Marc Savlov

Bottom line: Jonah is strictly for kids suffering from rescinded television privileges or adults seeking a nap in a cool, dark environment that reeks of stale popcorn.

Where has all the fun science-fiction filmmaking gone?

While nowhere near as mawkish at the abysmal "Pay It Forward," K-PAX nevertheless seems somehow unfocused and meandering; it's Spacey-light.

Hopper, unsurprisingly, devours scenery like he's already dead and loving it, but for once his penchant for overacting is overshadowed by the real stars of Romero's world: They're dead, they're all messed up, but it's great to finally have them back in town.

Beyond the Gates bears witness to the worst of the worst, but these days, and far more importantly, so does YouTube.

Helgeland's film positively seethes with bad vibrations; it's kicky, nasty urban sangfroid with pointy little teeth and a serious case of the angries, an existential hand grenade disguised as a heist film.

A storyline that makes less sense than the current state of tech stocks on the Nasdaq.

There's nothing terribly bad about Bend It Like Beckham -- in fact it's a fine Friday-night-out film -- it's just that it strikes me as being an awful little piffle cloaked in the garb of something so much more.

Simultaneously creepy and hilarious, this is the perfect slice of Grand Guignol for a humid summer's night.

Bonuses all around, but a double one for Perabo, the only cast member to survive this dull-as-dirt Cave with her actorly integrity intact.

It's a hockey affair at the best of times.

Much to my dismay this is not an unauthorized sequel to Abel Ferrara's 1979 East Village art-world freakout "Driller Killer." This is instead a dispiritingly mediocre tweener comedy from some very talented people who appear to be experiencing a delayed sophomore slump.

While expertly executed animation-wise and passably entertaining for very young kids (less so, their parents), is still as dull as the hull on Rocketship X-M.

One extended joke on the fallibility of texting ghetto slang to your buddies rings out above the others, but the vast majority of the buffoonery is subpar wigga-schtick, and so witless that not even some seriously slamming tracks from the likes of So Solid Crew, Ms. Dynamite, and DMX can save this white-chocolate meltdown.

You could do worse.

Dear George Lucas: What gives with this Eragon jazz? I mean, gee whiz, did you seriously think that we wouldn't recognize you, the Great Man, as the guiding, um, FORCE behind this dull retelling of "Star Wars"?

The "Citizen Kane" of Oedipal zombie-cannibal-right to death-comedy-love stories... So gleefully over-the-top that it's decidedly hard not to gag while you're laughing yourself incontinent... Sick. Perverse. Brilliant.

Despite an overlong running time and a punishing amount of violence and gore, it's a deeply ambitious picture, one of the most expensive and original to come out of France in many years.

Miner strives to imbue the film with the requisite autumnal haze of the original but then gives up midway through and instead resorts to the standard stalk 'n' slash formulas.

Great fun to watch, thoughtful and timely, Thomas in Love is likely to generate some decidedly interesting post-film conversations as well.

While director Bill nails the sheer spectacle of squads of SPADs dovetailing in flames into the wide blue yonder, the earthbound action (much as it was in another sputtering epic, Michael Bay's "Pearl Harbor") is strictly laissez faire.

For those looking to be stylishly entertained while learning more than anyone might ever want to know about the formation of the Bergman psyche, well, here it is.

Everything fits perfectly, from titles to fin, but most of all Firth, who dons the role of George like a fine bespoke suit.

All I know is that guys are strongly advised to avoid this on a first date.

It's only at film's end that you realize the whole soggy, overlong mess isn't going to go anywhere.

By far the weakest of the trilogy. Spurting arteries and random acts of horror are not enough to sustain a film with such a supposedly bold groundwork. Let's hope Barker himself can find the time to return to directing before he ends up like Stephen King.

Snail-paced and ultimately dull creepy-crawl.

Instead of true grit and gutshot black-hatters, director Les Mayfield has crafted what may well be the world's first Tommy Hilfiger Western.

Suffers from a persistent case of narrative backsliding that only serves to make older members of the audience long for the days of the dwarves, beauties, and poisoned apples of Disney-yore, and younger ones squirm in their seats.

The story is a shambles, incoherent throughout, veined with tirelessly wearying flashbacks, hallucinations, and just plain old lousy storytelling.

You may have the biggest flat-screen DLP monitor in the city, but Red Cliff will never look half as spectacular as it will on the big – and I mean really big – screen.

It's big, it's stupid, it's pretty kick-ass.

The movie feels mechanical all the way through, leaving Sadek's debut an inauspicious and ill-lubed affair.

A bitter, bloody masterpiece with adrenalized emotions and hyper-realized images, this is perhaps as close to battle as any sane human being should ever hope to tread.

Closer is an un-love story as honest and naked as Cupid in the devil's dock, the whole truth, and nothing but.

For some reason Derailed never fully engages our sympathies. I think that's because it's difficult to swallow Owen as anything other than eminently resourceful.

An exercise in unintentional farce.

Plenty of killings abound, nevertheless the film is a masterful -- albeit warped -- love-story-cum-road-movie that revolves around three of the most invigorating performances of the year.

It pains me to say it, but Afterlife, the latest installment in this seemingly eternal zombie apocalypse franchise, is considerably more entertaining than George A. Romero's most recent exhumation.

Peterson's film is a huge, loud beast of a film, filled with gunfire, explosions, and not a few tears. It's all grounded, however, in Ford's gritted-teeth performance as President Marshall.

For fans, however, Saw VI is, pardon the pun, a cut above the rest but not, sadly, by much.

Achingly gorgeous in almost all respects, the film soars in its period depiction of turn-of-the-century London (and later in Venice, as well), from costuming to cinematography on down.

Rollicking is the term that best sums up Plunkett and Macleane, not in itself a bad thing, just, I think, not a very good thing.

It's visceral bloodbathery at its most repellent, but worse than that, it's horrific like the aftermath of a suicide bombing instead of terrifying like the bomb beneath the table or the knife behind the back.

This quiet, contemplative gem of a film paints a painfully accurate portrait of familial love, loss, and healing-by-degrees among the migrant communities bordering San Antonio.

Hoge's film raises more questions than it answers – that's his point, I think, to get us thinking – and Gosling, who previously played the conflicted Jewish Nazi skinhead in "The Believer," inhabits the role of Leland so fully it's as if the character had killed him as well.

Shimuzu sees darkened staircases and hears the rustle of dead autumn leaves and reacts as if from the devil’s own haiku. And his dread is catching.

Director Noyce has a sure hand with the action sequences and keeps The Saint from bogging down too often in the mires of action film exposition (once again, think Mission: Impossible).

As fluid and intellectually stimulating as the man himself, a tragic, heartfelt take on an event some 40 years old that feels as fresh as yesterday's Times.

Director Rose seems not to know what to show next, and whether this is in an effort to keep his audience guessing or not, it only ends up making what could have been an exceptionally disturbing film exceptionally annoying.

Cronos is a thoughtful, intelligent film, and as a horror movie (which is, I think, its main mission in life) it's genuinely disquieting.

Suffers mightily from sequelitis. Forced to explain what’s going on and what’s going to be going on in the next and final installment (due out in November), the Wachowskis have laced the film with a series of crushingly dull and often incomprehensible scenes of exposition and yakky gabfests.

It's relentlessly bad in a way that just makes those theatre seats plain uncomfortable.

Suffers from a lack of good gags. That’s not to say there aren’t scads of chuckles scattered throughout – Dylan and his cast are nothing if not gluttons for the fast and cheap yuk (not to mention yuck) – but the howls of laughter that arose from Paul and Chris Weitz’s original slice of Pie just aren’t there.

It's not so much the individual storylines that grab you, but Curtis’ unrelenting optimism. In the end, it's nice to know that love, actually, does conquer all.

Truly, the greatest torture of all is boredom.

Truthfully, it's hard to imagine a better screen adaptation of this queer household. Addams would have been proud.

For Sandler's core audience of developmentally arrested males, it may all be a little too cute.

It's stoner comedy of the most absurd kind, part fryboy mental drizzle, part wink-wink audience baiting, and wholly, utterly funny.

Howard's snappy-smooth performance, unsurprisingly, is what elevates Fighting from its hoary genre predecessors.

It's just the most inept filmmaking you can catch in theatres right now, or probably all year long.

It's all a bit much, yes, a bit exhausting, that's true, but then why on earth would anyone expect otherwise?

One of the Peking Opera-trained superstar's most mediocre films, rivaling last year’s God-awful "The Tuxedo" for sheer messy filmmaking and brazen acts of tedium... Abysmal.

Eager to please, but it’s so lacking in real-world skate politics that it more resembles the chugging PG-13 mediocrity of Top 40 pop-punk-lite than the hard-core Black Flagisms of Peralta’s scathingly real doc.

Home Alone is the apex, the pinnacle, the culmination of every bad bit Hughes has ever written or directed. It overflows with primitive, disastrously unfunny sight gags and neo-hateful familial humor.

A dark comedy caught in a white-light washout, it's neither mean enough to be funny, nor funny enough to mean much.

Feels overlong and underscripted.

It's mediocrity at its most unremarkable.

The less said about The Ring, the better for you, the sooner-to-be-freaked-out.

I came out of Beyond Borders with the gnawing feeling I'd just been subjected to some sort of ghastly prank, Punk’d by the director of "GoldenEye" with Lara Croft as his willing confederate.

It's a testament to Bill Nighy's cadaverous panache that this third entry in the ongoing exsanguinators vs. lycanthropes franchise (that's vampires and werewolves to anyone not weaned on Famous Monsters) is as tolerable as it is.

The highlight of this satirical remake of ABC's mid-Seventies buddy-cop anomaly is named, unsurprisingly, Will Ferrell.

Summer was made for this kind of film, and Predators is almost exactly what you need to fix this otherwise busted summer cinema season.

Plays like a bad adolescent revenge fantasy on Ritalin, all jagged editorial edges and silly, pumped-up testosterone.

So full of good stuff that it's impossible not to fall in love with it.

Like last year's "Lethal Weapon 3" -- another ridiculously uninspired sequel -- Another Stakeout starts with a terrific bang and goes nowhere fast.

This is a Farrelly film for adults, if not the entire family, and its a charmer, honest both to the nature of the loves we choose in haste, and the fear that makes us so hasty so often.

Scrappy, powerful, and shocking.

Guaranteed to inspire many more belly laughs than it does actual shivers. Boo, scary? I think not.

High Heels becomes mired in its own best intentions - primary colors and all.

Like the Flying Dutchman, this third Pirates outing is an empty vessel haunted by the ghosts of its sabre-rattling betters.

Reality has overtaken the movies here, which, I suppose, makes T3 all the more cathartically appealing. At least onscreen we have Arnold Schwarzenegger in our corner.

I saw the original version of this same story 28 years ago. It was called "Scanners" and it blew my mind for real. Push just blows.

This film is unquestionably the most unromantic and downright despairing romcom since "Made of Honor" or, possibly, "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?"

It's not the greatest movie about baseball ever made (and I'll keep my mouth shut on that one if I know what's good for me), but it's not the worst, either. Like the game itself, it's pretty darn fun.

The straight dope for speed junkies and fans of the art of flinging one’s well-padded frame through the contortions enabled only by disastrously catapulting oneself off a slippery asphalt track at speeds even Dale Earnhardt would have dismissed as lunacy.

Sauper's delicately horrific documentary is a short, sharp slap in the face of the developed world, and a long overdue one at that.

This is an unpleasant film, but Argento, whose bloodline positively seethes with unpleasantness, is, in her own right, a master cinematic stylist of the first order.

Americans are befuddled by the inexplicable, and they demand explanations. With The Grudge 2 Shimizu delivers them and thus defangs the horror, leaving us in a well-lit room, pining for the shadows.

Isn't going to make anyone's head explode with joy, but it is sweet and sporadically funny in its own loopy way.

Greenaway and his picture-perfect cast weave so many interlacing threads into the story, and so many curious subtexts - stylistic and otherwise - that it sometimes leaves us scratching our heads in wonderment.

Prinze, Lillard, and Biel are all pleasant enough to look at, but the film's Romeo and Juliet tropes are shopworn by now, and the movie gives us nothing else.

With centrifugal force on his side, Spider-Man dips, weaves, and whooshes past, up, and around the camera -- it's a rush, and it plasters a grin on your face even after you've left the theatre.

Detailed but, ultimately, one-sided.

As we are informed in the film’s prologue, "Cats live in loneliness, then die like falling rain." Sh--, man, whatever. This is so stupid it’s positively genius.

Indeed, the biggest acting coup here comes by way of Courtney Love, whose cameo as an obliging waitress is the best thing the film has going for it.

Hero dips into the world of Capra's Meet John Doe, and comes up with an even more repellant visage of the Media/Citizenry connection than that film.

It just devolves into the limp sort of schmaltzy conclusion you keep hoping it will avoid.

Smith's film is a celebration of quirkiness, eccentricity, and certain individuals' tendency to let it all hang out, and damn the consequences.

A consistently entertaining parody that never once makes you feel like an idiot for laughing out loud at its idiocy.

Remarkable and enlightening.

Carrey has yet to find the perfect vehicle for himself, but The Mask, while hardly as fantastic as it should have been, is a step in the right direction.

Unnerving and occasionally witty, were it not for its weak third act, Nolan's film might fall just short of genius. As it is, though, it's unique nonetheless.

A slam-bang, sci-fi actioner, relentlessly paced and edited, with a pounding soundtrack and some ingenious aliens courtesy of Berni Wrightson and KNB Effects.

A warm, comfortable, thoroughly inoffensive kidfilm.

Despite the grating, workmanlike direction of Chris Columbus (he's no Robert Wise, and Rent is nobody's idea of "West Side Story"), this boisterous adaptation is both a vivacious, wiseacre musical and an inarguable morality lesson: Love is all you need. Oh, and rent, of course.

It's not quite as relentless as Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer, but Bride of Chucky is still sick and wrong in all the right ways.

A forgivable error, but an error nonetheless.

It's all fab, baby, a kicky, wiggy sequel that scores on all levels, from the sexy to the sublime.

At its core, a very manipulative piece of work.

A spare, discomfiting score and uniformly excellent performances, and you have a quiet little masterpiece of dark and chilling beauty.

It’s ingratiating in that nice doggie way, but the dogs, who have had their lips enhanced via CGI to aid in the illusion of speech, don’t have much more on their minds than where the next stick is going to sail in from.

Be forewarned: Folman closes his film with a grisly, real-death denouement that may give you some nightmares of your own. As well it should.

Edge of Darkness has the look and feel of a Brit film shot in America – it's all dark, boxy rooms with powerful white men in impeccable black suits discussing how to tidy up the minor mishaps of their game over brandy and cigars.

Greenwald's doc is pure partisan warfare of the liberal stripe, to be sure, but that doesn't make it any less disturbing.

By the end of this film/experiment/prank – which, to be blunt, is pretty unsatisfying – the viewer is left to ponder what it's all about, and what its purpose may have been, which, knowing Lynch and Herzog, might well be what it was about, and what its purpose was.

It's a huge, bloated, hulking movie.

It's a humorous film, to be sure, but there's also a stringent vein of giddy realism to it.

This new film version, sad to say, is a hollow shell of the original series.

As it stands, The Ruins is about as interesting as a pile of old stones and a monkey-dumb yanqui falling prey to the horrors of globalization. And that's pretty dumb.

Its adult themes of familial separation and societal betrayal are head and shoulders above much of the director’s previous popcorn work -– more hurt, more heart, more unassailable hope.

A pure distillation of the great director's ongoing themes of the frailty of the human psyche and mankind's willful inability to accept the inevitable, whatever that may be.

It's the type of film that begs to be called “charming” and by doing so instead ends up grating.

Mangold, Phoenix, and Witherspoon, all excellent in their roles.

If you were one of the many who thought the original film was brilliant, you'll undoubtedly laugh yourself stupid over this one, too. Me, I think I'll go turn on the VCR and watch the Marx Brothers' A Night at the Opera. Again.

It's all a little too polished, a little too smug to be ranked up there as one of the great journalism films.

The film’s major drawback is the broad strokes with which the henpecked trio of males is presented -- they’re not quite caricatures, but their individual quirks feel as though they were cribbed from other, better films.

For all its stylistic flourishes and interlocking storylines, Inglourious Basterds is, at its bullet-riddled core, a bloody good war movie, twisting and twisted and full of wordy shrapnel but no less kickass for it.

It's so unreal it hurts.

The script, written by the three brothers, is ludicrous and incomprehensible, and plays cat-and-mouse games with what could have been some deeply funny comments on race, wealth, and, in one inspired changing-room scene, eating disorders.

It's childhood done just right: part cotton candy angels, part gurning adult frighteners, and all wide-eyed kidhood bravado.

This remake of the 1972 Peckinpah gem lacks the Ali McGraw/Steve McQueen heart and soul of the original, opting instead for the vacuous and thoroughly forgettable anti-chemistry of Baldwin and Basinger.

As atypical a summer film as they come -– no explosions, no car chases, no Arnold -– but immensely more pleasing than films with all three of those summertime staples.

It's a knowing, dare I say sweet, little film that takes pains to let the characters speak for themselves, never rallying behind an implicit religious message, which may be the best message of all.

A visual tour-de-force; it's just that there's not much else to sink your teeth into once the pretty colors fade from view.

Falls short of both the social history lesson it so pointedly strives to impart and the sport it so roughly embraces.

Works just fine for the first half hour or so, but quickly devolves into a case of too much affection and not enough affliction.

Zombieland is dead set against being dead serious. Its tonal pallor has more in common with a foreshortened "It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World" than with "28 Days" or "Weeks Later," and then, again, there's that jaw-dropping cameo. It'll kill ya.

Although the film tends to suffer from a severe case of overt preachiness in the third reel (shades of James Cameron's "The Abyss"), it's still a wonderfully visual, exciting ride.

A riot of colors, Kika is sometimes sick, sometimes playful, but consistently hilarious and entertaining in ways that few films have been lately.

The film tries so very hard to be The Movie of Summer '93 that it almost makes you sick for what could have been, what should have been, and, in the end, what it is: soulless sound and fury -- action in a vacuum.

Paranoid Park shows the Portland-based director to be working at the pinnacle of his art in every frame, in every composition. It's breathtaking, heartbreaking, tragic, gorgeous, and true all at the same time.

Attica! Attica! Everyone involved in the creation of this muddled, joyless, and deadly dull serial killer-meets-forensic psychiatrist snoozefest should be forced to spend – at the very least – 88 minutes behind Attica's bars.

Director Chappelle lays on the spook factor heavy in the first 30 minutes or so, but the film quickly devolves into a simplistic slash 'n' bash shoot-'em-up which goes nowhere fast.

Just as clichéd as its predecessor, and lacks the old-school charm of films like "Wild Style" and "Breakin’."

Harris' thought-provoking performance art/life isn't yet over, but by film's end he's become unplugged, both literally and metaphorically.

An order-of-magnitude leap forward in animated storytelling.

Reminiscent of the opening moments of "Monty Python and the Holy Grail," actually, only without the clever wit.

Stay Alive has none of the vicarious thrills of, say, "Konami: Silent Hill 2." It's barely even Pong unplugged.

Not only the best date movie of the year, it's also a -- dare I say it twice -- delightfully charming -- and totally American, I might add -- slice of comedic bliss.

Gleefully silly fun, with a few core concepts on the nature of time, space, and la-la-la-love thrown in for good measure. And who can resist a puffin, anyway?

It's an obvious effort through and through, but that doesn't seem to dampen its ridiculous charm one bit.

This utterly mediocre forget-me-now could've been crafted by any faceless serial director at all. The shame of it is that the man behind the camera is Wes Craven when, by all rights, it should have been Alan Smithee.

Works best when it seems like it's not working at all.

Just watching the trailer for Oliver Stone's new football epic a few weeks back left me with a grating headache; watching the whole sweaty film practically put me in the ICU.

The strangest biographical film ever made is also one of the most charming, melancholy and quirkily humorous films of the year.

Co-writers Don Calame and Chris Conroy utterly fail to notice the wealth of black-comedy gold inherent in the very notion of sprawling supercenters and instead go for the dumbest gags they can find.

It's a masterful film, the kind you itch to see twice or more, as elliptical as a dream and as direct as the short sharp shock of lead kissing flesh.

There may be nothing new under the sun, but you can bet your life there's absolutely nothing new about Rush Hour at all.

By the end, though, it's all too much what it seems, a literalist adventure with a socko "Twilight Zone" twist that's finally too little, too late.

For all its Del Toro touches (Goodwin as a young autistic boy kidnapped by the bugs), Mimic is a surprisingly hollow thriller.

Selick is widely and rightly regarded as a master of surreal, dark humor, and wildly inventive animation technique, and Monkeybone is the first tarnish on his otherwise spotless reputation.

There's so much and so little going on here simultaneously that you're not sure whether to squirm or doze.

U-571's plot moves like a rocket, never pausing for breath, and this works to a point, but certain events ... are glossed over in favor of more (exceptionally well-done) shots of exploding depth charges and topside battles.

There's nothing righteous about this tired and tiresome good cop/bad cop NYPD procedural.

It all falls apart at the end, however, and in such a loud and abrasive way that it makes Brian De Palma's "Raising Cain" look like a model of restraint.

Why remake Norman Jewison's staunchly cool 1968 heist film in such a lackadaisical, uninspired manner?

Macdonald is unaccountably bland here, which is unexpected since his lo-level, monotone snottiness is usually at least good for a grin or two. With Dirty Work though, he's fashioned an 80-minute harangue out of 10 minutes of material, an SNL sketch gone horribly awry, and one that drags on long after its daily ration of humor has been exhausted.

Arquette wander in and out of frame, but like everyone else in this film, they're eclipsed by Coogan's gloriously unhinged performance, which has the lunatic, semi-meta tone of a parody within a parody.

Meet Joe Black flows nicely, and the whole of the film is bathed in some of the most sumptuous cinematography (courtesy of "Like Water for Chocolate's" Emmanuel Lubezki) of the year.

Just don't go expecting complex moral and ethical quandaries and you'll likely never think of "Ishtar" even once.

Hopefully, someone will grab the torch and, if not run with it, at the very least track down and set fire to the highly combustible prints of this inexcusably inept yawn-a-thon - it's not so much bad as it is unfathomable.

Clearly the single best, the single coolest (to borrow from Harry Knowles) animated film in a great while.

War, Inc. is neither all that interesting nor all that cool.

It's interesting, though, to think of double-billing Woods' Crow with Pacino's Prince of Darkness from Devil's Advocate: Scenery-chewing never looked so good.

Not likely to win any hearts or minds this holiday season, La Bûche finally scores points by virtue of its inoffensiveness: Relax, pour a cuppa nog, and watch somebody else muck up the holidays for once.

Timecrimes is a tremendously entertaining bit of Kafka that whirlpools down into "The Twilight Zone."

Absolutely one-hundred-percent ridiculous, this is comedy of a higher order, and more maniacally inspired than almost anything released in years.

Valiantly tries to recapture the spit and polish indie feel of the original, and comes up looking more like something Franklin might have directed on a Bad Day.

Too sloppy, pinning psychological crime dramatics to good old-fashioned gunplay.

A middling film through and through, despite the occasional shocks it tries to earnestly to achieve.

It's Teen Witch for the Nineties: dark, brooding, dangerous, and, come to think of it, a lot like high school.

Sometimes a little too pat, a little too cute.

You can barely tell what's going on half the time, but what you do see is effective.

It's 99 and 44/100% pure Mamet all the way.

A dull, tired mess.

Surrogates' morality is less Asimov than asinine, although it's bizarrely reassuring, in a nihilistic sort of way, to believe that in the future, when the world is ready to play The Sims for real (so to speak), our avatars are all going to look like generic porn stars with shitty airbrush jobs.

At the very least, Hoodlum might have been better off had it been filmed in monochromatic black-and-white instead of the garish color palette (and plenty of gore) that Duke opted for because they, unfortunately, only reinforce the hamminess of the picture.

It's also a doozy of a comedy, matching the dark wit of Ross MacDonald's Lew Archer novels to the stylized theatrics of Matt Helm-era Dean Martin.

The gags are quick and barbed, but the wire seems blunted by the essentially one-note gag storyline.

It's a real gone flick, daddy-o.

There's no denying the fact that Jackson is woefully miscast here, and as a result spends much of his time struggling to define his role as a “serious” collector of objets d'art in this muddled-though-gorgeous omnibus film.

The Host is a freewheeling mix of high style and goofy, good-natured fear-mongering.

Tepid, borderline offensive cyber-serial killer thriller.

While it’s far from bad, it also falls far short of the icy frissons produced by the original.

It's a totally serviceable reboot for young people who are just discovering the joys of manga, but I can't help but miss the raw animation and even rawer emotional aesthetics of Tezuka's original televised animé series.

Fallen's pretentious vision of a demonic force out to shatter the life of one lowly homicide detective is, ultimately, a pretty silly ride despite the film's obvious strengths and some genuinely eerie scenes.

It has the resonant feel of myth, buoyed by simultaneously vicious and compassionate performances from the men on both sides of the bars.

Barely worthy of a legitimate theatrical release.

Unfortunately, this kind of sledgehammer comedy has worn thin over the many years since Mack Sennett first hit on it.

It is, in essence, the video game transferred part and parcel to the screen, and very well at that.

This is the first Spike Lee Joint that feels more like a mainstream Hollywood cops-in-the-'hood picture and less like one of Lee's recurrent soapboxes.

A bore... The film leaves you with the feeling, once again, of having enjoyed a lovely meal fit for royalty only to discover, too late, that the fruit was made of wax and the roast was little more than a Styrofoam mock-up.

By the time the explosive finale arrives (with a wistful Ray Charles crooning over shots of cataclysmic destruction, no less), you'll be hard pressed to name a recent film with this much action, pathos, and smarts.

A brilliant, exhilarating piece of filmmaking. It may even be the best mainstream film of the year thus far.

It's mad, bad nonsense of the summer, popcorn variety, disposable but oh-so-much fun to endure, a roller coaster on a wobbly cinematic track.

So silly, so garishly over-the-top, and so bracingly eager to please, that it's hard not to fall under its gleefully gooney spell.

Feels like an overlong "SCTV" skit. Many prime gags are recycled throughout the film, and, honestly, there's only so much Eugene Levy schtick one can take (though he does get the best Yiddish lines in the film).

Predicated on the slimmest of notions, this debut by Jones is so cuddly-cute in its desire to be pleasing that it's all but transparent.

Moll's film is a far cry from the elegiac poetry of, say, Night and Fog; it's a document more than an examination, and its power of record is inarguable and incorruptible. And then, at the end, somehow you find yourself with that least likely of expressions on your face, a smile, courtesy of Representative Lantos.

Does little to dispel the creeping feeling that Washington’s getting himself in something of a rut.

Osama begins in fear and ends in terror. In between there's all manner of hopelessness, deprivation, and death, which is to say that as the first film to come out of a post-Taliban Afghanistan, it's practically a documentary.

Emmerich’s sense of irony has rarely been so pointed, and The Day After Tomorrow, for all its obvious cataclysmic set-pieces and stock characterizations, is nothing if not timely.

As always, there's the combustible band of mismatched survivors.

Feels brief and dreamlike. Waking from its spell, you touch your face, and it's wet, but you're smiling anyway.

With a running time of 78 minutes, Awake is relatively painless, playing a little like a lesser story from one of EC Comics Shock SuspenStories – or a lot like Joseph Cotten's "Breakdown" episode of Alfred Hitchock Presents – updated for the Fangoria generation.

That Aimée & Jaguar manages so well in triple duty as a wartime melodrama with a lesbian twist is remarkable.

The Negotiator falls short of greatness by a country mile; it's too chatty for its own good sometimes. But it's still a solid shoot-'em-up.

In a word, it’s soulless.

The concept of loss, and the sorrow that shadows it, is not what you'd call an uncommon theme in films, but rarely is it handled with such uncommon eloquence as it is in Maborosi.

It doesn't always succeed, and sometimes it has the egocentric obviousness of a particularly clever, grad-student thesis film, but at least Harrison is game enough to mess with your head in the first place.

Cyclo is a rich, gritty, and ultimately distressing feast for the eyes. It's a dark and dirty dream that stays with you long after you leave the theatre.

Unconventional and idiosyncratic love story.

When she's (Dunst) off the screen, Elizabethtown goes dark and broody, stranding us with the morose Bloom during a third-act road trip that goes everywhere and nowhere at once.

So bereft of hope... that it's a chore to withstand.

Two-and-a-half hour slice of unmitigated depression.

This film is an evocative, effective entry into the holiday blood-spray subgenre in its own right. And if it doesn't make your skin crawl ... you probably ate too much Christmas dinner.

Its kooky hybrid of slapstick gender jokes already had whiskers on 'em in Shakespeare's day.

This fourth and, presumably, final entry into the ever-deteriorating Hellraiser series is by far the worst of the lot: a jumbled, unsatisfying, and ultimately boring glimpse into the past, present, and future of the notorious cenobite affectionately known as “Pinhead”.

This expanded version only suffers, albeit in grim visual splendor, from the extrapolation.

A confused, unfunny film with a few guns and some decent tunes. As CB4 (the CB stands for Cell Block), Saturday Night Live's Chris Rock and company are the hottest rap group in the world, an NWA gangsta rap rip-off oozing the prerequisite amounts of street tough sass, misogyny, and devil-may-care, screw-the-police attitude.

When the film changes gears from light coming-of-age comedy to ex-post-facto war parable midway through, it loses its focus and suddenly becomes a much darker beast.

Perhaps vice isn't what it used to be, or maybe Crockett and Tubbs just aren't all that interesting when removed from their appropriate time slot, but this may well be the dreariest and most monochromatic time you'll have at the movies all summer.

At times poignant, joyful, and terrifying, Shawshank Redemption is an altogether brilliant movie and the debut of an equally brilliant director.

It’s odd and unfortunate, however, that The Return of the King just barely misses the eye-misting emotional wallop of the series’ previous installment, The Two Towers, which had a lyrical subtlety underpinning the vast vistas of growing chaos (and Christopher Lee hardly hurt matters) and hobbits-in-peril.

Is it a comedy? A documentary? An underground gore-fest? Man Bites Dog, the first feature film from Belgian director Rémy Belvaux, is all of these and much more, a ghastly, shocking and explosive debut with all the genuinely ruthless ability to disturb as an oily blue-barreled revolver jammed in your mouth. And it's funny, too.

The end result is an electrifying, morally complex story of the evil that men (and women) do in the name of the greater good.

It's not rocket science making nonstop action feel semi-fresh, and The Losers’ script by Peter Berg and James Vanderbilt manages to render each individual, um, a loser in the broadest and most memorable strokes. It's not a masterpiece, either, but it'll do until Hannibal, Murdock, and the rest the A-gamers start blowing things up come June.

The film itself is a muddle, all rapid-fire step-edits and grainy, blue-filtered hokum. What is good is Stallone.

Granted, the lavish set pieces are beautiful, and there really is quite a bit of amusingly acrobatic coupling going on, but in the end, it's extremely hard to fight down the giggles you'll find swelling inside you. It's all so relentlessly goofy, it makes you long for the early Eighties antics of Traci Lords, or The Dark Bros.

While past parodies like Airplane! and the marginally worthwhile Hot Shots filled out down time with slapstick visuals and spastic throwaway gags, Loaded Weapon is content to lumber along at its own boring pace: you end up checking your watch between jokes, and there's nothing funny about that.

A preposterously silly bit of work, chock-full-o' nuts and rife with the kind of plot holes you could drive a submersible ROV through.

It's gritty, nasty, predictably meat-and-potatoes suspense, but genuinely gonzo fun nonetheless.

Almost insufferably sufferable. It's a chick flick of the tallest order, with schmaltz galore and the sort of ongoing romantic hubris that practically screams, "This is codswallop, right?"

A Better Tomorrow isn't his best film ever -- that title remains securely attached to The Killer -- but it is required viewing for anyone remotely interested in Hong Kong cinema. After all, there might not be any filmmaking in Hong Kong come 1997.

A crazed, lovestruck, wholly original (and yet amazingly referential) beast, part pop-culture wasteland, part glowing tribute, and part wild-eyed roller coaster (of love).

Consider this yet another nail in the Eighties coffin.

A fearless sort of melodramaticism that might have seemed silly if it weren't for the impeccable EVERYTHING on display here, from the lush, sexy camerawork of director of photography Yorick Le Saux (Swimming Pool) to the throbbing, atavistic score by John Adams. It's not silly or, at least, rarely so, and Swinton's nuanced, aching performance is downright revelatory.

Dull and unfunny claptrap.

It's a kick, it's a gas, and it gives the Rat Pack itself a run for its money.

Can barely limp to its final CinemaScope sunset shot.

uUltimately Better Luck Tomorrow feels nearly as hollow and unknowable as its characters’ hearts.

Van Helsing is simply far too much of a good thing, and although Hensley's Frankenstein Monster comes off better than anyone else, the film suffers from some truly inane dialogue and pacing that will likely cause tachycardia in members of the audience old enough to recall who Dwight Frye was.

I'm certainly not asking for car chases and explosions here, but this is a suspense film that's too "adult" for its own good, despite the fact that Redford, Dafoe, and Mirren (in particular) have rarely been more mature in their performances.

Sloppy, confusing, and dull as a dented crucifix.

Strives to be an inspirational depth charge, but its power is consistently waylaid by some genuinely hokey dialogue and situations.

Koepp's film examines the interconnections between man and the electronic society, and the terrors that are unleashed once those connections are severed, and does so in a wholly original and unnerving manner.

It's a ripping good yarn, to boot, breathlessly paced and seamlessly edited, but most important, resoundingly and surpassingly fun.

It's all so much blood and brine signifying nothing, not even a good time. Now somebody do us all a favor and cut that albatross from around Petersen's neck already.