Stephen Holden

Mr. Lipsky’s screenplay, a messy collection of fragments arranged chronologically, adds up to one of the most intimate screen portraits of a relationship ever attempted.

The movie never recovers from its jarring turn into a rushed, unconvincing caper movie with a blasé, Robin Hood attitude.

Words and Pictures has a host of flaws, but the performances by Mr. Owen and Ms. Binoche have a crackling vitality, and the screenplay’s strongest moments set off the kind of trains of thought that dedicated teachers hope to spur in their students.

Its most consistent pleasures derive more from its performances than from storytelling.

If the movie had more courage, it would lay waste these people as hilariously as Robert Altman's film "A Wedding." But as its bad vibes accumulate, Cheerful Weather exhibits all the energy of a disgruntled wedding guest muttering complaints under his breath.

The film’s rich performances, in which every shade of every character’s emotions registers, can go only so far to camouflage the glaring lapses in a drama that often confuses hints and allusions with coherent storytelling.

Although Stuck in Love is an indie film, it hews slavishly to Hollywood formulas.

Despite its contemporary touches Around the World in 80 Days is a satisfying slice of old-fashioned storybook entertainment.

A conventional underdog sports movie that should have been much more gripping.

Solemn, sentimental bore of a movie that suffocates in its own predictability and watered-down psychobabble.

The comedy of male midlife angst dates back at least to “The Seven-Year Itch,” when it was sweet and innocent. Each time it is recycled, it gets more sour and joyless.

The suds that cascade through Tyler Perry’s The Family That Preys more than equal the cubic footage from nighttime soaps like "Dallas," "Dynasty" and their offspring.

Stagedoor is like leafing through a collection of snapshots assembled with few captions and no text.

Evokes the flavor of the era just before the music business exploded into a mass-market juggernaut. The film's pleasures are the same ones offered by a sprawling, lavishly illustrated magazine spread.

Dark Matter, with its view of cutthroat politics and competing egos inside a university, is also laudable in its refusal to soft-pedal the viciously petty side of the academic fishbowl.

Works up a reasonably delicious tingle.

The guiding philosophy of The Price of Milk seems to be that if you throw something on the screen and call it a fairy tale, it has to mean something. But it doesn't.

Ms. MacLaine and Mr. Plummer make an especially compatible match, because his understated portrayal of a despairing misanthrope reins in her scenery-chewing exhibitionism.

Son of a Gun adds to the mystique that Australian crime films are meaner, nastier and more brutish than their American counterparts. But it changes style roughly every half-hour. And behind its macho preening is a preposterous, routinely executed story.

The franchise, which had begun to run out of steam in Part 2, has been given a shot of adrenaline with the replacement of the Wayans Brothers as the prime creative forces by Hollywood's original spoof-meister, David Zucker.

If Return to Never Land -- doesn't have a story to match the original's in breadth and imagination, it does a smooth job of recycling its characters and themes.

Too leisurely paced and visually drab for its own good, it succeeds in being only sporadically amusing.

Shrewdly taps into the lurking primal terrors of anyone who ever had to sleep with a night light.

Rie Rasmussen and Jamel Debbouze, the stars who portray Angela, the celestial therapist, and André, her star patient, display enough screwball romantic charm to keep this sugary trifle afloat longer than you'd expect.

Despite some gorgeous sequences. . . Titan A.E. is bland.

Certainly begins with its heart in the right place. But the movie eventually snaps under the strain of its plot contrivances and its need to reassure.

The movie works so diligently to convey a spirit of heroic uplift and fails so completely that it feels like a tragic misfire.

You are left with the feeling that its excesses notwithstanding, it knows its chosen terrain.

As an instructional movie on the sport, Ride offers some useful tips, but beyond that, it feels like a slightly bizarre vanity project.

Tokyo Decadence is much better at evoking a creepy urban sophistication than at revealing character or telling a story.

This opulent movie, with gorgeous rainbow animation, is heavy on message but light on humor.

Whether or not Bush's Brain makes its case against Mr. Rove, the movie leaves you with the sickening feeling that it's no longer possible in American politics to stay out of the gutter unless, of course, you want to lose. Dirty politics work.

Would much rather wallow in music than develop the strands of a story.

There is a paradox at the heart of the film. It strains to celebrate diversity and individualism, while its processed music exemplifies strict corporate teamwork.

The best thing about All We Had is Ms. Holmes’s stormy portrayal of a desperate, foolishly trusting woman who rushes from man to man seeking security, only to find herself used and betrayed while her daughter looks on with increasing dismay.

The novelty of hearing Ms. Bonham Carter spew four-letter words fades quickly. So does the sight of Mr. Branagh elaborately rehearsing how to rob a bank. This versatile actor has many strengths, but as his wooden turn in ''Celebrity'' has already demonstrated, comedy isn't one of them.

Subject matter that seemed mildly shocking, even radical, a half-century ago may be impossible to refresh, though the screenplay, by Ms. Coiro, has a firm grasp of its characters.

Crackles dangerously to life whenever Constance (who narrates the film) is on the screen with her father Hank (Terry Kinney).

Very well written and acted, Every Day feels like a glorified television drama softened with comic and surreal trimmings.

What "Tales From the Crypt" does best is sustain a look and tone that bring a comic-book's broad strokes into the realm of a live-action movie without seeming too mannered or arty. The film's gooey monsters with their electric green eyes and ferocious voracity are among the more convincing zombie demons to be found in a recent horror film.

Spike Lee's messy, meandering, bluntly polemical Red Hook Summer has one crucial ingredient: a raw vitality.

For all its attention to detail, Yonkers Joe isn't half as tough as it pretends to be. The real story of these bottom-feeders and the sad young man they exploit is a lot uglier than the movie even begins to let on.

As Janice, Eileen Walsh, an engaging, wide-eyed actress whose teeth are a little too big for her mouth, infuses the movie with much of its slender, glinting charm.

An occasionally savvy farce that suffers from attention deficit disorder.

A peppy romantic trifle from France that rises above the mundane on the strength of its beautifully detailed lead performances.

If the movie is terrific on ambience and street language (the women call one another Dude), much of its melodramatic story involving a rape and payback feels forced.

Mr. Jones’s performance is the only spark within this otherwise dull, well-mannered exercise.

There are a lot of truthful notes in Some Girl(s), but there are also false ones that let you know that you are being played with. You’d best beware.

What holds the film together, more or less, is the steady stream of mostly slapstick clips from early cinema.

Faced an insoluble problem: how do you make a boundary-shattering gross-out farce about the porn business that isn't itself pornographic? Having the actors wear silly costumes embellished with sex toys just won't do the trick.

For all its faults, Fortress has an unusually energetic imagination. At its best, it blends "Robocop," "The Handmaid's Tale" and "Brave New World" into something scary, original and grimly amusing.

If American Gun avoids the most obvious kinds of sensationalism, it has the flaw common to many editorial broadsides of overstuffing its episodes with melodrama and symbolism.

The major miscalculation in Wonderful World is the presence of a dream figure, known as the Man (Philip Baker Hall)...he throws this delicate, intelligent film, which at its best suggests a muted hybrid of “The Visitor” and “It’s a Wonderful Life,” off balance.

If the concept is ingenious, its execution is erratic.

Like Warwick himself, the movie begins to run amok after a taut and tantalizing first act. Not even Mr. Hyde Pierce's best efforts can make sense of a character who by the end of the film seems to be a completely different person with the same name.

A hopeless jumble of visual and linguistic styles.

Had it taken a more hard-headed approach, 3 Needles, might have been to the AIDS epidemic what "Traffic" was to the drug trade.

In trying to keep track of everybody while providing enough melodrama to sustain an atmosphere of controlled terror, Paradise Road stumbles all over itself and never really finds its center.

Perhaps not since "Steel Magnolias" has Hollywood turned out a movie so resolutely for and about women.

Acute emotional honesty and a frustrating narrative coyness coincide in Morning.

A tedious World War II epic that slogs across the screen like a forced march in quicksand.

This season's answer to "Dr. Seuss' How the Grinch Stole Christmas," it's an overstuffed grab bag in which lumps of coal are glued together with melted candy.

A disturbing, somewhat repellent portrait of a depressed middle-class woman's struggle to live comfortably in the world.

The gay, independent comedy Adam & Steve is as crude and nonsensical as any number of B-list studio equivalents, with the added disadvantages of a low budget and shaky direction by Craig Chester, who wrote and also stars.

As long as it is fixated on gadgetry, FX2 is reasonably entertaining. But when the movie focuses on plot and character, it turns quite dotty in an amiable way.

Behind the clunky machinery is a lyrical meditation on life, death, heroism, regret and forgiveness written in a florid style that might be described as Tennessee Williams on testosterone.

To say it feels reasonably authentic doesn’t mean it’s very good. Mr. Kelly, who directed the well-received “I Am Michael,” starring Mr. Franco as a Christian pastor with a gay past, clearly knows the territory, but he barely skims the surface.

Its uplifting message about teamwork and caring wouldn't hurt a fly. You might even say, the movie is good for you.

The hokey solemnity of A Love Song for Bobby Long suggests "The Mundane Secrets of the Ya-Ya Brotherhood" or "The Notebook Goes to the Big Easy." The movie is another example of Hollywood's going soft and squishy when it goes South.

For all the earth shaking that goes on, “Percy Jackson” is agreeably tame and unthreatening.

The movie’s refusal to abandon commercial formulas and examine its characters’ inner lives suggests that the director’s years inside the Hollywood bubble may have prevented him from recognizing the degree to which independent films and television are already overrun with deeper, more sensitive explorations of addiction and recovery.

If Bella (the title doesn’t make sense until the last scene) is a mediocre cup of mush, the response to it suggests how desperate some people are for an urban fairy tale with a happy ending, no matter how ludicrous.

Neither funny nor sexy, nor leavened by the wistful laissez-faire wisdom of the typical sophisticated Gallic comedy, it is less than a trifle.

Fatal culture clash, imperialist entitlement, forbidden passion between master and servant: the ingredients of the Indian director Santosh Sivan’s period piece Before the Rains may be awfully familiar, but the film lends them the force of tragedy.

A likable rites-of-passage memory piece doused in period nostalgia, including the prominent use of vintage Movietone newsreels to mark the events of World War II.

A grindingly conventional comedy that insists on tying up its subplots in pretty ribbons and bows.

Hotel de Love, the directing and screenwriting debut of Craig Rosenberg, is like a Valentine's Day box of heart-shaped chocolates that all have the same too-sweet cherry fillings.

A Good Year is a three-P movie: pleasant, pretty and predictable. One might add piddling.

The movie has only the most tenuous connection with reality. But the same could be said of classic 30's screwball comedies in which the treacherous feints and ploys of the mating game are transmuted into witty, romantically charged repartee.

May be reasonably diverting, but the story never matches the movie's fantastic visual imagination.

With its many unsolved mysteries, WXIII joins a long list of film-noir projects that end up stranded in the maze of their own invention.

This aggressively whimsical fairy tale about a pair of grown-up orphans who rob from the rich to give to the poor (themselves!) and end up living happily ever after darts forward so quickly that several major plot turns are dispensed with in 10 or 15 seconds of babble.

Feels a little like a science-fiction Sunday school pageant.

The meek, mopey comedy In the Land of Women is the film equivalent of a sensitive emo band with one foot in alternative rock and the other in the squishy pop mainstream: a softer, fuzzier "Garden State."

Ends up stranded between two concepts, either of which might have yielded a more satisfying film.

Deteriorates from a potentially enlightening exploration of urban development and class conflict into a preposterous melodrama.

Bland, unrevealing.

A moth-eaten stranded-in-the-desert yarn that throws in every cheap trick in the manual to pump up your heartbeat, is so manipulative that the involuntary jolts of adrenaline it produces make you feel like a fool.

It adds up to an entertaining collection of vignettes strung together by a sarcastic loudmouth whose heart is breaking under his sophomoric bravado.

Sleek, attractive and ultimately vapid.

It all feels utterly real and banal. You could describe The Trouble With Men and Women as a comfortable armchair to come back to: too comfortable.

The final product is soft at the center, a rustic cinematic greeting card.

Watching it is like a slow injection of a numbing anesthetic. It may send a chill to your heart, but along with it goes a warning signal to your brain not to believe a word of this hooey.

As the film veers uncertainly between meticulous historical recapitulation and shameless hokum, it brings enough characters to populate a mini-series. When the historical details become too clogged, the movie shamelessly overcompensates by wallowing in cheap sentimentality.

An old- fashioned feel-good fantasy that piles on the euphoria.

In its groggy way The Lost City holds your attention. Incoherent, but splendidly panoramic and drenched in wonderful Cuban music, it has the texture of a vivid, intoxicating dream that seems to mean something until you wake up and feel it slipping away. All that remains are feelings and impressions connected by a mood.

Parked collapses into sentimentality that not even an actor of Mr. Meaney's dignity and restraint can redeem from mawkishness.

This candy-colored movie, whose soft hues match the colored cereal loops that Alby devours at his mother's house, is a post-Freudian fable that wants to be a kind of anti-"Wizard of Oz" for a culture inundated with toys and toons.

This is a hiss-the-villain, cheer-the-hero kind of movie.

The upbeat ending can't erase the lingering aura of being trapped in an insane asylum with the Manson family.

Although the opening scene suggests a dark urban satire, Blade quickly turns into a cartoonish futuristic action-adventure yarn in which Blade is the only thing keeping humanity from being exterminated by vampires in a hematological holocaust.

Ms. Silverstone's pouty all-American brashness counts for little in a film whose flat screenplay doesn't give her a single funny line.

It captures a gritty urban reality without moralizing or sentimentalizing its hapless young protagonist.

A cream puff with a melted marshmallow inside it. As the temperature rises, the whole gooey thing starts to melt.

A perfectly silly movie for a silly season that in recent years has forgotten how to be this silly. Directed by Angela Robinson, this latest installment in the movie-television franchise about a tiny car named Herbie with a will of its own and the temperament of a rambunctious 7-year-old knows exactly what it is and what it isn't.

The indoor scenes are so dark that you can barely make out the outlines of the bodies, much less distinguish who is who. Because almost half the film is this dim, it makes for a frustrating viewing experience. The jerky cinematography compounds the irritation.

The movie’s confident performances and its eye and ear for detail make The Good Guy a satisfying insider’s snapshot of a shark tank.

A movie that knows how to pace its audience. Watching it is like going for a long and satisfying jog.

A poor man’s “In Bruges” that frantically chases itself in circles.

The queasiness produced by this sentimental weepie builds into a wave of nausea during its interminable finale.

If Lebanon, Pa. is a tidy little indie with steady acting, it is too politically self-aware to transcend its well-mannered sense of fairness. But the performances by Ms. Kitson and Ms. Hurt give it spritzes of energy.

For an actor like Mr. Hopkins, disappearing into another character, especially a historical figure, must be a far more unsettling deconstruction of reality than for the casual moviegoer observing the transformation. That is a notion Slipstream might have explored more fruitfully, had it focused its wandering attention span, kept its camera steadier and figured out what it wanted to say.

In the same way that a crossword puzzle tickles the mind without asking to be taken as literature, November plays games for the sake of game-playing. It also has a pretentious streak.

Throughout the movie, you have the feeling of being dragged along on an impromptu journey by a filmmaker who is traveling without the benefit of a GPS device.

Overcompensates for its sloppiness with loud, knockabout farce.

As it rubs our noses in our own fascination with vanity and the silliest values in life, it's charming enough to make us like it.

A satire of contemporary sexual warfare that leaves you smiling but also stung.

The message about race relations in America conveyed by The Tenants, a small, serious, but choppy and psychologically cauterized screen adaptation of Bernard Malamud's 1971 novel, is dire.

Mildly engaging, formulaic.

A juggling act between high soap opera and low comedy, Maybe Baby manages to keep its pins in the air until very near the end.

The dialogue may be crisply idiomatic, but there's finally nothing realistic about the speed with which the characters hurtle through their mood swings and power plays.

What one word might best describe Payback? How about "loathsome"?

The lives of Olivia, Tomo, Milot and Joey converge in a climactic chase sequence as frantic as a Keystone Cops movie. By this time, grim realism has curdled into bleakly absurdist farce.

To say that this live-action comic book lives up to Mr. Lucas's description is not a wholehearted endorsement. Are teenage boys as naïve today as they were 60 or more years ago? And much of the dialogue is groaningly clunky. But so it was back then.

Had John Cassavetes directed “Love Story,” it might have turned out looking and sounding something like Mercy, a portrait of a sub-Mailer-like literary pugilist and the woman (named Mercy) who wins his heart. Odd as that juxtaposition may seem, it’s not a bad mix.

Despite earnest attempts, Mr. Franco can’t bring the fervency of Crane’s poetry to life in the extensive recitations.

Aside from appreciating the movie's sturdy performances, my reaction to this satire of the middle-class, all-German family swung from revulsion to mystification.

A film that delights by confounding expectations.

If Deliver Us From Eva is amusing, it is not uproarious.

Because The Nanny Diaries is essentially a two-character story whose supporting players are wooden props, it would help if the actors playing the two were evenly matched. But Ms. Johansson’s Annie, who narrates the movie in a glum, plodding voice, is a leaden screen presence, devoid of charm and humor.

How could a movie starring Hugh Laurie, Oliver Platt, Allison Janney and Catherine Keener go so wrong? That is the mystery behind The Oranges, a dysfunctional-family comedy - excuse the cliché - that backs away in terror from its potentially explosive subject.

Ashby is a movie divided against itself. It’s a comedy afraid of being too funny lest its macho sentimentality seem even more ridiculous than it is, and a drama afraid of appearing too serious lest you dismiss it as hogwash.

A good deal of anger washes through this acerbic portrait of the movie business in histrionically high gear. But so does a lot of sentimentality, and as the sentimentality quotient rises, it erodes the film's credibility.

The actor's (Jamie Foxx) deft touch lends the flighty story of mistaken identities and romantic mix-ups among mostly African-American characters in Los Angeles the kind of saucy bounce that Cary Grant lent to similar roles six decades ago.

Begins with such a flurry of promise that it comes as a sharp disappointment when this drug-rehab comedy skids out of control.

Beyond the Sea, with all its gaping faults, is the genuine article. It succeeds in being deeply and sincerely insincere.

As the movie glides along, it may not elicit explosive laughter, but it plants a steady smile on your face and doesn't leave you feeling molested. If that's another way of saying Johnny English Reborn is old-fashioned, so be it.

To warm to Manderlay, the chilly second installment of Lars von Trier's not-yet-finished three-part Brechtian allegory examining United States history, you must be willing to tolerate the derision and moral arrogance of a snide European intellectual thumbing his nose at American barbarism.

Strives desperately for a zaniness that is largely absent from the screenplay and from comic performances that are too blank and unfocused to register as parody.

It's when The Deal leaves the corporate offices behind that the story turns into a bogus, convoluted mess. Once the Russian mafia, personified by Angie Harmon playing an evil seductress with a terrible Russian accent, rears its head, the ballgame is over.

Grounding the zaniness is the chemistry between its two likable stars. Beneath their crusty eccentricities, Max and John are teen-agers at heart, a Wayne and Garth for the "Modern Maturity" set. As Max, his leathery face beaming with pleasure, might put it: "Holy moley, is this a dumb movie!" But it is also fun.

Bluntly downbeat.

Might be described as a muddy, cliché-ridden sudsfest that lurches uncertainly between comedy and soap opera without finding its emotional or visual footing.

Even more than Jerry Lewis, Robin Williams or Pee-wee Herman, Mr. Carrey, now 41 (pretty old for an overgrown kid), sustains a maniacal energy that explodes off the screen in blinding electrical zaps. Those jolts don't always feel pleasant.

Does a better-than-average job of conveying the panic and helplessness of men terrorized by a sadist in a degrading environment, but it is still not especially scary.

So clogged with kooky gadgetry and special effects and glitter and goo that watching it feels like being gridlocked at Toys "R" Us during the Christmas rush.

For all its visual zaniness and its aura of psychic imbalance, the movie, which won the Discovery Award at the Toronto International Film Festival last year, stays on the surface and never locates its own heart of darkness.

The heavy-handed man-beast comparison is one of several grossly overstated themes in a movie that abruptly changes direction as it goes along while taking shortcuts that leave its characters underdeveloped and crucial plot elements barely fleshed out.

Like its recent forerunners, "Rachel Getting Married" and "Margot at the Wedding," Another Happy Day is both anguished and histrionic and in its strongest moments very, very good. But it is also overpopulated, strident and constitutionally unable to step back and scrutinize itself.

Except for the piquant garnish of Mr. MacLachlan, the movie, written and directed by Ian Iqbal Rashid, is barely a cut above an amateur production. The attempts at humor fizzle, and the performances are wooden and overstated.

The Last Days on Mars ultimately can’t transcend its pulpy roots.

Ms. Madsen, radiant and tousled, without a trace of narcissism, conveys maternal devotion, undaunted courage and a serene sensuality. Real, if idealized, grown-ups: We haven't seen them much in the movies lately, but here they are.

Proving once again that skillful performances can't create something out of almost nothing - the best they can do is make it palatable.

Mr. Freeman projects a kindness, patience and canny intelligence that cut against the movie's fast pace and pumped-up shock effects. His performance is so measured it makes you want to believe in the movie much more than its gimmicky jerry-built plot ever permits.

Plods along in its sloppy, joshing way, it tastes like pasta sauce that has sat on the shelf long after the expiration date on the can.

A bubbling crockpot of farcical mush to warm the tummies of anyone who really and truly misses "The Brady Bunch," and I mean really and truly.

A sugarcoated romantic comedy that is just clever enough to make you wish it were three times as smart and only a third as sweet.

Everybody loves a David and Goliath story, and this one is told almost entirely from David's point of view.

Has a strained, unconvincing screenplay whose failure to connect the dots of its story suggests that it might have been largely improvised.

That Flipped isn't insufferably cute is a measure of its integrity. But it still strains to view the world through the eyes of children without a filter of grown-up cynicism. It is plodding and awkwardly paced.

Mike Binder’s steady, well-intentioned exploration of the racial tensions affecting two branches of a Southern California family, is notable for what it doesn’t try to do.

A cinematic game that might be called Urban Creep Show, New York-style.

Mr. Newell is master of the feel-good ensemble piece whose shallowness is partly masked by the expertise of a high-toned cast.

With such plodding dialogue, there's little the actors can do to surmount the falsity, although Ms. Shaw, in her brief appearances, almost succeeds.

The kindest thing to be said about this deluxe photo spread of a film is that Sienna Miller's Edie and Guy Pearce's Andy capture their characters' images and body language with relative precision.

An obscene, misanthropic go-for-broke satire, Pretty Persuasion is so gleefully nasty that the fact that it was even made and released is astonishing. Much of it is also extremely funny.

As the pace picks up, whatever spell the movie cast is shattered, and Still Life melts into a heap of sentimental slush.

It is no wonder that the insufferable romantic comedy Happythankyoumoreplease, set in New York, looks and sounds like a flop pilot for a television sitcom.

Inspiring enough to make you wish that the filmmakers had reined in their sentimental excesses.

Evokes a mood of tenderness. Beyond that, it is a weightless, sentimental and intellectually lazy effort from an independent filmmaker whose movies seem increasingly insubstantial.

This likable, humane movie is not an attempt to recreate the epochal Woodstock Music and Art Fair captured in Michael Wadleigh’s documentary “Woodstock.” It is essentially a small, intimate film into which is fitted a peripheral view of the landmark event.

There is so much to admire in The Weight of Water, Kathryn Bigelow's churning screen adaptation of a novel by Anita Shreve, that when the movie finally collapses on itself late in the game, it leaves you in the frustrating position of having to pick up its scattered pieces and assemble them as best you can.

It's a striking measure of the nervousness of the country right now that a movie so full of holes should be as gripping as it is, at least for its first two-thirds, after which it collapses into a swamp of sentimental mush.

What ultimately sinks this stylish but heartless film is a flat lead performance by the eternally snippy Meg Ryan.

Stylistically a formulaic, middle-drawer television movie about intergenerational strife and forgiveness. Every plot turn is groaningly predictable. But at least the lead performances set off sparks.

Not even the skillful performances of its stars, Susan Sarandon and Pierce Brosnan, playing the boy’s parents, can cover up the mysterious gaps in continuity of a screenplay whose thudding dialogue spells out every emotion while refusing to clarify many crucial plot details.

A werewolf movie masquerading as a thriller, it looks like a canny attempt by Bruce A. Evans, its director and screenwriter (with Raynold Gideon), to establish a "Saw"-like franchise using the names of fading ’80s stars to lend the project a semblance of respectability.

Doesn't trust the audience enough to keep from laying on the schmaltz.

Whether you find its dual resolution hopelessly pretentious or profound depends on your tolerance for a certain strain of Gallic sentimentality that takes itself more seriously than it lets on.

Valiant is in dire need of some "Shrek"-ian sass, not to mention a drop or two of genuine emotion.

If Sweet Home Alabama, directed by Andy Tennant from a screenplay by C. Jay Cox, has the ingredients for a classic screwball comedy, the movie is in such a rush to entertain that it barely connects the dots of its story. But it still has its effectively goofy comic moments.

There are some very good performances and parts of performances in Blood Ties, but the movie fails to convey a sense of tribal identity within this world.

Did I mention that Upside Down is simply awful?

Under the direction of Andy Tennant, the Olsen sisters lay on the icky-poo cuteness with several trowels, often delivering their lines as though they were reciting the alphabet.

Almost until the end, Loverboy maintains a shaky integrity. But in its final moments it caves in to convention with a mawkish epilogue to a story that ends with an appalling act of selfishness.

Metamorphoses from a character study into a confusingly edited sampler of sexual possibilities that feels both programmatic and old-hat.

This absurdist satire of sex, sibling rivalry, Oedipal ties, homicidal fantasies and fast food in the American heartland at least has the right attitude. It just isn't funny enough in its particulars to make you break up laughing.

As much as these wonderful actors invest their performances with psychological nuance, their efforts go mostly for naught in a movie that gives character development a distant back seat to the grinding mechanics of its formulaic plot.

Highly entertaining, erotic science-fiction thriller that takes Mr. Crowe into Steven Spielberg territory.

As anyone who remembers "JFK," his 1991 film about the Kennedy assassination, can attest, Mr. Stone has his own paranoid tendencies, but they are muted in this provocative, if shallow, exaltation of Latin American socialism.

At around the halfway point, its characters’ haranguing voices begin to grate on you. People in their early 20s, even pretty people, lose their appeal when they dwell this obsessively on their own inchoate turmoil.

A candy-colored, unabashedly sentimental movie.

Does a fine job of building up a sense of dread as its adulterous relationship gathers steam. So it's all the more disappointing when the movie ultimately collapses with a ridiculous comic ending that leaves you feeling almost as betrayed as its cuckolded husband.

A high-minded, lethally dull biography of the legendary golfer Bobby Jones.

The main, and perhaps the only, reason to see the revenge thriller Lila and Eve, a shallow, cut-rate “Thelma and Louise,” is for the thunderous lead performance of Viola Davis.

You see, this character, who is given no back story, is Life with a capital L. He is the Forneys' guardian angel who rouses them out of their funk. Given the movie's U-turn into allegory, maybe he's supposed to be a punk Jesus. Not even Mr. Gordon-Levitt's unremittingly savage performance can begin to salvage such hokum.

Sad to say: There is far more crackle in an average episode of “Law & Order.”

A taut, skillful exercise in cinematic clockwork.

As this chaotic barrage of muscle flexing, swordplay, fireballs, crude digital effects and comic-book quips hurls itself off the screen, it's like having several garbage cans clogged with stale pizza, lukewarm cola, soggy French fries and greasy, ketchup-stained napkins emptied over your head.

If the movie were a farcical free-for-all ridiculing the hyper-competitive world of college football, it might be amusing. But it can never decide whether to be an athletic answer to "National Lampoon's Animal House" or icky-inspirational like "Rocky."

Because Mr. Carell doesn’t go in for the kind of all-out caricature that Mr. Ferrell embraces with a manic glee, The Incredible Burt Wonderstone has an underlying soulfulness that cuts against its farcical aspirations. This is not to say that Mr. Carell isn’t just fine, only that his performance, as impressive as it is, lacks a shark’s bite.

The shortened version is lovely to look at, but the stilted dialogue and crude overdubbing in scenes where English is not spoken often make it an impenetrable hodgepodge.

The one solid element in Wild Horses is Mr. Duvall’s squinting, stone-faced portrayal of a gruff, crusty patriarch beginning to crumble.

K-9 doesn't have a shred of credibility. And Mr. Belushi, despite some rough edges, lacks a strong enough macho growl to make Dooley seem like a police dog in human clothing. But with its surefire dog tricks and breezy pacing, K-9 is at least mildly diverting.

Compacted into an 80-minute mishmash of interviews, confessions and sketches, melded into a shaky mosaic, the answers from a cross section of men are shallow, self-serving and ultimately unenlightening.

Has only the most tangential relation to reality, and therein lies its slender charm.

A lower echelon of musical comedy hell (or heaven, if you love the hoariest musical comedy clichés).

A Million Ways to Die in the West seems serious about only one thing: its contempt for the gun-crazed macho ethos exalted in countless Hollywood westerns. You might call the movie “Revenge of the Übernerd.”

Much more effective at evoking a paranoid mood than at telling a coherent story, and the jerky action sequences are among the film's weaker visual elements.

Brokedown Palace is good enough so that you wish it were better.

High-minded but hopelessly wooden film.

A dense biographical collage.

The film's spiritual deck is stacked. In the mawkish tradition of movies like "Simon Birch," "Wide Awake," "August Rush" and "Hearts in Atlantis," Henry Poole Is Here is insufferable hokum that takes itself very, very seriously.

These characters may serve an obscure metaphorical agenda, but they make no psychological sense. And as the movie contemplates the rewards and perils of giving and receiving, it winds itself into stomach-turning knots.

If it weren't so overpopulated and desperate to shock, Nowhere might have succeeded as a maliciously cheery satire of Hollywood brats overdosing on the very concept of Hollywood. But the movie is so hectically paced that it doesn't have time to develop its characters or to flesh out the tales it sets in motion. Even comic books are better at telling stories.

Two Weeks gets into serious trouble in its clumsy attempts to offset the sadness and anxiety with humor. This pursuit of sitcom levity contaminates a movie that might have been an American answer to the hardheaded Romanian masterpiece "The Death of Mr. Lazarescu."

It's all very sweet and lightly comedic. After it's over, you half expect a statement to appear on the screen promising, "No humans were traumatized during the making of this film."

More than sad, it's slightly sickening to consider the technology, talent and know-how squandered on Hostage, a pile of blood-soaked toxic waste dumped onto the screen in an attempt to salvage Bruce Willis's fading career as an action hero.

Sloppy but smart-enough-to-make-you-squirm comedy.

Man in the Chair has few surprises. Once its machinery is humming, it settles into a soothing fable of a last hurrah.

Amusing one-joke film.

A big dripping scoop of marshmallow sentiment topped with whipped-cream spirituality. [15 July 1994, p.C10]

Faster, a turgid, ultraviolent parable of revenge and forgiveness, is as muscle-bound as its monosyllabic antihero.

None of it adds up to terribly much beyond a rip-roaring adventure that shows off Carlyle and Miller as cynical British city cousins of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.

Jesse Wigutow's screenplay is one of those marvels of economy, idiomatic facility and well-chosen detail that knows exactly when to cut away from a scene without grinding it into your face.

Unlike the juicy, overripe prose in the novel from which it was adapted, Mr. DeCubellis’s screenplay is utterly lacking in style. Mr. Brody captures his character’s attitude, but the colorless screenplay robs the character of literary imagination.

It is up to its fine cast to build what little sense of mystery is conjured and to bring a sense of coherence to a narrative mishmash that is all smirking attitude with no subtext. Think of it as a goof.

This version of The Mummy has no pretenses to be anything other than a gaudy comic video game splashed onto the screen.

The spectacle of two mature stars forced to grovel in the bathroom for cheap laughs is pathetic.

What Dreams May Come, based on a novel by Richard Matheson and directed by Vincent Ward, the New Zealand filmmaker noted for his skill at creating lavish cinematic dreamscapes, represents the uncomfortable collision of two ideas about filmmaking, one commercial, the other eccentrically, ambitiously dreamy.

The documentary illustrates the premise that if you lie down with dogs, you wake up with fleas. Until everything collapses, and the filmmakers are left grasping at straws, it's absorbing in a sick way.

As a female vocal duo, their performances are passable, if a little dull and lacking in any sense of camp exaggeration.

An alternate title for Gut Renovation, Su Friedrich’s cranky, sarcastic documentary polemic about the gentrification of a Brooklyn neighborhood, might be “The Rape of Williamsburg.”

Angels have proliferated in popular culture in such profusion lately that maybe they needed a comeuppance. A few more movies like The Prophecy should stop the whole celestial bandwagon right in its tracks.

Shrewdly divided against itself. What begins as a small, cleareyed drama about a teenager with terminal cancer morphs into a gauzy tear-jerker.

If The Operator, which is Mr. Dichter's directorial debut, has a clever concept, it clasps it much too fiercely to its chest.

Admirably high-minded and visually gorgeous but fatally anesthetized by its own grandiosity.

Tautly acted, fairly sexy and atmospheric. Its vision of Stella and Lenni as defiant, doomed outsiders desperately racing toward an elusive paradise on a treacherous highway may be bleak, but it's also intensely and proudly romantic.

A conventional, rather shallow up-by-your-bootstraps drama, but with a difference.

The appeal of The Wendell Baker Story depends on how charming you find the Wilson brothers, with their chipmunk grins and hip smart-aleck attitude. For my taste, a little goes a long way.

The film, adapted from a novel by James Hadley Chase, aspires to out-noir every other film noir that has been lumped under that popular term, including "The Big Sleep" (which it resembles), in plot trickery and steaminess.

Any movie that lumps Mr. O'Neal, Ms. Derek and Snoop Dogg (as the voice of a gangsta-rap answer to Stuart Little) under the same title can't be all bad.

Although the screenplay by Roy Blount Jr. comes up with some potentially sidesplitting situations, the director, Howard Franklin, who shepherded Mr. Murray through the equally limp Quick Change six years ago, methodically subverts them.

American Pastoral leaves a residue of dread and despair that is oddly in keeping with today’s moment of uncertainty amid an ugly presidential campaign.

Although I find the term "chick flick" odious, I imagine that Columbia Pictures regards Catch and Release as exactly that, although there are signs that Ms. Grant was reaching for something more layered and subtle than the usual fairy-tale formula

Terminally glum and waterlogged.

What hip means in this uneven comic suspense film is maintaining the ironically distanced tone of a deadpan ''Married to the Mob'' or a tongue-in-cheek Coen Brothers caper.

The movie's biggest strength is a story that refuses to quit and almost makes sense within its own screwball logic.

Transcendently dumb but very funny comedy.

Sadly, Mr. Smith has made a movie so false and blatantly icky that it's the film equivalent of making goo-goo noises and chucking a baby under the chin for 103 minutes. At the end, all you're left with is drool and a mountain of baby powder.

9 Songs, for all its failed ambitions and its tinge of sexism, is lovely to watch.

It is so vague, cliché-ridden and devoid of surprise and suspense that once you grasp its premise, watching it is like leafing through a design magazine kept in a refrigerator.

The movie never bothers to show you life inside a shelter dormitory or tries to convey a broader vision of the city’s street culture. It is too busy showcasing its star Jennifer Connelly (Mr. Bettany’s wife) in degrading situations.

Its narrative continuity is so sketchy and the screenplay so haphazard that the movie doesn’t add up to more than trash, seasoned with pretentious religiosity.

Wish I Was Here is so eager to please that you are never allowed to feel uncomfortable for more than a minute or two before a reassuringly stale joke rushes in to pat you on the head.

As the movie jumps back and forth in time, it displays an impressive cut-and-paste agility, skillfully interweaving humor and drama without tipping over into farce or soap opera.

The lead performances of Home Room go a long way toward camouflaging the severe flaws of this exceedingly earnest movie.

Faithful to the outline of the novel but emotionally and spiritually anemic, it slides into the void between art and entertainment, where well-intended would-be screen epics often land with a thud.

Recovery time is recommended after seeing Gardens of the Night, a harrowing, obliquely told story of kidnapping and forced child prostitution that conjures a world entirely populated by predators and prey.

Well acted, but it doesn't enrich its metaphor beyond giving an old story a sour contemporary resonance.

The story is a clever sitcomy contraption, the dialogue is pedestrian.

The sustained force of Mr. Dumont's vision of existence as a swirl of brute instincts may not be easy to absorb, but it marks him as a major filmmaker.

It is too flat-footed and sloppy to explore the obvious parallels between then and now, and the movie is peppered with gratuitous star cameos that distract rather than enlighten. At least it means well.

In the filmmaker's nightmarish view, the heartland is a decaying citadel of ignorance, boorishness and xenophobia, smugly rotting away in the twilight of the American empire.

The other alumni, played by Malin Akerman, Adam Brody, Jeremy Strong and Rebecca Lawrence, are given such short shrift that they come across more as sarcastic commentators than as characters.

More skin is shown in Spread than in most Hollywood movies. But despite twitches of insight into its characters and their world, Spread refuses go more than skin deep.

The core of the movie is a satirical political thriller that juxtaposes dual points of view that could be described in cinematic terms as "It's a Wonderful Life" versus "Chinatown." The digressions should have been pared away.

An outraged, unblinking depiction of institutionalized homophobia three decades ago, when the prevailing court opinion in adoption cases was that exposing a child to a homosexual environment was harmful. Never mind that nobody else wants Marco.

Until it plunges into gore, the movie remains above the typical splatter 'n' scream fest. These careless hedonists are convincing, and the ensemble acting feels believable; the orgy looks very real. But the realism turns to caricature once the panicked party monsters begin viciously turning on one another.

The film has no idea of how to develop its one-joke premise. The tepid love scenes are as erotically charged as a home movie of a little girl hugging her Barbie doll, and the satire as cutting as the blunt edge of a plastic butter knife.

In exalting the very worst of humanity, Bones displays a special glee and an unusual density of scary imagery.

Continually squanders its opportunities for hilarity.

As this cautious, politically evenhanded movie grinds along like clockwork, the fuse that should spark an emotional explosion fizzles after some sporadic hisses and sputters.

Loses tension (and ultimately credibility) as it wanders through three possible endings before grinding to a halt.

The performances are so skillful that the actors almost carry it off. But as the shocks come thicker and faster, the credibility of The Intended, wears away.

Once the movie gets down to business, the muscle and pyrotechnics take over. The action -- especially the motorcycle chases through the marble government halls -- pack a fairly good visceral charge.

The movie is in dire need of character development and a wider social context.

A meditation on the scale of a catastrophe so enormous that all the assembled resources seem paltry and inadequate.

Each thread of the plot is followed to its dangling, ragged conclusion in a movie that may be painful to watch but that maintains a chilly integrity.

Breezing along on gusts of stale air and perky inanities, Two Weeks Notice is a romantic comedy so vague and sadly undernourished that it makes one of Nora Ephron's low-cal strawberry sodas seem as tempting as a Philip Barry feast.

It is surprisingly timely.

Gives you the delirious thrill of ripping off your enemy's head and watching the blood gush by providing a ringside seat.

Daddy’s Home is an ugly psychological cockfight posing as a family-friendly comedy. Laugh-free — except for some farcical, life-threatening stunts at the expense of Will Ferrell’s character, Brad — it is best avoided unless a movie that has the attitude and mind-set of a schoolyard bully happens to be your thing.

Mighty Fine chugs along heartily until it abruptly stops on the edge of cliff, leaving you feeling shortchanged. It is a couple of crucial scenes away from feeling complete.

The acting, especially Ms. Moore’s, is solid. But her strong, sympathetic performance fails to transform The English Teacher into anything more than a sitcom devoid of laughs, except for a soupçon of literary humor. It is a movie at odds with itself.

Except for Williams, the sitcom-meets-sci-fi acting throughout the movie is strictly of television caliber.

A dawdling affair that never finds its own rhythm. Early on, it gets lost in its own earnestness and never finds its way back.

Fails its stars in fundamental ways. Mr. Nicholson has played wealthy rogues before (most recently in “Something’s Gotta Give”), but this particular bon vivant is unsalvageably repellent.

The movie has holes galore. It has abrupt tonal shifts, an incoherent back story and abandoned subplots. It doesn’t even try for basic credibility. But buoyed by hot performances, it sustains a zapping electrical energy.

I am ashamed to admit that this empty-headed, preposterous, possibly evil mélange of gunplay and high-speed car chases on Parisian boulevards is a feel-good movie that produces a buzz.

Pointless little kidnapping thriller.

Behind its transgressive affectations, The Foxy Merkins is a sweet, playful divertissement.

In the opening images of Devil’s Knot, the camera sets a menacing, Hitchcockian mood by stealthily creeping into the woods where the murders took place. But the movie settles into being a police procedural with the tone of a superior episode of “Law & Order: SVU.”

The Toxic Avenger may be trash, but it has a maniacally farcical sense of humor, and Tromaville's evildoers are dispatched in ingenious ways. One is dry-cleaned to death, another made into pizza, a third partly french-fried.

Mental wildly overplays the kookiness and quirk.

What keeps the movie, directed by Michael Dowse, on a more or less even keel is its steady pacing and emotional kinship to John Hughes comedies like "Sixteen Candles" and "The Breakfast Club."

Although this is potentially juicy stuff, it is as dry and tasteless as a shrunken piece of fruit left in the refrigerator far too long.

Heavyweights is really two movies in one, and they don't mesh.