Marc Savlov

One of the more intelligent comedies out there this summer -- it's not Brooks' best.

Fumbles on so many levels it's just plain silly. To paraphrase the film's tagline: The Thirteenth Floor: You can go there, but why would you want to?

Only good old Leatherface literally mirrors the festering cultural and political corruption of the era, and to the film's vast discredit, this hideous echo is never even noted.

Shrek, DreamWorks' big green cash machine, has finally run dry, perhaps not of box office power, but most assuredly of the caustic, fractured fairy tale-isms and the wry, snarky wit that made the first film, and to a lesser degree, the first sequel, so winning.

Mad Dog and Glory, thankfully, finds the director in remarkable form, crafting an engrossing new film out of what might have been, in less competent hands, simply another Hollywood formula movie.

The film is delicious, welcome, and entirely satisfying and, as an added bonus, far and away the best genre-fan date movie of the year.

Not quite loud enough to be a seasonal blockbuster, Mercury Rising is instead more of a dull thud on the action film map, fodder for Willis fanatics, and not much else.

It's not perfect - infrequently the comedy and drama rub up against each other too much - but it is the genuine article: a wholly unique family film that can moisten your eyes even while it quickens your pulse.

It's the kind of film you feel like watching twice -- not because you found it that engaging to begin with, but because you didn't, and everyone else did.

Awesome.

Tamra Davis' directorial debut is a noir-ish, adrenaline-fueled tale of a love on the border between teen angst and homicide, and it packs a mean, unrelenting punch.

Cooly feral in dark suit and tie, Glover’s the man in the gray flannel suit gone way, way over the edge, and it’s one of the most fully realized screen performances in ages, rats and all.

Director Irwin Winkler and his cast obviously hope to shed light on the boundaries of love, and instead come up with a walloping case of the preachies.

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.

Casting is everything, and the casting of Stallone -- playing way against type -- as the powerless hayseed sheriff in Cop Land is nothing short of inspired.

Like its protagonist, Cordero's film is a nimble thing, darting from hot-button topic to prison-cell metaphysics in the blink of a blind eye, but it never quite achieves the level of journalistic condemnation it so clearly seeks.

Junger has a deft touch with light comedy such as this; he manages to keep the film's convoluted plot spinning without resorting to too much gimmickry or descending to the level of so many teen comedies.

It's not "Billy Madison," quite, but The Waterboy is still pure Sandler. If you like that sort of thing.

Julia, Huston, Ricci, and Workman are all excellent in their roles (Carol Kane as Granny Addams seems little more than an afterthought), but they're unfortunately not enough to save this elongated mess. If you haven't yet seen the first film, rent that instead, or, better yet, go pick up a volume of the original Addams cartoons.

It is violent, certainly, but it's also a genuinely excellent film, horrifying and touching and beautiful in a bloody sort of way. A bit like real life, really.

Arguably the best cross-dressing comedy of all time, it's also one of director Billy Wilder's most fluid, vibrant, laugh-out-loud accomplishments, rife with zippy one-liners delivered in Lemmon's impeccable style, and a rakishly outrageous Cary Grant impersonation from Curtis. Monroe is at her gooey, blonde best here as the pouty, hard-drinking Sugar.

Like its protagonist, the movie tries to rise above convention, flails about a bit, and slides back into self-parody.

Everything about this swift and gorgeous and tremendously enjoyable film is played out in a rush of staccato edits, crisp performances, and charmingly giddy subplots that coalesce into Spielberg's most purely entertaining movie in years.

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.

Zealously nasty fun which, surprisingly, ends on something of a note of upbeat grace and familial redemption, Middle Men is more entertaining than 99% of 37% of the Internet.

This film will either drive you mad or make you angry, possibly both, if you’re lucky, but it’s rarely boring.

Dull, unnecessary film.

Ridiculously overwrought.

There is a line between gallows humor and tastelessness, but Very Bad Things apparently doesn't have a clue where that might be.

With its eye-popping color palette and surreal sense of ever-heightening melodrama, Thunderbirds comes across as "Spy Kids'" poorer British cousin.

Let's just say if you liked the last one, you'll like this one, too. Otherwise, you'll discover that it's time for Drebin, Nordberg, Capt. Hocken, and the rest to finally retire their badges.

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.

It's not the crowning achievement in Steven Spielberg's oeuvre, but Minority Report stands on its own sturdy sci-fi legs, and there's no sign of that little imp Haley Joel Osment, to boot, thankfully.

Tim Burton is all grown up and getting serious with this wildly scattershot tale.

A character-driven piece with a character who seems somewhat hollow.

Nobody's going to give this one an Oscar, sure, but as far as the venerable teen sex comedy goes, this one actually makes it to third base.

But instead of being the hippest kid on the block, this plays like some ranty, paranoid comic thriller. It'd be more fun watching Jimmy Stewart get the beat-down from Claude Rains on the Senate floor; when Mr. Williams goes to Washington, the result is a total snooze.

Rarely have I seen a film so willing to champion the fallibility of the human heart.

It smarts, and shocks, and just for a moment blows your mind.

Just plain dismal, an inexplicable mining of old, mid-level programming that has all the raging excitement of continental drift.

Not in itself a bad thing -- the "Star Trek" films have long come under friendly fire for being too heavy on the philosophizing and not enough so on the deep-space car chases -- but oddly, the film feels soulless and hollow, despite best intentions to the contrary.

Thanks to Haggis and the cast, who are convincing, often bitingly so, in their willingness to dive into the dark and unknowable depths of the modern American romantic relationship, The Last Kiss mirrors reality with remarkable faithfulness.

Marvelous not in its evocation of horror but in the way it slowly chips away at the mundanities of day-to-day urban living.

One of the most suspenseful films of all time, its wartime action setting makes it easy to forget it's also one of the most spiritually righteous. [Director's Cut]

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.

Deeply moral, thoughtful, and amiably humorous.

Canny and somewhat overwhelming documentary.

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

To be sure, Hitman is a lousy film, but like the video game that inspired it, it's also great fun, drawing as it does on everything from James Bondian Eurotrash panache to Vin Diesel's moribund XXX character.

Condensing a massive tome like Les Misérables into a cohesive 129-minute film is a labor of love in any case, and August succeeds with remarkable, powerful results.

A godforsaken (possibly literally) mess.

All in all, Imagine That is an amiable detour from its star's usual scatological skronk. Kids will empathize, parents will breathe a sigh of relief.

It's done with such a wonderfully dry style and wit that you don't mind having to stop to catch up now and again.

I Dreamed Of Africa...and all I got was this lousy movie.

Just plain unforgettable.

Simply put, Battlefield Earth is the worst film I've seen in over 10 years, and believe me, that's saying a lot.

The Happening is both too incoherenly weird and too narratively ambitious for its own good.

Ends up as little more than a recursive footnote to the infinitely better up-all-night teen comedies of, you guessed it, John Hughes.

A drop-dead gorgeous period noir, rife with paranoia, femmes fatales, and good men inexorably sinking into the bloody mire and opaque texture of life (and death) during wartime.

Mandel and producer Sherry Lansing have obviously put their whole into the creation of what ought to have been a riveting and powerful film. Instead, School Ties ends up about as memorable as a plate of gefilte fish.

Billed as Li's final martial arts epic (would that Jackie Chan be so thoughtful), Fearless is fittingly peripatetic, finding the Hong Kong superstar ricocheting across the screen.

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

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.

The result is a riveting, eco-wise epic that'll do fans of both Ralph Nader and Katsuhiro Otomo proud.

Green and Henson make an inspired comic team, Sawa has the befuddled stoner thing down pat, and Alba is, in a word, yummy.

Loud, hilarious, and enormously entertaining, 24 Hour Party People makes you want to toss current FM radio out on its pre-fab, corporate-sponsored backside. And not a moment too soon.

Transformers is about as clever as an unplugged blender.

Crowe has rarely been better, and the same goes for director Scott, who parallels and then dovetails Lucas and Roberts' stories with sublime, gritty precision, working up to a magnificent "Godfather III"-style crosscutting sequence that electrifies an already explosive tale.

The plot is negligible, but that's fine since it's really only a way to get from one set-piece to another.

Crucial to the nature of the disaster film -- and something that Irwin Allen knew so very well -- is that films of this sort depend on an emotional hook, a peg of normalcy to hang the chaos from. Volcano offers no such hook, and as a result it plays like some La Brea dinosaur risen from the tar, all effects and no heart.

The script by S.S. Wilson and Brent Maddock (Ghost Dad) is so jumbled and the direction so chaotic that it's often hard to tell what's going on -- where, when, and why.

For those who only recall Bana from his bland showing as Ang Lee's super-thyroidial meltdown monster, his performance here is a revelation.

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.

Never less than good but it's also never quite great.

While it’s perhaps not the best date film of the year, it is a grim and unmistakable masterpiece of bleak, black sorrow.

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?

Layer Cake is suffused with a stately sense of menace and a sort of doomed existential suave.

Such a monumentally bad remake of such an exceptionally chilling genre favorite.

A sweet-natured romantic fable, albeit one that packs in carnivorous cockroaches, rampaging brontosaurs, and the ever-Freudian Empire State Building among its requisite emotional baggage. And, too, it's a corker of an action/monster movie.

Utterly pointless remake.

A poor man's "Excalibur," but the fact of the matter is that the film displays far too little of the incisor-sharp wit and out-of-control mayhem readily available in the other two films. It just doesn't work.

It boggles the mind that The Legend of Chun-Li is as vapid and dull as it is.

Packs all the spine-tingling punch of a soggy bag of mulch.

Inoffensive and sporadically engrossing.

Color of Night is yet another in a string of vapid, low-tension headaches passing for suspense thrillers (Fatal Attraction, Jennifer 8, Single White Female) that tries to go everywhere and, instead, goes nowhere. At all.

Seems as though its reach is always exceeding its grasp...partly because Kasdan spreads himself a bit thin amongst the nine major characters he's working with.

Of course, Slither isn't for everyone, but if you've a yen for gallons of grue and a smart, sassy story to boot, you couldn't do better than Gunn's hellishly fun horror show.

Hollow, predictable, and too glitzy for its own good, The Fan never even makes it to first base.

Cronenberg’s nonlinear narrative is trying at times – it keeps you nearly as off-kilter as the characters, and surely that’s intentional – but as a character piece about madness and stymied dreams, it’s remarkably realistic.

The real problem with this Aliens encounter is that it's patently a Nick at Night midweek movie that inadvertently got greenlighted for a big-screen opening.

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.

You need only see Get Low for absolute proof that, while Hollywood may be in decline even as bad actors' salaries climb ever higher, there remain at least three very exemplary reasons – Duvall, Spacek, and Murray – to switch off your home theatre and get out into a real one.

An inoffensive, eminently forgettable bit of fluff.

The animation itself is superb, and the filmmakers long ago mastered the dreamy, stream-of-consciousness narrative tropes that work so well with stop-motion, but even with all that going for it, A Town Called Panic feels more like some exotic animated curiosity than a film to return to again and again.

Staged and stagy, this adaptation of Wendy MacLeod's play about family dysfunction and the "anti-Camelot" is a muddled, middling mess, despite a witty, top-drawer performance from Posey and a surprisingly comic turn from Spelling.

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

Factotum, for all its grim grind, is funny-serious, and smart-stupid. Just like you after four beers, and me after eight.

A muddled, gimpy mess, filled with the worst sort of Trek clichés and ill-timed humorous outbursts.

If only someone had taken away that disastrous third act we'd have one of the better mainstream films dealing with the impossible societal demands put upon gay parenting yet made. No such luck, though.

Five years after Ang Lee attempted a stylistically and narratively daring reimagining of what a comic-book movie could be (an example that tanked disastrously at the box office), the big green gamma-guy returns to the screen in a purer, more unadulterated, vastly more entertaining form.

Not only is the franchise growing hoary, by now it's become downright laughable, leaving Lethal Weapon 4 feeling more like a bad Fox sitcom than anything else.

Mann's film is beautiful to watch. Cinematogrpaher Emmanuel Lubezki employs a washed-out, harshly lit style that makes everything look vaguely menacing and hyper-real, which is complemented by Lisa Gerrard and Pieter Bourke's Africanized score.

Far and away, one of the most tedious, uninspired offerings thus far (and, worst of all, the door is left open for yet another pointless sequel).

Do yourself and your kids a favor, parents, and head to "Spy Kids" instead.

This newest laff-riot from the once and future director of The Decline of Western Civilization documentaries is a lamentable mess, chiefly made up of stale gags that went bad sometime during the Kennedy administration and a stunningly unengaging romance that has all the snap of a moist cotton swab.

As concert films go, this is heady stuff.

There's no denying it's a tragic film from start to finish, but equally undeniable is the endless stoicism displayed by the women, and Panahi's crisp, meandering direction.

This is a garish, rocket-fueled slice of popcorn mayhem, and the perfect antidote to this summer's limp action lineup.

Adding to weirdness is a tacked-on, live-action appearance from the real Aldrin, who reassures kids and terrified X-Files fans that there weren't, in fact, any houseflies on board Apollo 11.

You can take a page from Wes Craven before he went flat and keep repeating, "It's only a movie; it's only a movie; it's only a movie." But is it?

The filmmakers wisely stay in the background and allow the people of Whitwell to tell their own story, although this simple, honest little film is occasionally marred by an emotionally manipulative music score straight out of Heartstring Tuggers 101.

A film within a film encapsulated by a clever and very accurate anti-materialistic Buddhist morality lesson, Travellers and Magicians feels a bit like Chaucer's Canterbury Tales as retold by Siddhartha.

Ultimately, it's a bore. Don't see the movie – read the book, play the game.

To this day one of the most riveting, horrific, and empathetically turbocharged pieces of motion picture history ever recorded, Eisenstein's mind-bogglingly complex composition – utilizing a seeming cast of thousands of extras in addition to the unnamed, iconic main figures – is a gory ballet of marching Cossacks, frantic Odessites, trampled innocence, and doomed dissent.

One of the most eloquent tales in ages of dysfunctional love – between a man and his ideals, between a country and its government, and, in the end, between Evey and V.

It's not perfect -- thank Satan! -- but Hellboy II: The Golden Army is by far the most splendidly imaginative and creatively uncorked piece of fantastic cinema since the director's "Pan's Labyrinth" netted an Oscar trifecta in 2007.

As far from "Slacker" as you could possibly get and still be using a motion-picture camera, The School of Rock is nonetheless pure Linklater, pure rock & roll, and pure fun. Gabba, gabba, hey!

In a film like this, timing is everything, and everyone from the stunt coordinators to the crew-at-large seems to have gotten it right the first time.

While the film never quite reaches the emotional peaks it so obviously seeks to scale, Zwick's film is still potent enough to save you three months salary.

The film's greatest strength lies in its ability to view itself as a modern moral fable of sorts.

Pixar's Finding Nemo may well have the best casting of any animated film of the past 30-odd years.

You get the impression that Herzog believes wholeheartedly the planet will be better off without us. Nosferatu that we have proven ourselves to be, he may be right.

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.

Kempner's documentary is a streamlined, gorgeous piece of work, full of revelations of time, place, and person.

Alice Braga owns this film.

You end up feeling -- despite Jones' dead-on performance -- like you've been cheated. It looks good. It feels right. It gets the job done…. But there's nothing there. Just like Cobb. Maybe that's the point.

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.

Pure Luck manages to deliver only four decent laughs in its entire 105-minute time.

The amazing thing in Ropelewski's film is just how much of this lowest-common-denominator pabulum has been recycled from the foul spillage of the previous two films. Once again, needlessly, we're treated to lengthy scenes of the family singing and clowning about with treacly plasticity, fantasizing, dreaming, whining, mewling... it's all too much, grating on your nerves and leaving you desperately in need of a healthy dose of cinematic sanity. Or, at the very least, genuine humor.

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.

There's a genuine, sparky chemistry between the three (and later, a fourth), and Robertson, particularly, is luminous in her role.

It's Wilson's film all the way. He's brings an unexpected frisson of surfer-esque chutzpah to the role of Roy, a bad guy with good intentions, a cowboy who, dammit, just wants to be loved.

It's dead in the water.

Is this the future of horror or just some bizarre fluke? Don't ask me, I'm having too much fun to care.

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.

Bottom line: This Orphan is an atmospheric and occasionally vicious little git and an above-average entry into the "cuddly hellspawn" genre, overlong at two-plus hours, but nowhere near as excruciatingly overdone as others of its ilk (Devil Times Five, I'm talking to you).

Batman & Robin fails to engage the spirit of Batman, Robin, or decent marketing in general, and instead ends up as a limp, excruciatingly shallow knockoff that leaves viewers cringing at the unavoidable one-liners that make up the better part of the script.

Toils in high school hell and doesn't even manage to come up with one good shock.

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.

Despite a marketing campaign that appears bound and determined to make its subject look as grindingly dull as possible, Roll Bounce triumphs on almost all counts.

Bertolucci returns to his native Italian soil for the first time in 15 years, and the result is a gorgeous albeit fairly insubstantial homecoming.

A very nasty piece of work, indeed.

A great, bizarre, and ultimately very, very unique film.

Valentine succeeds only in boring you to death.

Barely even worthy of a straight-to-video release, as simplistic and silly as it is.

Even if you're familiar with the details of the game, Rafferty's suspenseful editing draws you to the edge of your seat and beyond, back into 1968 itself.

The man behind the "Rush Hour" franchise proves that dropping sly nods in Alfred Hitchcock's direction does not necessarily a fine caper make.

Walk on Water makes you wonder what the Mossad is teaching its field agents these days.

Boasting that your film features "two of the six writers of Scary Movie," as this film's marketing campaign does, is like bragging that you came in second in the annual Bulwer-Lytton Bad Fiction Contest.

A touching (and at times horrific) -- albeit overlong -- Christ allegory, that scores not so much on the strength of its convictions as it does on the truly remarkable performances it elicits from the cast.

By the time Foot Fist limps to its ultimate fighting climax, you'll likely wish you had double-teamed "Game of Death" and "Waiting for Guffman" instead.

Excruciating in the extreme, this is the nadir of urban comedies thus far: a trashy, crass, and painfully unfunny airline disaster of a film.

It is, in a word, boring, and that's the most un-Oliver Stone adjective I can think of.

It's almost dreamlike in its weird little tone, a Manischewitz hangover of a nightmare that's giddy enough to usher chuckles and is thoroughly unique.

It's Banderas' film all the way, of course: he's one of those genuinely gifted, glowing actors who can nevertheless hold your attention through sheer onscreen charisma.

The war might be over, but fear and hope remain locked in a rapturous stranglehold amidst the rubble.

Bizarre, trenchant, and unexpectedly hilarious, this is one regular guy's foray into the lonely world of love. Were that all budding relationships came out this well.

The confusion it mistakes for true soul-searching is about as realistic a look at the politics of youthful attraction as one of those "Did somebody say McDonald's?" commercials is a look at mainstream American family values. Did somebody say McCheese?

They shoot rodents, don't they?

Meandering, sub-aquatic mess: It's so bad it's good, but only if you slide in on a freebie.

One of the dullest films of the sextet thus far.

More emotionally complex than even I had thought possible, Chasing Amy is the sound of burgeoning genius on the fast track to maturity.

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.

It's no wonder Imamura has now collected not one but two Palmes d'Ors; The Eel is a flash of quiet brilliance that resonates long after the images have faded from the screen.

Winning and emotionally punchy film.

It's not necessary to be a longtime fan of the Star Trek universe to appreciate the sheer emotional punch and swagger of this rough and randy Enterprise crew.

Absolutely harrowing, shocking in its sudden revelatory immediacy, and very, very well done, Black Hawk Down is one of the best depictions of the outright lunacy inherent to battle I have ever seen.

Goofy summer fun that makes Earth vs. the Flying Saucers look like Citizen Kane.

A gothic little slip of a film, beautiful to behold but with less substance than the shadowy tendrils of fog that blanket nearly every scene.

Despite the hardships depicted, Golden Door is a sweet film at heart, playing witness to the birth pangs of modern America with both due respect and the occasional comic grace note, but not, oddly, one single shot of the Statue of Liberty.

Doesn't tell you anything about human nature you probably haven't already suspected, but then again it's good to be reminded of these dark things from time to time. Especially these days.

It's a neat, sweet experiment in meta-documentary filmmaking overall, but like Yi's own heart, it sabotages itself in the process and becomes another casualty of too-close scrutiny.

Shoddily plotted and unimaginative, Species II is a slapdash effort at best, creepily unaffecting and minus the T&A this sort of film so desperately hinges on.

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

Easily the smartest, snarkiest, and most honest depiction of that tweenage wasteland known as the "middle school years" that this former wimpy freak and geek has come across since having survived the daily derision afforded those of us who chose to spend our lunch periods perusing J.R.R. Tolkien, playing Dungeons & Dragons, or just hiding out in the boys' room.

There's not much more to this poorly scripted thriller than exactly one well-done shock moment and Michael Keaton's eyebrows, but, to be fair, Keaton's brows have carried three Tim Burton films nearly on their own, so don't let this dissuade you from seeing the film.

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

Far and away the most original thriller to come out of a major studio (in this case Columbia Pictures) in a long while.

Part character study, part redemptive drama, and all cheesy heart, it's Boston-baked melodrama, a little too gooey at times, but still pretty delicious.

What if the filmmaker had found a way to reconcile his two storylines into a cohesive whole? Wouldn’t that have made a wonderfully affecting film? Why yes, it would have.

Hit-or-miss comedy at its best and worst: When it connects, the belly laughs are long and loud, but when it misses, the groans you'll be hearing are your own.

Fails chiefly because it's senseless. How it even managed to bypass the straight-to-video route boggles the mind and is a speculative fiction far more engaging than any to be found onscreen.

Hell of a nice try, but I've seen it all before.

187 (the title refers to copspeak for a homicide) circles round and round, never making a salient point that isn't countered by another, utterly opposite notion three scenes later.

While the film ably thrusts longtime fans of Mignola’s highly stylized artwork and newcomers alike into the world of that ol' debbil Hellboy, the film suffers from both scattershot character development and a serious case of H.P. Lovecraft overdose.

So ingratiatingly good-humored that it's hard to take it seriously enough to complain. Sure, it's no great triumph of moviemaking, but it is entertaining, and a more or less plausible way to kill 95 minutes on a Saturday afternoon.

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.

Utterly charming.

Proving once again that no matter how many times you remake a film it's tough to top the original.

Herzfeld also wrote the screenplay, and so its leaden and obvious tone and the resulting dearth of delicacy rests squarely on him.

Though Foley is adept at handling the action, the film is a grim washout peppered with too many earnest, good-cop/bad-cop conundrums and not enough solid police work.

Unforgivably tedious tale.

But bad, this film's so bad! To flub the fans' most beloved butcher boy.

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.

A Life Less Ordinary fails on so many levels it's nearly a textbook case of What Not to Do.

Second-guessing the audience in the third act takes some of the wind out of his sails (the film wraps up the loose ends so tightly you can practically see the bow), but Hackford does his best with a King tale that many thought would be unfilmable.

Priceless is a supremely satisfying confection – a French romantic comedy of the sort that ends with you standing outside the theatre with a dopey grin on your face.

It's like the Sixties never happened, or maybe happened too much.

Brings absolutely nothing new to the autopsy table that wasn't previously covered.

Fans of the video game will doubtless love it all but for true fans of the gnashing dead – and we count ourselves among them – this is strictly second-tier terror.

Director Condon displays a sure hand with material that could easily have turned out far worse, making this a nicely disturbing piece of work that rises well above the conventions of the genre almost all the way through.

There are only so many pratfalls you can string together sans storyline and keep a ball like this rolling, and unfortunately, too many of Bean's schticks were old news by the time they first aired on PBS.

Like a dream, this film is wispy and ethereal; like a nightmare, it lodges in your hindbrain and gnaws away with gleeful abandon.

As uncomfortable as it is to have your nose shoved in this nightmare, its unforgettable in its violent lyricism and the bloody power of its message.

To make a bad movie worse, even Ballistic's fight scenes, which ought to be the film's strong suit, are poorly edited, slice 'n' diced into incomprehensible blurs.

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.

It is the perfectly cast Beckinsale who lifts Underworld out and away from the film’s many moments of silly gravitas and steers it into a truly interesting take on the whole vampires 'n' werewolves genre.

Eastwood's grim handling of even grimmer subject matter could have used some paring down toward its histrionic ending, but Changeling is still one of the director's most assured and engaging historical horror shows.

Solid, workmanlike stuff, and enough to keep the legions of X-philes sated until next September. And since I realize some of you are dying to know, no, Mulder's butt remains, as always, fully clothed.

The director is unflinching in his portrayal of the horrors that occurred, and nearly all the characters, from Voight's Wright to Rhames' Mann, are wonderfully nuanced, desperately believable creations.

A wistful, humorous, but ultimately fluffy look at those halcyon days, before punk, junk, and the onslaught of the Eighties.

As far as the chase genre goes, there have been worse films (better ones, too).

All told, it’s two-plus hours of trinkets and baubles and clever repartée beneath a perfect summer sun and beside the whitewashed walls of Fez, not inconsequential but as ephemeral as the sky above.

Trekkies is a hilarious work, mining the psychology of the average and not-so-average Trek fan, and coming up with the answers to all your burning questions about the show and its devoted following.

No matter how bad you may have it, you'll feel better about your own lot in life after watching the tumultuous sexual flailings of Marcela and Jarda (Brejchová and Luknár), a way, way, way down on their luck Czech couple.

Hauntingly beautiful film.

Neither so awful as to be enjoyable nor eerily artful enough to be anything other than a snoozy also-ran in the perpetually poor plotting machine that is the demon-child cinematic subgenre.

It's a pleasant enough ride, certainly, but in the end it also has all the wicked emotional punch of Bill Cosby on Quaaludes.

Everything here from costuming and production design to the note-perfect score from Edward Shearmur works in tandem to create not so much a film as a singular and joyous tribute to a vanished age when wonder only cost a nickel and played three time daily at the Bijou.

The finished product is as predictably dull as a newborn's soft spot.

Daltry Calhoun's saving grace comes in the form of a snappy compilation soundtrack that spans from Johnny Cash to Serge Gainsbourg, a feat of all-inclusiveness that renders the film a moot point at best.

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 the truth, unshackled and captured against all odds, and it's one of the most powerful documentary films I have ever seen, period.

Poses a problem for reviewers. The entire story hinges on a plot device that occurs roughly midway through the film and alters everything that has come before. To give away this massive, unavoidable spoiler would be disastrous and unforgivable.

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.

The most original comedy from either side of the pond in years.

A charming, winsome slice of Seventies pop kitsch reconceived as a kind of Knight-errant quest for that holiest of all grails, dear old mom.

But even a rapper needs to punch things up a bit, and 8 Mile, for all its hip-hop braggadocio, is a pretty weak riff.

This is a strange movie (it feels like a lost episode of the old Leonard Nimoy chestnut In Search of …) about strange people doing strange things.

Of all the missteps made and absurdities offered, the most glaring is the casting of what appears to be a steroidal Eurotrash pimp as no less than Dracula.

As usual with anime features, just because it's animated doesn't mean it's for kids; heads roll and blood spurts, so know that going in, mom and dad. For the older crowd, though, it's gory and gorgeous bliss.

There's much to enjoy here – Ratner's pacing is fluid and fast and the film rushes along its busy, cluttered way with something approaching melodramatic snarkiness – but it's also terribly busy and cluttered.

It's a curiously dull Americanization of one of the finest examples of subtle, moody J-horror out there.

It's the best-looking film of the year, hands down, and Thornton is dazzling, a dull diamond in the gutter rough.

Parcels out information like a triage medic doling out morphine; every tiny bit is carefully considered and then rationed out as though he were terrified he might exhaust his supply before the closing credits.

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.

Disturbing, harrowing, visceral, and even sporadically humorous, Kids is one of those rare films that begs the description “a must-see.” For once, it's the truth.

Aside from the ridiculous dialogue, of which there is much, and truly crappy CGI gore, of which there is even more, Survival of the Dead feels like the single weakest link in what is otherwise the strongest, smartest, and most transgressively revolutionary horror series in cinema history.

Sitting through the film was an exercise in confusion.

Even some third-act deus ex machina scrambling can't homogenize the film's darkly cynical punch. Tough as nails and twice as hilarious, it's a remedy for summer treacle.

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.

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

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

Enough already.

A genuine cri de couer in the director’s long-running battle against the forces of censorship and a banal societal (and cinematic) status quo. And for those reasons along it deserves to be seen.

Despite an ambitious script from Wadlow and Beau Bauman, it's extremely difficult to care, seeing as how these tropes have already been recycled enough to make Greenpeace proud.

It's far from perfect -- as many jokes fall flat as succeed -- but like Undercover Brother himself, it's smarter than most, and twice as solid.

D-FENS is a cut-out, a cartoon Everyman we're supposed to feel sorry for and can't. He's a bad parody in what will doubtless be an over-analyzed film about loss of control. It's just too bad nobody on the creative end seems to have had much control either.

Attack of the Clones' final 35 minutes very nearly makes up for the preceding 105, featuring as it does the jaw-dropping spectacle of the entire Jedi Council battling it out with not only clones, but also lumbering monsters, space ships of all sorts, and each other.

If Never Die Alone had even a smidgeon of comic relief (or even, say, a bunch of zombies) to offset some of its relentlessly downbeat brutality, it might have been at best tolerable. But it doesn't, and it's not.

This might not matter so much to the youngest members of the audience, but for anyone over the age of 10, it’s strictly a colorful bore.

It's pure Bedlam, but for genre fans, Scorsese makes it feel like coming home.

Part unfunny sitcom, part post-"Gigli" career resurrection strategy, and all bad.

From the creature FX to the stilted dialogue, Sleepwalkers offers nothing new for horror fans to sink their collective fangs into.

Dogg has the makings of a genuinely great actor. When he's on screen the film crackles, and even when he's not it's a trippy, funhouse ride.

The self-reflexive nature of New Nightmare is a twist we haven't seen before, and it works well, up to a point.

House has a few moments that ring genuinely eerie, but the cluttered, unconvincing dialogue – not to mention Moseley's ongoing penchant for crazed overacting – make it more of a genre curiousity than anything the "Fangoria" gang would likely want to sit through.

Snatch is nothing if not watchable: It has the insane, popcorn rhythms of a Road Runner cartoon, and for that reason alone it's a minor masterpiece.

Segel, scripting himself, injects regular bursts of comic genius into the proceedings.

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

Park is one sick puppy, and I mean that in the very best sense of the phrase.

A fine, near-seamless film that finally suffers slightly from an inability to wrap up its tale.

It's a pleasure to watch, but I found myself wondering if having a story here even mattered to the director at all.

True, the melodrama on display here can't compare to the likes of Larry, Moe, Curly, and the cannibals, but then this goofily charming quartet of Western outsiders is far more real than reel.

The spirited interplay between Goodman and Crystal is both wacky and, dare I say, charming.

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

Badham, however, keeps the whole thing up and running expertly -- it's interesting to note, also, that this Americanized version contains far more big-bang explosions and an elevated body-count than the French source material. Big deal. In a story as well done as this, a few extra bullet-hits only add to the delightful mayhem.

Quentin Tarantino sans the witty dialogue.

A simply flat-out fun film.

Recounting the history of nukes, mankind's seeming inability to render them obsolete, and the many nightmare scenarios that are cropping up with almost daily frequency in this grim new age of terror-on-demand,Countdown to Zero is less a documentary in the traditional sense than a scathing piece of advocacy journalism.

Shamelessly dull.