Mary Elizabeth Williams

What will likely draw butts into theaters for Friends with Kids isn't one star in particular, but the sum of its comic pieces.

What ensues is "Beaches" meets "Pineapple Express." Which, I've got to tell you, is pretty much what living with cancer is like.

The major drawback of I Don't Know How She Does It, however, is Parker herself. She seems pathologically drawn to characters who don't possess believable flaws or complications -- just annoying tics.

Farrell looks like he's having the time of his 400-year-old life.

It's a movie that succeeds, often beautifully, not by forcing its characters to be as naughty and gross and pathetic as men are. It soars by letting them be as naughty and gross and pathetic as women are. Three cheers for equality.

You know how they say to find one thing and do one thing well? Well, Pattinson's thing is glowering. It doesn't help matters that the movie itself is so painfully mediocre.

I don't begrudge Take Me Home Tonight or the whole "I Love the Eighties" juggernaut its fight for its right to party, but there is something touchingly off-base about it.

Falls flat for its skittish reluctance to bear any resemblance to an actual Wes Craven film.

It's a hit for the most surprising reason of all: because it's very good.

You would never have predicted it from the breakout success of "Pretty Woman" nearly a decade ago, but it turns out that the pairing of Richard Gere and Julia Roberts has ripened over the years into something resembling month-old brie.

It stinks pretty bad, but not so bad you'd go out of your way to avoid it.

At times, the movie feels less like a coming-of-age tale and more like an extended promo for the Chinese tourism bureau.

Liman's buoyant direction is almost enough to make one forgive the film its heavily appropriated plot (including its groaner of a punchline).

The whole vibe is so shrill and frantic that the truly accomplished actresses, like Bening and Bergen, are left to flounder. The less nuanced ones -- that would be you, Debra Messing -- are, to use the idiom of the movie, as pleasant to watch as a bikini wax is to feel.

When the enchanted crab is the most appealing character in a movie, you know you're in some serious metaphoric hot water.

You'd have thought, in his infinite wisdom, the Lord would at least send stinkers like this direct to video.

I'd appreciate toilet humor more if it weren't so often so unimaginative.

Enough flickers of Jay Ward's gloriously subversive sensibility to make it watchable, but it also has enough lengthy stretches of pure triteness to make it easy to skip altogether.

"Morgans" does bear the distinction of boasting the sourest cast ever assembled outside of a Lars Von Trier production.

Despite all their seamed stockings and Wonder Bras, the Reagan High girls are as far removed from their sexuality as Jawbreaker is from comedy.

Despite its stellar leading ladies, Anywhere But Here is still a predictable generation-gap drama.

Predictable, gratuitous and just self-referential enough to believe itself hip and knowing.

One of the most dreadfully unnecessary movies in recent memory.

The 3-D film is flat, the CGI-enhanced characters oddly waxen. In the center of the action is Jim Carrey -- or at least a dead-eyed, doll-like version of Carrey -- playing Scrooge, the ghosts, a younger version of himself, and probably a dozen other parts. As a general rule of thumb, one Jim Carrey is plenty for any movie.

After an uninspired middle period, the "Shrek" series has, like the revitalized character himself, roared back to form.

Whether he's getting hit in the face with a dildo or cozying up to Martha Stewart, Knoxville is always affable, playful and able coax a laugh out of an audience by doing ridiculous things. He's a jackass all right, but he's a jackass in shining armor.

So genuinely, viciously funny you can't help laughing -- even when you feel really bad about yourself for doing so.

What makes the characters in Pride and Glory real -- and raises the movie above the standard corrupt-cop fare -- is their capacity to live and die in shades of gray.