Robert Wilonsky

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.

What could have been an engaging, maybe even enlightening story about the unfairly high price a woman pays for conducting herself like a man winds up as nothing more than a worthless, harmless and ultimately charmless piffle.

A particularly painful event for those of us weaned on Brooks' earliest films, Saturday Night Live shorts and vintage clips of his deadpan standup appearances. It contains precisely two funny moments.

We have heard this song before, know it by heart (sadly, as film still can't keep pace with real-life headlines about fake drug busts and a shady LAPD), and still filmmakers can't resist its rhythms.

Nothing about Laws of Attraction is remotely original; even its title has the dull ring of the generic, like "Opposites Attract" or "He Said, She Said." See it or don't. You will never notice the difference.

This film is no "Usual Suspects," because there is no twist, no gotcha.

The film strains for some kind of meaning, but asks you to do the work it can't and won't perform on its own.

A shame Johnson couldn't give the movie over to Bullseye, since Farrell displays more danger with a cocked brow and sharpened pencil than Affleck with pages of melodramatic mush he can't force out without sounding like a high-school drama student with a sore throat.

The actual finale, which so betrays what's come before it that it leaves one walking out of the theater holding a grudge against what was.

A tenth of a movie masquerading as a full feature.

It's too turgid and redundant to have any real impact. As a thriller, it barely thrills; as a lecture, it has nothing new to say.

Hellboy is as much a wreck as "The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen" or "The Punisher," coming and going in two weeks, and as much a bore as "The Hulk."

Hunter's movies never condescended to the audience; they never winked, never pretended to be a mere Playboy party joke. Which is precisely why Down With Love, which strives to be to "Pillow Talk" what "Far From Heaven" was to "All That Heaven Allows," is such a disaster: It winks so hard it lapses right into a coma.

Into the Blue drowns before it even surfaces.

The cumulative effect is less thrilling than it is merely amusing.

The whole thing seems to meander aimlessly, rarely creating a chill.

Even if there were a great movie here, it would have been undermined by two lead actors who are barely even there, asked to deliver lines they can't handle: Bale, playing the Batman with clipped wings, and Katie Holmes as an assistant district attorney who doesn't have the gravitas to pass as an intern. Come back, Alicia Silverstone; all is forgiven.

The movie's a bust in myriad ways, especially because almost every scene possesses the oily feel of manipulation and condescension.

Evolution is merely stale, sterile and, worst of all, safe.

Aims to be loud, dumb fun, only it takes itself too seriously to offer anything approaching a good time.

Why would the writers bother with narrative when the story is just something that kills time, and brain cells, between feats and fists of fury?

It tries to be both camp and action film--send-up and kick-ass. But it delivers so little on both fronts.

The only thing The Missing isn't missing is a handful of climaxes, all of them of the anti- variety that leave you believing, then praying the movie's over a good 30 minutes before its actual and inevitable finale.

Plays like a greatest-hits remix; like "Die Another Day," it's bent on resurrecting a moribund franchise by recalling all the things you used to love about it till you grew into big-boy pants.

A spin-off of a sequel... It doesn't even try to be different, because it assumes the moviegoer wants only the same-ol' and then offers even less.

Redundant to the point of being absolutely pointless, a sequel that's almost a note-for-note, beat-for-beat redo of its predecessor, only with all the entertaining stuff left out.

As the movie enters its final chapter, you will come to the sad, sickening realization that the filmmakers have played you for a chump. What seemed so smart, so well crafted and finely tuned, falls apart into a flaming heap of c---, and all goodwill is dashed.