Robert Wilonsky

Murphy inhabited Jif like a sweet, innocent child, almost as though he were delighted to shed the cynicism and get down to the sweet, chewy center. Or day-care center, in this case.

Farrell's performance possesses a touch too many mannerisms on loan from Tyrone Power and Clark Gable; you can almost hear the gears turning in his brain each time he cocks his head or raises an eyebrow in homage.

Ultimately, it's the songs that energize this highlight, and lowlight, reel; you may forget the movie when you walk out of the theater, but you will do so while humming the soundtrack.

The movie's so hung up (pardon) on its gimmick it never transcends it; might have been better had Kiefer called Moviefone.

Feels less like a brand-new movie than a greatest-hits compendium. It offers nothing new and instead makes do with presenting the warmed-over like something pulled fresh from the oven.

Though it does cheapen itself with some dreadful moments of product placement, it doesn't instantly date itself with cheap pop-culture gags; it will play to our kids' kids tomorrow just as it does today, like something made for children who don't know to expect more from their cartoons than just pleasant, nostalgic mediocrities.

After trying to prove himself a serious actor in deadly dull movies, Ledger lightens up and brightens up a movie that attempts the trick of bringing a new spin to an old story but can't pull off the stunt.

Kind of meaningless--a thriller with delights that wear off before the credits even roll, a movie you might have watched on cable some Saturday afternoon and decided you didn't really waste that much time.

The result is something that feels very much like an overachieving made-for-TV movie--a history lesson dolled up like an action movie, with the action relegated to the final third, and even then, the battle is over before it really begins.

The cynics will scoff and dismiss it all as manipulative, the heartstring-tugging machine on hyperdrive. But this movie isn't for them; did you not see the PG? It's a sweet, sincere, utterly affable kids' movie about how parents are all kinds of screwed up and unable to tell their kids what they want or show them how they feel.

The jokes in Extract play almost like afterthoughts, the last-second add-ons of a former animator who, until now, has always treated his flesh-and-blood characters a bit like cartoon caricatures and vice versa.

For the first time, Burton seems comfortable walking around the real world.

It almost plays like a darkly comic "Peanuts" special.

This new version, which retains nearly every character and echoes nearly every scenario, is somehow its complete opposite--a slight, breezy incarnation that tries like hell to dishearten, which only makes it disingenuous.

A trifle at best, a lightweight, wink-wink amalgam of myriad other films, some of which have even starred Chan and Wilson.

It's war porn, a movie that revels in the carnage.

That's not to say Simone doesn't offer a good time. Shove aside its self-righteous agenda and it's a deft kick, a light comedy whenever it's not trying to play heavy. And it's bolstered by Al Pacino in a lively performance.

This is a Julia Roberts Movie about only one thing: being a Julia Roberts Movie.

If his first two films were about emotional mutes, then Before Sunrise is the tale of two kids who won't shut the hell up.

Wacky chaos ensues, as the film veers toward a subplot about industrial espionage, but director Clare Kilner's debut is never as daft as it should have been.

Like all films constructed out of pop-culture effluvia, Zoolander runs the risk of being so last month; this is a movie that treats Fabio as the ultimate punch line and regards David Bowie as the prince of style.

It has its moments, but they never add up to a record you'd want to play again and again in its entirety.

Miyazaki's movies are as stunning as they are confounding.

Morrow the actor tries too -- but he's a stylish director with a steady hand and a shaky eye (the scenes from Lyle's tortured point of view are dazzling, if not a bit unsettling). It'd make one hell of a TV movie.

This innocuous, frothy fairy tale isn't so off-putting as you might imagine, thanks in large part to Andrews' ageless charm.

This Jay-Z documentary is too much of a good thing, really.

To say it's better than it has any right to be gives the original too much credit and the remake not enough.

It's a dark lark, no more and no less, a caper comedy full of enough kinky jokes to remind the audience that, indeed, you're supposed to laugh at it every now and again.

Here's a bizarre hodgepodge of influences: "Kindergarten Cop" meets "Sound of Music," filtered through the Hulk Hogan movie "Mr. Nanny." The formula, by now so overused it's actually formless, is pure Disney

That Osmosis Jones plays like a sloppy hodgepodge is no surprise: The live-action scenes were done by the Farrellys, the animation by Sito and Kroon (whose names sounds like bodily functions), and the script was penned by another first-timer, Marc Hyman. Nobody seems to be on the same page.

Match Point may well be a return to form but only for those who love "September" and "Interiors," movies populated by Bergman evacuees too inert and dreary to even crack a smile.

Were it not for the performance of Foxx, the movie, which touches every base and slows to a crawl near home plate, would sink even when the score soars.

The best you can say of Asylum is that it plays like a topless "Twilight Zone."

Like so many other allegedly scary movies, it gets so tangled up in The Twist that it chokes the energy right out of the very audience it seeks to frighten.

As Frank, a widower who falls for his son's conniving would-be girlfriend (Maggie Gyllenhaal), Arnold is a revelation.

The real fault with this movie lies less with the clunky screenplay from Himelstein than with the acting, of which there is very little of note.

Uou may choose to read My Date with Drew several different ways -- as endearing or frightening, as bleak or expectant, as the optimistic daydream of the naïve Everyman or the beginning of a problem that could only lead to a restraining order.

In the end, it's a film so short on style and verve it feels lifeless; audiences might feel imprisoned in the Château d'If, praying for escape or quick death. Thankfully, one need not tunnel out of a movie theater.

Starsky & Hutch is less homage to an old cop show than a tribute to the people who made the movie--a circle pat on the back. And no obvious joke goes untouched.

The love story, not to mention plot holes large enough to swallow entire platoons, so bogs down the story that whatever tension the Vassili-Konig confrontation creates disappears every time Weisz appears on-screen; she tears apart comrades--and the movie.

It's a mess, absolutely, more a collage than a narrative.

Rock Star takes itself so seriously it becomes full-on parody -- "This Is Spinal Tap" as a sanctimonious cautionary tale. And how rock 'n' roll is that?

For all the affection Mangold feels for Cash and Carter, the movie feels oddly dispassionate.

Moore's likable and Goode's good. But . . . so what?

Just another baseball movie hitting for average -- very average.

For the large-type crowd, one that prefers to have its "dirty" clean and silly.

This circumcised "Shaft" plays half-awesome, half-aw-shit; it exists almost as if to prove you can cram every Jewish joke in the Old Testament into a single movie.

Busch, responsible for the similarly hit-and-miss-that's-a-mister "Psycho Beach Party," has a good idea; two in one movie would make him absolutely fabulous.

What's most astonishing is that a film populated by two madmen can grow so wearying and dull; the movie crawls toward its climax, which is so barmy it's almost surreal.

Jackson is merely indulging himself here, too, doing a thing not because he should but because he can. And maybe that's a good reason but not good enough. The girl still cries, the ape still dies and all you're left with is a ringing in your ears.

You will leave Mona Lisa Smile with only the slightest hint of the grin every slick studio movie gives you--the grin of reassurance and superiority. But you will not be changed, only out about eight bucks.

There's nothing at all scary about White Noise, which goes bump in the night so often it's easy to mistake it for clumsy.

Ultimately, Hart's War can't decide what it is: treatise on racism, escape (and escapist) thriller or murder mystery. So it sits there -- and we sit there with it, waiting and waiting. And waiting.

Ultimately, the filmmakers build toward a reasonably satisfying "Twilight Zone" climax, only they crawl toward the ho-hum ending; the movie appears to have been written and edited in a swamp too.

By offering up the feel-good, MGM-styled musical version, a movie you can hum along to, his biopic serves only as a giant question mark; why bother if you're going to excise the interesting and naughty bits.

Mostly dumb, no matter how desperately and even valiantly it aims for "thinky."

Linklater, whose intimate "Before Sunset" was an art-house wonder last year, proved he could make mainstream money with "School of Rock." With Bad News Bears, he proves he can waste it, too.

The Interpreter dashes the suspense by talking the audience to death.

It reminds one of "The Constant Gardener," another globetrotting thriller bereft of thrills that looks more important in retrospect than on the screen. Certainly, one man's trash is another man's masterpiece, and more power to the viewer who can stick with this deadpan travelogue and make it to the ending that actually satisfies.

When Affleck keeps getting work, the terrorists HAVE won. With blank eyes and soft features, he has none of the gravitas of his predecessors, Alec Baldwin and Harrison Ford, who saved the world with swagger. Affleck merely looks like a frat boy in over his head, which is perhaps the point.

The more technically proficient Anderson gets as a filmmaker, the more emotionally barren his movies become, till at last The Life Aquatic drowns in a sea of self-indulgent touches that delight the filmmaker but distance the filmgoer who wants to love the director and his characters but just can't, not anymore.

Buried somewhere in here, about 6 feet deep, is an intriguing premise.

A movie designed to wow winds up feeling cold, not, ya know, cool; the charm of the 2001 original has been decimated, its heart replaced with a microprocessor.

Ultimately only Moore, with her eyes always half-damp and voice half-cracked and body language half-mad, keeps the movie on the ground, when it too often threatens to fly into the thin air, where the audience would laugh it off the screen.

The heroes are villains, the villains are heroes, and in between are the innocents who become casualties in their wars waged in the names of morality and righteousness.

The Kingdom is essentially "C.S.I.: Riyadh," starring Jamie Foxx in yet another movie his Oscar statue will watch with shame.

Overstuffed (three villains), overlong (at more than two hours and 20 minutes) and undercooked (plot points include amnesia and alien goo).

It should be said that Travolta delivers a wonderful performance that's lost in a mediocre -- and, at times, rather misogynistic and homophobic -- film.

If the first movie played like a midseason TV pilot, its successor comes off like an extended episode of a generic sitcom.

All Sinbad has going for it is Pfeiffer's Eris.

It works for a good while--probably half of the movie.

Serendipity already feels archaic, like some dusty relic that's been unearthed from an antique store's attic and polished off for display.

This is the smart-ass stoner's "E.T.," the movie the fanboy parent won't be able to hand down like some tattered, squeaky-clean memento to their action-figure-collecting kids. It's just not quite right without Wright, who could have helped Frost and Pegg stuff Mel Brooks back into their Han Solo Underoos.

Younger, for whatever reason, simply can't abide their happiness, and so he destructs the relationship from time to time for no reason, using plot devices that wouldn't have been out of place in episodes of "Three's Company."

It's by turns poignant and cold, twisted and sweet, dreamy and drab, effortless and overwrought. In short, the movie is a stunning, ambitious mess that leaves you wondering how much better it might have been without Kubrick's specter peering over Spielberg's heavy shoulders.

Funnier when high -- what isn't? -- Harold and Kumar may also serve as the first infomercial for weed and burgers.

At its best, Cats & Dogs plays like a live-action Tex Avery cartoon, down to the exploding ACME dog bone; it's slapstick and slapdash, full of silly and violent nonsense worth a chuckle or two as dogs slam into glass doors and cats play dead on suburban streets.

Is it enough to make us like a thing we used to love? For most, that rekindling of an old flame will be good enough.

Sometimes junk is junk, no matter how fancy the platter upon which it's served. Which isn't to say A History of Violence is useless junk. It provides a few pleasures and a few giggles; it's a comedy, after all, an action movie in which things unfold at a deadpan pace.

Love it or hate it, you won't be able to leave it alone.

Runs out of breath and collapses into a heap of feel-good endings that turn a soaring feeling into a sinking one. But by then, the audience that adores it will forgive it its sins.

It strains to be funny where the original's gags were efficiently deadpan, yet it's also so unbearably lazy, stooping to cliché and caricature when it backs itself into the shower.

The film desperately wants to play like "Three Kings," a war film with a guilty conscience, but it's too pat and familiar to earn its high-minded stripes.

Trite and silly, but, blast it, the movie has a good heart.

Moore invested his characters with flaws, with a tangible humanity; God knows they never felt the need to explain themselves, as the film does, rendering it something akin to one long footnote.

The screenplay does enough sabotage on its own; the nose, perhaps, is there to give us something to focus on lest our minds wander and wonder just how we chose to kill an hour and 48 minutes giving this crime caper access to our pocketbooks. (Might be good on video, though. Or cable.)

Where "Silverado" swaggered, Open Range sulks; it's no fun at all.

There's no kick to its bag of tricks...It's a mild one among biker pics, a tricycle only pretending to be a Hog.

It's stunning, really, to consider how much time and expense went into something so chintzy and dull--a script full of non sequiturs shouted by a screen full of chum.

It's too turgid to awe the nonbelievers, too zealous to inspire and often too silly to take seriously, with its demonic hallucinations that look like escapees from a David Lynch film; I swear I couldn't find the devil carrying around a hairy-backed midget anywhere in the text I read.

A brilliant piece of garbage -- mesmerizing, but only because you can't believe someone has the temerity to put so much into so little.

Seems far too familiar for comfort. "About a Boy," anyone?

Sitting through Raising Helen is an exercise in frustration, because somewhere inside this big heap of Hollywood nothing is a something (someone, actually) worth saving and savoring. Her name is Joan Cusack.

Little more than direct-to-vid nonsense offered by Disney at dollars on the penny to parents looking to waste time and money keeping kids occupied away from the TV screen.

Shrek isn't clever or smart. It just wants you to think it is, through wink after wink after wink.

Once more, Tim Allen drops a lump of coal down the chimney.

It winds up like all Hollywood comedies these days--merely resembling something funny.

Whatever goodwill one harbored toward the first Pirates film is quickly dashed by its sneering successor, Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest, which is less a film than a two-and-a-half-hour trailer for the final installment in this accidental trilogy.