It's disconcerting to see Ferrell, a master of macho psychosis, adopt the stop-and-go dithering of Woody Allen-style neurosis.

Taken together, the sum of so many parts is too schizophrenic to be wholeheartedly embraced -- the movie is played for parody, but with a veneer of respectability that leaves the whole endeavor betwixt and between.

The low points in this movie aren't just catastrophic: they're bewildering.

You never get the sense that the director, Peter Segal, knows where the funny is, whether in his star or in the story.

The real strength of Return to Me is Hunt, who knows just when to retreat from the film's overriding sweetness and inject a cynical moment or two.

A visionary sort of horror movie should ponder three words: "Bram Stoker's Dracula."

The Bread, My Sweet is not for the cynical, who will doubtlessly find themselves gasping for air before the film's over and demanding a reality check of anyone who actually likes it. Their loss.

The film's impact and poignancy are undeniable.

In a cinematic landscape where truly original ideas are rarer than floating food, recklessness like this deserves to be appreciated. Not understood, but appreciated.

Tear-inducing feel-gooder that only a curmudgeon could find fault with.

The desert is clean in Gerry, but it's also empty.

This film isn't the most awful comedy of the year (that would be Bride Wars or New in Town), but it may have the grossest antihero.

Rock Star neither touches a raw nerve nor garners any resonance as a period piece. You'd be better off renting "This is Spinal Tap."

Jerry Seinfeld's foray into feature animation will delight young kids and leave their elders alternately amused and bemused.

Whatever spark the newer Precinct 13 has comes from its supporting players.

A mangy-looking mongrel with a lot of familiar markings and a little more on the ball than you'd expect at first glance.

Stars Juliette Binoche and Jean Reno give Jet Lag everything they've got. Too bad the movie doesn't better reward their effort.

What the film needs is more heart, humor and maybe some honest-to-goodness humility, not energy. And unfortunately, that's about all Gooding seems able to bring to it.

To their credit, director Nick Cassavetes and screenwriter Jeremy Leven heighten the melodrama and seize on the most distinctive strokes of Nicholas Sparks' bland best seller.

Kids will get antsy, wondering why their favorite characters disappear for long stretches of the film, while adults will wonder just when this scattershot approach to storytelling will congeal into something resembling coherence.

Alpha Dog may well go down as the most dispiriting film of 2007.

Poses as the story of a wild, eccentric love match but is really about a match made in limbo.

Ella Enchanted is one cute movie.

Without restraint or subtlety, but with a lot of heart and energy, this movie tells a real-life tall tale.

Bright semi-adult entertainment.

It's seductive in its buildup but overall as subtle and, alas, as humorless as a hatchet to the brain.

With Almodovar, things tend to happen fast, and "Kika" is all speed and no depth.

Sex and the City, as a film, is a testament to bad faith. It wants its characters to eat their wedding cake and have it, too.

It aims for outlandish and athletic love lyrics and instead achieves all the potency of a makeshift nonsense song banged out on a toy lyre.

Looking for comedy in Albert Brooks' Looking for Comedy In the Muslim World is a fool's errand. There's hardly any there.

Features lots of cool dialogue but doesn't provide much of a movie in which to showcase it.

The timing couldn't be better for a thriller that focuses on assassination, international war scandals and U.S. agencies of enormous influence and wildly varying competence.

A plot that seems stretched for the big screen.

Whenever I see this film, Pryor's look of what-am-I-doing-here? panic echoes my feelings exactly.

For at least two-thirds of its length, all elements combine for a taut thriller, a Hitchcockian exercise in suspense pitting human frailty - can our minds be trusted? - against human resourcefulness.

Watching Guy Ritchie's British-underworld farce, RocknRolla, is like being compelled to pay attention to a nonstop rock station you normally use as background while you're doing chores. The words are catchy and the beat keeps you awake, though all of it quickly fades.

A gritty, profane and profoundly disturbing look at the American drug culture.

But the movie really just sort of peters out rather than reaching a sublime point. In "Groundhog Day," there was an exquisite moment where the wonderfully horrid Bill Murray actually regained contact with his humanity and rejoined his species. No such thing occurs in "Multiplicity"; the movie just staggers toward a point where it's gone on long enough to do everybody the favor of ending it. Send out the writers. [17 July 1996]

The movie is a premise in search of a comedy. Rather than flesh it out, the filmmakers put familiar glad rags on the skull and bones.

This new version may be closer to the Cole Porter biography, but it's hardly any more true to life. There is no life in this movie. It's a brittle contraption of a biopic.

The whole thing is too preciously conceived. [05 Feb 1993]

Based on Palindromes, it's easy to see what Solondz is railing against but almost impossible to tell what he's railing for.

Zeffirelli has managed to make Shakespeare's greatest and most modern play one-dimensional. [13 Jan 1991]

The result is a movie that inspires without pontificating and plays on the heartstrings without pounding on them incessantly.

Sorry, Phantom, but the purple suit has got to go. No amount of buff bod can make an audience take a superhero in bright purple seriously...And while we're at it, that script has got to go, too. Screenwriter Jeffrey Boam apparently studied the first two "Indiana Jones" movies so thoroughly -- so that he could write "Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade" -- that he's carried many of the motifs to "The Phantom." The result is not breathtaking excitement, but rather a stunning lack of originality. [7 June 1996]

By contrast, the most amusing character is the ever-affable John Mahoney as the patriarch of the wayward Fitzpatrick clan. He gives consistently terrible advice, which his sons follow, which messes up their messy lives even more. I like that in a father.

Keeps its eye on the big picture even when focusing on the small scene.

A cautionary tale that's harrowing, heartbreaking and -- especially given the times, when Americans seem all-too-ready to once again judge people as a threat solely by their appearance -- disturbingly resonant.

In the movie, the unconverted will hold their ears as the banal tunes blare out in multichannel sound. And they'll wince as the camera closes in on every heart-tugging moment.

Too bad it shortchanges the music and fails to provide much evidence for Wilson's appeal.

A Goofy Movie is filled with rock sequences that aren't hard enough to please real teen-agers but are too hard to attract any grown-ups. The music sounds like it was composed by Marie Osmond on PCP. [07 Apr 1995]

This movie has its own emotional sorcery. In a raw, humorous way, it grasps how hope and desperation spur magical thinking and, sometimes, real magic.

Luhrmann steals good ideas, fair ideas and terrible ideas - anything that once moved him when he was a little boy. He's turned Australia into a more-than-you-can-eat buffet of colorful kitsch.

This turgid melodrama fast-breaks away from the heart of its own subject.

Eventually becomes cliched, predictable and crude. And that's a real sin.

Girls Will Be Girls thinks watching outrageous people acting outrageously is its own reward. It isn't.

The residents of Beauty Shop never quite gel. Instead of camaraderie, the feeling is one of bare tolerance.

The second movie, Dead Man's Chest, is everything you feared the first would be: a theme-park spectacle lasting 2 1/2 hours.

As a tasteful take on a minor novel, Metroland is genteel enough, but it lacks the urgency and scope of a must-see movie. [07 May 1999]

Even at its most enjoyable, Eight Legged Freaks is disappointing -- it grazes your funny bone instead of tickling it like crazy.

Wilson, who has never made the film in which he convincingly played sincere, turns out to be a wise choice to play John Grogan.

Except for the two stars, not much is believable in the movie. The ice skating sequences are clearly hampered by Sweeney's lack of skill, and it's crushingly obvious when a skating double has slipped into the picture. He's the guy who never looks at the camera.

The Guardian is that rarest of cinematic commodities: an action movie displaying brains and heart and the opportunity for its stars to do something more than keep the narrative flowing between explosions.

Ben Affleck and Gwyneth Paltrow are so immensely appealing, and their chemistry together is so unforced, that their presence alone makes a movie worth seeing. Thankfully, Bounce has even more going for it.

On the plus side, there's plenty of dry Canadian wit, a handful of songs and only occasional bits of nudity.

Irresistible, campy fun.

Redacted is a bristling act of protest that obliterates a target it isn't aiming for.

Tomorrow Never Dies is convincing proof that there's life yet in fiction's most famous cold warrior. In fact, because the film shifts the focus from Evil Empires to crazed terrorists, it's possible to walk away with a double good feeling: Not only does good triumph over evil, but countries of differing ideologies are able to work together.

Other than portraying Mary as an overwhelmed teenager, mystified that God has chosen her to be the mother of his child, it doesn't offer anything that hasn't been playing out in grade-school pageants for decades.

With Nicholson and Sandler aboard, we want to love it madly. But instead of a tickle, this big-name comedy just grates.

Even a superstar needs to surround himself with better material than this.

The film is hapless. The gap between the moviemakers' ambition and their wit is dizzying. It's as if they thought they were filming The Importance of Being Unimportant.

The problem with Allen's latest, The Curse of the Jade Scorpion, is "Not enough Double Indemnity."

No matter how good-natured, The Holiday ends up a glutted farce.

As a filmmaker, Brewer doesn't just yank your chain: He forges a bond with his characters and his audience that produces ecstasy and healing.

So witless it wins most of its laughs when Czech-speaking characters spout obscenities that get translated into English subtitles.

A delightful and exuberant bit of romantic comedy and, as a bonus, it breathes new life into a pair of '70s musical chestnuts long off our culture's radar screens.

Almost sinks under the weight of too many red herrings, but is rescued by a skewed sense of reality and pervasive sense of dread that should keep audiences from dwelling on them.

Watching The Gospel of John is like listening to a religious audiotape while working a picture flip-book of the Bible.

It's sad that with everything it has going for it, this movie plays like a tall tale -- something too good to be true.

If you haven't had enough of Tom Hanks-Meg Ryan weepies like "Sleepless in Seattle" (1993) and "You've Got Mail" (1998), The Lake House gives us Mopey in Chicago and You've Got Snail Mail.

Spirit lacks that essential emotional resonance, and suffers because of it.

Doesn't break any ground -- but it looks good in a tight sweater.

All that artistry is surrounded by a hackish, paint-by-numbers storyline that makes the time between dance numbers seem endless.

It's unfortunate that none of the principal actors is able to convey the passion the characters are supposed to have for each other.

Maybe the best way to see Serendipity is to take a cue from the characters and wait a few years.

Gracie is painfully earnest, which might be OK were it not also painfully trite, painfully cliched and painfully formulaic.

This fake-feminist thriller hides its sadism under a show of sympathy for its beleaguered heroine.

From the moment he enters the picture, Baldwin looks good and sick of the whole scene. Unless you're in the mood for dysfunctional-family vaudeville, it won't take long for you to catch up with him.

Latifah's performance and the film's gentle heart should prove enough to win over even the most churlish.

Enough flair and conviction to keep the movie buoyant even when its plot is abrupt and its emotionality conventional.

Entertaining, thrilling and honestly sentimental, it's an equal-opportunity crowd-pleaser.

This movie doesn't have a mean bone in its body; the problem is, it doesn't have any bone in its body.

Even Washington's welcome presence is not enough to save "Fallen," yet another spiritual allegory from Hollywood dealing with God, Satan and the presence of angels. [16 Jan 1998]

Cinema has once again proven its ability to incorporate every other mass-media art form. Director Zack Snyder and his computer wizards have made the best example yet of the movie-as-comic-book.

May not make adults feel as if they're 10 again, but it will awaken their memories of Saturday matinees that upped children's adrenaline without blinding them with Day-Glo colors or insulting their intelligence.

A kinetically charged gridiron drama that is enormous fun to watch.

The film is mostly forced and heavyhanded. Forman first thought of using Goya to tell a story about the Inquisition several decades ago. Yet this movie appears to be as much about American behavior post-Sept. 11 as it is about 18th-century Spain or the Communist Czechoslovakia of Forman's youth.