Sean Axmaker

For all of its minor pleasures, this encore lacks the depth of its conviction.

The kids have good chemistry, there's some fun oddball humor stuck in around the slapstick, and the gorgeous photography of the Gulf Coast beaches, waterways and wildlife brings their mission to life.

Rambling and easygoing, Nico and Dani is a modest but frank look at adolescent lust, both heterosexual and homosexual.

Resembles nothing more than an overstuffed, undernourished "Brady Bunch" episode, only not as funny.

Despite Clement's best efforts to make Jarrod a deadpan oddball nerd, it becomes apparent early on that excessive teenage eccentricity and terminal self-delusion isn't quite as cute in the adult male and absent father.

Willis and Breslin are stuck in a charmless, predictable picture they can't escape.

It lacks the invention of Pegg's comedies with Edgar Wright, which buzz and crackle with ideas and energy. This one simply plods through, just like Dennis. Only Pegg's doggedness gets this effort across the finish line.

I can't imagine how Smith can capture a big enough audience to pay off this private joke, but the inner geek in me had too much fun to care.

Michael Winterbottom's erotic drama isn't so much a story of a love affair as an anatomy of a sexual relationship.

Full of sharp ideas and wry moments awaiting the inspired ingenuity of a screwball comedy to pull it all together. It never comes.

Surely played better on the page than on the screen. What's left is the same old drill driven by brutal master race fervor.

There are some surprises to be had amid the cruelty (inflicted by both Jigsaw and his test subjects), but this time around the ordeal is less grueling than simply distasteful.

Deyfus' haphazard filmmaking dissipates a potentially fascinating mystery into one long diversion.

With a title like Chaos Theory, one might expect a little runaway energy or a dash of wild spirit under the antics, but there's little punchy anarchy in this controlled experiment.

Whether Mann's film will make a difference, however, is another question. He devotes little time to really exploring the issues, leaving the film a patchwork of assertions that, while they may be true, have to be taken on faith.

Opens on a display of humiliation and human degradation at its worst and then rewinds, like a video surfer zipping back to replay a favorite scene, to the nominal beginning of the spiral.

Evening is so distanced from the emotions of the story that it never breathes on its own.

Maybe it's fantasy fatigue, but for all the pretty effects and breathless chases and goblin war battles, the sense of wonder and magic is lost in the shuffle.

It lacks both complexity and compromised characters. While the cultural backdrop is intriguing, the story is frustratingly conventional and familiar.

Along the way the film loses sight of the joy of music that supposedly pushes them all.

A modest but amiable comedy.

Ashton Kutcher wants to be taken seriously so badly it hurts. So does this metaphysical mess of a movie, a pseudo time-travel drama so complicated it takes more than half an hour just to establish the gimmick. And a gimmick it is.

Ultimately a primer. Without actually putting it in direct terms, it proposes a revolutionary solution, not just in Argentina but everywhere that the corporate culture has failed its workers and their communities.

A bland Bond.

Momentum, motivation and story are all swallowed by simple sensation, and the film finally exhausts itself for lack of stylistic imagination.

Just another low-budget effort from filmmakers who mistake cleverness for smarts.

Feels like nothing less than Dana Carvey's desperate bid for his own "Austin Powers"-like franchise, but with a harmless humor far less crude. Carvey favors whoopee cushion punch lines to toilet gags and references to big butts over sexual double-entendres.

It's so affected and arch it flops into self parody.

Little Nicky will please Sandler's fans and likely won't win any converts.

Easily the least passionate romantic comedy I've seen in years.

Presents itself as tragedy with the insensitive Joe as its tragic hero, but Joe's fantasies of artistic rebellion and individualism have rotted into simple, solipsistic selfishness.

Whether or not Garden Party is an accurate portrait of the shadow L.A. culture where the young, pretty and desperate can find quick rent money, this low-budget production never engages with its characters or stories enough to make you care either way.

It's kind of like "Tootsie," only without the drag. Or the class. Or the laughs.

The result is a great-looking movie with an awkward balance of pulp noir and campy self-awareness.

To be fair, Clockstoppers isn't a bad film, merely bereft of creativity and personality.

A fumbling attempt to create the European equivalent of a Japanese manga thriller in the conspiratorial mold of "Akira" and "Ghost in the Shell" has a stunning look.

By the film's interminable, unforgivably embarrassing third act it sinks in a sticky swamp of sentimentality.

The Will Ferrell comedy engine is running on empty in Step Brothers.

The film is inoffensive, and Baldwin is fun and engaging.

This is one family reunion where you need someone to act up or pick a fight, anything to bring a little life to the party.

The contrast of the naive assurance of youth with the confusion and ambiguity of adulthood is sweet but simplistic and the wandering script hasn't much else to offer.

Though a hypnotically beautiful film, it's dramatically listless and dull, and completely lacking in passion.

Drowns promising ideas in a sea of missed details and unconvincing motivations.

Director Wayne Wang stumbles through the awkward script without finding its shape or its tone, steering it toward maturity while the script falls back into slapstick sports gags and adolescent social politics.

The film is thrown off balance by the weight of Norton's compassion for this troubled soul.

See "Freaky Friday" for convincing cross-generational female bonding. Despite it's elegant style and uptown milieu, this film is a cheap imitation.

For all its pronouncements, it's a frothy romantic lark.

Competently directed by Christian music producer Steve Taylor, it's a sincerely (if not exactly subtly) performed spiritual drama with a faith-based lesson in humility and the practical charity of offering a helping hand.

The new parody from the comedy troupe Broken Lizard, takes another swipe at the corpse armed with the same old weapons. This time, rigor mortis has set in.

Too bad the film, which Kennedy spun from a stand-up skit, remains as blissfully unaware of its possibilities as B-Rad is of his absurdity.

Has neither the raucous energy and impudence of "Animal House," the defiance of "If ...," nor the grace and wit of "Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle."

Splashy and sweetly romantic, if hopelessly unimaginative.

It's funny. Dumb, yes, but funny.

To call the haphazard string of gags a story is to give it far too much credit, but it is funny in a blunt, profane frat boy way, thanks to the bulldozing energy of Ferrell, the smarmy manipulations of Vaughn and the anything-for-a-laugh excess of Phillips.

For an ostensibly personal film, this plodding portrait of the self-involved flailing for meaning in a mercenary world has little of Soderbergh's insight, empathy or generous personality.

It feels like a peek into the closet of a pedophile and it's genuinely discomforting.

Think of it as a buffet of romantic comedy comfort food: the good old American standbys complemented by bland international dishes.

Ledger mumbles his entire performance (some of it barely legible) as a fuzzy, friendly, happily passive heroin addict and sometime poet, as if he's too blissed out to even open his mouth as he simply drifts along with his addiction.

There's no conviction among these self-involved folks who sidestep commitment with a quip and a grin.

Kilner's light touch keeps the romantic pair dancing around their romance without tripping, but as the film reaches the inevitable happy ending, the steps look all too familiar.

At times it gets lost in the backwaters, but the eccentric characters and offbeat humor make it an entertaining detour.

For all of the credibility of the performances (or at least the teens), it all feels like recycled social commentary.

Scott, whose sensitive turn as a priest inspired by Ralph's conviction and commitment gives the film a touch of grace at the cost of revealing McGowan's drab direction of every other actor.

It's not sleepy, it's comatose, and writer/director Josh Sternfeld never wakes it up with anything as crass as a plot.

It simply isn't that funny or clever. For a comedy, that's about the worst that could happen

The result is a heartfelt film brimming with ideas and passion but hampered by a literal approach that douses the emotional heat.

It's weird, clean, good-natured fun, and it's far too subdued for its madcap milieu.

A thoroughly ordinary drama of temptation, dubious redemption and easy revenge.

Offers precious little inspiration, and the only irony it manages is surely unintended.

In this brand of comedy, nothing succeeds like excess, and this film is seriously deficient.

The restraint so magnificently applied in "The Remains of the Day" has simply fallen into disconnection.

At 140 minutes, the film becomes a humorless, long-winded spectacle.

It becomes simply another banal gang film so familiar and predictable you have to wonder why so much potential is wasted on such a confused dramatic mess.

You can feel the debt to Sidney Lumet's '70s studies in police corruption and cop brotherhood, but O'Connor never captures the edge of danger, anger and moral stands being ground up in compromise.

Washington's fire and righteous anger can only do so much, and the token grit amounts to a few grains of sand in the sentimental machinery.

Yet for all the debauchery, there's a juvenile candor in its knowing embrace of teen sex comedy cliches, as if the entire film is just one of Scott's fantasies. You half expect him to jolt awake at the end, and why not? The film fades just like a half-remembered dream.

The curious character study is a comedy in a minor key, but for all White's fascination with Peggy, he brings little conviction to the healing message under all this creepiness and social awkwardness, beyond what Shannon brings to the role.

For a film so intent on the rules of engagement, this is hardly engaging drama.

The script is soggy and sloppy and Waters is no master of suspense, but he does have a pair of engaging stars flirting in a world of chic New York glamour.

For all its energy and inspired moments of giddy goofiness, Psycho Beach Party gets stuck in the sand.

A diversion so soggy that even the few combustible comic disasters fail to light a flame under the lukewarm laughs.

This film is satisfied merely to wallow in women in peril, cinematic sadism and the spectacle of violent death and dismemberment.

For all the color and lively music, it's an overlong, messy labor of love built on a sense of personal betrayal that rings hollow.

Even as the prosaic script gets lost in the intoxicating fantasy of the bloodless revolution, the hot heartbeat of the music drives the film with pure energy.

Between Stallone's soap opera of a script and Renny Harlin's speed-obsessed visuals, we're never really shown much more than fast cars and obsessed drivers.

A competent concoction of familiar ingredients, smothered with gothic mood and served up with a generous helping of teenagers: skewered, slashed and stabbed.

If Irwin is your bag, then this is your film. Otherwise, Crocodile Hunter: Collision Course is dumb, mate. Real dumb.

Disarmingly funny in its own naive way.

Imagine Warren Beatty in "Shampoo" by way of a Jewish Rambo.

Apart from the gender twists, there is one notable difference between the traditional slasher flick and this gay take: Here, even the nice boy gets it on. And he doesn't even get punished for it.

Prinze and Forlani coast on charisma alone, but even their charms can't coax magic from the prosaic dialogue and romantic clichés that clog this listless comedy.

There are cute flourishes, but much of the cleverness is smothered by tired dialogue and doughy animation, which gives the animated characters the personality of mannequins and the look of cheap merchandising knockoffs come to life.

Burns' trite talk and familiar romantic conflicts doesn't do any of the characters any favors. Everyone comes off flat and forced, with one notable and lovely exception: Dawson.

Utter lack of irony and curiosity.

The cozy, lived-in atmosphere created by the ensemble and the unlikely chemistry of Carell and Binoche are so genuine that you wish the rest of the film was just as effortless and authentic.

This is a familiar journey and director/co-writer Todd Phillips sidesteps every opportunity to inject a little edge or originality into it.

Harmless and thoroughly unmemorable: colorful, cute, fast paced, and about as involving as an amusement park ride.

Director Casey La Scala directs with enough energy to carry the odyssey over the next ramp, but for all the eagerness of the performances, the conviction is strictly prepackaged.