Maitland McDonagh

Nathanson's script has a disheartening let's get on with it air, and the film feels like marathon training...

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.

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.

Once it settles down, it becomes a star-making vehicle for Jackman, and a supremely polished example of the sort of swoony love story cherished by women who secretly hope that some day their prince will come.

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

Though the script's twists and turns are fairly conventional and the Davis subplot is handled in an awkwardly obvious way, first-time feature filmmaker Robert Connolly understands the power of style.

If the movie overall had the bitter brio of Malcolm McDowell's brief turn as Globecom guru Teddy K, a Franken-mogul stitched together from bits of Richard Branson, Barry Diller and Rupert Murdoch, it would be a pointed black comedy.

Fingleton turned his own story into a feel-good fable; neither Martin McGrath's gorgeous cinematography nor the hypnotic score by Run Lola Run(1998) composers Johnny Klimek and Reinhold Heil's can compensate.

Characters find themselves in absurdly complicated situations, but respond with sardonic cool rather than hot-blooded hysteria.

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.

This sentimental comedy is generally sweet natured.

If ever a movie cried out to be French, it's this one, and not just because it's a remake of Claude Chabrol's notoriously icy La Femme Infidele (1968).

Renner's performance as Dahmer is unimpeachable, fascinating without being charismatic, and Kayaru's Rodney is a marvel of complicated characterization under difficult circumstances.

This thin, clichéd comedy of crime and social climbing contains some scattered laughs and whole lot of padding.

Though consistently handsome, the film never quite achieves the shallow but hugely seductive intensity of its MTV-style opening credits sequence.

Westby's sympathy for the Scottys of the world is evident, but like them he doesn't always know how to put his best face forward.

Zwick frequently sacrifices dramatic urgency in the name of sobriety.

There's little room for ideas when there are flaming cars to be crashed, and overall the film is an infelicitous hodgepodge that lifts as liberally from "The Quatermass Experiment" (1956) and "28 Weeks Later" (2007) as "Body Snatchers" while leaving all the best bits behind -- even the iconic pods are gone.

The trouble with this precious fable isn't that the Whitmans are self-absorbed ninnies: It's that they aren't characters at all.

The result is undeniably offensive and occasionally very funny, but the gags fall flat as often as they hit their mark.

The film's seriousness of intent is unimpeachable – Forman and Carriere see disturbing echoes of the modern world in 18th-century Spain -- but the execution borders on farce.

Shot in the warm sepia tones of bittersweet memories, this whimsical, unpretentious shaggy war story is the sort of film that looks like a small gem when you accidentally stumble across it on TV or at the video store. But it feels a little unsatisfying when its small virtues are stretched to cover a big screen.

The breakout star is retired English bouncer Lenny McLean, 49, who memorably declares, "I f***ing hate violence."

De Mello's dedication is inspiring enough to speak for itself.

Although inspired by actual events, the film proceeds along formulaic wish-fulfillment lines, its dynamics unaltered by the casting of a mixed-race actor in what was originally a redneck role; it's a sign of some sort of social progress that justified ass-kicking trumps race.

Freakies fans will swoon.

Ricci brings her trademark gravity to the wary Suzie, but Blanchett's role is the dazzler.

A buzzed-up gloss on the original, it's entertaining -- if fundamentally shallow.

Ultimately, though, the film is forgettable even by the standards of prefabricated pop ephemera.

While the film is shot in shades of gray, the drama is played out in black and white.

The trouble isn't just that this haunted-house story, written by Mark Wheaton and directed by Hong Kong filmmakers Danny and Oxide Pang, is both formulaic and derivative. It's that it's completely free of atmosphere, the very thing that their 2002 "The Eye" had in such creepy abundance.

The film's mix of cheap gags, macabre coming-of-age story, social satire and Cronenbergian body horror is apparently meant to gel into black comedy, but it never quite does.

This amiable picture talks tough, but it's all bluster -- in the end it's as sweet as "Greenfingers."

fans of this venerable Eurotrash form will welcome any evidence that it's still alive and writhing lasciviously.

Mena's characters rarely do the sort of spectacularly stupid things that provoke derisive laughter from seasoned horror-moviegoers.

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

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

The plot is more of the same old running and screaming, but Weaver is worth the price of admission all by herself, which is just as well in light of the less-than-fleshed out characters by whom she's surrounded.

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.

Clichés negate bona fides; hence, the movie feels like a corny Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland vehicle with cussing. That said, the tapping is fabulous.

Characters are undermined by the inexpressive animation that mars the majority of animated films: Their haunted inner lives are clearly meant to take center stage, but their faces are blank and two-dimensional.

Formulaic to the core, this reworking of the fondly remembered high-school slasher picture works surprisingly well on its own terms.

Part of the problem is its length; at two hours and ten minutes it meanders rather than building up a head of steam and barreling straight through logic and plausibility on the way to Hell.

While the subject is potentially fascinating, Gosling's unfocused, sluggish film is a case study in missed opportunities.

An uneasy mix of frat-boy yocks and "Twilight Zone"-style science-fiction.

There are poignant moments in this apocalyptic "what if" exercise.

Well-written and surprisingly well-acted by a relatively inexperienced cast

The banality of faceless evil isn't actually all that compelling on the hoof; the film's more interesting as a curiosity than as a film.

An odd blend of recycled American exploitation movie tropes and snarky Euro-art film attitude.

Van Bebber is out to capture the mood of a generation-long bad trip and succeeds with unnerving accuracy by telling the story within the family circle.

All the segments are technically polished, but none offers much substance.

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.

This is a thoroughly conventional story of one man's search for redemption in the neon slime; its multiple flashback structure is just a way of parceling out information, not a device used to undermine the narrative.

Director Mike Hodges and screenwriter Trevor Preston's dark revenge tale strips its crime-story cliches of their hopped-up energy and seedy glamour, leaving nothing but sordid sadness.

Swank is painfully uncharismatic, leaving Christopher Walken, in the minor role of occultist Count Cagliostro, to decamp with any scene in which he appears. His performance may not be historically credible, but it's hugely entertaining: Would that the same were true of the film overall.

Preachy and predictable, an afterschool special in all but name.

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.

The film LOOKS great, but at a brisk 88 minutes, there's no time to fill in back story, from the epic history of paladin persecution to the deeply personal mystery of David's mother, and the cliffhanger ending is so abrupt that the movie seems bizarrely truncated.

It's hard to say whether the Wachowski brothers' live action take on the Japanese Speed Racer cartoons is more irritating because it looks like a Hot Wheels video game or because the brothers seem to think that there's a powerful family drama humming away beneath the flashing lights and spinning wheels.

Though handsomely mounted, this parable of intersecting destinies and implacable tragedy is as lifeless as a wax tableau.

All the right intentions but never overcomes the essential problem of showing what's going on inside people's heads.

There's way too much CGI gadgetry, some inventive, much simply flashy in the worst kind of video-game way. The kids are nearly lost in the glitz.

Gosling is the film's salvation: He really is good enough to make this underwritten fantasy feel as though it amounts to something. But it doesn't.

It's all about action and ogling -- Jolie's boobs, butt and thighs get so much screen time they deserve their own credits.

Forget about social significance, depth of character and complex thematic underpinnings, and repeat after me: "It's only a werewolf movie."

Cushioned by money - which frees him from needing to work and allows him to fly around the world looking for his past - Bruce is attractive and well-spoken but not especially interesting, which leaves a yawning void at the story's center.

Contains striking moments, but never coheres.

Their mania might be funny if it weren't so creepy.

The scenes from Epidemic have the high-contrast look of a 1920s horror film, are in English (much of it badly dubbed) and feature images that are handsome and preposterous in equal parts -- they're amusing, and too stylized to be disturbing.

It's hard to tell whether Attal means the fictional Yvan to be such an colossal jerk. His abrasive obnoxiousness undermines the film's generally light tone, and seriously deflects sympathy away from his character's dilemma.

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

This modest little moral thriller is a pleasant surprise.

The film's greatest asset, however, is its unusually authentic use of Manhattan locations: Younger clearly knows New York much better than the topography of the human heart.

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

The quality of the CGI-heavy special effects is variable and Nomura's fey performance as Seimei gives his relationship with Hiromasa a distinctly homoerotic cast that may or may not be intentional, but the demon zombies and Doson's cackling familiar are crowd pleasers.

Amateurish, badly acted and shot on the cheap (many sequences don't even have sync sound), this cult item features a 40-minute car chase (almost half the film's running time) that's nothing short of breathtaking, particularly in light of the obvious budgetary constraints.

David Mamet's political thriller about the disappearance of the president's daughter is an unsatisfying slipknot of a film -- it looks tight and elaborate, but give it a tug and it goes flat.

This brazen mix of old and new is undermined by the predictable story, shallow characterizations and a dopey sense of humor.

Despite excellent performances all around, the actors can't overcome the script's limitations.

The result is formulaic, shamelessly manipulative and surprisingly watchable.

Surfing isn't inherently service to humanity; it's a sport whose grace and athleticism Brown captures thrillingly, and that should be enough.

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

A peculiar and oddly haunting achievement.

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

The film never escapes the constraints of its genre, but it's a hell of a ride.

Hicks smothers the story in portentous images and the obligatory memory-inducing soundtrack. The effect is like peering at a photo through layers of shellac: evocative but remote.

Coppola's awkward screenplay never finds its tone -- or perhaps it deliberately evokes the pulp conventions of WWII adventures, horror films, weepy melodrama, psychological mysteries and superhero origin stories as a way of evoking the fundamental artificiality of the cinema. Either way, it never comes together into a cohesive whole, and is seriously undermined by Roth's morose performance.

Unfortunately, this visually sumptuous epic is the very definition of a "prestige production," swaddled in good taste and better intentions.

This feverish drama examines issues of faith and redemption through the practice of prayer intercession.

It's a sorry state of affairs when a goldfish and a frog (Ginger's prize specimen, unsubtly named Casanova) have more chemistry than a romantic comedy's human leads.

The result is 93 very long minutes' worth of admirably committed actors putting themselves through the emotional wringer to very little end.

This thin chronicle of bad behavior among the rich and self-obsessed is above all painfully derivative, borrowing wholesale from Theodore Dreiser's "An American Tragedy" and echoes Allen's own "Crimes and Misdemeanors."

Neither as dull nor as insufferably smug as it could easily have been.

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

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.

Mixes broad humor with a surprisingly subtle portrait of a family pulled in a bewildering variety of directions.

Stuart and Margolo are genuine marvels of computer generated special effects, each feather, whisker and strand of fur beautifully rendered. But they're bland and rather boring characters, dumbed down for kids.

Never adds up to much of anything.

London-born director Asif Kapadia's second feature, following 2001's critically acclaimed "The Warrior," is a slow, low-key supernatural thriller whose story is too slender to justify its feature-length running time.

Crafting this crude, noisy remake of Disney's first live-action comedy required the labor of no fewer than five screenwriters.

Stylish and twisty, but not clever enough to support its more outrageous plot machinations.

Actor-turned-director Clark Johnson uses the flashy, up-to-the-minute editing and camera stunts action fans expect, but keeps the mayhem on a recognizably human scale — it's big, but not insanely overblown.

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.

Undeniably handsome..., but no cliché is left unturned, right down to the spray of toy soldiers falling from the hand of a dead child. Everything old isn't new again.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

The supporting cast is stocked with far better actors than Seagal -- Kristofferson, Harry Dean Stanton and Stephen Lang among them -- and country music personalities ranging from Mark Collie, Levon Helm, Randy Travis and Travis Tritt to Loretta Lynn's twin daughters Patsy and Peggy, to whom Seagal's character makes some vaguely suggestive remarks.

A three-hankie weeper in disaster-movie drag, and its tear-jerking bull's-eyes are separated by long stretches of tedium.

One soggy, charmless heap of chum.

The movie fails to make Alma a vivid presence -- She deserves better, and so do viewers.

Buried deep inside this ponderous, repetitive psychological thriller is a fantastic half-hour "Twilight Zone" episode.

Though some individual scenes crackle, overall the film feels unfocussed and flabby, like a series of acting improv exercises strung together.

Falls far short of its grim potential.

Where "Charade" unfolds in a fantasy Paris full of glamorous white people, Demme's film takes place in a gray tangle of streets teeming with multi-ethnic Parisians. Newton and Robbins mimic Hepburn and Matthau, while Wahlberg is the anti-Grant, lumpen and thuggish rather than beguilingly debonair.

The end is hardly in doubt, since this sweet-natured film treads a path worn smooth and hard by countless other tiny feet. Its message is as unimpeachable as it is familiar, differentiated from countless similar tales only by the Filipino setting.

To an outsider, it's pretty thin stuff.

This picture's b-movie values probably play better on video than in theaters.

Weepy, overwrought love story.

This gentle, slow-moving film contains some charming sequences but no new insights into the pleasures and burdens of family.

The script is heavy on platitudes about friendship, but since there isn't a single fully fleshed character in sight, who cares?

The car stunts are ridiculous, all lightning-fast editing and computer enhancement -- by the time action is this far removed from reality, who cares?

Has a terminal case of the cutes.

Freundlich's postmodern road movie contains several sharply observed scenes but doesn't really add up to much.

Whether this riot of unrepentant trashiness strikes you as tediously ridiculous or brainlessly amusing is probably a matter of mood.

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

Sternfeld's script, developed at the Sundance screenwriters' lab, is spare to the point of stinginess; individual scenes play beautifully without adding up to anything, stranding the actors in an emotional vacuum that drains the life from their performances.

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.

A feature-length Twilight Zone episode, filtered -- not entirely successfully -- though the sensibilities of David Lynch and his Wild at Heart collaborator, Barry Gifford.

The filmmaker's command of storytelling is less than assured, and with the exception of Figueroa and Annette Murphy (who plays Pepe's mistress Letti), the film's performances range from awkwardly wooden to amateurishly awful. While Arteta is definitely a filmmaker to watch, this particular movie is a testament to aspirations that considerably exceed his present abilities.

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.

Although the story is as predictable as can be -- "surprise" twist ending included -- the performances are better than those in most super-low budget horror pictures, and Jessica Gallant's super-16mm cinematography is surprisingly handsome.

Things quickly degenerate into a series of juvenile jokes about flatulence and bosoms, and by the end the cast is reduced to frantically manhandling a corpse for yucks. Not funny.

Though glossy and smoothly directed, this limp concoction has all the sparkle of flat champagne.

It's familiar, undemanding and not as bad as it could have been, but you can't help thinking that somewhere else, there's a real party going on.

The movie's gossamer-thin plot, padded with dream sequences and flashbacks to scenes you saw less than an hour earlier, exists only as an excuse for obvious homages to better films, stunt casting...and what pass for clever remarks in circles unfamiliar with real wit.

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

While handsomely mounted and generally well acted, the film is undermined by long stretches of awkward, obvious dialogue and by the vagueness of Lisa's revolt against the status quo.

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

Gallo's poor, poor pitiful me routine wears very thin, very fast, but Ricci is incandescent, a softly-glowing dumpling of a dream-girl in powder-blue fishnet tights and sparkly tap shoes: She's the diamond in the dirt.

Fiore captures various artists horsing around with groupies, smoking dope and hanging out backstage, and cuts the material together in the kinetic but meaningless manner of MTV promos.

Penn, in particular, is so subdued he's hardly there, while Hurley's seductive, hyper-articulate Adaline is actually ludicrous, sucking suggestively on ice cubes and reciting poetry like a phone-sex operator pretending to be a book-reading babe.

Professionally produced and surprisingly tame.

All of which would be fine if Figgis managed to work up any real suspense, but the film slogs towards its inevitable mano-a-mano showdown like something up to its knees in mud.

The bad news is that, though professionally produced on a micro-budget, Azita Zendel's ambitious writing-directing debut is undermined by an awkward script and some very amateurish acting.

The big trouble here is that there seem to be pieces of three different films rubbing up against each other without ever fitting together.

A gloomy, preposterous psychological thriller.

The results are a bit amateurish, but wholesome and achingly sweet.

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?

Simultaneously nakedly formulaic and oddly clumsy, particularly in terms of character introduction.

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

It's really all about the cars, kandy-kolored nitro-injected streamline babies with sweeter curves than a Playboy photo spread, more personality than Rome, Brian and Monica combined and enough juice to send a fleet of rockets to the farthest reaches of the known universe.

The tone is inconsistent -- sometimes it seems to be straining for black comedy, other times it seems dead serious.

Bad enough that the plot is shopworn, but the tough-gal talk is unintentionally hilarious, and the complicated narrative structure is annoying and pointless.

Despite the handsome production values and best efforts of the attractive young cast, it's hard to get deeply involved with the frantic "what's going on?" sturm und drang.

Screenwriter Lona Williams doesn't seem to have gotten much beyond the petty absurdity of theme headdresses and ludicrous talent competitions.

Slight, smart-alecky romantic comedy.

The few minutes of footage devoted to a performance by bona fide jazz artist "Little" Jimmy Scott, an eccentric cult favorite, is more genuinely evocative than anything else in the film

A painfully claustrophobic picture.

A sickly soft-swirl confection of low laughs and smarmy sentiment.

The performances are uneven and the loosely structured story never actually goes anywhere.

Pascal's low-key presence is particularly important, since in another actor's hands Alain's whining and waffling could easily be insufferable.

The movie's tone and plot twists are so ludicrously overwrought that even Washington's admirably restrained performance -- can't rescue it from its own excesses.

This scattershot comedy (which might be called "irreverent" if anyone actually revered movies like AMERICAN PIE) features vulgar gags at the expense of recent youth-oriented pictures.

A hyperactive hodgepodge.

Lacks a sense of bone-chilling dread.

The youngsters all turn in game performances, but the standout is Anne Heche, whose weird Missy Egan is pure Mimsy Farmer at maximum twitch.

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.

This unsubtle parody probably worked better on stage; its candy-colored artifice looks more than a little strained on film, and the actors are all trying really hard to be camp.

Ledger swirls his cassock glamorously, while Weller is clearly concealing cloven hoofs beneath his; Addy plays the fool and the one-note Sossamon is thoroughly annoying, as fey as Meg Tilly but without Tilly's redeeming faraway air.

Fatuous twaddle posing as a REALLY DEEP consideration of what's wrong with our crazy, mixed-up world, Matthew Ryan Hoge's slick but deeply dumb film unfolds in a picture-perfect suburb of Anywheresville, USA.

Labored and dispiriting.

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.

This disappointing sequel to last year's horror sleeper gets trapped in the clichés it's trying to send up.

Ralston gets solid performances out of his cast, and the film has a surprisingly polished look. But in the end, there isn't much to it.

Without an assured character at its center, the movie quickly collapses in a heap of moldy clichés and contrived (and not especially funny) situations.

Overall, the film is occasionally interesting but essentially unpersuasive, a footnote to a still evolving story.

Would be too long even if it were twice as funny. And that about sums up the movie.

A slow-moving, dramatically slack film.

The occasional amusing one-liner can't compensate for the broad caricatures and awkwardly structured story.

Turturro's sweaty, lumpen Cain is a profoundly disagreeable guide down the rabbit hole of hallucinatory paranoia.

A rapper doesn't make the story fresh.

Witless comedy.

The mere sight of strapping men in micro-mini skirts suffering the indignities of thong underwear, catcalls and pushy pick-up artists is good for a couple of lowbrow laughs, but they're buried pretty deep in dreck.

Though Dylan shuffles through the dramatic sequences like a dessicated mummy, the music sequences are strikingly vibrant -- he's never looked worse or sounded better.

Mediocre documentary squanders a terrific subject.

The film delivers a few slick thrills before beaching itself on an ending that would be chilling if its depiction of unimaginable horror's lingering legacy weren't so muddled.

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

Director Forest Whitaker, who appears to have been typed as a female-friendly director in the wake of "Waitinh to Exhale's" runaway success, drags out the already painfully slow proceedings with syrupy dissolves, slo-mo sequences and redundant flashbacks, underscoring it all with an intrusively obvious country soundtrack that matches lyrics to emotions with cringe-inducing exactness.

It's merely glum when it should be bracingly grim.

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

Adults -- even the die-hard dog lovers -- will just have to resign themselves to being bored silly whenever the cartoonish Cruella is absent from the screen.

Thoroughly preposterous on every level.

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.

The sequences are handsomely designed, but frankly, you might as well be watching someone play a video game.

Though more coherent than the disastrous Hellraiser: Bloodline, this psychological thriller with demons gets bogged down in too many "Is it real or just a nightmare?" sequences, and Sheffer's typically wooden performance as Joe makes it hard to sympathize with his travails.

Whaley's determination to immerse you in sheer, unrelenting wretchedness is exhausting.

A straight-faced throwback to the glory days of mutant wildlife on the rampage.

The superficially cheery “Boogie Nights” is infinitely scarier.

In the end it's the same old blood pudding.

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

Utterly predictable, noisy and stupid.

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.

Production-designed within an inch of its life, this remake's best conceit is the casting of Crispin Glover as its socially maladroit rat fancier.

A lifelong baseball enthusiast, director and co-producer Mike Tollin -- persuaded many real-life baseball figures to make cameo appearances.

So formulaic it starts to fade from memory before the last punch is thrown.

The film's last 20 minutes devolve into a tedious slog through the kind of pointless, predictable running and screaming that give horror movies a bad name.

The verdict: More thoughtful than Harlin's version, but hardly the invigorating mix of shocks and metaphysical horror needed to revitalize the Exorcist franchise.

The result isn't very funny: There are clever bits, sure, but they're embedded in long, painfully obvious sequences built around one-shot gags.

Dave Collard's preposterous script relies heavily on fortuitous coincidence... and thoroughly stupid behavior.

The big surprise is so obvious that it makes the deliberate pacing seem painfully slow, and Kidman's prissy accent and tight-lipped performance are more than a little grating.

Goofy and surprisingly slow-moving.

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.

John Cleese supplies the voice of George's brainy and terrifically tolerant sidekick, a very unconvincing animatronic gorilla named Ape, but even he can't raise the level of humor above the harmlessly goofy.

Ostensibly an "adult comedy" about serious things, screenwriter Richard LaGravenese's disjointed directing debut rings profoundly false, a story about class distinctions and suffering conceived and executed in privilege.

This tale has been told and retold; the races and rackets change, but the song remains the same.

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.

Shot in shades of steely gray and streaked with near-constant rain, this gloomy revenge thriller is a sadistic cartoon.

This is a psychological study that rejects psychology, an erotic drama of surpassing coldness, and a story of amour fou in which the madness is calculated and the love frozen.

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.

Weber's losers really are losers -- envious, spiteful, complacent, mean-spirited and ultimately boring malcontents pickled in their own poison, and they drag his film down with them.

The material is familiar, and doesn't have anything new to say about the ways men and women wound each other.

It never actually coalesces into a movie.

An amazing artifact; the decor and lighting mix '70s tackiness with odd '50s touches, the sound design is elaborate.

So outrageously, unregenerately stupid that you might be tempted to think it's smart. But it's not: It's as dumb as Georgia dirt.

McTiernan's extensive action background is nowhere evident in the murky, all-but-impossible to follow battle sequences.

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