Steve Simels

Manipulative but fitfully entertaining "Twilight Zone"-ish comedy of redemption.

Musically it's often breathtaking.

The picture is nearly stolen, however, by co-star Greg Germann (of TV's Ally McBeal) in the role of Joe's company's resident corporate weasel. Germann's squinty-eyed insincerity is truly a marvel to behold, and it's an astringent corrective to the film's rather too frequent feel-good passages.

A very sweet, very funny coming-of-age story, featuring Kiss as the Great White Whale of adolescence.

An often spectacular but ultimately rather tedious musical/adventure/comedy.

It's a good thing the two rappers are such utterly natural actors, armed with terrific comic timing.

Veers inconsistently between sit-com jokeiness and nostril-flaring melodrama.

An unintentionally surreal kid's picture.

Let's be blunt: Bass can't really act.

An extremely loud and simpleminded cross between TV's "WWF Smackdown!" and "Dumb and Dumber."

Glacially slow going.

A triumph of genre filmmaking.

The plot is Kate-Moss thin. Basically agreeable stuff, but not much more. And that's a shame.

A delightful surprise, a tightly written, savvy slapstick comedy with genuine heart.

Visually dazzling, touching and funny.

It takes perverse genius to make an action film this stupid.

If you accept the film on its own brain-damaged level, there actually are laughs to be had.

As a director, La Salle manages to sustain a mood of looming menace almost throughout, and as an actor he gets the film's best joke: When his Satan fills out his hospital admission form, he gives his social security number as 666.

The film delivers some genuine laughs — Diggs and Anderson are a hoot throughout — and real rapper Snoop Dogg all but steals the picture with his brief voice turn as Ronnie Rizzat.

Not only one of the most spectacular cartoons ever made, but also a reasonably adult piece of sci-fi.

Sally Field has actually made a likeable movie.

Mildly amusing and as obvious as it is good-natured.

A hick-town, screwball comedy version of "Dog Day Afternoon," and surprisingly palatable despite its sitcom soul and star.

While not for every taste, this often very funny collegiate gross-out comedy goes a long way toward restoring the luster of the National Lampoon film franchise.

You have to have a certain affection for any movie in which a stressed-out Mother Nature announces ominously, "Don't mess with me -- I'm pre-El Niño."

The cast is aces, and Peter Morgan's screenplay is both very sharp on male sexual politics and crammed with enough comic twists and turns to keep you interested.

To be fair, this is hardly the worst gross-out comedy ever made; it's nowhere as misogynistic as, say, "Tomcats," and in the end, it probably won't leave you in a state of utter nihilistic despair.

Even generally sympathetic adults may eventually find their minds wandering, if only because of the characters' continual, annoying hopping; being vegetables, they have no legs, you see.

This broad, coarse farce is otherwise as insubstantial a piece of work as you could possibly imagine; in fact, a light breeze could blow it away.

Charming, low-key ensemble comedy that recalls the films of both John Cassavetes and Woody Allen, which is to say it's a loosely structured, quasi-improvisational saga about a bunch of New Yorkers obsessing about relationships.

An old-fashioned dinosaur opera, in the worst sense of the term. An obviously formulaic effort, designed more as a cash machine than a piece of cinema.

It may not be as epochal a piece of work as "Mean Streets," but packs what feels like a real-life punch none the less.

If this were a more mainstream film with a shot at a wider audience, we'd probably be talking Oscar nominations for Futterman and Ball.

Episodic, pretentious, and more than a little silly.

One conclusion is inescapable. You have really seen something you don't see every day.

A reasonably entertaining way to kill an hour and a half.

To be fair, this could have been worse.

Without question the breeziest viewing experience now available at a multiplex near you.

This mix of sweat and uplift in the Civil Rights era doesn't quite come off, despite some strong performances and the fact that it's based on a genuinely inspirational true story.

Vince and Cesar have been written to evoke equal audience sympathy, so there's no suspense whatsover in the outcome of their climactic match-up, the brutal realism of Shelton's staging notwithstanding.

The truth of the matter is that, given the thoroughly manipulative, red-herring plot twists that get her to the happy ending, most audience members will have ceased to care about whether she lives or dies long before the matter is settled onscreen.

A likeable, if somewhat whitebread, farce in the Woody Allen mode about love in the big city.

Has an interesting look, several sensational performances (notably from Kyle MacLachlan and Liev Schreiber) and in general works far better than it has any right to.

Stone handles his huge ensemble cast extremely well.

Think "The Lion King" redone for horses, with fewer deliberate laughs, more inadvertent ones and stunningly trite songs by Bryan Adams.

Comic Tommy Davidson, in particular, is hilarious as gangsta rapper Puff Smokey Smoke, who falls for Juwanna and then, in a twist lifted directly from the queen of all drag farces, 1959's "Some Like It Hot," decides he still loves her after she's exposed as Jamal. After all, nobody's perfect.

This fish-out-of-water buddy/action comedy is aimed squarely at undiscriminating 10-year-olds, and that demographic may well enjoy it.

The real problem with the new film, however, is a certain lack of chemistry between the leads; Wilson is game, as always, but his part is seriously underwritten, and while Murphy raises trash talking to the level of a fine art, he seems to be operating in another movie altogether.

An occasionally surreal meditation on coping with loss, and a love story with a dark side the size of Montana.

Your ability to overlook the film's myriad contrivances will ultimately depend on how you react to little De Roma.

Fans of cheesy '70s TV shows will also be pleased by Wonder Woman Lynda Carter's brief cameo appearance as the governor of Vermont.

Most of the music is as fine and fierce as you could want.

A genial and instantly forgettable sports comedy.

Much better than you'd expect, largely thanks to an extremely game cast.

By the film's big finale, the whole thing has begun to feel distinctly ridiculous.

Has a giddy silliness that's thoroughly endearing.

Acouple of well-earned laughs but ultimately overstays its welcome.

The aroma of hagiography is unavoidable.

Hallstrom's leisurely adaptation of John Irving's unconventional coming-of-age novel is so well crafted and intelligent that it feels churlish to point out that it's easier to admire than actually like.

It's too bad screenwriters Gough and Millar didn't have enough faith in their premise to play it straight; if they had, they might have produced a classic rather than a "Blazing Saddles" without the courage of its convictions.

But by the time the big not-so-surprise ending rolls around -- no, nothing that happened was exactly as it seemed -- most viewers will have long since stopped caring.

This totally sucks.

The cast is uniformly excellent -- Pryce in simultaneously utterly horrible and a real hoot as the wildly egomaniacal paterfamilias -- but the film itself is merely mildly charming.

Stylish, exciting and an occasionally poignant sci-fi adventure spectacle.

If this is even a reasonably accurate account of someone's real life, then we as a culture may be in worse shape than we imagine.

A genuinely heartbreaking, romantic film based on a true story; frankly, if it doesn't make you cry, we don't want to know you.

There's something inherently funny and surreal about Chinese kids speaking Singlish while trying to be goombahs from Brooklyn.

This megastar mix of CGI animation and live action is remarkably faithful to the spirit of the original.

A very funny superhero spoof.

Something of a cop-out, lacking the courage of its convictions.

Entertaining -- if predictable.

None of this is any more fun as it sounds -- the cancer ward scenes are truly disturbing -- but to be fair, writer/director Lone Scherfeg (the first woman to make a Dogme 95 film) manages some black-humored laughs.

Cudworth's script gives the characters more depth than is the genre norm, and the ensemble acting is terrific.

A creepily unpleasant study of race and class.

The film's center will not hold. Either crucial scenes were cut (perhaps for length) or Kapur has a problematic sense of narrative structure; sometimes it's unclear who's doing what to whom.

Saturday Night Live veteran Chris Kattan more or less steals the film as the racially confused Mr. Feather, a white supremacist bad guy whose speech patterns tend to get down and funky against his will.

A charming, technically sensational version of E.B. White's children's classic.

This is a smart and witty romantic farce that mixes sweet and sexy with surprising aplomb.

A moving, gorgeously filmed look at one of the Civil War's more obscure chapters, the quasi-official combat that divided friends along the Missouri-Kansas border.

The film is at heart a look at a unique slice of Americana, particularly an opening montage in which we realize that football here is a cradle-to-the-grave proposition -- literally.

But there's a vaguely self-congratulatory tone to the screenplay that's a bit off-putting.

A smartly stylized hoot.

This is essentially a glib soap opera whose main characters are two-dimensional cliches used as clotheslines on which to hang sitcom-level jokes.

The relentlessly self-congratulatory tone is oppressive.

There's a certain built-in poignance to the end-of-an-era proceedings here, regardless of how frostily they're dramatized.

Criticism seems irrelevant at best.

A wildly overblown, unpleasantly smirky mess of a film.

The acting is similarly accomplished across the board, though it must be noted that Currie nearly walks off with the film: He's the funniest preppie seducer since Tim Matheson in "Animal House" (1978).

To say that the film is unenjoyable would be an overstatement; a good time can be had counting the number of reassuringly stock characters it offers up.

The lead girls are easy on the eyes, and comic Faizon Love, who plays one of Matt's non-surfing, sumo-wrestler-size teammates, nearly steals the show when the girls teach him a few of their better moves.

The fact that this is somebody's real-life story up on there the screen doesn't necessarily guarantee it's an especially fresh story.

Added bonuses: A nice selection of oldies on the soundtrack, and an amusing third-act cameo by Rosie Perez as Ray's second wife.

A harmless, if ultimately inane, fantasy-comedy vehicle for youngsta-rapper Lil' Bow Wow, a 15-year-old who's already an alarmingly accomplished scene stealer.

Unfortunately the whole thing is less than the sum of its parts, despite a frequently droll script and a great performance from Shandling.

This is one of the most infectiously joyous celebrations of musicmaking ever committed to film. See it and be ennobled.

One of the sharpest and emotionally resonant romantic comedies in what seems like years.

It's especially nice that all the songs on the soundtrack are heard in their entirety, even if the accompanying video footage is sometimes drawn from performances of different vintage.

Meanwhile Baldwin (bulked up a la DeNiro and playing totally against type), is a revelation, funny and touching.

William Shatner's comic timing helps him nearly steal the picture.

The lame and apparently tacked-on ending (which seems to crib footage from 2000's "Gladiator"), suggests the rather terrifying prospect of a Roman-era sequel. Five words: Be afraid, be very afraid.

A self-consciously arty ensemble piece that's alternately exploitative, implausible and cliche ridden.

It's actually a sweet, often very funny story about a schlemiehl redeemed by love.

Stunningly cinematic and audacious on every level, writer/director Tim Robbins's look at the collision of the Depression-era art world and politics may well be a masterpiece.

Along the way, director Brian Robbins indulges Reeves in too many laughable inspirational speeches. He also wastes the terrific Diane Lane in the thankless role of the kids' dedicated teacher.

It's hard to overstate just how awful this movie is, despite the efforts of the appealing cast.

A shamelessly derivative, if basically likeable, kid's picture.

A butt-numbing exercise in tedium, sporadically redeemed by moments of unintentional hilarity.

Exciting and well-shot.

There's so much going on it's hard to keep track, and after a while you may be tempted to give up.

For every inspired bit -- Templeton playing chauffeur to 40 I Love Lucy-era Lucille Ball impersonators -- there's one that falls spectacularly flat.

A kitchen-sink realist coming-of-age story in the venerable British tradition, with all the good and bad that entails.