Maitland McDonagh

The film falls short even as a record of Broderick and Lane's crowd-pleasing rapport: Both have done the show so many times that every scrap of life is gone.

It's a one-gag film that rises or falls on how funny you find the sight of fat, grease-slicked Jack Black crammed into spandex pants and capering like an epileptic lamb.

As a film, it is earnest, cliched, often awkward and unlikely to inspire anyone who isn't already thoroughly sold on its message of salvation through community activism.

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.

The identity of the bad guy is ludicrously obvious; and his public unmasking relies on the dopiest contrivance in recent memory.

A deliciously bitter tale of lust and betrayal.

Seductive, funny, whip-smart and ultimately tragic.

Rather than converting messy, real-life experience into slick, formulaic entertainment, Well's script transforms it into a shapeless, internally inconsistent mess of artificial contrivances.

The payoff fizzles, but the buildup is intriguing until it topples under its own weight.

An acid-dipped valentine to the sometimes seedy magic of movies.

A down–under fable with a sweet country-music twang.

For all the complicated backstory, weighty themes, action set pieces and fanciful production design, the film is oddly unengaging.

While snowboarding enthusiasts will eat up every minute of its two-hour running time, it's thin stuff for the unconverted.

Ultimately, Tenacious D is a sight gag -- two unprepossessing, chunky dudes rocking out like wiry guitar gods -- supplemented by spot-on digs at the macho bombast and Dungeons & Dragons silliness that drives heavy-metal mania.

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.

The idea is more interesting than the screenplay, which lags badly in the middle and lurches between not-very-funny comedy, unconvincing dramatics and some last-minute action strongly reminiscent of "Run Lola Run." Great soundtrack, though.

This tale may well weave a more compelling spell on the page; onscreen it's simply ponderous.

The rare sequel that actually improves on the original, this robust entertainment's intelligence and emotional impact belie conventional wisdom that summer movie spectaculars are by nature brainless nonsense and only a stupid snob would complain about their cynical insubstantiality.

There's very little plot, and director Mangold's attempts to make a connection between the social confusion of the '60s and Susanna's inner turmoil don't really work.

Ford is the problem: He looks great for his age (56, to Heche's 29), but oozes a stolid gloom that snuffs out those sparks long before they can set the lush scenery on fire. In a classic screwball comedy, he'd be Ralph Bellamy.

This wry, low-key comedy, crafted by members of the sketch-comedy group The State, swims defiantly against the stream of contemporary comedy, eschewing bodily-function jokes and obvious gags in favor of laughs so sly and self-effacing you could almost overlook them.

Joe himself is an amazing creation, less personable, to be sure, than the original lovelorn King Kong, but a far more fully realized character than any of the flesh and blood humans by whom he's surrounded.

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.

Kidman accomplishes a remarkable feat of transformation, adopting not only an accent, but a slightly seedy, faintly feral demeanor that almost makes you forget her icy good looks and fashion model's figure.

Team M-I knows its way around James and ignores the lazy stereotype of Americans as gauche rubes bumbling around Paris like barbarians at the ballet in favor of sly digs at French and American mores alike.

If Griffin were a jowly Southern redneck, his mean-spirited rants would make him a pariah.

Amiable, brightly colored spoof of '60s pop culture.

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.

Philippe Diaz's controversial documentary about the legacy of the brutal 1991-2002 civil war in Sierra Leone -- widely considered the poorest country in the world, despite its rich mineral resources -- suggests that the rebel faction RUF (Revolutionary United Front of Sierra Leone) was not alone in terrorizing civilians and committing atrocities, most famously the amputation of limbs with machetes.

A sleazy, seamy, flashy, steamy, vulgar exploitation thriller that revels in every minute of its own trashiness and delivers some pretty solid -- if prurient -- entertainment before strangling in a one-twist-too-many ending.

Though ultimately flawed, the film's depiction of velvet-gloved cruelty and matter-of-fact betrayal is surprisingly potent, and it's pure pleasure to watch Bacall prowling the corridors of power, tossing her golden mane and tossing off world-weary observations in a voice pitched somewhere between a purr and a growl.

This dark comedy of addiction, delusion and humor as a weapon marks the feature directing debut of veteran writer Peter Tolan.

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

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 intoxicatingly beautiful but painfully simplistic fable about love and death.

Like most anthology films, this thematically linked trio of shorts is a mixed bag.

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

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

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.

Though overall an overwhelmingly positive portrayal, the film doesn't ignore the more problematic aspects of Brown's life.

It's a kiddie movie rejiggered for childish grown-ups, of whom there are enough to make it a hit. How such childishness has become a virtual secular religion is hard to imagine.

The film's meandering narrative, melodramatic conclusion and underdeveloped characters overshadow the genuinely shocking abuses it condemns.

Duvall at his worst is still an accomplished performer; Pedraza is a modern-day Ali McGraw, lithe and beautiful but no kind of actress. For all her fluidity on the dance floor, she's a dead weight who drags the film down.

A military satire in the tradition of M*A*S*H and Catch-22, based on Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa's 1973 book.

In fact it ends, as all good romantic comedies do, with a wedding, though the identities of the newly married couple might be the least predictable thing about this cheerfully ham-fisted celebration of love and family in modern-day Madrid.

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.

This dreary science-fiction/historical-action hybrid is a misfire of staggering proportions.

The cast deliver consistently fine, subtle performances, underscored by Ben Nichols' mournfully melodic guitar score.

Watts is good -- occasionally very good -- and her willingness to be filmed at unflattering angles, in pore-wallowing or with bright blue ice cream smeared on her face is admirable.

The pace is brisk and the details are carefully arranged, but there's no sparkle -- and what's a romance without that?

The film's flashy visuals (apparently geared to engaging video game-impaired attention spans) are entertaining, but its cynicism is distasteful.

Kilmer slips in and out of a series of ludicrously elaborate disguises, some more convincing than others, while poor Shue shuffles through the role of a sexy, book-reading babe pretending to be a dowdy lady scientist in kneesocks.

Campbell Scott's fiendishly mercurial performance as razor-tongued womanizer Roger is a revelation but it's only one of this nimble film's pleasures.

Henkel's directing debut isn't incompetent: It's just derivative, pointless and tediously repetitive.

Shot in gloomy shades of gray, this earnest but banal story about the legacy of bad parenting strands fine actors in a contrived situation and lets them squirm.

The bad news is that Seitz's protagonists are almost all insufferable: Smug, self-important, opinionated and relentlessly convinced that they're far more sensitive, intelligent and interesting than they are.

Beautifully encapsulates the film's sensibility, a bizarre mix of reverse cool and childishness.

The "Bullet" is an amusement-park roller coaster, and the title is a ham-fisted metaphor for facing your fears.

This dopey swashbuckler offers little action but lashings of DiCaprio's soft, hairless flesh.

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.

It's a bad sign when audience enthusiasm peaks during the credits sequence.

This film is pure, empty (if gorgeous) spectacle, and the decision to loose the tongues of the ape planet's humans (they were mute in the original) undermines the contrast that lies at the heart of the story's power.

Music video-trained director Francis Lawrence whips up a witch's brew of gray-on-gray atmosphere, but for all the end-of-the-world mumbo jumbo, nothing much ever seems to be at stake.

The film's resolution is both haunting and satisfying.

A strong cast that flounders in profoundly unappealing material.

The cast is strong and work together flawlessly, and romantic comedies that take an unabashedly male perspective without being relentlessly vulgar or misogynistic are rare indeed.

This whimsical weeper gets off to an awkward start and never finds its footing.

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

Rises above its low-budget limitations by pandering to the most outrageously paranoid fantasies of unhappy office drones.

It's cool and spare, but there's an essential lightness to the film's tone despite the heavy material, and Deborah Eve Lewis' glistening B&W cinematography is simply luscious.

The impulses that produced this project, which brings together three short, English-language films by African female filmmakers into a feature-film package introduced by rap icon Queen Latifah, are commendable, but the results are uneven.

The film's wittiest moment comes before it starts: the familiar MGM lion is replaced by a roaring crocodile when the studio's logo appears.

Though the clash between old-world parents and their American-born children is familiar territory, New Jersey-born, Taiwan-raised director/cowriter Bay-Sa Pan gives the conflict a culturally particular spin and elicits strong performances from her appealing cast.

Shot on digital video as murky as Masuoka's imagination, its creeping sense of dank dread is as slow to build as it is hard to shake.

Pacino is a one-man three-ring circus, blustering, capering, cursing, raging and weaseling his way through this predictable morality play like a trickster Satan on speed.

There's nothing blatantly wrong with it (except perhaps the red-assed baboon ex machina), but it's 100% shock-free and coasts to a formulaic conclusion.

It's almost three hours long, and that's a lot of time to invest in what is, essentially, a theme-park attraction you can't ride.

In the end, the sheer obviousness of Shainberg and screenwriter Erin Cressida Wilson's take on Diane Arbus' perverse determination to examine and document the forbidden overshadows even Kidman's beautifully modulated performance, which takes Diane from brittle neurosis to a vaguely predatory ingenuousness.

Not a terrible movie exactly, just a dark, edgy idea relentlessly worn down into mildly diverting blandness by the mega-wattage presence of stars Mel Gibson and Julia Roberts.

For a slick pop entertainment, more than the usual quotient of timely ideas rattle around between the relentless product placements and futuristic geegaws.

Everyone involved seems to have been operating from the presumption that gross and blasphemous equals hilarious. Would that it did.

Surprisingly compelling, if not up to dealing with the larger political issues it raises.

This bizarre hybrid of romantic comedy cliches and less-than-subtle social commentary defeats their best efforts to make it sparkle.

Most of the gags recycle the same tired old romantic comedy schtick, with special effects.

The stepping is terrific and the climactic sequence, a knowing nod to the infamous Bollywood "wet sari" number, is a knock out. But the united colors of we-can-overcome cuties, predictable class conflicts and sanitized keeping-it-real bluster bring the story's intensely formulaic nature into the.

Overall it's slick, brainless entertainment.

Rosie O'Donnell's bracing freshness and genuine likability cut through the cloying stuff every time, but there's nowhere near enough of her to balance things out.

It's a terrific showcase for battling Boleyn babes Scarlett Johansson and Natalie Portman.

The manipulative climax works, even as you feel like the jerk in tear-jerking.

There's a caper and there are some laughs, but this isn't a larky caper flick; it's a pulpy little story that could at any minute go straight to hell.

For most of its running time, this lunatic euro-thriller is creepy, stylish and occasionally suspenseful.

Overall the film is a stylish lark with no resonance, a mean-spirited one-night stand of a movie.

Though filmmaker Nina Gilden Seavy followed Bering Strait for the better part of two years, their story is in no way over at the film's conclusion.

This underrrated shocker has developed a cult following since its scattershot 1973 release, but deserves a wider one.

The thrills are few and the expository dialogue tediously overwhelming in this preachy cautionary tale about getting too big for one's britches.

The "cute" kids are insufferable, but leads Ali Khan and Mukerji radiate the unabashed star quality that's all but gone from American movies -- poverty and desperation haven't looked so glamorous since the glory days of Joan Crawford.

There are fewer laughs and more lectures -- but there's plenty of sass and soul in between.

Just a little shy of twisting the knife that extra twist.

The result is gorgeous, if ultimately shallow -- much like Simone herself.

Given the controversy, which strongly suggested that the filmmakers had it in for President Bush, the film's biggest shocker may be how kind Range and coscreenwriter Simon Finch are to him.

But for all the profane language and sexual frankness, Soderbergh's film is no more cynical or world-weary than its inspirations, and in the end, it feels like a clever trick wrapped around a hollow center.

Sprawling, gooey and profoundly juvenile, this derivative thriller piles on the cheese: aliens, male bonding, psychoanalytic gobbledygook, childhood secrets, military black ops, gross-out special effects, explosions, bodily function humor and a retarded boy with special powers.

There are people who eat this kind of thing right up -- if you're one of them, dig in.

A vivid telling of a familiar story -- the rise and fall of a street criminal -- bolstered by exceptional performances and a clear-eyed take on the economics of dealing and the pathology of ghetto fabulousness.

An intriguing mix of the familiar and the alien. DaFoe's distinctly American speech patterns are a little jarring amid a tangle of British inflections (French actor Cassel's accent is justified within the story), but it doesn't spoil the film's overall effect.

This dogged journey of self-delusion is interrupted periodically by snippets of footage...that promise a dark revelation that would give an edge to the otherwise tedious goings-on but, sadly, never materializes.

The film ends before Franken can actually take the step from commentator to participant, which adds to its overall unfinished and unfocused air.

For all its contrivances, the film is cheerfully rude and surprisingly generous to the mothers, most of whom find sizzling new romances at an age when their American counterparts are reduced to sexless dithering or played as humiliating punch lines to jokes about horny old hags.

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

The movie isn't "Blade Runner," but it's got some provocative ideas about the implications of cloning in a market-driven, capitalist society.

The flashback structure drains the story of momentum, but Mashkov and Uchaineshvili portray the reptilian glamour of cultured thugs with frightening intensity.

Douglas and Sutherland do crackling hostility with devilish glee, and the fireworks are nothing if not entertaining.

It's funny without being toothless, adrenaline turbocharged without being mean and utterly deranged in the best sense of the word.

All too often, dramatic confrontations feel like barely dramatized debates.

One of the flat-out creepiest films ever released by a major American studio.

It's sweet-natured, soothing and there's a behind-the-scenes/blooper reel at the end that will reassure anyone worried about the animals' treatment during filming.

Noisy, spectacular and disposable.

Poky, oddly uninvolving.

The result is unfortunate: Pinter can't find emotional depths that just aren't there, but dispenses with most of what made the original entertaining in the search for them.

Strong performances and sharp dialogue distinguish Jeff Lipsky's melancholy second feature, which charts the two-year course of a "perfect" relationship whose flaws are evident from the outset.

It's too fundamentally light-hearted to wallow in grinding poverty and despair.

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.

Since her claim to fame is having brought the first living panda -- a cub named Su Lin -- out of China, Harkness's success is a given, but the footage of pandas in their natural surroundings is enchanting.

The story's self-conscious seaminess cries out for the ministrations of a filmmaker like direct-to-video auteur Gregory Hippolyte.

Quite enjoyable on its own terms.

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.

A leaden excuse for family entertainment, loosely inspired by Jules Verne's 1873 novel, coarsened almost beyond recognition and dominated by Jackie Chan's comic martial-arts schtick.

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

A ludicrous mishmash undermined by ghastly performances and a hopelessly convoluted screenplay.

It is message filmmaking so blunt you might be tempted to root for the parasitic reprobate over the saintly old man, and that's just not right.

Lasse Hallstrom's leisurely drama about remorse, forgiveness and spiritual healing is a film of big emotions and ferociously small gestures.

The movie's film-studentish navel-gazing wears thin long before its over.

Nat comes off as flat-out crazy and more sad than amusing or heroic.

A disappointment that mines the same vein of gross-out romantic comedy as"There's Something About Mary," without that film's oddball charm.

The film’s pleasures are small ones, but they’re perfectly pitched and anyone who’s ever collected anything will empathize with the depth of Alan and Paul’s passion, if not their actions.

Despite its admirable sobriety for most of its running time, the film's climax is a parade of ludicrous clichés.

Films like this are the definition of "critic proof"; if the casting, synopsis and very concept don't deter you, you'll probably find it very funny.

The story itself is uninteresting, and the songs are painfully undistinguished.

The performances are rough and sometimes amateurish, but that works in the film's favor more often than it doesn't -- there's none of the false slickness that comes with hot young actors playing rock 'n' rollers.

In light of the aesthetic of ugliness that informs von Trier's Dogme films, it's easy to forget how subtly beautiful his work once was.

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

This handsomely photographed, briskly directed sci-fi fright picture is enjoyable enough on its own limited terms.

There's always been a wide streak of the tediously naughty little boy in Besson, and all the seductively stylized images in the world can't hide it.

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.

For the first time, Allen's trademark shtick sounds less like the anxious kvetching of an endearingly neurotic New Yorker and more like the ramblings of a tired, elderly man fumbling for the right words.

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.

Watching Sarandon and Hawn sashay through their paces is its own reward.

The action is ridiculously overwrought, a state-of-the-art combination of CGI wizardry and Hong Kong-style wirework so removed from the laws of physical reality that it might as well be animated.

Wongpim pays tribute to classic Italian Westerns in his face-hugging close-ups, but his film is more silly than existentially anarchic, and its exotic quirkiness wears thin quickly.

Under the veneer of hip lies a bland romantic comedy wrapped in a layer of less-than-biting lifestyle satire, whose single most authentic moment involves an old woman and her scruffy mutt Buddy. Not cool.

A fresh and spirited fairy tale.

An improvement over the tedious "Saw II" (2005), this second sequel to the surprise 2004 hit still features the series' trademark gruesome "games" but shifts the focus to the relationships among the characters.

The character relationships are solid and there's blessed little in the way of smug, smart talk

God bless Jennifer Tilly, who attacks her role in this third sequel to 1988's killer-doll picture CHILD'S PLAY with incomparable slutty brio.

This modest little moral thriller is a pleasant surprise.

Rough-edged but affecting drama.

Has honorable aspirations, even as it becomes mired in mainstream movie conventions.

The effectiveness of this kind of issue-driven give and take relies heavily on casting, and Ritchie puts himself at a disadvantage: Madonna looks terrific in a bikini but she can't act, and the younger Giannini is stunt casting.

Shimizu generates a sense of palpable dread in each segment, expertly manipulating tried-and-true scare tactics supplemented by a truly inspired use of spooky sound effects.

Falls disappointing short of its ambition to be both sympathetically straightforward and funny.

The plot's contrivances are uncomfortably strained, and ultimately your reaction to its featherweight story of love and serendipity will be determined by how charming you find the dithering, slack-jawed Janice.

A breezy romantic comedy in which opposites attract against all the reasonable odds, this slight but thoroughly charming film benefits immeasurably from the assured performances of leads Juliette Binoche and Jean Reno.

Goofy and inconsequential, but pretty damned cute.

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

This oddly flat serial-killer picture shows none of the baroque flair that characterizes the best of Italian horror filmmaker Dario Argento's work.

Should please undiscriminating fans. But it in no way improves on the clichéd formula.

A predictable moral tale enacted by blandly pretty young things who bear little resemblance to the average brainiac.

Elvira fans could hardly ask for more.

The love story is pretty conventional stuff, but Linney's finely calibrated, low-key performance as Callie goes a long way towards making it more interesting than it might otherwise be.

It's repetitive and obvious but somehow endearing, like a truly ugly dog with sweet eyes.

Undermined by contrived suspense sequences, a pointless subplot involving Claire's flaky, trashy sister, and a formulaic thriller ending.

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.

No voice is more vivid than that of the writer of O, who died in 2002.

Jamal's comedy of family dysfunction is essentially a sitcom episode writ large; it's not subtle, but it's good-natured and hits its marks with ruthless efficiency.

The film deploys its disparate elements smartly, and director Hirotsugu Kawasaki can stage an action sequence with the best of them.

Suffers from an excess of material crammed into too little screen time. There's so much story that the characters get short shrift; you have to wonder, for example, what became of Siddalee's three siblings.

It desperately wants to be a paranoid political thriller, but this cobbled-together collection of corruption-on-Capitol Hill and cop movie cliches is so implausible that it's hard to care about any of the conspiratorial cover-ups and counter cover-ups.

An unvarnished look at the emotional havoc that ensues when middle-class housewife Kira (Stine Stengade) returns home after a lengthy stay in a mental hospital, anchored by devastating performances.

Despite its floating narrative, this is a remarkably accessible and haunting film.

If only Reiser or director Raymond De Felitta had been able to resist the fart jokes and the sloppy male-bonding scenes, this could have been a terrific little movie. As it is, it's shamelessly manipulative shtick brightened by sharply drawn supporting performances.

It works its gilded butt off to give you your money's worth.

The irony is that for all its "not your father's spy movie" posing, it's exactly like the later James Bond pictures: predictable, lightweight and 100 percent disposable

One soggy, charmless heap of chum.

This smooth concoction goes down with a pleasant tingle and leaves behind a warm glow.

There's nothing more to it than meets the eye, but Bertino understands the mechanics of suspense and knows how to use them.

It's not earthshaking or life-changing, but it's cute, occasionally predictable and only requires ACTUAL idiots, like Barry, to act like idiots. As formula entertainment goes, that's a pretty sweet deal.

Unfortunately, the remake is as toothless as the original and gets bogged down in the humiliations of the Harpers' down-slipping life.

If all this were anarchically funny, its shambling idiocy could be forgiven.

Sivan's film is well acted, beautifully photographed and oddly reassuring. It comes perilously close to suggesting that the injustices of colonial rule were the product of morally weak and misguided individuals rather than a system that empowered and enriched foreign interests at the expense of locals.

The jabs at the expense of self-centered New Yorkers with more money than sense are so mild they're pointless -- if satire doesn't hurt, what's the point?

The film's greatest assets are leads Susie Porter and David Wenham, whose considerable personal appeal make its trite observations about the war of the sexes seem charming, at least for a while.

Delivers some powerful emotional wallops alongside the chopsticks-up-the-nose violence, and manages the remarkable feat of making venerable American genre conventions seem eerily alien.

This simplistic animated feature falls firmly within the long tradition of bland, upbeat and earnest religious instructional films.

Goofy and surprisingly slow-moving.

Seriously flawed and not for every taste, the film was shot quickly and on the cheap, and is driven by Argento's slurred, scratchy voice and Bette Davis eyes.

That there's precious little chemistry between buffed-and-tanned stars Parker and McConaughey is only the first of this slight, overly busy film's problems.

Though the film ends on a surprising and genuinely magical note, it takes its own sweet time getting there; some viewers will have lost patience before the denouement arrives.

The backgrounds are handsome and moody, and the character animation is less distractingly cartoonish than that of films like the otherwise breathtaking Metropolis (2001).

A train wreck of a film whose chaotic, partly improvised story and too-tricky mix of film stocks, image sizes, split-screen effects and color/B&W footage overwhelm some phenomenally beautiful sequences and a memorable performance by Saffron Burroughs.

It neither works as a stand-alone film nor captures the thrilling sense of somber, pulpy mystery that made "The Matrix" so compelling. Nevertheless, It brings the saga to a satisfying close, and relies less on the clumps of pop-mystical cyber gobbledy-gook that gummed up the gears of "Reloaded" and more on the powerful emotional bonds that bind Neo, Trinity, Morpheus, Niobe, Link and Zee.

The Super is well written and acted—two things that should be givens but often aren’t, especially in genre films

Thinly conceived and thoroughly shallow.

To call Christian's film unpolished is an understatement.

LaPaglia and Davis deliver top-notch performances that go a long way toward offsetting the material's didacticism.

Clearly Phish's appeal is fundamentally experiential, and the experience doesn't lend itself to being captured on film.

While in her earlier movies Jennifer Love Hewitt made an impression by spilling out of her tops, in this one she spills out of her clothes at both ends. This could, if one were feeling charitable, be construed as a broadening of her range.

While the aerial dogfights are handsome and apparently historically accurate, right down to the tracer bullets that leave graceful, crisscrossing trails in the clouds, they have a video-game feel.

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.

Contrived, meandering, clichéd and just plain preposterous.

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.

Egoyan drains the life right out of the material, and the result is a chilly, complicated thriller that's neither thrilling nor a "Through the Looking Glass" head spinner.

Though smartly written and handsomely produced (the film's visual polish is remarkable, given its modest budget and the swanky settings the story dictates), this film would benefit greatly from more bite.

Everything has a fusty, embalmed quality: Whatever gave the novel its vitality has been smothered.

Nathanson processes this pungent stew of greed, ambition and self-delusion into pablum so sweet and bland it wouldn't shock a convent-raised idealist.

The truly creepy thing is that there's no bizarre, COMA-like conspiracy behind the malfeasance, just an awful betrayal of trust -- the kind of thing that sends an icy, paranoid chill through the blood just as the anesthetic takes hold.

Bill Murray plays the secondary role of a nameless American gag writer brimming with one-liners about the absurdity of Cuban life, Dustin Hoffman has a cameo as kvetching gangster Meyer Lansky.

If you don't care about the characters, then everything's just a big, dumb joke.

The generally competent B-list actors are hobbled by cliché-ridden dialogue but do their best to react in remotely plausible ways each time the script nails them with some new melodramatic contrivance.

It's dramatically unsatisfying.

This unnecessary and overlong sequel fails to recapture its predecessor's zing.

Light, formulaic and soft around the middle.

Canadian-born choreographer Alison Murray draws on her own experiences as a 15-year-old runaway living in squats and on the streets, in her feature-filmmaking debut, which is a clear-eyed look at the pleasures and price of abandoning conventional mores for experimental lifestyles.

The first fruit of wunderkinder Alicia Silverstone's First Kiss Productions, this muddled thriller-cum-romantic comedy of errors suggests that she might want to lay off the producing for a few years.

You can see the outline of an interesting movie beneath the cutesy-pie characterizations and heavy-handed mockery of small-town small-mindedness, but any chance it might have had is short-circuited by director Griffin Dunne's overwhelming inability to establish a consistent tone for the admittedly off-kilter material.

Strident and bombastic.

Scott swaddles this fundamentally straightforward revenge story in a jumble of bleary freeze frames, random changes of color saturation and film stock, jump cuts and stuttering montages, splashing text from some menacing word soup onto the resulting collage of chicly disturbing images.

Pointed, unsubtle political satire.

The whole lurid business is undeniably entertaining, but it leaves a bad taste.

Hokey, slow-moving thriller.

The Carter and Spotnitz's credit, such weighty concerns aren't the stuff of most mainstream genre movies. But they're also not sufficiently gripping to transform a middling thriller into something truly provocative or haunting.

It's periodically enlivened by unlikely cameos, including Lou Diamond Phillips as an undercover cop posing as a transvestite hooker and Gladys Knight as a forgotten Motown singer.

To make the package look fresh, there's a pile of complications.

It's not the bomb on the plane that scuttles this film: It's the mugging, ham-fisted direction and total absence of comic timing.

Tries to be all things to all people and winds up a tedious muddle.

Van Sant's film feels as dated as Hitchcock's, and Hitchcock's has the better excuse.

Tediously predictable thriller.

If not exactly dull, Hopkins' stream-of-consciousness rant is nonetheless self-indulgent and crammed with bits of business that never add up to anything much.

Writer-director Erik Palladino's admirably subtle bit of chronological trickery allows his small-scale drama, set in 9/11 New York, to deliver a sucker-punch of an ending.

Enthralling, darkly funny, horrifying and hopeful.

There's less than meets the eye in this tricky psychological thriller, one of a long line of mess-with-your-head brain ticklers in which all is not as it seems.

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.

Ironically, Faris' Samantha is the most convincing personality in the mix: She's a grotesque caricature of Courtney Love by way of Nancy Spungen, a vulgar, selfish monster of unbridled id, but you always know where she's coming from.

Too daft by half -- it might have been better if Ken were less loony, especially because his nuttiness verges on implying that loons love large women -- but supremely good natured.

Sweet-natured charmer in its own right.

Make no mistake: This slackly paced picture doesn't gel.

Fans of the series may be disappointed to see so little of Barker's sadistic Cenobites, but while they're used sparingly, they're used to good effect.

An awkward amalgam of road movie, buddy comedy and melodramatic conventions, first-time writer-director Jordan Roberts' male weepie ricochets between affecting scenes and insufferably maudlin ones.

The film looks great, but there's nothing under the high-gloss veneer.

Atkinson's painfully unfunny turn as an insensitive gynecologist is eclipsed by Hollander's scathingly funny portrayal of belligerent auteur Proclaimer, whose wears his pretenses with such scabby aplomb that they achieve high style.

Small children should be delighted by the menagerie of chatty critters, but their parents may be less than thrilled by what the animals have to say.

It careens from coarse comedy to smart-ass stylization to vicious violence without ever becoming convincing on any level.

The results isn't especially engaging, despite a quietly charismatic performance by Weiss, a relative newcomer who holds his own against far more experienced actors.

Witless farce.

Nasty fun all around.

It's hard to watch two fine actors working themselves into a lather for so little reward.

An amiable romantic comedy.

Lyne's direction is sometimes overblown -- debauched playwright Clare Quilty's (Frank Langella) appearance amid the pale fire of exploding bug-zappers really is a bit much -- and the unfortunate fact is that the novel is one long tease, an intricate, seductive game in which words are as important as deeds.

With its brisk pace, breezy dialogue and gently jaundiced view of the rites of filmmaking, this is one of Jaglom's most accessible and genuinely enjoyable films.

Funny, thought-provoking and, yes, touching.

An eccentric historical horror tale whose blackly comic tone wavers distracting.

Owen Wilson single-handedly hauls this amiable, middle-of-the-road comedy out of sheer mediocrity.

Still odder is the movie's sexual worldview, which is simultaneously infantile and fetishistic. Boys wear rubber, lipstick, and spandex, but don't seem to have a sexual bone in their unmuscled bodies.

Formulaic but surprisingly affecting drama.

Gorgeous but seriously unsatisfying.

Shot largely in Toronto and cast with the best of the B-list, this film has the low-rent gloss of a made-for-cable thriller.

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

An Arthurian tale minus everything the average person knows or cares about Arthur and his knights.

Maybe such cloddish sight gags as dipsomaniac priest chug-a-lugging from the communion chalice or an apparently straight-laced yuppie in full S&M drag just aren't very funny.

The movie's "shock" payoff still feels like a cheap trick.

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.

Though unpolished and formulaic, this tribute to the power of faith and music benefits from the contributions of musicians Tamyra Gray, a first-generation American Idol contestant who plays D.T.'s wholesome love interest; Grammy winner Kirk Franklin, who contributed six songs — three original — to the rousing soundtrack; and faith-based singers Yolanda Adams, Martha Munizzi, Fred Hammond (who also executive produced) and Delores Winans.

It feels as though everyone involved was having a rollicking good time, and while the film itself is wildly uneven, Lin and company get in a few pointed jabs at Hollywood fatuousness and self-delusion, cultural stereotypes and '70s fashions.

Only McKellan seems to understand the profound silliness of the film in which he finds himself, and he camps it up accordingly.

It's not that you can't go home again. It's that you SHOULDN'T, at least not in a lowbrow Hollywood comedy, because your family will inevitably be lewd, crude, loud and obnoxious.

Orenna, Thornton and Belton deliver strong, surprisingly subtle performances that make the modest fireworks genuinely engaging.

The prodigiously talented Allen, Bates and Lange give it their all, but there's a limit to what even they can do with platitudes and prefabricated homilies.

He (Allen) seems to have forgotten that comedy is all about timing, letting individual scenes meander -- often to accommodate his own stammering monologues -- and giving viewers far too much downtime in which to consider the staleness of many of the film's gags.

The limp thriller plot Deery constructs to frame his theological inquiries is both artificial and not very interesting, a lethal combination.

Wan's debut feature is a twisted, squirm-inducingly nasty bit of work, which isn't a criticism because that's exactly what he and cowriter Leigh Whannell had in mind.

Tame as can be by today's standards, but will charm fans of vintage erotica.

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

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.

The result is the farthest thing from a bland, spineless sequel: It's a brutal, insanely excessive successor to grindhouse pictures of yore.

Done in by its tone.

Simultaneously sober and silly horror picture.

This modest picture is distinguished by some marvelously bitchy dialogue.

Fleder delivers the requisite shocks, and his direction is brisk, efficient and occasionally stylish; Judd and Freeman both give more than the material demands.

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.

Biopic cliches hamstring producer-star Jennifer Lopez's pet project.

Cheerfully gross, deliberately retro horror picture pays tongue-in-cheek homage to the kind of genre movies Charles Band and Roger Corman's companies turned out in the 1980s.

As a debut it holds out the promise that Montias might do something more interesting in his next film.

It's hard not to be charmed by scenes like the one in which Briggs gives his posies a little pep talk, assuring them that just because they sprouted behind prison walls doesn't mean they can't compete with those hoity-toity flowers at Hampton Court.

If you were watching it at home you wouldn't feel compelled to pause the film before going into the kitchen to fix a snack.

It's a dumb movie, but it's good for a few profoundly undemanding laughs.

The satire is broad and easy, while the romance is thoroughly unconvincing.

Unfortunately, this flawed but interesting film will be Wassel's only legacy; the director was murdered in 2001 by Nathan C. Powell, who helped finance this film.