Ron Stringer

Country singer and sometime actor Tim McGraw excels as the bitter, besotted ex-Panther who can't cut his kid enough slack to follow his own game plan.

Tenderhearted Staten Island Christmas comedy.

Provides an unfulfilled promise of pleasure (providing one doesn't cave in to the spectacle of bare-chested Elizabeth Hurley sucking on an ice cube) in this heavy-handed exercise in time-vaulting literary pretension.

Occasionally scary, never coherent.

An exquisite metaphor for the high cost and higher returns of an enduring marriage.

Performance after performance -- by Kim Stanley, Marlon Brando, Laurette Taylor . . . Never heard of her? That’s reason enough not to miss this movie.

Doesn't offer much new in the way of news or analysis. What it does offer is inspiration from an unlikely source, via an unsparing look at one such victim.

The film should also wow fans of Herbert Wise's "I, Claudius" and Franco Zeffirelli's "Jesus of Nazareth" alike.

You may as well watch the movie too, if only so that another of life's astonishing possibilities won't have entirely passed you by.

Not to mention the good-when-moody, best-when-raucous art-band soundtrack!

The cast's sometimes capable, sometimes gross mugging is overwhelmed by lavish costumes, shiny vintage cars, hordes of meticulously directed extras, and the here-incongruous seriousness with which the French still regard this momentous, if humiliating, chapter of their national history.

If the trailer for this one left you feeling you'd pretty much got it, plot point by plot point, so really why bother.

Game Over provides no answers.

It manages, in the course of a single tersely delineated story, to say more about the dark pathology of American racism than any five character arcs in "Crash." So go, by all means, but be prepared to take a beating.

While your personal estimation of this conservative counterprogrammer will depend largely on your politics, Chetwynd and company at least attempt to score their points honestly.

What Ratner brings to the proceedings is an awareness that what worked for "Silence" -- namely screenwriter Ted Tally, production designer Kristi Zea and, of course, Anthony Hopkins as Lecter -- will work overtime here, to enhance the project at hand and provide a seamless connection back to Jonathan Demme's multiple-Oscar winner.

Allusive as all hell, Tuvalu's slapstick allegory of European socioeconomic upheaval in the 20th century opens with a spoof of "Breaking the Waves" lofty coda, then races through a mise en scène that's equal parts Tarkovsky, Méliès and the Brothers Quay.

Calculated to titillate middlebrow audiences on both sides of la Manche.

An awesome introduction to the sport and the outspoken personalities -- riders, mechanics, engineers, lorry drivers, commentators, fans and girlfriends -- who support it.

Impressive supporting cast---, in character parts both expanded and invented, enrich the enterprise.

The excellent cast is headed by Gwyneth Paltrow in the mood-shifting title role and Daniel Craig as the helpless, not-so-happily philandering Hughes.

It's a prolonged, maddening, predictable -- yet curiously pleasurable -- descent into incomprehensibility.

They have succeeded in establishing conservative ideologue Ken Starr as one of American prosecutorial history's biggest heels and Clinton loyalist Susan McDougal as a bona fide hero and martyr. The problem, of course, is that the president himself was neither, and no amount of hand wringing -- however justified -- can make him one.

Turgid, melodramatic travesty of Thackeray's gimlet-eyed satire.

Unfortunately, the innovations that attend this updating dilute the iconic weight of the original.

To no one's possible satisfaction -- the non-question of how Paige is to ascend to the throne and retain her personal integrity that The Prince and Me falls, finally and irrevocably, flat.

The final revelation which, however anticipated, however contrived, stings just enough to make it feel like life.

The problem for director Keith Gordon is that Potter's script pares down to virtual nothing the very narrative threads that allowed us, in the full-length version, to identify with his prickly protagonist, and knocks us upside the head with a hyperkinetic, disorienting first act from which audiences -- especially those approaching this material cold -- are unlikely to recover.

The main inspiration here seems to be David Lynch, though fans of Fred Walton’s 1979 hair-raiser "When a Stranger Calls" may experience a touch of déjà vu as well.

What's most disturbing about this ineptly scripted, utterly implausible (and at the same time curiously likable) comedy of sin and redemption in TV's home-shopping universe is how close a committed cast and a talented director (Stephen Herek, late of Mr. Holland's Opus) come to pulling it off, to making us feel good about the 110 minutes or so we've just pissed away.

Still and all, the makeup special effects are as over the top as anything in Hooper and L.M. Kit Carson's 1986 Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2, and -- for those of us without the sense to steer clear of this sort of thing -- that's saying something.

A fine specimen of clean-cut Mormon family entertainment, but it may also be a step in the wrong direction for the fledgling production company.

A fine cast of unknowns in a story of faith -- lost, found and continually challenged -- that neither romanticizes nor condescends to its milieu.

Those seeking anything resembling a real discussion of the issues had best seek elsewhere.

Fails in so many respects, even die-hard constituents may have trouble learning to like it.

The fun here is not so much in the solid if stolid performances from Bale and co-stars Taye Diggs and Emily Watson (gussied up to resemble the Jefferson Airplane–era Grace Slick) or in Wimmer's overpolished plot devices as it is in the production values.

While decidedly green, at least isn't mealy or tasteless. And if the juice in tyro screenwriter Erica Beeney's witty dialogue can't quite flow through the hard tissue of underripe gimmicks and derivative set pieces, there's enough sweetness in the performances, and tautness in the direction (by Efram Potelle and Kyle Rankin), to forestall any serious bellyaching.

Yo momma so fat, when she gets in an elevator, it has to go down. Had enough?

Of course, this is just another teen movie -- with tons of dick jokes that don't know when to quit, and buckets of realistic-looking "excrement" splattered all over its "juvenile" cast, and even a couple of gags that actually fly.

By highlighting the human costs of slavery to everyone BUT the enslaved -- here, relations between African-American domestics and their owners are cordial, even respectful, on both sides -- Maxwell risks being pilloried as an apologist for that institution.

The “surprise” ending, when it comes, is more of a hoot than a holler.

What this turkey produces in the way of hang-ups is a transparently phony class conflict.

Low-budget, high-camp.

The fault lies mostly with the writers, who consistently come up short on wit and imagination enough to finish, let alone flesh out or polish, a joke.

Overlong, hard look at the perils of tampering with Creation.

Let horses be horses, scrap the tin-eared Lukas Haas narration.

A good horse kick, or a fistful of Valium, may help you get through this relentlessly sadistic exercise with your soul more or less intact.

Bad photography, bad acting and bad dialogue.

A stinker.