely drawn it's hard to imagine what Cates was thinking.

The script is often obvious and much of the acting is amateurish (Rakesh's comic sidekicks are just dismal), though Purva Bedi is a shining exception — she's got star quality to burn.

The film's greatest asset is Linney, whose prickly, finely calibrated performance as the doomed Harraway makes her loss resonate more powerfully than any of the point-counterpoint rhetoric.

It's a silly, stupendously artificial enterprise.

Driven equally by big questions and the abiding desire for small pleasures, like a decent cup of tea, it's an eccentric, mind-bending head trip that greets every catastrophe with an endearingly goofy smile that embodies Hitchhiker's Guide's Zen mantra: Don't Panic!

This old-fashioned Western about the glory years of the Texas Rangers, cast with fresh-faced, telegenic young actors whose performances range from adequate to awful, is undermined by a serious lack of true grit.

The film's a trifle, but a beautifully crafted one.

Neither cheerfully naughty nor suffused with gauzy prurience, it evokes a time of turbulent (and often ugly) emotions with disquieting intensity.

This moody film is ravishingly beautiful to look at -- but the story's fairy tale atmosphere doesn't entirely mesh with its psychological underpinnings.

This slow, derivative chiller (which lifts liberally from "Ghost Story," "Rear Window" and "A Stir of Echoes") wastes far too much time on red herrings and telegraphs its plot points with painfully obvious dialogue.

Like the fresh-faced leads, the film is an unexpected charmer.

An amateur in the best sense of the word, Dobson is an engaging ambassador for a life of the mind lived firmly in the real world.

So crammed with plot twists that it's hard to follow, simultaneously ludicrous, sappy and casually dismissive of all the things Hollywood holds dear.

Though the story eventually runs out of steam and it's never clear why the night-crawlers torment certain children and then come back to get them, fledgling screenwriter Brendan William Hood and director Robert Harmon -- whip up some effective suspense sequences.

If you were to strip the "Austin Powers" films of their juvenile lewdness, psychedelic decor and swinging soundtrack while leaving intact the potty humor and pratfalls, the result would be something very like this pointless spy spoof.

An old man's movie, filled with regret over things lost, corrupted and spoiled.

The insidious influence of too much therapy permeates this misguided and very long picture.

Ethan and Lenny's story is silly, good-natured and full of unlikely moves, just like the titular twister.

This high-concept gangster picture tries unsuccessfully to duplicate Reservoir Dogs's(1992) hair-raising high-wire balance between dark comedy and violent crime thriller, undermining some entertaining performances and the script's small virtues in the process.

In a film about the ruthless corporate destruction of small businesses, it's hard not to flinch at the prominent placement accorded IBM, Starbucks and AOL logos.

Despite its failings, Wind Chill represents a road rarely taken by 21st-century American horror films: Original (in the non-remake sense of the term), subtle and restrained.

Even Stevenson, a singularly accomplished and versatile actress, can't do much with Julia's early scenes, in which she's forced to dither around like a complete idiot.

Thoroughly old-fashioned entertainment.

Then there's the utter lack of sexual chemistry between Li and Aaliyah, sucking all the urgency out of the relationship between the star-crossed lovers.

Slight, over-long.

The Country Music Channel's first foray into feature filmmaking is sickly sweet and thoroughly predictable, and woefully underuses veterans Harper and Reynolds, but it features some stirring performances, including BeBe Winans and Willie Nelson dueting on "The Uncloudy Day."

A far cry from such sneakily subversive werewolf-sex tales as "The Company of Wolves" (1984) or "Ginver Snaps" (2000), this pallid little picture is all "Lost Boys" (1987) posturing by way of the sublimely ridiculous "Covenant" (2006).

Pacino's no-holds-barred performance is either the reason to see this tepid thriller or the reason to avoid it. His evocation of a Sidney Falco-style flack worn to a nub by decades of trying to spin this dirty town is nothing if not bravura.

Shock-rocker Rob Zombie's loving homage to flat-out nasty horror films of the 1970s will leave many post-"Scream" (1996) horror fans cold because of what it's not. It's not slick or glossy. It's not funny or self-referential.

The movie is at its best when it's most straightforward. Flights of fancy like the child angel perched on Melvin's ceiling or his conversations with the black-clad Sweetback, who appears to undermine his confidence at crucial junctures, seem forced and pointless.

Screenwriter Matthew Tabak's directing debut is carefully plotted, well acted and surprisingly free of cheap thrills.

Although it looks like an action thriller with a sci-fi twist, the bad guys aren't scary (Biehn's soul patch notwithstanding), the sci-fi element is silly and the action is limited to some extreme bike riding and computer-generated zipping around.

Making such a tragedy the backdrop to a love story risks trivializing it, though Chouraqui no doubt intended the film to affirm love's power to help people endure almost unimaginable horror.

Though something less than a masterpiece of the genre, this good-natured skirmish in the war between men and women benefits from Hudson's thoroughly charming performance.

A long, dark night o' slacker despair, courtesy of Richard Linklater and self-important blowhard Eric Bogosian.

Well acted (notably by newcomer Brown), warm hearted and utterly predictable, this film is aimed squarely at everyone who loved "Good Will Hunting."

First-time filmmaker Ben Younger makes not a single false move when delineating the merciless, high-testosterone world of boiler-room brokerages.

An efficient but shallow fright show.

Between Magruder's oily schmoozing and the camera-ready combo of Spanish moss and constant rain, he and cinematographer Changwei Gu whip up some amazing atmosphere.

If Reeves weren't onboard this picture would have gone straight to video.

Lack of chemistry between Richard Gere and Julia Roberts sinks this souffle.

Ultimately, the film feels unfocused and attenuated, despite its brief running time.

The climactic revelation is a real disappointment, humdrum rather than chilling.

The obvious product of a corporate search for the next great fantasy franchise, this adaptation of the first in a series of popular children's books by the writer-illustrator team of Holly Black and Tony DiTerlizzi is a lump of leaden whimsy.