Scott Brown

The plot can't be summarized: Let's just say that crazy s--- happens, and occasionally, you laugh.

Watching his deft, effortless character work chafe against the outermost boundaries of the stand-up format, you sense the transgressive energy of Richard Pryor filtered through leading-man charisma — albeit tinged with hostile paranoia.

A deliriously, defiantly unfocused headrush, Stick It is primarily an exercise in exercise.

Special kudos go to Walker, for his dead-on impression of a time-traveling 2x4, and the perpetually hysterical O'Connor, who delivers one of the most grating performances in history.

Coffey, a tart comic mind who should cast his net farther from the 405, pads his story with more and more familiar degradations, and Watts plays each one to the hilt.

A threadbare crazy-quilt of Spanish sex comedies, Queens wants desperately to be "Women on the Verge of a Big Gay Wedding."

Step, under the sure hand of director-choreographer Anne Fletcher, quickly discovers its own virtuoso charms. Two of them are its leads.

The main problem? Raid lacks a center. It's an exhausted sprawl with multiple story foci, none of them terribly compelling.

Thing is Woody Allen on a third-grade reading level. Neurosis abounds, but awareness doesn't, and certain ''jokes'' demand additional therapy.

Accepted's winning dumbness and breezy bons mots save it from the pit.

Refreshingly, it's actually about action, albeit arbitrary action, and how it defines us and keeps us alive.

Some movies make love look schematic. The Trouble With Men + Women makes those films look stunningly insightful.

Teetering on an abyss of meta-wackiness, The Last Shot -- a movie about movie fakery, based on a true story about a fake movie -- succeeds modestly where, by all rights, it should fail miserably.

The characters are perfectly evolved screwups and the premise has potential. It lacks only the discipline of a 30-minute episode -- or a YouTube video.

Writer-director Alison Murray picks at a hard, true hurt in this zombie melodrama of defloration, but nothing beyond that hurt really comes into focus.

For anyone zombified by creaky thriller clichés, Skeleton is a fine little shot in the head.

By far, the most shocking carnage is Tilly carving up her persona. What a doll.

For all I know, Ryan's performance could be a dead-on Kallen impression. But what she appears to be doing is an impression of Johnny Depp doing an impression of Keith Richards doing an impression of Liz Taylor.

Beerfest panders shamelessly to the 15-year-old in this 30-year-old... without assuming he is a 15-year-old. It's R-rated puerility for actual immature grown-ups.

Anthony, with his famished thousand-yard stare, turns in a delicate -- perhaps too delicate -- performance more informed by the shadow of Lavoe's death than the spark of his art. And his shrill domestic scenes with Lopez feel small and squalid, as we wait restlessly for the band to play us out.

The dialogue aims young and low, and sounds translated from comic-book Esperanto.

The CG is on the rubbery side, and the backdrops are jarringly 2-D. But Valiant isn't so hard to look at -- it's hard to listen to.

Whatever you're imagining -- self-serving self-awareness; unedited hipster mopes; yammering dear-diary script -- The Hottest State, Ethan Hawke's bathetic tale of a good-looking young actor's first heartbreak, is far worse.

Having tamed one muscled man-child (Vin Diesel in The Pacifier), Disney sets its sights on The Rock. He preens winningly in The Game Plan.

So what disturbed me? It was the Shetland pony, which sports both Dustin Hoffman's pipes and his "I Heart Huckabees" toupee, and will haunt my nightmares forever.

Burns pads around Gotham, yammering yesterday's op-eds about Disneyfication and ''classic New York holdouts.'' He somehow manages to sound fogyish AND immature.

Feast isn't quite demented enough to reach Raimi-an heights, but Gulager uses parts of the monster-movie buffalo even the buffalo didn't know existed.

The film's generic feminism pales beside its bloated sense of privilege, only underlined by a nonstop cabaret of sideshow acts.