Nick Pinkerton

On every level this production - from Robinson's callow performance to Vila's hackneyed handheld camerawork, punching beats in the stead of the actors - remains firmly on the level of the obvious.

Working from a story by all-around genre specialist Jonathan Mostow, director Mark Tonderai steers the story cleanly around its queasy hairpin turns, perversely toying with one of pop cinema's most cherished clichés: the audience's inculcated desire to side with the underdog.

The exuberant editing and puke-into-the-camera edginess indicate a film more interested in boasting of hell-raising than in exorcising it.

While Sandler has never trafficked in epigrammatic wit, there's a difference between, say, Billy Madison's "Of course I peed my pants--everyone my age pees their pants" or "I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry's" shakedown of hetero squeamishness, and this lazy stuff--the difference between smart-dumb and plain-dumb.

Likable enough to wear you down with its eager-to-please capering.

The forced horseplay is entirely without ensemble chemistry, probably because the leads were hired principally as singers/musicians, as this, the directorial debut of former Law & Order: Criminal Intent star Vincent D'Onofrio, is that rarest of mongrel movies: a slasher/musical.

Neither intellectually nor viscerally engaging, what The Divide finally offers audiences is the not-terribly-edifying, stagnant experience of being locked in a basement with a pack of assholes.

With neither the moral bite of satire nor a voluptuary surrender that really basks in shallowness, this is a vague, unsatisfying work.

The makeup department's glommed-on plague pustules are fantastic, but the concession to modern technology in a badly rendered last-act CGI demon, cut and pasted from a Diablo II screen-grab, is so eminently lame as to cure all fear of hellfire.

When every injury is repaid with interest, this self-destroying work has nowhere to go but to the credits. Such symmetry is a dismal, barbarian sort of perfection.

Game performances and a couple of half-laughs, sure, but this is the screen comedy equivalent of the televised Yule log.

All might be good for a flask-to-the-theater laugh, if not for the unconscionable price gouging.

The most avid fans of merciless mugging will be the sole admirers of the bookending story of Liu Xiaoye's Butcher.

Add to this that it takes place in the town of Merkin, and you'll get an idea of the labored spirit of dirty-old-man humor that prevails.

It's exactly what you thought it would be: A plagiarized, campus-set "Single White Female" pitched to teens.

Aspires to nothing more or less than carrying along an audience through a string of unremarkable kills, often involving high-jumping fish.

It is part of the film's premise that the movies are only a pretext to serve personal needs. Given how little the murky finished product offers an outside audience, this comes across all too convincingly.

It is absolutely terrible.

Christian "Direct-to-Video" Slater lends not a shred of credibility to the role of Craig MacKenzie.

It's the kind of thing you feel you should laugh at through a phlegmy, hacking cough-and it does get laughs, if inconsistently, predictable given the circumstances of production.

Smart money says Friedberg and Seltzer never sit through these movies in entirety.

The Apparition is not a great or even good haunted-house movie, but it does have the advantage of a memorable setting.

A Little Bit of Heaven demands miracles of its cast to keep proceedings from becoming grindingly mawkish and does not get them.

It is dreary to envisage the viewer who could become emotionally involved in The Victim, but it does have the kind of slack watchability - lugubrious driving scenes and girl-talk flashbacks pad the movie toward feature length - that make for good late-night TV.

A pretend poison pen letter to Hollywood sleaze and excess, Prince of Swine is in fact Toma's application to join the club - hopefully denied.

Bereavement-miraculously as dull as its title-is neither far gone enough to be funny nor well thought-out enough to be disturbing.

A Pacific shore whose rolling tide is rendered as a field of static is the final, remarkable image - though the water cycle film might work best on loop.

The most genial professed social Darwinist you could ever meet, Rice has never stopped to explain how much of his persona is a goof. Likewise, Larry Wessel's documentary portrait Iconoclast doesn't bother to synopsize its subject for the novice before setting off on its four-hour journey.

Koechlin, a striking woman with a slim frame, horse mouth, and big turbulent eyes, has screen presence enough to kick along the frequently-stalling psychodrama up to an ending that seems like a tossing up of hands.

Rogosin was showing a vital culture on the brink, at the moment when it was calcifying into the form it would hold for more than three decades to come.

Taken together, the whole thing is good for approximately one laugh, generated by the shabbiest CGI reptile since "Anaconda."

More irksome, the clips, often improperly masked or displaying conversion issues, are rarely drawn from the best available materials. This scruffiness would be easily forgiven if there were something sufficiently "innovative" in Cousins's approach to transcend the cut-rate production value. Instead, this Story, for all its claims of rewriting, is too reliant on received film-buff wisdom.

Like any good study in couple's psychopathology, a familiar relationship is visible here, but in a parodic, mutated form.

A send-up of a communal project made of vague goals and empty postures that is ultimately indistinguishable from its target.

Laughton, of course, is elegant rotundity in motion, a naughty, moonfaced cherub in his drunk scene, later sweetly surprised when finding himself elevated into a man by the Gettysburg Address, a recitation of which is the film's palpitating heart.

The novel and wickedly funny topic is mined for only a portion of its potential, but a little ironic astringency is certainly more unsettling than by-the-book slum drama.

"Love" is a quicksilver thing that can't be held in the present tense. It is somewhere between nothing and everything, and no one pinned down more of its complexities and contradictions than Maurice Pialat, hunting barehanded for slippery truths.

Chodorov follows the first-person tradition accordingly, entering the subject through his own early immersion in these films via his father, television presenter Stephen Chodorov.