The result is two-tiered humor, broad enough to appeal to anybody but overlaid with jokes that will be funnier if you know the show.

It plucks ceaselessly at our heartstrings to play a sad song indeed.

The film's an irresistible time capsule of that Camelot summer, blending girrrrrl power, social consciousness and faux-'60s pop with the fizz of a soda jerk whipping up a root beer float.

Plays like some uninformed seventh-grader's view of gay men.

No matter what character Don Cheadle has played in his 23-year career, he's always seemed to be holding something back...Until Talk to Me.

Given a choice between this and the navel-gazing of the novel, I'll take the short ride on a fast machine.

Quirkiness is as essential to a small indie film as beef stock to French onion soup. But if you don't have enough of any other ingredient, you end up with a watery, barely edible broth.

Christian Bale loves to suffer on-screen. Werner Herzog loves to make people suffer on-screen. Rescue Dawn is proof they were made for each other.

The energy never lets up, and two committed, unfussy leading actors are an improvement over other summer flicks.

Director Ken Kwapis uses those monster infants perfectly, down to a funny final outtake.

The film contains the usual Moore plusses and minuses, now familiar to anyone who's watched even one of his films.

The most difficult task in Pixar's 20-year history: to make an un-Mickey-like rodent appealing enough to admire.

It paints its world in pastels, but the subject cries out for vivid colors.

When the movie becomes pure fantasy, it's impossible to swallow. (No landlord rents an apartment to a 12-year-old with no adult in sight.)

I can safely say I've never seen anything as ridiculous as Live Free or Die Hard. I'm not saying my 10-year-old self didn't enjoy a lot of it.

Wanda Sykes and John Michael Higgins have energy as Evan's aides, and Jonah Hill (hot off "Knocked Up") gets laughs as a sycophantic researcher, but Graham has no chance to show what she can do.

The title comes from the memoir by Mariane Pearl, wife of kidnapped Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl. It applies equally to Winterbottom, who has made the rarest movie among this summer's releases: a taut police procedural that examines all sides of an issue and forces us to re-think our own.

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.

When will the people who adapt comic books into films realize that less can be so much more?

It's marginally possible that Nancy Drew is spoofing high school adventure movies, and I almost hope so. Otherwise, it's unwatchable on every level.

Has its own peculiar, loose-knit kind of charm.

Most of the movie feels like a loose, sometimes improvised lark among friends.

Bekmambetov introduces too many elements, losing interest in them or using them inadequately.

I won't be able to talk anybody into or out of the Pirates of the Caribbean experience now, so I'll simply offer sage advice: Hit the bathroom just before it starts. To miss any five-minute chunk of this densely plotted trilogy-capper will leave you confused.

Historians at Ellis Island estimate nearly half of all Americans had at least one ancestor pass through there between 1892 and 1954.

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.

Deals with emotional concerns for half an hour. Then it turns into a mindless bloodfest, where it's impossible to care which characters end on the zombie gore-gasbord.

Hector Elizondo, who has appeared in all 15 of Marshall's features, turns up as a Basque rancher and adds a bit of sparkle. I just wish Marshall's good luck charm was not a 70-year-old actor but a fresh, honest screenplay.

Long, utterly predictable and always bland.

A director needs to know how to pace the tale, where to place the camera, how to draw out a shy actor or get out of the way of a strong one. Those skills are rarer than you'd think. Sarah Polley, who never wrote or directed a feature film before Away From Her, has them all.

If the longest and beefiest "Spider-Man" movie to date were a baseball player, it would be tested tomorrow for steroids. That won't stop "S-M 3" from hitting a home run at the box-office, where fans will roar.

If you see Hot Fuzz, you'll never again watch a Michael Bay film without howling with disrespectful laughter.

Until Year of the Dog, I've never seen a movie where someone obsessed over a puppy.

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.

Cool. Stupid. Juiced-up. Feeble. Stripped-down. Self-indulgent. Clever. Sophomoric.

Wheeler and director Lasse Hallstrom don't want us to take anything too seriously.

The filmmakers' ineptitude is staggering.

The storytelling is inept and illogical.

Call it "Talladega Ice," and you can be nearly certain whether or not you want to see it.

Exactly the right length. That sounds like faint praise, but isn't it rare? Many movies drag past the points where they should stop; others end abruptly, leaving you to wonder at things unexplained or unconcluded.

Most of Meet the Robinsons plays like a movie made by ADD adults for ADD children.

Mikkelsen, like Jimmy Stewart, projects emotions with a slight twitch of a lip or narrowing of an eye. His long face - often handsome, sometimes plain, always cryptic - yields secrets slowly; you have to watch an entire film to know how his character feels and how you feel about him.

An intermittently preposterous, drawn-out but sometimes entertaining story about an unstoppable ex-Marine.

It's about black athletes, and they swim. It's as reassuringly uplifting as its predecessors, but the African-American and aquatic elements set it pleasantly apart.

Sandler, whose mop of curls makes him look like a 40-ish Bob Dylan, acts up a satisfying storm. Cheadle remains an appealing island of calm; other cast members deliver the little that's asked of them.

Attaching Chris Rock to I Think I Love My Wife is like chaining a Kentucky Derby winner to the merry-go-round in a petting zoo. His humor is hobbled, his personality dulled, his energy depleted. Who's responsible for this lapse in judgment? Chris Rock.

300 is a huge step forward in visually sophisticated storytelling.

I never thought I'd crack up watching a family mourn the death of a beloved daughter. But I've never seen a film quite like The Host, and that's far from the most bizarre thing in it.

Anyone who enjoys the novels of Ed McBain, the Oscar-winning "All the President's Men" or any televised variation of "CSI" will be at home here.

I knew blues music can make you feel you're not alone when your woman has gone, and rock your soul when you're on top of the world. But until I saw Black Snake Moan, I didn't know it could also cure nymphomania.

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.

The movie is the usual kind of film biography of a respected figure from the distant past - honorable, oversimplified, handsome.

Like "Shattered Glass," the other picture Billy Ray directed, Breach probes a guilty mind and reveals how he baffled people. We get a Hitchcock-like pleasure from knowing the protagonist is guilty and watching other shocked characters realize his wickedness.

The planets aligned favorably, and this "Music" is sweet without cloying the appetite. It follows the meetcute-kissyface-breakup-reunion pattern of most of its kind, but the behavior seems more genuine and the situations less forced.

Errors in logic will delight the attentive.

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.

As close to perfectly unwatchable as it can be.

A roller-coaster ride that goes on far too long, ends with a colossal crash, then follows that wreck with a lecture explaining the physics of the machinery. My head was spinning for multiple reasons, none of them pleasing.

Its main feature is incessant, unimaginative profanity...Take out the cursing, and you're left with a plebeian drama about angry, aimless potheads, sloppily directed by the man who wrote it.

The movie is based on the life of California high school teacher Erin Gruwell, played with captivating honesty by Hilary Swank, yet it feels like the usual Hollywood exaggerations.

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

We don't find out until the last scene how reality and fantasy intersect, when the meaning of the first shot of the film gets driven home. How many movies have you seen with a payoff like that?

Most horror movies try to show us the man inside the monster, so we'll empathize with his moral dilemmas or feel his suffering. Perfume: The Story of a Murderer shows us a man who is all monster, whose colossal amorality makes him a potential Messiah or menace to humanity.

The best vampire movie I've seen in years.

It depicts a world close enough to our own to be terrifying, yet different enough to rouse curiosity.

If serious intent led inevitably to greatness, The Good Shepherd would be a masterpiece. It turtles forward for 160 minutes with unrelenting, humorless solemnity, as if everyone involved were unaware that it has arrived three decades too late to matter.

This movie is made by and for people who don't care about good storytelling.

Filmmakers have presented an unvarnished drama about Marshall University and the people who love it, and the results are inspirational.

I can say only three good things about his latest martial arts picture, the incoherent The Curse of the Golden Flower: 1) Gong Li deserves better roles, 2) The costumes are astonishingly beautiful, and 3) Ummm...wow, how about those costumes!

Letters covers less emotional ground than its predecessor, because Eastwood and first-time writer Iris Yamashita (who shares a story credit with Paul Haggis) allow Japanese soldiers only three modes of behavior.

The result is a beautiful painting come to stately, intermittent life.

Stallone doesn't pander to audiences with unearned sentiment. He believes in his story, in the inspirational element that has sent thousands of folks running up the steps of the Philadelphia Museum of Art over 30 years.

The film soars in the right places, especially when powerful newcomer Jennifer Hudson sings, and the charismatic supporting cast keeps it chugging forward.

Everything from the book is inserted with wisdom and care, and everything added to pander to kids with short attention spans or adults who need an overtly religious message is unnecessary.

The only interesting character is the dragon, who grows from an adorably dependent baby to a protective, intelligent adult voiced by Rachel Weisz.

My sentimentality meter never went off, and Smith proved what people have forgotten since his breakthroughs in "Where the Day Takes You" and "Six Degrees of Separation" 13 years ago: He's a serious actor.

There's an extraordinary subplot in Blood Diamond, sandwiched between a main story meant to arouse outrage and a Hollywood-clumsy finale meant to provoke a standing ovation.

It's "Braveheart" without historical significance and "Passion" without spirituality, though it dabbles in both, and it represents as brazen an act of career suicide as I can recall from a star director. If he were a first-timer, he'd never work again.

If you want my rock-solid statement on whether The Fountain is a masterpiece or a muddle, check with me in 2026.

This seemingly simple thriller has two subtexts, one more overt than the other, that should give pause to people who claim Hollywood is always too left-wing.

A movie for people fascinated by toilets and Sabbath.

Though all but two students look too old, their interpretations are unanimously fine.

For the first time in memory, the film ends not just with the promise of more Bonds but without a firm conclusion.

An animated film that challenges preconceptions about the genre and foregoes the usual romance/adventure structure.

Everyone's entitled to a slump, and this is only the first blah film in five for Guest.

Ridley Scott and Russell Crowe attempt light romantic comedy in A Good Year, and the results are as grindingly discordant as a punk band writing a suite of waltzes.

Harsh Times contains exactly 30 seconds of novelty.

With its twist, the movie leaps into a fresh realm of fantasy. But director Marc Forster and first-time screenwriter Zach Helm don't know what to do when they get there, and the film's greatest asset almost becomes its undoing.

Cohen and his gang are smart enough to know when to quit. Like a loud but amusing guest at a dinner party, Borat collects his coat and goes home just as his hosts are starting to fidget.

As usual, Almodovar finds unusual camera angles to break up the straightforward storytelling. But for the first time I recall, not a single male character is crucial to his story, and no actor has a leading role. You won't miss them.

Fire shows what happens when a government systematically denies rights to one racial group for decades, but its message is more current.

It offers razor-sharp editing, first-rate performances, direction that yields maximum emotional effect and a flabby, unconvincing screenplay.

Most importantly, Shut Up & Sing is about what happens in the music industry to people who won't.

Writer-director Coppola and her production team have gotten the look of the late 18th century right...But they've gotten almost everything else wrong.

Eastwood thrusts us into the period with an understated piano score (which he composed) and authentic production design by Henry Bumstead, who died last May after working on the film at 90. (He collaborated with Eastwood on 11 films, including the Oscar-winning "Unforgiven" and "Million Dollar Baby," and he's a dedicatee of "Flags.")

To talk more about the movie's layers is to risk giving away too much. I'll say only that this film confirms Nolan's status as the director whose work I look forward to more than any other.

Top honors go to Guinee, who steadily builds his character from tiny details, and Reaser, who's understood through eyes and attitude while speaking a hodgepodge of German, Norwegian and English.

Writer-director Barry Levinson leaned on Robin Williams the way a one-ring circus relies on its lone acrobat. So they're jointly responsible for the film's utter failure.