Owen Gleiberman

Ebla Mari, the actor who plays Yara, makes Yara’s despair over her missing and possibly murdered father, and her agony at having had to abandon her country, incredibly layered and precise. Her performance doesn’t allow us to phone in our empathy.

It is often an oddly compelling tabloid foray, since it winds up shedding a crucial ray of light on the mad moment we’re in now. Whether or not you believe in the Devil, the film helps to color in how our culture got possessed.

It takes a lot of chops to shoot the majority of a movie underwater, and Johannes Roberts is a skillful crafter of images ... But he’s a throw-what-he-can-at-the-audience director, and there’s little in 47 Meters Down: Uncaged that really sticks. The shocks, however, are consistently well-timed, and for the audience that seeks out a movie like this one that’s probably enough.

The movie has no comic-book hook; it’s a trash-compactor genre buffet that smashes together a dozen things you’ve seen before. But that’s the hook. Violent Night is amusing in a few spots, wearying in more than a few others, but to complain about it in the way that I’m doing is to come off as churlish. It’s a movie that feeds the beast.

It’s a moderately diverting dessert that carries you right along. It never transcends the feeling that you’re seeing a relic injected with life serum, but that, in a way, is part of its minor-league charm.

Smith has every right to be older and wiser here, and Jay and Silent Bob Reboot, with its gentle anarchy and not-quite-mock nostalgia, is a time-machine sequel that passes the time amiably enough. But if Jay and Silent Bob get any older or wiser than this, they’re going to stop being who they are.

No Sudden Move, for all its pleasures, doesn’t quite make the old seem new again.

Army of Thieves is one of those bombastically blithe and fanciful Netflix action movies, in this case with a romantic heart.

In its dry deliberate way, Paint skewers something all too real: a certain kind of toxic self-deluding male myopia.

Eternity should have been 90 minutes long, with more energy and more crackpot invention than it has at nearly two hours. It’s a bauble that tries to stretch itself into a boutique dream.

Vortex doesn’t let us off the hook. Gaspar Noé never does. But if he did, he might transcend his “Behold, you will know the dark side” brand.

There’s a bombast built into the material, but let it be said that the “Transformers” movies have been transformed. They’re no longer the kind of fun you have to hate.

The film’s 90 minutes whiz by.

Lynch/Oz is bursting with ideas about it, and about how it colonized the consciousness of David Lynch, but the movie is too pie-in-the-sky to quite make it over the rainbow.

A movie that’s a loosely structured ramble can work, and about half of “Tommaso” feels more vital than anything Ferrara has made in a while. But the film should have been shapelier and 20 minutes shorter, with a more focused dramatic psychology.

Moana 2 is an okay movie, an above-average kiddie roller-coaster, and a piece of pure product in a way that the first “Moana,” at its best, transcended.

Scene for scene, Affleck does a decent job of directing — his touch is soft, intimate, humane — but he has saddled himself with a script that isn’t entirely there.

2+2 = 5 is a movie that very much leans toward chronicling the brutality and violence of despotic regimes, and is less interested in exploring how they toy with your brain.

The whole thing becomes drenched in a kind of downbeat sentimental martyrdom that feels oppressively old-fashioned and moribund.

Ne Zha has something vital to teach the American animation industry — about the glories of letting the dark side rip — but it’s also clear that Chinese animators, working under more restrictions than we have, have absorbed a great many of the breakneck freedoms of American pop culture. Let’s hope it’s the beginning of a beautiful symbiosis.

Luhrmann has made a woefully imperfect but at times arresting drama that builds to something moving and true. By the end, the film’s melody has been unchained.

Maria bears many of the hallmarks of Larraín’s lavish empathy and filmmaking skill. Yet the movie, in contrast, is driven by a dramatic fatalism that does it little favor.

The movie is a mess, yet once the thriller plot kicks in, you do start to absorb it as a “silent” film, tuning into the visual atmosphere of stalker fear and rusty chemical entropy.

It’s still, in the end, a bit of a connect-the-inspirational-dots movie, but that doesn’t mean you won’t be inspired.

It has its amusing (and enlightening) moments, but in many ways it’s just dancing around the meat of the matter.

Nope doesn’t have a plot so much as a series of happenings that spill out in an impressionistic and arbitrary way. Logic often takes a back seat, and that has the unfortunate effect of lessening our involvement.

The movie, in its mud-on-the-doily way, is amusing enough to get by. But it never shocks you into laughter.

This one, taken on its own terms, isn’t bad in a TV-movie-fodder-as-parable way.

Its dread has no resonance; it’s a hermetically sealed creep-out that turns into a fake-trippy experience. By all means, go to mother! and enjoy its roller-coaster-of-weird exhibitionism. But be afraid, very afraid, only if you’re hoping to see a movie that’s as honestly disquieting as it is showy.

Cut Throat City has vivid moments, but RZA’s direction is better than P.G Cuschieri’s script. The film is a muddled social-protest thriller that tries to bridge the corrupt machinations upstairs with the desperation of the streets, and can’t find a way to connect them convincingly.

Uncharted is a lively but thinly scripted and overlong mad-dash caper movie, propelled by actors you wish, after a while, had more interesting things to say and do.

The movie, watchable as it is, never quite overcomes the sense that it’s a lavish diagram working hard to come off as a real movie.

It isn’t bad, but it’s kind of a trifle. Though it treats its themes with reasonable honesty, it can’t help but come off as a bit diagrammed.

The movie, despite enthralling moments, is so self-intoxicated by its blissed-out vision of global healing that it’s a little soft.

The herd’s endless quest to find water becomes a repetitive (and rather dry) theme. And to the extent that super-square anthropomorphic Disney filmmaking isn’t merely a form but a skill, I never felt overwhelmingly close to Gaia or Shanti or Jomo. The Disney nature films have always had a certain hermetic quality, but this one feels more sealed-off than usual.

The film asks us to indulge and share the privacy of its characters. That’s its moody, free-floating allure.

Paterson, Jarmusch’s wee dramatic curio starring Adam Driver as a New Jersey bus driver – his name is Paterson, and he lives in Paterson — is a movie that’s all too aware of how much it diverges from contemporary tempo. That’s because the entire film is a self-conscious anachronism.

Drive-Away Dolls is 84 minutes long, and it’s styled to be an easy-to-watch caper, but it’s most definitely a trifle.

Climax works, at least when it’s willing to be a human drama. But then it sinks in that you’re watching “Fame” directed by the Marquis de Sade with a Steadicam.

The film is trying for something, but it’s also sketchy in the extreme.

“CHAOS” ends up suggesting that the Manson murders were a grand plot, orchestrated from on high (by the CIA? the Deep State? Nixon?) to turn America against the counterculture. I don’t believe that theory for a second, but there’s one way I think it stays true to the spirit of Charles Manson: It’s pure madness.

The notion of a larger-than-life theme-park world as a projection of what June is going through comes directly out of “Inside Out,” but the comparison does Wonder Park no favors, because the earlier film was a masterpiece of bursting ingenuity, leaving this one to play like the scaled-down toddler version. On that score, it must be said that little kids will like Wonder Park just fine. But there’s a difference between a great escape and a winsomely crafted pacifier.

“Ready or Not 2” delivers exactly what it promises: a garishly booby-trapped, winkingly clever-dumb good time. If that’s your idea of a good time.

The Boss Baby, the jokey new 3D animated lark from DreamWorks Animation (it’s being distributed by 20th Century Fox), is a visually brisk, occasionally clever low-concept comedy that’s also trying, half-heartedly, to be some sort of Pixarish masterpiece. You may wind up wishing that it had been one or the other.

“Furiosa,” like “Beyond Thunderdome,” wants to be something loftier than an action blowout, but the movie is naggingly episodic, and though it’s got two indomitable villains, neither one quite becomes the delirious badass you want.

The origin story was the charm, but the sequel is hobbled by a less buoyant hero and bland villains.

What do you call a movie about a midlife non-crisis? How about tame, competent, mildly touching, and a little dull — except for Catherine Deneuve's fearless turn as a boozing, ailing wreck.

A Christmas Story Christmas is like “A Christmas Story” with a softer center, but at least it doesn’t leave you feeling like you’ve had a glass of eggnog spiked with Long Island Iced Tea.

The movie has three extended action sequences, and I would have been happier if it had eight of them — that is, if it had less pretensions and, like the “Wick” films, was more willing to wear its pulp on its sleeve.

Reminders of Him is notably restrained — a good thing more than not, even if the film does get a bit languid at times. It tells its story without making us feel used.

The director, Benjamin Kasulke, is a veteran cinematographer who brings the L.A. settings a spangly glow, but he stages too many scenes with generic “punch.” I wish he’d played against the comedy instead of italicizing it, and that he’d come up with some pop-music epiphanies and ditched the film’s cloying synthesizer score.

Overboard has been made with enough bubbly comic spirit and skill that the gender switch turns out to be a smart move, from both an entertainment and commercial vantage. Like the original, the new version is a snarky situational farce that evolves into a cheese-dog fable of home and hearth, and the role reversal lets it feel halfway fresh.

It’s friendly and diverting and formulaic, in an inoffensive and good-natured way, and it’s a totally minor affair.

“Smurfs” might be the best of the Smurfs films. It’s an amiable diversion for kids.

The underlying integrity of “Ezra,” what makes it an honest film despite some formula devices, is that its message about how to help children with special needs is that there’s no magic way. Beyond celebrating them for who they are and showing them who you are.

Gifted wants to be an “honest” tearjerker, but it’s as plotted out as an equation on a blackboard. It’s the undergirding of formula that roots the movie in the commercial marketplace, but that may ultimately limit its appeal.

As a movie, White Noise announces its themes loudly and proudly, but the trouble is that it announces them more than it makes you feel them.

Lemon is a comedy of miserablism that keeps poking you in the ribs — and, quite often, fails to hit the rib it’s aiming for. Yet it’s a watchable curio, because beneath it all the director, the Panamanian-born Janicza Bravo, has a more conventional sensibility than she lets on.

Under the Silver Lake gets its hooks in you, but it’s a good-bad movie: an academic stab at making the darkness visible.

Polina is vivid as dance but vague as drama.

Berg, when he wants to be, is a surgical craftsman of chaos. Yet Mile 22 has little weight or resonance.

When Christmas movies cease to be special (when they’re all scooped out of the same river of nonstop product), there’s something almost reassuring about a Christmas movie that lifts you up by knowingly dumbing Christmas down.

The distinguishing quality of its jokey, can-you-believe-this? tone is that the two millennial hayseeds at its center are so richly incompetent that they seem to be inventing a new low place on the totem pole of backwoods idiocy.

The movie is engineered to be seen as “powerful.” Right now, though, I’d say that he’s an ace director who’s still being undercut by the holes in his screenplays.

In the case of Don’t Breathe 2, one reason the movie, for all the operatic (and often absurd) grisliness of its second half, isn’t quite as good as the original is that the original didn’t have a trace of that franchise self-consciousness.

The film is a lot like its hero, Herman Munster: benignly dim-witted, Day-Glo in color, top-heavy with tomfoolery, lumbering in one direction and then the next, always cracking itself up in an innocently aggressive monster-mash way.

Haynes, working from a script by Selznick, guides and serves the material with supreme craftsmanship. For a while, he casts a spell. Yet one of the film’s noteworthy qualities is that it creates a nearly dizzying sense of anticipation, and the payoff, regrettably, doesn’t live up to it.

20th Century Women is an endless chain of anecdotes, and though many individual moments are winning, the movie as a whole is rudderless. It never achieves an emotional power surge.

Why watch Screened Out? Because it shows you something you didn’t know.

As a rom-com, Irish Wish is more than willing to kiss the Blarney Stone. Yet the chemistry of Lohan and Speleers makes it watchable enough to get by.

A Madea Family Funeral isn’t good, exactly, but it’s Perry good. It combines weaponized comedy and sexualized soap opera in a way that defuses all shame.

But the thoughts she overhears don’t, for the most part, have the snap of comic surprise. They just fill in the walking alpha blanks we already know.

Churchill is a small, watchable, rather prosaic backroom docudrama.

Causeway is a drama of redemption that’s both touching and a little arduous. Just because your characters are suffering doesn’t mean they have to mostly stop talking.

Becoming Led Zeppelin is full of essential stuff, but on some level it feels like a Led Zeppelin infomercial.

Loughren is a compelling character. So are the cops, and so, in his way, is the documentary’s “star,” who we hear on tape (from Graeber’s extensive interviews with him), and who comes equipped with an earnest explanation for why he killed all those people.

It leaves us with a character you won’t soon forget, but you wish that the movie were as haunting as he is.

The Light Between Oceans winds up taking one too many self-serious twists and turns. The film earns its darkness, but it might have been even more affecting if it didn’t shrink from the light.

It’s not a rousing animated comedy that parents will cherish along with their kids. It’s more like a colorful and diverting pacifier.

There was a time when audiences lined up around city blocks to see the movies of Lina Wertmüller. Behind the White Glasses lets you revisit a bit of that passion, without quite nailing what it was.

Rebuilding Paradise is a movie that shows us a great deal without necessarily exploring what it shows.

Shephard has a lively eye for the neurotic ripples of high-school society, but her most audacious gambit is to dare to place the audience in a grey zone between innocence and judgment regarding a relationship that plays out more sympathetically than it should.

The movie ends with a rebel gesture that feels too much like…a gesture. It’s the perfect sign-off for a drama that cares, but maybe not enough to see that this kind of caring actually became part of the problem

At its height, it feels exhilarating. But not all the way through. Cameron, in "The Way of Water," remains a fleet and exacting classical popcorn storyteller, but oh, the story he’s telling! The script he has co-written is a string of serviceable clichés that give the film the domestic adventure-thriller spine it needs, but not anything more than that.

A decently baked slice of fan service that still seems like it might be arriving a little too soon.

For all the wholesome cheesiness of much of the film, you’d have to have a pretty hard heart not to be touched by it.

“Rebel Moon,” while eminently watchable, is a movie built so entirely out of spare parts that it may, in the end, be for Snyder cultists only.

Men have been gorging on righteous, blood-splattering pulp action rides like this one for decades, and if women are now looking for the equivalent, Gunpowder Milkshake fits the bill. Its message is that there are a lot of Bills to kill.

If there were any lingering doubts that Pete Davidson has what it takes to be a terrific actor, this movie should dispel them. In “The King of Staten Island,” he holds the screen with his blinkered, scurrilous, and oddly innocent I did-what? personality, and for the first time he makes the sociopathic goofball he’s playing a fully dimensional presence.

In short, Carousel is a flawed drama that can be disjointed, but by the end the movie feels worth it: mannered at times, touchingly real at others.

Midas Man is never less than watchable, and it does capture something about Brian Epstein that’s honest and affecting.

The last thing you want a movie like this one to feel like is a slick Hollywood suspense drama with famous historical names plugged in. Operation Finale doesn’t feel like that, yet taken on its own here’s how it really happened terms, the movie is at once plausible and sketchy, intriguing and not fully satisfying.

Yet for all its surface pleasures, it’s a likable but underimagined one, with more enthusiasm than surprise and, at the same time, an overprogrammed sense of its own thematic destiny.

As an alien-attack thriller, Prey is competent and well-paced, though with little in the way of surprise. But the journey of Naru lends it a semblance of emotional coherence that most of the “Predator” films have lacked.

It’s easy to watch, it’s wired to be exciting, with a showy hot-button relevance, but the problem with the movie is that it isn’t quite convincing. It’s trapped between trying to be a “serious” thriller and a piece of glorified schlock.

The movie itself isn’t bad, though I wish it were better.

With its ungainly double-deception premise, How to Lose a Guy feels like it was made out of two connect-the-dots drawings laid haphazardly on top of one another.

The surprise, and disappointment, of The Da Vinci Code is how slipshod and hokey the religious detective story now seems.

The rules of good screenwriting are mostly broken, though Jamie Foxx's smash-and-grab charisma remains intact.

Has a voyeuristic tug, but all in all it's a lot less sensational than it wants to be.

The movie, I'm sad to report, has a majorly disappointing follow-through. It turns into a noisy, squalling chase movie.

Shia LaBeouf, who appears to be on hand to prove that a movie with a crusading newspaper reporter can still exist, perks up his scenes, and Redford acts with his usual hyperalert, placid control.

Tony Leung plays Ip Man with his old-movie charisma and reserve, but the film, despite a few splendid fights, is a biohistorical muddle that never finds its center. Maybe that's because — big mistake! — it never gets to Bruce Lee.

He's Just Not That Into You turns romantic sanity into something so sanitized that it starts to make delusion look good.

My Cousin Vinny is the definition of obvious, and it’s way too long (do films like this really need an hour’s worth of setup?). But Pesci and Tomei make a first-rate team — they’re Punch and Judy gone Brooklyn.

Mostly comes down to rage fiends going at one another with baseball bats, knives, pesticide tanks, and power drills.

As an actress, Roberts has more than a great smile. She’s alive on screen — you can practically feel her pulse. But someone should have realized that audiences would be on her side even if every single moment of a movie weren’t calculated to put them there.

The difference between "Pretty Woman" and Runaway Bride is that we can no longer buy Roberts in her tearful romantic-melancholy mode. It seems vaguely patronizing now.

As a movie, Freakonomics is like Jujubes for the brain - it starts to get cloying halfway through the box.

Every so often, Keanu Reeves' robo-voiced blankness serves him well, but when he has to play a pulpy, tormented demon-saint, scraping up insults and spitting them out like bullets, he's like the host of an infomercial doing an impersonation of a badass.

Romeo Is Bleeding just ends up flaunting its Grand Guignol outrageousness, rubbing our noses in its desire to be a gaudy hipster freak show. By the end, the film has become so mired in pointless sensation that it ceases to be any fun at all.

Some motion pictures portray ultimate passion; others create ultimate thrills. Men in Black II achieves ultimate insignificance -- it's the sci-fi comedy spectacle as Whiffle-Ball epic.

It’s really Prince who’s the ingenue here. He engages in much mock-effeminate vamping, scampers around the French Riviera in outfits that would have humbled Liberace, and grants himself the most melodramatic death scene since Camille.

The aliens aren't particularly scary or funny, and so the joke of watching Smith and Jones crack wise in their faces wears thin.

One of those feminist cries in the dark in which the heroine, a saintly sufferer, is more admirable than interesting.

Safe has more action than intrigue (or logic), and it's boilerplate vicious. It may satisfy Statham's fans, but they - like he - would do well to enlarge their expectations.

You hardly need to be devoted to the ways of Buddhism to see when a gifted filmmaker, for the sake of multicultural niceness, has enthusiastically abandoned his mind.

A celebration of the theater that tends to drag the moment it's out of drag.

So diaphanous it practically dissolves as you watch it.

A bland, pious yet touching faith-based tearjerker.

Cowboys & Aliens has fun moments, but it's a plodding entertainment because it mostly tastes like leftovers.

For all its garishness, though, the film is punchy and fast, and it has an engagingly preposterous cheeseball climax, with Schwarzenegger, in full Turbo Man regalia, zooming through the skies like a consumer-king Rocketeer.

Director Kathryn Bigelow is one of the new-style action wizards who’ve never quite mastered the nuts and bolts of telling a story.

The movie takes off from a concept as basic as a videogame, and it sticks to that concept, without surprise.

Are there surprises? A couple of big money ones, notably the ludicrous would-be jaw-dropper of a finale.

The movie is merciless sending up "Juno's" self-satisfied hipster gobbledygook, and it's quite funny to see Hannah Montana still promoting her tie-in products as she lies crushed and dying under a meteor.

This shot-on-film-and-video trifle reveals a Bombay (that's what all the characters call it) that "Slumdog Millionaire" didn't: a delicate metropolis sunk in torpor.

Depression is a fair subject for a movie, but this much moroseness shouldn't come to this little.

White Hunter, Black Heart emerges as little more than a plodding shadow of the great film it could have been. An actor making a stretch is one thing. As Huston, Eastwood is so out of his depth he seems to have lost his entertainer’s instinct, not to mention his modesty.

Hudson's sunny, ringlet-tossing appeal fits snugly into the film's happy-homemaker ideology: She makes caring for three kids she barely knows look downright glamorous.

Frequently silly, yet eminently more watchable than such leaden Schwarzenegger efforts as ''Eraser.''

There's always something to look at (an octopus holding his eyeballs aloft, the petulant Jane assaulted by pixie dust), but the story is weak tea.

What it isn't is a believable relationship. Yet that may scarcely matter to LaBute, a gifted and corrosive wordsmith who appears intent, by now, on shoving all romantic couplings into the meat grinder of his misanthropic design.

A synthetic yet shrill sadomasochistic cartoon.

Instead of a full-bodied comic portrait of the coming-out-party set, Metropolitan offers a thin, cartoon version. Then it uses that cartoonishness to make everyone on-screen seem irresistibly cute.

The result isn't liberated from the stage; it's trapped, with waxworks literalness, onscreen.

This is one of those films in which the Act of Driving becomes a 10-minute statement of high emptiness; Dumont even manages to make sex in the desert boring.

As it moves from the drizzly to the overly stormy, Rain freights a young girl's self-destructive eagerness to lose her virginity with so much danger and even horror that it's as if the events were trying to make up for the film's previous lack of drama.

More potent than anything in Snakes on a Plane is the fantasy offscreen: that if enough people talk up their desire to see this film and, at the same time, take an overt delight in what an unabashed piece of junk it is, they will fuse with the hype, with the movie's mystique. They will not just watch Snakes on a Plane; they will own it.

The movie zips around without any true forward momentum. The stars carry you along, though.

With its smooth skinned cast and demonized adults, doesn't feel very authentic.

Pucci proves to be one of the most charismatic male ingenues since Johnny Depp.

In the world according to Eurotrip, the Europeans may be a twisted, outdated, ridiculous lot, but what defines them is that unlike the Americans, they've never quite evolved to irony: They treat even the scuzziest habits with dire sincerity.

Romeo & Juliet is a series of spectacular production designs posing as a motion picture.

There have been far shoddier sequels, but City Slickers II remains a good example of why more is sometimes less.

A horror film that consists of virtually nothing but don't-go-in-the-attic suspense scenes strung together with a reasonable degree of brooding mood and a minimum of logic.

The plot makes almost no sense, and Eastwood directs in his usual toneless fashion. But in this case, the fact that you can’t always tell the intentional comedy from the unintentional isn’t necessarily a drawback.

A harmless crime caper. It stars Peter Facinelli (Nurse Jackie, the Twilight series), who also wrote the script, shaping the movie to his facile, unlayered charm.

It's a veritable Greek chorus of wry therapeutic chatter, the touchy-feely pensées skittering over the stock dualities of adultery and fidelity, lust and devotion, narcissism and intimacy, blah, blah, blah.

A clunky family-therapy soaper.

A Jekyll-and-Hyde teen comedy that sounds like a Pauly Shore reject, but Qualls moves his marionette body around with a true clown's effervescence, and he does rubber-faced parodies of youth cool that are just what youth cool deserves.

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

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 drama is so minimalist that it's hard to glimpse the man behind the woe.

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.

Amusing in its very shallowness.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

A boxing film with no conflictual punch.

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.

Fitfully amusing, mostly annoying rom-com.

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.

Sweet, flaky, and more than a little aimless.

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.

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

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.

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.

The gruesomely unnecessary remake of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre is such a smorgasbord of slimy grunge that to call the movie gross wouldn't do it justice -- it's downright sticky.

The Mask, a rattletrap Jekyll-and-Hyde farce, surrounds Carrey with a nothing plot and a cast of ciphers. Still, his scenes as the Mask are rowdy and enjoyable.

Basically, it's "The A-Team" meets "Rambo" meets "Mission: Impossible," with a mission that's one part trickiness, four parts blowing stuff up.

A fake street drama that keeps telling you things instead of showing them, though Mekhi Phifer, playing a hustler who loves the life, is electric and true.

In ''Ordinary People,'' at least one character -- Mary Tyler Moore's -- had to fall so that the others could survive. In Moonlight Mile, no one gets shut out of the hug cycle.

A tawdry excuse for a movie, but it has a handful of shameless giggles.

27 Dresses is a movie geared to a pitch of high matrimonial-princess fever.

Andy Garcia reminds you of what a cunning, likable actor he can be.

For two and a half hours, Edel lays out the bombings, kidnappings, and murders committed by the Baader-Meinhof group, which mutated into the RAF. He catches the violently delusional self-righteousness of their antifascist fervor, but as individuals these cultish guerrillas remain opaque.

And when [Roberts is] on screen with Mulroney, who seems a frat-house jerk -- all dimples and a perma-tan -- we don't feel much of anything.

In My Country doesn't so much explore as use the tragedy of black South Africa to give its heroine a righteous slap of nobility.

It's all way too heavy-handed, though nicely acted by Hirsch, Culkin, and, especially, Jena Malone.

The sexy, scruffy, neo-Warriors pageantry of ghetto teen hunger would have been a lot more vital if Clark didn't have such a class-war chip on his shoulder.

Couldn't Mike Judge, with his acid wit, have come up with a better title for a suburban-schlub comedy than ?Extract?

A weakly scripted shambles.

Isn't incompetent; it's just plodding and obvious. If anything holds it together, it's The Rock's ironic ability to tread lightly, which the movie is neither fast nor inventive enough to recognize as different from the spirit of Arnold.

Offers tricky fragmentation without mystery or mood; it's a mosaic of fear that grows less and less unsettling as it comes together.

After Dark, My Sweet is cool and compelling for about 45 minutes, but it has a clinical, hothouse garishness that grows oppressive.

He does an okay imitation of his father's languidly matter-of-fact dreamscapes, but it's hard to deny that a certain vitality is missing in Tales From Earthsea.

Cold Weather becomes the world's first mumblecore "thriller" - a good idea for a movie that someone, in the future, should execute a bit less lackadaisically.

A tastefully overbearing franchise fairy tale with a handful of ravishing touches.

The Peoples Temple congregation was sizably African-American. But when it comes to how those followers turned into a zombie Kool-Aid death cult, Jonestown: The Life and Death of Peoples Temple leaves you with more questions than you went in with.

For a while, the movie has a cat-and-mouse appeal - it's like "Hard Candy" crossed with a smaller-scale "Deathtrap." Pierce acts with an enjoyably testy flamboyance, but by the time he starts to imagine that his guests have arrived even though dinner's been canceled, the film has given him one loose screw too many.

There's something sweet about the way that Murphy throws himself into this piffle. Thomas Haden Church does too.

Has a few viciously funny moments.

My Girl has some sweet, funny moments (the cast is uniformly appealing), yet it unfolds in a landscape of paralyzing, pop-psych banality.

Nothing in the two snail-paced hours of Pulse makes close to a shred of sense?

Agreeably mindless generation-next trash, but it leaves you hungry for a movie in which the characters are more than walking screenwriter index cards.

It's a tease of a satire that never really follows through on its audacious premise.

From its jokey, one-note characters to its endless baseball montages, A League of Their Own is all flash, all surface.

The original "Straw Dogs," at least to me, isn't close to being one of Peckinpah's masterpieces, but it's a movie that the people who first saw it still remember 40 years later. I doubt that anyone will remember the new one by next month.

Has my eye, seduced by the devious and tactile delights of ''Shrek,'' already evolved in tandem with the technological leaps in computer animation? Or is Atlantis simply a Disney dud?

Here's one case where it's no praise to say that a movie leaves you with more questions than answers.

Blunt-witted, visually pedestrian, and overly long, with too many scenes of Blade and his cohorts standing around in darkened corridors, waiting for their enemies to show up. The action, however, is as throat-grabbing as you want it to be.

It's slow and pretentious, full of craggy Bavarian snowscapes and dour "mystical" portents that seem to circle back to nothing but themselves.

Starts out well, but it turns into an almost perversely undramatic legal thriller.

For Patriot Games to have been more than a generic international thriller, it would have needed to take us deep inside the clandestine organizations — the IRA and the CIA — on which Clancy is fixated. That doesn’t happen.

By the time Army of Darkness turns into a retread of "Jason and the Argonauts," featuring an army of fighting skeletons, the film has fallen into a ditch between parody and spectacle.

In the end, there’s something opportunistic and glib about the way that Medicine Man yokes together medical wish fulfillment and save-the-rain-forest agitprop into a neat, messagey package. Nothing takes the fun out of romance quite like liberal earnestness.

Paula Patton is such a terrific actress that even in the ultra-tacky romantic comedy Baggage Claim, she gives a luminous, thought-out performance, not just walking through but digging into the role of an eager, nervous doormat with a people-pleasing grin.

Modine, as a morosely self-involved actor, looks as if he's about to strangle someone -- and the movie, an attack on superficiality, never quite makes it out of the shallow end.

This is how a fairy-tale movie gives us our money's worth today. Even if once upon a time, it was called overkill.

A splattery futuristic zombie thriller, designed as a jolt-a-minute freakout for young audiences who were numbed into submission long ago.

It has a few whispers of intrigue, but at the heart of The Bourne Identity lies a dispiriting paradox: The more that Jason Bourne learns about himself, the less arresting he seems.

If Kids is simultaneously engrossing and detached, observant and just plain showy, that may be because the film is so caught up in trying to be a statement that it never develops its characters beyond their rowdy, bellicose facades.

It’s engagingly junky entertainment with a healthy sense of its own ludicrousness.

A concrete slab of science-fiction melodrama that, for all its obvious limitations as a movie, plays on zeitgeist fantasies of an alien visitation as surely as Spielberg’s blissed-out fable did.

I didn't mind The Terminal, but I didn't really buy it, either. Spielberg has crafted the film with a proficiency as seamless, and impersonal, as the setting, and you may feel, after a while, that you're longing for your departure time.

What starts off as a neighborhood scandal becomes a liberating thing for everyone involved - an attitude that seems as if it's trying to be oh so European, and might have been had the director, Julian Farino, not been working so hard to convince us of the Deep Inner Goodness of everyone involved.

Rendition certainly makes the case that torture, whatever name it goes under, is indefensible, yet one can agree with that view entirely and still feel that the movie is just a borderline exploitation of what anyone who reads the papers already knows.

Too arty by half.

Reynolds makes Hal a perfectly functional comic-book hero, but there's a big difference between functional and super.

Dare, a sweetly sexed-up high school triangle movie, is like a John Hughes comedy trying to pass itself off as ''transgressive.''

A dismayingly impersonal piece of anime, genial yet chaotic.

Propulsively outandish thriller.

Volatile yet fairly lunkheaded.

Bobby coasts along on a dread, and sorrow, it doesn't earn.

The Ugly Truth isn't fizzy and fun -- it's vacuously snappy.

Elegant yet surprisingly remote royal-court drama.

Makes you wish that Newell and company had had the gumption to finish what they so enticingly started.

Quick Change starts out fast and loose — it gets the audience primed for a ripsnorting caper comedy. Yet almost nothing that follows is as clever, as surprising, or as casually anarchic as that nifty opening sequence. Murray himself served as codirector, and though he doesn't do anything terribly wrong, the movie lacks comic zest.

A unintentionally funny fanzine-flavored documentary.

Nothing but mood... it simply has too few surprises to justify its indulgent atmosphere of malignant revelation.

People Like Us demonstrates how a drama can be heartfelt and bogus at the same time.

Vantage Point starts to slide off the rails when it tracks a tourist (Forest Whitaker) and his trusty camcorder; instead of Zapruder-like intrigue, the episode has him running around like an agent in a rote thriller.

There are funny bits in Amy Heckerling's high school sat-ire, but the characters are teen-movie zombies with no discernible personality apart from their trendoid obsessions.

The movie could have been a lot scarier.

This comedy about a couple who can't get pregnant is stuck between Judd Apatow's humane raunchiness and the American Pie series' smirky broadness.

Most of the film is a chintzy but watchable B-movie knockoff of "Gladiator," with Kit Harington, the English actor from "Game of Thrones," mustering very little in the way of facial expressivity in the role of Milo.

There are moments of lewd hilarity, like a game of footsie that turns genderifically confused. But Booty Call loses its dirty-minded, how-low-will-they-go-to-get-laid edge when the boys venture out into the New York night to buy condoms.

The folly of Blue Chips is that the film makes this greased-palm corruption seem an even bigger sin than it is. (It's like a political drama made by someone who is shocked, shocked at the sleaze of campaign financing.)

In the Land of Blood and Honey captures the sickening way the war in Bosnia became a gray zone of genocide. Yet that, unfortunately, is not enough to make it a good movie.

As the school drama teacher who tries to unlock ''the real,'' Patricia Clarkson makes high theatrical solemnity funny.

[Sluizer's] original, pitch-black ending would have sent people out of the theater giddy with shock; it’s doubtful anyone will remember his new one long enough to tell their friends.

There are some clever and exciting sequences, but this $120 million epic of reconstituted Atomic Age trash lumbers more than it thrills.

Lee's images of black and white stereotypes are agreeably silly yet altogether too thin and vanilla safe.

By the end, most moviegoers are liable to see it as much ado about nothing.

What makes Double Impact, for all its dull-witted theatrics, an energizing experience is the picture’s astonishing level of ballistic mayhem.

Most of The River Wild moves at an annoyingly maladroit, stop-and-go tempo — it feels too much like a camping trip — and almost nothing that happens is very believable.

The film is so brazen about its pandering, crumple-hearted silliness that it had me rooting for Vardalos to land her big fat Greek stud-muffin.

It may be an accidental historical parallel that, at times, we seem to be watching a 19th-century version of ''The John Walker Lindh Story,'' but the fluke is only enhanced by the weird anonymity of Ledger's performance.

Big Miracle is harmless enough, but what's annoying about it is its aura of fake activism. The movie doesn't seem to get that it's exactly when the news media began to devote more time to subjects like whales that it started to turn into news not for activists but for couch potatoes.

Stuart Saves His Family is a hit-or-miss satire in which Stuart, for too many scenes, comes off simply as a goofy neurotic butterball.

Schlock weeper.

Jackson, though, does lend this earnest formula flick a core of conviction.

Brothers isn't badly acted, but as directed by the increasingly impersonal Jim Sheridan, it's lumbering and heavy-handed, a film that piles on overwrought dramatic twists until it begins to creak under the weight of its presumed significance.

The movie is too cute to take itself too seriously, but it still feels like it was made by some very stoned college students.

For a while, the atmosphere seems just right. As Mrs. Parker goes on, it becomes apparent that the one-liners, droll as some of them are, aren't really going to coalesce into characters, scenes, dramatic encounters.

Sports betting is a great subject for a movie, but Two for the Money is short on the number-crunching nitty-gritty.

There are some funny moments, but this may be the first time the director’s scabrous, anarchic wit seems vaguely depressed.

The movie is earnest, heartfelt, and, for all its lavishness, rather plodding.

It's a boisterous and amiable movie but not, in the end, a very funny one.

Zombie doesn't pretend to be on the side of the victims. He makes no bones about his identification with the sexy outlaw serial killers.

Barker spins grisly fantasy out of sexual obsession, yet his style here couldn’t be less obsessive. It’s cluttered and rather incoherent, as though the trailers to four different horror movies had been spliced together.

A thriller of carefully cultivated murk. It's enigmatic in the worst sense, in that every explanation for what's going on holds less water than the last.