Retro in a refreshing sort of way, a return to those sci-fi films of the 1950s, filled with cheesy special effects and over-the-top acting, but with a gem of an idea at its core, and all done with just enough wit and inventiveness to keep audiences in the cheap seats happy.

There's little that's special about Underclassman, certainly nothing that Murphy and Eddie Griffin haven't done better in movies far funnier than this.

A thriller from the inside out, a romance from the outside in: that's the double-edged brilliance of The Constant Gardener.

Neither Grimm comes across as especially interesting to watch, and neither does anything in the movie offer much to get excited about.

Probably the most sweet-spirited sex comedy ever made. It's pretty funny, too.

Craven's films aren't showy, but that should never be held against them. In their streamlined construction and rock-solid simplicity lay their brilliance.

The most amazing fact about Supercross is that it took three people to write it. Two chimpanzees with a typewriter could have done just as good a job.

The soundtrack is guaranteed to send chills where they'll be most effective, and the ultimate resolution is a real shocker. While it doesn't explain away everything that's happened, it comes deliciously close.

True, John Ford and John Wayne did this stuff a lot better back in the day, but they're not around anymore. John Singleton is, and it's nice to see someone caring enough to keep the tradition alive.

There's an element of the nature film to Grizzly Man, and those passages are truly stunning, offering an up-close look at these magnificent animals.

Nolte brings this movie a piece of his heart, and grants us peace.

The Dukes of Hazzard may mark some sort of nadir when it comes to movies made from TV shows. It's an overlong, under-thought and numbingly one-dimensional extrapolation of a TV show whose pleasures were, at best, marginal. See it at your own peril.

It forces you to fill in the blanks, then refuses to judge whether you're right or wrong. It's almost like the audience writes its own script, and everybody appreciates his or her own work.

The film is the work of a visual genius who may have overextended his storytelling ability, but with fascinating results.

One happy surprise after another, even when the content is bittersweet or sad.

Think you know where this film is going? You do, and the best thing about Must Love Dogs is that it takes only 88 minutes to get there - short enough to enjoy the film's modest, well-worn pleasures, but not so long that you feel your time could have been put to better use elsewhere.

For those of us who wish that John Hughes' "The Breakfast Club" had kept the cheeky tone of Hughes' "Sixteen Candles," what ensues is the best Hughes farce that Hughes never made about adolescent snobbery and heartbreak as well as adult obtuseness.

If you like hard bodies and hot engines, if you want to feel like you're inside a cockpit or a video game with someone else working the joystick, you'll find decent escape from the summer doldrums in Stealth.

Sure, this movie is proudly profane, but it's also funny.

In Hustle & Flow, a star is born playing a star who's born.

Like "Mr. and Mrs. Smith," The Island is the kind of suicidal high-concept movie increasingly prevalent these days: a film so thoroughly pre-conceived and pre-sold that most audiences know more about what's going on than the characters do for half the movie.

The most grievous flaw in Richard Linklater's remake of Michael Ritchie's 1976 misfit juvenile baseball comedy The Bad News Bears is that it over-relies on Thornton's willingness to play an irredeemable degenerate.

A pastiche of sadistic horror-movie cliches with minor traces of wit but major overflows of perversity.

Brand's script is a puzzle without a satisfying solution. Even at its supposedly heartfelt conclusion, it's more ironic than emotional, more of an art thing than a suspense movie.

Burton's movie is more like Chris Columbus' first Harry Potter movie. Nearly everything that's supposed to be magical falls flat; nearly everything that's supposed to be mundane is magical.

Wedding Crashers is unashamedly profane and, for its first two acts, very funny, a classic guilty pleasure that revels in its basest elements.

Roos suffers from fallen archness in his interminable new movie Happy Endings. He wants to be mischievous and ambitious and "human," all at the same time. He ends up with delusions of tragicomic grandeur that leave an audience fed up and dissatisfied.

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