To call this campy would be charitable.

Most of the confrontations are shot in close-up, dragging us into the melee as the grungy-looking actors spit out their venomous dialogue.

Would be sweeter if the fair maiden weren't such a pill and more exciting if the villain weren't quite so nasty.

Ill conceived or badly handled.

The compositions and camera movement are both precise and elegant.

Sometimes come together exquisitely.

It's all very impressive without being particularly enthralling.

Writer-producer Paul Kimatian was once a still photographer for Martin Scorsese, who reportedly encouraged him to write this Italian-American soap opera. Given its tired dialogue, predictable situations, and vicious street fighting, Scorsese may wish he'd kept his mouth shut.

Its ponderous explanations about why there are vampires in Arizona in the new millennium (blah, blah, blah).

The story, which is even dumber than it sounds, is told in flashback.

Not unlike "Eyes Wide Shut," this is an eerily earnest contemplation of fidelity, and it's pitched as farce.

This early-1900s costume drama surely differs from Henry James's source novel.

May persuade you to identify not with race-car drivers but with race cars.

Almost too clever for its own good.

The running joke about coffee enemas will date this innocuous, crowd-pleasing adventure comedy.

Might be for you. Or you might be bored anyway.

This kind of filmmaking is riddled with so-called errors, but these mistakes are indistinguishable from the uncommon rewards.

The earnestness of some of the drama in the only deceptively unsophisticated narrative may be more shocking than any of the gross-outs.

It's also about pain, which both tempers and complicates the eroticism.

The most striking thing here is a performance by Robert Forster, as one of the older men on the boat, that's so terrific everything else in the picture pales beside it.

I could have done without all the pushy tactics of this romantic comedy.

This underdog comedy and its title character have considerable charm.

The insultingly trendy post-postmodern tale rationalizes its own product placement by using overkill.

Satisfying in small ways.

The connection between his boasting about killing and killing so he can boast about it -- is made beautifully insidious.

Only Depp and Ray Liotta (as Jung's father) manage to animate this tired formula.

Screenwriter Marc Moss can take credit for the film's laughable dialogue.

A watchable thriller.

Compelling collection of three loosely connected vignettes.

A fascinating and entertaining piece of work.

I haven't seen the original, and this mishmash -- doesn't make me want to.

If your kids are fans there's probably no escaping this installment.

An Austin Powers movie for grown-ups.

Solidly engaging.

A slyly subversive adventure tale that should appeal to children and adults alike.

At least it has the decency not to pretend it's aspiring any higher than the toilet.

A so-so romantic comedy.

The psychological and psychoanalytical probes into sexual and emotional problems keep this reasonably lively.

Despite its nasty facade, this comedy is surprisingly good-natured.

A cringe-inducing flop.

The actors do a pretty good job, though not good enough to sustain 133 minutes.

This is possibly the funniest lesbian romp since "Go Fish."

Director Kieron J. Walsh never quite figures out what to do with the numerous film references (he quotes dialogue, they reenact scenes), and the resulting uncertainty in tone, which sometimes treats the characters as parodistic products of mass culture, undercuts his later attempts to suggest that their love is authentic.

A first-rate Hollywood entertainment--at least if one can accept the schizophrenia of combining a cop/buddy action thriller with an angry satire about the shamelessness of the media.

Beautiful, absorbing, and touching, this film is a mind-expanding experience not to be missed.

This comedy-drama was written by Simon Beaufoy, who brought us "The Full Monty," and it has some of the same gamy mix of alternative sexuality and working-class heart.

Kasi Lemmons directed this tepid thriller, whose only genuinely creepy aspect is its cavalier and uninformed use of mental illness and classical music to heighten the meager suspense.

An exceptionally glib satire about reality TV, by writer-director Daniel Minahan, that puts most of its effort into looking as much as is possible like a real TV show.

All of this comedy's jokes are old.

A seemingly mad dog periodically turns into a well-trained pet.

At first Costner seems to distrust the hokey character he plays, but his performance and the movie's slanted humor, rash melodrama, and ludicrous action soon become riveting.

The scenes set on earth--messy, predictable satire about the commercial exploitation of fevered genius. The unconscious/underworld scenes may be boring because neosurrealism is a cliche.

A hopeless romantic meets a hapless realist in this gritty, elegant drama brimming with spontaneous-seeming close-ups.

Bosnian-born director Emir Kusturica delivers a superb performance as the prisoner, a brutish cipher who gradually reveals his humanity, and the delicate lighting often produces silhouetted faces that evoke the ultimate incomprehensibility of human emotion.

This earnestly charming black comedy, written and directed by Korean-born Wonsuk Chin, posits several interesting metaphysical questions that offset the occasionally pretentious and ironic tone.

It's slight but likable, and diverting enough as light entertainment.

The unfunniest comedy I can recall seeing in ages.

A cute send-up of preadolescent stereotypes.

It's all corny and contrived and usually sensitive. The filmmakers even dare to show the effects of illness--a subject frequently glamorized to the point of being insulting--in a love scene of rare honesty.

It's doubtful that the haste with which two actors of the same sex break away from a kiss in this comedy was in the script, but otherwise everybody stays in character, which is impressive given the manic range of some of the roles and the comic monotony of others.

Stylistic excess, comedy, and romance often help make extremes of cruelty and horror function as cathartic metaphor, and all three figure, not always successfully, in this sequel.

In nearly every scene of her dangerously underwritten role, Diaz has a mouthful of cliches.

Seems perfectly timed to coincide with the ascension to office of George W. Bush. It's a clunky effort Bush could have written and directed.

Lightweight slasher.

More of the abundant sight gags and slips of the tongue originate in bathrooms and bedrooms than are actually set there.

This ambiguously pitched comedy--its idea of sexy humor is a cheerleader farting--shoots for camp without bothering with satire.

Time and space are condensed by means both elegant and crafty, and rarely are any of the characters made to be more--or less--than allegorical.

Finkiel (a French director who apprenticed with Godard, Tavernier, and Kieslowski) plants clues throughout the film suggesting that the women might be long-lost relatives but declines to wrap things up neatly. The very uncertainty--and the fading possibility of an end to their search--is what makes the film so eerie and poignant.

Hence the fascination of Faithless: the tension between the script's dour puritanism--the craving of suffering, the wallowing in abstract guilt--and the earthy plenitude and innate sensuality of Ullmann's austere compositions.

Dopey but charming.

A nervy as well as somber piece of work, not only for the way it confounds and even frustrates certain genre expectations, but also -- and especially -- for the way it confronts the viewer with the moral implications of that frustration.

The characters seem both reduced and idealized, and the plot has turns a dispassionate dramatist would avoid.

Ritchie may be skilled at generating controlled chaos, but his surprise-a-minute strategy ultimately holds no surprises; Snatch is even more frenetically boring than his 1999 "Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels."

This bright noir, with gleaming cinematography by Jeffrey Jur, is as single-minded as a short story, but the premise is almost too clever.

Poorly paced action comedy.

Fans of the famed porn star, who died of AIDS in 1988, will want to catch this exhaustive 1998 video biography.

Silly but fairly harmless.

A rapturously beautiful, lyrically dazzling work.

It's odd that a movie featuring a great classical director is notable for some extremely contemporary acting.

I don't see this slightly better-than-average drug thriller, with slightly better-than-average direction by Steven Soderbergh, as anything more than a routine rubber-stamping of genre reflexes.

Somewhere in writer-director Giuseppe Tornatore's overstyled movie, about a 12-year-old boy (Sulfaro) during the Italian fascist period who has the hots for a mistreated war widow (Belluci), is a pretty good short story about the fickleness of community and the cruelty of gossip struggling to get out.

This thriller is a lot better than you might expect--especially for a Kevin Costner vehicle.

The landscapes--which come close to outshining the worthy actors in the opening and closing stretches--are beautiful, and the plot, which is basically a grim coming-of-age story, holds one's interest throughout.

Writer Barry McEvoy and director Barry Levinson might want to brush up on the use of metaphor.

An impressive piece of filmmaking, with lively and suggestive depictions of pre- and postrevolutionary Cuba (shot in Mexico).

The cast as a whole is astonishing--especially Gillian Anderson as Lily and Dan Aykroyd in his finest role to date.

Too full of its own heavy breathing to work as the primordial storytelling it's aiming for--a so-so adventure story is closer to the mark.

After making their two best features to date, "Fargo" and "The Big Lebowski," the Coen brothers have surely come up with their worst.

The gratuitous use of the city (New Orleans) during Mardi Gras is the least of this movie's unoriginal sins.

At first I thought I was watching yet another version of "A Christmas Carol"; then I wondered if it was a remake of "It's a Wonderful Life"; finally I gave up trying to find anything at all in it that was unfamiliar.

Images about imagery can be diverting, even insightful, but this painterly 1999 feature piles up studies in elaborately choreographed motion that are their own reason for being.

The kind of ugly-duckling role that's long been ironic for her (Bullock).

I laughed a lot at the anti-Hollywood humor and generally had a fine time, in spite of the holier-than-thou hypocrisy that makes this movie easily and even intentionally Mamet's most Hollywoodish picture to date.

The movie is impressive for its even mix of snarky humor and sincere sentiment, and even more impressive when one considers that director Isao Takahata made his name with the harrowing antiwar drama Grave of the Fireflies (1988).

Not even D.W. Griffith, Steven Spielberg, and Stanley Kubrick working together could succeed in making this pandering piece of nonsense work dramatically on any level except the most egregiously phony.

Would have proved the point if it weren't so mechanically scripted.

Writer Philip Stark ("That '70s Show") and director Danny Leiner ("Freaks and Geeks") apply mature comic instincts to an adolescent genre.

Exciting, clever sequences driven by surprisingly little plot and culminating in a climax full of the transmogrification animation was invented for.