It's far more ambitious than its predecessor and suffers from too many ideas rather than too few, making it an inspired, fascinating, and revealing mess.

The movie takes a while to hit its stride, and its conclusion is fairly slapdash, but somewhere in between are some of the funniest bits of low slapstick Brooks has ever come up with, and an overall uncloying sweetness helps to save much of the rest.

Myers pumps out a river of inventive shtick, but it doesn't cohere or connect; he seems less a character than a comedian doing couch time on a late-night talk show.

The sadism of "1,000 Corpses" is ameliorated here by the addition of an action plot and open spaces, and the comedy is more skillfully played, mingling agreeably with Zombie's ardor for southern trash culture (the final showdown plays out to the strains of "Freebird," for heaven's sake)

You want misery? he gives you misery—dark, drear, suppurating medieval oppressiveness; monotony? he gives you that too, lots and lots of monotony; subhuman grotesquerie and primitive superstition? not to worry: this guy didn't direct Quest for Fire for nothing.

An amiable demonstration of how two charismatic actors and a relaxed writer-director (Brad Silberling) can squeeze an enjoyable movie out of practically nothing.

This is mainly a narrative brain-teaser like "Memento" or "The Jacket"; merely keeping up with the game requires so much energy that the thinness of the material becomes fully apparent only toward the end.

This originated as a late-night play, and the humor is correspondingly sophomoric, but I loved Dennis McCarthy's melodramatic score.

John Zorn's ethnically tinged score is effectively minimalist without succumbing to Philip Glass-style monotony, and Harris Yulin is effective as the hero's semi-estranged father.

Pearce pads out his plot with lots of borrowed bits (notably from The 39 Steps, with Gere and Basinger as manacled fugitives), but the borrowings don't have any resonance of their own: they simply hang on the story like empty thematic husks.

The stories are pretty good folk, though a little too coyly calculated. But the plantation stuff is beneath contempt. Better save this for nostalgia only—kids won't be missing anything if they never encounter this relic.

Coogan's screen persona is vain, dim, angry, and deeply miserable, and his handful of scenes here with a smilingly harsh Catherine Keener are little masterpieces of comic sadomasochism.

Though Coppola sticks to the principal narrative line and resists tangential, anecdotal episodes, he might as well have gone off in those directions for all the coherence he ultimately achieves.

There are some solid, outrageous laughs here--most of them involving anal sex--but don't expect a second lightning strike.

In Shonali Bose's tightly constructed debut feature... the slaughter of thousands of Sikhs during the riots sparked by Indira Ghandi's assassination take on greater personal significance.

The cast—with the happy exception of the always delightful Paula Prentiss—is uniformly dreary; and by the time the mystery begins to take shape, it's hardly possible to care.

Fresh Manhattan locations prove as photogenic as the leads, and the supporting actors--especially Tina Benko as a glacial, impeccably dressed amazon--don't miss a beat of Maggenti's snappy dialogue.

Remaking Get Smart without Don Adams and Barbara Feldon is like remaking "My Little Chickadee" without Mae West and W.C. Fields--the best possible outcome is disappointment.

Memories of Me, directed by ex-Fonz Henry Winkler, is a "Long Day's Journey into Schmaltz," in which an already overripe father-son conflict is further sugared by large doses of show-biz sentimentality. [07 Oct 1988, p.A]

Sidney Lumet's wired-up, hysterical direction overwhelms the minor pleasures of Ira Levin's play.

There's little rapport between Duchovny and Driver after their initial meeting. More exciting and suspenseful is the relationship between Driver's confidant (Hunt) and her husband (James Belushi), who can't seem to get all their kids to go to sleep at the same time.

Labyrinthine yet oversimple, the story seems to hide a more provocative one. But perhaps this is the nature of the beast.

The movie is truly an open text--its generous poetry inspires free association rather than predictable emotion.

A rich but regrettably lumpy pastry, with moments of genuine drama redeeming an almost defiantly hokey plot.

The film features subtle, honest performances by Daniel MacIvor (who also cowrote the screenplay) as the perplexed prof and engaging newcomer Aaron Webber as the sensitive student.

The problem with this film's earnest script about corruption in college basketball is that the usually witty Ron Shelton (Bull Durham, White Men Can't Jump) wrote it long before he developed his familiar jivey style. Not even an unsentimental basketball fan like director William Friedkin can wash away all the corn syrup.

Never recovers from a jarring and improbable act of ritualized violence that occurs halfway through the film.

The film can't simply be discounted as a skim job on the original; Romero's dark social commentary, which grew in impact over his entire Dead trilogy, is still very much present here, even if it no longer has the same bite and urgency.

So keenly felt and so deeply imagined I couldn't help but be moved, even grateful for its bleeding-heart nostalgia.

There are moments of high hilarity in the slapstick that results when the characters attempt to minimize mucus-membrane contact during sex.

The film doesn't transcend its genre, but it's an honorable achievement within it.

Unbelievably pretentious and a bit of a hoot but rarely boring.

All this could've collapsed into empty shocks if not for Inoue's gripping performance as an exasperated single woman who senses her happiness slipping away with each vengeful blow.

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.

The few halfway decent ideas in the story (by John Skip, Craig Spector, and Leslie Bohem) and production design (by C.J. Strawn) are mercilessly and fatally crushed by the inept direction of Stephen Hopkins and the flaccid editing.

Unbearably twee mockumentary.

Milius can be faulted for reviving a number of ostensibly dead macho myths, but in the context of the subculture his film deftly re-creates, they take on the aura of eternal values. The breathtaking surfing footage, rather than the slightly stunted characters, makes his most eloquent argument.

A fairly enjoyable piece of junk from Oliver Stone.

Sex and JFK's assassination are intertwined in this puerile, pseudodark story about a wacky family--an adaptation of Wendy MacLeod's play that uses the medium of cinema mainly to exploit archival footage.

Tends toward arch silliness more than actual humor, a formula that's tolerable enough in 15-minute tube installments but deadly dull in this 86-minute feature.

Perry hasn't lost his touch for stroking his loyal audience of Oprah women; his enforced happy endings are the car keys taped under your seat.

Self-congratulatory feature, which artificially exalts the character--a classic saint with clay feet--by casting a grande dame and by reducing her motives to facile psychodrama

It's certainly a provocation, with a few funny moments, and for my money it's less phony and offensive than "Finding Forrester."

Glen's style...goes for the measured and elegant over the flashy and excessive.

I've observed this Seth Rogen comedy, and I can report that it's not very good.

As a drama this is rote, as a musical it's uninspired, and as a comedy it's adolescent; ultimately it's a mess, unsure what it wants to be.

The music could have been better in this spineless drama, which has several angles but no perspective.

Now that Robin Williams has been emasculated--dangerously schizoid comic turned into nice-guy movie star--it isn't too surprising that a commercial hack like Chris Columbus would use him the way he does in this cutesy 1993 comedy: cutting between Williams trying on different voices rather than holding the camera on him as he lurches between these voices without notice.

The whole thing's pretty cute and breezy, but don't expect logic or coherence.

Entertaining if superficial.

The cast packs enough sexual ambiguity to satisfy the most rabid Williams fan (not to mention a screenplay by Gore Vidal), but Mankiewicz leaves much of the innuendo unexplored—thankfully, perhaps.

Less suspenseful than the original but more ethically nuanced, politically pointed, and violent.

Limiting the potential overripeness of the material with tact and sincerity, he (Wang) generally makes the most of his resourceful cast; only the dog overacts.

Matthew Robbins acquits himself honorably as cowriter and director of this gentle 1987 fantasy about miniature spaceships that land on a tenement in Manhattan's Lower East Side and save the tenants from imminent expulsion and disaster at the hands of greedy real estate developers.

80 minutes of formulaic unpleasantness isn't even close to my idea of a good time, and I doubt that Hitchcock himself could have done very much with Mark L. Smith's script.

Holly Hunter and Sigourney Weaver, a cop and a shrink, are the main trackers, but so little is done in Ann Biderman and David Madsen's script to give them or their colleagues or even their prey interesting human dimensions that the overall ambience is chiefly pornographic.

Director Chad Friedrichs works around Jandek's never having revealed his identity by interpolating shots of the PO box and rocks on the beach with the talking heads of fans, critics, and journalists, and lots of Jandek's wistful, haunting music.

Binoche is especially effective playing a character that seems to have as many layers as her makeup.

This shopworn premise allows for a series of improbable plot developments, resulting in a story that's about as geniune as Gooding's character.

The connection between the two narratives is supposed to be a big, heartbreaking surprise, though I figured it out well in advance and spent the interim unfavorably comparing this greatest-generation hanky wringer to the British drama "Iris."

Like the former first lady, the filmmakers go slightly overboard.

Like many artists today, Grisham and Schumacher exploit racial tension without understanding it.

The bucketloads of sanctimonious message mongering ladled on by director Peter Hyams still can't disguise the sheerly mercenary basis of this 1986 project, a wholly uncalled-for sequel to Stanley Kubrick's 2001.

Magic vies with technology in this exuberant adventure comedy, which unfolds achronologically in a series of zany, effects-laden vignettes.

Steven Sawalich directed with invention and heart.

Many of the charms of Kate DiCamillo's best-selling children's book are lost in this British animation by Dreamworks alumni Sam Fell (Flushed Away) and Rob Stevenhagen.

As usual with Burton, the visuals are much better than the story, and Carroll’s characters are richly realized--especially Tweedledum and Tweedledee, poster children for juvenile obesity, and the raving Red Queen, played with razor-sharp timing by Helena Bonham Carter.

The epic poem Beowulf gets an imaginative, low-budget workout in this 2005 Icelandic feature by Sturla Gunnarsson.

Apart from the grim forebodings of tragedy, writer-director Nick Cassavetes seems to have modeled this ambitious docudrama on Larry Clark's kiddie-porn shockers, but he doesn't know what to leave out, and the movie becomes excessively complicated with ancillary agendas.

As in Korine's other movies, characterization is often just amplified weirdness.

The final image, a minimalist evocation--perhaps a compromise for an unmarketable ending--puts an intriguing spin on everything that's come before it.

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.

Falls flat.

It's a pleasing but shallow hodgepodge.

This has wit and energy to burn, but I can't call it escapism, because tackiness and snarkiness are among the things I most need to escape.

An amiable, highly ingratiating piece of lowbrow entertainment.

The story is inspiring and involves sports, but to call it an inspirational sports story would be wrong; its real center is Leigh Anne Tuohy (Sandra Bullock in a fine performance), the strong-willed woman whose love and generosity helped turn a mute, hopeless boy with no social or academic skills into a functioning young man with a promising future.

AnnaSophia Robb (Charlie and the Chocolate Factory) is too subdued as the teenage heroine; one might expect more affect from a young woman fighting to overcome disability and return to competitive surfing.

This desperately all-ages movie just emphasizes its banality by throwing money and effort into effects and production design at the expense of pacing.

The postmodernist evocations of the past (roughly the 50s through the 80s) are a charming mishmash, delivered with wit and style.

The problem, as always, is that when you try to mix cliches with more complicated data it's often the cliches that win out.

Forget about a stake through the heart: sheriff Josh Hartnett discovers that decapitation is the best way to stop the bloodsuckers, who suggest feral, steroid-crazed gymnasts as they scale buildings and leap onto moving vehicles.

So much has been written about the show's emotional importance to single women that I can't possibly add anything, except to say that, in both its TV and movie incarnations, the empty materialism and sincere longing for love always manage to cancel each other out, leaving behind nothing but what this started out as--a sitcom.

If you can abide booming orchestral punches during verbal confrontations and ubiquitous Adidas product placement, you'll be rewarded by exciting soccer sequences and the joy of watching a likable character triumph on a global stage.

Clunky and obvious.

Chen Kaige clearly intended this Chinese fantasy-action spectacle to top Zhang Yimou's "Hero," and I must admit that I prefer it to the earlier movie: the digital effects are sometimes excessive, yet Chen's story of a loyal slave, his master, and a wealthy, seemingly doomed princess is more affecting, especially in the closing stretch.

The elliptical narrative centers on the unspoken erotic attraction between Sakamoto and Bowie, and Oshima appears to be treating ideas of elegantly transmogrified, purified emotions, yet the context and frequent incontinence of the execution bring the film uncomfortably close to the pseudophilosophical bondage fantasies of Yukio Mishima.

This contains enough candid interview footage with legendary athletes to be occasionally informative.

Brooks' film is especially welcome now because it frankly admits that most Americans are ignorant about Muslims and have a lot to learn, in contrast with the few other Hollywood movies dealing with Muslims -- "Syriana," "Munich" -- which seem to suggest that non-Muslim viewers can emerge knowing the score.

With its diabolical ending, this is the movie equivalent of a crossword puzzle: fun, clever, and disposable.

A tiresome 1998 rip-off of The Hustler, with poker (in a New York Russian Mafia milieu) taking the place of pool, Matt Damon taking over for Paul Newman, and John Malkovich's scenery chewing supplanting Jackie Gleason's self-effacement.

The story is often ridiculous, but director Antoine Fuqua provides plenty of fun distractions.

The direction is lively and often overinventive, as was frequently the case during the early, experimental phase of his career.

As in so many summer behemoths, the real stars are the projectiles--in this case, arrows with their own point-of-view shots, zipping through the air and finding their targets with pinpoint accuracy.

The tradition goes back centuries, but by tracking the seven-year odyssey of a young girl named Guddi from dutiful daughter to family rebel, Brabbee is able to puncture the system's facade of social acceptability, exposing its contradictions in memorable fashion.

Somewhat depressive anecdote drawn out to feature length.

A lot to look at, little to contemplate, and nothing to hum.

This thriller is effective if you can accept that--as with some of John Dickson Carr's locked-room mysteries--the trickiness counts more than any plausibility.