Scott Brown

Deeply odd films are often deeply personal ones, and Constellation, a dazed, inchoate drama about a mixed-race Alabama family, tells a story that's clearly close to the heart of writer-director Jordan Walker-Pearlman.

In the ranks of improbable gymnastics coaches, Nick Nolte falls just below the cartoon version of Mr. T.

Cry_Wolf is underscored with idiot adolescent excitement (and gets extra absurdist points for casting Jon Bon Jovi as an educator).

In the ''flesh,'' Garfield himself (voiced by Bill Murray) is once again strikingly unlikable, a bloated, bingeing fascist.

The story is so bored with itself, it collapses -- but the diverse troupe of dance talents at least makes it an eclectic slide.

The big climax isn't climactic, just hysterical and incoherent. Murphy, with her bug-eyed, love-me mugging, is simply too slight and gawky to play the Everygirl.

The whole thing feels like a half-day of community service, which Lawrence walks through good-naturedly.

Hide and Seek, despite early signs of higher goals, is a factory-standard box of shocks.

A strange, sprained, but sprightly fusion of "The Usual Suspects" and the "Tragic Mulatto," Slow Burn wants badly to turn its standard neo-noir into a nuanced racial chiaroscuro.

There's nothing overtly better or worse about this sequel. But the ''kids'' look to be pushing 30 now -- an awkward age for theme-park performers.

Terrified of puppets? Enjoy being scared? Then you'll be half-satisfied with Dead Silence, a rote horror pantomime.

Once again, we're treated to loosely aligned scenes of half-formed characters getting a faceful of director Takashi Shimizu's croaking, implacable, and, yes, still scary housewife-geist.

Werewolves are tame with overuse, and movies like Blood and Chocolate -- where moments of inspiration vie in vain with Goth cliché -- play like underlit "Charmed" reruns.

What does satisfy is the pleasantly becalming presence of "Deep" costar LL Cool J. He's fast becoming Liv Ullmann to Harlin's Bergman.

If you're looking for comic insights beyond the well-documented ass differential between whites and blacks, well, golly, you ought to try another carrier.

The sheer, animal idiocy beaming from their faces in the opening credits of The Brothers Solomon creates the film's only moment of uncalculated comic joy.

Epps has a nicely beaten charm to him -- among the leads, he alone looks like he knows what a trip to the moon costs.

Sci-fi horror aficionados, however, might want to look elsewhere for their scares, as they're unlikely to find any here. Fright-wise, The Cave is a dry hole.

What might have been a rote horror exercise becomes instead a twitchy, mannered, often amusing rote horror exercise.

There are some genuinely clever moments of physical comedy, and the inevitable crudeness is offset by winning whimsy. Without has all the freshness of moldering Playboys stashed under a mattress, but it evokes what few boys-will-be-boys larks can: chumminess.

Too mild to be dirty, yet too dirty to be charming, and altogether too generic to be much of anything.

A pretty lousy movie, which would be offensive were it not safely neutered by its own stupidity.

The lushness of a Modigliani is largely absent from Modigliani.

A mud-simple horror trudge set in a swamp colony of Abercrombie models.

So perfect in its awfulness, it makes one seriously consider a theory of unintelligent design.

An animated movie designed with very young children in mind. And very young children should be very angry about that. Where is it written that 4-year-olds don't deserve a good story, decent characters, and a modicum of coherence?

While sloppier than the sloppiest of seconds, is laudable in one important regard: Its obsession with the male body.

A fairly harmless fertility rite with a skewed if not downright ugly view of women.