The Farrellys have always danced along the tightrope between funny-disgusting and just plain gross in "There's Something About Mary" and "Shallow Hal." If the ratio was about 50-50 at the best of times, it's now 30-70 in favor of crassness.

There are usually good reasons why a movie gets shelved for more than a year, however well-acted it may be and however well-meaning its message. Many are on view in Penelope.

If you're going to serve up a half-baked idea, you might as well have Sigourney Weaver do the cooking.

A slow, grim, atmospheric but virtually plotless look at a blank-faced loner who is obsessed with his work, has no friends except for one woman inexplicably attached to him, and ends up making those around him miserable.

I couldn’t tell whether the film was intended to be a comedy; as it became more and more improbable, both predictable and ludicrous at once, I heard audience members chortle again and again.

Confidence is "The Sting" without period appeal, humor, the charisma of Robert Redford or Paul Newman and the quietly seething villainy of Robert Shaw.

By the way, the other thing that keeps Transamerica from being a mainstream movie is its obsession with penises: showing them, talking about them, placing us in bathrooms and trailers when they're in use.

Someone Like You is from Hollywood's bottomless box of cliches.

A movie for people fascinated by toilets and Sabbath.

Long, utterly predictable and always bland.

So Depp summons every type of behavior Burton requires: heroism, zaniness, longing, wit, ferocity, sexuality, icy resolve. Had they stuck to one or two of these, we might have had a terrific film.

The whole thing seems to have been faked up for our amusement, like a circus freak show.

Beyond the philosophizing, Mean Girls is a standard collection of low comic jokes.

They've never been farther into outer space than in The Big Lebowski. Fans (myself included) may cackle at absurd situations and in-jokes. But director Joel and producer Ethan, who write together, have never made so much clamorous ado about nothing. [6 March 1998, p.7E]

The team of four writers supplies one surprise, and you’ll wait 90 minutes to see it. Before and afterward, stereotypical genre characters get trotted out.

The final failure comes in a climax that defies science, good taste and common sense.

The reason to see the movie is Field.

The biggest irony of this project is that it was made by a company that calls itself Original Film but has produced perhaps the least original movie of the year so far.

The Bronze is one of those faux-naughty comedies that simply doesn’t have the courage of its lack of convictions.

There is indeed a murder - two of them, in fact - and the movie proceeds strictly by the numbers laid down long ago in some by-the-book Hollywood writing class.

It's clumsy revisionism. As storytelling, its simplistic characters and ludicrous situations would embarrass a ninth-grader shooting a short film on a digital phone. Not one of its alleged revelations has the power to surprise.

The movie veers from cleverness to crass stupidity. You can never tell whether the next scene will induce loud laughter or contempt; for me, Dodgeball divided right down the middle.

A safe same-sex movie the family can embrace. At heart, it's a Britcom: a British situation comedy with superficial characters, mildly naughty humor and a familiarity that may make even homophobes comfy.

Like the star's acting, the movie is bland, full of good intentions and generally as stiff as a fireplace poker.

The special effects, with one painful exception, hold up beautifully. But the people have no personalities, the story is unconvincing, and the whole movie is as shallow as the puddle left on a flat roof by a 20-minute shower.

Eventually, though, the movie turns into a "Touched By An Angel" knockoff that dares us not to reach for a hankie while we succumb to its comforting message.

So despite fine acting and swift pacing and well-managed effects, it falls apart.

Outdated before it opened today.

Goodman exudes doltish kindness, Dillon a hapless gentleness, Reiser a vulgar buoyancy. Douglas turns in the best performance.

Partly a travelogue for the Greek islands, partly a simplistic love story, and generally a rehash of the Oscar-winning "Mediterraneo," as if we needed even the first one.

King Kong, a labor of love that's visually stunning and moving in its best moments, is also bloated, shallow, clunky, full of illogical scenes and at least an hour too long.

A typical shallow caper film. Just assume the truth is the exact opposite of what's happening.

Crash. Kick. Stab. Punch. Talk (briefly). Smash. Chase. Screech. Shoot. Mumble. That's the wearying pattern of Safe House. Had "think" been an action verb, the movie might have risen above the knee-jerk excitement of the second-tier, "Bourne"-style spy thriller. But it never does.

Most of the time the movie limps amiably toward its feeble conclusion.

Somewhere inside "School" lurks a heartwarming or hilarious movie, perhaps both.

Good acting from the three principals – four, if we count Max Thieriot as the son – keeps this leaky craft afloat for quite a while.

(The filmmaker) never does achieve the breakthrough with her father that she and we hoped for.

The yarn itself is a winning one.

By refusing to take anything seriously (including himself), Shatner lifts the movie to a truly funny level of absurdity. Soon, though, it goes back to being the type of buddy picture Hollywood stamps out like stale cookies.

These pros lift this button-pushing blob of faux folksiness to a higher plane than it deserves.

This installment, which is subtitled "Give Us Your Money, Sheep," really isn't a Pirates of the Caribbean movie at all.

Mature folks may wonder why a simple and simply beautiful story from their youth has been buried under layers of emotion Woody Allen's psychiatrist might want to pick over.

Reason to make Shrek the Third: Probable earnings of $400 million worldwide. Reasons not to make Shrek the Third: Played-out characters. Bland villain. Novice directors. Slipshod plotting. No compelling story or emotional depth.

However good DiCaprio may be, everything else feels overblown.

Flaccid remake of a tough 1966 original.

There's plenty to offend Christians and non-Christians in Saved! but little to trouble either: The movie vanishes in memory like morning mist expelled by the first stiff breeze.

The Rock isn't always comfortable delivering dialogue. He's handsome, physically sculpted and farther along dramatically than Arnold Schwarzenegger in "Conan the Barbarian," but he's still learning the simple acting skills an action hero needs.

The dangers in the lives of these Catholic teens are self-made; they spring from small-town boredom and lead to a conclusion that's meant to be emotionally crushing but is only slightly affecting.

The filmmakers try to make us sympathize with Barney by surrounding him with even more annoying types.

Peter Berg directs the action sequences cleverly at first. Then he starts to behave as though a hornet flew down his pants at the instant he aimed the camera. He's not much of a dialogue director, but there's not much dialogue.

For all the satisfying details in the script, the big picture remains hopelessly and intentionally trite.

The cancer of dishonesty begins to grow half an hour into the film, and it riddles the picture by the end.

The filmmakers would have been better advised to stick with the Zeroes and spend less time making up heroes.

The actors were mostly nondescript, sometimes noticeably clumsy. Stunt coordinator Dion Lam brought a bit of freshness to the martial arts choreography, but the rest of the film was as stale as a week-old carp on a fish vendor's pushcart.

Dahl has directed half a dozen sardonic noir movies, dating back to "Kill Me Again" in 1989, so he should have been the ideal choice for this material. But even he can't make chicken salad from a pile of beaks, bones and claws.

It's a run-of-the-mill action film that falls short of the 1976 original - and, for that matter, the 1959 western "Rio Bravo," which inspired the first film. The characters run out of energy and personality long before they run out of bullets.

When George Lucas last pulled off an original idea for a feature film, Bill Clinton was still thought of by many voters as overweight and chaste.

Breakfast on Pluto, like its cross-dressing heroine, is appealing yet irritating, fun company at times but just as often a bore, occasionally quite touching yet frequently fey and self-indulgent.

Any of the key relationships would have been grist enough for one movie's mill, but "Feast" crams them all together.

A question: If you hire actresses from England, Kansas, Ireland and Michigan, shouldn't someone teach them all to do believable Southern accents -- and remind them to keep doing those accents as the film goes on?

It can devote itself entirely to bodily functions or, having established its grossness quotient, take the high road toward satire like its 2004 predecessor, "Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle." It fails mainly because it does neither.

It's hampered further by a piece of star miscasting unmatched in recent memory: Julia Roberts' archly evil queen remains as jaw-droppingly dull as her costumes are jaw-droppingly gaudy.

Folks wanting to hear the usual New Testament message will be pleased; others may feel that the tension dissolves in homilies and wish the main character weren't led around by a blonde-haired little angel in a white dress.

What does it say about a picture when the highest praise must go to impressive scenery?

The whole thing's as phony as a funeral oration from a pastor who never knew the deceased.

Thornton and Heder perform at about half their maximum wattage, which isn't enough to power the inert script.

A tale that ought to dispel the clouds of mystery surrounding life gathers them into impenetrable fog.

Unlike David Foster Wallace in “End of the Tour,” a masterful look at depression, Stone’s just a self-centered, unaware bore. He doesn’t merit attention from the kindly, cheerful, anxious Lisa – or from us.

The movie gives away its shifty-eyed villain almost immediately. What it doesn't give away is why he betrayed his trust, who wants the president dead or what they hope to gain by killing him.

The special effects look like a high school science project: The giants are clearly rear projections behind the real actors, and that snake is as rubbery as a garden hose.

That’s the problem with Winter’s Tale, which tries to cram too many conflicting stories into one space and ends up defying us to believe any. Call it magic unrealism, a well-intentioned but clunky genre.

The surprising thing about Michael Moore's polemic is not one-sidedness, which was a given: It's his failure to find devastating new weapons of mass destruction to aim at Bush's head. The smoking guns he holds up often fire blanks, and the ones that don't are mostly derringers.

Sean Bean makes a positive impression as the caring but puzzled captain of the flight, though Peter Sarsgaard flies at half-mast as a clumsy air marshal.

Emotions too often get ladled unconvincingly.

The lead actors come from America, Ireland, Iceland, England and South Africa. Who decided they should attempt Russian accents? Neeson forgets his, Ford wavers in and out, and real Russians in the cast make the others sound inauthentic.

Superbad simply isn't. It isn't super, as it intersperses crudely funny gags with an equal number of dry spots. It isn't ever truly bad, because even the lame segments pass quickly.

Some movies need a suspension of disbelief. Simone requires a suspension bridge. And as fast as you try to build it, the movie keeps tearing it down.

Flawless never begins to live up to its title.

The picture isn't nearly enough on any level: not scary, not suspenseful, not complex, not atmospheric.

Is this just silly filmmaking, or have Ivory and Jhabvala succumbed to the Francophobia that gave us "freedom fries" in the congressional cafeteria?

After the box-office failures of "The Emperor's New Groove" and "Treasure Planet," I wonder whether Brother Bear might not be the last traditional bit of Disney animation for a while.

The dialogue includes double entendres that are rather clever, if you're mentally at the age of 11.

The story introduces a mystery halfway through to keep the plot from running out of steam, but neither its set-up nor its resolution provide much drama.

This isn't a cheerful movie. But director Alejandro Gonzalez Iñarritu and writer Guillermo Arriaga tell these stories with authority and verve, making 2½ hours zip by.

Before The Astronaut Farmer, I'd have said such dumbed-down filmmaking was beneath the Polish brothers. But if their dream is to ride Hollywood's gravy train once, I suppose I'll have to respect it.

His (Spielberg) The Adventures of Tintin jettisons character, back story, plot, depth and emotional ties to deliver 100 minutes of beautifully shot mayhem. It's handsome, hectic, heartless and hollow, a shiny Christmas box with nothing but glitter inside.

Hints heavily at its One Big Secret from the get-go, then waits for you to figure it out miles ahead of the not-too-bright characters.

Four Brothers immediately joins the Good Idea, Bad Execution club. Hardly anyone seems to care about its believability - not director John Singleton, writers David Elliott and Paul Lovett or some lackadaisical actors.

Cinematographer Christopher Doyle suffuses the film with color, fire and smoke. But the more lively his images become, the more faded the characters seem.

It's a self-blunting satire, a toothless attack on fashionistas that twists around tortuously and ends up biting (well, gumming) its own tail.

Watching this comedy is like going out with an attractive blind date who runs out of conversation after a quarter of an hour.

If you want the cold, honest truth about "Space Jam," prepare yourself for the shock: It's average. It's broadly funny in spots, but without any edge. It'll make kids giggle, but it makes a minuscule effort to appeal to adults. Special effects are sometimes imaginative, sometimes just the same explosions and pratfalls Warners Bros. has done for half a century. [15 Nov 1996, p.1E]

Except for a surreal moment when Fat Albert meets the real Bill Cosby, who tells his cartoon creation he must go back into the television, nothing inventive occurs.

By the pseudo-shocking end, we're half-entertained by the dedicated cast and half-lulled to sleep by the dull, overfamiliar sounds they make.

Cuba Gooding Jr. lands on his behind more often than a one-legged figure skater, and the preschooler next to me giggled every time.

Andie MacDowell bursts out of her good-girl cocoon in Crush to become a bright, bad butterfly: drinking, smoking, flirting with Ecstasy, having moaning sex on a tombstone just minutes after the funeral of a friend.

All performances remain irrelevant in the face of such expensive, explosive combat and destruction, and there the film excels: You will feel blown back into your seat, starting 40 seconds into the story.

In the end, coincidence undoes Criminal.