100 minutes spent watching children struggle and delight in learning is, at least in my book, 100 minutes happily spent.

It's not perfect - infrequently the comedy and drama rub up against each other too much - but it is the genuine article: a wholly unique family film that can moisten your eyes even while it quickens your pulse.

Can someone dial down Cuba Gooding Jr. a few notches? He's so hyperactive during this MTV Films production - which is comedically indistinguishable from "Sister Act," but with more marketable music - that his Vegas-showgirl drag act in the dreadful "Boat Trip" looks like Bressonian minimalism by contrast.

It is the perfectly cast Beckinsale who lifts Underworld out and away from the film’s many moments of silly gravitas and steers it into a truly interesting take on the whole vampires 'n' werewolves genre.

Millennium Actress has more layers to it than the proverbial onion, but Kon’s sure hand keeps things moving right along and into the next historical period.

You can easily lose five minutes making sense of it - and another 10 poking holes in it - but what of it? The preceding 100 minutes pass so pleasurably, the few false moves barely register - maybe the biggest con of all, but consider me happily snowed.

Ultimately, Cabin Fever isn't going to win any awards for originality - it's too busy twisting the conventions of the genre back in on themselves for that - but it does provide a jarring battery of scares (often depressing ones at that) that make it severed-head-and-shoulders above the spate of recent shockers.

A lovely, quietly thrilling thing.

The movie gets goofy from time to time -- as when payola arrives in a vintage "Clash of the Titans lunchbox -- but the filmmakers and cast have the style and the swagger to back it up.

The movie offers glimmers of truth about the aging process, but there is always the sense that Moss only wades knee-high into this river.

Yaar has enough heart to redeem its cruder moments, and it turns out to be quite a little charmer.

Ill-suited to casual viewing. But its challenges are worthwhile, and the gifted Gleize is one to watch.

A colorful mess, all style and substances and little else.

The best bit, however, is not even in the movie, but in the film’s end credits: an expletive-filled parody of We Are the World in which a host of has-beens croon about their halcyon days as child stars.

In the end, Meadows' film lacks the bite it needs to make us care about this oddball trio, endearing though they are.

Hopefully, someone will grab the torch and, if not run with it, at the very least track down and set fire to the highly combustible prints of this inexcusably inept yawn-a-thon - it's not so much bad as it is unfathomable.

Director David Zucker once upon a time made a very funny movie called Airplane!. Twenty years later, he’s made a movie only a 13-year-old horndog could appreciate, and for all the wrong reasons.

One of the Peking Opera-trained superstar's most mediocre films, rivaling last year’s God-awful "The Tuxedo" for sheer messy filmmaking and brazen acts of tedium... Abysmal.

Skateboarding is not a crime, but the subject of this exhaustive documentary... is very much a criminal.

Just plain unforgettable.

None of it is handled with any emotional believability or grace. Well-worn phrases and plot developments are repeated here as though the world had never heard of "Cinderella."

The first "Nightmare on Elm Street" was wickedly surreal, but the wacky dream sequences were offset by the sitcomlike, almost satirical flatness of ordinary suburban life; that was the really scary part. Freddy Vs. Jason is innocent of such nuances.

Remarkably fresh and exciting.

Though visually lovely and ambitious, never soars to the heights achieved by "Unforgiven." Costner’s film lacks the moral complexity that might earn it a solid berth in the canon of the American Western.

Eager to please, but it’s so lacking in real-world skate politics that it more resembles the chugging PG-13 mediocrity of Top 40 pop-punk-lite than the hard-core Black Flagisms of Peralta’s scathingly real doc.

Backed by a soundtrack of hip-hop and edited to within an inch of its life, Kennedy’s film has sleek gutter charm to spare.

There are flashes of wit and flair here, including two stylish sequences detailing the French obsession with food and scarves, but they are but brief respites from the film’s near-pathological drear.

The Princess Blade opens with one of the most note-perfect action sequences ever committed to film.