Marc Savlov

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.

When Dangerous Beauty grows up, it wants to be a Merchant/Ivory film. Too bad puberty is still such a long way off.

Burns has done such a thorough job of perfectly re-creating the moment that even the non-events (family dinners, procrastinated college-enrollment applications, the banal yet life-or-death routines of being a teen on the cusp) are lovingly rendered.

Awesome.

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

Has an unerring eye for the banal intricacies of 1950s pre-planned suburban neighborhoods, à la Levittown.

Woo's mainstreaming his vision here, and though Windtalkers has its moments of precious, awful clarity, it can't hold a candle to the man's earlier blood-soaked balletics.

Love, death, hope, and hatred: Spider-Man 2 has ’em all, in spades.

The appearance of Richard Gere as a new guest whom everybody assumes is a plant from the multinational hotel chain that Muriel and Sonny have been wooing is straight out of the “Hotel Inspectors” episode of Fawlty Towers. Where’s John Cleese when you really need him?

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

Jolie's explosive performance surpasses all expectations and renders the film a veritable must-see.

Let the brilliant, epic silliness of The Man With the Iron Fists engulf you in a tsunami of crimson cheese and you, like I, will have a super-happy-fun-big-smile-crazy-face-monkey-time.

Paxton, as always, is thoroughly engaging, and Theron is coming into her own as an actress, but the bottom line here is that the film lacks the original's goofy good humor. Less effects and more humanity are in order before this remake can even get within spitting distance of the original.

A lean, mean chase movie that plays like equal parts Donald Trump’s immigration policy, Steven Spielberg’s "Duel," and Wes Craven’s "The Hills Have Eyes," Cuarón’s desert-based take on "The Most Dangerous Game" is very much of the moment. It’s also, unfortunately, a one-note story populated with a handful of semi-anonymous archetypal characters.

The delectably atmospheric Asylum remains gothic to its morally maggoty core.

Still, it's worth checking out if only to see Kidman immolate everything else on screen through sheer sexy charisma. Tom who?

Unfortunately, The Pelican Brief comes across as a prolonged bout with deja vu: you know you've seen this before, and more than once at that.

Shoddily constructed out of bits and pieces of previous genre triumphs, She's All That is as dull and droning as the fluorescent lighting in your old study hall.

Surprisingly, it’s distinctly one of the better faith-based films in some time to wander down the road to Galilee.

Transporter 3 is so far over the top that it more than once spills into outright cartoonishness.

Director of photography Robert Murphy deserves a Spirit Award of his own for his breathtaking and evocative lensing of ever-cinematic Berlin and Montenegro, and Stephen Coates’ melancholic score is equally suited to the story at hand.

The few gags that hit their mark only serve to point up how flaccid the rest of his material is, and that spells doom for a comic, no matter how much his hometown crowd cheers him on.

Not for everyone's taste, I'd think, but a notably thoughtful effort nonetheless.

It's a kinder, gentler "Tales From the Crypt" that, in the end, is neither kind nor gentle.

The fun of Wild Things -- and there's a lot of it -- is in its never-ending game of cross and double cross.

Isn't teen heartache confusing enough without adding into the libidinal mix a bunch of buff scullers nicknamed the Queerstrokes?

It's all noise and flash and chaos, but it lacks virtually everything that made the original television series so memorable.

If you’re expecting "Paddington"-level profundity and whimsical adventure you’re going to be sorely disappointed.

Marshall, like his characters, does not mess around: Good people do bad things to not-entirely bad people while the Man (in this case No. 10 Downing St.) seeks ways to screw everyone.

This is strictly dull chuckles from dull wits, and while there are a few genuine laughs to be found amidst the dross, they’re as rare as Francophiles in Crawford, Texas.

MBV 3D is full-on, old-school, Fangoria-approved, gorehound heaven – a supersaturated arterial goregasm with zero socially redeeming values for anyone other than first-year med students.

It's hit-or-miss comedy of the very broadest sort, but those who groove on deciphering obscure film-geek in-jokes will find their work more than cut out for them.

Diehl’s performance is a model of restraint; he more often imparts information by a look, a glance, the slump of his shoulders, than he does with a spoken word.

A genuinely outrageous and occasionally brilliant coupling of American animation and classic early-Eighties heavy metal (does anybody even remember Riggs and Trust?).

The entire film is curiously soulless, with major characters making their entrances and exits (some of which are unexpectedly final) as if they were breezing in from some other screening next door.

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

Hood's realization of Card's novel is a tightly constructed, thought-provoking meditation on adolescence trapped by permanent war footing, alloyed with some of the best CGI effects work I've seen since, uh, "Gravity."

Why make a new mediocrity when the old ones are still so much more fun to watch?

Nemesis, by comparison, is about as exciting as a Tribble on Vicodin.

As Timeline so adequately proves, not every bestseller will render a good film.

Serrano's frequently mystifying device of having Lucía's cardboard psyche mess with the audience's minds is ultimately a confusing bore that detracts from what might have been a more eloquent (and interesting) take on middle-class midlife crises, telenovela-style.

Gets its teeth in you and shakes. Once it’s over, you find yourself replaying it on an endless loop in your head.

It's unlike anything else out now, and Williams, to his credit and our immense relief, has for the moment foresworn his usual giddiness in favor of a muted, hunched acting style that befits both the character of Noone and the overall tone of the film.

Fans of all that has come before (excluding Roger Corman's premature-ejaculation version of "The Fantastic Four," natch) will weep tears of giddy joy at how crowd-pleasingly cohesive – and ridiculously fun – this film is.

Old-school "Gosh, wow!" sense-of-wonder filmmaking is in short supply in these anxious days, and John Carter (of Mars!) left me with my disbelief in suspended animation and once or twice with goosebumps dotting my arms. And that's enough for me.

A classic sophomore slump, all bark and very little bite.

Step Brothers has comic fuel to burn, some of it unashamedly non sequitur and stupid-brilliant, but it still feels like a post-"Talladega" flameout.

Schroeder's film is fun to watch, even when it's being predictable or brutal, but its memory is nearly gone the next day.

"Shakespeare in Love" it ain't, but the wealth of stage and screen talent on display, most if not all of whom have essayed one or another of the Bard's characters in the past (including a modern-day introduction by Sir Derek Jacobi), make for a pleasantly ridiculous descent into utter confabulation.

You get the feeling the filmmakers didn't want to make anyone think too hard about what's going on here behind the scenes of the main storyline, and that's more than a little insulting.

Merendino's film is lacking the streamlined cohesion it needs to spike itself in your cortex as hoped, but it is about as accurate a punk film as I've seen in some time, especially when it comes to the horrors and boredoms of small-scene life.

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).

Its vague stabs at moralizing and goofball shenanigans are an odd mix. It's not the high school experience I had, nor is it probably like yours.

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.

A far more profound and moving film about this particularly Aussie/Kiwi campaign (and one that will probably never be topped) is Peter Weir’s devastating Gallipoli, starring a very young Mel Gibson. Given the choice, I’ll take that over Crowe’s earnest bombast any day.

Can this be the end of Death? If only.

Still, the revelations of evildoers clogging the corridors of power pack very little punch; we're all too aware that such malfeasance and malignity have become the status quo in the real world.

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.

It's hardly a classic of the genre, but then again, like Armour hot dogs: it's Comfort Food for Men.

This new chronicle of the adventures of the king's musketeers, as directed by Braveheart scribe Randall Wallace, suffers from a severe case of over-earnestness and star-power overkill.

A bizarre mélange of earnest and romantic road movie, high-octane chase picture reminiscent of everything the mustachioed version of Burt Reynolds ever did, and a slapsticky comedy that gives Tom Arnold considerably more screen time than actually necessary.

It is an utterly unique and highly ambitious project that isn't afraid to veer wildly from witty, risqué comedy to heavy emotional melodrama, often in the same sequence.

Simply put, Burton's film lacks the social and political gravitas of the original, a film that was wholly of its time.

Constantine will likely hold far more interest for devoted fans of the series, but it's not necessary to have read the books to appreciate the film's sumptuous visuals and art direction.

No Reservations succeeds as well as it does (kinda sorta) by virtue of Zeta-Jones' performance.

Take this one for what it is, an entertaining Disney comedy of really large proportions, and you'll have a ball.

Hasn't got a lot more to say than it did last time about the necessity of accepting the nontraditional family in extraordinary times, but what it does have going for it are its well-delineated characters.

It's an admirable, if clunky, attempt, and though it never quite jels in the way that, say, "Waiting to Exhale" did, it's good to know someone's making the effort to portray black urban males as something other than criminals or crime-fighters.

Get out your handkerchiefs. No, scratch that -- get out a pair of windshield wipers and staple them to your brow. Perhaps they'll obscure the screen.

The Land isn’t a perfect film, but it is a hell of a good start, and director Caple Jr. – and his young cast – are artists to keep an eye on, for sure.

While this isn’t anywhere near a classic of the comedy-horror genre, it’s still a well-written work of splatstick that’s more downright engaging than 90% of the “serious” (i.e., mediocre) horrors that have flooded theatres of late.

Amazingly, it all works up to a point, although at approaching two hours in length, it could’ve easily shaved its bifurcated mohawk down by a good 15 minutes.

By turns sweet, sadistic, and silly, American Ultra will probably make a stronger impression if you watch it while high.

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

If ever America needed Hollywood to crank out a comedic antidote to the toxic political madness that has engulfed our nation, now is the time. Unfortunately, this loopy, muddled, and ultimately insulting Campaign isn't it. It feels more like an extended Saturday Night Live-meets-FunnyOrDie.com castoff than an actual comedic commentary on American politics.

Well-intentioned but hardly well-executed.

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.

Works both as an engagingly sordid meditation on protofeminism and contemporized sisterhood set in a time and a place where either/or were grounds for, at the very least, defenestration.

By no means a great film, but it is an entertaining one, a nearly bloodless, family-friendly throwback of sorts to a cinematic age when Persian palace intrigue, winsome princesses, and ambitious princes ruled the back lots and Errol Flynn was in like, well, Errol Flynn.

It comes across as yet another in a long line of poorly produced horror/paranoia bloodbaths, short on everything except cheesy effects.

Sugar Hill is arguably the most beautiful-looking crime drama since Coppola's Godfather, Part II. Forsaking the glitz and over-the-top grittiness of New Jack City and other recent NYC gangster films, director Ichaso instead opts for the lush, burnished earth-tones of the Corleone clan. It's a dark, rich film, and its lengthy running time of over two hours glides by with only a few annoying snags.

Ultimately a fluffy bit of caper-noir, the success of Where the Money Is rests heavily with Old Blue Eyes.

Offers too small a dose of the blood-and-sand adventure you expect from this sort of big-budget Hollywood remake. As it is, it borders on The English Patient's on again-off again heroics, minus Anthony Minghella's patient skill in eliciting romantic suspense.

Gory, spastic fun, Love & a .45 is a broken roller-coaster ride of Texas trouble. It's not anything you haven't seen before, but it might remind you why you liked those other movies in the first place.

It's not "Sixteen Candles," but it's not "Road Trip," either. Instead, this comedic car-trip riff on the teen-male libido and the lengths to which it will go to satisfy itself falls somewhere in between part endearing emo love story, part gross-out semen gag-fest, and, very occasionally, a smart, inspired, non-sequitur-laden hoot.

One of the most inventive romantic comedies to come around in some while.

Torpedoed by its own overarching idealism -- the film targets the new star system, the media, the studios, digital technology, and pretty much everything else you might care to think of -- and not enough script to back it all up.

Neither a revelation nor a total wash, EDtv is instead solid comic filmmaking. I just can't help but think it could have been so much more.

So much is going on, and so many bizarre and seemingly random subplots collide in Dreamcatcher, that the film feels like some crazy patchwork quilt sewn by a schizophrenic seamstress. It’s not only confusing, but dull, as well.

Comes close to overdosing on bone-pulverizing kickassery at the expense of a plot that ricochets from the nationalistically fatuous to the lovestruck, farcical before shutting down completely in favor of punch-drunk loveliness.

Where else are you going to get a chance to see the aircraft carrier USS John F. Kennedy drift down the side of a mile-high tsunami and take out the White House? Big. Dumb. Fun.

The bottom line with the film is that there's just no damn mystery about it.

McGuigan's wonderfully ambitious but terribly melodramatic film is chock-full of symbolic references, subtext, and the sort of period detail that made Monty Python's historical comedies so gamely endearing.

Neither as adroitly funny as Franken's comic routines, nor as notable as his conversion to the fine art of politics, this is a 90-minute "What If?" with no discernible answer.

There's absolutely no shortage of stunning eye candy in this spiffy, sexy, and frequently thrilling sequel to Disney's 1982 game-changer Tron. There is, however, a certain lack of connectivity between the digitally enhanced characters onscreen and the user – excuse me, "audience" – in the flesh.

It's mediocrity at its most unremarkable.

Unlike anything you've ever seen before, Final Fantasy is, finally, one for the history books, and tremendous fun to boot. It makes Lara Croft look like an old maid.

Heijningen's The Thing is tightly paced, has enough imaginative horror to satisfy even the most jaded gorehound, and never strays too far from its source, so why do you come away from it feeling like it was the runner-up in a daylight nightmare festival?

Far better than advance word had it, Coneheads makes last year's Wayne's World film seem tame by comparison. And yes, Garrett Morris is in it, too.

Of course, if you loathed the first film, this one probably won't do much to change your mind. But fans, and I count myself among them, of the Weitz brothers' unexpectedly enjoyable original will find themselves in a familiar and perhaps comforting place … filthy language, risqué situations, die-hard friendships, and all.

Dougherty appears determined to work his way through the underbelly of our most cherished seasonal festivities. Plus, it’s an extremely welcome change of pace from the “found footage” barrage of the past 10 years.

For all its emotional and familial kerfuffles, People Like Us is an honorable misfire – good intentions and all.

For the most part, this is strictly kiss kiss, bang bang, yawn yawn.

One glance at the cast should be enough of a recommendation for any film lover -- it's Winger's first time on the screen in seven years, and Howard deserves a nod or two if only for getting his wife back in front of the camera where she so clearly belongs.

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.

It’s not a disaster by any stretch, but purists will ache to show newcomers the horrific genius of "Ju-on" over The Grudge as soon as they exit the theatre.

Terrifically dull, full of ear-searing sound design and much yakkity-yakking about the fate of humanity but entirely lacking any sort of soul or sense of good old summer matinee fun.

Make no mistake -- this Mummy is an effects film all the way.

A godforsaken (possibly literally) mess.

Highwaymen is an also-ran. It lacks the sprawling, Westernized mythos of The Hitcher and feels, in the end, like a previously owned nightmare sorely in need of a new universal hell joint.

Possibly the best argument against couples therapy ever, Antichrist is a tour-de-force trip inside the mind of a dangerously depressed man. That man is Danish filmmaker von Trier, and he has gone on record as having conceived and executed Antichrist in the wake of a deep depression.

Doesn't say much of anything at all about the Balkan conflict -- it's more concerned with MacDowell's shattered face and Brody's passionate, paranoid whinny, which, come to think of it, is just good enough.

By turns entertaining, incomprehensible, goofy, and even on occasion unnerving.

While "The Chronicles of Riddick" was an overstuffed melange of CGI and unnecessary subplots, Riddick is a far more streamlined affair, and all the better for it.

It’s fun, but it’s no "Class of Nuke ’Em High."

It's a welcome and nicely goofy bit of sci-fi froth with the occasional hint of genuine comic smarts.

Forty-five minutes in, I was already glancing at my watch and wondering why the only lively actress in this film was playing the dead girl. Go figure.

A roaring snooze that should by all rights be edge-of-your-seat, compelling cinema, Mark Felt lives and dies by Landesman’s laborious script, which revels in the minutiae of the scandal without ever managing an iota of passion.

Has those proverbial big laffs in spades.

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.

The third time is definitely not the charm.

This remarkable adaptation of the supposedly "unfilmable" novel by David Mitchell achieves near-perfection on virtually all levels.

Its most remarkable featis sustaining the level of forebodeingly atmospheric suspense.

It's a mess, and one that even the pickled cowboys behind me found yawningly tedious, and that's not something I ever thought I'd be saying about a Sam Raimi movie with the word “dead” in the title.

Leads Henson (barely recognizable under a mountain of Tyler Perry-esque practical makeup) and Rockwell turn in top-notch, emotion-laden performances, buoyed by a supporting cast of equally fine character actors.

Inoffensive and sporadically engrossing.

At its best, Dr. Dolittle 2 is an inoffensive mish-mash of cute talking animals and their somewhat less-than-cute human buddies.

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

If "The Others" is this year's paean to “quiet” horror, then Jeepers Creepers is its down 'n' dirty, punk rock, rip-your-throat-out-and-feed-it-to-you bastard child.

West (Con Air) saturates his imagery in a sickly, sulphurous stew of rotten-egg yellows and oranges, making a mediocre picture downright repellent at times.

Quentin Tarantino sans the witty dialogue.

Enough already.

From Lee’s point of view, I can understand the enticing challenge of taking on a revered cult film Oldboy. But a pair of ill-conceived casting choices can jolt you out of the film, or worse, elicit the rolling of eyes and barely stifled giggle.

Inkheart was shot in and around Liguria on the Italian Riviera, and it looks absolutely ravishing.

Say what you will about the story, but Pitch Black at least looks and sounds stunning.

A gorgeous-looking but ill-conceived mash note to the city of Paris that riffs on its better, wiser, glaringly obvious cinematic predecessors.

A weird mix of pseudo-jingoism and Bay’s usual bombastic firepower, 13 Hours ends up being a straight-up war film without an actual war in it.

Robinson keeps Jennifer 8 moving right along, alternately dropping clues right in our laps and tossing in a red herring or two, but it's the dark town running like a black thread throughout the whole film that keeps your nerves jangling.

Feels like a been-here-done-that dud.

Certainly it's not for everyone, but fans of Euro-sleaze will groove on Argento's obvious charms and the film's dystopian thrill ride, while the rest will probably doze off dreaming Fassbinder dreams.

A less cohesive action-comedy than its predecessor, Full Throttle is instead a freewheeling collection of random action sequences strung together with little or no discernible rhyme or reason.

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

The final 30 odd minutes of this revisionist Holmes explodathon are downright thrilling, and it should go without saying but we'll restate it for the record: Downey Jr. inhabits the role of Sherlock Holmes to a near-molecular level.

Whether or not Murakami intended this rambling, erotic nightmare as a metaphor for modern-day Japan is a question I'm not going to get into here, but the fact remains, Tokyo Decadence is a powerful, disturbing film, teeming with episodes of rampant passion, abuse, and beauty.

It's dumb, to be sure, but then again, so were most of the old movie cliffhangers, from which Timecop is obviously derived.

DiCillo has always had the laconic, funkified, vaguely surreal air of a Woody Allen on cough medicine (or a Jim Jarmusch on Jolt, for that matter), but The Real Blonde is just so much ado about nada.

Pop psychology has never been as visceral as it is in Saw III.

The outcome is no great surprise, and plenty of the gags feel as though they were meant to be throwaways, but Ted 2, exactly like its predecessor, has plenty of heart, which makes all the rest of the black-dick jokes marginally more tolerable.

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.

It is, in effect, a movie-house meta mirror, warped and weird, strange but true (except when it isn't). It's whatever you want it to be, which doesn't necessarily make it a great movie (although it contains moments of greatness), but it IS – by virtue of its premise alone – boldly unique.

Feels like the little animated adventure nobody loved.

It’s as deadly dull as the blunt end of a rifle.

Dull and meandering documentary.

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.

Fassbender, though, gets the kudos (again) as the man who has everything but loses it all – thanks partly to a slyly cast Bruno Ganz (Wings of Desire) and, more important, to the character’s moral compass that points wherever he feels it should, until, of course, it points due south of heaven.

I'd rather have a testicular nail-gun mishap than sit through this migraine-inducing train wreck of a film one more time.

Rifkin has fashioned a crawly little movie that underscores the Faustian price of fame in a way that few recent films have managed.

This new iteration of Ms. Croft, played in a far more realistic fashion by Vikander (of Ex Machina fame), is somewhat more serious in tone, but altogether more fun to watch.

The cramped environs and the paranoiac thrum that runs throughout the film like a main circuit cable straight to hell are almost outmatched by a third-act explosion of horrifyingly excellent practical gore effects.

It's a huge, bloated, hulking movie.

It’s just not quite bad enough to be considered good, although Stanley Tucci’s hairpiece comes awfully close.

This is horror with a wink and a nod to drive-in theatres and sweaty back seats. This is how it's done.

While very much a “hard R” movie, Rise of an Empire is, nevertheless, the perfect sort of film for rainy weekend afternoons. It’s a spectacle right down to its shattered ships and duplicitous warcraft, and this time out the story’s been leavened and enlivened with plenty of old-school girl power.

It's a rich, humid mix of race, murder, and mystery that works well, even if it doesn't work perfectly.

Like everything else Parker puts his mind to -- is equally outlandish, part skewed morality play, part sophomoric slapstick, and wholly ridiculous.

Even the requisite gore is sub-par, so it's not even neat when some poor sap explodes and his entrails whiz by. Perhaps Gordon should go back to mining H.P. Lovecraft's territory.

Consistently entertaining, athletically brutal, and, more often than not, well-acted.

This is an impressively realized (and, yes, occasionally, unavoidably humorous) valentine to Hollywood's sci-fi glory days – all heart, no snark, and one big eye.

Quite likely the most original dance film you'll see this year, The FP is awash in silliness that probably took ages to script, but the film's goofy heart and soul (yes, it has one) is what sticks with you in the end and makes this crazed film into a potential cult-movie masterpiece.

The annoyingly coy title of this non-epic about two people trying to survive a private plane crash in the high Rockies while a passive sort of romance develops during the descent pretty much says it all while simultaneously offering nothing of any great interest, much like the entire movie.

As befits a comedy monolith based around a loose series of old Saturday Night Live skits, Blues Brothers 2000 is essentially a series of flamboyant comedy and musical set-pieces, some of which soar and some of which merely twitch, but all of which are infused with a ceaseless beat-your-head-in comic sturm und drang; if one gag doesn't do it for you, surely the next one will.

Like the infamous Japanese water tortures of WWII, Dahl’s film is a steadily mounting series of pesky nonevents paced with all the frenetic, action-packed verve of a wounded lawn sprinkler.

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.

Much of the film’s fun is overrun by a combination of overlong exposition, ham-fisted dialogue, and some genuinely confusing editing. You’re never quite sure at any given point where, exactly, the human characters are, what exactly they’re doing, or what the f**k that sudden, off-putting plot twist that just happened means.

So gleefully abandons any semblance of sanity that it's virtually impossible not to enjoy the sheer breadth of nonsensical fun taking place on screen.

Honestly, at this point in time there's no legitimate reason to confuse “bad ass” filmmaking with just plain bad. Nice GTO, though.

There’s a surprising lack of surprises in DreamWorks’ answer to Disney/Pixar’s runaway smash "Finding Nemo."

As scripted by Craig Titley, this first in a presumptive franchise is a dull, scattershot affair that owes much to both "X-Men" and Greek mythology, but which never seems to slow down enough to make any sense whatsoever.

Pink Flamingos is, in its own unique way, the quintessential American Family Film. Not my family, certainly, and probably not yours, but a family nonetheless. So here's to family values. And shock values, too.

Bella is, indeed, a beautiful film. The bustling, cab-crowded thoroughfares of New York City have rarely looked as inviting and the coastline as momentously beachy as they do in this film.

All things considered, Sgt. Bilko is little more than a lengthy episode of the original show. Only less creepy.

Its ultimate message is as French as they come: The family that lays together, stays together. What the hell, it's more fun than a riot.

As an extended metaphor on the perils of imperialism and the colonization of both land and heart, Before the Rains works just fine, but as a love story run afoul of the times, it's a soggy affair.

It's a silly, goofball romp, sure, but this newfangled Josie rocks far harder than her predecessor.

There’s not a whole lot of heft to von Scherler Mayer’s romantic comedy with ethnic Indian entanglements; it’s like overdone naan, too flaky and ephemeral for its own good, but still somehow appetizing.

It's rougher stuff than most would expect, though not unrewarding in its own horrific way.

Ford, as usual, is a delight to watch; his portrayals of both Henry the Ruthless Lawyer and Henry the Reborn are dead-on, unerring in their accuracy. Bening is likewise excellent.

If nothing else, this adaptation of Peter Mayle's umpteenth ode to livin' la vie en Provence will make you wonder about Ridley Scott and the directorial aging process.

It's a mess and it might cost him some career freedom, but at least Kelly hasn't cashed in his trademark narrative complexity for Hollywood pap.

A predictable affair that nonetheless ingratiates itself into your good fortunes by sheer virtue of its amiable nuttiness. It's mindless fun while it lasts.

It’s an impressive closing to the cycle, and, frankly, one that arrives not a moment too soon.

Director Howard, his actors, and indeed the entire salty sweep of the film are all aided tremendously by visual-effects supervisor Jody Johnson and his team’s spectacular combination of live action and flawless, awe-inspiring CGI creations, chief among them the great, white whale.

It's a film so filled with sex and violence that many critics have derided it as nothing short of hardcore porn.

Manages to capture the essence of one of the world's most surprising success stories.

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

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.

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.

It's a glorious mess, though, with genuine bits of comic genius strewn amidst the rubble, not unlike a plane crash in its own way.

It's also and most interestingly about the writing process itself, a difficult feat to pull off on film, which Wagner and co-screenwriter Fred Parnes manage to display with unvarnished realism.

Zombie continues to have a true, unflinching artist's eye for the sublimely horrific (a woodsy murder sequence is pregnant with disturbing, painterly compositions), that eye is wasted here on an unnecessarily moribund history of sociopathy as it relates to Halloween in Haddonfield, Illinois.

Midway does a decent job of cramming in not only the eponymous three-day naval battle between the United States Navy and the Imperial Japanese Navy but also treats the audience to a wealth of other, related Greatest Generation’s greatest hits.

About as pedestrian as you can get.

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.

There are precious few things for a Zorro fan – or a film fan, for that matter – not to loathe about The Legend of Zorro.

"Interview With the Vampire" it's not, but marginally thrilling nonetheless, and besides, any film that features a house party in which the ceiling-mounted fire extinguishers expel freshets of crimson goo in place of H2O gets my vote.

The script fires off clunker after clunker so fast you don't know whether to laugh or cry. (I chose to laugh as I'd already done enough crying at The English Patient.) Vintage bad Stallone, this lost-in-the-shuffle Summer of '96 blockbuster is just what you thought it would be: loud, boisterous, and without a single original line of dialogue. It's enough to make you miss Judge Dredd.

Open Windows has plenty to say about both the death of privacy and the dominion of the always-connected digiverse we now inhabit, and editor Bernat Vilaplana does a remarkable job of keeping the film’s frenetic pace rushing headlong toward an ending that you’ll never see coming.

Less a traditional martial-artistry marathon than it is an exercise in filmic frustration, lovely to look at by small degrees, but a mud-spattered mess of a movie overall.

It’s a fun and mostly effective ride while it lasts, part Slenderman creepypasta weird and part full-on, nerve-jangling horror, but it’s ultimately, perhaps unavoidably, unsatisfying.

As for Hotel Transylvania,, no need to put a stake in it, it's deadly dull already.

They've become deadly dull, these two once-keen buckers of bureaucratic BS, and watching them interact on screen is akin to having your pleasure centers removed by knobby little aliens whose only knowledge of mankind comes from Jack Webb's stoically unvarying television incarnations.

Inoffensive fun that kids will love and adults will likely love too, it's a middle of the road affair, but a far cry from roadkill.

It’s The Alamo, all right, but will anyone want to remember it?

There are some good gags here, and I caught myself grinning more than a few times, but Hughes and Columbus are so set in their ways that everything they work on seems to look, feel, and sound the same.

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.

There's a manipulative streak to the proceedings, and you'd have to be stone cold dead not to grasp the inevitable outcome long before the third act, but it's a professionally handled sort of emotional manipulation common to its genre, dating back to "Blithe Spirit" and, somewhat less memorably, "The Ghost and Mrs. Muir."

Gere is excellent as this disturbed fellow; his twitches and too-happy smile are right on the money, but this only serves to illuminate the ramshackle state of the rest of the film, which is a shame: good, honest films dealing with mental illness are exceedingly few and far between. This, however, is not one of them.

It's not the most flattering depiction of Jews I've seen. Still, The Passion of the Christ is something of a masterpiece, terrible to behold, unfit for children, certainly, but very much the work of a director in the throes of his own distinct passion.

The script, by Adam "Tex" Vegas, ricochets between over-earnest romantic comedy staples and a noticeable lack of any consistent tone for Reynolds’ character.

Inoffensive and sporadically funny, its chief charm is Arnold's ridiculous noggin, and that's not saying much.

In the end, Forces of Nature is a creampuff of a film, it being a scrappy romantic comedy of the purest stripe, what's so wrong with that? Not a thing.

A fine, familial elixir to remedy despair and soften hardened hearts, Around the Bend is likely just the first of many feathers in Roberts shiny new directorial cap.

Howard surprises with this decidedly honest comedy-melodrama.

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.

Red Tails is both a stirring and simplistic tribute to the men that not only shattered the U.S. Army Air Corps' racial barrier but also saved the lives of many a white, B-17 crew member, all while downing countless numbers of Hitler's formidable, jet-propelled Luftwaffe.

Dobkin, in his directorial debut, seems ready and willing to ply the conventions of film noir in the harsh Montana daylight, but Clay Pigeons never manages to reach the crucial suspense plateaus that noir demands.

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.

The result is a vacuous feel-good movie that leaves you feeling nothing at all.

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 know you're watching some sort of bizarre classic when King of Trash John Waters gets half his face burned off by sulfuric acid in the first act.

A glorious, spastic mess. Jamie Hewlett and Alan Martin's neo-underground cult comic book Tank Girl comes to life looking, amazingly, exactly like it ought to, positively overflowing with an ever-changing riot of color, gratuitous violence, inter-species shagging, toss-away one-liners, and gobs of little wonky bits that will either knock you upside the funny bone or leave you reeling from out-of-it confusion.

Remains little more than a briefly fascinating curiosity, a travelogue for those of us who can't actually attend.

It's nobody’s idea of a classic comedy, but in its own inoffensive and eager-to-please way it's a pleasant enough way to spend 90 minutes ogling the lustrous Ms. Union and Mr. Foxx's equally and endlessly fascinating volcanic coif.

Bird's grim, picture-perfect direction -- the Sierras are more character than backdrop, and everything else looks like it's already been digested and expelled -- augments what is frankly a small, albeit lusterless, gem of a horror show, for once with as many smarts as body parts.

Might make a terrific double bill with the equally inane (but considerably more entertaining) "Con Air," with the French electonica duo Air chirruping in the background. But, you know, only if you're stoned out of your head.

Lehmann has dropped the ball -- or the pick, whichever the case may be -- again. Instead of playing up the inherently silly, goofy nature of heavy metal, he sinks to its level, offering nothing more than the occasional chuckle and some ratty old combat boots.

Silly, predictable, and, dare I say it, oddly endearing, Hackers is the first film I've seen in a long while that annoyed me so much I actually enjoyed it.

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

King Arthur is a snooze, overcast and drizzly both on location and on the pages of the script. Owen is too classy, too James Bond-handsome to realistically portray the not-yet-King Arthur.

Director Roth has accomplished the near impossible with Hostel: Part II: He's crafted a vastly superior sequel to a film already considered something of a classic by genre aficionados, one that supersedes its predecessor's sadistic entertainment quotient by orders of magnitude while also upstaging its own outrageous gore effects with a script that's smart, vicious, and occasionally, gleefully subversive.

The film itself is an effective enough metaphor for out-of-control bullshit that frankly, Koepp aside, was part and parcel of King’s novella from page 1.

For all its noble intent, Hopkins' film falls flat halfway through, mired in bad philosophizing and too-beautiful killing fields, neither bark nor bite mean much here.

Saw has its moments, and most of them are brutal in the extreme, but ultimately it's one tremendous misfire that will either leave you laughing or, possibly, gagging. Not what I'd call a winning combination.

The Meg is simply mediocre, PG-13 monster-moviemaking at its mind-numbing kinda/sorta best-ish. Meh.

Tonally one of the strangest films of the year thus far, Project X is at heart a John Hughes-esque celebration of that fleeting teenage moment prior to actual adulthood when throwing a badass backyard party could instantaneously elevate your social status, and cement bonds of friendship that would last a lifetime, and get you laid all in one go.

Derrickson's staid direction, coupled with Wilkinson’s sad-sack priest and a general air of dreariness make for a courtroom thriller that’s somewhat less apocalyptic than the "L.A. Law" episode involving the death of Benny's mom.

It seems downright unfair to harp on the remake’s differences from the original when both films are having such a ball.

Granted, it's breezy enough in a retro-chic kind of way, but the meh factor is too high to overcome for all but the hardiest of J-Lo die-hards.

Jorgen Persson's camerawork is spectacular, illuminating the cobalt blue of the frozen wastes with an almost regal air. As a travelogue, August's film works wonders; as a narrative, it's just not all there.

Basically a rehashing of previous genre films, Hopkins borrows heavily from such superior efforts as Philip Kaufman's The Wanderers (minus that film's gang motif, natch) hoping that no one will notice.

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.

There's the shell of not one but two excellent films in Pumpkin, but as it is the one we have here is just too bewildering to puzzle out.

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

It's one of the better sequels to come out in years, and although it doesn't pack the emotional wallop of the first film, it's still head and shoulders (and punctured eyeballs) above most of what's out there.

Ultimately, the remake is, at best, rote and, at worst, totally unnecessary.

A middling urban thriller that's one part "Rear Window" and three parts "Seven."

Bottom line: costumed Goku and Chi Chi cosplayers may argue the finer points of this adaptation, but it is fairly dazzling it its own overextended, futurist-teenpulp fashion, and Chow makes a vastly more entertaining Roshi than he did a King.

Girl in Progress is an old story about a young girl told in a smart way, and that's something you don't see every day, no matter how many times you think you've seen it before.

Feels awfully rushed, as Ryan flies from the Ukraine to Moscow to the Russian hinterlands and back to Baltimore to make sweet, sophomore agent love to his physician girlfriend (Moynahan). It has the feel of one of 007's globe-hopping adventures, but without any of that franchise's giddy sense of fun.

Feels so depressingly vacant that it registers less as a film than as a pointed lesson in what not to do in the wacky world of non-traditional dating. Hasn't anyone in this film heard of Friendster?

It's the pod people's version of a great, contemporaneously resonant cinematic fable, created by apparent committee, and utterly devoid of both meaning and feeling. The tagline warns: "Do not trust anyone. Do not show emotion. Do not fall asleep." Yawn.

Colombiana is one long megayawn; I'd have garnered more titillating thrills rewatching freckle-faced Russkie sexbomb Natalya Rudakova strut her leggy, sassy stuff in Megaton and Besson's "Transporter 3."

Relentlessly dull and curiously bombastic.

Broad across and rippling with muscle, 50 Cent mumbles his way through his hits.

Come What May over-romanticizes the horrific, forced French exodus.

Is this the start of a new subgenre? Probably not – 2009's "The Unborn" traded in Jewish mysticism, too – but it's considerably creepier than it has any right to be and, to be sure, righteous rabbis can be pretty terrifying in and of themselves.

It's a Herculean task to steal the thunder from a Johnny Depp performance, but Richard Griffiths (best known these days as Harry Potter's tubby Muggle uncle, Vernon Dursley) does exactly that.

Sandler is a post-Catskills goldmine of potential, he always has been, and when he's willing to break with tradition (a là Punch Drunk Love), he's downright revelatory. Not this time, though. This time he's just dying.

It's fun enough on its own relatively low-budget merits, but it's really nothing to die – or kill – for.

Unfortunately, the film rests heavily on the shoulders of Murphy, who seems to wander aimlessly from scene to scene, searching for a laugh. The joke's on him, though: There are none.

This is nobody's idea of a happy family story, but it is a pristinely chilling depiction of familial meltdown in a post-Stalinist, Twilight Zone anti-place, the dark heart of heartlessness and mysterious parenting techniques.

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.

It's a film that you can take home and chew over later, both abrasive in its loudness and reflective in its fleeting, feminine moments of silence. Well done.

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.

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

It’s hardly the most original teen comedy we’ve seen, but, again, Schaffer, working from a script by himself, Alec Berg, and David Mandel keeps things borderline sweet throughout.

Roughly as entertaining as watching your neighbor's kid's soccer game, not because you want to, but because you have to.

When you've got Maya Angelou and Cicely Tyson in the kitchen, laying on the sophomoric laughs is just plain stupid.

It's big, it's loud, it's dumb, and all things considered, it's not completely un-fun.

Drained of much of its presumed power by a distinct "been there, seen that" vibe.

Surely something more original than this could have been mined from the history of North America’s largest and most professional police force. As it is, though, Johnson’s film is just firing blanks.

If you've seen the 2006 Nick Nolte vehicle "Peaceful Warrior," then you've pretty much already seen this. Capturing the essence of surfing – or any sport, for that matter – is more often than not a fool's errand. A more fitting tribute to Moriarty's legacy? Go buy a board and hit the deep blue yourself.

For all the swords 'n' sandals hoodoo that makes up the wilting backbone of Jonathan Hale's script, the Rock is, nevertheless, fun to keep an eye on.

It just signals a series that's plainly out of gas.

Kaplan's lustily awful film is to be avoided if at all possible, and if not, well, don't say I didn't warn you.

A crowd-pleasing blockbuster if ever there was one, features as its centerpiece a jaw-droppingly vivid re-creation of the Japanese attack on the U.S.'s fabled (and extremely vulnerable, as it turned out) Pacific fleet.

This is a more hardscrabble, beaten down version of Neeson’s iconic revengers than most of his action roles, with Hanson coming across as sympathetically appealing despite the cliched storyline.

Still, every generation deserves its own coming-of-age cinematic snapshot; if this is that, though, things are tougher than I thought.

"When you race with the devil, you'd better be fast as hell." (And you, angry driver, are not that fast.)

Utter rubbish compared to its 2013 precursor. Enter with low expectations and you might just have some rock ‘em, sock ‘em, let’s-ravage-Tokyo fun.

This is Baron Cohen’s worst film, period.

The third and final chapter in Araki's teen-angst-run-riot-in-L.A. triptych is as gorgeously messy as the first two opening salvos (Totally F***ed Up and The Doom Generation), but this time Araki employs a far broader and more complex character canvas than previously.

"Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice" meets a considerably tamed Van Wilder for a mediocre romp in the Hamptons.

As a parable about the inherently dehumanizing aspects of the rat race, it’s bloody good fun.

So syrupy-sweet in its depictions of the game, angels, orphans, children's wishes, and estranged parents, that it may be all you can do to keep from taking a Louisville Slugger to the projectionist.

This is meat-and-potatoes (and bullets) action filmmaking, although, really, that title's got to go.