Maitland McDonagh

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.

The film seems longer than its 93-minute running time, but kids will probably enjoy its potty humor, many scenes of 4-year-olds getting the better of harried adults and the inevitable moment when a cute little girl kicks the fat guy in the nads.

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.

Cynical, misanthropic and embittered.

For all the flash and flutter, the movie overall lacks, well, HEFT.

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

If he were a more subtle director, it would be a great film; as it is, it's an extremely good one, anchored by the subtly devastating performances of Penn, Robbins and Bacon. The supporting cast is equally good, and blue collar Boston's mean streets take on a beaten-down life of their own.

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.

Surprisingly enough, puberty-stricken J.D. and Chowder actually sound like real teenagers, but the cartoony look will probably alienate real-life kids that age, and the man-eating house might be downright terrifying to younger kids.

Propelled by a soundtrack as diverse as its international gallery of thieves, Jordan's cheerfully scruffy neo-noir caprice even lays on the religious imagery with a palette knife and sweetens Melville's ending without seeming terminally sappy.

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.

While Rachel's story is fiction, many of its incidents are rooted in historical events carefully researched by Soeteman and the film's briskly staged action and stunning reversals of fortune ensure that its two and a half hours fly by.

There's some fun to be had in seeing two of TV's resident sweetie pies, Campbell and ER's Noah Wyle, play unrepentant sons of bitches, but it's not enough.

Painfully unfunny and misguided to boot.

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.

The film satisfies on both visceral and emotional levels.

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.

An oddly lifeless affair, though Gretchen Mol's sunny performance almost hauls it out of its doldrums.

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.

The film's uniformly excellent performances are a delight, and fans of Irish actor Farrell (whose pitch-perfect American accent has served him well in Hollywood) can hear both his natural inflections and his singing voice.

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.

A deep and astonishingly authentic streak of melancholy runs through this fifth sequel to the 1976 sleeper that made both struggling actor Sylvester Stallone and hard-luck slugger Rocky Balboa international stars.

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.

But the real marvel is that beneath the ghoulish in-jokes and horror-geek allusions, there's a core of the same bittersweet truth that makes the best fairy tales resonate from one generation to the next.

Their doomed fling is oddly hypnotic and ultimately haunting.

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.

Bloated and incoherent.

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.

Hopelessly muddled film cries out for the firm hand of a dyed-in-the-wool cynic like Billy Wilder, who would have put some teeth in its jabs at amoral politicians and blindly ambitious journalists.

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.

Although this first chapter in a three-part tale is inevitably overburdened with back story, it ends on one hell of a cliff-hanger.

What you're seeing isn't wire work or CGI -- it's stunt choreography, beautifully executed, flawlessly cut together and brainlessly thrilling.

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).

Just when the film seems to be getting bogged down in "before I made it big" anecdotes -- around the time she and Andy Dick, who was once dismissed from a food-service gig, spend a day operating a mobile lunch stand -- Gurwitch wisely broadens her focus, interviewing ordinary victims of corporate "right-sizing," plant closings.

Phillippe has the unenviable task of trying to make O'Neill equally interesting, but an eager beaver with some unresolved family issues is no match for a poisoned soul methodically laying the groundwork for his own inevitable fall. The unfortunate imbalance makes long stretches of the film feel dull, but when Cooper is on screen it's mesmerizing.

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.

It's just a clever, pointed little fable about the price of complacent conformity, slavish worship of the status quo, and trading freedom for the illusion of safety, wrapped in a sugary-sweet, Jordan-almond-colored coating that looks good enough to eat.

Best of all, though the Simpson clan is 18 years older, they're not one bit wiser.

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 ideal viewer is a Miike fan...You know who you are.

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.

Seductive, funny, whip-smart and ultimately tragic.

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

It's the kind of film Hollywood doesn't make any more, and a pleasant retro diversion.

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.

The result is a little bit nutty and pretty entertaining in a thoroughly unconvincing way. And watch out for that 11th-hour twist -- it's a head snapper.

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.

Not clever. Not scary. Not funny.

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

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

Outsourced is a sweet, good-natured surprise that takes the cliches out of an overworked genre and makes them seem almost fresh and entirely charming.

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.

The unspoken question that underlies their struggles is whether a facility run by sheer force of personality can survive when that personality is gone; the film ends on a cautiously hopeful note.

It's just plain exhausting to watch the admirably game cast members running around like headless chickens in chic period clothes, surrendering their dignity to the task of navigating the plot's frenetic contrivances.

A candy-colored, superficially fizzy revenge fantasy with a startlingly corrosive undercurrent of bitterness and frustration.

Elvira fans could hardly ask for more.

A painfully self-conscious comedy that mistakes relentless self-referentiality for cleverness, this half-witted misfire is filled with accelerated motion, repeated and overlapping scenes, direct address to the camera and other cliches of defamiliarization.

Dellal and their cast consistently hit the right notes, and the result is an uplifting tale that you don't have to be embarrassed to enjoy.

Beautifully acted, minutely observed story.

Buono is truly charming, and the film delivers a handful of genuine laughs -- low laughs, but laughs nonetheless; if only they weren't so few and far between.

The sad thing is that Arnett, Shepard and McBride quickly establish a loose, easy camaraderie that's a real pleasure to watch. The shame is that they're working with such unrewarding material.

While Travolta and Gandolfini have the beefy, closed-off look of post-WWII era cops, they never FEEL: They look like actors playing dress up. Leto overcomes his delicate good looks to embody Fernandez's feral, faintly exotic charm, but Hayek is a standard-issue femme fatale, damaged on the inside but flawless on the surface.

It's as laceratingly entertaining as its predecessor.

Feather-light and proudly goofy, this Jackie Chan action comedy appears to be aimed squarely at under-12s.

The plot is simply an excuse for a string of good-natured dope jokes (come on -- you have to love that their hookah is called Billy Bong Thornton) and goofy sight gags inspired by everything from Jerry Garcia to Jerry Maguire, most of which are undoubtedly funniest if you're eight miles high.

A stale rehash of Woody Allen-style "he's a neurotic Jew, she's a flaky shiksa" gags.