Owen Gleiberman

Incident at Loch Ness, unfortunately, is a riddle wrapped in a hoax stuffed inside a crock.

Blue Steel lacks sustained storytelling craftsmanship, and it never approaches the saturnine intensity of the film it sometimes recalls, Michael Mann’s Manhunter (the greatest thriller of the past decade). But it makes you eager to see what Bigelow could do with a good script.

Curse of the Golden Flower is a watchable soap opera, but its marching-band martial-arts scenes are little more than weakly staged retreads of the ones in Zhang's "Hero."

You can expect a lot of shredding and gurgling. 30 Days of Night is relentless, but it's also relentlessly one-note.

Keaton is at his most urgent and winning here. His fast-break, neurotic style — owlish stare, motor mouth — is perfect for the role of a compulsive news junkie who lives for the rush of his job.

It's a feat of star acting, and it helps make (500) Days not just bitter or sweet but everything in between.

A testament to the discipline, humor, and life of kids who swing.

A sturdily diverting old fashioned heist thriller that looks like a masterpiece of sheer competence next to the slovenly action fantasy F/X grab bags that have been passing for summer entertainment.

I was pleasantly surprised to discover that the new cartoon of Curious George, featuring the voice of Will Ferrell as the Man in the Yellow Hat, doesn't veer all that far from the soothing tone of the books.

Vampire in Brooklyn is a horror comedy that mixes lame blood-pellet effects with lame gags, and it clunks along on a series of interchangeably deserted streets that manage to look dank and overlit at the same time.

As a flight of fantasy, Jurassic Park lacks the emotional unity of Spielberg's classics ("Jaws," "Close Encounters," "E.T."), yet it has enough of his innocent, playful virtuosity to send you out of the theater grinning with delight.

Bland to dismal.

Harrison Ford as the President of the United States is such a perfect piece of casting that it's at once a fantasy and a joke: The joke is how perfect the fantasy is. [25 Jul 1997, p. 48]

The United States of Leland is tedious yet infuriating, since its characters, all of whom seem to have emerged from a screenwriter's manual, are like exhibits in a thesis meant to indict the middle class for the crime of its collective dysfunction.

Daybreakers turns?into a ponderous apocalyptic chase film -- it's like "Children of Men" with exploding-plasma shock effects.

It's a potent and moving experience, because by the end you feel you've witnessed nothing less than the birth of a soul.

“Blow the Man Down” has a few contrivances ... Yet Morgan Saylor and Sophie Lowe invest the embattled but loyal Connolly sisters with a desperate resonance, and the movie is clever enough to hold you, even when you wish it had taken the extra step and gone full Patricia Highsmith.

If only for the sake of adults, couldn't the folks behind the Alvin films have had the good grace to turn Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Squeakquel into a musical?

Lee's performance is by far the best thing about The Crow. Unfortunately, he's just good enough to make you wish that the movie had had a whisper of storytelling invention to go along with its showy visual design.

The movie isn't racist; it's just lame. If Brooks truly cared about Muslims or how their funny bones worked, Looking for Comedy might have had some zing, but all his character is interested in is the 500-page report he has to deliver - a homework assignment from hell.

Zucker gives the Camelot legend a makeover and rediscovers its humanizing fire. He has made a true adult fairy tale, only with a heart of glass.

The best reason to see Mother is the deliciously off-kilter performance of Debbie Reynolds, who speaks in pure honey-sweet tones yet keeps planting tiny seeds of disapproval, using her maternal ”concern” as an invisible form of warfare. You never quite catch her doing it; the character doesn’t even know she’s doing it. She just is who she is, and by the end you realize that that’s her glory.

Admit it: It's not every horror film that can make you feel preached at and slimed at the same time.

Left wing? Right wing? Center? Who cares, as long as Bruce Willis is saving the world.

Perry is of the spell-everything-in-capital-letters and act-it-out-loudly schools. Yet his sensitivity to women is a tonic.

Using newsreel footage, clips of artistic propaganda (e.g., joyful proletarian farm ballets), and interviews with survivors, the movie draws us into the annihilating fervor of an era in which purge followed upon purge, in escalating waves of terror and control.

It's a toasty, star-packed ensemble comedy in which a handful of lonelyhearts attempt, with some success, to come out of their shells, and it's going to make a lot of holiday romantics feel very, very good; watching it, I felt cozy and charmed myself.

Lusciously revealing fly-on-the-wall portrait of Anna Wintour.

Lopez, for all her Latina-siren voluptuousness, has always projected a contained coolness, and this is the first movie in which it fully works for her.

What sin did Heather Locklear commit to deserve her role in The Perfect Man?

Whenever a few of the Young Guns get together and have to behave like soulful cowboys, the movie stops dead in its tracks. The trouble with so many of today’s young actors is that there’s no deep-seated yearning or fury in their performances. They just seem like well-adjusted California kids putting on a show for a few hours.

Young, wizened yet valiant, his voice still braying at the moon, delivers these songs of aging and loss as if caught in a beautiful dream of what lies waiting for him on the other side.

Though the filmmaker's feel for his Cuban heritage is bone-deep, it's a glazed and dolorous movie - a depressed epic.

The trouble with Giuliani Time is that Keating, as a filmmaker, wants to give power to the people but in his every perception he takes it away from them.

In a few of the action sequences, director Kevin Hooks evokes the entertaining preposterousness of the James Bond series. Still, as high-wire action melodrama Passenger 57 is almost laughably implausible.

A brutally monotonous thriller.

Reilly, in his 70s, takes us through his hilariously awful childhood: Eugene O'Neill as toxic high camp.

To dismiss this movie for being ''offensive'' would be to offer it high praise.

Slick, reasonably amusing, never asking its audience to swallow anything too wild for consumption.

Scene for scene, the duo are in good form. Yet this is one case where more turns out to be less.

In ”Son-In-Law,” Pauly Shore is like MTV’s missing Marx Brother; call him Sleazo. For once, he makes being utterly shameless seem halfway likable.

Amusing in its very shallowness.

Fracture is working on us, playing us, but that's its pleasure. It makes overwrought manipulation seem more than a basic instinct.

It's like "Capturing the Friedmans" scrubbed to a happy ending.

Roland Joffé brings an artful video-grunge look, and not much else, to this "Saw" clone.

Mostly preposterous, and it has no dramatic center, but the racing scenes hold you in their death-trip grip.

The film's argument against overly literal Bible readings may not preach to anyone but the converted, and when For the Bible Tells Me So strays from scripture, its ardent plea for sexual freedom within modern Christian life grows a bit too late-night PBS generic.

Even at his coolest, Downey's Iron Man remains a ghostly, neurotic crusader -- one whose life, in the Marvel tradition, has become a grand spectacle of overcompensation.

Benigni's Pinocchio is meant to be adorable, but he comes off as less an enchanted puppet than as a harmlessly deranged middle-aged man prancing about in the kind of froufrou cream-colored pantsuit that Dinah Shore retired to her back closet in 1977.

Face becomes a study of the immigrant embrace of freedom in America - a bridge built over time and generations.

Has a topsy-turvy sense of injustice.

A highly conventional 2-D infomercial.

Epic Movie is just timely enough to conclude with a wink and a nod to Borat. I only wish that it had been bold enough to go Borat on HIM.

Denzel Washington, by now, could do this sort of role in his sleep.

Sneakers is an agreeably lightweight caper thriller that has absolutely nothing to do with Reeboks or basketball.

The sequence serves no real purpose beyond dazzle for dazzle's sake, but when you're watching it, that's purpose enough.

An intensely exciting puzzle-gimmick thriller, the kind of movie that lets you know from the start that it's slyly aware of its own absurdity.

Eastwood is now playing a man whose will is stronger than his body, and it's that tension -- between anger and frailty, steel and decay -- that powers the movie.

To call Lukas Moodysson's A Hole in My Heart the feel-bad movie of the year would be an understatement -- it's the feel-sick movie of the millennium.

The Beat That My Heart Skipped lacks the screw-loose existential vibrance of "Fingers," yet it teases out a romantic underside to the original I never quite knew was there.

The film has barely started, and already we can tell what we're in for -- two hours of metaphysical drift.

The movie, after a while, drifts into an all too literal parable of the limits of never leaving the house.

The movie's got bounce. Spanked along by a soundtrack that has a surprising punky bite for something aimed at 13-year-olds.

By the time The Crying Game is over, you'll never look at beauty in quite the same way.

Cairo Time is affectingly gentle, with Juliette slowing down to open up -- a gossamer transformation that Clarkson makes tangible.

The plot is déjà vu all over again, another variation on the proletarian-joker-goes-yuppie formula used in Trading Places, The Secret of My Success, and Opportunity Knocks. In Taking Care of Business, the formula gets boiled down to its bare bones. The movie is nothing but a series of executive signifiers — it should have been called The Trappings of My Success.

Little Man Tate keeps introducing characters and narrative lines that seem promising, but it doesn’t sustain them. The movie feels like three Afterschool Specials welded together.

Technically, Madonna's singing is beautiful -- elegant, silky, refined. Yet there's no fire, no twinkle of ambitious joy, to her performance. Her face is fixed, almost tranquilized -- a porcelain mask.

What sustains the film is the performers' belief in their shaggy-dog selves, which is more than just talent - it's faith.

It doesn't quite wash. Guédiguian has a telling instinct for the buried shame of working-class squalor, but his film is inflated with a doom that feels programmatic rather than earned.

On paper, the movie sounds unbearably schlocky, but Costner plays Garret the reluctant backcountry prince as mythic but also foxy and life size.

The most irritating thing about Hoffa is that even after you've sat through Danny DeVito's turgid, meaninglessly sprawling account of the Teamster boss' rise and fall, you still won't have any idea who Jimmy Hoffa was.

It would be nice to see a sharp, funny, penetrating satire of the new, kicked-up culture of empty media fame, but Tom DiCillo's scattershot buddy movie Delirious isn't it.

It’s a winsome screwball love story that grows on you and takes you somewhere charming.

Kate Hudson is as blah and dazed as her costar is cloyingly enthused. If it's possible to have too even a tan, Hudson in Fool's Gold would be the poster child for it.

Jolie, in this movie at least, has exactly two expressions: blank wistfulness and blank dismay. She reduces the tides of history to one more raided tomb.

Good Night, and Good Luck has a small-scale time-capsule fascination, yet its hermeticism is really a form of moral caution -- a way of keeping the issues neat, the liberal idealism untainted.

The movie has the structure of a madcap romantic chase without the wiggy, busting-out freedom.

We Are Marshall has little of the bone-crunchingsincerity of the recent pigskin rouser "Invincible." This one is more like Unconvincing.

So much flatter than it was on the comic-book page.

Permanent Midnight never shows us who Jerry Stahl was before he began shooting junk, and so we have no real stake in what the drugs did to him. He’s a case study in search of a movie.

Titanic floods you with elemental passion in a way that invites comparison with the original movie spectacles of D.W. Griffith.

A nimble and supple and moving comedy.

What’s numbing about this sub-Eastwood potboiler isn’t just the grisliness of the violence but the absence of any possibility that Seagal will stumble, or show doubt or pain, or have to challenge himself in order to defeat his enemies.

The most exhilarating movie so far this year. It's made up of many familiar elements -- think ''Monsoon Wedding'' meets ''My Beautiful Laundrette'' meets ''Personal Best'' -- yet before long, you catch on to how buoyant and funny and original it is.

Batman Returns offers many jolts of pleasure, yet it’s also a mess — a gilded sketchbook of a movie that keeps falling open to random pages.

The movie is literally a series of showstoppers, unified by the impulse to turn life, at its scruffiest, into theater - into a rhapsody of the everyday.

From what we can tell, Brown was a dancer, all right, in life as well as on the field -- a dancer with a powerful forearm, one that Lee covers in protective padding.

I don’t think Apocalypse Now Redux is superior to the 1979 version. Quite the contrary, it’s draggier and more portentous, more inflated with its own importance.

Bay doesn't stage scenes, exactly -- he stages moments.

It's an energetic, watchable mess.

If any of these characters were half as resonant as Wenders appears to think they are, the film might have seemed charming instead of merely stranded.

The story is too patterned and too contrived.

The one performer who seems at home with the gravity of it all is Emma Thompson.

A ''fun trash'' movie that's more trash than fun.

Lords of Dogtown is a docudrama, rare in its grit and authenticity, that also strives for the mythical youth-rebel excitement of something like "8 Mile."

Creates a flow of symbolism so potent, so transporting in its physicality, that its impact all but transcends its righteous liberal ''meaning.''

A boxing film with no conflictual punch.

A good but far from great movie because it portrays truth telling in America as far more imperiled than it is.

The morality of revenge is barely at issue in a movie that pushes the plausibility of revenge right over a cliff.

The film gently sends up the messiness of modern matrimony, and Alda has assembled an appealing group of actors and given them plenty of breathing room.

Velvet Goldmine is no masterpiece, but, at its best, it's a ravishing rock dream.

The thinnest, draggiest, and most tediously preachy of the Saw films.

By the end, the pieties of Nell fall into place all too neatly.

A Lot Like Love is a lot like a romantic comedy, except that all that's keeping these two kids apart is the trivially insufferable movie they're in.

Undisputed is a shrewd and splendidly volatile B movie structured around a highly original gambit of suspense.

Clever and smooth, yet, like Angèle herself (or Nathalie Baye), the film is almost too placid for its own good.

Chucky the plastic slasher proves that his novelty value has long worn off.

Garry Marshall takes over the movie (no mystery: his son, Scott, directed it), and Keeping Up With the Steins turns into a recipe to forget: chopped liver with ''heart.''

Lynch's first movie since ''Blue Velvet'' that truly envelops you in its spell. It's a piece of celestial Americana -- his journey to the light side of the moon.

The revelation of Microcosmos isn’t just that the insect world has a complex and stirring order — it’s how close these bugs come to having minds.

What’s finally missing from Bugsy is the dirty, low-down kick of the crime genre — the quality that marked last year’s The Grifters, and that was there in The Godfather, too. Levinson would like to be bad, but his approach is reverent, ironic, tasteful. He’s made a gangster movie that, for all its lithe pleasures, enunciates too well.

Gerron's terrible film was never shown in the places it was meant for, but in Prisoner of Paradise it reveals a queasy corner of the Nazi mind that tried to imagine a concentration camp as it fantasized the inmates might have.

As a comedy, 50 First Dates is standard Sandler, but as a love story it left me pleasantly buzzed, if not quite punch-drunk.

Doesn't offer anything to adult viewers as thrilling, as shivery, as satisfyingly primal as Steven Spielberg's intricate predator choreography in the original ''Jurassic Park.''

A thriller that holds less interest - and less water - the more it reveals about what's actually going on.

The surprise of Superman Returns is that it isn't a funky, ambitious conceptual reimagining, like last summer's "Batman Begins." This really IS your father's Superman; it re-creates - and updates, though just barely - the universe Donner invented.

By the end, Campion views all her characters with a compassion bordering on grace, a humanity-like her heroine's-as dark, quiet, and enveloping as the ocean.

A thriller that wheezes along on bits and pieces of ''character.''

As vividly imagined as The Crucible is, it’s up to the actors to animate the stern Puritan cadences of Miller’s dialogue. They bring it off spectacularly.

As long as Revanche focuses on the relationship between Tamara (Irina Potapenko), an indentured Ukrainian prostitute, and Alex (Johannes Krisch), the ex-con gofer and would-be tough guy who wants to help her escape, it's riveting.

The film's fragmentary structure, though, is suspect. It says that the soldiers find no real meaning in their combat actions, yet Gunner Palace presents the operations we're seeing in so little context, reducing them to a random hash of ''sensational'' moments, that Tucker at times appears to be exploiting the war to create a didactic canvas of manic military unease.

Anyone expecting a tender sunset elegy, however, has wandered into the wrong film. Saraband, despite a few wistful moments, is a poison pill of a reunion.

Asia Argento is not what I would call a good actress, but she's a prime specimen of train-wreck sexuality: a debauched Eurotrash starlet who oozes punk cred more than she does talent. It's not too hard to see why she wanted to write, direct, and star in The Heart Is Deceitful Above All Things.

Somberly fantastic new mystery thriller.

It's made with deftly unsettling genre flair.

Déjà Vu is watchable trash, meticulously edited in Scott's skip-stutter style, but there's something ultimately unsatisfying about a thriller that more or less makes up its rules as it goes along.

While George Lopez, Cheech Marin, and Paul Rodriguez are funny men, it's amazing how boring these Latin-shtick cutups can be when none of them gets a single good line.

Turns into a lyrical and stirring meditation on the mystery of autism.

Fitfully amusing, mostly annoying rom-com.

The first hour of The Last of the Mohicans plays like a convoluted history lesson. I appreciate that Mann has enough respect for the audience's intelligence to sketch in this briar patch of conflicting loyalties. But he outlines the interlocking factions without really making it clear, in dramatic terms, what each one stands for.

Even those who may agree with Cho's agenda are never allowed to forget that it is an agenda.

A cheerfully disposable gangland freak-show thrill ride that's been directed by the gifted Joe Carnahan (Narc) as if he were trying to give the audience a seizure.

Any doubts as to whether Sienna Miller is a gifted actress should be laid to rest by Interview.

The tiny scale and armchair talkiness mark the movie as a bit of a folly, an act of idealistic hubris in today's commercial marketplace, yet that's its (minor) fascination too.

It's all about a likable scoundrel who discovers what it means to act out of conviction. The film's underlying twist, though, is tartly ironic.

The only thing shocking about it, however, is the degree to which self-congratulatory gutter exhibitionism has become the degraded ash end of indie ''edge.''

Like Orson Welles, Francis Ford Coppola has gone from being the filmmaker of his time to becoming a make-it-up-as-you-go-along indie free-shooter.

Catherine Breillat, the French director of "Fat Girl", blends victim feminism with the threat of slasher violence in this arid ''deconstruction'' of Bluebeard, the wife killer of legend.

The result is an ''action film'' mired in stasis. The ending piles on the potboiler mayhem, but it's telling that Schwarzenegger's climactic catchphrase is down to one measly word. This time, he's the luggage.

Colorful and exciting, yet unless you're a young moviegoer, nothing in it takes you by complete surprise. (It's less a nail-biter than a chin-stroker.)

Too scattershot to take hold.

In its nothing's-quite-at-stake way, Mars Attacks! has Tim Burton's flaked-out spirit -- it makes you feel like a very knowing 8-year-old, seeing through the artifice yet believing in it at the same time.

After a while, a didactic overdeliberateness seeps into Noé's design, but there's no doubt that he's a new kind of dark film wizard: a poet of apocalyptic shock.

The home-studio recording sequences in Hustle & Flow are funky, rowdy, and indelible. Brewer gives us the pleasure of watching characters create music from the ground up.

If you're going to get on the wavelength of Little Miss Sunshine, you've got to be able to enjoy a comedy in which the characters fit into hermetically cute, predetermined sitcom slots.

Freshly transplanted from the stage, is a thrilling ode to the intertwined glories of sex, showmanship, and lying: what the film calls ''the old razzle-dazzle.''

The picture is so lethargic that I began to think of watching it as a form of atonement.

Shainberg reduces this most disturbing of all photographers to a portraitist of Halloween.

So overstuffed with random fireworks that despite its politics, it's easy to imagine the film getting a four-star rave from Bush or Saddam.

It might be courting hyperbole to call Corky Romano the single worst movie ever to feature an ''SNL'' cast member (Dan Aykroyd hit some pretty arid valleys), but I'm willing to go out on a critical limb and rank it among the all-time bottom dozen.

As a character, Austin Powers hasn't worn out his welcome, exactly, but he has outlived his novelty.

Payback is a thriller so mean and degraded it carries a low-down, vicious charge. Sadism is its only real subject, and its only real life as well.

Paris Is Burning is the most passionately empathetic piece of documentary filmmaking I’ve seen since Streetwise, the brilliant portrait of homeless teens in Seattle, and The Decline of Western Civilization Part II, Penelope Spheeris’ sly and galvanizing heavy-metal collage.

Damsel is a comedy of attitude made with the indulgent touch of an art Western. That’s a refreshingly original thing, though it’s not as blow-you-away cool as the filmmakers seem to think it is.

Pfeiffer transcends any hint of cliché ''cougar'' voraciousness.

The result is a sub-"Saw" knockoff that manages to be brutal yet monotonous, not to mention monstrously unpleasant.

Divided into chapters, the film jumps around in time, which means that we get to observe Shimizu's utter failure to develop his characters from endless narrative angles.

A magical-realist sitcom war farce that ends up being about nothing but its own slovenly smugness.

In The Bounty Hunter, the couple that foils a bunch of tiresome grade-C thriller goons together stays together. Whether or not that's a recipe for love, it's certainly not a formula for romantic-comedy magic.

It's a film noir that grows more potent as its secrets are revealed.

Simply put, it may be the lamest movie ever made about poor white... Southern characters.

Parts of the film play like the world's slowest and most insensitive reality show (Who Wants to Be an Octogenarian?).

Even as the director, Stephen Daldry, places his star front and center, he doesn't know how to highlight him.

A great, searching, incendiary chronicle of the Sex Pistols, the razor-hearted visionaries of punk anarchy.

Fragmentation can be an artful method; it can also be the last refuge for someone who scarcely knows how to make a film. In the no-budget fantasia Wild Tigers I Have Known, the fragments are like a borrowed collage of gay coming-of-age tropes.

The Quick and the Dead is too light to pack the dramatic punch of a true Western and too flat to pass as cheeky revisionism. It ends up in its own amiable, slowpoke limbo.

You miss the knockabout edge of "Bend It Like Beckham" -- though the ending, in its Pavlovian sports-flick way, pumps you up.

A gonzo splatterfest from New Zealand that manages to stay breezy and good-natured even as you're watching heads get snapped off of spurting torsos.

Mr. Magorium, who is 243 years old (so are his jokes), is a cross between Willy Wonka and Geppetto, but Hoffman plays him with little more than a goofy dumb lisp, achieved by tucking his lower lip under his upper teeth, so that he looks just as rabbity-stoopid as he sounds.

It's tempting to say that Mamma Mia! has the worst choreography of any big-screen musical in history, though that would imply that what happens in the film IS choreography.

It's no insult to Tupac to say that he was gangsta rap's greatest matinee idol, or that he lived the part only too well.

3-Iron is like a Raymond Carver story that slowly, inexorably takes on the dimensions of a ghostly fairy tale.

Washington immerses himself, even more than he did in "Malcolm X," in a stare of unforgiving outrage.

For all its technical bravado, The Hudsucker Proxy is an unsettling contradiction, a ''whimsical'' fable made by acerbic control freaks. It's a balloon that won't fly.

As a movie, Trade is so-so, but as an exposé of how the new globalized industry of sex trafficking really works, it's a disquieting, eye-opening bulletin.

Val Kilmer, as a polite horn-rimmed sociopath with a heart of gold, keeps showing up to drop Nietzschean pensées.

Dyrholm’s performance is a powerhouse of authenticity. Her moroseness is mesmerizing, but she also gives Nico a tense intelligence, and her singing is uncanny.

Much of Big Daddy looks like it was made up on the spot, but Sandler, with his bad-dog eagerness to get caught in the act of misbehaving, pulls you through it.

Poisonously smug, one-joke indie comedy.

A lackluster affair — smooth and mildly pleasant, with some honest chuckles but without Brooks’ special, prosaic madness.

At best, a half-finished puzzle, but Broomfield leaves you with questions that few investigators have even dared to ask.

Vitus, a fizzy domestic fairy tale from Switzerland, gives you a lift, as it revels in the oddball joy of genius as kid power.

It was originally called ''Animal Husbandry,'' and while the producers were throwing away that title, they might have done well to chuck the movie along with it.

You may go into Flatliners hoping for a psychedelic mindblower, but the film is about as exciting as staring at a lava lamp for two hours.

It’s a measure of the film’s middlebrow kitschiness that its centerpiece sequence turns out to be a tasteful soft-core version of the lesbian ravishment of Marilyn Chambers in "Behind the Green Door."

Essentially, the movie is Cliffhanger with one third the firepower. Ice-T, looking like a depressed lion in his thick Rasta braids, remains a charismatic camera subject, though he’s too much the snaggletoothed urban runt to make a convincing action dynamo.

Mostly about the prospect of getting your skin ripped by fishhooks.

The movie opens as borderline Hitchcock, echoing the tone of the filmmaker's bravura "Bad Education" (2004), and then turns into a kind of overly conceptualized Tennessee Williams.

Entertainingly deft sleight-of-hand thriller.

Told in Campion’s fancifully fractured style, An Angel at My Table is very accomplished, but it’s also an epic act of perversity: a 2-hour-and-38-minute movie about a wallflower.

As The Commitments goes on, you begin to weary of the one-note characters, who don’t so much converse as exchange arch put-downs.

You'd better deliver the goods. And Them, despite some moody imagery out of the "Blair Witch" school, never does.

Don Coscarelli, writer-director of the logy, fatuous Bubba Ho-Tep, is trying to will a cult movie into existence -- which, of course, never works.

The beauty of Two Girls and a Guy is that it presents us with a hero so craven, so indefensible in his duplicity, that his twin victims leapfrog past vengeance into an almost physical state of curiosity.

Lays on the compassion a little thick, yet its heartfelt squalor stays with you.

Efficient, uninspired sequel.

I.Q. is easy enough to sit through, but it’s all surface come-on-the romantic-comedy equivalent of a shallow young Hollywood star who puts on fake glasses so that it will look like he, too, has brains.

In Happenstance, fortune doesn't just smile -- it schemes and tricks and zigzags, forming an urban road map of fate's detours.

Chong does his time (nine months) and has the last laugh, emerging as a born-again activist-survivor of the culture wars.

Too tightly made not to keep you watching, Holy Smoke is also too hokey and didactic to take seriously.

Splendidly crafted as it is, the new Disney is a luscious impasto of visual invention that never quite finds its heart.

The best thing about the movie, which is a very elegantly crafted piece of gothic snuff hokum, is the way it teases and intrigues us with the revelation of what's on that tape.

There’s one funny bit in Another Stakeout — a dysfunctional dinner party — but director John Badham puts more energy into high-tech chase sequences featuring the neighborhood pets than he does into refining the comic chemistry of his stars.

The cutting and camera work in Sign ‘O’ the Times are too intrusive, and the somewhat discordant songs worked better as a magnificent hodgepodge on the album. Still, this concert movie (which barely made it to theaters) is a feisty, engaging show.

A work of intimate and wrenching humanity.

Berlin is far from the lost masterpiece the movie wants it to be.

Eden lacks the technique to give its stifled domestic-erotic feelings their full power.

Top-heavy with whimsy, so muddled it makes Mission: Impossible look like a model of narrative cohesion, The Saint is the apo-theosis of the new incoherence, with the cliches of espionage and action thrillers jammed together like bumper cars.

The movie has no wit, no charm, no cleverness, no traction. Simply put, it is no fun.

Mostly hot air.

The movie is ''Rosemary's Suburban Baby'' without a witch in sight.

Watchable in a facile, trashy way. Unfortunately, most of the movie is mired in sludge, slime, mud, blood, and studiously dank cinematography.

The characters in Memphis Belle may have ethnic names, but in spirit the actors are all playing WASPs — fresh-faced, pretty-boy WASPs, the kind that make the little girls swoon. It’s Dead Poets Society Goes to War.

The role requires Clooney to dial down his charm to nearly zero, and frankly, he looks twitchy and uncomfortable without it.

There are more chuckles than laughs, but the film does a witty job of replicating the hermetic, overlit shot language of '60s studio movies.

A gilded entry in the cinema du quirk. It's a movie that invites you, all too often, to feel superior to the people on screen.

The Cove is the rare documentary specifically designed as a thriller.

Leap Year could have used more pizzazz.

In Land of the Dead there are virtually no good parts. The movie is listless and uninspired.

Navy SEALs isn’t just the most stupidly didactic action movie since The Green Berets. It’s the dullest action movie since The Green Berets.

A truly titillating and truly convoluted tale of l'amour fou. Perhaps the American remake could be titled ''Hot Fudge Ripple Sky.''

Paranoid Park has the slightly glum insularity of minimalist fiction, but it's the first of Van Sant's blitzed-generation films in which a young man wakes up instead of shutting down.

As a lissome art restorer, Asia Argento (the director's daughter) comes off as the sanest human on screen, which is pretty scary.

Writer-director-stars Zach Cregger and Trevor Moore, of the Whitest Kids U'Know, here prove the crassest, most maladroit moviemakers you know.

It's a romantic noir chase thriller made in the violently schlocky spirit of Sam Peckinpah's "The Getaway."

England Is Mine is fussy and prudish — about erotic longing, and about the rock ‘n’ roll that gives form to it.

Yet another low-grade spectacular about an evil force that leaps from body to body.

A big, juicy, enjoyable wide-canvas biography with a handful of indelible moments.

Sweet, flaky, and more than a little aimless.

Gracious, if meandering.

"Andy Warhol" makes you see that beneath the gargoyle hipster mask, he filled that emptiness with an art of transcendent sincerity.

Schrader seems to have found his way. In Light Sleeper, he attains a new, fluid emotionalism. The movie is a small but absorbing mood piece, a canny insider’s view of the life of a Manhattan drug dealer.

A watchable bad movie, but it's far from your typical cookie-cutter blockbuster. There are no shoot-outs or car chases, and there isn't much romantic suspense, either.

Van Helsing, a fusion of eye candy and brain sputter, is a long, kinetic, yet dreary mess.

The movie version, directed with unobtrusive precision by James Foley, stays amazingly true to the play's feisty spirit.

Moses was elevating mankind to a place closer to God, but when the Red Sea parts here, the feeling it gives you isn't awe; it's closer to deep impact.

It might have helped had the film included a few more representatives of the straight world. As it is, there’s almost nothing for the family to play off. We’re shut up in that mansion right along with them, and the kookiness grows fatally quaint.

In his curdled-butterball way, Jiminy Glick may be the most acidic showbiz send-up since Andy Kaufman's Tony Clifton. This movie, though it has its moments, is a pedestal he didn't need.

Supplies stretches of actual skating footage by pros doubling for the stars. It's in these moments, freed from the earthbound pull of its market-tested components, that the movie briefly relaxes into the sheer thrilling audacity of flying into the air propelled by a board on wheels.

The two characters barely even have a relationship; they're a union of demographics--the "urban" market meets the slapstick-action market.

The movie is a gently overstuffed cinematic piñata, crammed with tall tales -- with giants and circuses and fairy-tale woods, plus a huge squirmy catfish, all served up with a literal matter-of-fact fancy that is very pleasing.

Obsessed has little plausibility, but at moments it's an entertaining bad movie, and the performers are vivid.

An entertaining but also oddly naive documentary about American advertising.

When Kidman slithers into a bathtub with her young ''husband,'' the scene, in its soft-pedaled way, is the definition of exploitation: It appears to have been cooked up for no other purpose than to conjure creepy child-porn overtones.

The best reason to see Melinda and Melinda is Radha Mitchell, who has her grabbiest role (or two of them) since she broke through with "High Art."

The movie is a true throwaway: By the end, it seems to have disposed of itself.

In a strange way the Williamson of "Dawson's Creek" is now at odds with the sophisticated joker who wrote "Scream."

Del Toro lays on the operatic head-trip gore, but his heavy-handed embrace of the ''Blade'' mythology allows Wesley Snipes to give more of a performance than he did in the first film.

It would be hard to imagine a moment when romantic passion seemed more desperate, more rapturous, more true.

The whole noisy movie is really just a setup for the climactic duel between renegade cop Danny Glover and the monster. By that point, you’re pathetically grateful for a few stomach-churning special effects.

A canny franchise escapade; it gets the job done. But it also leaves you hungry for something more, and I don't necessarily mean the next episode.

His (Gibson) slow-burn fury keeps the movie going, but not enough to invest us in any justice beyond payback.

This brave documentary takes on the topic of anti-Semitism in a relentlessly probing and original way.

Kollek is a fringe auteur who makes independent films the old fashioned way: no budget, static camera, a script that telegraphs its tiny, paste gem ironies.

The First Wives Club has all the conviction a comedy of female vengeance needs. But as soon as the dumb plot takes over, the wit leaks out of the movie like helium from a balloon.

The movie takes the form of a lackluster women's-prison picture.

Much of the time, the film itself veers perilously close to becoming the sort of high- body-count action spectacular it’s supposed to be parodying. When gags are tossed off in the midst of bomb blasts and deafening machine-gun fire, is it any wonder that audiences will tend to ignore the comedy and focus on the mayhem? If Hot Shots! Part Deux proves anything, it’s that making fun of big, raucous, sky-high explosions is a joke of rapidly diminishing returns.

It's less a tale of religious rebirth than a faith-based Hallmark card.

Still, even when the plot sags, the erotic moodiness of Love Jones remains fresh.

Ritter, who's like the young Ethan Hawke on a bender of violence, is an actor to watch.

Unlike the first two Decline films, this one is only tangentially concerned with music.

As an actress, Bynes is wholesome to a fault. She impersonates a teenage boy yet never gives him one good dirty thought.

In A Scanner Darkly, we're watching other people freak out, but the film is maddening to sit through because their freak-outs never become ours.