Epps emerges mostly unscathed, and Dutton gives an excellent performance; he's as able before the camera as he is inept behind it.

The worst horror sequel of this or many another summer.

Proves two things irrefutably. First, Fishburne doesn't get enough work that tests his acting abilities… Second, Luke's breakout performance in "Fisher" was no fluke.

Arnold Schwarzenegger, move over: Your dramatic replacement has arrived.

It's hard to fault a script that keeps finding new dilemmas for characters and rewards attentive viewers with in-jokes.

What starts as a cute premise crashes faster than a skateboard with an oak branch shoved between its wheels.

Diary rather sloppily blends melodrama and spiritual uplift with crass comedy, sometimes in the same scene.

Writer Simon Fuchs begins with a reasonable idea – we’re all likely to be curious about the origins of Peter Pan – and does unreasonable things ever after.

I also wondered how the movie got the title Cradle 2 the Grave. Nobody used the phrase; it didn't apply to any characters; it didn't even turn up in a song. Maybe the filmmakers were saving "Rotten 2 the Core" for the sequel.

This isn't nitpicking. Every bit of the tale is as full of holes as a wool sweater at a moth convention, and Shyamalan telegraphs each potential surprise.

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.

The yarn itself is a winning one.

Formulaic, yes. Settled with as many reconciliations and promises of happiness as “A Christmas Carol,” absolutely. But a familiar pleasure, nonetheless.

Williamson deals mostly in cliches, as if high schoolers weren't smart enough to appreciate anything subtler.

This giddy summer extravaganza does deliver aerial thrills with eye-dazzling visuals and ear-smacking (though beautifully designed) sound.

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.

Director Doug Liman and a trio of writers eventually forget the rules they set up and hurl combatants to places they could never have seen or even known about: Who'd willingly project himself into the middle of a Chechnyan war zone?

I took a 12-year-old along to Scooby Doo just in case I didn't get it. Our verdict: one paw up, one paw down.

Far be it from me to spoil the secret, but I will say this: The last reel should've been sent straight to the city dump.

Interesting and idiotic elements almost exactly balance each other.

Self-respecting filmgoers will find this a "Walk" to dismember.

Universal Studios has unloaded its entire monster catalog in this movie, which is aimed at people with the attention span of a kindergartner. Shreds of coherence and character have been sacrificed to fangs and fisticuffs at every chance.

It starts as enjoyable B-movie pulp, degenerates to camp, then turns into laughable lunacy.

Kids might get a charge out of the mayhem. I got the vapors.

The dialogue in Craig Mazin’s script crackles at its best, and the supporting characters (led by Robert Patrick as a grizzled skip chaser) have bizarrely funny moments.

It falls back on straightforward horror tactics, executed competently but without flair. It takes liberties with the second half of the book, including one big change that will leave fans of the novel growling with disbelief and disapproval.

Writer-director Reverge Anselmo has created a movie of ineptness so perfect and unified as to boggle the mind.

If we can’t believe these characters could really be friends, we can live for 101 minutes in a world where they do.

Errors in logic will delight the attentive.

Trying to make sense of this shaggy dog story is like climbing a mountain with glass-smooth sides and quarter-inch toeholds.

Puts a fun, frothy spin on the 1960s TV show before sinking back into the mundane.

Beach blends all the performing styles smoothly: LL's blithe coolness, Blalock's sultry ambiguity, Liotta's slow-boiling intensity, Ejiofor's dapper amiability, Phifer's brooding intensity.

Ghosts finishes well, and the familiar McConaughey heel-grows-a-heart story arc is engaging.

Bullock good, but King reigns in movie sequel.

It's neither dull nor stimulating, neither off-putting nor engaging.

It's the poster child for bad taste, not to mention bad construction.

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.

We don't need a discussion of plot in a review of a movie made from a video game, do we? Nor do we care whether the characters are complicated (no), the acting is sophisticated (no), the direction is competent (no) or the camerawork is clever (no).

Could pass for any serial killer movie except for some pertinent philosophizing about the nature of evil and the operations of the soul.

I do have one overpowering Y2K fear: that Hollywood will keep belching out movies as excruciatingly dull, brutal, mindless and overlong as End of Days.

When the film stumbles to its last and silliest conclusion, you realize much of the plot line was unnecessary -- or couldn't have happened at all!

Offers an amusing break to the undemanding.

Watching this is like sitting by a pinsetter at a bowling alley. That's too bad, because the picture had potential.

A mind-numbing carnival of violence.

I realize fantasy-based action movies aren't supposed to be as complex as William Gibson's novels. But do they have to be this simple-minded?

It's not only an ultraviolent, ludicrously inconsistent rip-off of Bradbury's idea, but it poisons the well for future efforts.

Harden and Tierney waste performances of moderate complexity, Baranski adds her usual brand of silky sarcasm and Rip Torn provides a welcome presence as Cole's jolly campaign manager.

If you're the kind of person who goes to the movies primarily to watch faces melt to pulp, you won't be disappointed.

Unimaginative.

As in most cheap futuristic movies, everything is dark or illuminated by a drab bluish glow. The buildings look grubbily similar to each other, so every location has to be identified onscreen. Of course, that saves the audience the trouble of paying attention.

How bad, really, could it be? I couldn't have guessed.

In its design, at least, Mindhunters"surpasses all other Christie knockoffs.

M. Night Shyamalan has directed movies that are surprising, hokey, suspenseful, sentimental, clever, touching or cheesy. But until After Earth, he hadn’t made any that are dull from end to end.

Writers Pamela Falk and Michael Ellis aim for the soufflé-style comedy audiences ate up greedily 40 years ago, but the film falls flat.

Lawrence plus latex equals laughs.

Sinks or swims with the actors. Gallner makes a very convincing boy-about-to-die; Madsen is his properly stricken mom; and Donovan, an under-used leading man, plays the stressed, guilt-ridden dad well.

There's nothing wrong with Simpson's performance that a head transplant wouldn't cure, and the grinning Reynolds looks Botoxed into immobility.

Directed by William "When's the next chase scene?" Friedkin, acted by comatose David Caruso and monotonous Linda Fiorentino and Chazz Palminteri, Jade is more like "Jaded." [13 Oct 1995, p.11F]

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

Messing may simply be one of those actresses who's the right size for TV and the wrong size for the big screen.

A punch-drunk lightweight. Inside the ring, it lands some forceful punches. Outside the ring, it stumbles around, swinging wildly at nothing, until it collapses.

About 45 minutes into Swordfish, the picture degenerates permanently from drivel to sleaze (only a short drop).

Wilson brings low-wattage amiability to his part, as always. Hudson's mismatched with him but tries to set him afire.

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

It relies on short bursts of Lawrence's zaniness, punctuated by an occasional joke about stinking feet or vile breath. For his admirers, that will be plenty.

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.

The best way to sit through Max Payne is by using minimal brain.

It honors the tone of that wonderful comedy while setting it in present-day New York City.

Better than you might expect, if you didn't expect it to be any good.

The movie briefly suggests Viola is an incestuous psychotic.

It's cheerful nonsense from blithe beginning to obvious end.

Has any movie this millennium had less reason to exist than First Daughter?

Creature is refreshingly and intentionally silly, in an era when horror has devolved mostly into torture porn and high-tech, computer-generated assaults on our senses.

Much of the movie’s charm comes from seeing middle-aged women in roles that usually go to middle-aged men. (Vergara is 42; Witherspoon will be 40 next March.) Hot Pursuit isn’t funnier than most male outings in the cop-witness genre – the 1988 “Midnight Run” remains the best of those – but its casting makes it fresher than many.

I'm afraid it just stinks.

Randolph and Parker play fair with us, setting up a motive early and clearly. Yet whether you buy the motive or find it far-fetched, it almost immediately tells you who's responsible for the death.

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.

Though the film sat in drydock for a year, partly so technicians could convert it to 3-D, it looks as dull as it sounds.

The writers supply character traits that seem to point toward a pay-off but never reach one. People all end up as tight-lipped, indistinguishable automatons who plummet 50 feet down jagged rocks with scarcely a scratch.

Director Rob Cohen shoots believable action sequences, too. Nobody jumps the gap between skyscrapers or falls 40 feet, then gets up and runs away.

As dry as a high school history book, solemn as a funeral service, humorless as a Politburo meeting, bloated as a waterlogged corpse and unbalanced as a bout between a debutante and a sumo wrestler.

What a riveting movie The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen might have been! And what a rickety mess it turned out to be when the people responsible lost faith in the origin of the material!

Abbott, Petroni and director Michael Rymer do exploit the visual and aural cliches of vampire movies from the last 20 years: The creatures wear tattoos, shave their heads, listen to blistering rock and dress in black leather. For a band of societal outsiders, they're pathetically conformist.

It's yet another warm, fuzzy, New-Age tale that cozies us into believing the grave doesn't mean oblivion.

It's choppy and cheap-looking, and it has dead spots like the Sahara, but it also has a surprising number of genuinely funny bits, most of them slapsticky and gleefully rude.

The film works best as an extended "Twilight Zone" episode.

Totally underwhelming.

Sometimes seems longer than a rainy Super Bowl.

You won't see a single joke here you haven't encountered before, all in funnier forms.

Director Richard Donner finds a few startling images for bloody battle scenes, but awful dialogue prevents the actors from giving performances of any depth.

Whenever the tires stop screeching and the fenders slamming, the story lands in a brutal pile-up of cliches.

The Observer won't let me get stoned before a review, so I'll never know what How High would be like after a big fat blunt. Without one, it's sloppy, broadly funny in spots and chaotic.

Designed to appeal to people who thought "She's All That" was too mentally demanding.

Babbit clumsily underlines emotional moods.

Of COURSE it's bad. It was always going to be. But it's worse than necessary.

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

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

Repeated lapses in continuity and common sense.