It has the resonant feel of myth, buoyed by simultaneously vicious and compassionate performances from the men on both sides of the bars.

Serves up a weak brew.

Its narrative conceit will entertain for a while, but eventually you will long to disappear with the rest of the Mexicans.

There is also a lot of good supporting work in this movie, including the performances of Irma P Hall, Tom Bowser as Evie's clueless dad, and Bruno Kirby as Kiddie Acres' gruff impresario.

The character of Valentin is immediately recognizable to anyone who's gone to more than 20 films in their lives -- charming, cuddly, hellbent on making his world tolerable -- but to his credit both Noya and Agresti don't overplay their hand.

The kind of winking, disingenuous youth comedy that tries to play it both ways, dangling the twins as fetish objects and then yanking them back on the leash because, you know, this is a family film.

Van Helsing is simply far too much of a good thing, and although Hensley's Frankenstein Monster comes off better than anyone else, the film suffers from some truly inane dialogue and pacing that will likely cause tachycardia in members of the audience old enough to recall who Dwight Frye was.

Is it classic cinema? Perhaps not, but then again, American shores and citizens have never been lacerated by atomic weapons. What do we know?

Although Super Size Me benefits from a number of interviews with nutritionists, lobbyists, lawyers, and the like, the film inevitably (but not unenjoyably) is dominated by Spurlock, who offers his sober-minded statistics and cheeky asides without ever devolving into an off-putting Michael Moore-like moralizing.

Envy feels like a comedy in search of a drama in search of some sort of lugubrious existential meaning; it never quite seems to know where it's going to head next, and neither will the audience.

Neither very scary nor very interesting, Godsend is an unresurrectable muddle.

Posey and Sheen appear to have a blast playing oversized characters so obnoxious that it's obvious they belong together.

Wistful voiceover explains too much, and, even worse, interrupts the requisite Teen Movie Climactic Speech.

It seems nothing is left out, and the movie makes us begin to feel as though we've witnessed every swing the man ever swung.

The movie occasionally continues on too long with certain scenes and may strain the sensibilities of anybody not caught up in its delirious visuals and melodrama, but The Saddest Music in the World nevertheless beckons with a seductive and unforgettable melody.

The film lacks the emotional resonance that made "Big" such a sentimental favorite with audiences of all ages.

Ultimately more bleak and furious than most Hollywood tales of this sort. Man on Fire plays it out to the bloody end, like there’s no fire extinguisher in Mexico but for the oceans that hold its borders.

This is a determined, resolutely paced, and atypical samurai movie, more an epic of the heart than of the battlefield, and all the more powerful for it.

Remarkable, melancholy, and ultimately hopeful documentary.

The straight dope for speed junkies and fans of the art of flinging one’s well-padded frame through the contortions enabled only by disastrously catapulting oneself off a slippery asphalt track at speeds even Dale Earnhardt would have dismissed as lunacy.

A compendium of really neat stuff and nifty sequences, and it will just have to do until Vol. 3 or reunification comes along.

Although the transvestites’ plight – mishandled, misunderstood, and/or misappropriated – is meant to supply Connie and Carla's emotional core, one never gets the feeling of anything stronger than an at-shoulder-length's sympathy from this film.

The Punisher is such a bad film that it becomes inadvertently entertaining; it’s enough to make you pine for the original version of the black-clad Marvel Comics’ badass, played to awful imperfection in 1989 by Dolph Lundgren.

The film is set in post-WWII Scotland, but its tone and its telling are so stark, so Medieval, that it seems anachronistic when one of its characters picks up a telephone or plays a bebop jazz record.

It’s The Alamo, all right, but will anyone want to remember it?

This might not matter so much to the youngest members of the audience, but for anyone over the age of 10, it’s strictly a colorful bore.

Until Hollywood stops being a boys club, and America graduates beyond short pants and its embarrassingly pubescent attitudes toward sex, I suppose one can only hope that all male adolescent fantasies will play as goofily sweet as this one.

The characters all feel like concoctions, like synthetic movie people forged in a crucible of Red Bull during late-night meetings at the studio compound.