Robert Wilonsky

Instead of satire, we're treated to diarrhea jokes, dogs dangled from the windows of speeding SUVs and tasteless sobriquets bestowed upon anyone who looks vaguely ethnic.

Banal sit-comedy masquerading as religious deepthink dolled up as boy-meets-goy love story.

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

Do not read too much into Burger's mockumentary, then; it's just having a lark, poking fun at conspiracy theorists, taking the piss out of the dozens of docs out there that present themselves as The Real Story About the Killing of John Kennedy.

Zucker!'s a bona fide hit in Germany, where, apparently, there's been a shortage of Jewish comedies since, oh, 1939, give or take. But it deserves its imported rep; rare's the movie that has an Orthodox Jew tripping on Ecstasy while getting a massage from a Palestinian prostitute hours before his mamala's funeral.

Delightful almost in spite of itself.

Co-directors and writers John Musker and Ron Clements doll it up so marvelously you're sucked into the screen and forced to confront the fact that at their best, these filmmakers can make the two-dimensional astonishingly warm and full-bodied.

Johnson, who was computer-generated in "Mummy" and only looked it in "Scorpion King," keeps it engaging, displaying a comedic knack first revealed during his Saturday Night Live appearance in 2000; he has the timing of a Rolex, even when playing straight man to American Pie's Stifler.

It may have been the perfect storm, but this is the imperfect movie.

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

The most offensive movie of the year.

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

Signs blessedly displays a sense of giddy dark humor absent from Shyamalan's previous outings. It appears for much of the film he's merely having fun with the genre, goofing on its paranoid roots.

Hoffman, though, is the real gas--the vet getting dopey and loopy and handsy because, hey, what the hell...The midnight cowboy rides again.

It may feel familiar, but it's a bleak and profound piece of work.

Provides Hoffman with what he's long deserved: a movie of his own.

A spastic, indecipherable, unholy, and altogether unwatchable mess.

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?

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

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."

Either a put-on or a straight shooter; that you can't tell the difference underscores its small but ultimately overwhelming flaws.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.