Tom Keogh

The film's light success really comes down to Shannon, though, the exuberant "SNL" star whose alter ego actually seems more real and sympathetic here than she does in brief TV skits.

Doesn't go the distance in either story or style, unwilling to liberate itself from real or presumed expectations about what it takes to sell a movie featuring teenagers.

Look to the cast as the best reason to see this film.

If you're paying close attention, there is reason enough to find Up at the Villa a fascinating experience, almost an experiment in some ways, but it's not a fully realized work of cinema.

About two lives in which transformation is a constant, destabilizing threat to freedom and sanity. That's a very provocative premise, though halfway through the movie Doyle and Walsh abandon its potential to go for easy laughs.

It is an ostensibly serious story about being young and struggling to wrest control over one's life from the hands of fools, yet it doesn't behave like a serious drama that wants to lead us anywhere.

All fleeting charm where it could have been one of the most memorable films of the decade.

Jim Carrey is magnificent as Kaufman.

The true star of this film, funny and often breathtakingly lovely, Zellweger carries virtually every scene in which she appears -- which aren't nearly as plentiful as one might like.

A mixed bag, all in all (casting Huey Lewis was not the best idea), but worth seeing.

Streep delivers another of her chameleon-like transformations in appearance, accent, and manner.

The film is simplicity itself.

Shaft is a decent popcorn movie and Jackson rises to the responsibility of appearing bigger than life.

It does yield solidly comic performances.

Comes across as a deceptively streamlined comic-drama; an unnervingly violent, gritty film noir with a wink.

The would-be emotional centerpiece of his three-hours-plus adventure flick is the most juvenile romantic tale of 1997.

This is still Ron Shelton in good -- not great, but good -- form here, and the rewards are plentiful.

What the film doesn't have, ironically, is a soul.

A dark comedy that squanders its potential and never quite, as they say, suspends disbelief.

Simply a case of severe overreaching and the illusion that an overstuffed movie is an epic movie.

Ripped works best as a middling series of gags about being far too many tokes over the line.

Despite promising elements of mixed-genre thrills, the film is finally the underwhelming sum of too many plot devices.

An authentically spirited popcorn movie.

Ross might have been better served by dismissing verisimilitude altogether and going for a real fable-fable to make what is essentially a very simple point about the dangers and rewards of accepting life's beautiful risks.

The filmmakers went for cheap laughs as well as for some a little harder-earned. The only thing pure about this film is the dog, and he's magnificent.

The story, ultimately, is about the classic conflict between a desire to cherish and protect one's unique gifts from a brutal world and a more practical instinct to compromise beauty.

The film’s bleached colors and Reeves’ trademark woodenness add to its emotional remoteness, though Basso, Zellweger and Belushi create a convincing family in crisis. Zellweger, especially, delivers a fascinating, complex performance as a damaged survivor.

Once at sea, The Perfect Storm collapses in a heap of spectacle and a dubious piling-on of scary incidents.