Walter Addiego

This is a slacker comedy with "festival" stamped all over it, so you can bet the consequences will be quirky.

Carbon Nation serves us a full portion of scary statistics, but overall tries to accentuate the positive.

Despite its worthy subject, this feature by veteran Brazilian director Bruno Barreto has a bluntness that's at odds with Bishop's personality and work.

If nothing else, The Inbetweeners Movie proves that raunchy comedies about horny teens aren't just an American quirk.

A frantic, epic-sized blowout of campy, "Indiana Jones" -style derring-do mixed with lots of computer-generated gee-whizzes.

With the exception of a couple of inspired moments, Mary Reilly is merely a curious variation of an often-told story.

Bateman comes off well, humanizing his character with a strain of melancholy that’s one of the movie’s genuinely touching elements. Fey is all right, though she falls back on her patented shtick. Driver makes the most of his hipsterish role, nicely playing off the other siblings’ tension.

A lightweight and sentimental exercise that succeeds at little except maybe inspiring the viewer to go out and find a decent curry.

The needle on the laugh-o-meter barely budges.

There’s lots of eye candy, and the pace is fast, but somehow the movie falls short. You’re forgiven if you get the idea that “Scorch Trials” suffers from “middle movie” fatigue.

The picture is a relentless blast of color and movement that's based on the old TV show, but boils down to a supercharged version of old-time Saturday-afternoon movie serials.

A big, juicy bone for canine-focused humans, but much less of a treat for others.

Dante's Peak expands the concept of badness in movies.

You feel the full weight of the movie's three hours, since the filmmakers only had 90 minutes' of plot.

A weakly performed rehash of master-slave role-reversal tales.

Filmmaker Doris Yeung tries to mix a whodunit with a story of explosive family dynamics, but the effort succumbs to a weak script and a one-note lead performance.

This is middling Woody, at best: For every funny line or sequence, there's at least one misfire.

Maybe there's a real use for Carrie 2 after all. Stand it up against the original, and you have a pretty good lesson in what's happened to the movies in the last couple of decades.

The bloodshed is somewhat less gory than in many slasher films -- with stress on the "somewhat." [26 Sep 2004]

Mocking Tinseltown is a pretty exhausted subject, and even Jaglom, a genuine insider, has a hard time making it fresh.

A counterfeit of a Woo movie, even though Woo himself co-produced it.

Depending on your tolerance for talking Chihuahuas, this could make for a fun family night out.

That's the real problem with this melodrama. Whether or not you agree with the pacifist message, the presentation is often overwrought and maudlin.

A complete misfire.

Home Again is plain vanilla, from start to finish.

Director Paul Morrison ("Wondrous Oblivion") nicely re-creates the period, but puts too much weight on the sexual relationship as determining the men's artistic courses.

The result is a thrill ride with enough plunges and turns and loop-the-loops to make it worth a spin. What the picture lacks is the magic and resonance you feel in the best of popular entertainments.

Entertainment made well enough that you can overlook its absurdities.

A lot of noise and nothing to justify it.

Never gets the mixture right, lurching between bullet-happy shootouts and overwrought domestic content.

For Tim and Eric, what's funny is what's odd, ultra-cheap, pathetic or scurvy - and what's funniest of all is that some people just don't get it.

Heavy-handed dialogue, flurries of melodrama and a silly ending make the whole enterprise sink like a stone.

Director Troy Miller, making his feature debut, does a decent job with schmaltzy material.

This Paramount-DreamWorks collaboration, with Stephen Spielberg credited as executive producer, is competently made, strongly focused on its characters' relationships and surprisingly light on special effects.

These pictures need a light touch and a lot of attitude, but this time you can hear heavy breathing in the background.

Too much of nothing and far from the potentially star-making material that Foxx deserves.

Well-intentioned but heavy-handed.

It’s a great story, but the movie has a flatness that can’t be denied. Who’d have expected a Herzog film to invoke thoughts of “Masterpiece Theater” and Merchant-Ivory productions at their most stiff and formal? I surely did not.

A well-intentioned, but all-thumbs down drama.

Stupid.

The real trouble is that it's supposed to be an outrageous comedy, but in fact it's fairly tame and not all that funny.

Strict plausibility isn’t necessary in these movies, and while No Escape doesn’t completely throw it out the window, it still inspires the occasional unintended giggle.

A fall-off in writing is part of the problem, but I think a more important issue is the replacement of Terry Zwigoff (“Crumb”) as director. Zwigoff’s humor is razor-sharp and incisive, qualities missing from Bad Santa 2.

This kind of psychological mystery, with its suggestion of fugue states, needs to work by hints and whispers, but Pali Road has pretty low expectations of its audience. It ought to be light on its feet, but it lumbers.

About the only time the film emerges from its stupor is when Lewis bares his fangs and shows us that Max has a bilious, acerbic side.

For some, this sort of thinking is a much-needed revolution in human consciousness. For others, it's little more than New Age platitudes and questionable science.

Trying to be provocative with a capital "P," Anne Fontaine's Adore undermines itself by provoking unintended laughs.

Standard-issue slasher pic.

Your heart will go out to Shlain, who clearly adored her father. But other parts of Connected may remind you of an Al Gore lecture.

Two hours of senselessness and overkill, decked out in lurid, bad-trip colors.

Tired comedy.

So many horror conventions are at work in After.Life that either the filmmakers are parodying them or couldn't come up with anything better. I'm betting on the second choice.

Will probably pass muster with very young viewers, but their parents may grit their teeth at its saccharine quality.

Relies on slapstick scenes that are neither essential nor especially clever.

No-one's-home acting by Bierko and Mol doesn't help, while the talented D'Onofrio ("The End of the World") and Mueller-Stahl (a veteran of European pictures) are better than the material.

The new version has been speeded up and dumbed down, which does not reflect well on the mouse factory's view of its audience these days.

Goes south as a sci-fi film.

No target is too obvious for Salvation Boulevard, a farrago of cheap shots aimed at Christian fundamentalism. It's a blunderbuss satire that criminally wastes a talented cast.

The direction, by Ben Nott and Morgan O'Neill, is average, except for the surfing sequences, which are easily as striking as what we see in documentaries about the sport. Another positive is the soundtrack, with amusing high-energy rock tunes of the era.

Good-looking and empty.

There are two main obstacles to enjoying The Last Witch Hunter. One is your ability to buy Vin Diesel as an immortal slayer of evildoers plying his trade in today’s Manhattan. You also have to swallow a by-the-numbers plot buried under an avalanche of fast-and-furious but underwhelming CGI effects.

The title is exactly the sort of juvenile joke the entire movie leans on.

The movie equivalent of the fruitcake you get every year from the folks back home. It's brick-heavy and full of nasty bits you don't want to put in your mouth, lovingly wrapped in pink cellophane.

Second-banana material.

Excess Baggage aims to broaden her appeal beyond her established, youthful audience. It won't, because it's a messy mixture of so-so comedy and unmoving drama; its inconsistent tone suggests a production where no one was fully in charge.

Otherwise, the movie, which borrows from a dozen pop sources and improves on none of them, is pretty much a washout.

Both very funny and a bit of a tearjerker, with an on-the-money performance from Ricky Gervais.

Perhaps the film's greatest strength is the performance by Kwanten, who appears in HBO's "True Blood" and may be familiar from his lead role in the big-screen Aussie thriller "Red Hill." Dermody also does well.

The Honeymooners isn't the worst of the endless spate of TV rehashes, but it still feels perfunctory.

A way-below-par golfing comedy.

Francis Ford Coppola's Jack has its affecting moments, but in the end illustrates the pitfalls of the "concept" movie, the kind you can boil down to a one-line hook.

Some of the talking heads say entertaining or thoughtful things and some of the locations are quite exotic. But does this justify 98 minutes of screen time?

The film has a good cast, and is competently made in a plain-vanilla way, but its greatest appeal will be to those who share its endorsement of traditional religious values.

Two points save "Lousy 2" from the absolute abyss. One is a couple of imaginative touches in the art design: Cori drives an old Citroen, and a couple of Vespa-like motor scooters are briefly glanced. The other is the performance of Frewer, who played the lead in TV's "Max Headroom." He endows the character with more sardonic humor than we have a right to expect from the junky script by TV-oriented director Farhad Mann.

Miserly on food porn but not on prefab characters, it's well short of a cinematic feast.

Marshall has an astounding instinct for popular entertainment. He's done it again with The Other Sister.

Belongs in the holiday hall of shame.

Godawful.

Earnest and well-intentioned, The Identical is based on a "what if" that straddles the line between ingenious and loopy.

A dimwitted, fill-in-the-blanks horror opus that slanders a fine and useful mammal.

Whatever It Takes is DOA -- dated on arrival.

An hour into the picture, Spade offers a pretty funny imitation of belter Neil Diamond, but it's a long 60 minutes for such a pitiful payoff.

The bad news is that the characters and situations are platitudes and the story is so heavy-handed that the film is hard to sit through.

Turns into a pedestrian slice 'n' dice feature.

Perhaps Patten is trying to do to us what Rinpoche does to his followers, but the film's meandering structure and intrusive narration detract from the focus on the master.